Cinnabar and Alabaster: authorship Archives

January 24, 2006

marxisistic (authorship 26.2/25)

Eagleton, Terry. "The Author as Producer." Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: U California P, 1976. 59-76.

1 sentence summary:art like other things & lit like other art isn't a miracle born out of nothing (individual genius) but is a produced (social) commodity; marxist theorists have different ways of theorizing authorship within this frame.

passages:
68. "for brecht and benjamin, the author is primarily a producer analogous to any other maker of a social product. they oppose...the romantic notion of the author as creator--as the god-like figure who mysteriously conjures his handiwork out of nothing. such an inspirational, individualist concept of artistic production makes it impossible to conceive of the artist as a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal."
69. for marx & engels "to divorce the literary work from the writer as 'living historical human subject' is to 'enthuse over the miracle-working power of the pen.' once the work is severed from the author's historical situation, it is bound to appear miraculous and unmotivated"; "pierre macherey is equally hostile to the idea of the author as 'creator.' for him, too, the author is essentially a producer who works up certain given materials into a new product. the author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values, myths, symbols, ideologies come to him already worked-upon....macherey is indebted here to the work of althusser," whose definition of "practice" means "'any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using a determinate means of "production").' [9] this applies, among other things, to the practice we know as art. the artist uses certain means of production...to transform the materials of language and experience into a determinate product. there is no reason why this particular transformation should be more miraculous than any other. [10]"
70. lukács: "ragards the literary work as a 'spontaneous whole' which reconciles the capitalist contradictions between essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, individual and social whole. in overcoming these alienations, art recreates wholeness and harmony. brecht, however, believes this to be a reactionary nostalgia. art for him should expose rather than remove those contradictions...the works should not be symmetrically complete in itself, but like any social product should be completed only in the act of being used."
74. in marxist criticism art, while it has been "converted into a commodity and warped by ideology...can still partially reach beyond those limits. it can still yield us a kind of truth--not, to be sure, a scientific of theoretical truth, but the truth of how men experience their conditions of life, and of how they protest against them. [16]"; "there is, however, an obvious danger inherent in a concern with art's technological basis. this is the trap of 'technologism'--the belief that technical forces in themselves, rather than the place they occupy within a whole mode of production, are the determining factor in history. brecht and benjamin sometimes fall into this trap; their work leaves open the question of how an analysis of art as a mode of production is to be systematically combined with an analysis of it as a mode of experience. what, in other words, is the relation between 'base' and 'superstructure' in art itself?"

Posted by ttobryan at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

marxisistic (authorship 26.2/25)

Eagleton, Terry. "The Author as Producer." Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: U California P, 1976. 59-76.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2006

doctor amy says (authorship 27/25)

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

1 sentence summary: by inviting students to co-investigate the nature of authorship & their own authority as students & writers we can help overcome the cultural split between students and Authors that undermines the validity & relevance of the work they do.

passages
5. despite writing for a newspaper for a year, "or maybe because of it--because i had had the experience of seeing my name in print and still being the same person i had been all along--i never really considered myself an author. publication didn't change me the way i assumed it changed an author.
10. definitions: "throughout this project, i use the term 'author' to signify a commonplace understanding of the term: one who writes with originality, autonomy, morality, and proprietorship"; "for the most part, when i use the term 'author,' i mean what foucault means by the 'author-function.' an author is not a flesh-and-blood human being; an author is instead ephemeral. part of the purpose of this project is to point to the cultural baggage that accompanies the term 'author' because i believe that composition studies' adoption of the term is problematic."
15. more definitions: "i define co-investigation as the cooperative study of an issue of concern to all parties. all parties have experience and knowledge to contribute to the study, experience and knowledge that shapes and reshapes the questions and objects of that investigation. i make no claims of equality...as the teacher involved in the present study, i exercised an institutional form of authority and i exercised power that was not available to the other members..."
18. foss & foss's useful definitions: "'experiential expertise'--expertise based on knowledge of personal experience" vs. "'presentational expertise'--expertise based on the selection and representation of experience, an expertise that has traditionally been associated with the researcher rather than the researched"
20. the difference: "whereas critical pedagogy aims to empower students with critical knowledge that the teacher already possesses, co-investigation aims to engage students in questions to which teachers do not already know the answers"
23-4. our positionality only enables us to do so much: "while teachers may have the power to grant students some degree of institutional authority in the classroom, they do not have the legitimizing power to authorize students as writers" & a conception of authority as grant-able--power the powerful can choose to share--"fails [in this context] because it rests on the assumption that teachers possess the requisite cultural authority to authorize others. my institutional authority in the writing classroom enables me perhaps to empower students as institutional agents, but it does not enable me to empower students as writers. my institutional authority in the writing classroom can position me as a beneficent teacher working to empower students in an institution designed to keep students in their place. but a student's writerly authority comes not from my sanctioning of her writing--though my sanctioning of her work or my belief in the value of her work certainly is part of the writing's symbolic production....i cannot, as a teacher, authorize a student's writing as anything other than student writing."
38. "despite composition studies' professed agenda of forwarding student empowerment, the field has been slow to acknowledge the workings of an author/student binary informing so much of the work we do with students and their writing. like any other binary, the first term, author, holds the elevated position of dominance, while the second term, student, holds the position of the dominanted. where authors are required to be original, students who write are often required 'not to be original. a student's job is to comprehend and repeat the ideas of others. yet, paradoxically, students are required to be autonomous in their writing' (howard, 'binaries' 2)."
39. the binary in (robie's version of) crowley: "where an author's text could be described as timeless because of its universality, a student's text could be described as timeless because it is 'expendable'...because of its status as practice for the 'real thing.' if an author is ephemeral, a student is a very real material presence in the classroom. and, if an author is presumed to be possessed of morals, a student is immoral, ready and willing to steal the words of others at the first opportunity"
44. & building off brodkey, "it is not enough simply to replace the masculine transcendent author in the garret with an image of a writing student or of a favorite female author."
47. on joe harris's statement in Cs: his policy "is based on the notion that 'professional' authors have control over their work after it is published" so that "textual control becomes one of the boundaries that separates student from author, via the assumption that students need a kind of protection that authors themselves are rarely afforded. citation of one's work--positive or negative--is a mark of respect for any writer; it means, after all, that one's work has been read and has been deemed worthy of response"
48. in her own treatment of students' work: "by treating hickel as an author whose work is worthy of discussion, i am according him the respect that accompanies any citation, be it supportive or antagonistic. in contrast, creating a separate class of citation for students, as harris suggests and as we've been doing for decades now, places them outside the economy of citation, depriving them of the possibility that their writing might provoke agreement or disagreement"
49-50. as trimmer points out, "to remain the heroes of teaching narratives, we must construct the student as deficient, as needing our help. to construct the student as deficient is ultimately to construct ourselves as equally deficient, for we are and have historically been identified with the low status of those we teach"--so treating them as kids is so easy it's almost automatic.
53-4. foucault's 4 characteristics, according to amy who can count better than he can: "the author-function
1. is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses;
2. does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture;
3. is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; and
4. does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subject positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy"
55. "like the author-function, the student funciton does not 'operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times.' there are exceptions to all of the patterns that i will claim make up a student function in composition scholarship, but it is their status as exceptions that prove the existence of a student function. the student function, too, is defined 'through a series of precise and complex procedures'--the patterns informing composition's treatment of students and their writing. and finally, the student function, like the author-function, 'does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual'; the student of the student function...refers not to an actual person but to a timeless, sexless beginner, a nameless stand-in for the individual students we teach."
59. "readers want to know everything they can about an author as a person--what he eats for breakfast, how and where he writes best, how many lovers he took while writing the book that made him famous. yet teachers want to know next to nothing about the biography of a student writer as a writer. many teachers prefer to keep 'him' ageless, sexless, timeless. pass him, move on to the next group of students next semester"
60. "the discourse of the student function is deeply engrained in our work; it will take much more than simply reversing the Author/student binary to effect a change in the way our disicpline perpetuates the student function."
61. "our perceptions of students as transients, often realized in our public expressions of delight at facing an entirely new group of students each semester, allow--even encourage--us to perpetuate the student function. why not keep our students anonymous, keep complaining about them, keep describing them as the opposite of professional writers (whose functions, in their roles as authors are anything but transient) when we know we don't have to deal with them after this semester?"
75. the goal: to "begin to represent students as social, historical, political, gendered, complicated people in stories that go beyond the binary of author/student"
80. no proponent of artificial authorization, robillard argues instead for "approach[ing] student writing as student writing--with all that entails for student authorship, legitimation, and rhetorical situation--rather than working to authorize student writing by addressing it to 'real' audiences. approaching it [in this way] means readin git for what it might teach us about writing in the university rather than reading it as the writing of 'authors.' it means acknowledging students as contributors to our knowledge-making"
85-6. in the bartholomae/elbow debate "elbow argues for treating students as writers as opposed to treating students as academics. because the debate sets up binary oppositions--and is regularly cited in composition studies as representing binary positions--what is often overlooked are not only the assumptions about authorizing student writers but an early challenge to those assumptions. reread through the lens of student authorship, bartholomae's challenge to the process movement's discourse of empowerment not only provides a new vision of the well-known debate but also shows another way in which that debate represents a central moment in the history of composition theory"--"authority, as represented in bartholomae's illustration, is a quality that teachers posses, that they can give to others. this begs the question--do teachers have to--can teachers--relinquish the authority they bring to the classroom in order that students may posses writerly authority?": this "raises specific questions about how we understand students' textual authority. what or who can authorize a student as a writer? how does attention to one's cultural, historical, social, material situation function in the production of text? how does the ideology of the autonomous author contribute to a student's understanding of herself as a writer?"
95. "if we think of composition studies as a field of cultural production and if we recognize that teachers cannot grant students authority as writers because the kind of authority that teachers possess is primarily institutional, it is worth considering how the field of composition studies...is premised on the tension between cultural capital and economic capital"; "if we conceive of writing skills as primarily a form of economic capital, it makes sense to encourage students to seek authority as writers from audiences other than the teacher, for these are the kinds of audiences that they will be required to address once they enter the 'real world.' if, however, we conceive of writing as a way of knowing...we are less likely to focus our attention on the world outside the classroom" (& what do we know about the "real world" anyway?): "we might think of scholars in composition as participating in a field of restricted production. we write primarily for other composition scholars. our work is only granted value by virtue of its being authorized by others in the field"
150. "at the same time that composition studies wants to use autobiographical writing as a way to authorize student writing early in a required writing course--to establish them, however briefly, as authors--the field limits its representations of studen autobiographical writing to examples that illustrate 'voice' or 'authenticity'"--& this starkly limits the sorts of contributions to our knowledge we allow them to make.
169-70. "our scholarly representations of students--as well as students' expectations about our representations of students--affect their perceptions of themselves as writers or as non-writers. students cast themselves and the authors of their assigned texts in familiar power relationships in two significant ways....many students referred to themselves by first name only yet referred to the authors by last name only. secondly, the assignment explicitly asks students to include an alphabetical cast of characters. while some students left themselves off of the list altogether, others put themselves last on the list despite my request that they include their own names alphabetically. students' obedience to the hierarchy of teachers over students superseded their obedience to the requirements of this teacher--me--and to the assignment i'd created"
172. the problem of conflation: "in 'writing and Writing,' crowley points to the concept of 'author-ity' as that which distinguishes poststurctural approaches to texts and current-traditional approaches to texts. 'author-ity' to crowly is 'the relative appropriation of privilege by a text through the agency of its author's name' (94). the problem with crowley's term is that it enfolds the term 'author' into 'authority' unproblematically....an author is more than one who writes with authority. simply referring to students as authors in the scholarship does not change the authority with which they write for their teachers or for 'real-world' audiences."
173. in her class, "authority replaced author as the object of inquiry because authority was something we could discuss and debate with relatively little symbolic capital at stake. as members of this culture, each of us in the classroom held dear the notion of the autonomous, originary author in ways that made challenges to that notion difficult....as a group, we did not find ourselves so attached to a notion of authority as autonomous....even more significantly, students and i found it easier to discuss their authority over their writing rather than their authorship of their writing because 'authority' is a term that can apply to any writer, while authorship applies only to those who have been published or who make a living from their writing."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

