It's not that the author is dead. The author is still only too alive.
Rather it's that authors are very expensive in the generation of knowledge.
Behind that standard idealization, author – text – reader, is a material range of industries and other assemblages of things, skills, people, kinds and venues of use. Every author costs that materiality something of its substance, value, recognition, and working.
At the same time, these industries and other assemblages include as part of their (partially) working systems, elements in which an author, the author, authors, and other makers are adjudicated, manufactured, brought into being, misrecognized, and even sometimes rewarded.
To make an author requires a lot of erasure, deflection, humility, and distain, and is possible only when many people collaborate to make it happen. Even the most independent zine maker or scribe depends on materialities that cannot be created individually.
Not that authoring isn't hard work for individuals, as well as these collectivities.
Bearing the burden of the social maker is extraordinary – in all its facets of action, thought, contemplation, imagination, connection, symbol, and hope.
It's not just that some people, skills and things don't get their share of recognition, but rather that we don't collectively understand how making works. We make it expensive to try to understand this. Sometimes the cost is being able to make something we need and don't have.
We think ideas are the important part. At the expense of all the work to communicate ideas. We think communication is the important part. At the expense of all the collective work in which ideas come into being, over time, and through communities and possibilities.
We make knowledge products, like books, which circulate. Sometimes the venues of circulation are hostile, sometimes friendly, sometimes so heterogeneous they can't be characterized, sometimes small, or large or unexpected or newly created through this very circulation itself. Sometimes circulation never happens, sometimes it happens in some other future or venue, unknowable in some moments.
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Before you posted this blog, I was going to send you an email saying, "Maybe it's time to read Foucault's 'What is an Author?' again." Capitalism is about calculated risk. Publishing is about that as well, but academic publishing is marked by traditional academic hierarchies. The editor depends on the readers, and the readers are typically senior faculty and are in some cases personal colleagues of the faculty members who sit on the editorial boards. I was on the University Press of Kansas faculty board and observed this kind of networking and its impact on how faculty respond to readers's reports and editors. There was tension a couple of times between the press's stakes in having a "new series" and turning to readers that seemed to me anyway not quite right for the ms. In both cases, the author was untenured, and in both cases their ms. interested me, but the readers' report in one case made it possible for other faculty on the board to nix it. There's more to say about this privately, but I think there are various kinds of hierarchies that come into play in the negotiation between author, reader, editor, and faculty editorial board, since it is the faculty who must vote approval of the ms.
Okay, I'll say some more about what I witnessed here. Publically. One dynamic I saw involved what I would call the "reluctant patriarch." A senior male faculty member on the editorial board was reacting to a senior woman reader of a ms. taht was under discussion. The ms. would eventually be published by a more prestigious academic press and receive a professional award.
But the reader found "factual" errors which made those faculty on the editorial committee closest to the "area" in which the author existed--this is also key--balk. Now, the author was working across disciplinary and interdisciplinary niches, as I recall. So, the faculty editorial board members who claimed authority in area that was most proximate to their own, asserted themselves.
I was the youngest faculty member on the committee. It was the first meeting of my appointment on the committee. I pointed out to the committee that this ms. was the most interesting to me of the entire docket of ms. in the batch we had to vote on.
I told the committee that I planned to buy the book when it came out, and what I recall was that one faculty member said that he hoped I would not be "misled" when I did. The other thing I remember was that another faculty member referred to the author as this "young man," and that when I inserted myself into the discussion to say that I too was proximate to the author's text, this faculty member claimed he didn't "like" being in the position he was in.
So maybe some gendered dynamics were going on as well that day.
What I would say stepping back from this brief description is that there were gendered generational dynamics going on--about older and younger men that were mediated in discussion by two younger women, the press editor and myself, who were the defenders of the author.
At stake were generation, gender, what counted as "cultural history," senior and new members of the editorial board, relations among the editors themselves--the woman editor was relatively new and was hired to take the press in new directions, and "Kansas." At least what I think of as Kansas, as when one faculty member upon hearing that the author's manuscript was being sought after by other university presses on the east coast said, "well let X have it" in a tone that I have come to think of as distinctly "Kansan." As in well, if the east coast wants it, well let them have it. We don't need it here. Thank you very much.
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