By Isabel Lustosa
"I can not accept the idea that he is identified with the dust , s-modernism that all speeches are always possible because they refer to the position of those who never sets and the object ", says historian in an exclusive interview
found Roger Chartier in the lobby of the Casa de Rui Barbosa on the day before this interview. He was returning from lunch with Sandra Pesavento, your friend and organizer of the Seminar on Cultural History, which was participating. Sandra already had spoken to me and said I am interested in talking with him, so when we saw each other she waved away. Immediately, the teacher came among Chartier encounter with that friendly smile is one of its characteristics. For Roger Chartier, along with being a celebrity in the academic world, is extremely simple, affable, almost Carioca in natural way and humorous of approaching people, leaving them at will. We arranged the interview for the following morning (16/09/2004), the Gloria Hotel, where the historian likes to stay in Rio de Janeiro. Knowing how
Chartier has been interviewed by historians and journalists and following my natural inclination to learn about the lives of people supervised my first questions in order to know a little biography of the interviewee. Chartier bravely to become himself an object of study, but in the legitimate exercise of resistance here gives us an interesting reflection on the issue biographical.
Interviewed which facilitates the work of the interviewer, because it reacts to issues with clarity, wit and erudition, which highlights Chartier's speech is his permanent interest in issues related to their work. The way to articulate and intelligent as their answers spring to denounce the intellectual work and life mix as in proposition Wright Mills: "The scholarship is a choice of how to live and while a career choice; either knew or not, the knowledge worker to form his own self As you approach the perfection of his craft. "
Director at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, and professor specializing in history of cultural practices and history of reading, Roger Chartier is one of the best known historians of today, with works published in countries around the world. His theoretical breakthrough opened up new possibilities for studies in cultural history and stimulates the permanent renewal in ways to read and make history.
Chartier was visiting professor at numerous foreign universities (Princeton, Montreal, Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Berkeley, etc.) in Brazil and published the following books: "History of private life, vol. 3: Renaissance to the Enlightenment "(Companhia das Letras)," Writing Culture, literature and history "(Artmed)," Ways of meaning - Writing Culture: between distinçãoe apropriaç ; will "(Mercado de Letras)," The challenges of writing "(ed. Unesp), "The Adventure of the book" (UNESP), The edge of the cliff "(Editor's University)," From Stage to Page "(House of the Word)," The order books & rdquo ; (UNB), "History of Reading in the Western world" (Attica), Practices of reading "(Liberty Station)," The power of libraries: the memory books West (under the direction of M. freak and C. Jacob, Ed UFRJ) and "Reading and readers in France's Ancien Regime "(UNESP).
Who is Roger Chartier? How your work relates to your life story?
Roger Chartier: I always have some caution with personal issues. I think when we talk to each other, build something impossible to be honest, a representation of themselves to those who will read or for yourself. I remind you, in this respect, the text of Pierre Bourdieu on the biographical illusion or delusion autobiographical. Bourdieu criticizes such a narrative in which life is treated as a path of consistency, as a single wire, when we know that the existence of any person, multiply the hazards, the causalities the opportunities.
Another aspect of the biographical or autobiographical illusion to think that things are very unique, singular, personal, when, in fact, often collective experiences, shared with persons belonging to the same generation. When making an autobiographical is almost impossible to avoid falling into that double illusion: the illusion or the uniqueness of people in the face of shared experiences or the illusion of perfect coherence in a path of life.
I think this kind of reporting makes sense only if we can correlate a detail, something that is purely anecdotal, with social or academic world in which we live. Pierre Nora introduced the idea of "self-story" a collection of essays where eight autobiographies are met: George Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Duby, among others. They were known authors talking about their personal background or relating it to the choice of a particular historical period or field. But personally I find it very difficult to avoid the anecdotal or too personal in this kind of story. As you in mind, aiming to understand their own social destiny? I think we must first be within the social world and then make an effort to dissociation of character: the character and the character who talks about what they say, that's the same guy .