leci n'est pas (authorship 26.1/25)

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

this is not a summary: last night i explained, quite coherently, i thought, the "author-function" to our friend cordell, beginning and ending with a chinese menu as an example of a textual object that has at some point by someone been "authored" but is not in any way representative of the "author-function" (i.e. it doesn't have an "Author") & taking a circuitous route through discussions of William Shakespeare, Quentin Tarantino, and the culturally-acknowledged author-function of the Walt Disney corporation. i tried convincing my husband that this counted as proof that i understood the idea well enough that i didn't have to keep reading foucault, but he was having none of it, & thus the notes that follow.

passages:
114-5. the guiding question here: "why did i use the names of authors in the order of things" if he didn't intend to explain & be held accountable for everything those authors' work might mean, imply, connect to, complicate? the answer, he says, will show up somewhere else; what's interesting to this essay is "the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figured who is outside and precedes it"
117. cultural context & (?) that whole barthes business (?): "we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. if we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing"
118. "the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change"; killer questions: "what is necessary to its composition, if a work is not something written by a person called an 'author?'"; "if an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or comunicated to others?"; "assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said...to be included in his work?....if we wish to publish the complete works of nietzshce, for example, where do we draw the line?...can we agree on what 'everything' means?" & what about his laundry lists?
119-20. the mystical "notion of écriture"--which "stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment" but not "the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text, of an author's meaning"..."has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. the extremely visible signs of the author's empirical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of religious and critical modes of characterization. in granting a primordial status to writing, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin or a critical belief in its creative nature?"
121. so what? "it is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; god and man died a common death. rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance....in this context we can briefly consider the problems that arise in the use of an author's name? what is the name of an author? how does it function?" (& he has no answers, of course); "obviously not a pure and simple reference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) has other than indicative functions. it ismore than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is...the equivalent of a description" and "a proper name has other functions than that of signification: when we discover that rimbaud has not written la chasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of the proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and...they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions"
122. "the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author's name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way"--things we found out about a person we think of as an author could change our impressions of him/her as a person but not an author or as an author but not a person.
123. "these differences indicate that an author's name is not simply an element of speech....its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification" doing 3 things: it "can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others"; it "establishes different forms of relationships among texts"; & it "characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse"; from another perspective, "unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts--separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. it points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. the author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence"
124. therefore "in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and...an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author"; "in dealing with the 'author' as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses." 4 features characterize "only those books or texts with authors": (1) "they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago"
125. (2) "the 'author-function' is not universal or constant in all discourse....the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call 'literary' (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author"
127. (3) "this 'author-function'...is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. it results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power....nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author...are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts" (& where's 4?)
128. st. jerome's 4 "norms" that "will disclose the involvement of several authors" or give away inconsistencies in an author's presentation: (a) consistent quality, (b) expressed ideas don't disagree, (c) "stylistic uniformity," & (d) a lack of anachronistic disconnects; in modern criticism the same concerns appear
129. but it's more complicated: "it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive amterial, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author" (pronouns etc.)
130-1. "the 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and imply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy."
131. "even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of much more than a book--of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate....we could say that such authors occupy a 'transdiscursive' position" such that "the distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts"
132. his examples, "marx and freud, as 'initiators of discursive practices,' not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but...they also made possible a certain number of differences. they cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated"
137-8. why he cares: in addition to helping categorize discourse, "the 'author-function' could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships"; thus questions about who exactly the subject/author/originator is are less useful/important/valuable than these:
"'what are the modes of existence of this discourse?'
'where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?'
'what placements are determined for possible subjects'
'who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?'"

Posted by ttobryan at 07:11 PM | Comments (1)

re-reading syllabi (authorship 24.3/15)

Fuller, Mary J., and Jean Ann Lutz. "Constructing Authority: Student Responses and Classroom Discourse." Discourse Studies in Composition. Eds. Ellen L. Barton and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002.

1 sentence summary: the authors find upon analysis of their own language use and students' responses to survey questions that their presentations of authority--as perceived--weren't in line with--or nearly as simple and clear-cut as--the impressions they intended to be making.

passages
357. "just how complicated these notions of authority might be": "our female colleagues tell us that students are sometimes upset when they discover that their teachers enforce late paper penalties, whereas our male colleagues enforce the same such penalties with less student complaint. the students in male-taught and 'male-marked' classes seem simply to expect that class policies will be enforced....grade grievances are brought more often against women than men (roughly three to one), and many of them involve the students' anger at their teachers who enforced late penalties and attendance policies and reflected these in final grades. in female marked classes, we surmised, students believed that they wouldn't be held to those policies, even if those policies were clearly outlined in the syllabus"
360-1. why the heck not?!? who in the world would discussing & negotiating questions injure? --> "complying with IRB requirements about the interactions of teachers and students meant that we could not, as feminist qualitative research encourages, negotiate our questions with our students and refine them as we went along"
370-1. "when we analyzed our syllabi...we saw more clearly the spaces in which we acknowledged or even touted our authority and the comparable spaces in which we decided to give it away. what became most clear in this analysis is that we were in control. empowered as we are by the institution in which we work, the positions that we hold, and the imbalance of power in the student-teacher relationship, we were the ones who determined what authority to exhibit and when. maybe our classrooms were, more than we had realized, marked male....as we listened to our tapes and read our transcripts, we were at first disconcerted to find that we not only [sic] exhibited authority, but that our students sensed this authority, expected it, and even embraced it. most importantly, their interpretation of our stance was the deciding factor in how we were 'marked.' sometimes they found authority in spaces where we meant to give it up, and other times they sought authority in places where, despite our attempt to negotiate shared responsibility, they expected us to be unyielding....they claimed confusion: they saw that sometimes we were authoritarian; sometimes we were not"; ultimately "we found...that even when we consciously attempted to be nonauthoritarian, we punctuated our approachability with authoritarian moves....and we found, that in our attempts to be nonauthoretarian, students sometimes interpreted us as nurturing, sometimes as irritating"

Posted by ttobryan at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

where we come from (authorship 24.2/25)

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.

1 sentence summary: imitation--as both a key theoretical element and set of practices--was fundamental to ancient rhetoric, in many ways that correspond to activities we still occasionally conduct--but with less intentionality and less pervasiveness--in today's classrooms.

the point:
the desired product of a (writer's) rhetor's work wasn't always conceived of in ways that isolate authors and their ideas from all others in service of the god of originality; classically rhetors learned to do what they do from the works of others, and were expected to--not critiqued for--trying on the words of others, practicing their patterns and approaches, and absorbing (sometimes by way of direct memorization) in order to use, the language of their forebears.

(do i really need to quote bits to make this point?)

Posted by ttobryan at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2006

sideshow freaks (authorship 25/25)

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

1 sentence summary: our disciplinary practices--since & in many ways because of the very founding of our discipline--enable if not require us to continually position students and their writing as carnival exhibits--as "others" who are of low status but worthy of curious scrutiny (and needing both intervention and perpetuation).

