A Companion to Media Authorship 9780470670965, 9781118495254, 9781118495278, 0470670967

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A Companion to Media Authorship

A Companion to Media Authorship Edited by

Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2013 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to media authorship / edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-67096-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-118-49525-4 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-118-49527-8 (epdf) 1. Arts – Authorship. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Gray, Jonathan (Jonathan Alan), editor of compilation. II. Johnson, Derek, 1979–editor of compilation. NX195.C66 2013 302.23 – dc23 2012042777 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Main image © Katie Edwards / Getty Images; girl with laptop © wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock Cover design by Cyan Design Typeset in 11/13pt Dante by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India. 1 2013

Contents

Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction: The Problem of Media Authorship Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray

Part I

ix 1

Theorizing and Historicizing Authorship

2 Authorship and the Narrative of the Self John Hartley

23

3 The Return of the Author: Ethos and Identity Politics Kristina Busse

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4 Making Music: Copyright Law and Creative Processes Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

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5 When is the Author? Jonathan Gray

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6 Hidden Hands at Work: Authorship, the Intentional Flux, and the Dynamics of Collaboration Colin Burnett

Part II

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Contesting Authorship

7 Participation is Magic: Collaboration, Authorial Legitimacy, and the Audience Function Derek Johnson

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8 Telling Whose Stories? Re-examining Author Agency in Self-Representational Media in the Slums of Nairobi Brian Ekdale

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9 Never Ending Story: Authorship, Seriality, and the Radio Writers Guild Michele Hilmes

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10 From Chris Chibnall to Fox: Torchwood’s Marginalized Authors and Counter-Discourses of TV Authorship Matt Hills

200

11 Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Ownership of Serial Narratives by Multiple Authors Ian Gordon

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Part III Industrializing Authorship 12 ‘‘Benny Hill Theatre’’: ‘‘Race,’’ Commodification, and the Politics of Representation Anamik Saha

239

13 Cynical Authorship and the Hong Kong Studio System: Li Hanxiang and His Shaw Brothers Erotic Films Stephen Teo

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14 The Authorial Function of the Television Channel: Augmentation and Identity Catherine Johnson

275

15 The Mouse House of Cards: Disney Tween Stars and Questions of Institutional Authorship Lindsay Hogan

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16 Transmedia Architectures of Creation: An Interview with Ivan Askwith Jonathan Gray

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17 Dubbing the Noise: Square Enix and Corporate Creation of Videogames Mia Consalvo

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Part IV Expanding Authorship 18 Authorship Below-the-Line John T. Caldwell

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19 Production Design and the Invisible Arts of Seeing David Brisbin

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20 Scoring Authorship: An Interview with Bear McCreary Derek Johnson

391

21 #Bowdown to Your New God: Misha Collins and Decentered Authorship in the Digital Age Louisa Ellen Stein

403

22 Collaboration and Co-Creation in Networked Environments: An Interview with Molly Wright Steenson Megan Sapnar Ankerson

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Contents 23 Dawn of the Undead Author: Fanboy Auteurism and Zack Snyder’s ‘‘Vision’’ Suzanne Scott

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Part V Relocating Authorship 24 Authoring Hype in Bollywood Aswin Punathambekar

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25 Auteurs at the Video Store Daniel Herbert

485

26 Authorship and the State: Narcocorridos in Mexico and the New Aesthetics of Nation Hector Amaya

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27 Scripting Kinshasa’s Teleserials: Reflections on Authorship, Creativity, and Ownership Katrien Pype

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28 ‘‘We Never Do Anything Alone’’: An Interview on Academic Authorship with Kathleen Fitzpatrick Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Hector Amaya is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes on the cultural production of political identities and the complex manner in which cultural flows and immigration are transforming the nation-state. He is the author of Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War and Citizenship Excess: Latinas/os, Transnationalism, Media, and the Ethics of Nation. Megan Sapnar Ankerson is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She has published in New Media and Society, NMediaC, and in collections including Convergence Media History, Web History, and Digital Confidential. She is writing a book that explores the commercial development of web design industries, production cultures, and aesthetics during the dot-com bubble. Olufunmilayo Arewa is Professor of Law and Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Her writing focuses on the creative industries, copyright, and technology. She has written about various topics related to African-American music and Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry, and is currently working on two separate book projects on Nollywood and the global impact of African-American music. David Brisbin has production designed over 20 movies ranging from the fiercely independent (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, In The Cut, A Single Shot) to popular ‘‘tent-pole’’ fare (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Day The Earth Stood Still). He also directed a documentary feature about Cambodia and has taught production design at Capilano University in Vancouver and at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. Colin Burnett is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St Louis. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Invention of Robert Bresson: Auteurism and Cinephilia in Postwar France.

