New Media

within herself all the histories of people and of individuals, guessing like a clairvoyant the original sense of the different hieroglyphics.

Gradually, even she will grow tired and do what she can to avoid the constantly new streams of written signals streaming forth.

Cultural differences, the moment they are translated and offered for exchange, relapse into more of the same. It is no different for authorship that grounds itself not in a developing language but rather an identity or (what amounts to the same thing) a remix of available patois and cultural identifiers. The contemporary choice among a multiplicity of authors using different languages deriving from various named cultures, and the hesitation among scholars to identify, let alone judge, contrasting world views, turns us away from participation in an imagined community of authors ideally writing in a single evolving language for a common audience. That commonality was certainly imaginary, no less than the idea that one's authorship would contribute to the life of a language (as our words take form in other minds, the minds of our eventual readers fluent in this language). There never was, in actual fact, a literary commons with laws, rights, rites of recognition, and rules of inheritance comparable to the nation state; there never was, in Pascal Casanova's formulation, a world republic of letters. But this literary extension of the state was nonetheless worth imagining unlike the current multiplication of languages and discourses which are instantly translatable and can be understood, literally by any person anywhere using new media.

Our present literary communities, like our "born digital" texts, appear to have no need for imagination at all. What we have, instead of Goethe's world literature, Casanova's world republic, or Anderson's imagined communities, are communities of interests: professional, functionally differentiated communities within a strictly limited sphere of action, whose work is addressed to very