3.1 Authorship and the Book Historical Discourse

The relationship of book history and book historians with authorship, its historical development, and the author function, has been changeable and complex. As Chartier argues, book history was developed within currents of literary criticism such as structuralism, analytic bibliography and new criticism, which were especially dominant in Anglophone countries, which all saw the text, and thus books, as self-contained systems, without authors and readers. As Chartier claims, the history of the book was thus for a long time a history with neither readers nor authors (1994: 24–25). In the French school of the histoire du livre, the situation initially was not much better, although it focused at least on the sociology of readers (but not on reading practices). In France, just as in the Anglo-Saxon bibliographic school, the author was forgotten, even in the tradition of the social history and the material production of the book, as produced by Febvre and Martin, among others. In France, Chartier claims, books thus had readers but no authors (1994: 25–26). However, Chartier sees attention to the author return in Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production, McKenzie’s sociology of texts, reception history within literary criticism, and new historicism. A constrained author, as Chartier calls it, as opposed to a romantic one, appears here, as in these theoretical systems the text and the book are reconnected with their author and her or his intentions. Chartier applauds this return of the author as a subject of investigation in book studies, especially and more precisely, of the author function and its practice and techniques.

         One of the questions concerning authorship that plays an important role in the book historical discourse is whether it is print that established or enabled our modern notion of authorship, or whether authorship predates print? For instance, Chartier focuses on how, in its connection with censorship, property and ownership, authorship is fully inscribed with (the culture of) print. Print extended the circulation of potentially transgressive books and it established a market system in which proper roles were established (author, publisher, bookseller etc.). At the same time, he argues that certain essential traits of authorship predate print. Already in the manuscript age, authors, such as Petrarch, tried to establish control over the way their texts looked and were distributed, especially with respect to corruption through continual copying by copyists. According to Chartier, this shows an early emergence of ‘one of the major expressions of the author-function, the possibility of deciphering in the forms of a book the intention that lay behind the creation of the text’ (1994: 55).

         Ong also locates the beginning of authorship before print, namely with the coming of written discourse. Where orality is performative and produces community, written discourse, he states, is detached from the performer. Writing starts to become an autonomous thing turning the writer into a subject distinct from the group. As Ong puts it, ‘with writing, resentment at plagiarism begins to develop’ (1982: 128). In manuscript culture, however, intertextuality continued to rule, where it was still connected to the commonplace tradition of the oral world, creating and adapting texts out of other texts. As McLuhan emphasises, written text was still authoritative only in an oral way (1962: 104). Both Ong and McLuhan thus argue that it was print that truly created the sense of the private ownership of words and that created a new feeling for authority, where print and its visual organisation encourages a different mind-set. A work becomes closed, cut off from other works, and thus unique. It was print culture that, according to Ong, finally enabled romantic notions such as originality and creativity to arise, and which encouraged the development of our modern notion of authorship (1982: 130–131). As McLuhan states in this respect, ‘scribal culture had neither authors, nor readers’ (1962: 130).

            How did authorship develop in a print environment? When it comes to early publishing, Eisenstein explains that the modern division of labour was not yet very common. Printers were mostly printer-publishers and many academics, such as Johannes Kepler, were themselves publishers or were very much involved in the printing process (Eisenstein 1979: 18). As Eisenstein points out, early printers played an important role in forging definitions of property rights, shaping new concepts of authorship, and exploiting new markets (1979: 122). However, their labours would not have had much result in the manuscript age, as Eisenstein argues it was only with the coming of print, and with that of a fixed text, that individual innovations and discoveries could became more explicitly recognised, and that the distinction between copy and original could become clear (1979: 119–120). After the advent of copyright especially, it became much easier for an author to make a profit by publicly releasing a text, as their invention rights were now firmly established in law and no longer only guaranteed by guild protection (in England by the Stationers’ Company—consisting of printers, booksellers, and binders—for instance). Only with the coming of print, Eisenstein claims, could personal authorship really become established. People now wanted to see their work in print, fixed and unaltered. As she puts it, ‘until it became possible to distinguish between composing a poem and reciting one, or writing a book and copying one; until books could be classified by something other than incipits; how could modern games of books and authors be played?’ (Eisenstein 1979: 121). New forms of authorship and property rights thus started to undermine older forms of collective authority, which was exposed as error-prone. Where innovation came from was hard to determine before print, Eisenstein points out, as due to drifting texts and a lack of access to manuscripts, it was hard to establish what was already known and who was the first to know it. In other words, there was no systematic forward movement (Eisenstein 1979: 124). The term ‘original’ also started to change its meaning. Initially, it meant ‘close or back to the sources’. The modern meaning, however, focuses on breaking with tradition. According to Eisenstein, it was print that started to change this meaning of original, as notions of recovery and discovery were reoriented after the coming of print technology (1979: 192).

Printer-publishers also started to construct the author as a marketing product. New publicity techniques were explored, by printers as well as by authors, including marketing forms such as blurbs to publicly promote authors and sell their works (Eisenstein 1979: 229). Yet again Eisenstein emphasises that this kind of marketing could only take place successfully and establish new forms of authorship after the coming of print. Scribal culture, she points out, ‘could not sustain the patenting of inventions or the copyrighting of literary compositions. It worked against the concept of intellectual property rights’ (Eisenstein 1979: 186).

         Johns takes another approach with respect to the development of authorship, focusing mainly on the establishment of credentiality. How did readers ensure a work was authoritative? It is important to keep in mind that compositors, just like modern editors, played an important authorial role, he argues. A copy of a manuscript could never be exactly reproduced in print, due to space constraints, for instance. Copies were thus amended during the printing process. For example, typography was used to enhance authorial meaning and changes were made in anticipation of a certain readership. Johns further remarks that original used to refer to a particular performance or reading of a work. This meant that written records were seen as a simple fallible transcription of a particular event. As Johns states, ‘compositors could thus make the changes their cultural position demanded, not only because of the prized virtue of the master printer, but also because they held in their hands no sacrosanct text at risk of desecration’ (1998: 105). According to Johns, copyright meant that a Stationer had a right to both the manuscript and the text. The Stationer thus protected his investment by turning this (fallible) transcription into a fully edited printed book (Johns 1998: 105). In this way Stationers and booksellers controlled every aspects of their books’ production.

            The establishment of authorship as we know it today was very difficult in these conditions. Hence both Johns and Chartier argue that we should speak of forms of distributed authorship at that time, where authorship was allocated to a number of individuals and groups. Chartier points to Foucault’s focus on the penal background of authorship in this respect, when he states that ownership of a text has always been related to its penal appropriation. Books only really came to have authors, instead of mythical figures, when authors became subject to punishment, and they could be held responsible for the diffusion of texts that were seen as scandalous or as guilty of heterodoxy. Chartier focuses on how this responsibility was initially a distributed responsibility. As he puts it:

In the repression of suspect books, however, the responsibility of the author of a censured book does not seem to have been considered any greater than that of the printer who published it, the bookseller or the pedlar who sold it, or the reader who possessed it. All could be led to the stake if they were convicted of having proffered or diffused heretical opinions. What is more, the acts of conviction often mix accusations concerning the printing and sale of censured books and accusations concerning the opinions—published or unpublished—of the perpetrator. (Chartier 1994: 50)

As part of the proprietary culture of that time, and based on their right to copy, Stationers for a long time held the position of authors, specifically with respect to establishing credentiality (Johns 1998: 138). In forms of collaborative book production, however, establishing credentiality was harder, as no one publisher was responsible for the entire book. Nonetheless, the Stationer was, for all intents and purposes, the proprietary author of the book, the one who was responsible for the content. Febvre and Martin explain that authors had no right to their work once it was bought and published, as then the copy was vested in the publisher (1997: 162.). As Johns makes clear: ‘certainly, this was designed to give the state someone to prosecute: its aim was to create a person in whom responsibility for the contents of the work could be said to reside. It was also hoped that the device would eliminate unauthorized printing—the practice increasingly called “piracy”’ (1998: 159–160).

         What kind of options did authors have in this situation? How could they control their authorship, when the publishers’ market-based conventions were so dominant? Did publishers control printed knowledge in this respect? As Johns states: ‘authorial civility was inextricably entangled with Stationers’ civility. For the modern figure of the individualized author to be constructed, this had to change’ (1998: 246). What is clear, Johns argues, is that the situation did change once authorship and copyright were embedded in law. With this the notion of authorship started to change too, where the Lockean idea of invention as the mark of property started to gain wider ground (Johns 1998: 247).

         In opposition to Eisenstein, among others, Johns thus emphasises that authorship and authority are a matter of cultural practices and negotiation; they are conventions that could and can be challenged. We should see them as attributions to a book (by various groups and individuals such as publishers, readers etc.) instead of intrinsic attributes of a book (Johns 1998: 271). As Johns argues, then, in the battle surrounding how and to whom a book should be attributed credit or ownership, the author emerged. For scholars, forms of appropriation were a natural part of publishing their book. To protect their reputation they needed to negotiate potential hazards such as piracy, translations, abridgements, commercial sustainability etc., all matters that could deeply harm a scholar (Johns 1998: 445). The priority disputes in experimental philosophy—linked to publishing—got increasingly complicated and urgent, Johns points out, where both the existence of a record as well as the identity of its contents mattered. A new proprietary culture was therefore set up around authorship to deal with these problems, through which the profession of the author emerged (Febvre and Martin 1997: 66). Johns explains that fixity and authorship were thus set-up together, as the establishment of a problem: ‘And as the recognition of authorship blossomed, so, in a mutually reinforcing process, arguments demonstrating a resolved identity for printing began to win the upper hand, and the credit of its products became more widespread. By the end of the nineteenth century, print and fixity were as firmly conjoined by culture as ever could have been achieved by machinery’ (1998: 632). Chartier warns, however, against pinpointing specific historical moments of construction or determining causes for the rise of authorship and the author function. It is no good to focus on univocal solutions or oversimplified causes, he states. Book history can offer some insights in this problem, in all its variety, sketching out a possible path or focus point—such as the juridical, repressive and material mechanisms Chartier focuses on—however, it does not offer an answer to what authorship was, is, and will be (Chartier 1994: 59).