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Kristina Busse is an independent scholar and active media fan who has published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan cultures. She is co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, as well as founding co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, an Open Access international peer-reviewed fan studies journal. John T. Caldwell is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, Production Studies: Critical Studies of Media Industries (co-edited), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (co-edited), and Electronic Media and Technoculture. Mia Consalvo is Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, and is currently writing a book about Japan’s influence on the videogame industry and game culture. She has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Brian Ekdale is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. His research on new media, international mass communication, and media production has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and Africa Today. He also has directed and edited award-winning documentaries. Ian Gordon is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture and has edited Comics & Ideology and Film and Comic Books. Recent essays include ‘‘La bande dessin´ee et le cin´ema: des origines au transm´edia,’’ in La bande dessin´ee: une m´ediaculture. Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality; Television Entertainment; Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts; and, with Amanda Lotz, Television Studies, he is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World; Battleground: The Media; and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. John Hartley is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for Culture & Technology, Curtin University, Western Australia. He is co-founder of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation, and Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Recent books include Digital Futures for Media and Cultural Studies, A Companion to New Media Dynamics (ed.), and Key Concepts in Creative Industries. Daniel Herbert is Assistant Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His research is devoted to understanding relationships between the

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media industries, geography, and cultural identities. His essays appear in several collections and journals, including Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the UK. He is the author of five books, including Fan Cultures and Triumph of a Time Lord. Matt has published widely on cult media and fandom, and is currently completing a study of Torchwood for I.B. Tauris publishers. Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her recent publications include Only Connect: A Cultural History of American Broadcasting (3rd edition), and Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. Her current project is Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, co-edited with Jason Loviglio. Lindsay Hogan is a PhD Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include television and new media industries, stardom and celebrity, and qualitative audience studies. Her dissertation explores the ways in which young stars mediate the relationship between teen/tween identity practices and the economic adaptations of media conglomerates. Catherine Johnson is Lecturer in Culture, Film, and Media at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Branding Television and Telefantasy and co-editor of Transnational Television History and ITV Cultures. Her current research examines the broader creative industry sector that produces promotional material for the screen industries. Derek Johnson is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his work focuses on understanding production cultures, cultural hierarchies, and creative identities within the media industries. He is the author of Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries, and has published articles in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Cinema Journal, and Popular Communication. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Intermediaries: Management of Culture and Cultures of Management. Aswin Punathambekar is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. He is co-editor of Global Bollywood, and author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, and of articles published in various journals and anthologies. Katrien Pype, an anthropologist, wrote her dissertation on the production of television serials in Kinshasa, and afterwards worked as a Newton Fellow on journalism and memory in Kinshasa. She is currently a MarieCurie Fellow at MIT and KULeuven, studying media in the lifeworlds of Kinshasa’s old aged. She is

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author of The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa. Anamik Saha is a Lecturer in Communications Studies at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, where he had previously held an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. He has also held visiting fellowships at Trinity College (Connecticut), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has been published in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Popular Music in Society. Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in Occidental College’s Center for Digital Learning + Research, and a board member of Transformative Works and Cultures. Her work has appeared in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, How to Watch Television, and the Anniversary Edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Louisa Ellen Stein is Assistant Professor at Middlebury College. Her work focuses on transmedia authorship, gender, and generation in media culture. She is coeditor of Teen Television and Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom. She is a Futures of Entertainment fellow and Book Review Editor for Cinema Journal. Her current book project, Millennial Media, explores digital authorship and fandom in the millennial generation. Stephen Teo is Associate Professor and Head of Division of Broadcast and Cinema Studies in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, Wong Kar-wai, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film, and Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition.