That said, we can enter with some caution, in answer to your question. I was born in Lyon and pertençoa a social world outside of the dominant, with no tradition in academia. My school and university career was a consequence of this origin. In France, the dominant feature was the play: the school and university system meant that the children reproduce the same social positions of parents. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron dealt with this subject in two books. The first, published in 1964, was called "heirs" and the second, 1970, "Playback."
course there is room for people who come from other social horizon can circumvent this tendency. My own trajectory belongs to this exception. To understand it you need some knowledge of the social reality of post-war France, between 1950 and 60, when the predominant mating system, but there was also some opportunity for advancement for people of other social origins. I think, however, that when there is this kind of tension between a dominant form of school and individuality of different origin that can stick this system always remains something of this tension, this difficulty.
British historian, Richard Hoggart, in his book "The Uses of Literacy," reflects on his own path of fellow student from a family of laborers. This affiliation to the place of origin, this ratio between autobiography and object of study was extremely useful in the case of Hoggart, do not you think?
Chartier: Translated into French as "La culture du pauvre," Hoggart's book is really wonderful, because he can articulate biographical elements with a deep reflection on the media for the classes, in this case the English working class of the 1940s and '50s. The main purpose of this book is to question the idea that all readers or listeners of the productions of this industry cultural strongly believed in their messages. Live under a form of alienation, subject to social models that the messages of mass media from time-radio, cinema and magazine-imposed.
Hoggart wanted to show that there was a much more complex, ambivalent, between believing and not believing, accepting ficçãoe at the same time, be aware that this is a unreal world, a world of fable, fiction. The opposition between the nose the other was a very clear Hoggart in the book and the way establishes the relationship between personal history and sociological discussion seems very fair and appropriate.
In Lyon, however, were not a working class in the same sense of Hoggart. We lived in a world of artisans who worked in one way or another in the dominant activity in the city that is silk. There was something like what Hoggart describes the relationship with horoscopes, with the mass circulation daily and the songs. But there was only the circulation of cultural products that describes Hoggart, there was also a certain taste for a part of mainstream culture. The opera, for example, was very popular. In Lyon
of my childhood going to the opera as if going to the movies, twice, three times a week. It was a very popular non-ownership of the entire repertoire of opera, but mostly of Italian opera by Verdi, the French. My father saw "Carmen" 25 times. This relationship has changed between 1960 and 1970, when this world of artisans was gradually disappearing and in its place came a deeper fracture between the world who come to those who like opera and other forms of entertainment.
One thing that struck me as interesting in the book Hoggart is the importance that the literature had to their training. I imagine that in France, where the literary tradition is so strong, a training based on these readings youth should influence the possibility of breaking with the system reproduction. Do not you think?
Chartier: In fact, in France, the literature was very important in school. Mainly because the primary school curriculum used for several years teaching the classics fragments of Victor Hugo, the 19th-century novelists such as Alphonse Daudet. Thus, as school is mandatory, each one, until the age of 14 years, including people from the grassroots level, had a direct, albeit fragmentary, with this body of literature that defines the French literature.
For students of high schools also had the complete repertoire of classical literature of the 17th century: Corneille, Molière, Racine. There was a strong impregnation of what, in a canonical definition, call it literature. I do not know if it still is today, because the primary or secondary school fell off a little of that corpus of canonical texts and opened to contemporary authors.
Media changed too much. Recall that in the 1960s there was only one television network that left the air at eight-thirty at night and that read Corneille. Present a public network, with a unique programming for all, at half past eight, a classic text, it is unthinkable today. Except in private channels for a certain audience.
The world has changed profoundly in the late 1960s. 1968 was a landmark of cultural disruption, not necessarily in the sense that is usually thought: an opening, the breakdown of authority in ways more open behavior. But there were also 68 from the aggravation was that spirit of trade, with the destruction of the cultural dimension, for example, television.
Destruction in the sense that there is not only shared the ability for everyone to see or turn off the television. Now there's an infinite fragmentation, there are channels for those who like pop, for those who like rock, classical music. It a form of cultural fragmentation that can also be seen as a form of freedom and diversification. But at the same time, mark 68 tambémo disappearance of a shared culture and ingrained as a reference to national and universal literature.