6. our baggage: "composition helps define 'levels' of writing, authorship, and status that are necessary for vernacular literary study to maintain its traditional place in the center of mass education. it also…supports a comprehensive social desire to maintain the cultural ideal of 'social place.' but as a carnivalesque site within consequential discourse hierarchies, composition additionally embodies a contrary impulse, giving both its faculties and its students what bakhtin called 'temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order'"…."in addition, composition instruction offers the culture at large an emblem for the repugnant 'body' of writing by individuals. it is an institutionalized way of discriminating between those who will or will not occupy a space for contributing to (and for changing) powerful discourse traditions"
13. (amy tagged this: ) "if we are to contemplate more than personal or local causes for the stunning regularity in descriptions of prejudice against student writing and those who implement instruction in it, or of incidents that appear to pit 'composition' against 'literature,' we must go beyond, or before, examples to identify and explain patterns that reproduce them"
54-5. "as foucault often pointed out," the "kind of enclosed unity" the english courses of the american college represented as composition was developing "requires 'outsiders who make insiders insiders.' like the carnival, composition's moment of origination involved allowing it to act as a relay, a metaphoric switch that diffuses the 'center' throughout lower, metaphorically and actually rural orders"…."as the symbolic national domain of 'literature' was suddenly produced over and against the actual public realm, a newly identifiable, low, and now alien 'writing'" emerged; "nonliterary writing by the unentitled acquired…implications and connotations of murkiness and mythic danger. in composition, literary authorship could be openly compared to the inadequacies of popular writing and especially to inadequate student authorship. like early american popular writing, institutionalized writing-as-composition could be implicitly demeaned as unequal to writing from the advanced elect"
57. "whatever clinical distance a written text might place between a teacher and the student's person was compressed by transferring images of recitation onto the situation of written examinations. in the continuing view that a student's written language reveals personal flaws as readily as his speech, the quality of the student can be identified with the correct or incorrect quality of that student's texts. the embarrassments that students were meant to feel after corrections of their (appropriately) 'mechanical work' placed them well within the range of shame that idiosyncratic speech, or the body, can evoke. writing, in fact, exposes errors and infelicities that speech might elide. thus a pedagogic obsession with mechanical correctness also participated in a broadly conceived nineteenth-century project of cleanliness….undertaken in all good as well as bad faith to convince the masses of their dirtiness while saving them from it. it used the figure of separation between human and animal in an impulse to promote scrubbed surfaces….it raised the issue of contamination from the pointedly unwashed masses, while also…placing them in the dangerous site of the physically messy carnival"
59. as the "theme" developed, "observations from personal experience and narratives about them replaced any purchase on participating in public discourse the student might once have had. consequently, both the written status of mechanically marked compositions and the content of those compositions were now reduced to objects of inconsequentiality."
61. the development & promulgation of assignments in generic "modes rather than actual purposes for writing results in convincing both students and teachers that their already demeaned 'practical' instruction further has no actual practical purpose, except by rather oblique metaphoric extensions that suggest (as rhetorical education never had) that writing can be undertaken and executed well without a specific goal in mind."
68. lit leaking in & taking over served to "increasingly identify introductory writing courses with the result of reading 'important' literature, leaving individual purposes for composing to more advanced courses"
98. the composition course, as it has traditionally been practiced, "divorces writing from any claim on a value system and instead contains it in 'valuing' or 'processing' of language that is even purer than the literary subject's perspective on specific literary objects. in its emphasis, for instance, on 'meaning,' without reference to meaning to, the course extends…the new critical desire to give priority to meanings that are entirely within written language"; "literary subjectivity, and now the subjectivity inevitably created by allowing composing processes to become purposes for writing, focus on the author/writer, not on the results of authorship or of writing"
100. "the subjectivity of composition now created by its model programs appears to result for its students in an infantile and solipsistic relation to the results of writing
198-9. ideally, "with….commitments to articulating many relations between discourse and power and to undertaking close analyses of the social implications of current and past writing pedagogies….students of writing might be imagined as actual people in actual writing situations. such writers do not write without reference to the appropriateness of that action in a specific circumstance. they conceive of resistant written language as the actual form of their desires, not as a set of determinate 'meanings' that they can singularly shape. given responsibility to account for the place their writing will take among others in specific situations—its particularities and the responses it is designed to elicit—students could become aware of the window on full participation in discourse communities their writing represents"; in reality, concerning the roles we allow for, "students are rarely asked to become either the 'writing teachers' that successful writers actually must be for themselves or the teachers of reading they must be for others."

Posted by ttobryan at 02:01 PM | Comments (3)

January 14, 2006

how form/content made writing (authorship 24.1/25)

Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.

1 sentence summary: that modern notions of copyright & textual ownership emerged around eighteenth century is becoming a field commonplace, but little discussion has heretofore centered around why; specifically one theoretical move--fichte's--at the end of a cumulative sequence makes all the difference.

passages:
426. "the 'author' in its modern sense is a relatively recent invention...the product of the rise in the eighteenth century of a new group of individuald: writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writings to the new and rapidly expanding reading public"; previously "in the renaissance and [its] heritage in the first half of the eighteenth century the 'author' was an unstable marriage of two distinct concepts": "the craftsman" and
427. "something hither"--"inspired--by some muse, or even god"; "in neither of these conceptions is the writer regarded as distinctly and personally responsible for his creation" but is "always a vehicle or instrument: regarded as a craftsman, he is a skilled manipulator of predefined strategies for achieving goals dictated by his audience; understood as inspired, he is equally the subject of independent forces, for the inspired moments of his work...are not any more the writer's sole doing than are its more routine aspects, but are instead attributable to a higher, external agency"; eighteenth-century theorists departed from this compounded model of writing in two significant ways. they minimized the element of craftsmanship...and they internalized the source of...inspiration" so that it now came "from within the writer himself": "original genius"
429. thus "from a (mere) vehicle of preordained truths...the writer becomes an author"; wordsworth's observation about the burden of responsibility this inheres: "ever Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is enjoyed"; it's a catch, see: "the great writer who produces something original is doomed to be misunderstood"; to be great, the Poet "has to call forth and to communicate power" (<--wordsworth), "that is, empower his readers to understand his new work"
430. young: "[the author's] works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who...thinks and composes"
431. lessing as the starving artist writing to his brother: "take my brotherly advice and give up your plan to live by the pen....it's the only way to avoid starving"
432. schiller's writerly positionality: "the public is now everything to me"
433. why they were starving & dependent on the public (18th-cent Germany): "with the rise of the middle classes, demand for reading material increased steadily, enticing writers to try to earn a livelihood from the sale of their writings to a buying public. but most were doomed to be disappointed, for the requisite legal, economic, and political arrangements and institutions were not yet in place to support the large number of writers who came forward"
434-8. writers got honoraria; publishers got privileges (sometimes), but nobody really got paid.
439. and thus enter the book pirates! (stage left)
440. where theory comes back in: "the problem of how these two levels of discourse--the legal-economic and the esthetic--interact is one that historians of criticism have barely explored. this is unfortunate because it is precisely in the interplay of the two levels that critical concepts and principles as fundamental as that of authorship achieved their modern form"
442. like robin hood, "the weight of opinion was for a long time with the book pirates[!] for the reading public as a whole considered itself well served by a practice which not only made inexpensive reprints available but could also be plausibly credited with holding down the price of books in general through the competition it created."
443-4. "a variety of defenses was offered for book piracy[!] but the most pertinent to the genesis of the modern concept of authorship are those which sought to rationalize the practice philosophically": ex. "the book is not an ideal object....it is a fabrication made of paper upon which thought symbols are printed"; <--"to ground the author's claim to ownership of his work, then, it would first be necessary to show that this work transcends its physical foundation"; & another ex. (christian sigmund krause) "once expressed, it is impossible for it to remain the author's property.... it is precisely for the purpose of using the ideas that most people by books"--who can then "do with it whatever [they] will. but the one thing [they] should be prohibited from doing is copying or reprinting it?....would it not be just as ludicrous for a professor to demand that his students refrain from using some new proposition he had taught them?....just let someone try taking back the ideas he has originated once they have been communicated so that they are, as before, nowhere to be found. all the money in the world could not make that possible"
444-5. fichte's magic trick: (1) "distinguishing between the physical and ideal aspects of a book--that is, between the printed paper and content" & (2) then further "divides the ideal" into "the material aspect, the content of the book, the ideas it presents; and...the form of these ideas"; thus pragmatically in addition to its physical form "the material aspect, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents also pass to the buyer," but "the form in which these ideas are presented, however, remains the property of the author eternally." & shazam! "fichte solves the philosophical puzzles to which the defenders of piracy had recurred, and establishes the grounds upon which the writer could lay claim to ownership of his work--could lay claim, that is, to authorship."
447. more philosophy: herder's "herb" & "animal" metaphors about taking in nutrients & making them organically into the flesh of the being; "goethe's description of writing as 'the reproduction of the world around me by means of the internal world which takes hold of, combines, creates anew, kneads everything and puts it down again in its own form, manner'";

any poem, even a long poem--a life's (and soul's) work--is a tremendous betrayer of its creator, often where the latter was least conscious of betraying himself. --Johann Gottfried von Herder

& then implications: this new idea of "the book as an imprint or record of the intellection of a unique individual--hence a 'tremendous betrayer' of that individual--entails new reading strategies. in neoclassical doctrine the pleasure of reading had derived from the reader's recognition of himself in a poet's representations (a pleasure guaranteed by the essential similarity of all men). thus pope's charge to the poet to present 'something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,/ that gives back the image of our mind.' with herder, the pleasure of reading lies instead in the exploration of an Other, in penetrating to the deepest reaches of the foreign, because absolutely unique consciousness of which the work is a verbalized embodiment"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

big brother's remediation (authorship 23.2/25)

Marsh, Bill. "Turnitin.com and the Scriptural Enterprise of Plagiarism Detection." Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 427-438.