1

Introduction The Problem of Media Authorship Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray

Why write a book about media authorship when it seems that so much is already being said about it? Perhaps we would be better off turning to Facebook, for example, where our news feeds are often dominated by discussion of the creative practitioners behind popular culture and their significance to what we see on our screens. ‘‘David Cronenberg makes strange movies,’’ announced the first line of one article shared by one of the editors’ acquaintances.1 Just two items down, a picture from another friend mapped the writing staffs of many popular American television shows back to Joss Whedon as supposed father figure. Whedon reappeared in another friend’s post linking to a New York Times review of The Avengers whose title boldly announced ‘‘A Film’s Superheroes Include the Director,’’2 and that linked to a slide show on ‘‘The Work of Joss Whedon.’’ Yet, Whedon’s star was dwarfed on this day – May 4th, or ‘‘Star Wars Day’’ to some – by many items discussing George Lucas, some of which extolled his virtues as a master storyteller, many of which expressed dismay with his ‘‘meddling’’ with his films, and many of which compared him to other franchise author figures such as Christopher Nolan, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Suzanne Collins. Other posts debated or glowingly commended various newspaper columnists and media pundits’ comments from the morning or the night before. Yet another linked to the latest video by online auteur and actress Felicia Day. And while clicking on these links, many of the accompanying ads used their authors to sell: one sidebar, for instance, sold The Five Year Engagement as ‘‘from the producer of Bridesmaids,’’ while another announced The Lucky One as being ‘‘from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Notebook and Dear John,’’ and another for the new Walking Dead videogame offered a more complex authorial trail by noting that it was based both on the comic book series by Robert Kirkman and on the AMC television series. In this same feed, television scholar Jason Mittell even announced that he had just published a chapter (about television authorship, A Companion to Media Authorship, First Edition. Edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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no less!) of his book-in-progress, Complex TV, in an experiment in ongoing peer review, whereby Mittell encouraged readers to comment (thus, in some way becoming ‘‘co-authors’’?) so that he could revise the book prior to publication in paper. Projects such as this call attention not only to the authorship of media, but also to how authorship is mediated, where the technologies and platforms that we use in the course of creativity seem to enable social and collaborative forms of cultural production. So while the news feed of a Facebook user who happens to be editing a book about authorship may certainly be shaped by a bit of self-selection, it seems reasonable to conclude at the very least that there’s a vast discourse about authorship already in circulation, and that perhaps this book is thus not needed to call our attention to the importance of media authors or media authorship. What this book can do, however, is point to what often goes unspoken in all the discourses and issues of media authorship that surround us in everyday life. To see press or marketing for almost any item of media today without seeing the invocation of at least one author figure is rare. Yet each and every item carries with it the ghosts of authors not mentioned. The Five Year Engagement might be from the producer of Bridesmaids, for instance, but who directed it? Who wrote the script? One comment on a friend’s Facebook post about Star Wars Day alleged that Star Wars was taken largely from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces,3 while another noted A New Hope’s (1977) multiple borrowings from Hidden Fortress (1958). Discussions of adaptations often lead to accusations of ‘‘ruining’’ a pristine original and of textual infidelity, moreover, so to invoke ‘‘the acclaimed bestselling author’’ of The Notebook and Dear John is not only oddly to summon an author without a name, but is also to risk igniting concerns about poor adaptation, and a divergence from ‘‘the way the author intended it.’’ And behind each and every one of the above-mentioned texts, we could list at the least tens, and perhaps even thousands, of other faces of the author-as-hero, of individuals who contributed to the creation, envisioning, and realizing of the text, and yet whose names are not listed. If we examine Star Wars, for example, even beyond pointing out the obvious influences from Campbell and Hidden Fortress’s director, Akira Kurosawa, we might ask about the authorial power of other directors, writers, producers, cast, production designers, special effects designers, matte artists, sound designers, foley artists, and so on. Some of these figures have gained authorial or pseudo-authorial status in popular culture themselves, as with John Williams, the composer of the Star Wars music, Ben Burtt, the sound designer, or Carrie Fisher, a cast member who went on to become a writer and who has thus often been suspected to have written parts of the dialogue. Yet others remain untouted, except by the most loyal and informed fan and/or production communities. On one level, the constant invocation of authors reveals a cultural fascination with them and with the super powers ascribed to them. The narratives – both fictional and non-fictional – that the media delivers become resources for so many discussions and thoughts in our waking and sleeping lives, making it only natural that we often find ourselves keen to find out who made them and how they