My generation was in Brazil, perhaps the last in which the reading of the classics of world literature was a habit. I think that created a universe of reference for our generation is different from the youth today. How is that universe of cultural references that originate from reading the classics is the basis of the worldview of the historian of today? On the other hand, how the universe expanded cultural reference more contributed to the acceptance of interdisciplinary approaches?
Chartier: We should not think that the past was necessarily better. There are authors who specialize in this kind of pessimistic diagnosis. I think instead that it reads more today than in 1950. Even as the computer is not only a new vehicle for pictures or games. He is also responsible for the multiplication of the presence of the writer in contemporary societies. On the computer so you can read the classics in scholarly journals and in general. Readings may not necessarily be essential, enriching, but they are reading.
can not say, therefore, that we are watching the demise of print culture. The problem is that written culture persists. It is difficult understanding the link between unstable when the new cultural forms, the new preferences of young people and which remains a fundamental reference. The fact that the texts read by teenagers on the computer, his favorite readings, do not belong to that set literary repertoire is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is a discrepancy between this new culture and reference designs that, in our view, would be more consistent and provide more resources for understanding the social world, to understand himself and the representation of another.
For this I have no answer, but I think that there are two positions should be avoided. One is that it considers that the presence of literature in everyday reality belong to a world definitely gone. I do not think a proper diagnosis as there are, in actuality, an effort within the school and outside school to preserve the literary culture. What makes this effort is difficult to identify which, if before he was clear and focused on some activities, today it is diversified through, for example, new and varied media.
The other is the position of those who think that there is nothing helpful, useful or important in this new world. Posture that seems very inadequate when we think about educational possibilities created by new technologies, various experiences for literacy, for the transmission of knowledge from a distance.
I think it is the responsibility intellectuals, the media, publishers, ensuring the transmission of knowledge about the world through projects that link the aesthetic or scientific dimension with everyday existence. So people are not fully subject to the laws of the market, uncertainty or anxiety, the key is to give each instrument enabling him to decipher the world he lives and his own situation will in this world. This knowledge that can come from sociology, literature, history, would enable the dominant resistance to the impositions that come from all sides: the ideological discourses and messages of the media, mass culture etc..
What Hoggart described in his wonderful book was the way we can also mold in the building through knowledge. This is a dense and strong experience which can be obtained through literary texts, the present or the past, a perspective that involves both the transmission of beauty, but also a critical dimension. But I think that if there is not a literary way to acquire knowledge about the social world, why go to the most vulnerable tools for unraveling this world?
Despite the theoretical value that modern historiography has always promoted the narrative historians see the work yet with a certain modesty, following each narrated fact a careful analysis of that aspect and then using called the argument from authority. It seems to me that prejudge the outcome of the narrative point of view, because, in general, becomes fragmented and uninteresting. What do you think?
Chartier: Between the 1950s and '60s, historians have sought a way of knowing controlled, supported on technical research, statistical measures, theoretical concepts etc.. They believed that the knowledge inherent in the story should take precedence over narrative, because they thought the world was the world of narrative fiction, the imaginary world of imagination. From this perspective the narrative historians rejected and despised professional historians writing biographies that followed, factual history and all that. The French Annales tradition was one that led to further this trend.
Today, however, the situation became more complicated. One reason is that authors such as Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, showed that even when historians use statistics or other structuralist method, produce a narrative. I mean: when they say such a thing is cause or consequence of another, establish a sequential order, make use of a design temporality, which is the same as a novel and a historiographical account.
the same time, abstract entities such as classes, values and concepts, work in the discourse of historians almost as characters, there is a whole way of embodiment of the collective or abstract entities. Thus the historian can not avoid the story, even when consciously rejects. For the writing of history itself, by way of joint events, the use of the concept of causality, work always with the same structures and the same characters in a fictional narrative.
