Pathways Project

Stories are Linkmaps

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:49:37 Z

Stories are Linkmaps

Oral traditions amount to cultural intranets, complex and ever-ramifying networks of options that the performer effectively clicks into being. When a teller performs a story, he or she surfs through a shared intranet, following a series of oPathways and activating certain nodes in the process.

This model can offer a fresh perspective on two longstanding and stubborn questions in OT studies: (1) What does a story consist of? and (2) What happens when a living, performed story is textualized?

What does a story consist of?

In short, and in the OT/IT terms we espouse throughout the Pathways Project, stories are linkmaps. Just like the alternate pathway-sequences offered within the wiki and the alternate reading sequences suggested in the opening pages of the brick-and-mortar book, stories consist of familiar, rough-hewn itineraries within the larger web of oral tradition.

But while the trails are well blazed, performers don’t simply trace the footprints left by prior performers or by themselves. For one thing, the flexibility of the medium means that there would always be more than one set of footprints, each varying in some way from the others. More fundamentally, and although textual ideology teaches otherwise, specific footprints aren’t permanent in the oAgora: they vanish as soon as the story-event ceases.

Navigating linkmaps

To grasp how stories consist of linkmaps, consider what actually happens over time.

When tellers perform and re-perform a story, some aspects vary while much remains the same. Because the tale is being re-created by surfing along oPathways, which offer options at every juncture, versions will naturally differ somewhat, even when the same teller is involved and other factors are relatively constant (audience, setting, mood, and so forth). But the variation among different performances will also be limited because the teller is traveling the same general route through the OT network. The starting point, the destination, and most of the in-between journey are relatively stable, with differences arising as the inevitable product of a flexible method of creation.

For example, the famous Grimm Brothers tale of “Hansel and Gretel” will unfailingly involve the two title characters, a witch, and a gingerbread house. That much remains constant and expectable. Likewise, the interactions among the principal characters will be identifiable across the spectrum of performances. The general sequence of oPathways through the story-web—let’s call it the story-route—will retain its fundamental integrity. It must; otherwise, we wouldn’t understand the story. And why not? Because we wouldn’t be able to surf along with the performer.

At the same time, however, the details of particular performances will inevitably morph. One teller may decide to focus on Hansel’s adventurous attitude more than another; Gretel’s reactions to the witch may figure more prominently in Tuesday evening’s than in Sunday afternoon’s rendition; or the gingerbread house may be described in a few words or at considerable length. oPathways allow for—even encourage—these somewhat variant realizations of the always-emergent story.

The crucial point—for both the teller and the audience—is that the story-route remains the same while small-scale navigation allows for individual creative differences. Fluent in the oAgora medium, we recognize “Hansel and Gretel” at the same time that we can appreciate different tellers’ versions.

What happens when a living, performed story is textualized?

To textualize a living story-event is to lose the forest for the trees or, to be more exact, to construe the forest as consisting of only a few dozen particular trees. It amounts to losing the web for the linkmap, to mistaking a single, freestanding, set-in-stone linkmap for the larger story.

Transcription, then edition

Let’s think through what happens when we construct a story-text.

1. First comes the transcription, whether in video, audio, or paper format. It’s well to remember that while each of these media offers a different reflection of the living event, all are fossils. They continue as fixed, non-changeable entities, but pay for that status with their media-lives. And at some point—whether before or after the recording—a selection of which performance is to be fixed and memorialized—has to take place. Remember: there is no “original,” no “epitome,” no “finest version.”

2. Next, raw transcriptions become formal editions, according to the best judgment of an editor whose responsibility is to make the item understandable to a tAgora audience. In earlier times, the Brothers Grimm saw fit to rewrite the folktales they transcribed from fieldwork, often adjusting the stories’ language radically to suit their imagined audience. But even the most scholarly book-editions add another level of interpretation and distance, taking us another step away from the living, contextualized event. Audio and video texts may encode more information than the printed page, but they too are interpretations of single performances.

The tAgora has its own demanding structures, and they do not mesh with OT dynamics. The more textualized the oral performance, the more limited, artificial and devoid of life it becomes.

What’s lost

By textualizing a story, transcribers and editors detach one realization of the linkmap from the OT web. They take it offline, severing all connection to the network of possibility and implication in which oral traditions are naturally embedded. Consequently, the web of other options and idiomatic meaning is lost, emergent experience is diminished to a flat surface of minimal linear portrayal, and reality no longer remains in play. It’s a denaturing process parallel to the eAgoraphobic act of freezing Wikipedia into a linkless, static, forever fixed document.

In short, the price of textualization, of converting the story to a trekkable, one-dimensional route suitable to the tAgora, is nothing less than forfeiting its viability in the oAgora. Of course, the story as linkmap still prospers as an OT phenomenon within its natural marketplace, and in most cases is not affected at all by the reduction of one of its myriad performances to an item and removal of that no longer viable item to the textual marketplace. There just isn’t any feedback loop connecting the dead artifact back to the variable linkmap and the living oral tradition.

Representation of OT performances, as discussed and illustrated throughout the Pathways Project, is more faithfully pursued through eEditions. To show how stories are linkmaps, we need to set the textual object aside and exploit the OT-IT homology.

Remix

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:46:39 Z

Remix

A contemporary and an ancient art

As the Wikipedia entry advises, remixing occurs in literature, art, music, and other media. More broadly, cultures are constantly interleaving old and new, domestic and foreign resources—combining religious beliefs and symbols, adapting governments and laws and customs as they encounter “new” cultural environments. The resulting remixes can be frozen into tAgora documents, and the process that produced them is thereby halted and fixed, at least for a while. In this fashion a remix becomes a thing in itself—a freestanding item, but with obvious debts to its constituents.

The possibility of remixing has come into clear focus with the advent of the eAgora, where digital weaving, unweaving, and reweaving is commonplace and expectable. Whereas the tAgora yields and deals in ordered series of invariable linear surfaces, the electronic marketplace offers the tools to reshape reality and the qualified citizenry to use and appreciate the new-media content that results.

What may not be so obvious to us moderns is that remixing is the ruling dynamic of the oAgora as well. Every oral performance is an oPathway-driven surfing of the traditional network, responding to different times, places, audiences, new cultural contacts, and other factors. Distributed authorship is the mode of creation, as in the eAgora, and variation within limits is the name of the compositional game, again as in the eAgora.

As in other aspects, then, we see the basic Pathways Project homology emerge in the correlative phenomena of eRemixing and oRemixing.

A contemporary remix

A brilliant example of this art form is the McLuhan Remix by Jamie O’Neil/Kurt Weibers, who distributes his authorship—which blurs with distributed editorship—between two personas as well as among the content-producers from whose work he has drawn. The 13-minute video is posted here with his explicit permission. For content and discussion, see the remix website.

The Medium is the Mix by Jamie O’Neil/Kurt Weibers

Ancient remixing

For an explanation of how remixing principles were operative in the ancient world, with a comparison to contemporary examples, see Morgan Grey’s discussion of mashups.

Systems versus Things

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:44:52 Z

Systems versus Things

Divergent dynamics

The oAgora and eAgora are linked systems of potentials; conversely, the tAgora amounts to an assembled collection of things.

The first two of these gathering-places consist of sets of intangible pathways activated by navigators making their own decisions and choosing among ever-contingent realities. The other is an expansive, generously stocked, and updatable warehouse of already-finished items accessed by clients seeking an “objective” reality.

The oAgora and eAgora present multiform possibilities, and only in the act of speaking or clicking do potentials produce unique instances. And notice that we said “instances,” most decidedly in the plural, not in the singular and epitomized. Given the complexity and interactivity of the linked choices that constitute both oral performances and Internet sessions, a nearly limitless number of actual instances is possible. Indeed, that’s the whole point of these two textless technologies—“infinite riches in a little room,” to echo Christopher Marlowe.

The tAgora, on the other hand, works like a brick-and-mortar library, with an established and well-ordered collection of finite items in place and with new acquisitions always being added to its catalogued holdings. Links versus texts, systems versus things.

Divergent activities

Whether you’re surfing through electronic or story-based pathways, you’re co-creating the reality as you go. You the surfer are a full and necessary partner. Nothing happens until you engage the system, summon its open-ended but rule-governed potential, and literally em-body its innate power.

Without the hands-on flexibility and generativity of the system that supports oral performance, the oAgora would cease to function. The network would collapse into singularity. All possible stories and versions of stories would fossilize into a unique version of a unique story, a master-text repeated verbatim forever. Em-booked and non-morphing, effectively “writ in stone.”

Likewise, without the hands-on flexibility and generativity of the system that supports navigation of the web, the eAgora would cease to function. Its complex route-map would collapse into a single one-way street. Hypertext would devolve into a predetermined, invariable sequence with sharply curtailed power to support exploration and representation.

Oral performances and Internet performances would become mere texts, mere dead letters.

Open-ended but also rule-governed

Systems draw their power from an interactive combination of open-endedness and rule-governed behavior. Systems provide users with a frame and a set of techniques within which individuals can create a series of unique instances. And because systems are both open-ended and rule-governed, rather than only one or the other, works created within them are both original and intelligible. You aren’t slave to a system in the oAgora or eAgora, but neither can you do “just anything.” You have to play the game by the rules.

The best analogy is simply language itself, of which OT and IT are highly coded special cases. After all, language operates by balancing the flexibility that fosters creativity with the grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic forms that together provide the vehicle. Subtract that flexibility and language fossilizes, loses its human usefulness altogether. Subtract the grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic forms and anarchy ensues; no one will be able to communicate with anyone else. But meld the two together, combining the ability to morph with systemic rules for allowable variation, and the possibilities for expression become inexhaustible.

Proverbially speaking, OT and IT work like language, only more so.

Repatriation

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:42:48 Z

Repatriation

Literally, it’s the act of returning someone or something to its “fatherland” (patria). Wikipedia defines repatriation as “the process of returning a person back to one’s place of origin or citizenship,” but extends the idea to cultural artifacts as well. For example, the entry cites the much-debated removal of the Elgin Marbles from the ancient Acropolis in Athens to the British Museum in London, where they have resided for more than two centuries. Perhaps the most frequent current application of the concept involves the movement addressed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a 1990 federal law that governs the return of human remains and cultural objects from museums and other institutions to their tribes of origin.

Whatever the application, there is often a sharp division of opinion on the merits of repatriation. From the perspective of those in the patria, something has been wrongly removed from its natural context and frame of reference. From the point of view of the removing agency, that something is now the property of another institution, where, it is frequently claimed, it can be better appreciated by more people through expert management of the resource. Two very different views of a troublesome matter.

Lurking not so subtly below the surface of this standoff is the vexed problem of ownership. At one level, it’s simply a question of who owns the resource. At a deeper level, it’s a question of whether it actually can be owned and, if so, whether and how that ownership can be established, transferred, or restored.

Elgin OTs

Imagine an oral tradition that exists in and supports the community that practices it, in some important fashion, for generations. It might be a tale of origins, or an ethnobotanical remedy, or a genealogy; you make the selection. Whatever your choice, this OT will dependably demonstrate a number of characteristic features. It will involve many scores of individuals, here and now as well as over different times and places, who draw their group identity in part from its ongoing cultural function. Some are performers and some are audience members, but all are embedded in its society-sustaining matrix. In Pathways Project terms, this oral tradition prospers in the virtual arena of the oAgora, where performers and audience members alike go to navigate shared networks, to transact the continuing business of cultural communication.

Now imagine a well-meaning and well-trained ethnography team who learn about the existence and function of this oral tradition and seek to understand how it works. They enter the oAgora – let’s say with audio or video apparatus – with the express purpose of recording the event as part of their research. In fact, let’s assume they make multiple recordings of performances within this OT, carefully and accurately transferring each one to a digital archive. Of course, they also collect contextual data about the event and all of its participants, ranging from surveys of performance parameters (time of year or day, weather, physical location, etc.) to observations of and interviews with all contributing individuals, performers and audience members alike.

So what do they do then, once their fieldwork is over? Almost always, the very next step is to export the event (or static reflections of it) from its home marketplace to the marketplace where they ply their trade – from the oAgora to the tAgora. In practical terms, that means to write an article or book, to create an edition, to post the “best” audio or video text(s). The event-become-thing is imported into the world of textuality, where it effectively becomes an owned commodity (despite its origins as a shared experience).

Not unlike Lord Elgin, then, these well-meaning investigators have automatically assumed that what they collected “belongs” in the museum-like institution of textuality. There it can be displayed on the curators’ terms and according to their wisdom (always tacitly considered superior to any local and original embedding). They’ve enshrined a living tradition – or, more accurately, the once-living remains of a living tradition – in the Museum of Verbal Art. The territorial imperative of the tAgora has claimed another victim.

The oAgora of origin

Oral traditions arise in and are sustained by the oAgora. In this marketplace performers surf through webs of potentials and audiences navigate along with them. Both parties to the transaction are conversant with the networked possibilities that lie before them and fluent in the specialized, idiomatic language that serves as the agora-appropriate lingua franca. OTs are fundamentally systems rather than things, processes rather than products.

This is the general situation for all types of oral tradition, regardless of mode of composition, performance, and reception – with reasonable adjustments for the natural diversity of OTs from genre to genre and culture to culture, of course. The oAgora is their first and foundational allegiance, the marketplace in which they define themselves.

Consider how various types of OTs relate to the oAgora:

1. The simplest case is Oral performance, where performer and audience co-navigate in real time without texts playing any role at all.
2. Voiced texts function in much the same way, since regardless of their written composition they live only to be performed. In other words, they too can function and be understood only within their home territory of the oAgora.
3. Voices from the past, textualized refugees from oAgoras that no longer exist, were nonetheless formulated via navigation of the OT network. For that reason they can’t be fully appreciated without at least partial awareness of its option-driven possibilities.
4. Even Written oral traditions, penned by individuals specifically for silent readers of books and never performed, derive not from a textual but an OT environment. Their solitary readers interpret them most faithfully when they understand them as products generated from the navigational process.

With forced translation into the tAgora, everything changes. Morphing ceases, co-creation ceases, and OTs become something else. Some may claim that this capture and mandatory emigration constitute a positive development, that the traditions in question can now be redistributed to a new audience, all for the greater good. But this is an empty defense: if we put aside self-serving doublespeak, it will become apparent that textualists are distributing fixed artifacts rather than living, multimedia OTs.

There’s an uncomfortable and sobering truth here, namely that oral traditions imported into the foreignness of the tAgora and thereby stripped of their natural identity and context are destined to remain distorted images of themselves. They can never “measure up” to verbal art that is indigenous to the textual marketplace, simply because they are created, transmitted, and received according to a different set of rules. They are from somewhere else. Under such conditions they will always remain poorly understood, and usually mis-understood, outsiders in a foreign marketplace.

Repatriation: an ethical solution

Native American peoples have successfully and rightfully argued for the return of their ancestors’ remains to their community of origin. In that same spirit we should do all we can to return oral traditions to their community of origin, to their patria, to the oAgora. We should focus on repatriating verbal art that has been forcibly removed from the marketplace in which it arose and flourished, and in which this media-technology does essential cultural work. It’s our duty as people who care about the remarkable diversity of human communication, as aspiring, responsible citizens of multiple agoras.

In a real sense this is nothing short of an ethical act – a restoration that rights a wrong and redresses an imbalance caused by the ruthless imposition of textual ideology. I say “ruthless” because our natural proclivity in studying communication is to convert whatever it is we’re analyzing to tAgora code. We attempt to understand phenomena, and that includes oPhenomena, by “embooking” them. Because this proclivity is unexamined and reflexive, we may consider it innocent and not intentionally distorting. After all, it flies below the radar, beneath our conscious awareness; maybe we’re not to blame, maybe it’s just “our way.” But the reflexive nature of this act only makes it more dangerous and harder to combat. To get beyond unexamined assumptions, and to defeat agoraphobia and give modes of communication and cultures a chance to be understood on their own terms, is an ethical act.

Initiatives for repatriation

How do we repatriate oral traditions? In general terms, and proceeding by the various types of OTs as referenced above and described in more detail here, we can pursue the following initiatives:

1. Recognize Oral Performances as the events they are, with oral composition and performance partnered with aural reception. Do everything possible to understand and portray them as products of a navigational process, and be attentive to their cultural context and multimedia nature.

2. Recognize Voiced texts as the events they are, with written composition intended solely for oral performance and aural reception. As with the first category, these oral traditions deserve attention to navigational process, cultural context, and multimedia nature.

3. Recognize Voices from the past as the event-records they are, with their background in oral composition and performance and aural reception. Take navigational process, cultural context, and multimedia nature into serious account, to the extent that such oAgora features can be recovered (keeping in mind that a partial victory is always preferable to a simple surrender to the textual model).

4. Recognize Written oral traditions as the oPhenomena they are. Despite their written composition, lack of performance, and silent reception by individuals, these works emerge from navigable webs of potentials and specific cultural contexts.

Ethical responsibilities

Repatriation can and should go forward on two fronts, a double initiative that reflects the fundamental homology of OT and IT that lies at the root of the Pathways Project.

Back to the oAgora

Whatever the type of oral tradition, we understand it best when we grasp its nature as networked, multiform, variable within limits, event-centered, and contingent. From Oral Performances to Written oral traditions, every product – in whatever form it reaches us – is the product of a larger process, and we need to know as much as possible about that process. No self-respecting linguist would try to study a single sentence in isolation from its language; just so, we need to learn about the networked and multiform background of whatever OT work we’re examining. Each work is contingent, inviting co-creation by its audience (whether a group of live listeners online with OT or a single reader offline. And each instance – even if it is now the sole surviving instance – is an event in the “tradition history” we aim to imaginatively reconstruct.

To do justice to an oral tradition is to grasp how inherently untextual it is: how it resists textual ideology, the illusions of object and stasis, the production of freestanding entities, the authoritative item. But, agoraphobia and culture shock notwithstanding, we need to make the effort to escape our default assumptions about verbal art. We need to open our minds to the dynamic actually operative in the oAgora.

Back to the future

As the Pathways Project homology demonstrates, the new tools of the eAgora offer us an unprecedented opportunity to do just that. Instead of reducing a performance – or even a written oral tradition – to the distortion of a conventional text, we can take advantage of the networking strategies of web-thinking to mirror or emulate the networked dynamics of the oAgora. It is the goal of the Pathways Project not only to study but also to represent OT in terms of IT.

One step toward using the homology to better understand OT has been the development of eCompanions. First conceived as a facility to accompany the book How to Read an Oral Poem, this same kind of electronic digest of audio, video, and photographs was then made available to authors publishing articles in the journal Oral Tradition. In both cases it became possible to supplement textual accounts and descriptions with multimedia examples, to lift the OT under discussion off the page and portray it as a living, multidimensional presence. Bringing the journal online made both text and multimedia immediately available to anyone in the world with a browser and an Internet connection, eliminating the tAgora problems associated with cost and distribution.

A second step has consisted of resynchronizing the event, of putting the book-segregated aspects of an OT work back together into a facsimile whole. Instead of separating the transcription, translation, glossary, commentary, and so forth, an eEdition places all of them on the same electronic page, playing the audio of the performance concurrently, and allowing the user access to a much richer and more complete experience than texts alone can provide.

Thus far one eEdition, which presents a South Slavic oral epic performed by Halil Bajgorić, has been formulated and is, like the journal Oral Tradition, available open-access and free of charge. More eEditions are in progress, which will collectively lead to a living inventory of Bajgorić’s performances and eventually of four or five epic singers from his region in Bosnia. Today it is possible to “read” one of his performances in far more depth and with much greater understanding than ever before; in the future it will be possible to “read” across his oral epic tradition.

For the categories other than Oral performance, versions of the same tools can help. Plainly enough, eCompanions can provide all sorts of information and experiences beyond the reach of the conventional textual page, for any of these varieties of OT. And the eEdition concept could be applied to serial performances of slam poetry (Voiced texts); to interrelations among the ancient Greek poems of Homer, Hesiod, and the composers of the Homeric Hymns (Voices from the past); and to the published, oral-derived works that were “sung on the page” by border-crossing figures such as Bishop Njegoš (Written oral traditions).

It is admittedly difficult to return oral traditions to the oAgora. Even the best intentions can fall victim to agoraphobia and culture shock, and there are practical problems associated with the inability of the textual medium to convey core features of OT. A great deal of misunderstanding has arisen from just this technological shortcoming.

But there is another way – back to the future. Repatriation of oral traditions can be accomplished – to a significant degree – by “returning” these oAgora citizens to the networked, contingent marketplace of the eAgora. In doing so, we leverage the OT-IT homology to help us understand what texts can never show us: how oral traditions work, how they mean, and how we can best grasp this oldest and most fundamental of humankind’s technologies of communication.

Real-time versus Asynchronous

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:36:10 Z

Real-time versus asynchronous

Are you caught up in the moment of surfing through an oral performance or the web, working your way through an evolving, cooperative, real-time process? Are you involved in an emergent partnership that can’t be dissolved and rejoined but requires your ongoing attention and participation? Or, alternatively, are you using an asynchronous medium, holding the communicative process at arm’s length, stopping the proceedings as you see fit and resuming when the time and place are right? Do you have the luxury to pause and restart without destroying the experience?

Whatever you’re presently doing, imagine not just one but both scenarios. And then ask yourself a challenging question: which type of experience is inherently truer, richer, more faithful? Which one qualifies as the more fundamental reality?