            What these discourses show is that authorship is integrally linked to developments in the commercial book trade, growing scholarly claims for priority and credit, and the expansion of ideas related to ownership, copyright and originality. As Mark Rose has argued, ‘the distinguishing characteristic of the modern author (…) is proprietorship; the author is conceived as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the work’ (1993: 1). Although the debate on how authorship came about again focuses mainly on the medium vs. society binary, a further conclusion that can be reached is that authorship came to be entangled with the humanist characteristics now commonly attributed to the book. Fixed, essentialised, and bound as a book, romantic notions of authorship came to stand for a highly individualistic, authoritative and original writer, who was to be connected to a permanent body of works. The commercial and capitalist nature of the book trade with its focus on propriety and ownership instilled the idea of copyright and property into the relationship between an author and her or his text.

            Although these humanist notions of authorship—including the connotations of reputation, individual creativity, ownership, authority, attribution, responsibility and originality they carry—seem to be an integral part of the scholarly method, despite the fact that they are often critiqued, they are very hard to overcome. Nonetheless, it is important to continue to challenge these traditional concepts, discourses, institutions and practices of authorship within academia. First of all because these essentialised notions of authorship do not do credit to the more collaborative and networked authorial practices as they exist currently and have existed in the past, in academia and beyond. As Johns emphasises, agency is more complex and distributed than the highly individualist narratives accompanying romantic notions of authorship argue for. In this respect there is a ongoing clash between what Robert Merton has identified as the values of originality and communism in scholarship (1973).

            Another reason to challenge humanist concepts of authorship relates to the function currently fulfilled by authors in the academic political economy. In an effort to gain reputation and authority in a scholarly attention economy, academics are increasingly depicted as being in constant competition with each other (for positions, impact, funding etc.), where scholars are still rewarded mostly on the basis of their publication track record, and on their reputation as individual authors. Academic authors are on the one hand turned into commodities, while on the other they increasingly need to act as entrepreneurs and marketeers of their own ‘brand’. This objectification of authorship at a time when ‘unoriginal’ thought, depicted as plagiarism, is heavily combatted and frowned upon, goes against some of the more distributive and collaborative notions, practices and discourses of authorship described above. Yet the latter can be seen to not only be just as prevalent in contemporary academia, but in many ways a more realistic depiction of scholarly authorial practices.

            Finally, the strength of the humanist discourse on authorship in academia can be seen to inhibit experimentation with different models and functions of authorship and forms of what can be called posthumanist authorship,[1] and the potential of digital media to help rethink what authorship is and can be. This does not mean, as we will see in what follows, that digital forms of authorship are always a critique of the humanist notions underlying more traditional and print-based forms of writing. However, I want to emphasise that, no matter how problematic they still might be, digital media do contain the potential to help us rethink and re-perform authorship and to envision more ethical and inclusive forms of authorship within academia.

            In order to analyse some of the main theoretical and practical criticisms that have been brought forward with respect to romantic and humanist notions of authorship, the next section will explore some of the authorship critique expressed by poststructuralist thinkers in the 1960s and 70s. This will be followed by an analysis of three more recent assessments of authorship, which can all in their different ways be seen as a practical extension of the poststructuralists’ critique. As I will argue, these practical or embodied expositions target different aspects of the discourse of the humanist author, namely the author’s authority, individuality and originality. First of all I will analyse the position taken by theorists and practitioners of hypertext with respect to networked authorship, challenging the authority of the author by focusing on the power of the reader and on the author as a node in a distributed network of meaning production and consumption. Secondly, I will look at some of the authorial practices that have been developed in the sciences and increasingly in the digital humanities, such as the spread of hyperauthorship and collaborative research work. These are challenging the individualistic nature of authorship and promoting increasingly open-ended research practices and alternative (digital) views concerning creativity and invention. Finally, I will take a look at academic practices of remix, which are mainly critiquing the originality of authorship, where the trope of the remixer or curator seems to be increasingly prevailing in current scholarship on digital authorship, for instance (and the narrative of the former seems to be replacing the latter).

3.2 Critiquing Authorship in Theory

Fitzpatrick writes in her article ‘The Digital Future of Authorship: Rethinking Originality’, about her personal struggle with traditional notions of authorship, a struggle not uncommon to other academic authors. As remarked upon at the beginning of this thesis, Fitzpatrick states that although we try to criticise the way authorship functions in academia and society at large, ‘our own authorship practices have remained subsumed within those institutional and ideological frameworks’ (2011b: 3). Connected as it is with our scholarly and publishing practices, one of the biggest challenges with respect to changing our notions of authorship will be, as Fitzpatrick argues, that ‘changing one aspect of the way we work of necessity implies change across the entirety of the way we work’ (2011b: 4). As Derrida has pointed out in this respect, we ‘cannot temper with it [the form of the book] without disturbing everything else’ (1983: 3). For instance, if we want to move towards an authorship function that puts more emphasis on openness, sharing, experimentation and collaboration, this means that we need to reconsider where scholarly authority, originality and responsibility lie in a digital environment, and whether or not we really need them.

            The by now classic insights of Barthes and Foucault on authorship remain valuable in this respect. Both analysed and critiqued romantic and humanist forms of authorship by examining the specific subject position and agency of the author, and the relationship of authorship to text, writing and the work. In his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) Barthes describes how authorship kills the text by stabilising it. It is authorship in this sense that tries to affix a definite meaning, and which has been used over the centuries as a strategy to read meaning into texts, Barthes argues. And this process reaches its culmination in capitalist society where work and author are united in a commercial product. However, in his anti-intentionalist critique of authorship, Barthes states that we cannot affix a stable meaning to a text via the authorship function, as it does not control it. He focuses instead on the multiplicity of meanings (heteroglossia) and threads that are available in language, in the relationships between texts (intertextuality), and in the act of writing, and which are extracted through the person of the reader. In Barthes’ vision, then, text, and its multiple meanings, comes into existence in the act of reading, not when the author is creating it. In this respect Barthes’ critique has initiated a move away from the integral connection between an author and her or his work, focusing more on the performative character of text and language and the meaning attribution by readers instead (1967).

            Foucault has drawn further on Barthes’ critique in his seminal paper ‘What is an author?’ (1969). He writes that the notion of the author is directly related to a moment of individualisation in history, connected to ideas of attribution and authenticity. A move away from authorship such as that proposed by Barthes, will not be enough, Foucault claims, as this has to involve a similar departure from the idea of the single, stable and often bounded work that is still integrally connected to our notion of the author, even if we abandon authorial meaning attribution. In this respect Foucault argues that a critique of authorship necessarily implies a critique of the work and, in this specific context, of the scholarly book. Where does a work end when it becomes no more than a trace of writing, disconnected from a specific author? Both the notion of the work and of the author are thus problematic, and replacing the latter’s authority with the former will not be very helpful, according to Foucault. He points out that we need to analyse the functions authorship fulfils in a society, such as the way it operates within a certain discursive setting to bind together a group of texts and establish a relationship amongst them. We need to critically reassess these functions as being the representation of certain discourses within a society, discourses focusing on ownership of research (appropriation) and related to (penal) responsibility. Authorship is thus a function of discourse in Foucault’s vision. In its connection with authorship, discourses themselves were even turned from acts into things, goods, and property. And as Foucault states, criticising Barthes in this respect, authorship is only one of the discursive practices we need to analyse. We need to explore how authorship and knowledge get to be produced in our knowledge economies and whether we need to reassess or change these discourses. In what ways do we construct an author and how do we determine the origin of a work? How can we rethink knowledge products, authority, truth claims, and originality? In what sense is an author function introduced to regulate meaning? By questioning the author, Foucault argues that we are not simply freeing the text, we are interrogating the work at the same time, the latter being the extension of certain discursive practices within a society (1977).

3.3 Critiquing Authorship in Practice

Barthes and Foucault are two of the most pre-eminent critics of authorship, and their writings on the death of the author, the author function and the role the author plays in capitalist knowledge production, have proved to be tremendously important for literary theory and authorship studies. In particularly, they have played a significant role in focusing attention away from the humanist idea of what an author is, to what an author does (Bennett 2004: 3). At the same time they have also helped to place more attention on the discursive historicity of both authorship and the work. Nonetheless it can be argued that both Foucault and Barthes didn’t in practice do much to critique their own authorship position, status and practices, and they were themselves often writing in a very authorial and traditional way, focusing on the authority and originality of their mostly individually authored and published texts. In this respect, their work at times lacked a practical or practice-based performative dimension.[2] In this respect the examples of authorship critique that will be discussed below (hypertext, collaborative digital humanities work and remix practices), can be seen to offer a more practical critique of authorship, whilst targeting specific aspects, such as authority, individuality, and originality that have structured the romantic, humanist authorship discourse in academia.