It is from this kinship between the narrative of ficçãoea historical narrative that begs the question: where is the difference? Some postmodern critics have adopted a radical relativism and decided there was diferençae that the story was fiction not only in the sense of form. I mean not saying that there is no truth in the story, but the truth of historical knowledge was absolutely similar to the truth of a novel.
Other historians, among which I insert, believe there is something specific in the historical discourse, for it is built from specific techniques. It may be a history of political events or description of a company or a practice of cultural history, to produce it the historian must read the documents, organize your supplies, manage té techniques of analysis using criteria of evidence. Things that a novelist should not worry.
So if you need to adopt these techniques in particular, because there is a different intention in making history: that is to restore the truth of the story and that is the subject of this report. The historian today must find a way to meet this requirement assumes that scientific knowledge about the technique, individuals seeking evidence, knowing that whatever their form of writing that always belong to the category of reports, narrative. Some historians
then decided not worthwhile to fight the inevitable and began to use resources more convincing narrative in the service of an historical demonstration. Adopted forms of narrative which would ensure, say, the mise-en-scène of proof. Historians like Carlo Ginzburg uses storytelling techniques that are even more cinematic than novelistic properly. Several other intersecting life stories.
I think the situation Current is not an absolute opposition between narrative and history as ficçãoea know, but a knowledge that is written through the narrative and then be required reflection on what kind of narrative to adopt. A narrative which respects the discourse of knowledge, but at the same time is attractive to an audience of readers. Not an easy task, but there are examples that demonstrate what can be done.
Perhaps here we can put the question tambéma talent of the narrator. Some history books, like Robert Darnton, Nathalie Zemon Davis and Michel Volvelle, are well written, enjoyable to read ...
Chartier: This is a matter of talent, yes, but also to the research field. I think there are ways of knowing in the humanities and social sciences that are absolutely fundamental, but that can not be presented in ways so sexy or even that it would not necessarily find a great public ; public. If
one works, for example, about archaeological techniques in ancient Mesopotamia or on a theme of economic history more difficult, obviously the scientific criteria required for the completion the work of the format away from a more seductive, easy to readers. If one works, for example, on the Greek philology, setting the text of a tragedy by Sophocles, is a major contribution to knowledge, but let's not think that goes sell 100 000 copies.
I say this because I think that in France, particularly after the success of books like "Montaillou," Le Roy Ladurie, has set itself the idea that every work of history should necessarily attract a large audience. From that publishers began to focus on the books dealing with subjects that were in fashion, adopting an attitude of contempt toward more modest or difficult work.
one hand it is very nice to think that the historian should not remain in his ivory tower, so they're doing something useful to provide a critical tool to the public to think their collective past and their contemporary world. But it becomes dangerous when the search for success away from the historian of the objects or their own criteria of scientific practice.
The important thing is to establish forms of mediation. Currently, along with Michelle Perrot, Jacques Le Goff, mind of a radio program in Paris, "Les matins de France culture", where we discuss books you can hardly find a large audience. But if there is mediation, the public can have an idea of the progress of knowledge. This is an example of what I consider a form of mediated knowledge.
Some time ago I did a review on a book of essays by anthropologist James Clifford. I had a certain feeling of discomfort before reading postmodern and deconstructionist he makes the ethnographic tradition. The ethnography was an instrument created by Western culture to understand people from other cultures, does not mean that those people had the same desire we understand or understand themselves, or even that they thought that ethnography would be the appropriate tool for this. Each culture has its own ways of relating with the world. In my view, has always been part of a historical basis, ideological or cultural to do something, to think or act. Postmodernism was an exercise in deconstruction of Western culture, and our base is the universe of information that make up Western culture. It is what gives us the tools and motivation to think about us and the world. And even to make a critique of this way of thinking.
Chartier: I think in a sense, the work of James Clifford is parallel to that of Hayden White. I think it's something legitimate historians and anthropologists to reflect on own writing. For too long the writing was seen as a neutral medium to talk about the past or to describe another. It was essential to make it a subject of reflection, as did White, thinking about the role, in writing of historian, as elements of rhetoric and figures that manage to write about the past. The same James Clifford made with respect to devices that anthropologists use in their work.