When your time is your own

We all profit from the multiple advantages of asynchronous communication, whether we’re consciously aware of them or not. Think of the many mainstream vehicles that fall into this broad category: brick-and-mortar books, static eFiles?, e-mail sent and received, and anything else that serves as a freestanding repository. Such cognitive prostheses help us to dodge the demands of emergence and the dire threat of contingency by offering apparent objectivity, permanence, and stasis. They allow us to defer exclusive, uninterrupted involvement and manage the ever-increasing demands on our time and energy by imposing a sequence – our own designated sequence – on the tasks and responsibilities we face. And all of these advantages are secure, we suppose, devoid of worry or qualification, since the information so dependably contained in these rock-solid media will unfailingly be there waiting for us whenever we’re ready to engage it. We, not others, decide when to participate; we, not others, remain in charge of the communication.

So deeply ingrained is this habit that we can easily forget that asynchronous communication is a remarkably recent invention. To be specific, we can trace its origins quite precisely to the founding of the tAgora, about November 22nd of our species-year, the very “day” when homo sapiens began to encode trading practices via clay counters, the eventual precursors of the tablet. Not long after that, on December 10th by our calendrical mapping, actual writing and literacy became available. From counters and tablets to papyrus, sheepskin, book-pages, and static eFiles, the tAgora has sponsored as well as depended on the peculiar power of disembodied tWords. Artifacts are created for later, off-line consumption; only after an intermission of indeterminate length is the communicative circuit completed repetitively if the serial occasions arise. Of course, that chronological and geographical hiatus between creation and use also marks a new kind of technology-supported convenience. With asynchronous media you don’t have to suspend your current activities (whatever they are) for an immediate, can’t-wait exchange. You can access whatever knowledge, art, or ideas are encoded in the text after the fact of its making and as partially or completely as you wish, whenever the time and circumstances are right for you.

Real-time in the oAgora

For an oral traditional performer and his audience, however, communication is real-time, not asynchronous. For the exchange to happen, both sides must be present and engaged at the same time and in the same place. If the genealogy spoken by a patriarch isn’t conveyed to anyone, its contents aren’t shared; it dies. If an elderly woman intones a healing charm with no patient involved, that verbal remedy loses its reason for being; it doesn’t cure anyone. If a story is told and retold without an audience, then the two-way dynamic of composition and reception fails; the story doesn’t qualify as OT communication. Yes, you can capture any of these empty, futile attempts at performance by introducing an asynchronous medium such as audio, video, or even dictation into text, and then playing back your quarry. We may even credit such off-line products with successful preservation of the event, even though they amount to an ideological intervention, a kind of imperialistic colonizing of the non-textual under the banner of the textual. But make no mistake: in the oAgora the only viable mode of communication is real-time.

Real-time in the eAgora

Likewise for the navigator of ePathways, who like the navigator of oPathways is inevitably a partner in the actual shared moment of co-creation. Interacting with a vast array of linked potentials, surfers click and travel in real time. Every trip consists of an ongoing negotiation from start to finish, every itinerary is a work in progress because it requires ongoing participation. Real-time explorations aren’t complete until the browser is closed – and in an important sense they’re never the last word, since each performance is simply one instance of what’s possible. Within the Pathways Project website, for example, you have four methods of construing reality. You can click on Full Table of Contents and proceed from node to node in alphabetical order (a linear logic that has no status in this marketplace). You can concentrate on the three principal media environments: the oAgora, the tAgora, and the eAgora. And you can navigate via pre-negotiated linkmaps or branches. Or you can do none or all of the above. So which strategy is best, most productive, or merely the most preferable? Well, that’s the essential point: your journey is what you yourself make of it – moving through an open system of linked alternatives. Just one requirement: you can never escape the contingency at the heart of the process. You can never become unenmeshed, because by doing so you’ll exit the web of ePathways and textualize experience. Simply put, there is no reality until you the surfer construct it.

Conventional wisdom is only conventional

Habits of mind notwithstanding, we owe it to ourselves to step beyond our agora-based biases and recognize the diversity of ways in which we communicate. For one thing, asynchronous media represent nothing more – and nothing less – than the accommodation we’ve settled on since the invention of the tAgora, an accommodation that’s been exposed by the invention of the eAgora and the rediscovery of the oAgora. For another, asynchronous technologies have until recently enjoyed an unacknowledged monopoly in “serious” communication, the kind of exchange via which indisputable facts must be duly ascertained, recorded, and faithfully transmitted. We’ve convinced ourselves that such crucial and responsible agora-business can be accomplished only in the tAgora. Of course, this is fundamentally an ideological claim, tenable only if you’ve swallowed and fully digested the illusions of object and stasis, the twin pillars supporting the textual marketplace. If you don’t accept these illusions as reality—and the Pathways Project exists in part to refute them—then you’ll notice that the tAgora emperor is missing more than a few of his garments.

This is not to say that asynchronous communication doesn’t present us with enormous advantages, or that, historically speaking, it hasn’t moved mountains in supporting our cultural work. It most certainly does and most certainly has. But those advantages aren’t as trouble-free or uncompromised as we like to pretend.

The price of no pathways

When we deal exclusively with asynchronous media, we by definition forgo real-time involvement, along with all of its own advantages and disadvantages. We restrict our creation, transmission, and reception of knowledge, art, and ideas to one technology, one medium, one way of knowing. We aren’t active partners anymore, except at the far end of the communicative process. We put down the book until tonight, by which time we trust it hasn’t morphed. We pause the audio or video in order to shovel snow, buy groceries, or share a few unencumbered hours with our family; no matter, we can pick up the film precisely where we left off. As tAgora denizens we know how to smooth over the jump-cuts in life and media-use (and we can’t influence the pathwayless text of the recorded performance, anyway). Asynchronous media allow and foster a staccato experience that we’ve agreed to interpret as continuous, but let’s not mislead ourselves: from the perspective of oAgora and eAgora participation, it’s not the same as sharing real-time experience.

Toward diversity: a fieldwork fairytale

Imagine an ethnographic team from another place and another time entering our twenty-first-century world on a mission to investigate how we communicate. What should they do? Depending on their particular aims and biases, these fieldworkers may decide to concentrate on oral traditions – for example, on the songlines of Australian aboriginal peoples, which serve as maps across their physical landscape as well as mythological digests, providing a kind of oAgora-style GPS and identity charter all in one. Or they may opt to focus on the myriad varieties of asynchronous media that proliferate throughout many societies, serving as tangible containers of information that can be read as off-line artifacts according to their users’ timetables. Or the visiting ethnographers may choose to spend much of their energy delving into the strange and powerful appeal of the Internet, establishing how that ever-evolving and network-dependent technology gained such traction so quickly. Perhaps they’ll observe that, in terms of interactivity and navigation through systems, the web appears to imitate the technology of oral tradition. Or, surveying all three agoras, they might even conclude that OT and IT mime the very way we think.

But however this team goes about its work, let’s hope that they recognize and understand two fundamental features of communication in contemporary cultures. First, may they come to realize that we are citizens not of any single verbal marketplace but rather of multiple agoras. Second, may they conclude that real-time and asynchronous media, as diverse as they clearly are, both provide absolutely viable ways of making sense of the world. By accepting all three agoras and both kinds of media-experience, our imagined ethnographers may just conclude that true, defensible democracy in media means tolerating and appreciating diversity in frame of reference.

Open Source OT

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:32:44 Z

Open Source OT

Remember your grandmother’s desk?

It wasn’t so long ago that oral tradition was understood as a static inheritance, something like your grandmother’s desk that traversed the generations relatively inert until it reached you. Your task was then to take your part in the preservation process: to maintain the beloved inheritance in the best shape possible for handing on to the next generation. “Tradition” in this sense was understood as a monolith, a static item whose value derived from its (perceived) immutability, its capacity for resisting change, its essential thing-ness.

Although this notion comfortably fits our cultural fantasy of absolute objectivity and stasis, applying it to oral tradition amounts to “bookifying” a bookless phenomenon. After all, OT depends for its very existence and continued viability not on fossilization but on the restless dynamic of rule-governed change. That is, OT continuity and sustainability stem not from fixation but from its polar opposite: innovation within a system available in the public domain. In this sense tradition means, first and foremost, a generative mix of pliability and pattern. It means a process rather than a product, sharing rather than owning. It means a living and evolving entity rather than your grandmother’s desk – however precious and irreplaceable that family-honored heirloom might be.

To illustrate this reality of continuity-via-innovation, and to provide another perspective on the OT-IT congruency that is the fundamental subject of the Pathways Project in general, let me propose an IT-to-OT “translation.” In the present node I’ll be attempting to convert an eAgora charter document – the Open Source Definition of software (OSD) – into the cognate language of the oAgora. In what follows we’ll be considering how the ten guidelines of the OSD also speak directly and importantly to the equally Open Source phenomenon of oral tradition.

Hopefully, this translation will help shed light on all three agoras and their importance for understanding the dynamic correspondences among media-technologies.

Two preliminaries

Register = Source code

At the basis of this IT-to-OT translation lies a fundamental parallel between IT source code and OT register, or way of speaking. Just as the specialized language of the oAgora is a particular “way of speaking” that supports particular expressive tasks, so software, the specialized language of the eAgora, amounts to a particular “way of programming” that supports specific cyber-tasks. In both cases the register/source code serves as the dedicated instrument or vehicle for building myriad possible products. Both vehicles amount to plastic and yet patterned media used by the performer/programmer to create and to innovate. In both cases we are dealing with processes that actively profit from being open, collective, and amenable to rule-governed change. Registers and source code are alike in being productively protean.

Translating the OSD for OT

The Introduction to the OSD cautions that “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” In OT terms, we could translate as follows: it isn’t enough simply to expose audiences and other performers to the particular way of speaking, or register, that performers and audiences use to negotiate the performance. Such access is the crucial starting-point, of course, but only that. Other provisions must follow if OT is truly to be regarded as open source. We can derive those provisions by analogy to the ten OSD stipulations, as follows.

1. Free redistribution

The OSD mandates that a software license must not restrict any party from transferring software to any other party, and must not involve a royalty or other fee. The rationale explains that this requirement “eliminate[s] the temptation to throw away many long-term gains in order to make a few short-term dollars,” and that failure to redistribute freely will generate “lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.” The logic is plain – conventional IT vending segregates rather than aggregates; it disassociates contributors within the collective software project. It sets innovators competitively against one another and constrains joint creativity by diminishing the energy of the larger group and foreclosing on its time for development. And all for the sake of a short-term result that can never achieve the long-term gain and stability that open source innovation fosters.

Correspondingly, and here our translation begins, OT depends for its viability on free distribution among its creative constituency (subject to the constraints of individual cultural patterns, of course). If there are commercial or other barriers erected to impede the flow and continuity of the innovative process, then the “T” effectively disappears from “OT”: it may be oral, but the continuity and ongoingness of tradition will fade away, potentially to disappear.

Examples of the crucial importance of free distribution abound. Xhosa and Zulu praise-poets from South Africa must be able to draw on the living resource of their tradition as they construct individually tailored “résumés” for tribal chiefs. Kaqchikel-speaking storytellers from Guatemala must be able to pass their tales along a continuous human chain that stretches from the distant past through the present and into the future. Mongolian epic singers must be able to narrate the particular cycle-chapter they happen to be performing on this occasion, and at the same time to imply other characters, stories, and events from the hugely larger Gesar and Janggar oral epic repositories.

Without this kind of free distribution – from one performer to the next, between performers and audiences, and over centuries and myriad different locales – OT becomes (at best) a static item, an artifact. Singular and self-contained, perhaps, but an evolutionary dead-end. What once were pathways become cul-de-sacs.

2. Source code

The OSD calls for all programs to be distributed “in source code as well as compiled form” in order to facilitate modification, to empower users to innovate as they wish and need to do (and to foster subsequent acts of innovation by others).

Compare the distribution of OT via the face-to-face, emergent situation of actual performance (that is, via source code) versus its transmission as a reduced, fossilized record in a published anthology or other paper edition (the compiled form). As the static, spatialized texts with which we’re so familiar and comfortable, paper editions present a digestible tAgora trace of OT. Ready to go and ready to use, this trace unquestionably “works,” at least according to the built-in expectations associated with our default agora. But can the compiled form of OT – the book – foster exchange, modification, and innovation among its users? Is it truly open?

Along with its superficial convenience, the (unrealistically) tidy textual edition reveals little or none of its source code: nothing of the living, morphing phenomenon as we know it in the oAgora. We entirely miss the many levels of sound and intonation, rhythm, gesture, vocal and instrumental music, visual signals, audience interaction, and other codes that make up the OT register. From the point of view of OT participants seeking to use and build on the living reality of performance, and here I include both other potential performers and all potential audience members, the way is blocked by their lack of access to the source code. Fluency in the compositional idiom – the ability to make and remake – is an impossible achievement if all we can experience is the superficial, radically reduced reflection we find in the textual edition.

eEditions, whose goal is the resynchronizing of the oral performance by electronically linking audio or video, transcription, translation, and contextual materials within an interactive whole, can’t ever substitute for actually “being there” as a member of the original audience. But at least they can offer access to some of the source code, representing the performance not as a finite series of static pages (the compiled form) but as the multidimensional, emergent, participant-driven phenomenon it once was and, to a degree, still can be.

3. Derived works

According to the OSD, a software license “must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.” That is, the IT license that accompanies the program must explicitly permit retooling by users to foster values central to the open source movement: “independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection.”

Although the OT license in question is implicit rather than explicit (though no less binding because it hasn’t been formalized in tAgora terms), oral tradition certainly follows this same model for “derived works.” The key feature here is to avoid any and all barriers to recomposition and reperformance, to insure that transmission through evolution doesn’t reach a dead-end, and thus to guarantee as far as possible that multiple generations of OTs will be born, thrive, and engender subsequent generations.

By analogy to the OSD, every OT performance amounts to one individual’s independent peer review of previous performances. Likewise, every performance is peer-reviewed by each of the audience members—sometimes with not-so-subtle results. Anything less than completely unfettered evaluation and remaking, followed by free distribution of the “derivative” performance on the same terms as its predecessors, will hinder “rapid evolution” in the oAgora. In the cases of both OT and IT, we should add, evolution will not be limited to a single direction or outcome but will organically proceed in many different directions with correspondingly diverse outcomes. Multiple navigable pathways inherently mean multiple realizations. While natural selection may accord special prominence to a particular performer or story, for example, the overall, long-term ecology of OT will be healthiest when it’s most diverse and most open to rule-governed morphing.

4. Integrity of the author’s source code

Some features of this fourth guideline pertain only to IT, with software authors and users being required to identify themselves and acknowledge responsibility and rights. But one regulation applies importantly to OT: “the license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.”

Understanding as above that the OT “license” is implicit in the social act of performance and transmission, this regulation would allow for modified versions of the register – both dialectal (regional) and idiolectal (single-person) – to serve as the basis of future performances. Again the emphasis is on meshing individually driven innovation with collective tradition.

To illustrate, consider the case of an oral epic singer from a particular geographical area who learns most of his or her “source code” from the other performers in that region, and perhaps especially from a close relative. Every performance that such a singer gives will reflect the regional form of the OT prevalent in that area (the dialect), as well as the individual language of his or her relative (the idiolect). Just as surely as a child raised in south Boston in the U.S. state of Massachusetts will speak a certain dialect of English, performers will use an OT source code that is in some respects typical of their home region. And just as surely as that same child will also reflect the pronunciation and vocabulary used by immediate family and peers (who may have lived elsewhere), performers will echo the individualized compositional register of the particular performers who taught them.

Extrapolate out a few generations of OT performers, and you can see that everyone will soon be working with a “modified source code” of one type or another. Broad similarities will exist alongside specific differences. Until the central, federalized, tAgora regulation made possible by print and static recordings arises, OT will evolve in many different directions, creating a scenario that once again fosters innovation by evolution. The truth is that Proteus never really stops morphing until you take drastic measures to try to hold him still. And even then what appears to be absolute stasis can turn out to be a tAgora illusion.

A mid-translation summary

Let’s take a moment to sum up what we’ve uncovered so far. Up to this point we’ve noticed that the specialized, dedicated languages of OT and IT resemble one another in fundamental ways – that the source code that supports Internet innovation corresponds to the register that supports the process of (re-)composition in oral tradition. The open-source concept applies, in other words, to OT’s “way of speaking” as well as to IT’s “way of programming.” This is one more way in which the three agoras align themselves: the oAgora and eAgora dovetail, while the tAgora stands apart.

5. No discrimination against persons or groups

The OSD mandates that “the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources.” Here we glimpse a bedrock correspondence between OT and IT, one that stems from their shared core dynamic of navigating public-domain pathways. Unlike the tAgora, the two bookless media actually nurture creativity through sharing rather than through ownership. Because they don’t operate by fixing and copyrighting, they encourage broad, democratic participation, everything else being equal. They draw from the collective strength of their users, rather than sequester a fossilized product behind the locked and bolted door of proprietary, legalized vendorship.

Of course, certain varieties of oral tradition may seem to discriminate against some potential user/performers, whether by gender, age, ethnic affiliation, or some other index. Viewed in context, however, this apparent exception merely proves the “no discrimination” rule. If a particular Navajo group mandates tribal membership or a specific time of year as a prerequisite for performance of a story, they are still licensing all eligible members to deploy the tale-telling register, to use the source code in a timely manner. If the South Slavic village tradition of magical charms requires that “conjurers” (bajalice) be female and pre-pubertal when they learn the spells and post-menopausal when they practice them, this restriction simply identifies the broad-based membership among whom there can be no discrimination (though of course there may be individual competition or further focusing via inheritance patterns).

This kind of limitation on eligibility is no categorical departure from the OSD definition, anymore than an analogous type of focusing would amount to discrimination in the IT sphere. Depending on its range of usefulness and its availability, a piece of software will always select a user-group much smaller and more focused than the entire eAgora population as the specific membership among whom there can be no discrimination.

The rule of thumb here – as in most IT and OT matters – is to respect the variety of the different situations and avoid committing blindly to a false (text-reflective) uniformity. Some open source software will involve smaller groups, some larger. Medical records or tax preparation software will no doubt attract more potential sharers than high energy physics or foreign language instruction programs. Likewise, the oral contest poetry of the Basques may well involve a much wider and more diverse group of participants than the Navajo and South Slavic traditions mentioned above, simply because it is more public and less restrictive in its rules about performers and performance. Perhaps most significantly, oral stories pass freely across national and even linguistic barriers via bilingual speakers – for example, bilingual epic singers who were preliterate in both Albanian and South Slavic were able to fluently manage the oral epic registers of both languages and traditions.

The key is that within the relevant, culturally defined group there is a free, unrestricted flow of rule-governed creativity. People and groups cooperate and share.

6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor

Any license for open source software “must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.” The OSD argues that the same programming instrument should theoretically be as usable in business as in genetic research, for example.

Correspondingly, OT thrives precisely by being transferable to multiple performance situations and, by being deployable, within culturally approved rules, for many different purposes by users involved in different “fields of endeavor.”

For one thing, the performance arena – the recurrent, essentially virtual venue for the performance of any given OT activity – takes myriad different actual forms that vary over time and place. Different performers and audiences participate at various times and places, all with roughly congruent assumptions about what’s transpiring in the arena. When they attend – whoever they are and wherever and whenever they participate in the particular event – they do so by speaking and hearing fluently within the register, just as IT adapters of open source software work fluently within a shared source code. In broad perspective the goal is never a static, book-like item, but movement within an ongoing, rule-governed process.

Beyond the innumerable unique instances of any generalized performance arena lies another level of adaptability. An OT genre – complete with its register, implications, and idiomatic force – may migrate to a starkly new use, as when the source code of South Slavic oral epic was pressed into service to chronicle the exploits of Tito and the Yugoslav resistance fighters during World War II. These “partisan songs,” as they’re known, invoke the epic apparatus current in oral tradition from at least the fourteenth century in order to portray the heroism of twentieth-century guerilla warriors. Or consider the South African praise-poets, who have adapted their résumé-building oral poetry, originally composed to “publish” the reputations of tribal chieftains in the non-textual medium, in order to celebrate or criticize contemporary political figures. This kind of evolutionary adaptation is another way in which OT avoids discrimination against particular fields of endeavor.

7. Distribution of license

The OSD stipulates that “the rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.”

In oAgora language, the corresponding regulation would call for the implied license attached to the register (OT source code) to extend automatically to all who seek to employ that register in performance or any other venue. In both IT and OT this requirement really amounts to attaching a smaller codicil to a more globally oriented will. Here’s the comparison. Barring discrimination against members of IT groups or fields of endeavor means extension of the original license to all subsequent users of the designated software and its source code. Barring discrimination against members of OT constituencies and against extension to new fields also means that the license to perform – and to serve as a fluent audience – cannot be required anew in each case (for each individual or performance). In an important sense, the implied license for OT is a fundamental aspect of the overall speech-act: every performance assumes (and operates under) its open-ended governance.

8. License must not be specific to a product

Correspondingly, the OSD mandates that “the rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution.” In other words, each single program within a larger conglomerate should be available and approved for sharing on its own, without the necessity of involving or transferring the entire conglomerate.

