A Poetics of Editing by Susan L. Greenberg (review)

In putting more than two words on paper you are bound to experience the editorial moment: the correction and rewriting that is the subject of a cartoon so famous its originator seems untraceable. A figure is busily crossing out and rewriting a wall inscription that says 'The strongest drive is not Love or Hate [insert image of pencil-sharpener] It is one person's need to change modify amend correct alter fix chop to pieces EDIT improve another's copy'. The habit of correction is an ancient one, appearing long before the third-century Bc Alexandrians compared manuscript texts, or the sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus reviewed the printed sheets of his books as they came off the press. Once upon a time correction (let's call it editing) had status and legitimacy, but in the past three centuries it has been de-legitimized successively by the forces of romanticism, scientific empiricism, conflicting forms of critical theory, and the excesses of popular journalism. Susan Greenberg sets out to craft a general theory of editing that will respond to what she sees as its undeserved invisibility, which as a professional editor she feels keenly.

Greenberg's aim is to resolve the problem of editing by returning to first principles, following Aristotle, who began his Poetics, 'We are to discuss both poetry in general and the capacity of each of its genres; the canons of plot construction needed for poetic excellence; also the number and character of poetry's components, together with the other topics which belong to the same category—beginning, as is natural, from first principles' (Poetics 1447a). In Part I three chapters consider definitions, descriptions, and comparisons, proposing a new working definition of her field: editing is a professional practice that 'aims to select, shape and link the text, thereby putting it into a context that helps to deliver the meaning and significance of the work to its readers … Editing is the art of seeing a text as if it is not yet finished' (p. 14). There is a valuable chapter here on the three types of mediation occurring in self-editing, in editing images, and in the challenge of translation. Part II has two chapters focusing on time and change: the emergence of modern editing in a culture which distrusts authority and expects error, followed by an informative chapter on the challenges of editing in the digital present. Four chapters in Part III situate the difficulty of editing in modernity within various 'theory frames' where real and ideal contend: teaching editing in the academy, anti-editing, and the 'digital romantics'. In the last chapter Greenberg offers a 'poetics of editing', developed as a response to this exploration.

The first principles from which all these emerge are firmly stated: they rest on the binary opposition of the ideal and the real represented by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which she forthrightly states are foundational. But is this binary in fact foundational? There are principled sources elsewhere that would sustain Greenberg's desire to link theory and practice: to take only one, the pragmatist C. S. Peirce, who escaped a disabling scepticism by proposing that human cognition did not operate within the constraints of fixed and opposed situations, but as a process: action working upon objects to produce thought. Phenomenologists and ontologists today would agree. Because of this adherence to a single philosophical model Greenberg is chained to an oppositional model herself, and it shows in the dependence on citation to build her argument in Chapters 3 and 4, and in the 'theory frames' of Part III, where citation is an essential sorting procedure. The frames may be useful for cataloguing the views of others, but the persistent tracing of oppositions, and the excess of citation it requires, constantly pulls her argument away from her own editing experience. Her personal sense of marginalization is generalized, and the tone is uncomfortably defensive. As a result it's difficult to...