3.3.1 Hypertext

Hypertext[3] has been classified as a practical application of Barthes’ and Foucault’s criticism of authorship, at least to the extent that in hypertext debates the focus returns to a critique of authorship exactly from this perspective of a new (literary) practice. For example, as theorist George Landow points out, hypertext can be seen as the ‘electronic embodiment of poststructuralist conceptions of textuality’ and it thus ‘reconceive(s) the figure and function of authorship’ (2006: 126). Hypertext scholarship is among other things interested in bridging the gap between the author and the reader, where the reader increasingly becomes the author of the work that is being consumed, challenging the authorial role (Bolter 2001, Landow 2006). It can be argued that in hypertext theory the figures and functions of author and reader become deeper entangled, where authorial power is redirected to the reader. According to Landow this is possible due to the read/write capabilities of the net and hypertext. This offers the reader interactivity and the possibility to choose their own way through a hypertext, via hyperlinks to other nodes and locations, and thus to create their own meaning based on that path. In a networked hypertext environment, the reader becomes the ‘performer’ of a text, where each text is a unique enactment. The multiple meanings of a work and a text, as theorised by Barthes and Foucault, were thus arguably more practically embodied and visualised in the production and consumption of hypertexts. Hypertext’s multiplicity of meanings therefore suggested a changed relationship between the reader and the text. Landow argues that radical changes in textuality, such as with hypertext, will cause radical changes in authorship, where the lack of textual autonomy, as he calls it, its unboundedness, disperses ideas of authorship too (2006: 126). Instead of the author subject and the bounded text object, we now have the network, in which both are decentred. This is also the main feature Jerome McGann attributes to hypertext: its decentred textuality, open and interactive, where hypertext is not centrally organised (2004: 25). Hayles similarly sees hypertext as dispersed, performative and processual, due to its capacity to transform on a continuous basis (2004).

            Notwithstanding the potential of hypertext theory to decentre the author’s authority, it has still kept many of the other ‘authorship functions’ in check, especially if we look at early hypertext fiction, which was seen to embody many of the possibilities the above debate focused on. Hypertext introduced a practical multiplicitous conception of authorship or of the prosumer—the reader as author—but does not deconstruct many of the other functions that are part of the romantic, humanist notion of authorship and the way it has been embodied in our institutions and practices. Hypertext works continue to be mainly published as ‘whole’ and finished works. In their early distribution mechanisms (using CD-ROMs or particular forms of software and/or platforms such as Storyspace and Intermedia), hypertext fiction also remained ‘bound’ together (albeit in a different way than books), both in a ‘medial sense’ as well as bound together by their authors. For hypertext fiction still came with a recognisable author, including a copyright disclaimer. Not only do hypertextual works thus remain recognisable by a distinct author, they also continue to function in terms of a reputation economy with clear attribution and responsibility, and in this respect the originality of the work is also still attributed to the author. In the dynamic between author and reader, the author continues to stand out as the designer of the hypertext, where the specific paths or linearity created remain prescriptive in many ways. In what sense is this authorial pre-description then not already fixing possible meaning association for readers? As it is still the author who defines relationships within a hypertext, it can be argued that readers remain 2^nd grade authors: it is an ad hoc relationship. When it comes to the interactivity promised by early hypertexts, on reflection this can be judged to have been rather low, having to do with the complexity of many hypertext fictions. The different paths and structures seem problematic and do not always create a coherent narrative for readers, where on a design level many of the interfaces were also hard to navigate. Finally, many of hypertext’s proponents have presented hypertext as a radical discontinuity, seeing it, as Bolter has argued, as a revolutionary break with the past, similar to the rhetoric of modernist artists and writers (2001: 44). Such a dichotomous schism between the old and the new, and between networked or hypertext authors and print authors can be seen as overstated, as many print texts and works already functioned according to hypertext structures (Bolter 2001, Fitzpatrick 2011a). Was print reading not always already collaborative and performative too? And does the authorship function really undergo a practical critique in an environment were artistic creativity and ownership or acknowledgement of works still remains an important aspect of the networked environment?

3.3.2 Collaborative Authorship

Initially, hypertext structures were mostly experimented with in a non-academic context, but increasingly aspects of hypertextual structures (especially the hyperlinking capacity) have become more common in digital academic communication, and many of the elements of hypertext practice and theory, are being experimented with in both formal and informal digital publishing. In this respect developments in digital tools and media, from blogs to wikis, have made readerly interaction and prosumption easier. As Fitzpatrick has argued: ‘Experiments in hypertext thus may have pointed in the general direction of a digital publishing future, but were finally hampered by difficulties in readerly engagement, as well as, I would argue, by having awakened in readers a desire for fuller participation that hypertext could not itself satisfy’ (2011a: 99). Within academia, however, a practical authorship critique of its own had started to develop, one which has been mainly based upon two developments: the rise in use of digital tools, media and networked environments in scholarly work, which has led to new forms of networked collaboration; and the growth, especially in a scientific context, of massively collaborative projects, following the principles of networked science (Nielsen 2011). These developments have lead to an enhanced questioning of the romantic discourse of single authorship, especially within certain fields in the sciences and the humanities where the developments described above have been the most apparent. High Energy Physics (HEP) is an example of a discipline where the romantic discourse on authorship as it normally functions within academia has become a serious problem. As Blaise Cronin explains, from the 17^th century onwards, in a scientific context the appropriation of credit and the allocation of accountability developed as simultaneous processes, based on the idea of a work written by an author (2001: 559). Jeremy Birnholtz shows, however, that even though authorship is the accepted method in science to assess contributions of researchers to their specific discipline—playing an important role in the reputation economy and as a measurement of symbolic capital—it can be difficult to recognize an individual’s contributions to a research article. Taking responsibility for an article becomes problematic on highly collaborative projects, for instance. Birnholtz shows how in HEP the authorship model has not been functioning very well in the traditional sense, as the amount of people working on a collaborative project can run into the hundreds. It is not uncommon that every article by a research team member lists all the participating physicists on that particular project, a phenomenon known as hyperauthorship (Birnholtz 2006: 1758–1770). As Cronin shows, the problem within such a regime of hyperauthorship is that it becomes impossible to determine where ultimately authority, credit and accountability reside. Authorship without responsibility, he points out, becomes literally meaningless, as responsibility, in the form of affixing authority, credit and accountability, is an essential part of the standard ‘rights and responsibilities’ model of authorship in the current scholarly communication model. For instance, I have the right to claim credit and symbolic capital for my authorship but also the responsibility to defend and stand behind my claims and take the blame if they are flawed (Cronin 2001: 562).

            This has led to a situation where, in HEP, the reputation economy no longer works on the basis of authorship or formal records of contribution, but, as Birnholtz states, runs via ‘informal means of assessment and evaluation’ (2006: 1764). This informal system of recognition relies on word-of-mouth recommendations and the ability to get noticed within large group collaborations. Credit does not come from publications but from establishing a reputation within the work group. Although traditional authorship has therefore become problematic within this environment, and the idea of individual responsibility seems to be bestowed upon the group and on collaborative notions of authorship within HEP publishing practices, the rights and recognition part of the standard model of authorship continues to run via individual recognition.

            Although hyperauthorship is not particularly common in the humanities and social sciences to date, where the single author still dominates most fields, the example of HEP does raise some problems that can be related to our accepted notions of authorship. First of all, it shows that different research cultures have different approaches to authorship and to issues of social trust, as well as various ways of awarding responsibility and recognition for research findings. Hence there is no standard concept or definition of authorship that traverses the various research communities. There are different definitions of authorship and these tend to change too within fields, making them contingent. These examples all seem to underscore that authorship is a social construct, not a natural fact, and that these constructs, and the way authorship ‘functions’, differs between epistemic communities, both within the life sciences[4] and in contrast to the humanities and social sciences. Secondly, the examples from HEP show that what we perceive as the standard romantic discourse of authorship has a problem when it comes to distinguishing different kinds of research contributions and collaborations. It only works within certain limits, limits which HEP and Biomedicine seem to be exceeding and which are also increasingly being challenged in the HSS.

            Collaboration and co-authorship practices, combined with a discourse that encourages collaboration, are rising in the humanities and social sciences too. For instance, Cronin has shown how, with the growth in scale and complexity of psychological research, the need for formal and informal collaboration has grown. This has led to changing disciplinary practices related to authorship. As Cronin makes clear, this can be evidenced in the growing importance of what is called ‘sub-authorship collaboration’, collaboration that is made visible through acknowledgments in academic writing. This form of collaboration is visible in the rise and gradual establishment of acknowledgements as a constitutive element in the scholarly journal literature in the fields of psychology and philosophy (Cronin et al. 2003). In the digital humanities, which has been defined as ‘not a unified field but an array of convergent practices’ (Presner and Schnapp 2009), digital tools and increasingly also scientific methods for conducting research are being applied to humanities research. Collaboration is seen as an essential aspect of the research culture here. As digital humanist Lisa Spiro puts it, ‘work in many areas of the digital humanities seems to both depend upon collaboration and aim to support it’ (2009). Simeone et al. explain this in more detail with the example of data mining: ‘With computational tools, digital archives can reveal more than they obscure by providing organizational frameworks and tools for analysis. However, these tools—in the guise of metadata organization, indexing, searching, and analytics—are not self-generated. They require the combined work of humanists with their interdisciplinary questions and computer scientists with their disciplinary approaches to partner with one another to produce viable research methodologies and pedagogies’ (2011). Digital humanities research needs collaboration but also depends on reliable infrastructures and platforms to make collaborations possible. Collaboration is visible in the valuable support received from, among others, librarians, IT departments and computer scientists, which are only slowly being acknowledged as full-fledged contributors to digital humanities projects.[5] There is thus a continued call within this environment to give credit to the various alt-ac (alternative academic) collaborators[6] in digital projects, following non-standard academic careers such as the ones mentioned above (Nowviskie 2011b).

