For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.
Walter Benjamin
4 comments:
Isakovsky - don't worry, I clocked yr last comment before changing the template.
In principle, Benjamin's idea has considerable merit. However, as a college professor who assigns, reads and grades hundreds of essays each term, well, let's say that there is a gap between the possibility and probability inherent in Benjamin's sentiment. Writing and other forms of effective communication (such as videography) are crafts. To be an effective communicator requires desire, training, reflexive self-assessment, the ability to learn from well-meaning criticism, discipline, and of course, the prerequisite of carrying a message worth attending to.
No doubt grading endless college papers, many of them regurgitations of what you the teacher have said in class, is enough to erode one's faith in effective communication. I agree though, that Benjamin was really attuning himself to potentials inherent in the new technologies rather than soberly assessing the actualities.
nb Please feel free to post non-anonymously, even if it's a pseudonym, just to differentiate you from other nonyies
hello... Charlotte Street! I had left a comment and suppose it was ghosted as you said along with others... My take on this posting of yours, went something like this. To me its postive that so many readers are becoming, and I emphasize the word becoming, writers. After all, what is writing and who owns it, and if blogs by accident and choice are allowing thousands of people to speak, who didn't speak previously, to voice their views, create production of creative spaces, new forms of language and art, then more power to them and us: I am one of them. after all who decides what is or is not good or valuable work. I like to think that perhaps we are the start of something that Sartre suggested in What is literature, to wit that the time has come when readers and writers are one community composing and recomposing the great text of the world. To me this is immanence in action and the moment of the Multitude to borrow a phrase from Toni Negri. Let
's go further and speak ofthe imaginative creative flows suggested by Felix Guattari's ideas and how the blog world, not in all areas obviously, takes on the role of an active desiring-machine cutting the flow of desire and shaping it anew. So writing and reading disclose their secret which is that of reading writing writing reading for all and in all, a sortie into the start of universal democracy democratizing... the world as text. In any case, I enjoy coming to your blog, and am delighted you rid yoursel f of haloscan.
Cheers
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