The analogous situation in OT might involve a cycle of stories about a particular character that are learned from a single individual – a small collection of Native American Coyote tales, for example, that a person might hear from an older family member. The implied license to perform any one of these stories doesn’t depend on a license for that cycle or any other. Instead, each story is individually licensed for performance and reception, even though one tale may implicitly refer to another within the tradition. OTs aren’t explicitly defined and delimited items, but rather implicitly linked and pathways-enabled patterns.

This is a bit of a slippery distinction, especially for those of us accustomed to thinking and interacting by creating and exchanging texts in a sort of potlatch ritual. True enough: most oral stories, for example, are in one sense complete in themselves, quite intelligible as isolated events. On the other hand – as with language itself, of which OT is but a special case – the fluent audience will be able to bring a great deal of idiomatic meaning to the isolated tale. They will “fill it out” with their background knowledge of the tradition, the character(s), the location(s), and the storytelling patterns that underlie what may otherwise seem a novel or even unprecedented plot. They’ve transacted business in the oAgora before, and for that reason they’re equipped to co-create the story.

Tell one, two, or more Coyote tales as you please. Each one is both its own story, licensed for distribution on its own terms, and by extension and implication a part of something much larger and more comprehensive. Nothing need stand in the way of telling and receiving the isolated tale, but it’s conventionally told (and meant for reception) within an implied, immanent context. The individual story works like a hot link in hypertext, providing built-in connections to other pathways. Click on the individual tale and its context—complete with built-in oPathways—comes up on your oDesktop.

9. License must not restrict other software

According to the OSD, “the license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.” In a sense this is the obverse of the preceding regulation: just as the whole cannot limit its parts, so the parts cannot limit one another.

We find an analogue in the real-world ecology of OT, the cultural system of various OTs that operate cooperatively but according to different rules, very much like a naturally occurring ecosystem with a diversity of species. Even though each of the OT forms is open-source, with its register or code available to all whom the genre selects as eligible practitioners, their diverse dynamics involve different performers and variant audiences. Rules for one species do not necessarily coincide with rules for others. One size doesn’t fit all.

Within the South Slavic ecosystem, for example, oral traditions are organized by gender, age, and social function. As we observed during fieldwork in Orashats, Serbia, women perform magical charms, lyric songs, and funeral laments (all in eight-syllable poetic lines), while men perform epics and genealogies (both in ten-syllable poetic lines). Magical charms and genealogies were primarily the province of senior women and men, respectively, while the other genres were age-independent. The actual function of the oral poetry – whether to cure ill humans and animals, to celebrate or criticize love and marriage, to mourn the dead, to affirm ethnic and historical identity, or to preserve the family tree – is a third axis for differentiation within the ecology of OT forms or species.

The implied license to perform any one of these genres applies to all practitioners of that particular oral tradition but does not extend to other forms in the overall ecosystem. Within the set of conjurers, for example, there is freedom to share, learn, and perform according to pertinent societal practices (charms are passed only from grandmother to grand-daughter). But that freedom does not extend to men or non-kin, nor can the charms be voiced in the men’s ten-syllable meter or enlisted to serve another social function. Although open-source, each of the ecosystem’s species plays by its own rules.

10. License must be technology-neutral

The OSD requires that “no provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.” Much of the language describing this regulation is specific and technical, but its general thrust is to avoid limiting transmission of software to and within GUI (graphical user interface) environments and to allow for sharing “over non-web channels that do not support click-wrapping of the download” (those check-boxes you find at the end of contractual agreements formulated by proprietary software manufacturers).

In regard to the implied license underlying the use of OT’s source code or register, this means that the tradition and its code must be able to be shared outside the foundational technology in which they arose. In other words, an OT register must be transferable to – and functional within – other communicative media, without the user’s having to seek a separate implied license.

How would this work with an actual OT? Consider the case of Petar II Njegoš, a nineteenth-century Montenegrin bishop who grew up in a rural village, mastered the local method of composing oral epic poetry, and eventually became a learned, highly literate and tAgora official. His “textual” poetry – never performed but rather written and published in books for readers – used the source code of oral epic to express his ideas on current political topics as well as traditional heroic mythology. He was employing OT source code to create a text.

Or how about Elias Lönnrot, the Finnish physician who scoured the Karelian countryside for what he posited were remnants of a once-expansive oral epic, the Kalevala? Although highly literate, he learned the special register of that oral poetry well enough that he was able to compose “missing” passages to cement these collected shards and re-create his envisioned national epic – which he then published as a book.

For both Njegoš and Lönnrot, the implied license to perform oral tradition transferred to a new medium, in this case that of the authored, published text. They managed a repurposing of oAgora source code for the tAgora venue.

Coda

The OSD prescribes the rules by which the IT community can share software and its source code in an open, contributory manner. Each of the ten tenets distinguishes open source philosophy and practice from proprietary, vendor-driven philosophy and practice, under the assumption that continuous, shared development is the most productive and sustainable way to foster innovation and create an inclusive constituency. Oral performers are effectively online with OT.

Our translation of the OSD from eAgorese to oAgorese suggests a kindred dynamic in another media-technology. Instead of depending on individual authors of individual texts, which are then packaged and sold as the concrete items they are, OT thrives on sharing among a collective. Discrimination among people, groups, or media is prohibited. Stories and other forms remain open and malleable; even the source code that underlies them is freely distributed. Historically, the result has been that OT “software” travels widely and easily across continents and eras – the Gesar epic is known across the face of central Asia, and ancient Homeric laments have descendant forms alive today in the Greek islands. Books and manuscripts – even in the form of digitized fossils – are far too brittle and user-unfriendly a medium to support the kind of generative sharing and sequel innovation that is the lifeblood of OT as an open source phenomenon.

In this way as in so many others, the eWorld mirrors the oWorld, while both stand “worlds apart” from the tWorld.

oAgora

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:29:42 Z

The oAgora: Oral networks to surf

An agora is a verbal marketplace, a site for creation and exchange of knowledge, art, and ideas. The Pathways Project recognizes three agoras, or arenas for human communication. This node is devoted to the OT arena, the oAgora.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Agora_in_Athens.jpg

The true currency of exchange in the oAgora is oWords—spoken, heard, and embodied words. Not typographical prompts or even audio or video facsimiles, but an actual, voiced, in-context performance experienced at that moment and in that place by a present audience. You participate in the oral marketplace via face-to-face transaction, not by swapping texts. Everything happens “in the moment”—right now, not at some convenient future time to be chosen by a detached, independent reader and forestalled until the time seems right. The oAgora event is all-consuming for audience and performer alike because it is unmediated by texts, with nothing held at arm’s length.

Agora-mirrors

Before proceeding any further, let’s highlight a built-in structural comparison among the three nodes on principal media types: the oAgora, tAgora, and eAgora. From this point on – and across all three involved nodes – the section headings and organization will follow a mirroring logic. In other words, immediately below this paragraph you will find two sections entitled “Genus and species” and “Word-markets,” followed by another with the subheading of either “Public, not proprietary” or “Proprietary, not public,” depending on the agora in question. In fourth position you will encounter a brief discussion of “The evolutionary fallacy,” and so on. The purpose of this organizational strategy is to help demonstrate the comparisons and contrasts that lie at the heart of the Pathways Project. For a complete list of the inter-agora parallels, visit Agora correspondences.

Genus and species

Early investigations of the oAgora assumed a binary model, with literature on one side and oral tradition (OT) on the other. This exclusive taxonomy helped to make a place for studying communications that didn’t use the default technology of the tAgora, but it grossly oversimplified the media involved. As studies in oral tradition expanded, and especially with the advent of widespread fieldwork in living cultures, investigators came to realize that their models needed to reflect the remarkable human complexity of verbal technologies.

Within the OT genus, then, we now discern many different and fascinating species or types of oral tradition. Suffice it to say for now that this host of species varies by genre, social function, performers, sites (both physical and virtual, and modes of interaction with the textual world. Some of these interactions are counter-intuitive for tAgora citizens, and comparative research has established that OTs show enormous variety around the world and from ancient times to the present. The watchword for species within the genus OT must always be diversity.

Word-markets

Consider the wealth of different word-markets in which oral poets ply their trade, whether performers of Central Asian epic, Basque contest poetry, South African praise-poetry, Serbian magical charms, or North American slam poetry, all of which are discussed below, or some other oral tradition. There’s no possibility of, or need for, copyrighting what they do. And why? Because of all forms of verbal art, oral tradition is the most firmly and naturally rooted in the public domain. And those roots are both nourishing for each immediate event and necessary for the continuing survival of OT as a whole.

Public, not proprietary

Subject to specific cultural constraints, OTs can be performed by multiple people without fear of violating any laws governing exchange in what amounts to an open-source marketplace. Those rules may limit eligibility by gender, age, kinship, status, or calendar, for example, but no individual ever “authors” a tradition, any more than a single individual ever authors a language. Nor can any one person ever deliver the final, canonical, “best” performance until texts enter the picture and make such a dead-end concept of verbal art imaginable and feasible. Such a monolith simply isn’t either imaginable or feasible within the oAgora. Once the economy of the tAgora is fully in place, however, public gives way to proprietary, open-access gives way to object-exchange, and traditions stop being traditions.

The evolutionary fallacy

With the variant dynamics of the oral, textual, and Internet arenas in mind, it’s easy to see why “oral evolves to written” and “written evolves to electronic” are fallacies traceable to the ideology of the text. If we model our understanding of all verbal commerce on a singular creation attributed to a singular author and consumed by a singular audience (one-by-one), then the necessarily plural identity of performer(s), OTs, and audience(s) will appear primitive and underdeveloped. Likewise, we’ll fail to understand and credit the plural identity of web architects and surfers with their shared but diverse experiences in the eAgora.

A Web

In either case, non-written, non-textualized communication will seem to lack something, to fail to measure up according to our ideologically imposed criteria. After all, until recently collectors of OTs have unquestioningly subscribed to an implicit rank-ordering by converting the living webs that support oral traditions into freestanding objects suitable for display in the Museum of Verbal Art. And how many times each day do you hear or read about people bemoaning the informality and impermanence of the web? They too undergo a kind of media-specific culture shock and feel compelled to “diss” whatever isn’t text.

But of course it’s not just a matter of one situation—one agora—evolving progressively and inevitably toward another. Each arena operates according to its own idiosyncratic economy. The oAgora uses a different currency of exchange than the tAgora – embodied versus entexted words, oWords versus tWords. And the eAgora uses eWords, similar in many ways to oWords and far removed from tWords. The eAgora sponsors code – like URLs and HTML – that depends for its power and efficacy on its performative nature; eCode actually causes something to happen, and does so recurrently, not repetitively. None of the three currencies is inherently better, more valuable, or more advanced than the other two. Each is simply the coin of its particular realm.

This is not to claim that any arena is entirely homogeneous. Nor is it to contend that they never interact, or that hybrid agoras can’t form; they do and they can, in fascinating ways. But it is a fatal mistake to posit a one-way developmental trajectory, to view verbal technology as working its way inexorably from a text-deprived Dark Age toward a thoroughly evolved and fully textual us, and on the way to a (fascinating though feared) virtuality. We need to resist the ideologically driven assumption that limits our imagination and citizenship to the textual arena.

Five OT word-markets

Let’s start by visiting five modern oAgoras to investigate who “shops” there (both performers and audiences) and how their economies work, at least in general terms. For this purpose I’ve chosen an Asian, an African, a North American, and two quite disparate European word-markets, with the varieties of verbal art ranging from epic to praise to contest to magic to social protest. These examples are intentionally highly diverse, engaging different geographical areas, ethnic contexts, performance styles, and cultural functions. But they also have something vital in common: they depend upon several key features of all oAgoras – continuity, emergence, rule-governed morphing, roots in the public domain, and pathway-navigation.

Central Asian epic
The stories and story-cycles of Turkic oral epic stretch across a huge area of central Asia, and can be traced back before the fourteenth century. Some of the principal “owners” of the epics are the Uzbek, Karakalpak, Kazakh,and Kirghiz peoples, who collectively range over large sections of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkestan, and northwestern China. When we add that many of these same heroic tales are told in Mongolian and Tibetan, languages unrelated to the Turkic tongues, it becomes clear that the oAgora for this tradition of oral epic is enormous and multidimensional both geographically and chronologically. Singers, variously named in various areas, must have numbered in the thousands, each with scores of audiences over time. Within this complex and multifaceted scenario we will search in vain for individual authors and authoritative works. What we will find is multiple performers telling and retelling tales involving Gesar, Janggar, and other heroes by surfing the web of story shared throughout this oAgora. We’ll find performers and audiences enmeshed in a continuous process of re-creation, navigating the linked pathways of their story-net.

No strategy for fixation and copyright – the core, defining activities of the tAgora – could ever begin to capture and protect even a fraction of the ever-morphing wealth of Turkic oral epic. Nor could such book-intensive strategies serve any purpose within the oAgora, since they work against the continuity typical of (and necessary to) OT by transforming living pathways into lifeless objects. While text-objects may constitute the official medium of exchange in the tAgora, they are non-negotiable in the oAgora.

Basque contest poetry
This genre of improvised verbal sparring, called bertsolaritza by its practitioners and enthusiasts, permeates Basque society at all levels. Communities sponsor after-dinner duels between hired bertsolari, and local and regional competitions lead to a national event that culminates in an overall championship every four years. In all cases a competitor must extemporaneously perform a short poem on an assigned but unpreviewed topic, using a particular traditional rhyme-scheme, melody, and verse-form, and his or her opponent must then counter with an immediate rebuttal composed within the same set of structural conditions. While each poem is unique and unprecedented, each one is also embedded in the web of bersolaritza tradition that is owned not by an individual singer or even a designated group of singers, but by the Basque community as a whole. In actual performance, audiences often sing the last few lines (of this original, never-before-heard poem) in unison with the bertsolari, a practice made possible by their fluency in the specialized poetic language and co-application of the compositional rules. As the rhymes, music, and verse-form converge toward an inevitable climax, the audience joins the extemporizing poet in mutual performance. Collectively, the Basque people as an ethnic group support this contest poetry through an organization called Bertsozale Elkartea.

South African praise-poetry
In earlier years Xhosa and Zulu praise-poetry served as an oral résumé for chiefs, a way to “document” and “publish” credentials and reputation via the oral traditional network. Composed for individual chiefs and based on well-defined rules for versification and performance, these poems celebrated the accomplishments and lineage of the tribal leader. In more recent times praise-poetry, which always could be used to criticize as well as praise the figures in question, has been employed as a vehicle for social and political commentary, both positive and negative. One of the most famous positive uses is the many “praises” of Nelson Mandela on his emergence from long-term imprisonment.

Serbian magical charms
In a Serbian village, medical treatments for skin disease and various other maladies take the form of incantations whispered by bajalice, or conjurers. As specialists in healing, these women learn their traditional remedies before the onset of puberty but don’t actually perform them until their fertile years are concluded. Charms are considered part of the bride’s dowry, and are passed from grandmother to grand-daughter as a living inheritance, joint property of the natal extended family from which a woman derives and the affinal extended family into which her descendants will be born. The audience for these healing performances is the single patient, into whose ear the conjurer speaks the spell, even though the treatment may well take place quite publicly, with other people well within earshot.

In order to study and analyze Serbian magical charms, collectively known as bajanje in the local idiom, our fieldwork team quite naturally sought to record multiple performances on audio tape. Especially because this highly focused genre employs an often arcane vocabulary, with numerous archaisms and other rare forms not found in everyday language, and also because it is spoken so rapidly and sotto voce, we needed recordings that we could play again and again as we struggled to transcribe, translate, and understand the nuances of bajanje. We had already sought and received permission to make audio recordings of performances of other oral genres in the same village, so we anticipated no objections.

But objections there most certainly were, right from the moment we brought out the audio equipment, providing us with an instance of how a generally open-access medium can be culturally restricted. Our initial explanation – that we were studying the charms “kao poezija” (as poetry) – did little or nothing to dispel peoples’ fears. It soon became apparent that our proposed text-making activities threatened to disrupt the traditional ecology of bajanje. By creating what amounted to objects that could be circulated outside their prescribed ritual environment in an unlicensed fashion, we were threatening to extend knowledge of the precious remedies beyond their “owners.” In other words, a charm that constituted a valuable asset in one woman’s dowry (and for which she had established a village clientele who recognized and paid for her particular expertise) might become another woman’s property as well, to do with as she pleased. What we regarded as harmless recordings for research purposes ran the risk of collapsing “proprietary” distinctions among women who practiced individual specialties within a common, shared tradition. Far from being an advance or an evolutionary next step, texts were potentially a uniquely destructive medium, a short-circuit that practitioners of these healing remedies wanted very much to avoid.

The solution? Effectively, to install another living node in the web of oral transmission, but one that would pose no danger to the overall charm ecology, and to entrust the charms to her safekeeping. For this purpose Barbara Kerewsky Halpern, mother of two teenage (and, strictly speaking, marriageable) daughters, was designated an honorary baba (grandmother) and identified as the recipient of the bajanje. By age and status she was deemed eligible to practice the healing arts, but as a Western anthropologist rather than a village baba she of course would never do so. Once this “dead-end” node was in place, and after pledging not to play the audio recordings for anyone in the village or the tradition at large, we were cleared to textualize the performances – for our non-proliferating, outside-the-circuit use only. From the perspective of the charm tradition as a village intranet, I presented no threat whatsoever to the process; as a male, I was automatically segregated by gender outside the set of pathways that constituted the tradition, and so I was allowed to be present at the various performances in order to run the tape recorder. What really mattered was maintaining control of the pathways among those who could participate, and this in turn meant keeping texts out of the loop. Overall, we learned a valuable lesson about how texts – our default medium in the tAgora – could present a dangerous threat to oAgora dynamics.

North American slam poetry
Step into a café in any large or medium-sized North American city, especially on a weekend night, and chances are you’ll encounter an increasingly popular oral tradition known as slam poetry. Often a vehicle for social commentary or protest, this tradition arose in the mid-1980s in Chicago and has quickly evolved into a popular, well-attended activity with local, regional, and national levels of competition. In its purest form, slam lives solely for performance: although poets compose their verse in writing, they do so strictly for live presentation, ignoring or even discarding the script after the poem is initially committed to memory. A text has no status or function in this oAgora, and as a result the poetic performance morphs naturally over time. According to the rules for both individual and team contests, the scores awarded by judges allot 50% to the poem and 50% to its performance. In practice, the two are indistinguishable.

In any given competition the oAgora for slam can involve either individual competitors or teams, supported by highly engaged audiences who also play a significant role in their word-market transactions. Guidelines prohibit the use of scripts or props, as well as set time limits on each performance. Although experienced experts evaluate the results at the level of the national championship, the customary local arrangement is to select as judges people who are new to slam – in order, as it was explained to me, to keep this activity a “people’s poetry.” Audiences enthusiastically enter the fray both during and immediately after each performance, shouting their approval or disdain in the hope of influencing the scores awarded to their favorites. Except at the national level, the prizes are usually nominal: $25 to the winner, for example. As Allan Wolf famously put it, “The points are not the point, the point is poetry.”

No real authors

Authors – in our modern and highly ideological sense of the term as individual creators of original, unique, objectifiable, and usually published works – simply don’t exist in the oAgora. And if authors as such don’t exist, then the burden of “protecting the work” can’t fall to them. Most fundamentally, there’s usually nothing to protect, since the story or lyric or eulogy or charm usually doesn’t belong exclusively and forever to any single individual. It can’t be owned in the way a freestanding text-object can be owned, and therefore can’t be used or transferred under carefully written and implemented guidelines. In most cases there’s nothing to prevent another person, sooner or later, here or somewhere else, from performing the “same” work, although the next performer will inevitably make changes in the “original” (which of course wasn’t really an original in the first place). Even when a performer creates and re-creates a singular work (as with slam poets), each transaction in the word-market – always involving a different audience, time, place, and set of conditions – is but one transitory instance of an ever-evolving process. Culture gets continuously mashed-up and remixed in the oAgora.

Five non-authors

The five word-markets mentioned above are alive and bristling with poetry, but they all lack what we would call “authors.” Consider the dynamics of each OT arena. With their stories strung out across enormous geographical tracts and throughout both Turkic- and Mongolian-speaking populations, central Asian epic singers can hardly be classified as authors in our sense of the term. Basque bertsolari likewise depend on and draw from a tradition, creating unique poems by performing within the designated rules that govern their oAgora. The situation is extremely similar with South African praise-poets, both Xhosa and Zulu, who construct personalized poetic résumés by working within a traditional matrix; the ability of this kind of poetry to morph is well illustrated by its application to political leaders for both praise and criticism. And though a degree of ownership does enter the picture with Serbian bajalice, they all intone their healing charms using the octosyllabic, rhyming language of their shared genre. Even slam poets, who start by composing their verses on paper or a computer display, do so only in order to ready themselves to perform it. They typically do not seek publication, since their poems are meant specifically and strictly for the oAgora of live performance. Strange as it may seem, there are no true authors anywhere to be found in the oAgora.

oAgora sharing and re-use

It’s primarily an issue for the eAgora, but we might pause for just a moment to weigh some alternatives to conventional copyright (a.k.a. “Big C”), which as we’ve seen can’t apply to the itemless word-markets of oral tradition. But maybe another kind of “little c” copyright might apply to the oAgora. Let’s briefly consider two of the licenses offered by the Creative Commons website – the most and the least restrictive of the six contracts – with a view toward determining whether either of them could help in governing performance and exchange of oral traditions.