Another key contribution of this current was the idea that there is a gap required between the present and past, or between the anthropologist and the other, which can not be broken by IDE ; would universality and understanding of itself. This conception is based on the concept of discontinuity of Foucault, who showed that there is disruption in concepts such as madness, medicine, clinical and sexuality. This approach provides an awareness of the limits of the use of investigative techniques or observation. It also assumes a form of ethics in research, meeting with others, past or today.
But both the text and in the Clifford White is an absolute relativism. I can not accept the idea that he is identified with postmodernism that all speeches are possible because they always refer to position of the person who never sets and the object. According to this view, discourse is always self-produced: it says nothing about the object and says everything about who wrote it.
seems to me a wrong conclusion from premises interesting because, in the case of both the history and anthropology, a production of knowledge is possible and necessary. It is also a perspective that draws on the arguments of political correctness, assuming as a way of respecting others, one who is absolutely unknown, keeping her own identity.
This juxtaposition of anthropological historical situations or situations where there is no communication, no exchange, nor knowledge, it seems a terribly reductionist way of what could be a project of shared knowledge. That is why I completely disagree with this post-modern attitude, this idea that there is no possibility of knowledge. It
different from saying that this knowledge has always been organized from the schemes of perception, classificaçãoe understanding of the observer. And that if there are ways of cultural discontinuity, we must, nonetheless, make an effort to understand the past and others. It was from this dual perspective that built a knowledge, and it seems that the fundamental work of history and anthropology show that this knowledge is not only possible but also may be offered to other for self-knowledge-to make the object of knowledge can become their own manufacturers, not just depending on the knowledge produced by anthropologists or historians.
seems to me that, so is the movement of the critical force of knowledge. If this is destroyed, we fall in absolute relativism. What I think would be a tragic conclusion, while very ideological.
Right now we have the feeling that everything has become possible: practices that were banned by a number of international agreements in the postwar being implemented by the U.S. in the war in Iraq or keep people detained without trial in Guantanamo. At the same time, there is loss of strength from international bodies like the UN. Insofar as we know that great ideas are filtered and incorporated into the agenda of common sense, the prospect of radically postmodern relativist would not affect in any way in this type of policy , draining confidence in some of the achievements of humanism and culture of the West?
Chartier: The greatest paradox of postmodernism is that stems from a critical perspective of the authorities, hierarchies and dominant elements, but with the introduction of the epistemological dimension of relativism, the analysis is left with no recourse to support this stance crit Science. Because if everything is possible, all the speeches may differ by jurisdiction rhetoric, for its art of expression, but in terms of knowledge and as critical instrument there is no difference ; in between. This creates a fundamental tension.
Hayden White, for example, is a humanist who shares the moral values of humanism. But the application of his approach to history does not give tools to produce a critical knowledge, to refute the false and establish a true knowledge. Because if there are no criteria to establish differences between the discourses of historians, it becomes very difficult to criticize the misleading statements, the false and attempts to rewrite the past. This is, to me, the great limit of postmodernism: the contradiction between his intençãoea its epistemology.
In his book The Great Cat Massacre, "Robert Darnton adopts the ideas and methods of Clifford Gertz, giving treatment to an ethnographic object of historical study. This expanded focus on one detail seems to produce a distorted view of the object. How do you see this kind of research?
Chartier: There was a big debate after the publication Darnton's book. One of the strongest criticism made him have to do with their identification with the ideas of Geertz and his tendency to textualization structures, practices and rituals all culture. The starting point of Darnton, using Geertz's idea of a rite that can be read as a text, one could think of was that the social practices as if they were texts.
