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suite of tools to more faithfully represent OT and to improve the user’s experience —by resynchronizing the event. • DON’T reduce the multiplex road-system of networked pathways to a one-way highway. The oAgora and eAgora offer opportunities to explore and create. Defaulting ideologically to textual representation necessarily means relinquishing those opportunities. • DON’T collapse reality into an object. Converting an ongoing experience into a thing may seem to confer objectivity and stasis (of course, it doesn’t), but the price is forbiddingly high: nontextualizable features of the experience are automatically eliminated before you get started. Call it an ideologically based handicap. • DON’T let ideology preempt understanding. Think outside the tAgora. Consider the dynamics and native technology of the oAgora and eAgora. To abuse Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your [textual] philosophy” (Hamlet, Act I, scene 5). L Illusion of Object When titles just don’t work Sometimes even the most basic assumptions prove illusory, and we can profit by taking a step back and reexamining what seemed like an utterly straightforward situation. Here’s a case in point: Fieldworkers interviewing oral epic singers (guslari) in the Former Yugoslavia were often puzzled by the singers’ failure to understand which stories they were being asked to perform. Citing titles like “The Wedding of Smailagić Meho” or “Alagić Alija in Captivity” usually elicited only blank stares, in spite of the fact that such designations were regularly associated with published versions of these narratives. Only when the investigators framed their requests in the form of what amount to oPathways (oPathways)—such as “Tell me the story of the young hero Meho coming of age, and the kidnapping of his fiancée Fatima, and the great battle against General Pero to reclaim her”—did the guslari recognize what was wanted. Titles, it turns out, were merely textual cues and thus meant little or nothing to them; only a key to active navigation would suffice. The problem? Simply that the fieldworkers were proceeding by making tAgora assumptions about what was clearly an oAgora phenomenon. They were speakIllusion of Object . 125 ing the language of things rather than the language of systems (Systems versus Things). Let’s dramatize this disparity in marketplaces (Agora As Verbal Marketplace) by formulating two sets of questions. Questions we expect to hear “Say, hand me Beloved, will you?” “Have you downloaded the latest Coen Brothers film yet?” “I don’t have that rendition of Moonlight Sonata by Vladimir Ashkenazy , do you?” Noneofthesequestions—orthemyriadothersthatwecouldposeaboutmyriad works of art—seems strange or unusual. Why not? Because the presupposition that the work under discussion is a text, an item, a thing is the operating assumption , the ultimate tAgora bottom line. Someone constructed that thing, felt it had reached final form, and then made it available (under applicable rules, of course) as a fixed, immutable object for us to own (Owning versus Sharing) and then to interpret as we wish. Our interpretations will always vary, perhaps radically, but artifacts supported in the tAgora will not and cannot. And since we understand the work as contained wholly in the artifact, the work seems just as thinglike as theobject.Nothingcuriousorsuspicioushere;justbusinessasusualinthetAgora. Now for the other side of the coin. Questions we don’t expect to hear “So how did Toni Morrison perform Beloved last Thursday?” “How do you expect the Coen Brothers to adapt their latest film for showings in fifteen major cities over the next year?” “Do I understand correctly that Ashkenazy wrote some new material to insert in Moonlight Sonata for his European tour?” This second set of questions, on the other hand, seems nonsensical. For Morrison to reconstruct her novel, by adding, subtracting, or substituting dialogue, for example, would be to collapse the “work = text” theorem that we take for granted. For the Coen Brothers to abandon their carefully edited film-text in favor of multiple variants would be to undo countless hours of fine-tuning and compromise its artistry. For Ashkenazy to “add new material” to the magical, immortal score created by Ludwig van Beethoven would be outright heresy. Such interventions, entirely typical in the oAgora and eAgora, represent serious violations of textual laws. Ideology and the tAgora Under the influence of textual ideology we conventionally make a number of automatic, unthinking assumptions about the creation, transmission, and reception of knowledge, art, and ideas (Ideology of the Text). But none of them is more fundamental than the illusion of object, the...

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