The most stringent
The “Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives” license stands at the conservative end of the Creative Commons spectrum, that is, closest to the ideologically driven concept of Big C copyright that governs the tAgora. This contract “allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.” Of course, since transactions in the oAgora don’t involve authors or static, finite works – not to mention tAgora definitions and rules – this license can have no utility for oral tradition.

The most open
At the other end of the spectrum lies the simple “Attribution” license, which “lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.” This one sounds like a perfect fit for the business of our oral word-market until we get to the final clause calling for acknowledgment of an original work by, we must suppose, an original creator. In other words, even the most liberal license offered by Creative Commons, an institution dedicated to enabling the remixing of culture, assumes a fixed, finite object eligible for sharing and remaking. Although this least inhibiting of licenses speaks cogently to the realities of distribution, remixing, tweaking, and building upon as we encounter them within the oAgora, it still doesn’t recognize the radical morphing and objectlessness of OT. The ideology of the text – whether a book, a musical score, a painting, a film, or whatever – dies hard.

Variation within limits

It’s counterintuitive for us, but continuous morphing in the oAgora doesn’t lead to anarchy. Things don’t fall apart, primarily because there aren’t any “things” in the first place. OT in fact draws its strength from variation within limits, from its rule-governed ability to change systemically – just like language itself, only more so. Performers always have a choice; they can select from viable, systemically arrayed options. They can follow multiple different pathways in realizing their emergent performances, which will not be photocopies or diskcopies of yesterday’s or last year’s or any other “edition.” They may choose one route today, another similar but non-identical route next week, and so forth, depending on factors such as their own state of mind, the nature of the audience, and the particulars of the occasion. Motion never freezes into stasis, the journey of discovery never devolves into the closed circuit of a daily commute, pathways never become ruts.

Variation within Homer
We know the Iliad and Odyssey only through manuscripts from the ancient world. Nonetheless, even these silent, static remains show evidence of the systematic remixing typical of verbal art in the oAgora. We can describe three kinds of recurrent patterning in these oral-derived poems.

At the level of poetic lines, traditional formulas provide pathways within the network of Homeric epic language. For example, such predicates as “Then [he/she] answered him/her” combine with a broad array of subjects, such as “much-suffering divine Odysseus,” “grey-eyed goddess Athena,” and numerous other stock names, in order to produce a large array of introductions to speeches. There is variation, to be sure, but it’s limited – and that double-edged dynamic makes the remixing strategy useful, effective and evocative, not willy-nilly, overdetermined, or clichéd.

Likewise, typical scenes, such as the frequent ritual of the Homeric feast, operate by meshing individual, situation-specific details with a recurrent series of actions, that is, by placing unique moments in a larger, resonant (because traditional) context. The systematic nature of these recurrent scenes provides a recognizable frame of reference even as unprecedented developments occur within them. Thus the aberrant behavior of the usurping suitors at the opening of the Odyssey stands in stark contrast to the standard, expected series of feasting details, and the composite portrayal gains depth from the powerful juxtaposition of disorder and order. Once again, the traditional is creatively remixed.

Finally, the Odyssey as a whole is but one version of what may be the oldest and most widespread story-pattern in the world, distributed as it is from Ireland to India and Pakistan and witnessed from ancient times to the present day in many hundreds of examples. The gist of the tale involves a hero summoned away to war just before or after his wedding (or the birth of his first child) and forcibly detained in foreign lands for many years. After a series of life-threatening adventures he returns in disguise to find his wife or fiancée besieged by suitors. He then defeats his rivals, tests the loyalty of his family and servants, discovers his mate’s fidelity or treachery, and either reassumes his place (if she is faithful) or starts another adventure (if she is not). The identity of the hero and heroine change, along with geographical and cultural particulars, but the tale-type remains recognizably the same, varying within limits. The return pattern, a highly generative story-system, simply gets remixed.

The analogy to language

Think about living, spoken language – continuously mixed and remixed – rather than its reduction to the page. We don’t resort each and every day to one of a limited number of fixed monologues or conversations, do we? Even similar pronouncements or exchanges on identical topics involve innumerable choices and adaptations, made in the moment and outside the scope of any fossilized, predetermined scheme. We depend on our human ability to generate rule-governed communication, we vary our speech-acts within limits, we suit our discourse to different situations. OT does the same.

A basic proverb
Consider this homemade proverb: “Oral tradition works like language, only more so.” OT is anything but objectified and static. It morphs according to rules that provide guidance and stability, but which also promote – to different degrees depending upon the particular genre – creativity and individual realization. In that regard, OT is simply a special case of language.

But how about the “more so”? Everyday language is necessarily broad-spectrum; general conversational language, for example, supports a great many interactions, with optional adjustments for your relationship with your addressee, or for the physical site of the exchange, the time of day, the weather, and so on. But OTs require more rules. Superimposed on the broad-spectrum language are additional rules that identify the communication as a particular kind of speech-act – perhaps there’s a melody, for instance, or a rhyming constraint or a particular rhythm. OT languages are narrow-spectrum tools; they serve fewer functions, but they fulfill those fewer functions much more economically than could general languages.

This built-in focus in turn means that OT languages are more densely idiomatic, with designated parts standing for much larger and more complex wholes. Thus Homer’s phrase “green fear” carries the connotation of a fear that has its origins in a supernatural source. Similarly, the South Slavic poets’ idiom “black cuckoo” takes on the traditional sense of a woman who has been widowed or is about to be widowed. Neither of these specialized meanings is reported in any dictionary or lexicon, since such textual resources gloss the broader-spectrum language of texts; they are formulated to serve the purposes of the tAgora. The oWords employed as currency in the oAgora operate under an enhanced set of rules and carry with them an enhanced idiomatic value. Like the eWords that we will discuss in relation to the eAgora, they “work like language, only more so.”

Recurrence, not repetition

What does it mean to say that something repeats? The scenario is familiar enough: a discrete and item-like event happens once, then it happens again, and so forth. A best-selling novel, for instance, may be published one year and reprinted the next, so that the title repeats on the bookstore or library shelf. Or consider a poetic refrain that appears at the end of every stanza, so that each iteration echoes those that precede it. Or the chorus to a song, which will dependably repeat after each verse. All of these cases are clearly repetitive because subsequent occurrences derive their meaning primarily from earlier ones within a finite, limited context. The chain of meaning is linear and contained, deriving from direct correspondences from one item to the next.

mise en abŷme images illustrate linearity

But that isn’t the way OT works. OT actively depends on recurrence rather than serial repetition. It operates via idiomatic responses that follow networked pathways. Consider two simple analogues. Perhaps you’re a college student and you make a habit of greeting your friends with a wave of the hand and a ritualistic phrase like “What’s up?” You react in this way regularly, every time you pass any of your friends on the street. Or perhaps you’re a Navy airman and your daily routine involves saluting a succession of officers, using exactly the same motion on every occasion. But in neither case are you really repeating the greeting; instead, you’re resorting to an approved, idiomatic signal that indexes your encounter and relationship. You’re following an established pathway, using a recurrent action to accomplish your purpose.

To illustrate the nature of recurrence in the oAgora, here are two kinds of examples from South Slavic oral epic: recurrent beginnings and recurrent performances.

Recurrent beginnings
Epic singers within this OT start their performances in one of two ways – either with or without a prologue (called a pripjev). If they opt to use a pripjev, the first few lines of the song might go something like this:

Ej! Where we sit, let us make merry!
Let us make merry and have conversation!
Let us sing a little song of times long past;
Long ago it was and now we are remembering.

What this short introduction does is to set the stage, to establish the performance arena, to admit performer and audience to the oAgora. It doesn’t prescribe the specifics of the story to follow, and in fact any epic tale can then ensue, regardless of story-pattern, characters, action, or whatever. In their overall function such prologues resemble the “Once upon a time” of Grimm brothers’ fairytales, recurrent but non-specific cues that a story is beginning. Prologues are first-step pathways that get things started in an idiomatic way.

The epic singer, or guslar, may also choose not to use a pripjev, and to plunge directly into the story (usually after an instrumental prelude to signal the performance arena. If this is the case, he has the option of following a broad, multi-purpose pathway or a focused, single-purpose pathway. For example, many performances begin with a line such as “Mujo of Kladusha was drinking wine,” which can signal a wide variety of story-types, involving weddings, sieges of cities, or other subjects. But if the oral poet starts his performance with the phrase “[Someone] was crying out” (Pocmilije), there can be only one result: a Return Song. That is, if the guslar sings “Pocmilije X,” where X names any of the dozens of heroes in the Moslem tradition of the South Slavs, he is alerting the audience to expect an Odyssey-type story about that hero. Of course, they cannot know in advance how the specifics of the narrative will unfold, or even whether the hero’s mate will prove faithful or treacherous, but that brief idiomatic phrase unmistakably marks a pathway toward a single generic story-pattern. And it does so not because it repeats (in this performance or any other), but because it recurs.

Recurrent performances
Just so with entire performances. Each version of a South Slavic epic tale is equally “the work”; no one of them repeats any other, or depends for its meaning on any particular prior rendition. A guslar may perform “The Captivity of Alagić Alija” on a Tuesday, for example, then again later that week and again two weeks later – all without repeating himself. How is that possible? Because these performances are not first, second, and third editions of a book, nor do they constitute a draft followed by a series of revisions. Each of these epic songs is a individual realization of the story, a singular navigation of the multidimensional pathways that – as a composite song-web – collectively make up the story-system. The epic tale doesn’t repeat; it recurs.

Built-in “copyright”

It will seem counterintuitive to us at first, but oral traditions are powerful precisely because they can’t be fixed, precisely because they morph while recurring. Because it isn’t predetermined and remains open to innovation that is idiomatically driven and forever under construction, the Internet harnesses the cumulative energy and contributions typical of distributed rather than single authorship. Unless or until they get textualized, OTs never weaken into finite, fossilized, and therefore discardable items.

What’s more, and again it will initially seem contradictory, the non-fixity of the oAgora guarantees a built-in kind of “copyright protection” for artistic activity by setting limits on variation. Rule-governed flexibility is of course the engine of recurrence and continuity, but too radical a departure from the implicit rules will turn an intelligible performance into gibberish. Fluent performance requires both an inherent grasp of those limits and an ability to fashion a here-and-now, true-to-the-place-and-moment creation. Otherwise audiences will complain or simply stop attending, and performers (or at least their performances) will be marginalized.

Survival of the fittest

To put it another way, the self-sufficient ecology of oral tradition will naturally select which performers and performances are to be understood as viable. No single member of that ecosystem will be able to claim—or have any need to claim—that he or she “owns” a particular work, at least in our default textual sense. If it’s not recognized as a tangible item, you can’t own it. And if you can’t own it, you can’t restrict its use. There’s nothing (no thing) to restrict.

In the OT arena, strength and continuity reside not in stasis but in ongoingness, not in fixity but in rule-governed flexibility. The oAgora is a word-market for living, embodied, systematic communication.

The oAgora works via pathways.

Museum of Verbal Art

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:27:49 Z

The Museum of Verbal Art: A Parable

Museum and canon

[Author’s/wikimaster’s note: What follows in this node is a story. It requires an effort of the imagination.]

Imagine a museum that houses and displays the core of the literary canon—literature as we know it, or, more to the point, as generations of scholars and students have established its scope and identity¹. Visitors to this privileged edifice have the opportunity to trek through the most treasured of texts, to read and study what Western culture has identified as the very most important verbal art, from the ancient to the contemporary world. Admission is gratis, the stacks are open, and the ever-diligent library staff has even placed a suggestion box just inside the front door.

But there is trouble brewing: the MVA is under serious threat.

Losing accreditation

After a lengthy and painful process of evaluation, the verdict is in: our much-admired, elegantly appointed Museum of Verbal Art—the cultural centerpiece and pride of the tAgora—has lost its accreditation. We’ve been duly notified, and the evidence is unfortunately compelling, that our collection is radically incomplete, even deeply biased in its parochialism.

It’s true, alas. The relatively few cherished items chosen for public display have been gathering dust, undisturbed on their pedestals, for far too long. We’ve tried to upgrade by repackaging our exhibits, pasting on fresh new labels, shifting the viewer’s perspective this way and that, but none of these increasingly desperate strategies addresses the accreditation team’s most damning charge: that we’ve created an unrepresentative display of homo sapiens' verbal art.

And the criticism goes on. We’re told that generations of our curatorial staff have shirked their duty in assembling the Museum collection. Relying on inherited and unexamined assumptions about what constitutes verbal art, they’ve foreshortened rather than broadened horizons. Sadly, an unblinking appraisal must admit that, until recently, our labors have all too often produced a circular result: we continue to celebrate what has always been celebrated, privileging those very artifacts from which we draw our criteria for selection. A kind of “subcultural narcissism,” one evaluator observed.

Recent renovations

On the bright side, over the last few decades complaints from visitors and experts alike have begun to stimulate dramatic and rewarding gains in many areas. Where are the long-lost women authors, you ask? Nationwide, new generations of scholars labor to bring women’s literature into plainer view. Where are the exciting new works by African American and Native American authors, you challenge? Again, the answer is gratifying: today’s reader-visitors are often as familiar with Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich as with William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, or Leo Tolstoy.

Herman Melville

Toni Morrison

In these and other once-marginalized areas, boundaries truly are expanding. New voices are entering the discussion, new champions are joining the fray, and the wizened old guard of canonical authors and texts is also profiting from immersion in a revitalized context of human diversity. The Museum of Verbal Art is inarguably a much more interesting place to visit these days. Nonetheless, we’ve apparently lost our accreditation. How could that possibly be?

The silenced majority

Living oral traditions

Well, it turns out that the problem goes far deeper than our selection of tAgora texts, no matter how many and no matter how diverse. For even our most visionary curators have largely failed to tap potential resources of verbal art that dwarf even the MVA’s recently expanded holdings in size and variety. We’ve taken such brave and important steps to acquire and display newly discovered and rediscovered treasures from the four corners of the known world (the literate and textual world, of course). How unfortunate, then, that we should have largely ignored the magnificent array of expressive forms that have but a single shortcoming: their preference for the spoken over the written word. By depositing in our Museum only what we can collect from the tAgora, we’ve programmatically ignored the oAgora. We’ve excised the greater part of homo sapiens' experience, past and present, as a creator of verbal art.

Even when we haven’t entirely failed to credit the existence of oral tradition, we’ve done the next worst thing: banning all or most such works from the hallowed halls of literary studies, treating them like unworthy pariahs by lodging them “where they belong” in buildings adjacent to the Museum. Finding other quarters for these textless kin may have passed for recognition, and within the Museums of Folklore and Anthropology unwritten verbal art—the proud issue of the oAgora—has certainly prospered. But the Museum of Verbal Art itself remains largely off-limits to prospective donations that lack a lettered pedigree.

Works with OT roots

Nor has our beloved tAgora-driven MVA been much more receptive to rethinking the descriptions and interrelationships of its current holdings as new discoveries about their oAgora history and most basic characteristics have emerged. Not that substantial pressure for change hasn’t been brought to bear. It just hasn’t worked yet: old cognitive habits die hard.

Homer

The Curator of Antiquities has probably had the worst of it so far: with evidence for the influence of oral tradition on Homer, Hesiod, and other ancient authors accruing at an alarming rate, it’s gotten harder to recycle the same tired old portraits of these figures as modern authors of original texts². Never mind that Homer “himself”—probably a code-name for the oral epic tradition rather than a fully historical person—doesn’t agree. He celebrates bards not as literati but as masters of oPathways. So far, however, the oAgora origins of the Iliad and Odyssey haven’t appreciably affected the Museum exhibit: curator and patrons like still defer to the time-honored concept of these and related poems as the fundamentally textual cornerstones of the Western tAgora.

Nor has the Curator of Medieval Studies had an easy time of it as the rediscovery of oral tradition has spread from era to era and item to item. The exhibit on the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf³ cries out for radical refashioning, as do those on the Old French Song of Roland, the medieval Spanish Poem of the Cid, and the Old Norse sagas, all of whose identities as uncompromisingly literary monuments once seemed safe and secure. There have even been whispers that high-traffic Museum exhibits featuring elite authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, long recognized for his mastery of texts in many tongues, require a bit of face-lifting to acknowledge oAgora dimensions of their artistry⁴.

Similar woes have beset the Curators of Eastern Art, whether Indian, Oriental, or Arabic. Not only do texts like the Mahabharata stem from oral traditions, it seems, but some of them also appear to have “lesser” kin still alive today in folk tradition⁵. And this is to say nothing of Middle Eastern Art, in particular the Judeo-Christian Bible—both Old and New Testaments—with its roots firmly planted in the realm of the spoken, embodied word⁶.

Textual authority

Still, even with the pressure exerted by reports from fieldwork on living oral traditions and by the rediscovery of oral traditions at the root of many canonical texts, the Museum has undergone no fundamental change, no major building program or renovation, no paradigm shift. And the reason isn’t far to seek: the tAgora canon of literary, text-based art looms far above the fray, austere and practically unchallengeable. Boasting both historical depth and contemporary political power, it selects and rejects with a faceless and final authority, supposedly objective but in reality self-fulfilling to the core. When it comes to verbal art from outside the textual marketplace, the chances for mounting a new installation are very slim indeed, no matter how urgent the need.

This is a critical situation. As it stands, the MVA simply fails even to acknowledge the preponderance of the world’s verbal art: those myriad and vital oral traditions that dwarf written literature in size, content, and diversity.

How, then, can we begin to remedy this disappointing situation? How can we restore our lost accreditation? What sorts of curatorial programs and strategies for acquisition are necessary to fill the enormous and important gaps in our collection? How do we ensure that visitors to our cherished institution are exposed to an appropriately expanded and enriched canon? What we need is an MVA that realistically reflects the many faces and voices of verbal art, and especially the worldwide cornucopia of oral traditions and works that derive from and depend upon this non-textual medium.

We need, in short, to hear from the oAgora.

From the Alexandrian Library to the Internet

As a first step, let’s attempt some revisionist history. Let’s try to place our hoped-for new Museum and its open, expanded collection in perspective. To do so, we’ll compare it to two famous “depositories”: the great and mysterious Alexandrian Library, wonder of the ancient world; and its present-day analogue and wonder of the modern world, the Internet. These two imposing edifices, bookends to the waning age of inscription and print, represent watershed moments in the technology of storing and communicating knowledge. Underlying their physical differences, however – the one a towering stack of brick-and-mortar maps, the other a networked web of electronic potentials – lies a more radical distinction. The Alexandrian Library consisted of things, while the Internet consists of pathways.

A warehouse in ancient Alexandria

Although plagued by contradictory testimony from earliest times, enough of the history of the ancient Library has been reconstructed that we can be sure of its central, ongoing purpose: nothing less than to house under a single roof copies of all texts ever created. During its prime under the Ptolemies, reports were required every year on progress made toward what was considered an achievable goal. How many scrolls were presently in hand? Were there prospects for major new collections?

Behind this bibliographical imperialism lay an astonishing assumption, straight out of tAgora thinking. Since there must be a limited, finite number of items, so went the reasoning, let’s find them all and make them our own. This policy may not sound entirely unfamiliar to a twenty-first-century culture of authors, readers, and objectified works of verbal art. In our era the same spirit has filled old-fashioned library buildings to overflowing, created the need for off-site storage facilities, and accelerated the advent of the digital library.

The Ptolemies had virtually unlimited funds at their disposal with which to pursue their dream of a universal library, of course. But more important to the project than their deep pockets were their most deeply held convictions about the necessary relationship between, for example, the author and works we call Homer and the numerous scrolls at Alexandria that wholly or partially recorded some version of the Iliad or Odyssey.

Twinned illusions

One of these convictions, what we might call the illusion of object, is still very much operative today, although evolving electronic media are daily forcing us to extend our definition of what constitutes a tangible object. Under the influence of textual ideology, the ancient Librarians effectively equated Homer and the scroll; for the purposes of collection, the two were indistinguishable. This is all the more remarkable because oral composition, transmission, and performance were still ongoing in some parts of the Greek world during at least the early years of the Library. Nonetheless, the illusion that the work of verbal art was a tangible and therefore collectible object made possible the Library’s foundation and its continuing existence—despite the irony of that assumption.

Hand-in-hand with the work-as-object fiction went the illusion of stasis. Only if the work of verbal art had the permanent value of a static, immutable object could it merit deposit in the Library. This second illusion must have helped relieve the embarrassment of the hundred-odd versions of Homer at Alexandria. If something had attained the form of a tangible object, then its suitability for the Library’s collection was warranted and defensible. And if one item, why not many? If you’re aiming at a comprehensive collection, then by definition you need them all.

The First MVA

Once again, the early stages of this process must have taken place even as what we attribute to the legendary “Homer“ was being performed and re-performed—in different places, by different poets, and certainly with varying results (as variant manuscripts prove). But the most important purpose served by the static objects so assiduously amassed by the Ptolemies and their agents was to nurture that sustaining dream of an exhaustive material record, a treasure-house of thought-become-written word, an archive complete in itself. In this respect the Alexandrian Library also housed the first Museum of Verbal Art, the original canon.

