[spectre] THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR 2.0

[bid]

http://www.peoplequotepeople.com
http://www.peoplequotepeople.com
http://www.peoplequotepeople.com


THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR  2.0


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

The figure of romantic genius was born in XVIII century, since this time, 
many speculations have been doing around the myth of author and its aura. 
Then it has been the culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached 
the greatest importance to the "person" of the author. The image of ideas 
to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his 
person, his life, his tastes, his passions.
In the first decade of XXI century, the myth of the author die.

The user-producer is a concept that speak to the digital experience and the 
freedoms that this digital culture allow for ordinary people to become 
artist and producer. This model fundamentally challenges the traditional 
assumptions of author, 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 act of copy, many usually in the digital world, as we lose the 
concept of the original, we forget the author ever more. So the only 
effective things that we remember and we feel, are narrative codes and 
moral signs.

Some factors as the democratic diffusion of tools for create and for spread 
content, the explosion of economy of imagination, the sharing of 
intellectual products, the figure of prosumer and the social network of web 
2.0, these have desacralized the figure of author, these have stripped its 
aura, it has been plunged in the Pangea of Knowledge, which is the only one 
creator of human culture, transversely in time and in place.

Authorship becomes indistinguishable from the multiplicity of authors, this 
profusion transforms the culture and their creators in 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 mesh of diffuse publications of intellectual products, from ideas and 
concepts, to arts and researches; these are the causes that have diminished 
the character of originally, individually and autonomy composition.
Culture consists of multiple writing, 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 back to its old work of compiler, and its name isn't 
important anymore. It's the inevitable way: ever more become difficult to 
be sure of attribution, so 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 this social 
spaces are YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Blog Sphere in general. In 
the end, the fifteen minutes of fame for each of us, go down to zero 
seconds, but each little piece of art becomes infinitely more useful for 
human being. It's the forest that take shape of tree, not vice versa.

The quote represents the 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. The culture is a tissue of 
citations, resulting from thousand 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



SOME BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Beam me up, Scotty, David McKie, The Guardian, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1560194,00.html
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
TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter 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, 2005