Introduction

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made them. The author as figure is often posited as the individual who created the product, he or she who can variously be thanked or blamed, and he or she who then ‘‘gave’’ it to us (witness the language of texts being ‘‘from’’ an author, as if a parcel in the mail). The author is thus imagined to stand at the gateway and threshold between creativity, innovation, wonder, and magic, and us – all of those experiencing and taking pleasure in media culture in the mundane spaces of everyday life. If we are to understand how that world of wonder and magic works, the author is often posited as the figure we must capture and study. Why wouldn’t we want to know not only who the magician is, but also how his or her tricks are performed? On another level – lest all this talk of wonder and magic has readers crinkling their cynical brows – this widespread interest in authorship also reveals a cultural suspicion about precisely how magical they are. Instead of taking this whole system of creativity, mundanity, and the author-as-magician positioned in between for granted, we should see it as a discursive construct. Whose interests does it serve to see the world divided into the magical and the mundane, and if the author is the mediating figure, who has the power to create this figure and to install him or her on that threshold? What, in other words, is at stake in seeing authors in general as magicians, but what too is at stake in seeing any particular individual as an author-magician? As noted above, every nominated author has a wealth of ghost authors standing behind him or her, those whose names have not been invoked – whether by an ad campaign, a review, or a fan in question. What are the strategic reasons, then, to sell one author (‘‘the producer of Bridesmaids’’) in one setting, or another in another setting (‘‘from the acclaimed bestselling author’’)? Who gets to determine who ‘‘counts,’’ who argues over this, and why might we argue over it? What cultural work is the author’s name expected to do? Let us follow up on the case of George Lucas briefly. When Lucasfilm or Twentieth Century Fox sell him as a remarkable author figure, they clearly have their reasons to do so. In a world full of many more movies than any one person could ever see, announcing that this movie is special, that it comes from a true visionary, aims to make any film of Lucas’ stand above others. In this sense, media authorship plays very similarly to the star system: a form of product differentiation cranked out of the marketing and promotion machines of Hollywood to distinguish product in a crowded marketplace. Of course, this similarity helps us to realize that it’s also not quite that simple, since Lucasfilm and Fox in fact sell the movie as multiply-authored, pointing to other members of the cast and crew whose work we are similarly encouraged to see as wholly unique, pathsetting, and magical. This poses actual challenges for those working on ‘‘a film by George Lucas,’’ as hierarchies need to be created of who gets to control what. If a whole host of people have supposedly unique visionary powers, how does one bring them all together? In any artform that requires collaboration – as with almost all forms of mass media – authorship will therefore require not just magical ideas but also no small amount of management. How do Lucas, Lucasfilm, and Fox ensure, in other

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words, that John Williams can write his best music, Harrison Ford can offer his best performance, Lawrence Kasdan can write his best script, and so on, yet that they can still come together and form something that is not just a cacophonous collection of contrasting creative acts? But the management that these individuals and their marketing teams must perform is also discursive. For beyond the actual acts of who does what, Lucas, Lucasfilm, and Fox (and now Disney) will encourage us to see some authors as more active than others. Hierarchies of control and value are not merely required on set: they are required in the press and in the popular imagination regarding what creativity is. Witness here the battles between Lucasfilm and some Star Wars fans. The latter have often contested the idea that Star Wars ‘‘belongs’’ to Lucasfilm, and have thus felt free to author it themselves. Some fans create fan film or fan fiction that add new characters to the mix, and that transform other already-existing characters or events. To do so is to challenge the notion of Lucasfilm and Lucas having a monopoly on the realm of magic, as the fans now position themselves on the threshold of magic and mundanity, and allow themselves freedom of movement, rather than seeing themselves wholly as receivers of the gifts from Lucasfilmapproved authors. At times, Lucasfilm has ‘‘allowed’’ this by not challenging the fans over the legalities of their actions, and usually these allowances come when Lucasfilm feels its economic and semiotic interests are not challenged inasmuch as it doesn’t stand to lose revenue or control over what the Star Wars franchise means and what it does. However, when their interests are challenged, as with much of Hollywood, it has then quickly invoked legal discourses of authorship, rights, and ownership in order to deny authorial rights to fans. Moreover, its approach is not simply reactive, as it also invests considerable capital – through press junkets, ‘‘making of’’ specials, Blu-ray bonus materials, licensed merchandise and books, and so on – in determining exactly who counts as an author, and who counts how much, so that when and if battles do occur, the battles take place on an uneven playing field. Authorship is therefore about control, power, and the management of meaning and of people as much as it is about creativity and innovation. That makes authorship one of the more vital processes in modern media and culture. The author is a node through which discourses of beauty, truth, meaning, and value must travel, while also being a node through which money, power, labor, and the control of culture must travel, and while frequently serving as the mediating figure standing between large organizations (such as Lucasfilm or Fox) and the audience. No wonder academics and citizens alike are all endlessly fascinated by authors. And no wonder we all discuss authors so frequently, since arguments about creation, beauty, the audience, production, the industrialization of culture, labor, and flows of meaning and cash will often be couched in terms of authorship. With the author performing so many actual and discursive roles in society, so much is thus at stake in understanding how authorship works, and authorship is a key entry point into examining much of how media culture works. In an age of new and digital media, these issues become even more interesting. For if we have