            Collaboration is also visible in the ‘non-digital’ humanities. In the process of preparing a publication we rely on others in multiple ways, both online and offline. For instance, via comments at conferences, in blogs and social media, via peer reviews, and support from editors, proof readers, copyeditors, book designers, printers and so forth (Danyi 2014). There is also a growing amount of interest in both the ‘traditional’ and digital humanities in environments and platforms for online collaborative work—in the case of international or cross-institutional research projects involving multiple project members for instance. This has led to the rise of what has been termed collaboratories, or Virtual Research Environments, and other instantiations of collaborative teams and technologies within the humanities (Verhaar 2009). As Simeone et al. show in their discussion of one of these collaborative projects, with the rise of large-scale, multi-participant collaborative research projects, the authorship of articles, papers, and books written by project team members becomes problematic, as it becomes hard to establish individual and collective contributions (2011). The romanticising of the sole author in science and scholarship leads to a notion of science as a stream of geniuses and inventors, intrinsically connected to a cultural and historical context that privileges individual creativity.[7] This narrative stands in strong contrast with the community aspect of networked scholarship that can similarly be perceived to be at the basis of our scholarly practices, and seems to be increasingly so.

            However, within the digital humanities further reasons have been developed with respect to why we need to be critical of our standard notions of authorship, as some have argued that they are becoming increasingly hard to sustain in a digital environment that can be seen as privileging process over product. As Fitzpatrick explains, online texts, such as blogs, tend to work via a logic of commenting, linking and versioning, stimulating the open-ended nature of networked writing and producing texts that ‘are no longer discrete or static, but that live and develop as part of a network of other such texts, among which ideas flow’ (2011b). Research in blogs especially, which are becoming more important in academic scholarship,[8] but also in other forms of online publications, from wikis to ebooks, can be updated and changed—by the authorial self but increasingly by the community at large too. This challenges the notion of a fixed text and with it the author’s authority based on that fixed text which, as Cronin has argued, is an essential aspect of the traditional ‘rights and responsibilities’ model of authorship. As Susan Brown et al. state with regard to the open-endedness of digital humanities research: ‘Scholars will increasingly be able to build on existing electronic texts, restructuring or adding to them, or recombining them with new content to produce new texts. In a radical extension of earlier forms of textuality, the possibility that an electronic text will continue to morph, be reproduced, and live on in ways quite unforeseen by its producers makes “done” to an extent always provisional’ (2009). In this respect traditional authorship, as is the case within the context of hypertext, is judged as having a hard time accommodating rival claims of authority from a reader or community perspective.

In practice, however, ideas based on the processual and unbound potential of digital works are still facing difficulty. Discourses building on print-based authorship, with its notions of individual ownership and authority, have functioned within academia as solidifying processes, where scholarship is from its inception already being created to function as a product to exchange on the reputation market. This process is institutionalised and enforced within the professional publishing system. David Sewell, editor at The University of Virginia Press, explains how under economic external constraints, the open-ended or processual character of both digital and traditional publications can be sacrificed once they become part of the formal publishing process:

But completely extrinsic factors such as the desire to include the book in a particular season’s list will often lead a press to veto an author’s wish to continue tinkering with a manuscript. Similarly, an author may not consider a monograph on Chinese art formally complete without the inclusion of several dozen full-page colour reproductions on glossy inserts, but a publisher may omit them for the wholly extrinsic reason that the profit-and-loss sheet doesn’t budget for them. Once a book is in print, decisions about its subsequent “done-ness” (i.e., whether to reprint, revise, issue in paperback, etc.) are based almost entirely on economic factors. In the case of digital publications, I will suggest, extrinsic factors become important at an earlier stage and are proportionately more important at every stage of composition and publication. (2009)

But this insistence on creating a finished marketable object, favouring product over process, cannot only be blamed on publishers. Fitzpatrick emphasises the ‘distinctly Fordist functionalist mode of working’ of scholars as writers, where in the reputation economy surrounding academia, the ultimate goal of research projects is final completion, the moment when a new item can be added to one’s CV as evidence of scholarly productivity (2011b).

            The narratives and institutional customs mentioned above all in different ways argue for a revision of our discourses on, and practices of, individual authorship. Rethinking and re-performing authorship might aid in promoting the discourse of collaboration that similarly accompanies authorship, and the newly developing digital research practices and their potential underlying values of scholarly openness, experimentation and sharing. However, in the narratives described above, collaborative authorship can be argued to focus mainly on extending (to include alt. ac. contributors etc.) forms of individual authorship to a larger group, instead of critiquing fundamentally the notions that individual humanist authorship is based upon. It might be interesting to again look at the work of Fitzpatrick at this point, who in her book Planned Obsolescence makes a passionate plea for the need for community and collaboration in (digital) humanist and experimental research and publishing projects. For instance, when Fitzpatrick talks about forms of collaborative authorship in her book, it seems that she wants to primarily focus on stimulating interaction and conversation and on getting the collaborative aspects of scholarship acknowledged more widely. Fitzpatrick’s is a reformist stance in this respect, rather than a disruptive one, where her critique of authorship seems to focus mostly on fostering individual authors’ sense of community in order to stimulate their writing practices, and to find more pleasure (as opposed to anxiety) in their writing process (2011a: 52). As she states, her aim is ‘less to disrupt all our conventional notions of authorship than to demonstrate why thinking about authorship from a different perspective—one that’s always been embedded, if dormant, in many of our authorship practices—could result in a more productive, and hopefully less anxious, relationship to our work’ (Fitzpatrick 2011a: 56). As Hall has pointed out in this respect, ‘Kathleen Fitzpatrick, does not really offer a profound challenge to ideas of the human, subjectivity, or the associated concept of the author at all’, nor is she ‘radically questioning the notion of the human that underpins ‘the “myth” of the stand-alone, masterful author’ (2012). Hall thus argues that Fitzpatrick’s notion of collaborative authorship is mainly based on the idea of a group of ‘“unique”, stable, centred authors (…) now involved in a “social” conversation “composed of individuals’’’ (2012).

            In this respect it can be argued that the collaborative authorship practices promoted in networked science and the digital humanities are not really an embodiment of the anti-humanist critique put forward by thinkers such as Barthes and Foucault, something this thesis does want to explore more in depth, both in theory and in practice. For instance, in the instrumentalist rhetoric of Nielsen, networked science is foremost focused on aiding discovery, more than it is on challenging the problems individual authorship has created for the way our institutions, practices and political economies of research production currently operate. Nonetheless, following Foucault’s idea of rethinking the way authorship functions within academia, experimenting practically with new forms of collaborative authorship might be seen as a way of beginning to rethink, re-perform, and re-cut authorship in a more ethical way. However, in this process, we have to remain wary of simply replicating our humanist authorship discourses and practices within our notions of collaborative authorship, and we thus need to be critical of these alternative forms of authorship, in a continued fashion too. For example, replacing individual authorship by forms of community knowledge production can still promote liberal hegemonic forms of control and, as I have written elsewhere, runs the risk of creating ‘problems of conformity, groupthink and bias in online communal knowledge production’ (Adema 2014). How can we in this respect continue to critique the potentially ‘oppressive aspects of the consensus model of community’ as Fitzpatrick calls it (2011a: 42–43)?

3.3.3 Authorship in Academic Remix Practices

Remix practices within academia, from combining different media in innovative ways to collaboratively (re)mixing fragments of texts in new contexts, not only offer an alternative vision of collaborative authorship, they also challenge one of the other main aspects of romantic, humanist authorship: its discourse of originality. Remix thus offers the possibility to performatively explore and critique these humanist and essentialist notions at work within humanities scholarship, aspects that have been connected to the development of the book and a fixed print regime. At the same time, remix practices in academia have also been critiqued in a variety of ways from a scholarly perspective. For instance, they have been attacked from a viewpoint which declares that remix practices in a digital environment seem to take on what can be seen as a ‘wide democratic approach’, in which everyone is able to update, reuse and remix. Critics such as Andrew Keen (2007a) and Sven Birkerts (1994) see this as a threat to expert knowledge and as diluting the distinction between amateur and professional content. Others have criticised Wikipedia, which is based on the online collaborative editing and re-editing of encyclopaedic or topical entries, for its perceived failure as a reliable source due to the lack of credentials of its editors.[9] Remix practices also challenge the idea of a stable scholarly work and pose a problem for the idea of the integrity of the scholarly object. They thus question the idea that scholarly objects exist and should be preserved as discrete entities (Warwick 2004, Keen 2007b, Brown et al. 2009). Remix practices can therefore be seen to pose a challenge to our traditional conception of authorship and present a problem for responsibility and attribution in the scholarly reputation economy.

            However, many contemporary scholarly remix practices, like the ones I will describe in depth in what follows, are in essence much less radical and less of a threat than they are sometimes perceived to be, to the practices, institutions and discourses surrounding this fixed print regime that continues to structure academia. I am thinking, for example, of remix practices such as the use of Creative Commons licenses for scholarly publications which in many cases (such as the CC-BY, attribution license) allow for the re-use of material; or those practices associated with Wikipedia. But I am also thinking of remix theories, including those from celebrated theorists such as Lev Manovich, Eduardo Navas and Lawrence Lessig, which focus mainly on finding a place for humanist and essentialist notions of attribution and authorship within remix practice and scholarship. As I will explore more in detail later in this section, Creative Commons licenses can be seen as mere extensions or adaptations of print-based copyright, which can be perceived as enforcing humanist authorship notions, and Wikipedia incorporates many print-based functions to establish authority within its system—by keeping edit-logs of each change by a particular contributor, for instance. Manovich, Lessig and Navas’s theories each in their different ways try to face the problem print-based authorship poses in a digital setting by replacing the author with the selector, the remixer, and/or the DJ as the authoritative and responsible figure. They thus primarily try to cope with, and find a solution for, the ‘problem’ of authorship in the digital age. Instead of fundamentally trying to re-perform or rethink the print-based and humanist notions behind authorship, they can in many respects be seen to reinforce these notions within a digital environment. Although remix practices in academia have the potential to shake up the authorship function, until now they have not managed to dethrone the traditional academic author-god and in some cases they even reinforce her or him.