In "The Great Cat Massacre" sources that are Darnton relies mainly textual. Historians who work with texts developed in the first place, a critical analysis of the text. However, Darnton hardly moves in that direction. To treat the text as a rite that is as a deletion of text in which the rite is narrated. When one looks carefully that work a problem arises: one can not say if the killing is real or imaginary, if he had really. He mentions the text of an artisan, but does not give you the utmost importance, because if you want to immediately put in the position of a spectator the massacre. As Geertz in Bali.
We can not think that there is a necessary identity between logic proper textual practices and strategies. Foucault studied his books in the series tensions between discursive and non-discursive systems. Michel de Certeau has shaped it in the tension between the discursive strategies and tactics of appropriation. Bourdieu reflected on the reasons for scholastic and practical sense. In these three cases of theoretical vocabularies What's different in common is the differentiation between the logic of textual production or deciphering a text using the writing and the practices or strategies other forms of construction, which are daily practices, etc the usual.
This is in opposition to the idea that Geertz seems to want to see all the practices of the social world as if they are decipherable texts. The more complicated for the historian is that these non-textual practices in general are through texts. The key challenge for the historian is to understand the relationship between the available texts and practices that these texts prohibit, prescribe, condemn, represent, describe, criticize, etc.. The key is to think the irreducibility between the logic of practice and logic of discourse that, as Bourdieu would say, do not be confused.
past practices are accessible to us, in general, through written texts. And the historian writes about these practices. In describing them the historian has to be clear that the write operation does not create a particular form of relationship with these practices, which became knowable through its mediation. The fundamental challenge is to think conceptually and methodologically articulaçãoea distance between the practices and discourses and to avoid repetition of that time between the years 1950-60, in the metaphor of the text would apply to all: the rites, society etc.. It was very comfortable.
So any document that is not written, that is not text, for the historian puts this kind of problem. Such is the case for working with image-object that can not be tackled through methods or rules very schematic, do not you think?
Chartier: The image is a magnificent example to think about what we said, it is not a widespread practice, is quiet, not even a text. I think we want to analyze it as a text view is theoretically wrong, because the logic of building the image or the image decoding is not the same text. It seems to me that the logic and rationale textual graphics are not identified.
textual logic is necessarily a linear logic, the writing is described by sequential order. And reading, even when going from one fragment to another, is a sequential read. The observation of a table is not organized according to this sequential order. It is something with its own logic and that is not identified with the logic of texts. There is a question of different plans, different inputs.
To restore the logic in decoding the image, the historian must necessarily wield the sequential or linear writing. The result of this effort is a tension. Which is not to be such an impossible task, but you must be aware of their difficulties. My friend Louis Marin, whose work I admire, has built a argumentaçãoa purpose of how to make text with images. He cites "salons", article in which a framework in Diderot transforms text to criticize him. And the whole aesthetic criticism assumes that transaction to make text with images.
Contrary to this, make images from texts, is the principle of all Christian iconography. Texts become images, and vice versa, but they are never identical to each other, because there are all sorts of interpretations, mediations, appropriations. You can use the metaphor of the image as text, such as reading or observation. But one should be aware that it is just a way of speaking, that there is an adequate logical-theoretical between the two documents and never dissolves the irreducibility of difference.
A perfect demonstration of the irreducibility occurred when some poets to break with this logic and sequential linear and presented the text written as a graphic with a form where you could enter text differently, without the imposition of the linear order of writing. It was an effort to make the writing was identified by its more graphically than by their semantic content. In my view the issues regarding the pictures are always traveling between the area from the textual criticism of aesthetic criticism.
Another issue is the style of rhetoric in the text of the story. For example, the ironic treatment of the problem, as you identified in Hayden White.
Chartier: When Hayden White describes the four rhetorical figures that would always be used by historians, includes, beside of metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy, irony as a way of historical writing that can be used even for topics that do not have the irony as an object. I know of many historians who have used this feature to write history books, perhaps because of the tension that causes the use of irony in the text.
I think making people laugh was the idea Darnton in "The Great Cat Massacre," to disclose the text on those artisans for whom it was very fun to kill cats. In all these works we find that we are facing a discontinuity. The devices, themes, forms, genres that, at any given time, cause laugh or smile are historically defined.
