Bakhtin and Warnick assert that communication is a social phenomenon that requires active participation by both author and reader to respond not only to each other but also to shared cultural, textual and societal references. They believe that author and reader exchange and co-create meaning by their shared understanding of a universe of preceding exchanges—exchanges that ultimately created genre and decipherable allusions that help decode meaning. The ability of author and reader to exchange that understanding is the basis for intertextuality.
Bakhtin declares that an author can never interrupt a “universal silence” because one does not exist (69); instead, an author is responding to predecessors, agreeing or disagreeing with schools of thought, etc. In fact, any work, in Bakhtin’s view, has “dialogic overtones” (92) because an author’s work is not only oriented to preceding works, but also oriented toward the response of others (75). That response—from the audience—is implicit in the act of understanding the author’s work: “understanding is the initial preparatory stage for response” (69). As a result, there exists no one message source: author and audience co-create meaning and a body of work.
One component of communication that ensures a shared meaning amidst this dialogue is genre. Bakhtin asserts that we learn to communicate in genres and therefore can anticipate others’ speech based on the genre revealed in the first words of an utterance (79). Warnick agrees by explaining that genre provides a reader/user with a frame for interpreting the message: “meanings emerge from interpretations of socially and historically situated viewers” (44). As a result, the author is not writing from some internal source, but an external one that has a historical tradition. And Bakhtin goes as far as saying that genre isn’t even defined by the author, but instead by the audience because, ultimately, the author must decide how to best address the audience (95).
Warnick points out that our new technologically advanced environment has created a more dispersed, disaggregated audience (44), making it more difficult to address one audience with one genre, style or message. As a result, single authorship is replaced (particularly on the Web) with group, corporate authorship, automated assembly, and the reliance on databases to tailor-make site content for an individual user. In this environment, authorship is anonymous.
In fact, Warnick shows how authorship can be usurped by the reader/user in a Web environment, describing the “parasitic nature of Web texts” (29), which can be borrowed, revised, and changed by participants (30). In this sense, Bakhtin’s notion of an utterance having a beginning and end is utterly defeated. The relationship of author and audience is no longer a polite conversation in which no one is interrupted and everyone waits their turn to respond. Instead, the dialogue is more like a screaming match in which the words of your counterpart are used in the way you choose. This ultimately begs the question that Warnick poses (103): Do authors have a role in interpreting meaning anymore?
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In fact, Warnick shows how authorship can be usurped by the reader/user in a Web environment
I see how readers have more control over virtual texts, because they can so easily copy, cut, paste, and insert words and visual elements into new documents to create texts that look nothing like the originals. Then, these texts can be sent on to hundreds--even thousands of people at the press of one button. How can authors keep control of their meaning, etc. in this medium?
After being so adamant (in class last week) about not "killing off" the authors, I am surprised at how my view of authorship this week is different as it relates to Web texts.
I think this is an excellent attempt to highlight the role (or dispersion) of audience for web-based documents, because determining audience is so problematic in this environment: who is my reader? Very often the intended reader is not the actual reader of an online text.
Does the web signify the limit (or end) of genre? Genre can be loosely defined as a type or class, or an established class or category of artistic composition, but what is the type of the online medium? Is it not the juxtaposition or sublimation of all genres? Text, music, video, speech--all mediums and all genres could potentially have a place on the web, in the same situation. I'm thinking of technologies like Clipmarks and the like. Is the web the end of genre or a new genre itself?
Quoting n.nyl: "I am surprised at how my view of authorship this week is different as it relates to Web texts."
When learning about basic Web design in a couple of different classes here, we learned that copying pieces from various Web pages was common and, for that matter, accepted. When text is copied and recycled in this way, context is under the control of the reader who is, in turn, becoming author. And the Web becomes this place where fragments of information are constantly being used and re-used in different texts.
Like n.nyl, I was a little surprised by my own tolerant response to Bakhtin. And while I know that he is writing about language in a context that predates the Web, I think it may be possible that his ideas are most useful when applied specifically to writing for the Web. I think I'm echoing something Jesse said, but for myself I don't see the destabilization of the author that is implied by Bakhtin as being particularly relevant to traditional printed text (though I do still think that he is describing the way language actually works). However, in an environment where the idea of text is itself so unstable, I think his theories start to become more applicable....
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