3.3.3.1 The Selector or Curator

One of the proposals offered in discussions on remix to grapple with the problem of authorship in an increasingly digital setting, is to shift the focus from the author to the selector, the moderator or the curator. This is one of the suggested solutions to the issues raised regarding authorship and originality that have been explored by remix theorist Eduardo Navas, especially in the realm of music. Here authorship, as he states, is increasingly being replaced by sampling and ‘sampling allows for the death of the author’, where it is hard to trace the origin of a tiny fragment of a musical composition. This makes authorship and writing into something distinct from an original work, where it becomes an act of resampling, selecting and reinterpreting of previous material. As Navas points out, with the death of the author as the one who creates a new and original work, the author function in the Foucauldian sense of selectivity takes over. Navas argues in this respect that s/he who selects the sources to be remixed takes on the critical position or the needed distance to the material used in remix, and with that takes on a new author function (2008).

            One of the problems with replacing the idea of authorship with the idea of the selector, however, is that this move only shifts the locus of authority from the author to the selector. Selection, although incorporating a broader appreciation for other forms of authorship or for an extension of the author function, can all too easily be just another form of humanist and individualistic agency, and so does not necessarily offer a fundamental challenge to the idea of authorship or authorial intention. Along with not inherently confronting the idea of authorial authority and intentionality, the selector also cannot be seen as automatically critiquing or rethinking authority, as authority here is frequently just shifted from the author unto the curator, who still carries responsibility for the selections she or he makes. What happens when the author function is further decentered, and agency is distributed within the system? And what do we do with forms of non-human authorship? The question then is: how do we establish authority in an environment where the contributions of a single author are hard to trace back, or where content is created by anonymous users or avatars? Or, indeed, in situations where there is no human author and the content is machine-generated based on certain tags or protocols, such as is the case with data feeds, where users receive updated data from a large variety of sources in a single feed? What becomes of the role of the selector as an authoritative figure when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? At what point does it become necessary to let go of our established notions of responsibility and authority, as they become impossible to uphold? What alternative cuts can we make that start to move in directions beyond individualistic forms of authority and towards distributed and posthumanist forms of authorship?

            Another difficulty associated with replacing the author by s/he who selects is that this doesn’t really offer a critique of the profit and object-based system of individual authorship, and therefore doesn’t form a challenge to the traditional idea of ownership as it is connected to authorship. As Bill Herman shows in his excellent article on the DJ as an author, the DJ is made an author, not by what he or she does, but by the representation of her or his practices in a capitalist system. As Herman points out, the DJ was instilled with authorship by the music industry by marketing him or her as a brand name and promoting the sale of commodities related to the DJ. In this sense the DJ is a tool, the author-as-selector becomes an object from which commodities can be derived. Herman argues that initially in remix culture we could see the disappearance of traditional forms of authorship. As he explains: ‘the authorship that was traditionally invested in the performers of songs was deteriorated as the songs’ individuality disappeared into the mix’ (Herman 2006: 24). The DJ started out playing a background role, foregrounding the artists and numbers that were being remixed, where s/he himself was just another member of the party. This situation didn’t last long however. Following the logic of profit and capitalism, authorship was soon re-established on an even stronger basis. The DJ became a superstar to fill a commercial void. Eventually this led to the DJ being instilled by music producers as another author-god.

            Herman makes a compelling argument for seeing the commodification of music via the DJ-figure as a crucial part of the author function in the music industry (2006: 23).[10] Furthermore he offers additional proof for the idea that the author function is a sociological construct, not based on a practice, but instilled upon the author—for instance, by cultural businesspersons within the music industry. The author is created as an integral part of a larger set of social relations, a system of exchange that is governed by the logic of capital. As Herman states: ‘The DJ’s authorship becomes the discursive solution to an economic problem’ (2006: 34).[11]

3.3.3.2 Wikis

As Hall has shown, it is interesting to look at the use of wikis as examples of experimentation with new ways of conceiving authorship practices (2009). Wikis have the potential to breakdown the authority of the specialist and replace them with forms of crowd-sourced authority. Wikipedia is the most famous example here, where its peer-production potential was seen to compete with traditional sources of expert knowledge such as the Encyclopedia Britannica.[12] Whereas in early hypertexts the potential for user interaction was still arguable low, with the implementation of hypertextual elements into a wiki environment, the distinction between readers and authors in practice seems to almost disappear. However, wikis are envisaged and structured in such a way that authorship and clear attribution, and therefore responsibility as well as version control, remain an essential part of their functioning. The structure behind most wikis is still based on an identifiable author—or at least an identifiable IP address—and on a version history which lets you check all changes and modifications, if needed. Wikipedia, the largest public wiki and one of the most well known examples of a wiki functioning via the structure described above, also encourages authors to sign their articles. As it states on Wikipedia’s Etiquette site: ‘Unless you have an excellent reason not to do so, sign and date your posts to talk pages (not articles).’[13] Wikipedia is also increasingly moderated and some moderators have more power than others, thus in a way becoming not unlike curators.[14] In reality, the authority of the author is therefore not fundamentally challenged in Wikipedia; nor does its authority really come to terms with the element of continual updating that wikis evoke. In this way Wikipedia can be seen to struggle between traditional notions of authorship and credibility and the more communal crowd-surfed ideologies of openness it is said to support. The prevalence of the print-based notions still seems to be strong. As the juridical researcher Ayelet Oz calls it, there is ‘a conflict between the aspirational and organizational goals’ within Wikipedia. As she points out: ‘The enforcement mechanisms on Wikipedia enact an internal conflict between Wikipedia’s open, inclusive ethos and its organizational reliance on power, hierarchy and punishment’ (Oz 2010).

3.3.3.3 Creative Commons

Creative Commons licenses are some of the licenses most used to promote the free distribution of research in an open access environment. It is not only books and articles, but also blogs and wikis that stimulate academic reuse by using the CC-BY license, or another variant that allows free reuse. However, Creative Commons licenses can again be seen to be based on a relatively traditional notion of authorship, and although they do have the potential to stimulate remix and creativity, in some ways they enforce traditional author functions even more. Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons, explains part of the reasoning behind these licenses in his book Remix (2008). Taking a pragmatic position, Lessig’s copyright reform focuses on ending the copyright wars while at the same time promising artists and authors the necessary copyright protection which he claims they need as an incentive to create (2008: xix). The argument Lessig makes pro-remix culture and against the current severe copyright law is that the latter restricts creative freedom, evolution and development. Furthermore, he emphasises that the law should not be too rigid and should not criminalise an entire generation by designating them as illegal pirates. But he does not go so far as to dispute copyright altogether, as this would be to go against ‘creative evolution’, as authors and producers need an incentive to create, and this incentive, in Lessig’s argument, is, at the very minimum, attribution, to ensure the reputation economy still functions. Here Lessig can be seen to continue to adhere to the liberal humanist notions of individual ownership and responsibility, based on privatised capital and individuated resources (Berry 2005). In its initial form Creative Commons and its licenses, set up to stimulate creativity and promote remix practices, strongly hold on to the authorship function: CC-BY still requiring attribution, for example, despite being one of their most liberal licenses. Even with their more recently established licenses such as CC-zero, which releases a work into the public domain, this still needs to be granted (or waived) by the author.[15] It could therefore be said that Creative Commons makes copyright less rigid and more open while also placing an extra burden on the authorship function. The author becomes more powerful in determining under which exact conditions his work can be shared and distributed. Instead of seeing cultural works and information as something people are always allowed to share, we are still operating here with a system in which sharing (of individuated creative objects) needs to be authorised.

Law professor Niva Elkin-Koren offers a compelling argument in her supportive but at the same time critical review of Creative Commons. She regrets that the strategy of Creative Commons is not aimed at creating a public domain in the legal sense, free of exclusive proprietary rights. Those behind Creative Commons believe free culture will arise by a different exercise of copyright on the part of owners, where contracts are used to liberate creative works and make them more accessible (Elkin-Koren 2006: 1). As Elkin-Koren argues, however, ‘in the absence of commitment to a single (even if minimal) standard of freedom in information, Creative Commons’ strategy is left with the single unifying principle which empowers authors to govern their own work’ (2006: 2). The focus point of Elkin-Koren’s critique is that by maintaining the idea of copyright, Creative Commons keeps on seeing cultural goods as consumable products. It treats creative works as commodities. This only strengthens the proprietary regime in information and culture (Elkin-Koren 2006: 2).

3.4 Towards Posthumanist Forms of Authorship?

The previous section has examined some of the more recent practical strategies to re-perform authorship as developed within hypertext theory, the digital humanities and as part of various remix practices. From this analysis we can conclude that, although these fields, theories and practices try to rethink specific aspects of the romantic, humanist authorship discourse in academia (such as authority, individuality and originality), these notions continue to be strongly ingrained. Furthermore, as we have seen, targeting one of these aspects (such as originality) in most cases seems to only strengthen the others. Thus, these examples of authorship critique all in some way or another continue to adhere to humanist authorship discourses and practices. What kinds of strategies and analyses of authorship and the way authorship currently functions can we then devise to try to rethink the various aspects of the romantic and humanist notion of authorship in a perhaps more comprehensive, critical and consistent fashion? We should pay more attention to the institutions and structures in which our authorship practices are embedded, as well as to the hegemonic discourse of the liberal autonomous author that continues to structure and inform these practices. What, for example, would a posthumanist critique of authorship look like in this respect?

