Seven Lions

I’ve been reading Ricoeur’s From Text to Action, and I think I’m starting to see the link now between the creation of media (either text or digital) and the creation of literature (here I’ll flatter myself and claim that Son of the Great River is literature) and the continuing tribulations of the publishing industry.  Ricour makes the point that writing, and here I’d assume also any other form of knowledge representation, such as animated explanations of the Creative Commons license, is structured work, and as such falls under the auspices of techne and praxis rather than poiesis.  As any aspiring author can tell you, convincing bookstores to carry your book has little to do with the quality of a book (Whether in its production or in its writing) and everything to do with your book as a product.  And it’s not just the chain bookstores.  Independent bookstore owners, what few of them remain, are just as likely to make their decision based on your distribution capacity without opening the cover as any Borders manager.

Part of this stems from the destruction of the old means of discovering, marketing and releasing books that results from the continued ability of the Internet to cut out the intermediaries, but a large portion comes from the unwillingness of the writer to acknowledge that they are creating a work.  When someone refers to a labor of love, the emphasis is on the love, not the labor.  As Ricouer points out, the creation of a work is an event, but it’s an event that begins “the temporal phenomenon of exhange, the establishment of a dialogue that can be started, continued or interrupted.”  There’s a certain sense of this, but it’s currently wrapped up in the rubric of marketing.  Writers create websites and post blogs and engage with their audience because it’s good business, but really it’s this dialogue that’s the poietic aspect of media creation.  This is why peer production like Wikipedia works.  It’s not that a bunch of writers get together to write about Slavery in Ancient Rome, it’s that one writer works on relaying knowledge of ancient Roman slavery and another writer sees this, is intrigued or bothered by the claims of the first, and adds to or amends it.  This is the dialectic, and it exists even with static works, because the reading and criticism of the work grows far beyond that work.  Ownership supports techne, but it damages poiesis, which is to say that it promotes the creation of a work through mechanisms to reward the worker (Be it money or acclaim) but it damages the establishment of a dialogue because the dialogue wants to be free.

There’s another exciting aspet to Ricouer’s claims that needs to be pointed out.  A work itself is not just the document, but also the means with which the document is presented to an audience.  Ricouer uses the example of ordering someone to give you a cup of water.  It’s not just the substance of the language, but the forcefulness of the demand.  In the same way, when I released my different animated mockups of an animated clearinghouse for verbs and processes, it wasn’t just the concept of the clearinghouse, but also the fact that one was frame-by-frame and linear, for which I felt I had to add notations in the Youtube video to explain as it ran, whereas the other was interactive and, due to the interactivity, I felt that the user would more readily understand the concept.  By the same vein, releasing Son of the Great River had elements beyond the storyline to signal to the audience the type of work.  The obvious aspects are its cover and illustrations, which indicate a direction toward a more idealistic audience, but also the method that it was released, print-on-demand, is part of the dialog.  Print-on-demand is still seen as a last resort of the desperate author, though this is starting to change, but if, like me, you’ve consciously chosen this over pursuing traditional publishing, then it becomes the “perlocutionary act” of Ricouer, where the statement I’m trying to make is one of hopefulness and in contention with the current publishing industry’s focus on selling widgets.  Regardless of whether you decide to buy my book, I think it’s time to recognize that some authors are making a statement with their distribution choices, and that it’s as much a part of their work as their writing or their art.  Hopefully, this claim can be taken at face value, and not as a marketing ploy.

Rheem would have self-published

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 8:46 AM and is filed under Art, Digital Innovation, Fiction, Print on Demand, Son of the Great River. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.