Cinema and television displaced the performative mutability of epic texts

Evidence

Let me raise only the ‘literary’ question. It is well enough known, first, that a great many of the constitutive texts of our literary traditions, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata included, consist of centuries of sedimentation, in all aspects of their composition from the linguistic to the ideological, with the ideological frequently embedded in the linguistic itself; it is also well enough known that regardless of the enormous machinery of textual standardizations and commentators’ glosses that all such texts have undergone, their essential status in the culture at large, century after century, has been fundamentally performative; hence the durability of their imaginative re-enactment, the always local and immediate construction of their meaning, the flexibility of their assimilation into the felt life, as well as their irretrievable mutability as written texts – until the much more recent phenomena of cinema and television began attempting a centrally produced, technically infinitely reproducible celluloid performance that could now aspire to displace both the mutability and the agential immediacy of all local performances and figurations. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 499

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Walter Ong’s orality-literacy contrast and extends it into the audiovisual age.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that mechanically reproducible performance aspires to displace local, agentive performance — a striking inversion of Benjamin, since here reproducibility hits live performance, not painting.