At the same time, if we can understand why this fact made us laugh at the Renaissance because there is sufficient continuity so that other aspects are perceived, defined and understood. And what else we have discussed with postmodernism is about the need to recognize the historical discontinuities without falling into relativism which states that there is no relationship possible through a distance and depth so that it is impossible to understand any another.
Lately, here in Brazil, have been circulating on the internet texts falsely attributed to famous writers and journalists. They are texts that have a certain identity with the style of the alleged perpetrator, but they are renegades with indignation. There have been also cases of texts attributed to Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, who, after having run much in the network, experts be denied them. What other problems to the question of authorship internet leads?
Chartier: This is an opposite approach to plagiarism, which is stealing a job and sign it, while here you steal someone's name to put in your own text. But this is not a phenomenon directly linked to the Internet. This only changed the form of circulation of forgeries.
Lope de Vega, for example, in the middle 16th century, complained that other writers used his name to sell comedies too bad that he had never written. To protect himself, he published a list of all its works, which were many, about 450, because he was very prolific.
In the world of print and theatrical appropriation of this name may have several purposes in the case of Vega served to sell the comedies. It can also be used to think of himself as capable of writing a text by Borges. In the case of Borges, seems a welcome phenomenon, since he wrote many works signed with names that were not his, as if they were written in the 18th century.
The copyright is based on the idea that the text is a creation, part of an individual, expressing their feelings, their language. The relationship between text and subjectivity, the idea that the text is a projection of the individual as having economic consequence of ownership arises from the text half of the 18th century. The problem of textual circulation in electronic form, when there ways to close the text is that it created difficulties for the rights of literary property. Each text can be changed sent by the reader and the internet. This malleability of the text in electronic form made it difficult to protect the rights of literary property.
Foucault presented his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France the idea of a world without textual appropriation, nameless, made waves textual succeeded where everyone could write their words on an existing discourse. It was a paradox, because he had his dream of a collective textuality, indefinite, from the position more individualized, the most prestigious French university. Somehow the internet allows authors to undertake this dream as it leaves the text open to written, appropriations and amendments. But there are those believers who claim to 18th century literary property and the identity of authorship.
A theme that has been discussed in the U.S. is how to prevent the text is processed, copied or printed. This is a complicated issue because the only way to solve it is closing the texts. And this is a paradox, since the invention of the internet occurred by facilitating access to the texts.
This was the problem of e-books, a text for which you paid, but you could not alter, copy or print. Protected the rights of the publisher or author, but did not succeed because the new technology that makes this text so compelling is precisely the freedom of mobility. All inventions that come to constrain this freedom are considered violence against new technologies.
This discussion happens in the midst of scientific publications. There electronic journals that want to ban free access and the possibility of copies of published articles. And some communities are investigating that claim, the manner of Condorcet in the 18th century, that knowledge is something that may not be appropriate because it is useful to the progress of humanity.
Some research communities in biology, for example, attempt to create a form of dissemination of results outside the control of economic journals, whose signature can reach $ 8,000 or even U.S. $ 12 000 . It is a question that is still to be resolved: the internet as a free and mobile textuality as a form of publication or on the same legal criteria and aesthetic values of print publication. A control
difficult to obtain because the record industry is losing this war ...
Chartier: But the difference is that the structure of the book printed text requires the reader without he can modify it. Even if you write on the blank pages, there recognition of authorship and that this leads to economic and moral rights. But the electronic text is an open text, which can interfere. It's a big difference.
The other big difference is that the world of printed text there is a correspondence between the type of publicaçãoeo kind of text that appears in it. A magazine is not a newspaper, which is not a book that is not an official document, which is not a letter. There is a hierarchy of objects that correspond to a distinction in the taxonomy of the text. The computer break it.
From the moment the same apparatus in the same form, gives reading all types of speech in terms of gender, letter to the book, or in terms of authority, it is more difficult to the reader who is not prepared to make immediate differentiation-that is much more evident in the printed material.
