Paratexts
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Starting from a conversation between Jonathan Gray and Henry Jenkins, Wayne Marshall ponders the utility of “paratext” (”all those things that surround a book that aren’t quite the ‘thing’ itself…the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews”) for music:
…“Crank Dat”…perhaps best illustrates the problem with trying to apply a theory of para/texts to music culture in the age of YouTube. Really, re: “Crank Dat,” which is the text and which are the paratexts? Is the text itself the song that Soulja Boy recorded (relying heavily on Fruity presets)? Or is it the easily-mastered set of dance steps so crucial to its spread? Is it the initial video that made the rounds featuring SB’s friends doing the dance in their living room? Is it the white-out-on-my-sunglasses tutorial-in-a-pool that SB put out there to help people learn to do the dance (and spread the song)? Or is it the official video / release? What about the dozens, if not hundreds, of other versions of people dancing to or mashing up the song? What about the dozens of “Crank Dat” spinoffs? I realize that as I go down this list, things can get more and more para/meta, but the first few questions, to my mind, show how hard it is to locate “Crank Dat” in any singular instantiation.
Or, take, “Super Freak” & “U Can’t Touch This” (which I discussed a ways back) — whose text has merged with whose? Which is now primary and which is para? It’s not simply a matter of which came first. And who can ever say when it’s all been settled?
I’d expand on this a bit, and highlight not just cover versions or 2.0 spreadable music, but the basic way that popular music has always circulated: not based in a single text, but spread across many media. The recorded music is typically the primary commodity–it’s what the other stuff supports, from an economic perspective (though of course this too is changing; think about licensing)– but that doesn’t mean that we can’t/don’t derive meaning from a variety of locales, not just the thing we buy/download.
Think about, let’s say, Michael Jackson. Is there a fundamental “Thriller” text, around which all the other stuff circulates? If so, is it the song on the LP/cassette/CD/mp3/radio, or is it John Landis’ music video? Should be begrudge someone their right to make the argument that the definitive “Billie Jean” text is the Motown 25 performance over the single, or music video?
Filed under: academia Henry Jenkins Michael Jackson paratext Soulja Boy Wayne Marshall
I think the distinction between text and paratext is best approached in terms of that between text as ‘meaning/form’ and paratext as ‘materiality’ – or any form in which a text is instantiated. If you think of this way, it becomes clearer what the text is (the ’song’ itself as a kind of autonomous entity) but that doesn’t preclude the fact that a text is never actually realised until made by its various paratexts, therefore it is always clouded by them as Jenkins and yourself mention. Not just ‘no text without context’, but ‘no text without paratext’.