Introduction

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briefly discussed the authorship of something like the Star Wars franchise above, let us also consider the portal through which we arrived at such a discussion, and ask what authorship looks like on something like Facebook. Who authors our Facebook feeds or our Twitter streams? These are massively collaborative productions that defy notions of singular heroic authorship, and that also require us all the more to ask questions of management, by organizations (Facebook), by individuals (Mark Zuckerberg, or an individual Facebook friend), by policy (Facebook’s notorious, and ever-changing, privacy settings that determine what we see and can’t see), and by algorithm and code. Even individual status updates or tweets quite often defy simple notions of authorship, as they might on the one hand combine the poster’s words with another’s (retweeting or embedding), and/or on the other hand frame whatever is linked to in a way that adds the voice of the poster to the linked-to subject’s words. Ultimately, then, while the last hundred years or so have been a period of intense fetishization of and dogged belief in the singular author in Western societies, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Final Cut Pro, blogs, YouTube, and Pinterest making collaborative, fused, remixed authorship all the more obvious and normative, it now strikes us as a particularly opportune time to stop and take stock of exactly what an author is and how authorship works. Along with enabling everyday authorship, perhaps the digital era has cleared away some of the Romanticism and belief in magic that has often doomed discussions of the author to beatification. Such is our hope, and such is the reason for us offering a collection of new statements about media authorship now. Within academia, considerable debate has raged about what authors are, how much authority they have over a text (or how much author is in authority), how much power our practice as analysts accords them, how much power we should or should not accord them, what their relationship to the text is, what they do for and to texts, and what is at stake in studying them. The chapters in this collection revisit these questions to offer fresh answers. Whether we care about art or industry, creation or reception, production or consumption, text or theory, culture or aesthetics, or all of the above, the author naggingly reappears as a problem to be solved. If authors need ‘‘solving,’’ though, this also suggests that fresh answers, theories, and understandings of how authorship work may have significant knock-on effects for our understandings of how art, texts, production cultures, audiences, power, identity, aesthetics, and meaning work. We have endeavored to collect voices from across various disciplines and addressing various media products. Thus, chapters cover authorship of everything from the films of Robert Bresson to the videogames of Square Enix, from Disney’s institutional authorship of Hilary Duff to collaborative cultures of making music, from the video store clerk as author to the nation-state as author of itself and of citizens, from amateur video storytelling in the slums of Nairobi to the business strategies of advertising and promoting Bollywood, from authorship on Twitter to authorship in the board room, and from the penning of comic books to practices

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of authorship by fans, music coordinators, production designers, cast members, academics, and more. Authorship has more often been studied in highly contained settings, and yet our goal in assembling such a diverse selection of subjects, writers, and disciplinary frameworks has been to eke out some grander truths of authorship through comparison. We have no definitive answer of what an author is, no easy statement to share in this introduction that could be underlined or highlighted and that could thus spare the reader the journey ahead. Rather, we hope that the chapters that follow will challenge readers to think of the many different ways in which authorship works: as a mediator of aesthetics and meaning, as an act of power and control, as industrial strategy, as something to be practiced, something to be contested, and something to be won, awarded, denied, hoarded, and/or shared. All in all, this means that the business of solving the problem of media authorship is as much about asking critical questions as it is about providing concrete answers.