Once all genres of texts, from the most intimate to the more public, if dãoa read an almost identical form on the same apparatus, there is a very big break on the way to enter or to design or manage the world of texts. For better or for worse.
For the best, because it allows this closeness between the texts, because there is a movement that is not simply textual mobility of each text separately, senãoa textual mobility, which would be a form of invention ; Aoe renewal. For the worse, when we think of denying the existence of gas chambers.
If one seeks information about the Holocaust in the world of print culture, or if, by doing a school project, consulting encyclopedias, history books, magazines recognized, will not have much contact with the propaganda of Holocaust deniers, who is outcast. In many countries it is prohibited or only in journals that are not easily. Thus, information about the Holocaust will be obtained in texts more or less controlled.
A journalist asked the same research Holocaust on the Internet and found a huge amount of advertising Holocaust denial, revisionist, presented with all the appearance of scientific text. If the reader is not prepared to establish a difference that was already established in print culture through the shape of the editorial or scientific communities, there is a likelihood of confusion between what and information OEO is to know. You know all this information revisionist propaganda, but it is not know. It is the opposite knowledge, is the falsification of truth.
The difficulty is how to manage, how to establish criteria for this. Who will establish?
Chartier: We return to our first topic of discussion. This is not about censorship but about how to recognize the authority of science. No authority in the canonical sense, but the authority which claims with evidence and proof. The texts describing a historical reality have no equivalent scientific authority. It through this that we can recognize the difference between a text of the revisionists who invented the gas chambers never existed, that never happened the massacre of millions of Jews, and a piece of a historian who can find in an encyclopedia, books on divulgaçãoe which established an adequate perception of the event.
What I say is that this differential was established scientific credibility in the world from the printed editorial differences between the types of publications and forms of discourse. We could give more credit to a book published by a publisher known for its requirement that a journal article or a private letter. This operation is not impossible with electronic text. She became more difficult.
Perhaps because credibility is something you earn over time. It's like the reputation of some universities and discredit others. Within the Internet has not had time to create portals where the user can say with complete conviction: I can trust this.
Chartier: Indeed, you must give users the Internet critical tools for understanding how the texts were constructed to assess the degree of seriousness of each site. We can not minimize the significance of breaking a world where objects and texts are linked through material with a multiple world in the same area illuminated display provides read all genres textual. The reflection on these transformations changes the perception of the texts and their differences.
There is a discontinuity with the reading we were familiar with and this implies the fundamental transformation of the relationship with something that continues to be a text, even if in different ways. The readout electronics is a reading of the fragmentation of extracts from the book, without knowing anything about the totality of which one fragment was extracted, as the fragment maintains no electronic liaison ; with the text that will guarantee the knowledge of all. The problem is whether the Internet can overcome the tendency to fragmentation.
You've guided many Brazilians. Throughout this time you've read a lot about Brazil in these theses supervised. From these readings as you see Brazil?
Chartier: I think that here there is a movement among the disciplinary fields of anthropology, history and cultural sociology stronger than elsewhere. The field of education, for example, that in many countries is very specialized, here seems to be fairly integrated into the world of social sciences. Most studies that address a supervised way or another in the world of cultural practices, the history of publicaçãoe circulation of texts and also some of the social world the history of private life, social structures of colonial Brazil. There is a vitality
impressive in this type of research. The problem is that in Europe or the United States there is a total lack of interest in other territories. Everyone is very attached to his own field of research the do not realize that you can learn much from studies on subjects that are not yours. This prevents moving numerous works that deserve to have a stronger recognition.
To publicize these jobs that have a theoretical or methodological inspiring force would be necessary to make American publishers translate Latin American works to the public that reads in English . It can be seen in references work done in Europe and the USA that many Latin American works are not in English, except works of American and British authors on Brazil.
Translation Ana Carolina Delmas
Lustosa Isabel is a political scientist, researcher at Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro, and author of "Printed Insults - The War of Journalists in Independence "(Companhia das Letras, 2000).
Retrieved from http://pphp.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2479, 1.shl
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