1 sentence summary: "the ways Turnitin.com maps identity, codes writing, and manages transgression in the service of broader, historically entrenched values of authorial propriety and educational achievement" (par 1) continues to construct student writers as anti-authors and their work as always potentially if not actually digressive.

passages
par 1. "Turnitin.com—as both a writing assessment tool and a kind of authoring environment itself—reifies identity categories via apparent metaphors disguised as informative educational content. Advertised as remedial pedagogy, the Turnitin.com service socializes student writers toward traditional normality and docility notions."
par 2. plagiarism definitions "draw[] on the Latin plagium (‘net to entangle game’)"; "given that plagiarism inherently threatens or undermines a masculinist authorial paradigm, the discourse of plagiarism (i.e., rules, regulations, proscriptions, and policies) often includes sub-narratives or catechisms centering on textual deviance that posit authorship as straight, masculine, and originary, and plagiarism as deviant, feminine, and destructive."
par 4. "whether matches turn up or not, the document sent back to the client is hardly an exact duplicate at all but rather a text repurposed to fit the originality report interface. In effect, all papers submitted for screening are reframed or 'remediated,' to use Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's (1999, p. 45) term, to highlight the possible web-based origins of submitted texts"; "[N. Katherine] Hayles suggested that '[t]o change the material artifact'—by building literary documents on a screen rather than a page, for example—'is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well' (p. 23)."
par 5. "The originality report, I would argue, is a remediated “material artifact” which, in recoding a submitted paper (a text document) to reflect the presence or absence of borrowed materials, transforms “the context and circumstances” within which student writing is read and assessed"
par 11. "these recent sample reports [using example-papers about serial killers & identity mix-ups] can be read as a field of [what Barthes calls] 'referential symbolism' (p. 52) where seemingly nonessential allusions to murder and mistaken identity evoke an essential and essentializing equation of plagiarism with (masculine) brutality and (feminine) deception"
par. 13 "As referential symbols, at least, these documents inherently brand plagiarists, to adapt Howard's language, as pathological, deceitful, diseased, and/or violent."
par 14. "how does plagiarism detection as an industrial/infrastructural solution to plagiarism deploy, extend, or challenge the identity constructs inherent to plagiarism? One immediate and simple answer is that plagiarism detection solutions—which build on the assumption that plagiarism by definition represents a false or mistaken authorship—inherently cast plagiarists as significantly different from other categorically true writers."
par 15. "The originality reports are in and of themselves symbolic markers of this difference," creating, as they do, "remediated material artifact[s]" which, as term-coiners Bolter & Grusin would expect, are also "remedial in the strict, pedagogical sense as well."
par 16. "plagiarism, like authorship more broadly, makes sense only when charted against a broader set of 'signifying forms' (Coombe, 1998, p. 29) pertaining to literary, legal, and pedagogical institutions"; "the product name—originality report—clearly capitalizes on the well-entrenched Romantic notion that real authors produce original works of art essentially free of undocumented source"; thus "if the unoriginal or illegitimately copied student paper inherently means a kind of unhealthy or diseased alterity, then clearly the originality report—as both figure and signifying form—functions as a kind of remedial or therapeutic device designed to index and recode in relation to standards of health and normalcy."
par 18. "Color-coded, indexed, and, where appropriate, rife with hyperlinks, the report bears the likeness and functionality of a web page and thus mirrors the process and formal mode by which plagiarized texts are often assembled"; "As hypertextual construction, the originality report faces off against its exteriorized other—the submitted text—and assumes power over its surfaces. The act of public exposure lies here, as well as in the subtle inversion of traditional author positions by which Turnitin.com assumes ownership of the resulting text product and then sells it back (as an exact duplicate) to the client."
par 25. "Turnitin.com—as self-proclaimed teaching resource and, for more students each day, a required component in the writing process—produces and distributes “an ethical technology of subjectivity that creates in students a healthy respect for the authority of the academy” (Crowley, 1998, p. 217)"; "In submitting their papers, writers submit to the color-coded reconstruction of their texts and, more profoundly, their identities as writers, insofar as the originality report frames every submission in terms of its program-driven assessment of similarity. In brief, all writers who participate in Turnitin.com's screening process provide, willingly or not, material support for the corporate detour known as plagiarism detection. In that sense, student writing functions as input or raw material for post-industrial corporate production. This production is an authoring: what comes in is something received, what comes out is a product"
par 31. "The interesting irony remains that if the service were actually to work in pre-empting or preventing plagiarism at large, there would eventually be no need for Turnitin.com or its competitors"; "Turnitin.com writes itself legible as a normative teaching and learning tool, even while its chief operation is to encode scriptural abnormality"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

mr. wizard, how do authors do it? (authorship 23.1/25)

Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.

1 sentence summary: "authors and writers" occupy different social positions and serve different social functions traditionally & theoretically in french society, although in contemporary times these positions frequently conflate.

passages
185. "for a very long time--probably for the entire classical capitalist period...the uncontested owners of the language--and they alone--were authors; if we excepted preachers and jurists...no one else spoke, and this 'monopoly' of the langauge produced, paradoxically, a rigid order....it was not the literary profession which was structured...but the very substance of this literary discourse, subjected to rules of use, genre, and composition, more or less immutable"
186. "when, in france, did the author cease being the only one to speak? doubtless at the time of the revolution, when there first appear men who appropriate the authors' language for political ends"; the authors maintained their positions as cultural creators, but were joined by another group he calls "a new custodian of the public language...the writers." most simply, "the author performs a function, the writer an activity"; the author is absorbed in "laboring" over his "utterances"
187. thus the author "is a man who radically absorbs the worlds why in a how to write"--"why the world? what is the meaning of things?"
188. ultimately, "by identifying himself with language, the author loses all claim to truth, for language is precisely that structure whose very goal...once it is no longer rigorously transitive, is to neutralize the true and the false. but what he obviously gains is the power to disturb the world"
189. the constituative power of the public nature of the authorial function is such that "every author is eventually digested by the literary institution...unless he ceases to identify his being with that of language: this is why so few authors renounce writing, for that is literally to kill themselves, to die to the being they have chosen"; "the writer, on the other hand, is a 'transitive' man, he posits a goal...of which language is merely a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. thus language is restored to the nature of an instrument of communication, a vehicle of 'thought.' even if the writer pays some attention to style, this concern is never ontological. the writer performs no essential tecnical action upon language....for what defines a writer is the fact that his project of communication is naïve: he does not admit that his message is reflexive"
190. "he [the writer] considers that his work resolves an ambiguity...whereas for the author, it is just the other way around: he knows that his language...inaugurates an ambiguity"; "the author participates in the priest's role, the writer in the clerk's; the author's language is an intransitive act...the writer's an activity. the paradox is that society consumes a transitive language with many more reservations than an intransitive one: the writer's status...is much more problematic than the author's. this is primarily the consequence of a material circumstance: the author's language is a merchandise offered through traditional channels...the writer's language, on the contrary, can be produced and consumed only in the shadow of institutions which have...an entirely different function than to focus on language....then, too, the writer's language is dependent...because it is (or considers itself) no more than a simple vehicle, its nature as merchandise is transferred to the project of which it is the instrument: we are presumed to sell 'thought' exclusive of any art"
191. "the writer's function is to say at once and on every occasion what he thinks, and this function suffices, he thinks, to justify him" whereas "the social function of literary language (that of the author) is precisely to transform thought (or consciousness, or protest) into merchandise." in actuality, this "contradiction...is rarely pure: everyone today moves more or less openly between the two postulations"
192. "today, each member of the intellegentsia harbours both roles in himself": "in short, our age produces a bastard type, the author-writer" who oscillates between occupying these positions, to varying degrees of success, freedom, & clout.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

over time (authorship 22.3/25)

Hesse, Carla. "Intellectual Property, 700 B.C. - A.D. 2000." Daedalus (Spring 2002): 26-45.

1 sentence summary: look, a timeline! (charting comparatively the development of notions of intellectual property in various global locales & noting both their influence on one another & potential ramifications of their current direction esp. in the dominant west)