            In this section I want to offer some suggestions as to what such a posthumanist critique and practice of authorship might potentially encompass. I will first, however, look at two practices, plagiarism and anonymous authorship, that can be seen as forms of anti-authorship critique. I have chosen to focus on plagiarism and anonymous authorship due to the fact that they are potentially less focused on accommodating new forms of authorship in a digital environment or in making authorship more inclusive. In other words, they are less interested in extending individual authorship to include new liberal and autonomous subjects, and are aimed more at directly undermining our current humanist notions of authorship along with the political-economy that surrounds them.

3.4.1 Plagiarism

Even if scholarly research is shared without having to pay to access it, as is the case with certain open access publications using a CC-BY or similar license, such publications remain objects within a reputation economy that are being exchanged to create more value in the form of citations. In this sense it can be argued that it is plagiarism (understood here as not citing someone) that becomes the biggest taboo in the academic exchange economy. Yet, following Lessig’s reasoning, as plagiarism is perceived to be increasingly prevalent in academic culture today[16], is it worth ‘criminalising’ a whole generation, when plagiarism might also be a step forward, in the sense of stimulating creativity, and it could just as well be seen as something that promotes creative freedom and development? (2008). We could think of examples where borrowing the words of others can be used as a method to learn to write. In this respect one might ask whether plagiarism is the next battle after copyright reform that we need to fight in order to stimulate forms of creativity that are less focused on the main elements of humanist authorship: ownership, originality, and authority.

Plagiarism as a term evokes mostly negative connotations, especially within academia. It is most often defined here as taking someone else’s work and presenting it as one’s own original work. In the simple case of this definition plagiarism doesn’t really critique or question authorship in any way, as the plagiarist’s intent is to elevate one’s own authorship standing and status. Additionally, the plagiarist on this account still seeks to claim something as an original work of authorship within the academic reputation economy—it’s just that they are doing so falsely. However, there is a more interesting aspect to using someone else’s work and representing it as one’s own. Within a different discourse or framework, including, as I will argue, a discourse of authorship critique, this is called appropriation. Appropriation is used here instead of plagiarism, as the former is a term that is more commonly used and accepted as a creative strategy within the artistic realm. Here the difference is one of intent; but also, as I will show, one of cultural difference, i.e. between art and academia—and this becomes interesting when we discuss the work of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, for instance.

Rebecca Moore Howard argues that ‘patchwriting’, a form of copying and collating different sources without any fundamental alterations, can be a part of a pedagogy of writing as appropriation and indeed a fundamental aspect of language learning and use (1995). Kenneth Goldsmith has a similar vision with respect to appropriating, pointing out that it is creative and that he uses it as a pedagogicial method in his classes on “Uncreative Writing” (which he defines as ‘the art of managing information and representing it as writing’ (2011b)) at the University of Pennsylvania. As Goldsmith suggests, the author won’t die, but we might start viewing authorship in a more conceptual way: ‘Perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse, and distribute language-based practices’ (2011a). Goldsmith’s arguments in support of appropriation criticise the idea of originality as it is traditionally connected to authorship. However, in his plea for ‘uncreative writing’, he does not fundamentally critique authorship; he again just elevates the role of the copier or remixer to that of the author. As he argues: ‘’Retyping On the Road’, claims that the simple act of retyping a text is enough to constitute a work of literature, thereby raising the craft of the copyist to the same level as the author’ (Goldsmith 2011b). Although his is an interesting attempt to challenge the continued emphasis on originality and creativity in writing, if we look closer at what Goldsmith writes, it seems that he is for the most part only broadening the categories of what counts as original and creative, instead of fundamentally challenging them. For him the digital environment actually adds more functions to authorship helping to produce a situation where, besides originality and creativity, skills such as manipulation and management will become increasingly important.

Nonetheless, in his practical work as a conceptual poet, Goldsmith does try to push the appropriation discourse further by deliberately juxtaposing it to, and playing with the blurred lines that exist between, this discourse and plagiarism. In the works of Goldsmith as well as in those of fellow-conceptual poets such as Vanessa Place and Kent Johnson, this flirtation with plagiarism thus clearly functions as a way to undermine discourses of liberal authorship.[17]

For example, in Day, a text by Goldsmith, he has literally retyped word by word a whole daily issue of the New York Times, and has published it as his own work. Goldsmith doesn’t label this as plagiarism, but as a practice of uncreativity (challenging originality) and of constrained writing. A few years later, conceptual poet Kent Johnson republished Day, keeping the book entirely intact, while just replacing his own name on the dust cover.[18] In this sense Johnson was extending Goldsmith’s appropriation discourse further into the realm of plagiarism.

Conceptual poet Vanessa Place in her works targets both the originality and the authority that reside in our discourses on authorship. In her ‘Factory’ series, inspired by Andy Warhol’s ‘factory model’ of creative production, she commissioned 10 writers and artists, or ‘art-workers’, to make chapbooks for her, which she subsequently published under her own name. In Place’s words: “I, being the one they call ‘Vanessa Place,’ am the (immaterial) public author function” (2010). By appropriating/plagiarising other artists as well as her own work in an ongoing fashion, Place thus seeks to challenge the authority that underlies the ‘referent’ or ‘signature’ of the author. As she puts it: ‘To extend these practices, I authorize works not authored by me or by those I authorize to author my work—copies of copies of absent authority. Like citation, the referent betrays a fundamental lack of authority on the part of the citing author. Unlike citation, there is no authoritative source. It’s a rank imitation of “Vanessa Place” as “Vanessa Place” is rank imitation’ (Place 2011).

            It can be argued that these practices of extending what would previously perhaps be seen as plagiarism into an appropriation discourse go beyond what is commonly seen as appropriation or remix practices. For they clearly intend to actively disturb or undermine the system of authorship, and the notions of originality and authority that come with it by ‘hollowing’ out or putting to the test those notions. In this respect we can see the above examples as an illustration of how practices and concepts of appropriation and plagiarism exist on a spectrum, where appropriation practices in an art context will most likely be judged as plagiarism practices within academia. This might have to do with the fact that the difference between plagiarism and appropriation remains so unclear. Therefore any appropriation that takes place within an academic context that does not adhere to a citation or referencing context will run the risk of being condemned. In this respect Goldsmith’s strategy can be seen as more subversive when he argues for extending forms of appropriation which are accepted within the artistic field, but which are still seen as plagiarism within a literary or academic context, into scholarship.

Therefore a focus on different forms and notions of creativity and originality might already be a significant change for those within academia who still adhere to the more print-based discourse of authorship. As Howard notes, patchwriting does not sit well with traditional notions of authorship (and ideas of originality most of all). Although in the Middle Ages patchwriting was a normal part of writing and scholarship, authorship as we now practice it, including ideas of literary individualism and ownership, is a modern invention. These notions are currently seen as natural facts relating to authorship even though, as Howard rightly argues, our views of what authorship entails keeps shifting. She states that ‘their historical emergence demonstrates them to be cultural arbitraries, textual corollaries to the technological and economic conditions of the society that instated them’ (Howard 1995: 791). Although new digital practices like hypertext and wikis, as well as remix and collaborative writing endeavours, make it increasingly hard to uphold a stable category of authorship, and in the process make it difficult to establish what merits plagiarism, academia nevertheless needs authorship and its plagiarising counterpart as a taboo, to sustain traditional forms of authority. As Howard puts it, ‘the prosecution of plagiarism (…) is the last line of defence for academic standards’ (1995: 793).

            Nonetheless, although I do consider the forms of strategic plagiarism discussed above to constitute an interesting critique of authorship, by definition plagiarism and appropriation also involve re-instating certain aspects of the liberal authorship function; albeit that this authorship function is a different, uncreative or unoriginal one. Additionally, one can argue that the way this specific form of authorship critique is ‘read’ risks installing the authorship function even further. As Bill Friend shows, the latter has partly to do with the lack of ‘meaning’ in these conceptual projects, where the deconstruction of the work has often led to the fetishisation of the author:

Implicit in Johnson’s work is a claim that the assault on the fetishized status of the artwork in (for example), Dada, language writing, or uncreative writing has not led to a similar interrogation of the status of the author. If anything, the questioning of the artwork has often led to a re-inscription of the author function, as readers look for a locus of meaning in texts that resist traditional explication. (Freind 2010)

Similarly Place has pointed out that when there is no meaning to be found within the text, the author again becomes more important: ‘There is nothing to be mined from these texts, no points of constellation or dilation, no subject within which to squat. The text object simply is. The reader is, but is irrelevant. But the thinker becomes quite important’ (2010).

            At this point, then, it becomes important to look at a further anti-authorship critique and practice (and to also return more squarely to the academic realm) in order to discuss examples of anonymous authorship in academic writing.

3.4.2 Anonymous Authorship

Anonymous authorship has a long history in academic writing, most famously as a strategy to avoid censorship or for authors to shield themselves from political or religious prosecution. This is related to what Foucault has called ‘penal appropriation’: ‘Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, ‘sacralised’ and ‘sacralising’ figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive’ (1977). Anonymous authorship can therefore be seen to function in a tradition of escaping responsibility, but it is also triggered by a critique of the individual ownership of a work. For example, Chartier has shown that anonymous authorship was quite normal in medieval and early modern times, whereas with the coming of print a new model came into prominence based on proclaiming individual authorship, as now the author was in a position to profit from these works (1994: 49).