And so was created the royal model that has reigned for two millennia and more, just as significant for what it excluded as for what it included. The collectible was defined as the written; everything unwritten was implicitly defined out of existence. The Library could aspire to all-inclusive, universal coverage because that universality was restricted solely to objects, that is, to texts. A finite canon was conceivable only because of the twin illusions of object and stasis, which then and in years to follow also made possible librarianship, literary studies, and, not least, text-driven cultural self-definition.

By the same token, these illusions entailed a built-in program of exclusion that was vast and far-reaching. Because performances of oral tradition were neither objective nor static (since in tAgora terms there was no real substance to them), they couldn’t qualify as entries in the grand inventory of concrete items. Oral traditions were not so much unwelcome as simply unshelvable in the Library.

A virtual inventory in cyber-space

Now we leap forward to the other bookend, to the incipient and ongoing construction of the Internet, the information superhighway that promises unprecedented access to theoretically unlimited knowledge. In its grandiose aspirations, this claim may seem to echo what the Ptolemies had in mind, and the two “repositories” do in fact have some features in common. While no single site on the Internet can play more than a supporting role, the system in its entirety—as a “virtual library” without geographical or other physical limitations—aims at providing universal access to everything.

Hands Typing

And “everything” now means a great deal more than simply “books.” Already colleges, universities, and other institutions specialize in and subscribe to electronic archives of texts, manuscript facsimiles, and other tools economically or technologically impractical to publish or own in conventional printed format. Already various organizations sponsor electronic journals in various disciplines, while citizen journalism moves Everyperson’s thoughts and commentary into virtual newspapers available and updatable 24/7/365. Already those at home in the virtual environment write their very identities into the Internet card catalogue on personal home pages, blogs, and social networking sites. Already Internet-savvy readers subscribe via RSS aggregators to favorite sources, each other’s updated podcasts, and other kinds of automatable feeds. Taken as a whole, this computer-driven system brings a heretofore unthinkable number of “volumes” into the electronic marketplace of the eAgora and under the same virtual roof. And of course the “holdings” only increase daily as more institutions and individuals join the network, as more of their often unparalleled facilities go online, and as those networks – unlike static books – themselves continue to morph.

But what makes the Internet much more than even an Alexandrian Library is neither the sheer number nor the remarkable diversity of its “eScrolls,” but rather their unprecedented, hands-on accessibility. What sets the Internet apart, in short, are the connections woven into its web – the hyperlinks that open up a universe of immanent knowledge via the surfing of pathways.

Visiting the Book of Kells

Book of Kells

So, for example: how do you get a look at that incomparable medieval masterpiece of manuscript illumination, the Book of Kells? Start up your browser and click on your first destination – in this as in so many other cases, Wikipedia offers a promising start. From that point of origin you encounter a cascade of information, powered by ePathways and organized in a network that you can surf as you wish. Public-domain color photographs of the splendidly illustrated pages sit alongside sections on history (origin, medieval period, modern period, reproductions), description (contents, text and script, decoration), use, bibliography, and other related sites. Everything is linked together – both intra- (within the Wikipedia entry) and inter- (to other Wikipedia entries). In other words, you pass effortlessly, according to your own needs and designs, among different texts, authors, languages, and centuries, fashioning your own understanding of the Book of Kells against a panoramic background as you go.

Compare this procedure to physically visiting Trinity College, Dublin, where the manuscript itself is housed in a conventional university library setting, and where you can examine a single page or two in dim light at the end of a musty corridor. Or perhaps you prefer the complete, freestanding facsimile printed on paper and bound between covers, which will allow you to examine more than a couple of pages, as long as your library is privileged enough to own a copy of the volume presently available for $20,511.40 as a used book. Or, for the bargain price of about 30 Euros, you could purchase the DVD-ROM of the Book of Kells approved by Trinity College, with a full visual record (plus zooming) along with information on the manuscript’s history and the eighth-century technology used to produce it.

But neither a journey to Dublin nor a research expedition to your local library nor even a personal copy of the DVD-ROM can offer the kind of immediate, proximate, multi-dimensional context that is a built-in staple of Internet study and research. And it is not so much that Trinity College or your nearby library or the latest disc merely lacks the requisite information (though that may be the case), but more that they lack the living web of pathways that make the information instantly and always accessible to everyone, and which allows for continuous updating and surfer-determined exploring via new and existing pathways.

A virtual journey

These ePathways have other characteristics as well, salient features that categorically distinguish an interactive journey through the Internet from browsing the best-stocked library, even the Alexandrian Library. For one thing, any route taken through the electronic maze is inherently more than a standardized, repetitive tour of the facilities. Within the interests and according to the judgment of whoever constructed the given site and its options, it offers automatic, institutionalized access to myriad related possibilities as an ever-present reality. What’s more, your itinerary is never writ in stone, but always susceptible to change enroute. After all, it’s being assembled by you, as you go.

Correspondingly, each Internet session – whether to research the Book of Kells or any other topic – is a unique event and experience, providing a fresh perspective for each user each time he or she enters the virtual edifice. Even after many sessions on the same topic, the opportunity to try out new avenues or follow out the same links in a different sequence or at a different depth, branching here or there or even contributing to the communal network (as in the case of open-source facilities like Wikipedia), will always shed new light on the most familiar surroundings.

Indeed, the watchword for successive visits to the Internet library must be variation within limits rather than rote repetition. As the Pathways Project illustrates, with these same observations we could just as well be describing the oAgora.

Pathways versus Canon

Homer’s “inside take”

In explaining how the ancient Greek bard navigates through the maze of traditional story, Homer also speaks of pathways (which he calls oimai). During the great feast among the Phaeacians on Scheria, for instance, he portrays Odysseus as honoring the celebrated singer Demodokos with the choicest cut from the shining-tusked boar and with a fascinating tribute to oAgora technology:

For among all mortal men the singers have a share in honor and reverence, since to them the Muse has taught the pathways, for she loves the singers’ tribe. (Odyssey, Book 8, lines 479-81)

What the Muse teaches, we should notice, isn’t texts – that is, items supporting the twin illusions of object and stasis – but rather routes, avenues, means for getting there. She is represented not as lending volumes from an immense story-archive, but as providing links for the performing bard (and his audience) to click on. Her repository of traditional oral epic consists not of scrolls shelved in an Alexandrian Library, but rather of a web of pathways that give users access to the stories via a pre-textual analogue to our Internet.

Let’s pursue this analogy, historically counterintuitive as it may appear. We’ve already suggested that the Homeric oimai are parallel to links on the Internet, and therefore that a web or network of potentials is a more apposite cognitive model for OT than any model associated with the tAgora, even such influence-sharing theories as intertextuality.

Some modern colleagues

Modern-day oral traditions certainly bear this out. For example, South Slavic guslari, preliterate singers of epics who have been particularly well studied at close range, focus not on the thing but the process. For them the song exists in its doing, its performance – its movement from here to there, partially predictable and partially unpredictable; for them the song has nothing to do with the cenotaph of the book. To be sure, by recording one of their performances we can manufacture a textual item, a durable good, a “scroll” fully fit for acquisition and deposit by the Ptolemies’ librarians. But a second and third recording made the next day, or in front of a different audience, or even with the same bard in a different frame of mind, will reveal inevitable disparities that quickly put the lie to the “authority” of any one version.

The OT poem lives outside any single performance or any single performer – never mind beyond the reduced medium of any recording or transcription. It lives and thrives as a series of potentials, a network of pathways that offers innumerable options at the same time that it connects with innumerable unspoken assumptions and implicit references. Any South Slavic oral epic is thus nothing more or less than a special case of language, and as such there can be no end to its morphing. There are limits and rules, of course, but they foster rather than prohibit change. Had we the patience to sit through a hundred performances by one or a hundred singers, we would simply reconfirm the same thesis a hundredfold: none of the recordings would actually be “the epic,” but all of them would in their different ways imply “the epic.” OT can no more be canonized than IT can be forced between two covers.

Exploding the canon

Thus we come to the first of the major reasons why OT is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of canon. Although Petrarch’s sonnets, Montaigne’s essays, and Gogol’s novels readily found a home in the Museum of Verbal Art, and even though the recently expanded Museum now features new displays on works like Morrison’s Beloved and Silko’s Ceremony, we still find no space for oral traditions. More to the point, there can’t ever be space, at least in the present building. And it isn’t the curators who are at fault this time. The problem lies instead with the very nature of oral tradition as a medium for verbal art, with the incontrovertible fact that any one performance is just that – one performance. We can’t file it, title it, edit and translate it as we would a papyrus manuscript, first edition, or other artifact of the tAgora. OT exists only in its multiformity and in its enactment, and to reduce that living complexity to a single libretto for ease of shelving is to falsify its art. Proteus exists only in his shapeshifting, and will forever resist the captivity of canonical form.

Virtues of plurality

To accommodate the world’s oral traditions, our Museum will have to undergo more than cosmetic alterations. First and foremost, the staff must find effective methods for representing plurality, as well as what that plurality stands for. Singularity, authority, and epitome are useless criteria for living OTs; they continue the illusions of object and stasis, ignoring the oAgora realities of process and rule-governed change. The many faces of OT are what folklorists seek to expose when they insist on eliciting and publishing multiple performances of a given story or charm or riddle, and we can take an initial step in renovating the MVA by following their lead. Just as any single node pales in importance against the totality of the Internet – since by isolating even the most valuable such resource we sap its greatest strength: connectivity – so concentration on any single fossil from a once-living OT blurs the focus on its naturally dynamic context. Always different and yet always the same, OTs are most realistically understood as immanent to rather than uniquely contained in each separate yet related performance.

Ethnopoetics

There are also many other strategies that can be engaged, some of them presently available and others on the near horizon of our updated “museum science.” Take the approach called Ethnopoetics, which amounts to constructing scripts that allow for more faithful reperformance of OTs. How do we proceed? In a sense, by being non-textual: by reinstating the pauses, intonations, gradations of volume, and other performance features that text-making customarily levels out or silences. We can make a start by respecting the actual structural units that each OT employs, rather than translating the performance to our default concepts of verse, stanza, syllabic line, or whatever. In short, we need to restore the expressive life that textualization robs from performances. Then, when readers read, at least they’ll hear some echo of the original performance in their heads. Some fidelity to the experience will survive the trajectory from the oAgora to the tAgora.

eArchives, eEditions, and eCompanions

Additionally, electronic text archives, in whose ready resources web-surfers will eventually be able to experience many dimensions of a performance (sound, video, etc.) as well as probe many parallel performances, are coming online. Tools such as eEditions and eCompanions are overcoming many of the hindrances imposed by spatial limitations inherent in the book format. No longer will editors be required to incarcerate the performance in one silent and epitomized version, unfairly consigning its sibling versions to secondary status in appendices and footnotes. What’s more, with the multimedia revolution, oral traditions can also be presented in more than one dimension concurrently, with the acoustic and even visual reality of the performance becoming an integrated part of its transcription. No longer will a reader/surfer have to be content with segregated edition-parts; transcription, translation, commentary, glossary, and any other “chapters” can be meshed electronically, enriching the reader/surfer’s experience by resynchronizing the performance.

Texts rooted in oral tradition

Very importantly, these strategies also apply to an appreciable number of texts with oral roots, what we might call Voices from the Past. These Janus-like items, chiefly from the ancient and medieval worlds, are already comfortably housed in the MVA collection on the basis of their presumably literary and textual merits. Recently, however, they’ve been shown to derive from OT and are therefore deserving of additional attention. In many ways these works are also more process than product, and thus not entirely “canonizable,” even though they survive only as manuscripts (with limited contextual information) and may appear to belong strictly to the tAgora. Of course, our readiness to accept that either-or reduction is just another measure of how blindly we adhere to textual ideology.

In updating these exhibits, we must take care to convey what we can learn about the background and foreground of each oral-derived text. Is their textuality merely an accident of transmission (as is always the case with performances recorded in writing before acoustic and video media were available)? If so, Ethnopoetics can help by creating a script for reperformance. Or are there performance cues that survive their reduction to texts? In that case Performance Theory can assist our understanding. Or are there special contextual meanings—traditional idioms—that require explanation? We can turn to Immanent Art for a way to discover and convey such meanings.

Even when we’re dealing with singly-authored, oral-derived texts, much closer to what most of us have been trained to call _literature_, we still have a curatorial responsibility to discover what we can about the history behind the work, its possible multiformity (in part or in whole), and the nature and degree of its dependence on an oral tradition. Even singly-authored texts often harbor more than meets the eye.

The list of MVA exhibits needing attention includes, as mentioned elsewhere in this node, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Old French Song of Roland, the medieval Spanish Poem of the Cid, the Old Norse sagas, the Sanskrit Mahabharata, the Judeo-Christian Bible, and even the “literary” genius Chaucer. To these and many similar Voices from the Past we’ll need to add still-living forms such as the ubiquitous and familiar ballad, which has long prospered as both oral tradition and text. In fact, mentioning the ballad offers the opportunity to emphasize how the worlds of orality and literacy, once thought to occupy mutually exclusive orbits, can and do coexist and interact in myriad fascinating combinations, within the same culture or region and even within the same person. Not only do OT features persist alongside and into texts, that is, but a single individual may be fluent in both expressive media. We know from real-life observation that the very same individual can indeed manage fluently in multiple agoras.

Conclusion: The Challenge for the MVA

So why did our Museum of Verbal Art lose its accreditation? Because in paying exclusive attention to the tAgora it completely ignored the oAgora. In focusing on objects, stasis, and shelf-space it failed to pay due attention to pathways, performance, and networks. What it managed to accomplish it did very well, but in the process the MVA unfortunately eliminated the larger part of humankind’s verbal art from consideration. In a word, by confining its displays to texts, the institution just didn’t live up to its title and purpose.

If our Museum is ever to house a collection truly representative of human diversity, then we must accept a new challenge. As responsible curators we must step outside of the tAgora and take full account of what transpires in the oAgora. And because of the developments in media technology, we are better equipped to do just that than at any other time in history.

The key is to enlist the tools of the eAgora to do what the tAgora was unable to support. The Internet, with its web of links, built-in context, and ever-emergent dynamics, offers both an analogue to oral tradition and a blueprint for renovation of the MVA. Online electronic editions, as well as online companions to brick-and-mortar textual items, can bring the verbal art that is OT to new (and new kinds of) audiences. Wikis like the one used as a vehicle for the Pathways Project offer another avenue for multi-layered and multimedia representation, and there are certainly many promising initiatives already underway or on the near horizon. The core of the renovation effort will lie in educating Museum-goers about the broadened and much more realistic scope of its holdings and displays, to demonstrate that verbal art need not be purely and exclusively textual. In regard to the oAgora, texts cannot by themselves present verbal art without serious reduction and distortion, no matter how polished and gemlike the treasured documents may be. Whether publishing or reading OT, the eAgora offers unique opportunities.

In terms of the untold wealth of living traditions, verbal art inheres in the instance of performance and in what that performance-instance implies. As for oral-connected traditional texts – and, as we have seen, there are many crucially important works in this category from all over the world – our responsibility is to gauge the extent to which pathways, performance, and traditional meaning are still applicable when speech-acts take on textual form. In either case, a significant part of the context for any individual performance or text will always lie outside the most expansive, comprehensive canon, just as it lay beyond the Alexandrian Library and the most ambitious acquisitions program in history. The Museum of Verbal Art must acknowledge these vital realities and reconfigure itself accordingly.

Homer was right

Homer had it right when, as he began navigating through the fantastic web of the Odyssey, he made this petition to a virtual resource undreamed of even by the Ptolemies:

“Of these events from somewhere, O Muse, daughter of Zeus,
speak also to us.”
(Book 1, line 10).

Of what events? All of Odysseus’ adventures, from boar-hunt to Trojan War to perilous trials and back home to reunion with Penelope. From where? From within the untextualized mythic reservoir of the oAgora. By whose agency? Under the aegis of the Muse, patroness of pathways and the OT internet. And to whom? Why, to Homer, to her beloved tribe of ancient singers and their audiences, and now, we hope, to future generations of Museum visitors.

Notes

¹ For the essay on which this node is based, “The Impossibility of Canon,” see Foley 1998b.

² See Martin 1998, Foley 2004a and 2005b.

³ On Beowulf and oral tradition, see Olsen 1998. For a performance of Beowulf in the original Old English, see Bagby 2007.

⁴ On medieval French, medieval Spanish, Old Norse, and Chaucer, see, respectively, Vitz 1998, Zemke 1998, Harris 1998, and Lindahl 1998.

⁵ On the folk-Mahabharata, see Smith 1990.

⁶ On the Old Testament, see further Niditch 1996 and Jaffee 1998; on the New Testament, see further Kelber 1998 and Hearon 2004.

Just the Facts

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:20:19 Z

Just the Facts…

When we want to decrease or eliminate uncertainty or subjectivity, we often narrow our focus to “the facts.” Instead of filtered reality, so goes the ideology, these irreducible verities offer us the unfiltered version—the real story, what actually transpired as opposed to an interpretation. By removing human agency and the fallibility and inaccuracy that are its inescapable trademarks, we gain access to a universal, free-standing level of truth. That’s what happens when we concentrate on just the facts. Or is it?

Facts are made, not born

Consider for a moment the etymology of “fact,” which derives from the Latin verb facere, “to make, do, or perform.” Our English word descends from the neuter past participle of that verb—factum, a thing which is made. Facts, in other words, are not at all pre-existent truths, but truths that are made, constructed, done, performed. At bottom, these treasured bytes of freestanding truth are much more contingent than contemporary usage allows us to recognize. All appearances to the contrary, facts are fundamentally provisional.

Q: So just what are facts, then, if they’re not archetypal principles waiting to be unearthed? A: They’re constructed reality, pre-interpreted thought. Q: And who does the constructing and interpreting? A: We do—as participant-observers who perceive, express, codify, and then re-perceive in a never-ending and interactive cycle. Our verities are as true as we can make them, no more and no less, but they are subject to revision from the very moment they’re made.

Facts in the tAgora

Facts are, of course, the everyday currency of idea-exchange in the marketplace we call the tAgora. Working within the twin illusions of object and stasis, we trade facts, bartering with one another and with the culture at large, seeking to acquire items to fill up our warehouse of cultural literacy (the deflection from cultural fluency to cultural literacy is naturally no accident). The premise of isolatable, concretizable, and therefore tangibly exchangeable ideas makes the tAgora run.

But let’s re-examine the textual reflex that shortcircuits our more considered view of facts. Stripping away the ideological assumptions that mask the root sense of the word, let’s ask whether facts can exist beyond the tAgora. If we step outside the prelapsarian illusion of complete textual objectivity, can the concept survive the translation?

Well, it depends on how much you’re willing to buy into the fiction of fact. Strictly speaking, since all facts are constructed, the tAgora concept of immutable, non-contingent truth is nothing more than a convenient falsification from the start. Only because we co-dependently agree to the lie that certain perspectives are impervious to context can we even posit the kind of fact on which the tAgora depends for its continuing function.

If, on the other hand, we are willing to face the contingent, provisional nature of facts—no matter what they purport to explain or characterize, then we’ll see that the oAgora and eAgora are actually far better equipped to support and understand them.

Facts in the oAgora

A more-than-leading question

Only too often we’re confronted with a question so skewed that it condemns OT technology to a lesser, inferior ranking on the totem-pole of comparative media. The query usually goes something like this: “What facts can we trust OT to provide us with, and what aspects of OT should we disregard, in our search for ‘what really happened’”? Sometimes the question comes from historians trying to use Homer’s epics or the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf or contemporary folk drama to write their histories. Sometimes it comes from journalists, who are responsible for fact-checking, a meta-concept that heaps irony upon irony. You can come up with many more examples, I’m sure.

But whatever the source, the core implication is clear: OT isn’t as dependable as a document. It’s the text that delivers facts, and our task in dealing with the less accurate, less dependable medium is essentially to weed out the inaccuracies, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Of course, there’s a trap-door lurking here: the unexamined assumptions embedded in the question, which automatically foreclose on discussion before it can start. By attempting to answer the question as posed (“What can we salvage from OT technology?”), we’re already subscribing to a hierarchy of media. We’re already placing the ideological program of the tAgora at the top and making it the sole standard by which other media-technologies are measured. In a sense, we’re confronted with the media-specific equivalent of “Are you still beating your wife?” That’s a tough spot to begin a fair-minded conversation.

OT as a contingent medium

OT provides a perspective; more accurately, it provides multiple perspectives for the media-users it serves. And, crucially, the users themselves are necessarily involved in formulating those perspectives. They’re the ones who navigate the network of pathways, who surf their way through a web of linked possibilities.

Consider the situation. There can’t be any pretense of objectivity if the performance-event takes its character in part from the patterned and flexible language of OT, in part from the performer’s mood, in part from the immediate surroundings, in part from the make-up and dynamic participation of the audience, and so forth. There can be and often is competition among performers, each one claiming implicitly or explicitly to be the best. But none of them can claim the final word, just as no performance is the final or optimal version. Utter finality in OT —as in IT —yields nothing but silence and the death of communication.

The most essential truth is that OT functions not in spite of but rather through the agency of its contingent, provisional nature. It adapts in rule-governed ways to the moment in which it finds itself, and therein lies its strength and power.