bullet-points:
26. "ancient greeks did not think of knowledge as something that could be owned or sold. a scribe could be paid feed for his labor, an author awarded prizes for his achievement, but the gift of the gods was freely given"; "socrates held the sophists in contempt for charging fees for their learning"
27. "a tour of the other great civilizations of the premodern world--chinese, islamic, jewish, and christian--reveals a striking absence of any notion of human ownership of ideas or their expressions"--"in china in the fifth century b.c. the philosopher confucius is recorded as saying 'i transmit rather than create'"; "throughout the islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years"; "the word 'koran' itself means 'recitation,' and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. the book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word"
28. "a certain notion of legal 'authorship' did emerge from islamic scribal practices. but a concept of intellectual property did not. sharī'a law against 'imposture' or 'fraud' was used to prevent the unauthorized appropriation of the reputation or authority of a great teacher through false attribution of written texts. but the teacher did not own the ideas expressed within his books"; quoth medieval theologians: "knowledge is a gift from god, consequently it cannot be sold"; "selling something that belonged to god constituted the sin of simony"; "even as books were increasingly bought and sold after the advent of print in europe in the fifteenth century, and even as writers began to sell their manuscripts to printers for a profit, there remained a dimension of the book, its spiritual legacy, that lay beyond the grasp of market relations"; "the renaissance elevated the poet, the inventor, and the artist to unprecedented social heights, but their 'genius' was still understood to be divinely inpsired rather than a mere product of their mental skills or worldly labors"
29. "this theologically informed moral revulsion to the idea of an individual profit motive in the creation and transmission of ideas continued to circulate in the united states well into the nineteenth century"; "the early modern period witnessed the emergence of elaborate systems of prepublication censorship, state-licensed monopolies to control the burgeoning printing and publishing trades, and the use of royal letters of patent or 'privileges' to give exclusive monopolies for the printing and publication of authorized texts"; actually, "the first known ordinance regulating publication was that of the emperor wen-tsing, in 835, forbidding the private publication of almanacs."
30. by contrast, "the earliest european initiative occurred in the republic of venice in 1469." & "in 1559, as part of her attempt to resolve the religious controversies that wracked the realm, elizabeth i issued an injunction against publication of any text unless it had been licensed by censors appointed by the crown. the stationers' company kept a registry of licensed books and the crown could, in principle, extend or revoke a license at will....these licenses were 'copied' into the registry book of the guild and soon came to be treated by members of the guild as exclusive rights to print a particular 'copy.'"
31. "a similar process of consolidation of great publishing empires, founded upon monopolistic claims rooted in royal privileges, occurred througout christian europe"
32-3. in the eighteenth century, "rather than selling a manuscript to a publisher, authors increasingly sought simply to sell the 'rights' to a single edition. with greater frequency, secular authors began to claim that they were the creators of their own works rather than the mere transmitters of god's eternal truths. as they came to view themselves as the originators of their work, they also began to claim that their creations were their own property, as susceptible to legal protection and as inheritable or saleable as any other form of property. daniel defoe wrote in 1710, 'A Book is the Author's Property, 'tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain: if he sells his Property, it then becomes the Right of the Purchaser.'"; "by the middle of the eighteenth century, the traditional system of publication was everywhere in shambles. first in england, and then in france and germany as well, calls for reform of the regulation of the book trade were coming from all parties involved. readers wanted cheaper books. government legislators sought to increase commerce and to encourage a more educated population within their realms. foreign and privincial publishers...clamored against the perpetual monopolies of the london and paris book guilds on the most lucrative books. authors wanted their property rights in their compositions recognized as absolute and perpetual"; "the reform of the publishing industry in europe thus entailed a rethinking of the basis and purpose of knowledge": quoth locke "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his"; "three generations later, the poet edward young...asserted that the author contributed more than simply his labor to a book--he imprinted its contents with his original personality"; "young's reflections, like those of john locke before him, constituted a dramatic secularization of the theory of knowledge"
34. "the individual personality supplanted god as the divine font of knowledge"; "it was gotthold lessing, the greatest writer of the german enlightenment, who most forcefully developed the notion of the author's unique personality as a source of property rights in ideas. in a 1772 essay, live and let live, lessing proposed a reorganization of the german book trade that attacked the foundations of the old system. he challenged directly the traditional ban on profits received from writing"
35. "a generation later, johann gottleb fichte, a philosopher and disciple of kant, probed the complexities of the problem even more deeply. fichte posed a difficult question: if creations of the mind were indeed 'property,' what exactly was immaterial property? clearly it did not simply consist of a physical manuscript..."
36-7. "the tension within enlightenment epistemology left those policymakers concerned with the book trade on the horns of a philosophical dilemma. did knowledge inhere in the world--or in the mind? to what extent were ideas discovered--and to what extent were they invented?"; "those who sided with locke, young, diderot, fichte, and the subjectivist camp argued that there was a natural right to perpetual property in ideas and that legal recognition of that right was simply the confirmation in statute of a universal natural right. the utilitarian position thus understood the public interest as the highest aim of the law, while natural-rights proponents argued that the sanctity of the individual creator whould be the guiding principle of any legislator. over the course of the eighteenth century, every european country witnessed a series of legal battles over which of these principles would prevail." "parliament finally filled the legal vacuum in 1710, when the so-called statute of anne definitively separated the question of censorship from that of literary property. the statute ruled that authors, and those who had purchased a manuscript from an author, would have an exclusive right to publish the work for fourteen years....in effect, the statute of anne...represented an uneasy compromise between the position of the stationers' company and the advocates of authors' natural rights on one side and the position of the pirate publishers and advocates of the 'public interest' on the other." in 1774 "the donaldson v. becket decision was crucial in two respects": "it established the 'encouragement of learning' as the highest aim of laws regulating books" and "even though copyright was acknowledged to be a natural right rooted in common law...held that copyright in practice hinged on government legislation"
38. "in early america...colonies differed as to which theory formed the basis of their laws"; in "the united states copyright statute of may 31, 1790" "the author or inventor was acknowledged as an individual with special claims upon his own ideas--but the public good dictated that those claims be limited...a similar tension in french legal thinking provoked a parallel set of court battles"; "in 1777, the french crown, confronted with mounting criticism, was forced to revise the system of privileges...[now] granted authors their own category of privileges....these new privileges were to be perpetual and inheritable, like any other form of personal property." then "the revolution changed everything. 'freedom of the press' was declared and literary privileges abrogated....authors were now widely celebrated not as private creators and possessive individuals, but rather as civic heroes, servants of public enlightenment"
39. "hoping to establish the french book trade on a new, secular footing, the abbé sieyès in 1791 proposed passing a 'law on the freedom of the press'...[that] "recognized authors' texts as a form of property, originating with their creators, and susceptible to legal protection; yet at the same time, the sieyès law reflected condorcet's conern for the 'public interest' by limiting exclusive claims upon literary property to the lifetime of the author, plus ten years"; "a number of individual german states did pass laws similar to the revised sieyès law" but "it was not...until 1870 that imerial germany successfully adopted a uniform copyright law similar to those of the french and the english." "it is no coincidence that the english phrase 'intellectual property' should first appear [in the OED] in 1845"... "because the modern laws regulating intellectual property rest on a largely unexamined set of contradictory philosophical assumptions, these laws have been uniquely vulnerable to challenge--not least by the continuing rise of new methods of distributing ideas and information across national boundaries."
40. in 1886 the berne conferences "led to the signing by ten european nations of the first international copyright treaty"; "this progressive shift in the legal spectrum toward the enforcement of natural rights has led to a steady strengthening of private intellectual property right claims over the doctrine of the public interest"; "as...the united states...evolved from being a net importer of intellectual property to a net exporter, its legal doctrines for regulating intellectual property have tended to shift from the objecivist-utilitarian side of the legal balance toward the univeralist-natural-rights side"
42. "american theologians, including the reverend isaac funk, now [1886] denounced the 'national sin of literary piracy' (which had allowed him to make his fortune on his pirated life of jesus) as a violation of the seventh commandment"; "in 1891 an international agreement with england for reciprocal copyright protection was finally signed by congress"
43. "developing nations...find themselves in the position of the united states in the nineteenth century. and the tendency has been for these nations to hold fast to the utilitarian claim that the national public interest should come before recognition of the natural right to property"; "chinese authorities during the cultural revolution promulgated the following popular saying: 'is it necessary for a steel worker to put his name on a steel ingot that he produces in the course of his duty? if not, why should a member of the intelligentsia enjoy the privilege of putting his name on what he produces?"
44. "in islamic jurisprudence...where the koran is silent, governments are permitted to make a new law, as long as it does not explicitly conflict with koranic injunctions. as a consequence, in the twentiety century a body of intellectual property law has emerged in most islamic states, based on western legal codes"; "the law has preserved the state's right to censor all publications as it deems necessary"; "in general, developing nations--including not only china, taiwan, russia, and the middle eastern states, but african and south american nations as well--have employed the utilitarian argument, derived from condorcet, that intellectual property is inherently social in nature and that the state has the right to limit the indvidual claims of its citizens as well as others in the name of the public good."
45. "conversely, the united states and western europe have witnessed a shift in their jurisprudential traditions away from the utilitarian side of the eighteenth-century intellectual property balance and toward an unprecedented strengthening of the doctrine of the universal natural rights of authors and inventors to the exclusive commercial exploitation of their creations and inventions. and since the 1970s the united states and western european nations have been increasingly aggressive in using trade sanctions and international trade agreements to coerce developing nations to recognize precisely this view of intellectual property rights"; "the consequences of this evolution...are troubling for several reasons": (1) "the dominance of the natural-rights view leads to immediate suffering and to the appropriation of local knowledge for international gain." (2) "the loss of a legal balance in the global arena risks giving monopolistic power to exporter nations." (3) "it puts at risk the liberal political balance between individual gain and the public good that was the foundational aim of the intellectual peroperty laws within western democratic polities themselves"

Posted by ttobryan at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

the dominator (authorship 22.2/25)

Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.

1 sentence summary we don't do our students justice to try to move them from one position in the Author/student binary to the other; what we need to do is coinvestigate with them the material realities of authorship to help them see to navigate its potential in various positionalities.