            Anonymous authorship has thus had a long history, one that extends into current scholarly and literary practices. For instance, in 2013 Duke University Press published Speculate this!, a manifesto in book-form to promote ‘affirmative speculation’. The manifesto has been written collaboratively by an anonymous collective, going by the name of ‘(an) uncertain commons’, in line with a more contemporary tradition of anonymous writing, which is exemplified by initiatives in the literary field such as Luther Blissett and Wu Ming, and by the collective pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki that was used by a group of mathematicians in the 20^th century. Uncertain commons define themselves as ‘an open and non-finite group’, their main reasons for choosing anonymous authorship being to ‘challenge the current norms of evaluating, commodifying, and institutionalizing intellectual labour’ (2013). Here they specifically refer to academic labour, and to a situation of growing corporatisation of academia, which increasingly demands ‘quantifiable outcomes for merit and promotion’. Their protest is thus also focused on the ‘proprietary enclosure of knowledge, imagination, and communication’. In this respect they point out that they ‘do not claim authorship’, nor control over the book, which they characterise not as an object but as an ‘emergence’. However, they do not see their actions as a ‘true resistance’, or as standing outside the system, more as ‘playfully inhabiting’ the various forms of discourse that are already available, and which include the exploration of collective intellectual labour and the ‘potentialities of the common’ (uncertain commons 2013). This might explain why they chose to publish Speculate this! as a coherent and bound book-object with an established university press, although it is also available for free online. In this respect the question remains, in what sense has the publisher here taken on some of the authorship functions that the collective tries to dispute, and in what sense, in its final published form, can this book still count as an ‘emergence’.

            In this specific case, as with the case of other collectives such as Wu Ming, it could be argued that the name and brand of the collective can come to stand in for the author, due to the lack of other signifiers. As Scott Drake has made clear: ‘While this may seem obvious given the fact that the name refers to a collective rather than an individual, on its own this does not prevent the name from being taken up into the economic-juridical order as a single name that protects the work as a literary property’ (2011: 31–32). Furthermore, as I made clear above, a celebration of collaborative authorship can also lead to new hegemonic discourses. That said, an uncertain commons do try to evade this narrative when they write that they ‘do not intend to romanticize this form of communal authorship’, which is also apparent in various commercial writing practices and genres, and in the example of the team as a specific post-industrial form of collaborative labour. From their perspective, collaborative writing practices don’t rely on consensus, but on ‘collaborative modes that instead embrace dissensus’ (uncertain commons 2013).

            It is interesting to go back to the idea of intent here, in relationship to what Drake has called ‘self-reflexive anonymous authorship’, where the intent to question authorship, as he puts it, ‘acts as a dissident form of cultural production in the economic-juridical order of neoliberalism’ (2011: 4). The problem here lies in the idea of self-reflexivity where, as in the case of those Creative Commons licenses discussed above, it needs to be the direct intent of the author to publish work anonymously, as authorship is otherwise granted automatically. It is the author that instils the command to not read any meanings into the work related to the authorship function, thus already shaping it from the outset. This act of renunciation is nevertheless interesting, notwithstanding the paradoxical nature of the situation. To actively renounce itself, authorship needs to be self-reflexive first.

         Still, the notion of intent in anonymous authorship can also be directed to create more open-ended meanings in (scholarly) works. This is exactly why anonymous authorship, for Drake, can be such a potent alternative to the current neoliberal system of cultural reproduction and literary property. For example, Drake points out—referring to the literary collective Wu Ming—that by using an open name, it is the intent of this collective to conceptualise their work as ‘material for further expansion’. This openness creates possibilities for seeing anonymous work as functioning within and reproducing an open public domain, instead of promoting individual property (Drake 2011: 40). Nick Thoburn argues similarly when he writes about the use of a multiple name (where anyone is free to take up this moniker to author their texts). Thoburn states that these communal works and forms of writing, although in a way extending the author function, also fragment it, expanding its openness:

Luther Blissett is an ‘open reputation’ that confers a certain authority—the authority of the author, no less—on an open multiplicity of unnamed writers, activists, and cultural workers, whose work in turn contributes to and extends the open reputation. In this sense the author-function is magnified and writ large. But it is such in breach of the structures that generate a concentrated and unified point of rarity and authority, since the author becomes a potential available to anyone, and each manifestation of the name is as original as any other. In this fashion a different kind of individuation emerges, the individuation of the multiple single: Luther Blissett is at once collective, a ‘con-dividual’ shared by many, and fragmented, a ‘dividual’ composed of multiple situations and personalities simultaneously. (2011: 128–129)

Thoburn writes about the ‘desubjectifying politics of anonymity’. What he is interested in here is a communist or collective alternative to the cult of personality and individual genius, as this discourse is both misguided and also seen as perpetuating ‘an essentially capitalist structure of identity’ (Thoburn 2011: 2). How can the politics of collaborative writing offer a critique of capitalism and help to shape an alternative in this respect? As Thoburn argues, the commodity form of the work is still being challenged in these anonymous practices: as no one owns the collaborative name of Luther Blissett, Wu Ming, or an uncertain commons for example, nor of the ‘anonymous author’, this means that the author name is not connected to the ownership of the product. However, as Thoburn also points out, the publication of a novel or of a scholarly book or manifesto as in the case of an uncertain commons, complicates this, as Speculate this! also functions as a clear commodity, of course. Nonetheless, in its published form, Speculate this! is also available for free online. Thoburn therefore argues with respect to openly available anonymous works that ‘in their published form, these books at the least indicate and allow for circuits of distribution not constrained by commercial exchange’ (2011: 13).

            As we have seen from the above examples, the role of publishers in the way anonymous work are published and distributed seems to be very important, as in many ways they can be seen to take over some of the authorship functions here (authority, responsibility etc.). In what sense then do we need to acknowledge the multiple agencies involved in our scholarly knowledge production, and how does this have the potential to break down our liberal humanist notions of authorship?

3.4.3 The Emergence of a Posthumanist Authorship Critique and Practice

Now that we have examined two practices, plagiarism and anonymous authorship, that can be seen as forms of anti-authorship critique, I would like to explore how these relate to the form of authorship critique I want to investigate and promote in this thesis, namely a posthuman one. What would a posthumanist critique and practice of authorship potentially look like? One potential starting point from which to answer this question—and from which to rethink the humanist notions underlying individual liberal authorship, including ideas such as originality, ownership, authority and responsibility—would be to focus on challenging the integrity of the subject and the priority of the human that continues to underlie knowledge production in the humanities. The posthuman subject—or author, I would argue—can then be seen, in the words of Hayles, ‘as an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (1999: 3). This means that a critique of the essentialisms underlying authorship would need to be continuous and would, as Mark Fisher argues with respect to the ‘dismissal of the self-present, conscious subject’, need to be focused on a reformulation of agency (2013). For example, Barad in her posthumanist performative practice focuses on breaking down the barriers between human and nonhuman agency, acknowledging the agency of non-humans—among others, in scientific practices—whilst also refusing to take this human/non-human division for granted. Barad thus wants to actively explore, via a Foucauldian genealogical analysis, how these distinctions are created (2007: 32). What are the practices that stabilise the categories of human and non-human—but also I would add, of the author, the work and the reader? What would a material-discursive notion of authorship then potentially entail? As shown in the previous chapter, specific book objects and author subjects have emerged and solidified out of the cuts into the book as apparatus that we have created and that are created for us as part of our scholarly practices and institutions. How can we reconsider these boundaries while at the same time acknowledging the various entangled agencies involved in the creation of scholarly works—from the material we work with, the media and technology we use, to the various material forms and practices (paper, editors, POD, peer reviewers, software, ink) that accompany a scholarly work’s production? But also, as Hanna Kuusela has shown, the socio-cultural practices, consisting of ‘hybrid networks of both human and non-human actors, technologies and texts’ that shape how a work is subsequently received and consumed (2013).

            As part of the process of continuously questioning these humanist cuts and boundaries, would a posthumanist (critique of) authorship not also have to include both a practical and theoretical critique? For it should involve the discourses, the practices and the material structures in which authorship is embodied, as they are integrally entangled. Hall argues in this respect that a digital posthumanities, which entails a radical critique of the humanist notions underlying our idea of the university and of the humanities, should involve a critical theoretical investment from scholars; but it should just as much be part of our scholarly publishing and authoring practices (especially since theory, as a form of discourse, is also materially enacted: it is a form of practice and vice versa). Hall notes a lack of uptake amongst posthumanist theorists of their ideas and politics in their own research practices. His critique focuses among others on the posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti, who in her recent book The Posthuman (2013) specifically calls for an affirmative, practical and situated critique of the humanism that underpins much of our scholarship in the humanities (2013). However, Hall shows that in her own writing and research practices Braidotti continues to adhere to liberal humanist authorship functions, to such an extent that:

The Posthuman also helps sustain the not unrelated sense of Braidotti as an identifiable, self-contained, individual human, whose subjectivity is static and stable enough for her to be able to sign a contract giving her the legal right to assert her identity as the ‘Author of the Work (…) in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988’, and to claim this original, fixed and final version of the text as her isolable intellectual property – not least via an ‘all rights reserved’ copyright notice. (2013)

Hall points out that this critique does not only apply to Braidotti, but to most theorists that engage with the posthuman.