Two examples

Our fieldwork team observed this kind of power-via-morphing in Serbian bajanje, or magic spells, orally performed by female conjurers for the treatment of their village clientele. No one form of the charm would cure every disease; no single performance would suit every patient; no practitioner would voice precisely the same sequence of words or syllables every time she performed. The “fact” of the medicinal matter proved contingent, adaptable, subjective—and, most crucially, constructed. Multiformity made the magic work.

Or consider the composition of medieval literature, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a work created in writing but with deep and nourishing roots in the oAgora. Chaucer and his contemporaries drew on various kinds of storytelling conventions to portray their characters, events, and situations. During the Middle Ages these conventions were collected in rhetorical handbooks, which in turn served as recipe-books for creating literature. The Wife of Bath’s gapped teeth and red stockings, for example, were telltale signs of a lascivious nature—not invented merely for her memorable character but rather applied to signal her sexual nature by much broader and more pervasive convention.

Of course, there is nothing inherent in dental features or hosiery that would unfailingly identify the Wife—or anyone else—as lascivious. The traditional meaning that accompanies these unsuspecting physical details is linked arbitrarily on the basis of usage, not on the basis of tAgora-type fact. To put it in the terms we’ve been thinking with, gapped teeth and red stockings are constructed signs. And Chaucer was hardly alone. Many medieval authors deployed such constructed facts to spin their stories fluently and idiomatically. Once again, the medium works precisely because these “facts” apply across multiple instances. They provide authors with a contingent language that comes alive in the oAgora experience of storytelling.

Facts in the eAgora

So how about facts on the web? We might be tempted to cite such bedrock items as dates, statistics, and static pages, and conclude that facts (as imagined in the tAgora) can and do exist in a virtual environment. But a moment’s reflection will reveal that even these supposedly immutable objects were mapped, calculated, and built by someone according to an arbitrary convention. In short, they too were constructed.

And then there’s the network of potentials itself, each node linked in multiple ways to other nodes. Very little if any tAgora-type fact can be found in that powerfully morphing, interactive medium at any level. Indeed, the Internet’s function actively depends on the absence of fact as ideologically construed.

And we can take things a step further. The very notion of absence already misrepresents the situation, using a tAgora distinction to mischaracterize the eAgora. It’s not absence or omission, but rather presence, plenitude, and contingency that enable the surfer to co-create experience(s). Every individual surfer constructs a personal “factual” universe, a self-made cosmos, by navigating pathways and co-configuring reality.

Until ideas collapse into things, until virtual diminishes into brick-and-mortar, until textuality stops the heartbeat of OT and IT, reality remains in play.

Home Page

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:18:04 Z

Welcome to the Pathways Project

The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet.

Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on “What?” but on “How do I get there?” In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it’s pathways – not things – that matter.

The Pathways Project consists of this website and a brick-and-mortar book, Pathways of the Mind: Oral Tradition and the Internet. The website serves as the focal point for a suite of media that will include a network of linked topics (called nodes), suggested reading-routes through those nodes (called linkmaps), audio and video eCompanions, multimedia eEditions, and a moderated forum for user contributions.

To begin your journey, please turn the page or click on

Getting_Started

For Book-readers Only

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:15:02 Z

For Book-readers Only

A disclaimer

This node was created to serve as one possible introduction to (one of several avenues into) Pathways of the Mind, the book associated with the Pathways Project. For that purpose it emphasizes the disorientation necessarily involved in abandoning the default medium of the book in order to grasp the dynamics of alternate media—specifically OT and IT. As such, it explains how tAgora-speak doesn’t and can’t translate to the eAgora.

The book in your hands

You’ve picked up this book, gently cradling it in your hands as you’ve done so many times throughout your life in so many different situations. It’s a cozy, familiar action, essentially a reflex, as you prepare to set sail through the smooth, silent seas of letters, words, lines, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. Everything lies before you in expectable sequence, reassuringly formatted and configured. Even the artifact itself comes complete with trusty features – a title embedded in an eye-catching design; back-cover blurbs that tend toward hyperbole; the smooth, cool feel of the pages as you turn them one by one. In ways that you don’t consciously register, the book provides a powerful and uniquely welcome frame of reference. You’re ensconced on the sofa, the light’s adjusted, your cup of tea’s in place, peace reigns. You’re about to re-enter a world apart, a world you’ve visited before and long to revisit.

Let the reader beware

Comfortable, then? Well, caveat lector: let the reader beware! This particular book doesn’t fit that tried-and-true mold; in fact, it seeks to expose the mold as an ideology we’ve adopted, a tacit compromise we’ve forged with a much messier and more complex reality. For that reason it’s a book more likely to ennervate than entertain, at least until you get used to how it works. Instead of the dependable calm that dependably proceeds from opening the dependably put-together artifact, what awaits you is, frankly, an unsettling experience. You may undergo a kind of culture shock, not so different from the disorientation we feel when we’re suddenly immersed in a foreign society with language and customs far from our own. And no apologies: Pathways of the Mind is actively intended to generate just that kind of disquiet and dissonance.

Why? Because we’ll be doing nothing less fundamental than challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail. We’ll be addressing the very nature of text and asking whether that’s all there is to communication. Worse yet, perhaps, we’ll be finding that there is indeed much, much more that we’ve made a cultural habit of ignoring or suppressing. We’ll learn that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative worlds of media-technology out there – if only we’re willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. We’ll learn that oral tradition and Internet technology support thinking and creating and communicating in ways that books can’t match. And we’ll find that OT and IT work in strikingly similar fashion, offering us networks to navigate, webs of potentials that we will be in a position to activate. And that won’t be a comfortable experience, at least initially. Not at all.

A way out… if you want one

Too much to ask? Well, there’s a way out, of course, a strategy to avoid the discomfort. We can simply choose not to think outside the book – not to jump off the dock – and thus avoid the reshuffling of our cognitive categories that the Pathways Project demands. The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west, the twin illusions of object and stasis will remain (artificially) in force, and our hard-won and desperately held convictions about the certainty, permanence, and primacy of the book and page will rest undisturbed.

And perhaps there’s a reasonable argument for doing just that. Having labored since Gutenberg to convert knowledge, art, and ideas to an item-based economy, are we now to throw away centuries of hard-won victories? Now that we’ve developed this marvelous textual prosthesis to help us manage the slippage that threatens to undo communication at every turn, are we now to discard it in favor of a broader view we can’t yet appreciate and may not be able to control? Maybe, given all that texts have meant and continue to mean to myriad readers, including you and me, that’s an irresponsible and indefensible act. Maybe we should remain on the dock. Maybe we should just close this book and return it to the shelf.

Opportunities ahead

But that would be a mistake, and a missed opportunity. For the process ahead also promises to be exciting and rewarding, as long as we’re willing to honestly confront some basic, unexamined assumptions and preconceived notions. That’s the catch, of course: in order to make our way through the ideas housed within this book and networked within the Pathways Project in general, we’re going to have to jump off the end of that proverbial dock and learn how to swim in a new and different environment. Only by relinquishing the relative safety of the stand-alone book can we start to understand how major media-types – oral tradition, Internet technology, and, yes, the book as well – really function. Only then can we then reorient ourselves and see how human communication actually works from a pluralistic, informed perspective. Only by first letting go can we realistically recalibrate our thinking.

Culture shock can lead to acculturation. Or, to put it proverbially: no media pain, no media gain.

If you’re ready to proceed, please turn the page to – or click on – Getting Started and begin your journey.

eAgora

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:13:25 Z

The eAgora: Electronic networks to surf

An agora is a verbal marketplace –a site for creation and exchange of knowledge, art, and ideas. The Pathways Project recognizes three agoras, or arenas for human communication. This node is devoted to the IT arena, the eAgora.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Agora_in_Athens.jpg

The true currency of exchange in the eAgora is eWords—coded, virtual, and linked words. Not typographical prompts, but an actual, clicked-on, in-context performance experienced at that moment and in that place by a present audience. You participate in the electronic marketplace via real-time, directly engaged transaction, not by swapping texts. Everything happens “in the moment”—right now, not at some convenient future time to be chosen by a detached, independent reader and forestalled until the time seems right. The eAgora event is all-consuming for webmaster and surfer alike. Why? Because in interactive format it is unmediated by texts, with nothing held at arm’s length.

Agora-mirrors

Genus and species

The virtual landscape is awash with newly evolved species that simply can’t be understood through the default technology of the tAgora. We can speak of “pages” and “destinations” and “data,” but concentrating on what seems thing-like (and comfortably familiar) misses the point. What makes the eAgora categorically different from textual items and repositories is its ability to morph within limits and to support navigation and co-creation by surfers, and at the same time not to foreclose on alternate possibilities. What matters is the network of links and ePathways, which distinguish systems from things. Even a few hours’ experience on the web highlights the remarkable diversity and complexity of eWorld ecology, and the futility of trying to reduce that world to the pathwayless tAgora.

Within the IT genus, then, we can discern many different and fascinating species or types of Internet technology, with many more types on the near horizon. Suffice it to say for now that this host of species varies by genre, social function, surfers, sites, and modes of interaction with other agoras. Some of these interactions are counter-intuitive for tAgora citizens, and the ever-increasing variety of IT types on the web shows no sign of diminishing. The watchword for species within the genus IT must always be diversity.

Word-markets

Consider the wealth of different word-markets in which IT users ply their trade, whether users of Internet browsers, Facebook, Twitter, open source software, or mashups and remixes, all of which are discussed below, or some other IT option. There’s little or no possibility – and in many cases no need – of copyrighting what surfers do via these eInstruments. And why? Because they are rooted in the public domain, where sharing and rule-governed morphing are the source of power and where fixity and stasis mean death. Public-domain roots are both nourishing for each immediate event (for each pass through the multiply linked network) and necessary for the continuing survival of IT as a whole. This last point may be difficult to grasp for those who aim to police the eAgora by trying to enforce tAgora rules, but citizenship in multiple agoras makes it only too evident.

Public, not proprietary

Subject to specific legal and financial constraints, IT strategies can be deployed by multiple people without fear of violating any laws governing exchange in what amounts to an open-source marketplace. Those rules may limit eligibility by password-certified membership or financial constraints on access, for example, but no individual ever wholly “authors” a strategy in final, invariable form, any more than a single individual ever authors a language. Nor can any one person ever deliver the final, canonical, “best” navigation of the involved network until texts enter the picture and make this kind of dead-end concept of verbal communication imaginable and feasible. Such a monolith simply isn’t either imaginable or feasible within the eAgora. Once the economy of the tAgora is fully in place, however, public gives way to proprietary, open-access gives way to object-exchange, and web-systems stop being web-systems. The difference is between downloading things? and engaging in emergent experiences within an arena that is forever under construction.

The evolutionary fallacy

With the variant dynamics of the oral, textual, and Internet arenas in mind, it’s easy to see why “oral evolves to written” and “written evolves to electronic” are fallacies traceable to the ideology of the text. If we model our understanding of all verbal commerce on a singular creation attributed to a singular author and consumed by a singular audience (one-by-one), then the necessarily plural identity of web architects, surfers, and IT strategies will appear primitive, underdeveloped, and in need of streamlining. Likewise, we’ll fail to understand and credit the plural identity of architects and surfers with their shared but diverse experiences in the eAgora.

In either case, non-written, non-textualized communication will seem to lack something, to fail to measure up according to our ideologically imposed criteria. For example, how many times each day do you hear or read about people bemoaning the informality and impermanence of the web? Likewise, until recently collectors of OTs have unquestioningly subscribed to an implicit rank-ordering by converting the living webs that support oral traditions into freestanding objects suitable for display in the Museum of Verbal Art. They too undergo a kind of media-specific culture shock and feel compelled to “diss” whatever isn’t text.

Five IT word-markets

Of the many possible eFacilities and eTools we could examine, I have chosen five that are familiar to many if not most patrons of the current eAgora: namely, browsers, Facebook, Twitter, open source software, and mashups and remixes. As the Pathways Project wiki develops, it is my hope that contributors will broaden the discussion, both by furthering our understanding of these five areas (and their inevitable evolution) and by addressing other (including yet-to-be-invented) facilities and tools.

Browsers

Firefox LiNsta (Linux is not Vista)

The most basic tool for transacting business in the eAgora, for navigating through networks, is of course the Internet browser. Those in common use include, in descending order of market share as currently reported, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Opera, all of them offering different configurations, speed, and options and all of them except Explorer compliant with web standards.

Browsers open the network and make possible your active participation and co-creation. Using eWords in the form of special coding, they support your self-generated itinerary by revealing and making available the host of options that present themselves at any point in your journey. When you open to a start-page you enter a performance arena, a virtual space where sharing is accomplished by exchange in the specialized language of URLs and HTML, the lingua franca of the web. Because the website architect and browser-maker have “written” the enabling code deep into their facilities, the surfer is automatically fluent in web-speak: if you can click, and perhaps occasionally type in a pathway-word (a URL), you can communicate without a hitch. Select a link, and a new set of choices appears; select one of those and another set of links pops up. Potential avenues for discovery and co-creation are everywhere, and it is inherently impossible to exhaust the network.

But caveat lector; let the reader beware. For all of the myriad actions and adventures they support, for all of the resources they put at our fingertips (literally so, with touch devices), browsers cannot offer permanence, fixity, or closure. In true eAgora style (and parallel to oAgora style), they operate by resisting textualization, by always opening another connection, another option, another encounter with knowledge, art, and ideas. A browser’s strength resides in its open-endedness, which runs absolutely counter to the twin illusions of object and stasis so central to tAgora exchange. Think about it: just like oral traditions, and just like language in general, eAgora tools must do their job by means of variation within limits, by remaining forever under construction. If a browser were somehow to submit to textualization, it would lose its engine of rule-governed variation, and thereby its purpose. It wouldn’t be a browser, any more than a text is an oral tradition.

Facebook

So you’ve signed up for a Facebook account, entered your information and photos, started friending, and are well on your way to becoming happily enmeshed in a shared matrix of electronic events, groups, causes, and other virtual relationships. What’s more, you’ve set up apps on your iPhone and iPad so that either of these devices will keep you plugged into an ever-morphing scene chock full of correspondents’ everyday remarks, deep thoughts, and inane patter – all of it precious and unthinkable without the Facebook prosthesis. So what does it all mean? What have you and your ePosse co-created? What permanent cultural intervention has occurred?

Well, if your Facebook crew is anything like mine, it’s an incredibly diverse lot, so diverse that there isn’t the remotest possibility of their ever gathering anywhere non-virtual for any reason whatsoever. And that’s not merely because they happen to hail from 19 different countries and have interests so wildly non-connected that most of them would have nothing to discuss with one another. Different languages would constitute one barrier, maybe different cultures as well, but different idea-worlds would be the principal obstacle. Put them in the same physical space and not much would happen – just puzzled grins, frustrated grimaces, and an early exit.

Non-connected interests, non-connected people in a physical, brick-and-mortar world. But notice that I didn’t say UN-connected. Using the special eTool called Facebook, you somehow managed to connect them. YOU created this world. YOU linked it up. And of course you aren’t alone: each of your friends did likewise – not by replicating what you did, but by assembling their own networked worlds according to their priorities and interests. What they and millions more have accomplished isn’t repetition, but rather recurrence. Because Facebook offers a platform that supports the core eAgora (and oAgora) function of variation within limits, these millions could also preside over the miracle of creating their own communities that otherwise couldn’t exist. And they did so by deploying a shared facility to do something unique, using an open-access, public domain eTool in inimitable, individual fashion. From an oAgora perspective, they’re using a shared tradition to tell their own stories. No tAgora tool could manage that.

And not only does Facebook make it possible to found new, never-before-realized and otherwise impossible communities, it also supports their emergent, interactive ecology. Its various channels encourage connections by “writing on walls,” for example, by leaving simple messages and observations that restore the everyday comments, ironic reactions, and unpredictable whimsy that bind communities together in just as important a way as the much more formalized (and severely limited) swapping of texts. You learn about trips, family members, food, films, political stunts, and a hundred other aspects of your friends’ lives, all without having to combat the inertia of tAgora-appropriate communication. Just dip your digital toe into the online water and sample the ongoing conversation, wherever you enter it. Contribute something, react to a long-lost friend’s post, share a photo, or just sit back and lurk, absorbing what your impossible virtual community is saying, thinking, and doing. Just as in physical communities, there is no single approved form of communication, and participation is always multi-sourced – rule-governed (by Facebook formatting and options) but multiply authored. Such is the richness of chaos when reality remains in play.

Facebook supports eCommunity-building, and serves a crucial function in the eAgora, a function that depends upon recurrence rather than repetition, upon variation within limits rather than fixity, and the open-ended quality of remaining forever under construction rather than aspiring toward closure. Its survival as an eTool actively depends on resisting fixity and closure, on keeping its ePathways open and connected for the greater good of the overall network. For this reason we can only hope that Facebook’s increasing trend toward the commercially driven release of users’ personal information is reversed. Nothing will bring down an eAgora facility more dependably than violating the eSharing compact that governs its fundamental dynamics.

Twitter

Public versus private is also a fascinating aspect of Twitter, where tens of millions of electronic correspondents co-create a bewildering array of virtual communities – 140 characters at a time. Via this eTool you can broadcast your verbal reflexes and tip-of-the-iceberg philosophies to anyone who signs up to “follow” you. The formation of your web village is considerably less formal than the invitation approval process in Facebook, but Twitter will allow you to block those you want to keep outside your networked circle. And of course you can follow anyone you wish – from friends and colleagues you see every day to voices from other chapters in your life to the previously untouchable celebrities who have turned their ”@” observations into a viral species of PR. Once again we can form and join communities that could not exist outside the eAgora.

So we can easily enough grasp the importance of Twitter as a social networking tool powered by IT, and the trademark phenomena of rule-governed variation, recurrence, resistance to fixity and closure, and permanent under-construction status are clearly enough at its functional heart. But does this connection-engine offer us any discernible long-term cultural value apart from its immediate purpose?

Well, the Library of Congress certainly thinks so. They’ve begun to archive Tweets by the million, and plan to make them available to qualified researchers on a timetable and under conditions that are still being formulated. The idea is to offer future historians a glimpse into the everyday stuff of life, unfiltered by historians’ chosen paradigms or perspectives – a peek into “Everysurfer’s Chronicle of My Self-generated Virtual Community,” mutiplied almost infinitely.

Library of Congress

From one point of view, this makes excellent sense. In recent years historians have begun to tap into unofficial sources in order to understand the age they’re portraying, paying less attention to government edicts and more attention to what ordinary and sometimes disadvantaged groups and individuals have to say. Witness the burgeoning accounts of women’s lives and influence, so often ignored in earlier years, as well as the slave narratives that have not only humanized but often entirely “rewritten” our understanding of that tragic and shameful period in U.S. history. What top-down, corporate, officially sanctioned sources ideologically weed out, Twitter may well help to reinstate as realities to be confronted and interpreted.

Open source software

In what some would call the best of all possible worlds, open source software would win the day in every situation and at every level. All software products would be open, the code that enables them would be open, and everyone would have the same, shared, malleable platform from which to innovate. All subsequent innovations would remain effectively in the public domain, and the momentum of development would be maintained on the principle of “many heads [or groups] are better than one.” To an extent that’s what goes on with the Mozilla Foundation and their popular “public benefit” browser Firefox, as well as with the Open Office productivity suite, which has seen over 100 million downloads. Open source would conquer proprietary, to everyone’s benefit, and ultimate democracy would reign.

Typewriter on steroids

But at this particular point in eAgora history we find ourselves embroiled, either directly or indirectly, with something considerably more complex than an either-or binary. The openness of a system will always matter, because without the key quality of variation within limits all acts of co-creation and innovation are limited or even impossible. The question has become not whether but rather at what level individual manipulation of software’s rule-governed variability should take place. If a proprietary program or application, bought and sold in what amounts to a tAgora exchange, constrains the creativity of even the most inexpert user, then it isn’t fulfilling the practical philosophy of the eAgora. Word-processing software that relies on tiered menus folded deep within its hierarchy, predetermining most of what one can do because of its effective pathwaylessness, are simply reifying the textual mindset. They amount to typewriters on steroids, machines designed to produce a limited range of fixed texts and little else.

On the other hand, to the degree that proprietary programs open up creative possibilities – promoting easy intermingling of multimedia using shared open standards and aimed at producing new kinds of vehicles like interactive magazines and morphing books – they support a measure of openness more suitable to the average user’s role in the eAgora. From this perspective, software that is strictly speaking not open source (that is, you buy it and use it under copyright, and the code isn’t available for retooling) can still foster a kind of “open” co-creativity. It can foster what amounts to unconstrained innovation for the end-user, who isn’t interested in (or capable of) reworking code. Such users, and they surely account for the huge majority of eAgora patrons, will actually profit from the decisions made at a lower level – often to optimize the hardware-software synergy, as in the Apple universe. In such cases “open” innovation can be enabled by providing a vehicle with many of the lower-level decisions already in place.

Mashups and remixes

What does it mean to use eAgora tools to merge two or more “things” into a third “thing”? What are the implications of that kind of merging – not just legally, but also socioculturally and artistically? For the oAgora such questions never arise, since true ownership of an oral tradition, always a never-finished process driven by distributed authorship, is patently impossible. You can’t own language; therefore you can’t own OT, which amounts to a special case of language. Sharing is not merely the norm but the mandate.

