User:SN/Essay 1

The Author: Thief

In my essay, I would like to speculate on the author's persona and its role in culture and art. The notion of author evolves accordingly to the changing role he plays in the process of a creative act. Nowadays we do not distinguish its definition from the concept of authorship, intellectual property, and originality. But none of us could boast of it.

The question about the author's persona was the subject of extensive speculation at the end of 60-s against a background of the rise of post-structuralism. Michael Foucault and Roland Barthes in debates on the author-figure highlight that the author in the context of authorship and its intellectual property is a capitalist invention. According to Barthes "The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual." Its presence is very convenient as we live in the society of consumption and commodity-money relations. We urge to know who to admire, who to hate, and, not to mention, to whom pay. Names play a huge role in art studies and history. They deeply penetrated into classification and organization systems. The name of the author determines and appraises the work. He is a God and creates in his image and likeness. Work serves as a medium; that delivers author's individuality, views, and intentions. Post-constructivists criticize the approach where the writer plays the decisive parental role. Foucault starts the discourse in "What Is an Author?" from rhetorical question adopting quotation from Beckett's Texts for Nothing: '"What does it matter who is speaking," someone said, " what does it matter who is speaking." He develops anty-authorial ideas and imagines a utopian culture, where "we would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?" Barthes highlights that "in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator." The was no author, rather a representative that delivers a message using oral and, later, writing traditions, norms, and rules. Narratives have been successfully developed, transmitted and archived without the imperative presence of the figure of the author. "The author is never anything more than the instance writing." This obsession with the author's persona steers us into the false believe that the work was created individually, and thus we accept and welcome writer's influence on the way we read the text. It leads to a narrow and limited perception of the work, builds an additional barrier between text and reader. In "the Death of the Author" Barthes writes that the text provided by the author is not original, "the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture." So what are these sources?

In the first half of XX century, Carl Gustav Yung developed the theory of Collective unconscious. In his lecture "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious," he describes this term as follows: "there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents." It is a sphere that contains common knowledge and experience, Unus Mundus, from which everything that surrounds us emerges. Is to the point to assume that Creation Act is an act of extracting, interpreting and describing that lies in unconscious sphere.

As much I would like to believe in the reality of the Foucault's ideas about the elimination of the writer's person, they rather belong to the theoretical discourses and idealistic concepts. As previously been stated, the primary role of the author is to extract and translate the message. The better he does it, the better author he is. The way it has been done, a certain way that corresponds to the author's personality is what we call authorial style. Returning to Young ideas, everything could be broken down and explained with archetypes. Philippe L. De Coster in the foreword for the book The Collective Unconscious and Its Archetypes indicates that the concept of the archetype explains "the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them "motifs"; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy- Bruhl's concept of "representations collectives," and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as "categories of the imagination." Adolf Bastian long ago called them "elementary" or "primordial thoughts." Considering literature (and art in general) as a descriptive instrument, we facing the fact that diverse amount of works are produced based on limited initial sources. In Cybernetics and Ghosts, lecture delivered in Turin in November 1967, Italo Calvino mentions studies of Russian folk tales, made by Vladimir Propp. The main conclusion Propp made is that these tales were nothing more than different variants of a single tale "and could be broken down into a limited number of narrative functions". Calvino concludes that "what can be constructed on the basis of these elementary processes can present unlimited combinations, Permutations, and transformations." Here arises the other role of the author that Kenneth Goldsmith introduces in his book "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age". He starts by altering Douglas Humbler's quote: “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more,” reducing the role of the author to a manager, who rephrases and reorganizes other’s words. "The problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours." Following an example of Marjorie Perloff and her unoriginal genius he establishes the term of uncreative writing, underlying that nowadays texts differs from each other in their ‘technical’ aspects, the way author "conceptualized and executed his writing machine."

During his classes of "Uncreative Writing" in the University of Pensylvania Goldsmith penalized students who tried to be creative and original. "Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become an expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed regarding responsibility instead of recklessness." (Goldsmith, iBooks) He found creativity not in their texts but in the way they choose what and how to reframe, proving that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible”. (Goldsmith, iBooks) So the concept of ‘creativity’ hasn't become obsolete but transformed in compliance of new realities. In other words, creativity goes not with the object but with the method, the way the object was created. In the era of Internet and computers “even if literature is reducible to mere code—an intriguing idea—the smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors.” (Goldsmith, iBooks) Due to the development of modern technologies and new medias the 'art of Copy-Past’ in literature has become the major trend that generates many works “proclaiming that context is the new content”. (Goldsmith, iBooks) In his book Goldsmith cites as an example a poem that consists of shopping mall store list rewritten in poetic form or the work that put together status updates in social networks with names of deceased writers, or Flarf, the new movement in writing that accumulates the worst of Google search result. The new gender has its charm and evokes emotions and connotations as the reaction on the writing process itself.

On the ruins of a genius and the traditional understanding of originality and authorship, on the odds and ends from the mediator that delivers the initial truth, the author becomes a thief, ideally anonymous, with mastered abilities to steal and recombine content.

Notes for Steve

I finally made a decision of dividing the text into two parts (essay1 and 2) as before I was creating a complete mess, in wich, I stuck for month or so. I am still not happy with the way text was written, some parts missing the logic connection. Besides that, I want to reorganize part about Goldsmith, add some references from combinatory literature and Oulipo. Now it feels weak and unfinished. The problem I'm facing now is that I want to distinguish author from machines and leave them to my 2nd essay.