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92 5 A Remixed Theory of (Digital) Authorship Who is speaking? —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, attributing Nietzsche Who is speaking? —Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge What does it matter who is speaking? —Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” attributing Beckett As part of the mixed-methods approach, in the next couple of chapters, I integrate and synthesize the data from the surveys and the interviews . First, I discuss a framework, a digital-context, remediated theory of Foucault’s “author-function” mixed with ANT, a theory of authorship reaching beyond the traditional “literary author” and deriving in part from my empirical work with “live” digital writers and their texts. Next, because of the changed nature of authors and writing due to digital environments , I map out an understanding of the Commons, which situates common knowledge and other kinds of texts and artifacts we frequently encounter. I end the chapter by discussing how this remixed theory of authorship challenges traditional, fixed understandings of “studentness,” further exploring some of the implications of digital authorship. In “What Is an Author?” Foucault focused part of his discussion on authors as others typically understand them, in the very limited sense of literary figures. Subsequent writers relying on Foucault’s ideas about authors tend to work with and theorize around the “literary” author—probably A Remixed Theory of (Digital) Authorship 93 because they are indeed writing about literary works, and that’s why Foucault ’s essay is deemed relevant to their discussion (see, for example, Rose, 1988; Ray and Graeff, 2008; see also Gutting’s [2005] chapter on Foucault and “Literature”). Reyman (2010) broadens Foucault’s theory a bit by discussing the Foucauldian author as a “construct” in order to emphasize the connection between copyright law and the formal notion of the “modern Western author” (p. 14; see also Woodmansee and Jaszi, 1994). In her study of narratives and metaphors in the peer-to-peer file-sharing debate, Reyman summarizes the digital author as one of the many “unfulfilled promises of the Internet” (due to legal and “code” restrictions). The promise of the “digital author,” according to Reyman, encouraged “a type of authorship that allowed for collaborative creation, the social construction of meaning, and dynamic and malleable texts” (p. 17). Reyman’s discussion is one to build on and further complicate as we move forward in theorizing and understanding digital authorship. In this chapter, I build upon Foucault’s idea of author-function by extending and complicating it with ANT’s concepts of radical symmetry and actor networks in order to make “author-function” more relevant to twenty-first-century writing practices. I tend to think of the author as a “node” or “product” because I want to focus on the materiality of the author. My hope is to work toward theorizing not only the author as a product or node, but to imagine the kind of work (activities and operations) this author/product engages in upon its emergence, and what networks go into creating the author/ product at its inception. To fill out the picture we have now, I build upon two senses1 of the word function (a word frequently used by Foucault throughout his writings )—one as a noun—where the word “function” is replaced by “activity” (Foucault himself refers to the “activity of the author function”; 1979/1984, p. 117)—in other words—activities leading up to and producing authors or activities of the author once he (it/she) emerges. The second sense is of function as a verb—to operate or to perform a duty after the author emerges. So if an “author” is a “node in a network” (Foucault, 1972, p. 23; Law, 2003, p. 4), the idea of “author function” or author-function as I refer to it, helps us analyze and theorize what occurs both upstream and downstream from the “author.” In “What Is an Author?” Foucault focuses on what occurs downstream from the emergence of the author (in this view, the author is “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” [1979/1984, p. 118]; that is, the author acts as filter and impediment to the circulation of information).—But Foucault does make references to the production of the author as a function of discourse and power (“the author does not precede the works” [p. 119]). In Discipline and Punish, when describing the Panopticon in the same way he described the author-function, Foucault [18.189.170.17] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 15:03...

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