passages
505. "one theme recurring in recent work in composition studies is the institutional distinction maintained between Authors and student writers"; "the binary rests on a bankrupt concept of the Author's 'self' as the unitary autonomous origin of writing"; "what appears to be needed are strategies which acknowledge the institutional operation of the Author/student binary while combating its effects"; "most of these….dominant pedagogical strategies compositionists have devised in response to the dilemmas posed by the Author/student writer binary….situate student (and other) writing in relation to the social in ways that do not confront but elide the…binary."
506. 1st warning: "the dominant attempts to silence alternate elements of the social by 'seizing' the definition of what constitutes the social. by inflating the sense of its reach, the dominant descourages resistance: what remains, it claims, is not social but marginal and therefore of no consequence."
507. 2nd warning: "the terms we use to name the location of the non-dominant are those granted by the dominant and so also in its service: currently, such terms as 'individual,' 'personal,' 'private,' 'natural,' 'experiential,' 'emotional,' 'feminine,' 'irrational,' 'psychological.' even the terms 'individual' and 'social' may invoke for many the dominant's conceptualization of these as discrete, uniform, opposed, and inherently ranked, rather than dialectically interrelated and fluid. efforts to recuperate the oppositional potential of areas of human practice identified as 'personal' or 'private' or 'emotional' by the dominant must involve the reconceptualization of these as 'unquestionably social' rather than somehow autonomous and separate from the social."
in williams, the Author operates @ 3 social levels: (1) "Authors operate within a 'political economy of writing'" involving markets & distribution; (2) they "employ socially inherited forms—a language and written conventions and notations"; (3) the only level at which the author isn't defined as "an autonomous individual" operating within a social sphere: "the continuing process by which 'the contents of [the author's] consciousness are socially produced"
508. "a variety of barriers stand in the way of reaching this final level of accepting the social production of individual consciousness": (1) "the monolithic understanding of the social"; (2) it's hard to understand "the 'emergent' arising out of 'practical consciousness' that is part of the process of the social production of consciousness"; (3) "there is resistance to recognizing the social production of consciousness because it undermines the concept of the Author as a quintessentially autonomous (masculine) individual on which english literary study—and academic institutions and capitalist ideology generally—depends"; "this concept of the autonomous Author is linked to the removal of writing from the social material world, redefining it from a socially located activity to an aestheticized, idealized art object"
509. "one motive for this redefinition, clearly, has been 'a simple class emphasis, to separate "higher" things—the objects of interest to free men, the "liberal arts"—from the "ordinary" business…of the "everyday world"'" (williams). what happens is that "by eliding the social production of consciousness, such pedagogies ironically neglect the capacity of students to engage as social agents in not only the reproduction but the transformation of social relations."
510-1. three common pedagogical "approaches"…"containing (social) contradictions": (1) "equating individual sutdent writers' desires with the demands of [the 'real'] world" (i.e. saying that their recognition of how knowing x will benefit them in today's context = they want to learn x); (2) "a…more common set of pedagogies allows for the possibility of difference between official forms and practical consciousness yet sidesteps any confrontation between these. the sidestep" is done by either: "meaning is posited as existing outside a society's language practices" & "the introduction of the effect of social pressures on the writer is delayed" until later points of the curriculum—"the distinction between 'process' and 'product,' used to resolve the contradiction between granting authority while rejecting its material enactment in 'drafts,' appears in course designs that delay attention to matters of formal conventions of writing only to introduce these later as givens to which students must conform" "these courses can seem at best irresponsible, at worst hypocritical"
512-3. "a third way of responding to the Author/student writer binary…[is] a return to expressivism" (w/all the individual authorizing-focus that entails); "paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same 'hypocrisy or despair' as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them"
514. "if there is a danger is removing the classroom from the social, there are comparable risks in more recent strategies which identify the social with the classroom": "collaborative pedagogies mirror expressivist attempts to create a zone free of power relations within the classroom, but bolster such attempts with a sense of the inherently social construction of knowledge. they aim to counter the academy's traditional relations of hierarchical authority by creating more democratic relations in the classroom…but differ from e xvsfrq431 xvsfrq431xpressivist pedagogies in their resolute insistence on the sociality of writing….writing is likened to conversation, requiring by definition more than one party." "indeed, the 'marriage' of democratic aspirations and 'practicality' seals over a contradiction between imagining the social as a process of struggle and seeing it as a static realm of conflict-free harmony. …the problem is one of transferring the attributes of autonomy and uniformity from the individual 'Author' to the individual community, and specifically the community of the writing classroom."
515. "so while this pedagogy acknowledges…the 'sociality' of authorship, it is a conception of sociality from which heterogeneity, conflict, and struggle have been excised."
516-7. "multicultural" or "contact zone" pedagogies "aim to overcome the silencing of difference effected through the maintenance of 'normal' discourse"…."where these…pedagogies can run into trouble, however, is in failing to recognize the operation of such pressures within individual student consciousness as well as within the classrooms, and in failing to recognize the contact zone itself (or multicultural education) as an historically specific strategic response, a representation of education put forth in competition with dominant representations of education as the site for (re)producing social homogeneity."
518-19. "(1) we need to recognize such [limited as it necessarily is] articulation as socially produced and mediated rather than as 'free' expression, and (2) mere articulation—the achievement of 'contact'—is not sufficient. otherwise 'contact,' like 'difference,' becomes reified as a process in and for itself rather than being understood as a response to, and with consequences in, specific social and historical conditions"; "what threatens attempts to teach writing as the site for mediation of cultural conflict is the residual power of this first view, in which writing is reified into an object. this danger appears currently in two sorts of arguments: that students can gain authority in their writing through learning a set of rhetorical positionings, and that students can resist oppression through experimentation with diverse or alternative discursive forms. both sorts of arguments aim to address the disparity between Authors and student writers and the resulting disparagement of students, the first by teaching students to produce texts that enact conventions for establishing rhetorical authority, the second by having students produce texts that break from those conventions of writing that may restrict their thinking. what links the two, however, is their identification of Authorship with (objectified) texts which students are then expected to produce"; "pedagogies aiming to teach students to achieve 'authority' through adopting strategies found in already authorized texts sidestep the social relations inherent in the authorizing of those texts while attempting to assimilate students to conventional textual representations of authority"
520. "efforts to teach students to establish rhetorical authority risk bracketing the work of the classroom from the social and reinscribing the status quo of the 'author,' naming as the soial a uniform official view of the classroom, unless they are accompanied by students' critique of the conditions of the various practices by which types of 'authorship' are socially produced, as well as those producing its opposite, the 'student writer.'"
522. "dominant notions of what constitutes work and the social can easily blind us (and others) to the kind of cultural work—for better and worse—accomplished in the writing and reading in which we and our students engage. but learning to recognize and intervene actively in that work can be a way to resist the dominant pressures on our practices as readers and writers, pressures symbolized for many in composition precisely by the Author/student writer binary. teachers persuaded to combat the deleterious effects of the Author/student binary by confronting rather than eliding its operation in their work face the question of how to recover the sense of work and the social in writing as always in process while recognizing (and combating) the dominant's efforts in that process to define both in fixed, limited forms."
526. "we can resist the damaging effects of the Author/student binary on the field, not by promoting students' accession to an authorial status we know to be problematic, nor by consigning them and ourselves to the 'low' labor assigned by the dominant to composition, but by joining with our students to investigate writing as social and material practice, confronting and revising those practices that have served to reify the activity of writing into texts and authorship."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

intertextual terminology (authorship 22.1/25)

Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.

1 sentence summary here is a quick, terminologically rich definition-set for "intertextuality" as a general category with many subordinate elements.

context
83. description: "almost every word and phrase we use we have heard or seen before. our originality and craft as writers come from how we put those words together in new ways to fit our specific situation, needs, and purposes, but we always need to rely on the common stock of language we share with others. if we did not share the language, how would others understand us? often we do not call attention to where specifically we got our words from. often the words we use are so common they seem to come from everywhere. at other times we want to give the impression that we are speaking as individuals from our individuality, concerned only with the immediate moment. sometimes we just don't remember where we heard something. on the other hand, at times we do want to call attention to where we got the words from. the source of the words may have great authority, or we may want to criticize those words"; why this matters: "we may want to tell a dramatic story associated with particular people with distinctive perspectives in a particular time and place. and when we read or listen to others, we don't often wonder where the words come from, but sometimes we start to sense the significance of them echoing words and thoughts from one place or another. analyzing those connections helps us understand the meaning of the text more deeply. we create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in. and we understand the texts of others within that same sea."

terms
intertextuality = "the relation each text has to the texts surrounding it"
levels of intertextuality
1. source[s] from which direct quotations and meanings to be taken at face value are taken "as authoritative" and built upon by the writer.
2. the "explicit social dramas of prior texts engaged in discussion" = s.a. a "newspaper report…shaping a story of opponents locked in political struggle" where the struggle preexists & the newspaper creates the shared stage.
3. statements pulled in "as background, support, and contrast"
4. "beliefs, issues, ideas, statements generally circulated and likely familiar to the readers" whether directly attributed/attributable or "common knowledge"
5. recognizeable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres = "used to identify [each] text as part of those [specific] worlds"
6. resources of language = "language and language forms" that are "of the period and…part of the cultural world of the times" ("every text, all the time" includes this).
techniques of intertextual representation
1. direct quotation
2. indirect quotation = "usually specifies a source and then attempts to reproduce the meaning of the original but in words that reflect the author's understanding, interpretation, or spin on the original"
3. mentioning of a person, document, or statements, which "relies on the reader's familiarity with the original source and what it says"
4. comment or evaluation on a statement, text, or otherwise invoked voice = direct commentary rather than linguistic implication (as in indirect quotation)
5. using recognizeable phrasing, terminology associated with specific people or groups of people or particular documents = deliberate echoing of culturally recognizeable texts
6. using language and forms that seem to echo certain ways of communicating, discussions among other people, types of documents = "genre, kinds of vocabulary (or register), stock phrases, patterns of expression"
intertextual distance or reach
intertextual reach = "how far a text travels for its intertextual relations"
intratextual reference = when "a document draws on bits of text that appear earlier in the text, echoing and building on it"
intra-file intertextuality = "a text can reach a bit farther, but stay in a limited domain when a memo refers to and relies on a previous memo from the company on the same case."
intertextual collection = "the way texts within a file or other collection pull together to make a representation of a case or subject"
classroom intertextuality = "a fairly closed world" where intertextual reference can flourish
disciplinary intertextuality = "explicit[ly]" created by "fairly contained…research disciplines"
interdisciplinary intertextuality = "broader…interdisciplinary reach"
intracorporate or intraindustry intertextuality = within a corporate field or industry
intrasystem intertextuality = "if, for example, corporate documents attend to larger corporate policies, government law and regulations, documents of other companies, economic predictions, consumer culture, and so on"
intermediality = "when the resource or reference moves from one medium to another"
translation across contexts/recontextualization
recontextualization = "each time someone else's words, or words from one document or another part of the same document, are used in a new context"
intertextual comment = when "the recontextualization may also put the words into a less friendly or more critical contexts, or some context that comments on, evaluates, or puts the other words at a distance"

Posted by ttobryan at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

underlying (authorship 21.3/25)

Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.

1 sentence summary: the ideologies underlying notions of plagiarism aren't as culturally consistent as we might assume; plagiarism rests on an understanding of the identity writers occupy that can be appropriated or called into question, and if that identity is concieved-of differently, so are infractions against it.

passages
1-2. "treatments of academic plagiarism tend to presuppose a common ideological ground in the creative, original, individual who, as an autonomous scholar, presents his/her work to the public in his/her own name"; "they do not probe further into whether the underlying presuppositions are in need of examination"--but contexts are characterized by different assumptions. for example "what might be called plagiarism in academic contexts is viewed as common daily practice in putting out the daily news."
5. "put most simply...definitions of communication reflect not universal characteristics of communication, but a cultural model which can be located in terms of a particular historical moment and a particular cultural group"
22. (in summary): "eight problems in constructing 'the author'"

(a) production format: speaker (and writer) roles must be more finely analyzed as author, principle, and animator. none of these can be expected to line up in a one-to-one and unique relationship with any biological person.
(b) footing: stepping out of one's stance is a common, not an exceptional, occurrence.
(c) enactment: we frequently take on temporarily enacted roles of a greater permanence than changes in footing, but of lesser permanence than social roles...
(d) social role: we may be simultaneously a parent, a child, a teacher, a musician, a man or woman. we borrow authority for speaking or writing from our social positions; we become who we are by how we speak.
(e) face: our selves have both internal (character) and external (social) faces; any of the communicative roles can be played out in either inner or outer configurations.
(f) politeness pragmatics: the selves we communicate in discourse are jointly constructed, maintained, and legitimated among participants....
(g) metaphors of self and communication: the langauge we use to talk about communication produces a metaphorical blindness to other conceptualizations, and to these deeply multiple realities.
(h) innatist/social concepts of knowledge: our language comes borrowed complete with the voices of our society. originality is only achieved with difficulty.

23. thus "it is very difficult to find contexts in which the simple paradigm of speaker or writer is manifested in communication"; "the concept of plagiarism...disguises these complexities by masking them in the idea that animators, authors, and principles speak and write as unified biological persons who always represent themselves in a straightforward and sincere way, as fully legitimated social actors within authorized roles"

Posted by ttobryan at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

not always what it seems (authorship 21.2/25)

Pennycook, Alastair. "Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism." TESOL Quarterly 30 (1996): 201-230.

