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The death of the Author  2.0

The (second) removal of the author is merely a historical fact.

The figure of the romantic genius was born in the XVIII century. Since this time, many speculations have surrounded the myth of authorship and its aura. Then it has been the culmination of capitalist ideology, in which the greatest importance is typically attributed to the author as an individual. The images and ideas to be found in ordinary culture are now often tyrannically centered on the lives of authors – on their tastes, and passions.

By the first decade of the XXI century, the myth of the author had died.

The user-producer is a idea that describes the digital experience, in which the freedoms embedded within the digital culture allow for ordinary people to become artists and producers. This model fundamentally challenges the traditional assumptions of authorship - it moves away from the idea of the romantic notion of authorship, which saw authorship and cultural production as an isolated activity of a genius sitting and creating something out of nothing.

In the digital act of copying data we lose the concept of the original and we increasingly forget the author. So the only effective things that we remember and feel are narrative codes and moral signs.

The democratic diffusion of tools for creating and for spreading content, the explosion of economy of imagination, the sharing of intellectual products, the prosumers and the social network of web 2.0 - these factors have desacralized the figure of the author and have stripped it of its aura. It has been plunged into the Pangea of Knowledge, which is the only one creator of human culture, transversal in time and in place.

As authorship becomes indistinguishable from the multiplicity of authors, this profusion transforms the culture and their creators into a unique body. It's the collective intelligence; it's the return of the rules of oral and folk culture. Collaborative creativity, influences, remix, sampling, reshaping and meshing of diverse publications of intellectual products, from ideas and concepts, to arts and researches; these are the causes that have diminished the character of originality, individuality and autonomous composition.

Culture consists of multiple writings, indeed, everything is to be distinguished. This multiplicity is collected, united and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was.

So the author goes back to its old work of being a compiler, and its name isn't important anymore. It's the inevitable way: increasingly it becomes difficult to be sure of attribution - it might not refer to a real individual.

Again as in the past, anonymous narrative contributions are the roots of our culture and our perception of reality. Contemporary examples of such social spaces are YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Blog Sphere. In the end, the fifteen minutes of fame for each of us goes down to zero seconds, but each little piece of art becomes infinitely more useful for human beings.
It's the forest that takes its shape from the tree, not vice versa.

The quote represents culture itself as the principle of human becoming, the improving of human thinking, from quoting to quoting, from the evolution of ideas to others and their negation. Culture is a tissue of citations, resulting from thousands of sources of culture and signs. The history of human thinking is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

AS FOLK :: AS ORAL CULTURE :: AS networked culture.

Authorship, originality is of no or little relevance in virtually all traditional forms of popular culture all over the world. Most folk songs and folk tales, are collective anonymous creations in public domain. Variation, modifications and translations are traditional encouraged as part of their tradition.
Much author founded much of its wealth on folk tales, by taking them out of public domain and turning them into proprietary and exploiting that.

The same is true for many works considered part of the high cultural canon, crafted by unidentified, often collective authors: Homer's epics for example, or the tales of 1001 nights, which were spread by storytellers and of which no authoritative, 'original' written version ever existed.
In the middle age, and renaissance, original authorship was even rather more disregarded than encouraged. Literally works typically render themselves canonical by inventing new stories, but rewriting existing one, so many adaptions of the same.
Originality of the work to recognize the value that various user contribute through their modifications and adaptions to an existing work, thus placing higher premium on collaborative production than on isolated production.
In fact the history of cultural production has, to a large extent been the history of collaborative production, and this is true in all kinds of human achievements. Many work considered part of the high-cultural canon, crafted by unidentified, often collective authors.
Shakespeare was brilliant play writing we should also remember the fact that he drew rather liberally from various source, form history, mythology and the work of his peers, as inspiration and as source of modify.

Language which speaks, not the author, linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as is no more than the man who says language knows a "subject", not a "person", end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it.

Work of art tries to set itself free from its artist, challenging preconceived ideas or opinions, sometimes being able to exceed the importance of its creator.

 
" Right or wrong, once these sayings get into the language they're impossible to eradicate "
David McKie
 


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Some bibliography:

Beam me up, Scotty, David McKie, The Guardian, 2005
Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, 2006
OS Tactics for Collective Art Practice, Saul Albert, 1999
Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, 1967
Plagiarism, Madrid, La Casa Encendida, ArteLecu, 2005
Guide to open content licenses, Lawrence Liang, Piet Zwart Istitute, 2005
Du bon usage de la piraterie, Florent Latrive, Exils, 2004
The work of wrt in the age of mechanical reproduction,W.Benjamin, 1935
The Mag.net reader, M. Eraso, A. Ludovico, S. Krekovic, 2006
Falso è Vero, Various, AAA, 1998
International Artistic Without-Sign Movement, Manifesto, 2006