Afterword

Abstract

At certain points in history, certain words take on a positive aura that makes it difficult to openly express dissenting or sceptical views about the objects, processes, or qualities they denote. Right now, social has this aura. This word’s role as a modifier to make the noun after it refer to society and other kinds of human association—as in social law and social life—emerged at the end of the sixteenth century (OED ‘social’ adj. 5a, 5b). Most recently, the word has attached itself to a relatively new word, media—first used to denote mass communication in 1927 (OED ‘media’ n.2)—to denote a new kind of technology of communication. Whereas the ordinary media provided only one-way, one-to-many, communication, the social media allow ‘users to create and share content or to participate in social networking’ (OED ‘social’ Special Uses S2 ‘social media’ n.). In the field of textual editing, being social is not so new. The French theorists of the 1960s Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault considered authorship itself to be an inherently social phenomenon. For Barthes, texts were not spun like webs out of the solitary minds of lone individuals but rather woven together from existing ideas and sayings: ‘The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). According to Foucault, we are thinking about creativity itself in the wrong way if we concern ourselves too much with authors as persons, for in truth we as readers collectively construct the author to suit what we want to do with the text. In this view, we have to speak not of the author but of the author function that we use to constrain the range of interpretations that a text may be subject to. These reader-constructed authors become ‘the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 352), saving us from outlandish misinterpretations. In their original French-language publications—much translated and anthologized—Foucault’s essay was a direct response to Barthes’s, and their shared aim was a thorough transvaluation of the notion of authorship by socializing it (Barthes, 1968; Foucault, 1969).