            Besides providing a practical, alternative and affirmative authorship critique, a posthumanist critique of authorship, as part its criticism of essentialisms, would also have to target the relationship between the individual author and the static and bound book-object. For both can be seen to materially and/or conceptually provide essentialist forms of fixity and hence to promote notions of authority, originality and responsibility in scholarship. Related to what we saw Drake and Thoburn argue in the previous section, a posthumanist critique of authorship should also want to continuously challenge the idea of the ownership of a scholarly work. For our scholarly authorship practices currently function within an object-based neoliberal capitalist system: a system that is fed and sustained by the idea of autonomous ownership of a work, copyright, and a reputation economy based on individualised authors. In this respect, an exploration of more distributed and collaborative notions of authorship, as well as of forms of anti-authorship critique, might help us take attention away from the scholarly work as a product and the book as an academic commodity. This might potentially stimulate re-use and more processual forms of research. Similarly, it might promote a move towards envisioning the production of research as a process in which a variety of actants play a role, both in the production, dissemination and consumption of that research.

            As part of its practical critique of authorship, experimentation with alternative forms of authorship or knowledge production, or with rethinking originality and ownership, should also be an important aspect of a posthumanist authorship. As an ongoing, emerging, and multiplicitous critique and practice of rethinking authorship in an experimental way, it can then both explore and potentially ‘re-cut’ the boundaries of authorship, the authorship-function and anti-authorship critique for our current medial and cultural-economic condition. What is important in this experimental exploration of authorship is again a continuous engagement with expanded concepts of agency, such as are brought forward by posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories. For this would enable us to examine closely and experiment with the interaction that takes place between authors, readers, texts, institutions and technologies in the production of knowledge and the creation of meaning. Here the focus should be on questioning and re-cutting the distinctions that are made between the author-subject and the work-object and the other agencies at play, and the ways these cuts are enacted and by whom. What kind of power relations are at stake in these demarcations, and how can we potentially disturb these? For example, in the specific context of academic book publishing, it might be useful to explore the authorial function of publishers in contemporary scholarly publishing: what is their role in establishing authorship, and in marketing and branding it, in taking responsibility for a work and for turning it into a publishable object? In which respects do they conform to a liberal humanist discourse as part of these practices? Can we, as part of our publishing practices, experiment with more distributed forms of authorship?

            Furthermore, how are we to devise our authorial practices in a world in which the stable objects they supposedly belong to are constantly changing? This means that authorship is not and has never been a stable category itself. How do we revise and rethink our authorship practices to take this into account? What would a processual and emergent—rather than an object-based—authorship look like in this respect? Finally, how do we relate to the role played by these fluid media objects when increasingly they are writing themselves? For example, as Christian Bök has stated, referring to RACTER, an automated algorithm written in the 80s that randomly generated poems: ‘Why hire a poet to write a poem when the poem can in fact write itself?’ (2001: 10). For a lot of our authorship is automated these days, or machinic, seemingly without any intent. In this respect it will be interesting, as part of a posthumanist critique of authorship, to focus on forms of what Bök has called ‘robopoetics’ (2001), defined by Goldsmith as a ‘condition whereby machines write literature meant to be read by other machines, bypassing a human readership entirely’ (2011b). What do we do with machine-generated content, gathered in feeds, and collected through tags and hashtags, sourced from a variety of locations? What about the authorial actions that are being made by computers and software? How do we assess or respond to the authorship related to automatically generated prose, Flarf poetry, Google poetics or the ‘Postmodernism Generator’.[19]

            A posthumanist critique of authorship, as an emergent and continuous practice and theory, can of course potentially consist of a variety of strategies to re-perform the humanist notions underlying our current scholarly authoring practices. However, as part of these strategies it will be essential to continue to actively explore the consequences of the alternative cuts we make. For instance, and as discussed previously, in what sense might we, while critiquing certain aspects of the authorship function (such as individuality), reproduce or re-install other aspects of the authorship function again (such as originality)? In what ways do anonymous authorship practices run the risk of installing more authority in the publisher’s author function, for example? One way we might try to potentially overcome this problem is by analysing closely how the humanist discourse and practices of authorship continue to function within academia, so that our posthumanist critique might at least try to target these forms of authorship in their ongoing complexity.

            When we start to look closely at authorship, and at texts and books (as we have always been doing), and at how their fluidity or open-endedness has been marginalised in favour of a discourse and practices that privilege a more stable identity, this might mean that we need to make more rigorous choices towards what constitutes authority in our scholarly practices; but also towards, as Hall states, the ‘meaning, importance, value and quality’ of texts, something we need to be involved in as authors, as readers and as communities of scholars (2009: 40). This might entail taking more responsibility for the entanglements of which we are a part, and for how agency is distributed and authors and works are mediated through a system.

However, experimenting with remix, collaboration, openness and wikis as such is not enough, not if we invariably end up replicating many of the features associated with print—for reasons of stability, quality etc.—we want to re-examine. Therefore we should see these experiments as critical practices, as a way of challenging humanist notions of authorship by intervening practically in and with them on a continuous basis, in order to try to expand and critique the author function to take into regard alternative, potentially more ethical notions of authority and responsibility, based on distributed forms of human and non-human agency. This might entail performing our practices differently, by amending what we value about scholarship. For as our practices change we have a chance to establish different norms and values at the basis of our scholarship; values that are based on sharing, openness, experimentation, interconnectedness, and otherness, for instance; or that are focused on research as process and less on academic products and with that questioning the reputation economy as it is currently set up. The practices and projects described in this chapter can be an important move towards performing authorship differently. A first step is to be aware of how our own authorial practices and discourses function and how they have been constructed as part of the workings of our academic system. A second step would be to actively rethink and challenge them from that position.

[1] A questioning of authorship’s humanist legacy does not necessarily need to be a distancing of humanism. Authorship’s humanist history already provides the seed for a radical self-critique, where an inherent post-humanist authorship has, as can be argued, always already been a part of its proclaimed ‘otherness’. The question is then how we can aid in a practical posthumanist critique of authorship’s humanist notions, if we see posthumanism as ‘humanism’s ongoing deconstruction’ (Badmington 2000: 9–10, Herbrechter 2013).

[2] Barthes did however experiment with a different ‘language’, a different style of writing, in his novel Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, published in 1977. Foucault has discussed anonymous authorship in his writings (among others in his essay ‘What is an author?’ (1977: 383) and in his interviews. He has also conducted an anonymous interview with Christian Delacampagne for the French newspaper Le Monde, in which he states: ‘Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy’ (Foucault 1990: 323–324). He also expressed his disappointment with the fact that, due to his fame and the immense popularity of his Collège de France seminars, he couldn’t discuss and develop his work in-progress further in a more interactive and collaborative (and less one-dimensional) setting (Foucault 2003: 1–3).

[3] Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the early 1960s.

[4] For the difference in the way authorship is constructed and functions within biomedicine and HEP, for instance, see Cronin (2001).

[5] See for an extensive overview of collaboration in the (digital) humanities see Spiro (2009) http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/examples-of-collaborative-digital-humanities-projects/.

[6] As Bethany Nowviskie describes it: ‘Alt-ac is the neologism and singularly-awkward Twitter hashtag we use to mark conversations about “alternative academic” careers for humanities scholars. Here, “alternative” typically denotes neither adjunct teaching positions nor wholly non-academic jobs’ (2011a: 7).

[7] On the development of this image and the continued importance of the myth of the lone genius and creativity in present day culture, see Montuori and Purser (1995).

[8] For a survey of social media use in research, see Rowlands et al. (2011).

[9] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Expert_opinion

[10] Similarly David Berry (2008: 42) and James Boyle (2009) have argued that contemporary authorship and related notions of ‘creativity’ are being ‘reconfigured to meet the needs of capital’.

[11] It would be interesting to extend this analysis to the academic publishing industry, and the role authorship plays here in commodification processes, something I touched upon earlier but will not discuss further in this context.

[12] For an overview of this controversy and the ensuing debate see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Comparative_studies

[13] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_etiquette

[14] For more on Jimmy Wales push towards a flagged revisions moderation system, see: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/wikipedia-may-restrict-publics-ability-to-change-entries/

[15] See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ and http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

[16] See for instance: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/08/28/the-digital-revolution-and-higher-education/2/

[17] In Uncreative Writing Goldsmith lists projects that have engaged with what in other circles or contexts might be seen as plagiarism:

Over the past five years we have seen works such as a retyping of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day’s copy of the New York Times published as a nine-hundred-page book; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit card application sent to him and bound them into an eight-hundred-page print-on-demand book so costly that even he can’t afford a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire nineteenth-century book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book’s index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the first verse of Dante’s Inferno from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library’s supply; a writing team who scoops status updates off social networking sites and assigns them to names of deceased writers (‘Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight’), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: The more offensive, the more ridiculous, the more outrageous the better. (2011b: 3)

[18] Although it was actually Geoffrey Gatza, the editor of Day’s publisher BlazeVox Books, who made the book, according to the production video that accompanied the publication, and Johnson retracted his claims to authorship and originality of Day as a work completely. As reviewer Bill Freind writes in a review of Day in Jacket Magazine: “In fact, Johnson emailed me to say: ‘After viewing Geoffrey Gatza’s video, I realized that Day was no longer mine. I now fully disown my ‘original’ idea and separate myself completely from the book. Day now belongs to Geoffrey Gatza.’ However, Gatza himself doesn’t seem particularly eager to claim ownership of the text, since BlazeVox Books has a special Goldsmith-to-Johnson conversion kit. It’s a free PDF file that includes the fake jacket blurbs and Johnson’s name that you can download here” (Freind 2010).

[19] Google Poetics consists of poems based on Google autocomplete suggestions. See: http://www.googlepoetics.com/post/35060155182/info; Flarf poetry has been described as the ‘heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems’. See: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-flarf-poetry; The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program which automatically creates random ‘postmodernist essays’, written by Andrew. C. Bulhak, using the Dada Engine. See: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/