Margie Borschke is a senior lecturer in media in the School of Art, Communicaton and English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of This is not a remix: piracy, authenticity and popular music (Bloomsbury 2017) and many other articles and chapters on the intersection of culture and technology. Copying, circulation/distribution and collecting as cultural practices are the focus of her research.
Authors | Margie Borschke
Articles on Amodern by Margie Borschke
THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK NEVER WRITTEN
A Media History of Saul Kripke’s Scholarly Samizdat
This article considers the significance of informal publication and circulation in the work of the philosopher Saul Kripke (1940-2022). It argues that everyday copying technologies (e.g. tape recording, photocopying) enabled academics in the 1970s and 1980s to create living documents whose private preservation and circulation maintained a community of interest and makes a case for understanding these technologies and techniques of reproduction as essential to the composition of Kripke’s ground-breaking published work. Kripke lectured a great deal, usually without notes, and was known to be reluctant to commit his ideas to print; this so-called samizdat preserved a space for the oral as the preferred mode of communication for philosophical discourse, connecting the modern tradition with the ancients, while the recordings, transcripts and photocopies archived Kripke’s ideas and secured access outside of institutional publishing channels.