Post 4 - KK Shauh
James Porter's "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" is the concept that all writing comes from a central network. Once again, this follows the idea of everything being a remix. Porter states, "Not infrequently and perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for their meaning. All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar as we understand its precursors." It is interesting to me that, similar to my reaction with the video Everything is a Remix, I have never thought about the idea of remixes before especially when it is such a common thread in everything we watch, hear, read, eat, etc. This idea has only been further dissected in Porter's work making it that much more applicable and perhaps even more valid.
"The newness of a sentence is a quite unimportant -- and unascertainable -- property and 'creativity' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation...(37)". This quote essentially sums up my thoughts about how remixes play into everything. I think if we look or think deep enough into anything we can find that the smallest things will make it true. Sure if we look at the words in a sentence it will prove that all writing is indeed a remix because you can find hundreds of thousands of the same words when you compare the writing of just two people. However, I think Porter is saying that if you look at it that way, you miss the larger point because creating a 100% new sentence is "unascertainable" and in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. What truly matters is the meaning behind those words and in my opinion that is where the line between being a remix and not being a remix becomes blurry.
I think this is the right time to bring up another reading we discussed, "All Writing is Autobiography". Every author is trying to say something different and readers can analyze it, talk about it, and dissect it however much they want but in the end the only person who really knows the story behind the story on paper is the person who wrote it. Regardless of if a piece of writing is fiction or not, I think there is a degree of it being an autobiography, but not necessarily autobiographical.
"The newness of a sentence is a quite unimportant -- and unascertainable -- property and 'creativity' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation...(37)". This quote essentially sums up my thoughts about how remixes play into everything. I think if we look or think deep enough into anything we can find that the smallest things will make it true. Sure if we look at the words in a sentence it will prove that all writing is indeed a remix because you can find hundreds of thousands of the same words when you compare the writing of just two people. However, I think Porter is saying that if you look at it that way, you miss the larger point because creating a 100% new sentence is "unascertainable" and in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. What truly matters is the meaning behind those words and in my opinion that is where the line between being a remix and not being a remix becomes blurry.
I think this is the right time to bring up another reading we discussed, "All Writing is Autobiography". Every author is trying to say something different and readers can analyze it, talk about it, and dissect it however much they want but in the end the only person who really knows the story behind the story on paper is the person who wrote it. Regardless of if a piece of writing is fiction or not, I think there is a degree of it being an autobiography, but not necessarily autobiographical.
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