Madeline and Jen both wrote thoughtful comments on my previous post on this topic. If you go look at those before you read the rest of this, it’ll probably make more sense. I was originally going to respond in the comments, but it became too long and so here I am.

If I’m hearing both of them right, it’s identity - and specifically the element of original genius, the uniqueness that an individual brings to their work - that’s bothering them. This is an entirely valid point. However, I think it’s important to examine the fact that this concern is tied to the ways we think about authorship now, in this civilization. It hasn’t always been this way. Most Authorship scholars argue that the notion of original genius is a fairly recent (18th century) development, and that prior to that inspiration (creativity) came from an external source, i.e. the Muse or the Gods. The writer (artists/composer/etc) was said to be subject to fits of divine madness while creating, to literally not be in his own mind. What if we work from this vantage point? Does this make the notion of Author as brand more palatable? It seems to me that under that construct, the person we would call an Author was even more a label associated with a product that s/he was not viewed as directly responsible for.

What if we work from a high poststructuralist perspective? Barthes, in Death of the Author, says the birth of the reader is at the cost of the death of the Author, that once a text enters the world the physical Author ceases to be particularly important in connection with it. ("The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and Author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after" (145).) In What Is an Author?, Foucault claims the Author is a function with four distinct traits:

• The Author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourse.
• It does not affect all discourses the same way at all times and in all types of civilization.
• It is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations.
• It does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simulataneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals (113).

In other words, authorship is a societal construct that we invented to fulfill a number of duties. It works in different ways in different societies and in different time periods. If we take the poststructuralist approach and claim the Author is either dead or a function, how does that alter our discussion? I think this sort of Author is very much equivalent to a brand.

There’s got plenty more to say about this, of course, but I have an exam in two hours that I've got to get going for. I’ve been struggling with the identity card a lot lately, particularly when it comes to authorship in blogs, with their simple, pseudonymous, anonymous and multi-authored constructs. I followed the poststructuralist line in my thesis, and in the six months since my defense have become more and more unhappy with the way this line of thinking pans out. Any thoughts on how all that works are more than welcome, as is continued discussion of the topic du jour.