New-media co-creations like mashups and remixes problematize the OT-IT homology. They also demand that we acknowledge some disparities between the core comparison of the oAgora and eAgora that the Pathways Project seeks both to understand and to represent. Of course, this is hardly anything out of the ordinary: as the disclaimer to the Project affirms in the strongest possible terms, a homology is a parallel and an analogy, and most definitely not an identity. We intend no simplistic, reductive equation of marketplaces. Indeed, it’s precisely the disparities between OT and IT that give the fundamental, base-line comparison its vigor and depth.

For the sake of ready reference, let’s use the examples of eHybrids featured elsewhere in the Pathways Project: musical mashups and their ancient precursors on the one hand, and the McLuhan remix on the other. Many of the principles associated with these particular instances apply to the much wider range of eAgora cross-species.

In musical mashups, two, or potentially more than two, recorded songs are combined to produce a hybrid that is meant as a separate creation. But here the easy description ends and the challenges begin. If the hybrid could not exist without its sources, to what extent can it ever be understood as an independent entity? If, further, that “new” creation varies over different performances, never taking precisely the same form twice, does that demonstrable lack of fixity affect how we regard its status? Should we distinguish its rule-governed variability from live performances of a single-authored, copyright-protected song? How do we characterize the authorship of these digital amalgams, which appears to be distributed over at least three individuals or groups?

At this juncture in rapidly evolving media history it would be foolish to see these questions as anything more (or less) than heuristics, as points of inquiry, and I will not attempt categorical answers. Our concern here is to emphasize that these are questions being posed in the eAgora that could not have arisen in the tAgora. Let’s also admit that in trying to untangle their complexities we have so far mostly applied tAgora rules. In a real sense, our very approach to mashups – legal, sociocultural, and artistic – has been decidedly agoraphobic, a study in culture shock.

Gregg Gillis, AKA Girl Talk

Distributed authorship (and for that matter, distributed editorship) are also the co-creative force behind Jamie O’Neill/Kurt Weibers’ highly suggestive remix of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas with contemporary eAgora interventions. The Medium Is the Mix, which portrays O’Neill/Weibers in a virtually constructed interview with McLuhan, examines how meaning is derived not through what we pretend is wholly original thought but through sampling the ideas of others and blending them into something new. During the faux-discussion, the interviewer channels McLuhan with remarks like “originality isn’t what it used to be,” emphasizing the role of digital media in enabling previously inconceivable hybridization. In fact, he goes so far as to observe that “today we do not think; we mix other people’s thoughts.” Radical commentary indeed.

But in terms of the Pathways Project this bold reformulation should come as no surprise. If as citizens of multiple agoras we look beyond the ideology of text and its pretense of individual authorship and ownership of knowledge, art, and ideas, we’ll recognize the fundamental principles and dynamics of the oAgora re-emerging in the eAgora. Mixing other people’s thoughts? Navigating networks and co-creating? Actually, that’s what we’ve always done.

No real authors

Authors – in our modern and highly ideological sense of the term as individual creators of original, unique, fixed, and usually published works – simply don’t exist in the eAgora. And if such authors as such don’t exist, then the burden of “protecting the work” can’t fall to them. Most fundamentally, there’s usually nothing to protect, since the browser or Facebook exchange or Tweet-sequence or open-source routine or mashup usually doesn’t belong exclusively and forever to any single individual. Individual steps in the evolving sequence can be attributed, especially the initial creation of an open-source application, for example. But the shared, emergent process can’t be owned in the way a freestanding text-object can be owned, and therefore can’t be used or transferred under carefully written and implemented guidelines appropriate to text-objects. In most cases there’s nothing to prevent another person, sooner or later, here or somewhere else, from performing the “same” work, although the next performer will inevitably make changes in “the primary version” (which of course is one of many equivalent versions). Even when a surfer creates and re-creates a singular work (as with mashup artists), each transaction in the word-market – always involving multiple sources and open to reconstruction in multiple performances – is but one transitory instance of an ever-evolving process. Culture gets continuously mashed-up and remixed in the eAgora.

Five non-authors

The five word-markets mentioned above are alive and bristling with verbal exchange, but they all lack what we would call “authors.” Consider the dynamics of each IT arena. With their navigational horizons spread out all over the endlessly expansive Internet, browser-users can hardly be classified as authors in our tAgora sense of the term. Facebook friends likewise depend on and draw from a malleable common source, creating unique posts by performing within the designated rules that govern their eAgora. The situation is extremely similar with the legions of Twitter enthusiasts, who construct and share personalized mini-portrayals of their private lives by working within a 140-character matrix. The ability of this kind of conversation to morph is well illustrated by the array of subjects and viewpoints it supports in emergent fashion. And though a degree of ownership does enter the picture with open-source software, every singular product derives its identity as much from the ongoing, fluid nature of its never-finished process as from its latest incarnation. Even the (re-)creators of mashups and remixes, who generate unique, never-before-uttered compositions that may well be fixed via the text of a recording, are also providing undeniable evidence of multiple authorship. How could we interpret their work as necessarily “the final step” if it actively depends on recombination and repurposing for its very existence? And when it may well be re-produced through a variant re-performance? Strange as it may seem, there are no true authors anywhere to be found in the eAgora.

eAgora sharing and re-use

As a first premise, let’s start by observing a simple truth obscured by the powerful (yet almost always unexamined) ideology of the text. The welter of rules that govern sharing and re-use of tAgora materials, embedded in a long and intricate sequence of legal battles that shows no signs whatsoever of abating, are largely inapplicable in the eAgora. To put it as straightforwardly as possible, tAgora rules were fashioned for the tAgora and don’t work in other verbal marketplaces. As long as we continue to apply the wrong rules for transactions and (re-)creations, we will continue to be frustrated by the non-fit.

If we evaluate the situation from the perspective of diversity in media, we’ll see why. In fact, it’s nothing less than inevitable, whatever the other agora involved. For example, for many years we misunderstood the communicative features and resources of oral traditions because we proceeded by insisting on a textual frame of reference. We imposed irrelevant and frankly damaging concepts such as single authorship, epitomized versions, and silent, spatialized, one-way pages on the multiply authored, Protean, and networked identity of the oAgora. We denatured the living reality of oral traditions, and of their oral-derived progeny, in what amounted to a desperate attempt to bring their natural variability and responsiveness into line with our philosophy of verbal art as a singular, owned, and purchased/bought thing. We tried to turn ongoing, ever-emergent navigation into a single, authoritative map. And of course we failed. How could we do anything but fail? Does French serve its intended expressive function (or any expressive function at all) when we sweep aside its native character and impose Swahili vocabulary and grammar?

The long and the short of it is that conventional copyright (a.k.a. “Big C”) can’t apply to the itemless word-markets of oral tradition or Internet technology. But maybe another kind of “little c” copyright might apply to these two non-textual agoras. Let’s briefly consider two of the licenses offered by the Creative Commons website – the most and the least restrictive of the six contracts – with a view toward determining whether either of them could help in governing surfing and exchange in the eAgora.

The most stringent

The “Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives” license stands at the conservative end of the Creative Commons spectrum, that is, closest to the ideologically driven concept of Big C copyright that governs the tAgora. This contract “allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.” Of course, since truly interactive transactions in the eAgora don’t involve authors or static, finite works – not to mention tAgora definitions and rules – this license can have no utility for IT exchange.

The most open

At the other end of the spectrum lies the simple “Attribution” license, which “lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.” This one sounds like a perfect fit for the business of our online word-market until we get to the final clause calling for acknowledgment of an original work by, we must suppose, an original creator. In other words, even the most liberal license offered by Creative Commons, an institution dedicated to enabling the remixing of culture, assumes a fixed, finite object eligible for sharing and remaking. Although this least inhibiting of licenses speaks cogently to the realities of distribution, remixing, tweaking, and building upon as we encounter them within the eAgora, it still doesn’t recognize the radical morphing and objectlessness of interactive surfing. The ideology of the text – whether a book, a musical score, a painting, a film, or whatever – dies hard.

Variation within limits

Fork in the road

It’s counterintuitive for us, but continuous morphing in the eAgora doesn’t lead to anarchy. Things don’t fall apart, primarily because there aren’t any “things” in the first place. IT in fact draws its strength from variation within limits, from its rule-governed ability to change systemically – just like language itself, only more so. Surfers always have a choice; they can select from viable, systemically arrayed options. They can follow multiple different pathways in realizing their emergent performances, which will not be photocopies or diskcopies of yesterday’s or last year’s or any other “edition.” They may choose one route today, another similar but non-identical route next week, and so forth, depending on factors such as their own state of mind and the particulars of the occasion. Motion never freezes into stasis, the journey of discovery never devolves into the closed circuit of a daily commute, pathways never become ruts.

This dynamic is clearly visible (and for some users just as clearly nettlesome) in simple navigation of the Internet via the browser of your choice. Even if you’re embarked on the same quest as yesterday, what are the chances that you’ll navigate identically through the linked potentials that await you? Maybe you’ll get “sidetracked” – though the meaning of that designation doesn’t really work in the eAgora – or discover new facets of even the most well-defined topic or theme. Or perhaps the website architect has added new features that cry out to be explored, or deleted some pathways you surfed along in prior expeditions. Did friends suggest what amounts to a linkmap? If so, were you able or willing to retrace their steps exactly, or did the natural subjectivity of confronting untextualized reality lead you elsewhere? Only too quickly the twin illusions of object and stasis begin to break down.

Or consider how variation within limits fosters interaction within the eAgora. When a “citizen reviewer” rates and describes a new application online, that communication becomes part of the conversation that surrounds the app. When software engineers respond to suggestions or requests from user (sometimes acknowledged in subsequent reviews), for example by installing a new feature or making another kind of co-creation possible, that step forward is directly attributable to the architect-audience interaction. In a similar vein, eye-tracking devices, which chart exactly how users explore electronic pages, offer another avenue for understanding eAgora itineraries and joint communication. Like the singer and audience in an oAgora performance, the key to success is continuous, fluent exchange, with shared responsibility for outcomes. Of course, even the term “outcome” textualizes the process somewhat, since the goal is not to finish but to continue innovating. Without rule-governed variation, none of these OT and IT exchanges would be possible.

The analogy to language

Think about living, spoken language – continuously mixed and remixed – rather than its reduction to the printed or pixeled? page. We don’t resort each and every day to one of a limited number of fixed monologues or conversations, do we? Even similar pronouncements or exchanges on identical topics involve innumerable choices and adaptations, made in the moment and outside the scope of any fossilized, predetermined scheme. We depend on our human ability to generate rule-governed communication, we vary our speech-acts within limits, we suit our discourse to different situations. IT does the same.

A basic proverb

Consider this OT-to-IT modification of a homemade proverb: “Internet technology works like language, only more so.” IT is anything but objectified and static. It morphs according to rules that provide guidance and stability, but which also promote – to different degrees depending upon the particular vehicle – creativity and individual realization. In that regard, IT is simply a special case of language.

But how about the “more so”? Everyday language is necessarily broad-spectrum; general conversational language, for example, supports a great many interactions, with optional adjustments for your relationship with your addressee, or for the physical site of the exchange, the time of day, the weather, and so on. But IT code requires more rules. Superimposed on the broad-spectrum language are additional rules that identify the communication as a particular kind of coded expression – perhaps the HTML underlying website navigation, or the URL that serves as the ePathways to get there. IT languages are narrow-spectrum tools; they serve fewer functions, but they fulfill those fewer functions much more economically than could more general languages.

This built-in focus in turn means that IT languages are more densely idiomatic, with designated parts standing for much larger and more complex wholes. Thus, and despite its literal meaning, 43 things carries the connotation of a social networking site when provided with the http:// prefix and .com domain suffix. Similarly, enclosing a word or phrase within the HTML sequence <em> … </em> changes the font to italic, while the sequence <strong> … </strong> changes it to boldface. None of these specialized meanings is reported in any conventional dictionary or lexicon, since such textual resources gloss the broader-spectrum language of texts; they are formulated to serve the specific purposes of the tAgora. The codes employed to fashion the eWords that serve as currency in the eAgora operate under an enhanced set of rules and confer an enhanced idiomatic value. Like the oWords that we discuss in relation to the oAgora, they “work like language, only more so.”

Recurrence, not repetition

But that isn’t the way IT works. IT actively depends on recurrence rather than serial repetition. It operates via idiomatic responses that follow networked pathways. Consider two simple analogues. Perhaps you’re a college student and you make a habit of greeting your friends with a wave of the hand and a ritualistic phrase like “What’s up?” You react in this way regularly, every time you pass any of your friends on the street. Or perhaps you’re a Navy airman and your daily routine involves saluting a succession of officers, using exactly the same motion on every occasion. But in neither case are you really repeating the greeting; instead, you’re resorting to an approved, idiomatic signal that indexes your encounter and relationship. You’re following an established pathway, using a recurrent action to accomplish your purpose.

To illustrate the nature of recurrence in the eAgora, here are two simple examples from our shared web-world: recurrent beginnings and recurrent performances.

Recurrent beginnings

Surfers within the IT marketplace initialize their performances by opening their browsers to a start-up page. This is, of course, a page of their own choosing, and it can be changed at any time, but the point is that summoning that ePage – the function that puts idiomatic code to work in the service of navigation to come – is a recurrent and not repetitive action. You don’t open your browser for the third or fourth time in an afternoon because you did so two or three times before. You begin your surfing by employing the equivalent of an OT prologue, a ritualized introduction that bears little if any relation to what follows outside of its core function as a designated ritual precursor. Start-up pages are first-step ePathways that get things underway by convention. Surfers cannot know in advance how the specifics of the subsequent Internet session will unfold, but that brief idiomatic gesture unmistakably marks a pathway toward whatever emerges. Most fundamentally, then, the start-up page fulfills its purpose not because it repeats (in this session or any other), but because it recurs.

Recurrent performances

Just so with entire surfing performances. Unless you pursue the very same static eFile?, which is itself pathwayless and offers no further options, your navigation of the web today is highly unlikely to follow the very same set of pathways as yesterday’s surfing. In other words, today’s navigation will not repeat yesterday’s. Instead, with every click you’ll be presented with new opportunities, each of which will generate another new set of potential destinations, and so forth. Even the most assiduous of explorers will find it hard or impossible to repeat under such conditions. More to the point, in the web arena it will be difficult to find a reason to repeat, or even to conceive of such tAgora-based activity. The eAgora operates, as does the oAgora, via variation within limits – the antithesis of repetition.

Now let’s examine your surfing performance in closer focus. When you click on a link, you visit the site that’s indicated by the underlying code. Neither the choice to do so nor the result of having done so constitutes repetition. If you know where you’re headed (in the sense of having visited the website beforehand), you may have a general idea of what the idiomatic convention will produce. But you can’t know that the site will be a mirror-image of what you encountered yesterday, and you certainly can’t guarantee that you will make the same decisions once you get there. What did your college friend write on your Facebook wall overnight, and did she leave a link for you to follow? What about those reactions to your latest blog entry – did they contain any useful eAgora leads?

While many will worry over the openness and unpredictability of Internet-based navigation, we should remember the built-in comparisons and contrasts between and among agoras. The eAgora has its own rules and its own advantages, which run parallel to the rules and advantages of the oAgora but not those of the tAgora. To avoid the culture shock and agoraphobia associated with imposing the ideology of the text in all marketplaces, we must remember the importance of citizenship in multiple agoras. In IT as well as OT, reality remains in play.

Surfing performances don’t repeat; they recur.

Built-in “copyright”

It will seem counterintuitive to us at first, but the Internet is powerful precisely because it can’t be fixed, precisely because it morphs while you surf it. Because it isn’t predetermined and remains open to innovation that is idiomatically driven and forever under construction, the Internet harnesses the cumulative energy and contributions typical of distributed rather than single authorship. Unless or until it gets textualized, the web never weakens into finite, fossilized, and therefore discardable items.

What’s more, and again it will initially seem contradictory, the non-fixity of the eAgora guarantees a built-in kind of “copyright protection” for website-creating and -using activities by setting limits on variation. Rule-governed flexibility is of course the engine of recurrence and continuity, but too radical a departure from the implicit rules is impossible. Fluent performance (on the part of the surfer) requires both an inherent grasp of those limits and an ability to fashion a here-and-now, true-to-the-place-and-moment experience. Otherwise the “surfing story” can have no narrative shape, no discovery, no co-creation. It might as well be a text.

Survival of the fittest

To put it another way, the self-sufficient ecology of the web will naturally select which websites and surfing performances are to be understood as viable. No single site will be able to claim completeness, absolute independence, or permanence. Likewise, no single surfer will be able to claim—or have any need to claim—that he or she “owns” a particular navigation of the web, at least in our default textual sense. If it’s not recognized as a freestanding, tangible item, you can’t own it. And if you can’t own it, you can’t restrict it. There’s nothing (no thing) to restrict.

In the IT arena, strength and continuity reside not in stasis but in ongoingness, not in fixity but in rule-governed flexibility. The eAgora is a word-market for living, embodied, systematic communication.

The eAgora works via pathways.

Distributed Authorship

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:59:41 Z

Distributed Authorship

For most of us who spend substantial time in the tAgora, authorship is an unambiguous term and idea. Hardly a mystery in common usage, “to author” means to create and thus to own a work-become-item. So deeply woven into text-making is this idea of sole, exclusive agency and ownership that we have trouble even imagining a text without an author. Look no further than our transparent attribution of uncertain creations to that prolific author “Anonymous,” a practice that says much more about our desperate need to force a work into the default marketplace of the tAgora than about the luckless, apparently orphaned work itself. (I do not speak here of the Internet-specific meme Anonymous), though it presents interesting comparisons.)

The unexamined tScenario

Here’s what you do without thinking about it. You compose a text, whether a memo, a novel, a policy brief, or whatever, and identify it as your product by adding your name. And why not? It’s an item you and no one else created; thus it belongs to you and to no one else.

There are of course small variations on this simplex model that effectively prove the rule. Scientific reports authored by your team of researchers might seem an exception, but here again the product is made and owned in real time by you and your colleagues, by a coherent team that serves as corporate author (not seldom with precise explanations of who contributed what to the document). The process of publishing your text may also enlist the help of non-authors: assistants who put an administrator’s text into proper, distributable format; or copyeditors, designers, and other editorial personnel who ready your novel manuscript for the bookstore; or an evaluation team who reviews your policy statement and makes politically savvy suggestions (which you may accept or ignore).

But in all cases there is no doubt about the central authorship of the text: the document is attributable to one or a coherent team of composers, and its fundamental content is the finished product of those minds and no others. Authored texts resist change. In other words, they resist re-authoring. It’s nothing less than their communicative job.

The ideology behind (single) authorship

In order to ballast these premises with a few examples, let’s take a quick peek inside one wing of the Museum of Verbal Art.

European literature from the ancient world onward has always assumed individual authorship. We celebrate the achievements of Homer, Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, happy to be able to affix their names to great works like The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and Hamlet. But there’s more to this unexamined assumption than first meets the eye.

The ideological pressure to identify verbal art as necessarily a tAgora phenomenon is extremely strong, so strong that we’ve regularly created pseudo-authors where no believable evidence for them exists. Thus the exalted place of Homer at the fountainhead of Western literature—even though Homer seems to be an anthropomorphic legend, a mythic figure who never existed (at least in the form we’ve imagined him). Thus the outsized prominence of the shadowy figures of poets Caedmon and Cynewulf in discussions of the earliest English poetry. Never mind that Caedmon the cowherd-poet is also almost certainly legendary, or that the only evidence for Cynewulf is a group of poorly matched signatures in runic letters. As tAgora citizens we feel compelled to appoint individual authors for all verbal art, no matter what its origins.

Authorship outside the tAgora

The eAgora

Not so in the marketplace we’ve called the eAgora, where distributed authorship is the empowering rule. Speaking of increasingly non-singular creations engendered by computer networks, Christiane Heibach has described the current trajectory in terms of “the author function, which … due to networked environments will change from the original creator to the co-creative collective.” We expect this kind of cooperative, ongoing, emergent product as characteristic of the electronic marketplace, especially in the continuous evolution of facilities such as always-updatable data-bases, wikis, websites, and open-source software. Such activities prosper by evolving, by resisting fixation and singularity, by fostering a reality that remains in play. They simply can’t live and develop in any other way.

The oAgora

Likewise, the oAgora, which at its root supports variation over time via different performers and performances. In this marketplace the concept of “the original” is meaningless and single authors are a dead end. Like language itself (as distinct from texts, which are scripts for language), no one person is ever wholly responsible for the invention or maintenance of oral traditions. Consider any of the world’s oral epic traditions, such as the Gesar stories from multiple ethnic groups in central and eastern Asia; or the wealth of Son-Jara and Mwindo sagas from western Africa; or the well-collected South Slavic and Albanian heroic tales. All of these traditional networks were surfed by hundreds if not thousands of “authors” over centuries, and remained pliable, rule-governed, and open to ever-changing variation within limits. In other words, Heibach’s closing emphasis is as applicable to the oAgora as to the eAgora toward which she directs the following judgment: “We indeed face a revolution: not the disappearance of the author, but the metamorphosis of its notion from the individual originator to the distributed collective author as a result of social dynamics.”