1 sentence summary: "plagiarism....needs to be understood in terms of complex relationships between text, memory, and learning" (201); it's not just a matter of teaching rules (even the ones that can be clearly articulated) & punishing infractions.

passages
202. the student who'd memorized the bio of abe lincoln, reporting it back on paper--is he plagiarising? "because all language learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable? how have the boundaries been drawn between the acceptable memorizing and use of word lists, phrases, sentences...paragraphs, poems, quotations, and so on and the unacceptable reuse of others' words?"
203. group grading/norming sessions "often produce...quite extraordinarily divergent views on what is and what is not a good piece of writing" and "there is nothing like the hint of something borrowed to radically split the meeting down the middle"; "ironically, once the spectre of doubtful ownership is raised, teachers start to look for grammatical errors as a sign of good writing and to become suspicious when such errors are crucially absent. our criteria are turned on their head: suddenly we are looking either for language that is 'too good' in order to incriminate the student, or we are looking for evidence of errors in order to exonerate the student."
211. big picture issue: "looking more carefully at traditions of ascribing meaning and creativity to god, the individual, or discourse raises a number of concerns about how meaning, texts, and textual borrowing are understood and thus challenges any easy ascription of a notion of plagiarism"
212. the "western tradition....faces very real challenges if we start to take seriously different textual and learning practices in other cultures. but...it also faces challenges from its own inconsistencies": "the western cult of originality has existed alongside wholescale borrowing" but/and also "textual practices are changing: even if there once were clearly defined lines between the borrowed and the original, they are starting to fade in a new era of electronic intertextuality."
213. as wordsworth & dorothy exemplify, "much of what gets claimed as the result of original academic work actually draws heavily on the work of silent others--women, graduate students, research assistants and so on"
216. a tale of murky academic attribution (he said she said): "and so, as these words and ideas circulate around the academic community, it becomes unclear quite what their origins are. and does it matter? the ideas attributed to giroux are interesting, but do we need to know who really said them originally?" (apparently it was faigley, misquoted after attributing his next sentence to giroux)
218. "i want to avoid simplistic arguments such as 'it's OK to plagiarise in chinese'....rather, what i am trying to get at is the ways in which relationships to text, memory, and learning may differ."
222. we might do well to consider "the possibility that the memorization of texts is not a pointless practice from [the chinese] point of view, because the issue is not one of understanding the world and then mapping language onto it but rather of acquiring language as texts as a precursor to mapping out textual realities"; "this veneration of old textual authority....is not necessarily....an inherently conservative construction of authority....rather, it can also be understood as according primary importance to the text rather than to the world"; "there are important distinctions to be drawn within forms of memorization rather than between memorization and understanding"
223. "the distinction between plagiarising ideas and plagiarising language" can be a problem for students in ways we don't anticipate: as one student explained "if he took the ideas but rephrased the langauge, he would be plagiarising ideas....it seemed almost more honest to simply keep the langauge the same"; another student "knew that rewriting would bring about more mistakes and probably a less powerful message."
225. one more (the patchwriting angle): "i don't think if one plagiarises, that means he doesn't learn anything....perhaps plagiarism is a way of learning."; "a final issue that emerged from these interviews...concerns the extent to which these students feel the english langauge remains a langauge of colonialism....as one student put it, 'the teaching of english is a kind of cultural intrusion in hong kong and may be regarded as a political weapon'"; "many seem to feel that they have no ownership over english--it remains an alien language--and thus to write 'in their own words' is not something that can be done in english."
227. thus: "many of the ways we approach supposed plagiarism are pedagogically unsound and intellectually arrogant"; "part of any discussion of citation, paraphrase, textual borrowing, and so forth needs...to include discussion of how and why these notions have been constructed, how authorship, authenticity, and authority have been linked together, and how these pratices may be in a process of flux."

Posted by ttobryan at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

whose rights are these? (authorship 21.1/25)

Jaszi, Peter, and Martha Woodmansee. "The Ethical Reaches of Authorship." South Atlantic Quarterly 95.4 (Fall 1996): 947-77.

1 sentence summary: those reaches are into property & ownership claims of all sorts--whose identity do words represent? who owns the spoils of one's work, of one's nation's work, of the work done in a name, & who owns the name?

passages
947. "experience suggests that our creative practices are largely derivative, generally collective, and increasingly corporate or collaborative. yet we continue to think of genuine authorship as solitary and originary."
948. "with its emphasis on originality and self-declaring creative genius, this notion of authorship has functioned to marginalize or deny the work of many creative people: women, non-europeans, artists working in traditional forms and genres, and individuals engaged in group or collaborative projects, to name but a few"..."so it should not surprise us to learn that [intellectual property law] tends to reward certain producers and their creative products while devaluing others."
949. by definition as "cultural," "cultural production necessarily draws upon previously creative accomplishments."
950. wordsworth was full of it: "i wandered lonely as a cloud" isn't even true; dorothy was there on the walk & wrote about it too; perhaps they even co-wrote the poem's final verses.
952. "today this process of authorial appropriation can produce even more extreme results: a modern-day dorothy would run the risk of being charged (albeit erroneously) with infringement of william's copyright for publishing her prior prose description of the daffodils."
958-9. "article i of the 1971 act of the berne convention (like its prototype in the original act of 1886) provides that 'the countries to which this convention applies constitute a union for the protection of the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works"; TRIPs in 1993 adds more detail especially to such newer concerns as "computer programs, whether in source or object code," which "shall be protected as literary works under the berne convention"; "the TRIPs agreement also indicates that 'compilations of data or other material, whether in machine readable or other form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations, shall be protected as such"
962. "crazy horse" as a new jersey company's beer brand--the lakota sioux are (understandably!) displeased, & his descendants "have filed an action in lakota tribal court assserting, in various claims under tribal law, two claims based on 'anglo' theories of recovery from outside the mainstream of intellectual property: defamation and infringement of the 'right of publicitity' (the latter more often mobilized against unauthorized impersonators of celebrities like elvis and madonna)"--in part, these outlier claims are b/c "indigenous peoples' efforts to deploy mainstream intellectual property law to control the exploitation of their heritage are generally unavailing"
966. at the "1992 convention on biological diversity," in response to questions about the healing properties of certain locales' indigenous plants, "signatory countries agreed to 'share in a fair and equitable way the results of research and development and the benefits arising from the commercial and other utilization of genetic resources.' thus the treaty emphasizes national rights rather than the interests of peoples. moreover, it conceptualizes 'genetic resources' as raw materials like coal or mineral deposits rather than as properties of the mind."
968. again, the good stuff: "the healing forest conservancy, a nonprofit foundation established by shaman" industries & their "model of intellectual property" which "treats traditional knowledge as a source of value rather than as a kind of raw material to which value must be added" AND "in doing so it does not seek to recast the bioknowledge of indigenous peoples in the mold of 'authorship' or 'invention': it emphasizes collective rather than individual entitlement"
969. more good stuff: the 1993 bellagio declaration, which "called for experimentation with 'special regimes'--based on, but not identical to, those of western intellectual property law--for the protection of 'folkloric works,' 'works of cultural heritage,' and 'the biological and ecological "know-how" of traditional peoples.'"
970. conclusion: "ultimately, it may prove impossible--or unfruitful--to reshape intellectual property law so as to incorporate new kinds of rights and new categories of owners. rather than refiguring traditional knowledge as the product of solitary, originary genius, we may have to reimagine the familiar subject matter of western intellectual property as the outcome of collective, collaborative social activity."

more from the bellagio declaration
971. "intellectual property laws have profound effects on issues as disparate as scientific and artistic progress, biodiversity, access to information, and the cultures of indigenous and tribal peoples."
972. "many of these problems are build into the basic structure and assumptions of intellectual property"; "a system based on such premeses has real, negative consequences. increasingly, traditional knowledge, folklore, genetic material and native medical knowledge flor out of their countries of origin unprotected by intellectual property, while works from developed countries flow in, well protected by international intellectual agreements, backed by the threat of trade sanctions"; "in general, systems build around the author paradigm tend to obscure or undervalue the importance of 'the public domain,' the intellectual and cultural commons from whcih future works will be constructed"; "these tendencies" are "not merely unjust but unwise."

Posted by ttobryan at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2006

purposed piracy (authorship 20/25)

Randall, Marilyn. Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power. Toronto:U of Toronto P, 2001.

1 sentence summary: the legitimation of authorial acts as authorial is always a function of power--who has it and wields it against whom else; likewise the naming of authorial acts as delegitimate and in many cases the construction of texts understood to be in violation of the (current/dominant) standards of legitimation are functions of power, functions that sometimes victimize and sometimes fight back against dominant structures.

passages
vii. fundamental question: "not 'who is plagiarizing?'...but 'who is reading plagiarism?' in other words: why do some instances of literary repetition become plagiarism, and others become great art?" the aphoristic answers: "plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder and...plagiarism is power. in other words, plagiarism is pragmatic."
xi. object of the study: "not primarily the 'plagiaristic' text, but rather the sociocultural conditions of the production of plagiarism as a negative--or positive--aesthetic category, and the discourse that constitutes this production"...."plagiarism is a judgment imposed upon texts, and in determining the history and progress of this literary category what is needed is a study not of texts, which are not in themselves a priori plagiaristic, but of the judgments that have deemed them so, or that, on the other hand, have absolved them"
20. "plagiarists...are essentially failed or false authors--those who are seen to have transgressed or left unfulfilled the cultural function authorship defines for them. thus, according to the aesthetic and critical assumptions adopted, the plagiarist may be judged either a theif or a kleptomaniac; an imperialist or a victem of imperialism; a cultural industrialist or revolutionary"
31. "variously defined as 'unacknowledged borrowing' and 'copying,' plagiarism is clearly present in the second case...while 'borrowing' needs to be qualified by the presumption of covertness to be judged illegitimate. in fact, 'copying' implies covertness, because of the relationship of identity, and therefore of the potential for substitution of the copy for the 'original.' the accusation of plagiarism presuposes not imitation, but copying....and mistaken identity, in the realm of intellectual production, is a crime against the relation of authenticity subsisting between the author and the work"
59. "the Author is alive and well in contemporary aesthetics...surviving as a network of functions...not remarkably different from those traditionally attributed to authorship. at one end of the literary-historical spectrum, the existence of accusations of plagiarism guarantees the presence of the 'author' during those benighted historical times for which contemporary literary history has proposed his not-yet-being. at the other end of the same spectrum, the real death of the author would entail the disappearance of plagiarism that is posited on individual authorship and a proprietary relationship over one's discursibe productions. that this death has not yet occurred is a matter of daily experience....the theoretical impact of this limited death notwithstanding, the reality of contemporary accusations of plagiarism attensts to the durability of the attributes of the author: especially to the authority, authenticity, and originality that define authorship both as a privilege and as a transhistorical function." (<-- take that, stupid metaphor.)
95. "ultimately, if copyright is a function of the economics of property, plagiarism is rather an index of the intimate and timeless relationship of identity and propriety obtaining between personhood and intellectual activity--a relationship that appears independent of and impervious to institutional and social sanctions or conventions and that surfaces in accusations of plagiarism throughout history....the very existance of charges of plagiarism...is sufficient indication that usurping another's ideas, words, and expressions has always constituted an affront to the integrity of the victem, and a slur on the integrity of the perpetrator. the intense disputes that preceded contemporary copyright laws should provide a stumbling block to theories maintaining the modernity of authorship and of propriety over intellectual work, as well as a stimulus for their reassessment"
125. "readers of plagiarism, ostensibly recognizing repeated discourse, are actually...readers of an act in which they recognize the absent, but presumably dishonest, intentions of a failed author."
profit plagiarism
159. in defining plagiarism, the notion of "unearned advantage" is constant even when "the question remains as to what, exactly, is lost or gained in the appropriation of intellectual property"--"the two most important and intuitively evident contenders for undeserved profit are money and reputation (honour), which can be either intimately associated or completely separate"...."it is often not financial loss, or even the loss of potential fame or reputation, that is contexted, but the unearned gain, either financial or symbolic, acquired by fraud on the part of the plagiarist."
160. then again, it is also often money--"plagiarism is most economically advantageous in modern periods where there exists no legislation covering a particular practice, as in the case of 'cross-border' copying before the internationalization of copyright legislation....however, financial gain as a consequence of discursive repetition inevitably gets recast as intention."
161. the "two categories of profiteer: the parvenu or the industrialist, both...presuppose lack of talent": (you can't just be a bad writer, but must be successful at it to get noticed and charged) the parvenu is the "literary upstart...an untalented writer bent on rising above the level of 'grub street' and on achieving fame--or noteriety--by virtue of a genius to which he can only pretend," is in his most innocuous form "deluded rather than dishonest"; the industrialist "writes purely for popular success and the ensuing financial advantage. his economy supposes quantity, rather than quality, of production, according to the principle that the lowest forms of work will be the most palatable to the greatest number"
179. "accusations of industrialism and parvenu plagiarism are, these days, often conjoined, and the perpetrators may rather seem to take on the face of victims, inhabiting margins other than the ones defined by financial profits"--s.a. alex haley, who
181. "will not be unseated--he was both a 'great author' and a cultural hero by the time the accusations of plagiarism and fraud were brought forward" even though "his success was due to industrial modes of literary production, both in his own use of researchers and 'editors,' and in terms of the marketing strategies...applied to his work"--i.e. his work wasn't his alone but was influenced by & in part written by other writers; it was a co-authored, collaborative work.
185. in calixthe beyala's case, her "defense...shifts from 'reminiscence' to evoking the african 'oral tradition' to, eventually, charges of racism, in a move that may be more astute than it first appears....her counter-attack, while not constituting a defense per se, strategically situates the responsibility for condemning 'borrowing' as 'plagiarism' clearly in the reader's court, and shifts the terms of the argument from the author's to the reader's motivations."
imperial plagiarism
190. "while plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder, the beholder is not a timeless and objective judge, but is inscribed in a complex context of social, aesthetic, economic, and political determiannts that govern the reception of texts and judgments made about them....plagiarism, like literature, can not be found in a text, or even in an intertext. it exists only in the space circumscribed by texts, readers, and their cultural presuppositions, that is, in the pragmatic space of the literary context"
192-3. "translation-as-conquest" & "cross-cultural appropriation"--first you could steal/copy/translate ancient texts but not modern ones (although ppl did, of course), then modern ones were ok as long as they were from other countries/languages ("to take from one's compatriots is theft, but to steal from foreigners is conquest"--except then the foreigners' ideas get exhaulted & spread around, even w/o their names, so really everybody's still winning, just in different ways) (her larger point is that the conquest metaphors persist even as cultural definitions/conceptualizations of "conquest" shift)
206. "the theory of symbiotic assimilation" accounts for this, & "is generally espoused by...later post-colonial critics"; "edward said argues against nationalism in the study of world and post-colonial literatures, maintaining that 'no one today is purely one thing' (336)"
215. "cultural appropriation" & the legal limits (are there any stablized?) of parody are a whole other kettle of (borrowed) fish.
guerrilla plagiarism
218. & so ultimately: "'plagiarism' might be the necessary or logical form of aesthetic production available to an author who has been deprived of the attributes of subjecthood: as we have seen, only 'non-authors' plagiarize."
221. "the self-conscious display of the absence of subjecthood in postmodern artistic productions, the absence of authorship, originality, and authenticity, as well as the flagrant contestation of the institutional and legal apparatus for determining the nature of art and authorship, are intentionally subversive expressions of conceptual precepts which demand to be recognized as such" = guerilla plagiarism
228. "aesthetic negation enacts a kind of permanent pre-revolutionary moment whose goal is the examination of the negative condition of the subject, rather than the positive transformation of social, political, or cultural conditions. these efforts could be more properly seen as subversive rather than revolutionary"--to her, the "value" of these efforts "lies in its pure oppositionality to dominant power--in other words, whose importance lies in the pressure it exerts against the institutions it attacks, but without which it could not exist"
229. "gaugin's distinction between plagiarists and revolutionaries entails that the only true revolutionaries are plagiarists, for only they will ever escape the fate of becoming official in being taken over by the state"
250. "the internal contradictions in their positions make it clear that acker and levine both are and are not the 'authors' of their works. to the extent that they hold copyright on their productions, and avoid criminal suits for their copying, they are clearly authors. but clearly, their appropriations situate their work in an arena where 'originality' and 'authority' are not only explicitly contested, but no longer have the kind of currency that allows them to stand as criteria for authorship"
251. "in the end, guerrilla plagiarists are not real plagiarists, but they might be real revolutionaries. the question in this dangerous game remains: who is being had by whom?"
253. "appropriation art" is our other word for the stuff acker etc. produce; it "has now become fully institutionalized as a form of contemporary art"--& "the commodification of art is generally considered to be the fundamental point of the critique enacted by appropriateive art; the right of artists to appropriate images from the world around them in order to perform their social-critical function is an element of the autonomy of art that its commodification can be argued to jeopardize"
259. "authors may or may not be dead, but the space of authorship is impossible to maintain as a vacuum: a signature will always fill it up....plagiarism posits a non-subject as the non-author of non-art; the institution of postmodernism aestheticizes the gesture of subversion, re-creates authorship as a condition of negativity, and authorizes a signature in the place of the absent subject"
262. the shift of sci-fi into reality: "is the electronic form of the postmodern era about to introduce another 'post'--the era of 'post-authorship'? 'appropriation' appears to be neither theft, opportunism, nor plagiarism; it is simply the inevitable consequence of the convergence of technology and ideology. as such, it is seen by some to be a natural evolution, only threatening those species already on the road to extinction"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

2/3 of the puzzle (authorship 19.3/25)

Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 417-38.

1 sentence summary collaborative writing is (entirely) about authorship, is at war with our commonly-held notions of authorship, & offers a way to more responsibly approach/teach/understand authorship.

passages
426. a funny thing about/revealed by comp's taxonomies: "the composition theorists and teachers most often identified with collaborative learning and peer response techniques--james moffett, donald murray, peter elbow, ken macrorie--are also usually identified with bizzell's 'inner-directed' group, berlin's 'expressionist' group, or lefevre's platonic group, which posits the uniqueness of individual imagination and sees writing as a means of expressing an autonomous inner self. ironically, then, the very scholars most often associated with collaborative learning hold implicitly to traditional concepts of autonomous individualism, authorship, and authority for texts."
427-8. elbow's "magic"; bruffee's collaborative learning as a way toward or step in a process of individual learning--students write alone & then revise alone after social-group response.
429. collaborative learning is not the same as collaborative writing: "collaborative learing theory has from its inception failed to challenge traditional concepts of radical individualism and ownership of ideas and has operated primarily in a traditional and largely hierarchical way. students in collaborative learning situations may work together on revising or on problem solving, but when they write, they typically continue to write alone, in settings structured and governed by a teacher/authority in whom final authority is vested. studies of collaborative writing,on the other hand, make such silent accomodations less easy to maintain and as a result offer the potential to challenge and hence resituate collaborative learning theories"
434. "in practice...colla

Cinnabar and Alabaster

(choose your materials wisely)

January 24, 2006

marxisistic (authorship 26.2/25)

marxisistic (authorship 26.2/25)

January 22, 2006

doctor amy says (authorship 27/25)

January 21, 2006

leci n'est pas (authorship 26.1/25)

re-reading syllabi (authorship 24.3/15)

January 19, 2006

where we come from (authorship 24.2/25)

January 16, 2006

sideshow freaks (authorship 25/25)

January 14, 2006

how form/content made writing (authorship 24.1/25)

January 13, 2006

big brother's remediation (authorship 23.2/25)

January 12, 2006

mr. wizard, how do authors do it? (authorship 23.1/25)

over time (authorship 22.3/25)

the dominator (authorship 22.2/25)

intertextual terminology (authorship 22.1/25)

January 11, 2006

underlying (authorship 21.3/25)

not always what it seems (authorship 21.2/25)

whose rights are these? (authorship 21.1/25)

January 06, 2006

purposed piracy (authorship 20/25)

2/3 of the puzzle (authorship 19.3/25)