Pathways support distributed authorship

The Pathways Projects aims to show that OT and IT are both by their very nature collective, shared enterprises, and that their collectivity and sharing extend over both space and time, involving contributions from many different individuals and their interactive audiences from many different times and places. Pathway-driven creation and re-creation represent community activities, the joint work of many hands. Distributed authorship cannot be forced into the tAgora without denaturing its core expressive dynamics, without making it into something it isn’t and can’t be. Even a video of a single oral performance is only a text that preserves an experience by converting something living to a fossil—by removing its ability to morph, severing its connectedness to its tradition, and thereby conferring a false sense of singularity and singular authorship.

If we succeed in becoming citizens of multiple agoras, we will quickly recognize that the oAgora and eAgora depend crucially on distributed authorship, and that the tAgora depends on the twin illusions of object and stasis as epitomized in the ideology of singular authorship.

Culture Shock

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:32:22 Z

Culture shock

Three uncomfortable anecdotes

Three stories to start – the first of them generically true-to-life, the second adapted from personal experience, and the last an actual series of intertwined events.

Displacement #1: Tools

You’re seated quietly in the corner of a cozy little brasserie in Paris. You’ve struggled through the menu (there’s no English version available), lodged your order, and the food and drink you requested have been delivered. But there’s a problem: you can’t begin to eat because you’re lacking a fork and spoon. Easy enough to remedy the situation if you could resort to your native language, but try as you might you just can’t dredge up from your high school French the magical words you need to negotiate this “implement shortfall.” No: fourchette and cuillère lie tantalizingly beyond your active vocabulary, lost in the mists of time – somewhere behind your teacher’s smiling insistence on the familiar versus the formal “you.” And there you sit, feeling quite powerless.

Displacement #2: Trains

Imagine yourself rolling through the German countryside, reading a favorite novel, sipping tea, and marveling at the coverage and on-time performance of the European train system. That Eurail pass that your cousin insisted on purchasing for you has made possible so many new adventures, and at such a bargain price. Now it’s off to Greece, then Istanbul, and even your second-class sleeper seems like a luxury.

But suddenly the train begins to slow and then stops, curiously enough, with not a station in sight. Word circulates among the multilingual community onboard that because of rerouting (due to a washed-out bridge) the engine has exceeded its allotted time commitment and is presently disattaching itself from the 20 or so cars it’s been pulling since Munich. With a promise to send a replacement, the engineer abruptly excuses himself and chugs off, leaving his passengers stranded in then-Yugoslavia with no alternative transportation.

The railway cars start to empty out and micro-communities begin to form, sorted out roughly by language and home region. Western European passengers are concerned about the unexpected development and earnestly discuss the engineer’s parting assurances and the (lack of) options, while their American colleagues fret and argue angrily among themselves, outraged over the inconvenience and what they see as an abrogation of responsibility. Central European passengers, on the other hand, simply break out the food and drink that they have brought along with them, precisely in case something like this might arise. They offer bread, cheese, and smiles of bemused resignation to those whose cultural horizons have left them anxious, frustrated, and impatient for the kind of resolution they could accept. After a while, with melding promoted by wine, food-exchange, and good humor, the micro-communities begin to merge, and everyone rests more easily until the substitute engine miraculously arrives the next day.

Displacement #3: Coffee

Some years ago during a six-month stay in Belgrade I developed a decided taste for Turkish coffee, a kind of high-octane espresso with considerable sediment lurking at the bottom of the tiny cup. But although my language skills were in most cases serviceable, I seemed to have trouble effectively ordering my beverage of choice at cafés. A request for kahva (coffee) would produce only a very milky, lukewarm latte, while the more definitive turska kahva (Turkish coffee) or crna kahva (black coffee) would produce the correct result severely compromised by a disapproving grimace. Like the prospective diner in the Parisian brasserie, I felt powerless, and things only got more embarrassing with every visit.

In response, I made it a personal challenge to overcome the linguistic barrier and figure out what was wrong. First I tried more sophisticated grammar: crnu kahvu, the same phrase inflected as the direct object of an understood root sentence, “I would like to have….” Surely this in-language agility would impress the person behind the counter and remove the telltale grimace. But no, his stare was just as withering, a sure sign that I hadn’t yet discovered the right code. So the next step was to resort to fieldwork – by sidling up to other patrons who were both native speakers and local urbanites, I planned to eavesdrop on how they accomplished the miracle of culturally sanctioned coffee-ordering. And, sure enough, the third or fourth man – for men ordered differently than did women – solved my dilemma in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. He used the phrase crnu kahvu, all right, but he absolutely growled it, clipping the second syllable off the first word and acting (from my extracultural point of view) with unforgivable rudeness. I felt badly about the apparently dismissive way he conducted himself, but no one else did.

So I stepped up to the counter, mustered my best dismissiveness, and growled the appropriately abbreviated code at the poor, undeserving attendant. Miracle of miracles, he responded not only with a precious cup of highly caffeinated nectar but with an open-mouthed, approving smile. The moral of the story? “Rudeness” was clearly expected and highly valued because in that cultural arena it was idiomatic.

Foreign agoras

It’s easy to experience culture shock when we find ourselves in an unfamiliar setting, unequipped to manage its language and culture. But the same is also true when we find ourselves in an unfamiliar agora, unequipped to manage the local technology for communication. Nor is the phenomenon restricted to any one word-marketplace; it’s just a question of where you’re coming from versus where you happen to find yourself.

tAgora challenges

Finding yourself in the tAgora without even the most basic literacy skills leads to the most obvious form of text-based culture shock, and it’s a dilemma faced by millions of people worldwide every day. But that’s not the end of it, not at all, for “literacy” isn’t a single ability or condition. More specialized transactions, such as writing reports or newspaper stories or romance novels or corporate memos, show that literacy “writ large” consists of an infinite collection of skills, many of them requiring substantial time and energy to learn and interpret. Those lacking the more specialized skills may feel fully as helpless as anyone trying to manage a foreign language or culture.

eAgora challenges

Pity the IT-phobic person who has to wrestle with an eAgora agenda of software installations, uploads and downloads, highly secure passwords, and indecipherable error messages; without someone who “speaks the language,” they’re in the same position as the tool-less diner. Almost always the IT version of culture shock results from unquestioned and unexamined immersion in the tAgora, from having one’s cognitive defaults effectively set to “text only.” With that set of built-in and unexamined expectations, the web will always seem treacherous and insubstantial, a will o’ the’ wisp that you can’t quite get your hands on, an ethereal sort of experience that vanishes without the trace you need to credit its real existence. The very virtuality that makes eCommunication possible becomes unnerving and disorienting, not seldom prompting defensiveness and outright avoidance. You may as well be trying to get yourself some Turkish coffee without growling.

oAgora challenges

But culture shock isn’t limited to the discomfort associated with underdeveloped tAgora skills or seemingly rudderless navigation within the eAgora. It can plague foreign visitors to the oAgora as well, leading to what we might call oAgoraphobia. Consider the generations of well-meaning scholar-fieldworkers who have sought to better understand oral traditions by entering strange new worlds. They opt to leave well-charted, already negotiated environments in order to live in societies that depend heavily or exclusively on the oAgora for their daily transactions. But what lies beneath this program for “foreign exchange”?

Well, it starts with cognitively predisposed scholars, people who spend their lives using texts as their primary communicative medium, who choose to enter a world that does nothing of the sort. As well prepared as they may think they are, they cannot leave their predispositions about reality and its faithful portrayal entirely behind. For many years the goal of such activities was to collect – that is, to record, isolate, and remove from social context – and then to edit and publish what they unearthed (and in part created). Editing allowed researchers to “clean up” their recordings, to “correct” what informants said, in short to remove the last vestiges of process and convert their captured quarry to acceptable freestanding products. Publishing essentially made those products shelvable and thus usable by tAgora consumers of static and complete-in-themselves items, objective things that qualified for canonization and deposit in the Museum of Verbal Art.

And why was this obviously reductive paradigm followed, until recently at least? Quite clearly, because oAgora culture shock was too much for text-bound researchers. There simply was no other way for self-respecting tAgora citizens – at least those who were limited to single-agora fluency – to understand and explain an oral tradition. They did what we all do if we’re not paying close attention: they translated the foreign reality back into domestic-agora terms, representing what they encountered as something it was not. In later years, and particularly with the advent of digital and Internet technology, that kind of translation has become more faithful. There is newfound attention to social context, process, emergence, performance, and other features that make oral tradition a decidedly non-textual – and finally non-textualizable – medium. Multi-agora fluency, with attention to the rules that govern communication in each venue, has mitigated this particular species of culture shock.

Thwarting recurrence

Culture shock once experienced can be hard to dispel. The only real cure – the only remedy that promises to help with future as well as immediate problems – is to learn the language or culture or agora well enough to cope, if still and forever as an outsider. This lesson is absolutely transparent for utensil-seekers, for example, and we all appreciate the practical reality that living inside a foreign community for a substantial period generally vaccinates a person against chronic recurrence of this dread disease. And traveling by train can prove not only a relaxing, rewarding pleasure, but an opportunity for continuing education as peers from other social orbits introduce us to viable contexts we never knew existed. Serial fieldwork such as that described in the Belgrade coffee episode can also go a long way toward not only solving specific problems but also coming to understand that an alternative and even counter-intuitive way of doing things could exist. In all three cases, people outside the language and culture make an effort to interpret the new situation on its own terms, aiming toward a workable cultural fluency that exposes their own cognitive biases at the same time that it opens them up to new channels, new code, and new kinds of exchanges.

The displacement anxiety caused by “residence” in a foreign agora can of course be handled with a cognate solution: learn and apply the rules of the particular word-marketplace in which you find yourself, rather than those you unconsciously import from outside. No matter which agora you hail from (for almost all of us, at least for the moment, the tAgora), seek at least secondary citizenship in your new context. Pluralize your perspective; diversify your frame of reference.

Better coping through homology

In addition, the Pathways Project also offers another remedy, one born of the OT-IT homology that lies at its heart. To put it aphoristically, when as a tAgora citizen you find yourself working and communicating in the oAgora or eAgora, be ready to navigate through networks rather than trek through texts. Put aside the expectations that arise from the ideology of texts – that knowledge, art, and ideas can be converted to finite, fixed things – and embrace the reality that you are negotiating and co-creating reality through exploring pathways. Give up the intense tAgora pressure to own and to sequester, and concentrate on sharing resources. In short, recognize the fundamental democracy of the oAgora and eAgora, which operate, and in fact prosper, by remaining forever under construction.

Contingency

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:21:42 Z

Contingency

It’s all around us

Contingency is everywhere, if we’re willing to look: in politics, in economics, in philosophy, in social identity, in the plans we make, even in the plans that others make for us.

Here is a brief but perhaps representative litany. Political successions often consist of a nest of contingencies. Home-buying is often made contingent on various related issues such as appraisal, loan qualification, home inspection, and so forth. Philosophers define contingency as “the study of propositions that are not necessarily true or necessarily false.” Some people understand the very bedrock of personal identity as a contingent social function subject to many variables both intraculturally and crossculturally. Every flight itinerary we arrange is, as we only too often discover en route, contingent on weather, traffic, and airline foibles. And the official organ of the American Association of Actuaries is named – what else? – Contingencies magazine.

So we can’t escape contingency, and that’s the most salient point. In truth we’re always and everywhere negotiating potentials and possibilities, working through them in real time, not asynchronously. After the fact that process may get conveniently flattened into a lockstep, here’s-what-happened narrative. But until that juncture we’re far too caught up in the evolving story to recount how it went (before it happened). We’re too busy living the events to manufacture the distance required to reduce them to a tidy, past-tense scenario.

What contingency means

The adjective contingent reveals a familiar kind of family tree, reaching back to Latin and moving through Old French before making its Middle English debut in 1385, roughly about the time Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his Canterbury Tales. In today’s language the word has the general sense of “liable to occur, but not with certainty; possible,” as when we speak of some favorable or hoped-for result as “contingent upon” some still pending action or development. The continuous availability of the Pathways Project website, for example, is contingent upon a number of factors: a connection to the Internet, a browser, smoothly functioning servers at the University of Missouri, the technological expertise of the webmaster, and not least electricity!

For our purposes – in this node and more widely – it’s crucial to recognize that “contingent” doesn’t quite mean “accidental” (though the two words are frequently used synonymously). A contingent outcome doesn’t occur inexplicably, with no underlying cause; instead, it’s dependent upon conditions or events not yet established; conditional. At its core a contingency is always an evolving reality, an emergent process that hasn’t yet generated a product. It names a possibility that may well occur but isn’t yet “writ in stone.”

Contingency most essentially means “What if…?”

Web-networks are contingent

“Contingent” also names the evolving, emergent, process-oriented experience of navigating through OT and IT networks. Because of the links that empower your exploration of interconnected possibilities, where you choose to go next isn’t by any means a willy-nilly decision. Surfing options are certainly myriad, especially as they pile up one decision after another, but at the same time they’re rule-governed and systemic. Every route leads to somewhere, or, more precisely, to many linked somewheres.

So negotiating a pathway-driven itinerary is by its very nature a contingent undertaking. It happens as it happens, unpredetermined, as you make one choice – one click after another. You can’t see through to the end-product because you haven’t yet reached the end.

So what actually is contingent, anyway?

A fair question: just what is conditional, dependent, in the process of becoming in OT and IT? We can identify at least five features of responsible business in the oAgora and eAgora whose contingency is central to their operation. Contingency keeps both marketplaces from collapsing into tAgora artifact-trading.

Here then are five trademark contingencies:

1. The very next option. OT performers and IT clickers remain in the present, continually confronted with options they may or may not elect. Storytellers and web-surfers conjure experience via serial decisions, each of which brings another decision – the next option – into play. As long as options exist, the journey is ongoing and under construction.

2. The performance. Because they create in the right-now immediacy of virtual agoras, both OT and IT surfers generate unique performances that are never true iterations of any other performance, either by them or by anyone else. Each set of choices is the result of weighing a great many alternatives, and weighing them serially, one after another, as you go. No two experiences, even if they’re reduced after the fact to texts, will ever match because each one is individually contingent.

3. The network. Like performances, which amount to tours of the oAgora or eAgora network, OT and IT networks are themselves contingent. Each one can and does morph in and of itself, remaining forever under construction, whether under the influence of social developments, personal creativity, or some other life-giving force.

4. Meaning. If surfers are navigating through networks by making serial choices among the options that open before them, then they are co-creating the experience and co-creating meaning. Because OT and IT users are choosing among alternative pathways (rather than trekking through texts), they are fluently converting contingencies into (momentary, necessarily evanescent) realities.

5. Authorship. Agency in the oAgora and the eAgora is only partially in the hands of any network navigator. Much depends on those who have come before, who have assembled the web of contingencies that supports an infinite number of individual configurations. And those who contribute afterward will reconstruct the shared system in unforeseeable ways. To a considerable extent OT, like the IT resource Wikipedia, is an open-source phenomenon. Authorship is distributed in both arenas.

Contingency is an invitation

In other words, contingency, so often negatively construed as unmanageable uncertainty that threatens to undo our best efforts, is an invitation to participate and to create in the oAgora and eAgora. Contingency means that the process cannot go forward without your involvement – and not just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict, but a continuing commitment to stay with the exploration until it’s over (for the moment, for this performance, for this instance). If you accept the invitation, you’re entering a web of potentials that will guide but not predetermine your activities. And as you make choice after choice, the individuality of your surfing will emerge as the jointly authored itinerary it is.

Of course, this “standing” invitation offers admission to an experience that develops as you go; there can be no foregone conclusions. oAgora surfers will adapt each of their performances to the existing variables (their own mood, the audience, the time of day or night, the physical venue, etc.), and eAgora surfers will find their way through complex, interactive constellations of electronic routes according to their preferences that day, week, or hour. Both kinds of navigators are invited not to a destination, but rather to a system of pathways through which they can jointly fashion an event.

Texts mask contingency

Historically, it’s been the role of texts to mask contingency, to (seem to) remove uncertainty and replace the conditional with the factual. Never mind that the very origin of the word fact exposes the fantasy of exterior, freestanding truth. For many centuries we’ve been content to accept the inscribed as the permanent, as somehow immune to contingencies, as the “last word” on matters of real importance.

If you need evidence of how open-and-shut this ingrained attitude is, you need go no further than the old proverb, Don’t trust everything you read in books! If we weren’t so blinded by our unexamined fascination with tAgora commerce, why in the world would we need such a warning?

But textual ideology is a powerful force, not least because it operates under the radar, deflecting our perspectives before we have a chance to consider other ways of managing knowledge, art, and ideas. It’s demanding and extremely uncomfortable work to escape ideological bias, and a kind of culture shock inevitably attends inter-agora boundary-crossing. We count on texts as beacons of objectivity and stasis – as still points in the chaos of give-and-take argument, as the “true” story that never varies, the official and dependable source to which we can return to settle disputes and establish the facts of the matter.

Of course, texts only appear to have eliminated contingency, as contemporary philosophy and literary criticism have shown with great persuasiveness over the past couple of decades. Every word in any text is subject to interpretation by every individual who encounters it, and – certain political stances notwithstanding – the individual’s prior life experience, always unique, will necessarily play a part in that interpretation. Texts as physical objects may themselves stand firm; how they are read does not.

And this isn’t a liability: Shakespeare’s redoubtable Hamlet wouldn’t be nearly as intriguing or celebrated if the text that revolves around his world-view communicated with total objectivity in every time and place. Is Hamlet’s character contingent? Yes, because our readings of the text – rather than the text itself – are contingent. Again, the artifact holds still; perspectives do not. That’s a significant difference between operations in the tAgora on the one hand, and on the oAgora and eAgora on the other.

OT and IT actively depend on contingency

The oAgora and eAgora aren’t merely venues where contingency is unavoidable or grudgingly tolerated. Neither marketplace could function without a system of openly acknowledged, dynamic “What ifs?”

Take the oAgora. As the performer and audience work their way along an ever-branching set of narrative pathways, both sides aware of the alternatives that lie before them, they’re effectively playing within an interactive set of rules. The Basque oral improviser, or bertsolari, for example, is juggling several balls at once – responding to an assigned topic, answering a competitor’s poem, singing along a melodic template, and fulfilling the requirements of one among many verse-forms. Within this rule-governed universe, there are many oPathways to choose among, many routes that the performer and the audience could follow, but contingency doesn’t become reality until that pathway is actually chosen and engaged. And so it proceeds, step by step, not all at once but emergently. Only at the end of the stanza, when available options have converged to a single inescapable solution, do the bertsolari and the audience converge, singing the final two lines ensemble. Until that culminating point the negotiation, fueled by contingency, is ongoing. Contingency initiates momentum.

Likewise in the eAgora. You characteristically begin surfing with a plan in mind, but just as characteristically your itinerary will include ePathways and experiences you hadn’t foreseen, that you couldn’t foresee, when you started out. A Wikipedia entry on the medieval Irish manuscript called the Book of Kells presents you with a host of “What if?” opportunities, among them an entry on vellum, the sheepskin medium of this and so many other manuscripts of the period, and Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced movable type to Europe. If you choose the latter, a link within the section on Gutenberg’s legacy may attract your attention: you might then click on Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, an interactive page that offers a gateway to the academic program in culture and technology at the University of Toronto that was established in honor of McLuhan.

Alternatively, you might be exploring the Pathways Project node on the eAgora and find yourself clicking through the various species that make up the genus IT. Suppose you fasten on the idea and example of the mashup, the digital meshing of previously freestanding works into a new synthesis. And suppose further that you follow the ePathway to remix, where front and center stands none other than Marshall McLuhan, the focus of McLuhan Remix. This site also does honor to the media theorist, by combining his very words with a host of others’ words, all knit together with the aim of representing as well as articulating just what it is that new media can do and how we should understand them.

For the sake of illustration, then, let’s agree that your navigation follows one of these two tracks and ends in one of these two places, either at the University of Toronto program or with the McLuhan Remix. Either series of choices, inherently logical in itself but nonetheless unpredictable, becomes a fact only after the matter. And what made “fact” possible was an open-ended, systemic series of contingencies.

The next move is up to you

In truth, of course, it’s hardly just the next one; every move is up to you. Of the more than 40 links that occur within this node alone, you may have chosen to follow several, all, or none. Perhaps you didn’t even get “here.” Perhaps you’re somewhere else. No one—not even you—can predict precisely where you’ll go, what exact choices you’ll make. All the oAgora or the eAgora can do is to create options for you to choose among, networks for you to navigate. But that’s most assuredly not a liability; it’s a serial opportunity to participate. OT and IT work only when you convert contingencies to co-created reality.

So from this point on (if you’re “here”), and from any point on (if you’re “elsewhere”), you have a number of choices. You can pursue any or all of the four ways to navigate the Pathways Project, as detailed in the Getting Started node. At various junctures, whether in the morphing book or the wiki, those four strategies may well lead you beyond the Pathways Project itself, and you may choose to return or not (today, at some future time, or whatever).

Or you may decide to explore other parts of the larger Web, to Twitter, to check your Facebook page, to store a bookmark for later reading, or to pursue some other eActivity. Or you may decide to pick up a brick-and-mortar book, settle down comfortably with a cup of tea, and savor the offline pleasures of the tAgora.

Whatever pursuit you choose, this node will have succeeded as long as you see OT- and IT-based contingency as an invitation. And the Pathways Project at large will have succeeded as long as you recognize the particular dynamics of OT and IT on the one hand and textual technology on the other, as well as the benefits of earning citizenship in multiple agoras.