Chapter Summaries While each of the chapters in this book offers its own unique perspectives on media authorship, a shared set of research questions unites them all. While the popular discourses of our Facebook feeds (and other sites where authorship discourses are constructed) seem to suggest that we know it when we see it, the chapters comprising this collection first and foremost problematize the question of what authorship is. This means not just accepting tacit definitions of practices and tacit assumptions about what constitutes creativity, but also engaging in critical thought about how all that cultural production is imagined and made meaningful. Through what discourses and cultural processes is media authorship produced? How does the authorship of different media – and the mediation of authorship more broadly–demand that we give our attention to the contexts in which creative agents and their practices unfold and are made culturally intelligible? This means thinking not just about where media authorship comes from, but also who that authorship is constructed around, how, by whom, in what kinds of cultural spaces, and for what purposes. Authorship is therefore not just a question of art and individual expression, but also of social and institutional structures that govern cultural production, enabling, compelling, and authorizing some forms while constraining others. By interrogating authorship as culture – and thereby, as something we can both construct and deconstruct – we are able to do more than legitimate creative genius worthy of note in those Facebook feeds; instead, we can explore how the attributions of authorship and claims of authority we make give specific value and meaning to the practices, creative or otherwise, of mediated everyday life. We can conduct grounded research into how authorship is rendered visible and invisible. We can understand how authorship is not a natural phenomenon, but a set of

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cultural values and concerns variably mobilized in different historical moments and geographic locales. We can think about how authorship has helped constitute the hierarchies between media, considering how literature and film have been legitimated through claims of the genius and vision of individual auteurs compared to forms of cultural production marked as more commercial or collaborative in television, videogames and emerging digital media – in which competing claims to authorship have now worked to construct new structures, practices, and ideals of creativity. In interrogating its relationships with struggle and power, we might not be able to define authorship in a neat, systematic way, but we can start to make sense of the culture that informs it and that it supports in turn. Asking questions about authorship, rather than just producing new claims about authorship, is the best way to get at that culture. With these shared questions, the authors showcased in this book were able to study authorship in a wide variety of contexts and yet produce a collective intervention. The answers they offer in the attempt to solve the problem of authorship feature a diversity of tones and registers, but from this diversity of approaches and case studies comes a harmony in which the most valuable ideas reinforce one another. Again, this collective contribution is not a definition of media authorship, but something that goes beyond while leaving the topic an open question; instead of a single definitive statement, the book works as a whole to propose a plan of how media authorship might be further problematized in both creative practice and scholarly examination of it. From that outlook, media authorship can be theorized and historicized as a discursive, legal, and practical phenomenon; it can be contested as a site of struggle between multiple parties claiming authority; it can be industrialized within structures and institutions of cultural production; it can be expanded to include new labor categories, emerging sites of creativity, and shifting understandings of the audience; and it can be relocated outside of the commonsense realm of creativity in spheres like retail, marketing, the nation-state, and even the divine. The first section of the book, Part I: Theorizing and Historicizing Authorship, therefore, aims to demonstrate what that theorization and historicization of authorship might look like. On the level of theory, the chapters in the section all extend from a shared concern with authority and agency, seeking to understand how authorship has been deployed as a concept to mediate tensions between the two. On the level of history, these chapters seek to understand how creative practices are themselves dynamic, changing phenomenon, but together they recognize that what practices count as authorship in what contexts has also been a matter of flux and change. In the first of these chapters, John Hartley seeks to distinguish between creativity and authorship, arguing that in historical usage the term ‘‘author’’ ‘‘never was a simple individual, but one who channels system-level or institutional authority into text’’ (original italics). While his chapter is far reaching – tying authorship to emergence, public sphere, industrialization, and property rights – Hartley begins, in fact, with

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the figure of God as the authority from which creativity was derived and made powerful through the idea of authorship. In conceiving of authors as agents of systems more so than sources of individual intention and agency, Hartley casts a critical eye on the ‘‘narrative of the self’’ and the way that do-it-yourself publishing and social media have everyone responsible for participating in authorship. Kristina Busse follows up these concerns with an exploration of the ethical basis of authorship, asking how and why it matters who the author behind a text might be. Surveying literary understandings of the author, as well as those of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, she focuses specific questions of authorial responsibilities, privileges, and identities in specific contexts of production and reception. From examinations of hipster racism to fandom, she argues that it matters not just who is authoring culture, but also how the context we have for making sense of that authorship matters. Complementing these ethical perspectives, Olufunmilayo Arewa follows with an examination of authorship from a legal perspective, equally concerned with the history of copyright as with musical forms as well as race and ethnicity. Arewa argues that Western traditions of classical music have sat at odds with models of creativity based in collaboration, borrowing, or copying in African-based musical forms like blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and rap. Uncovering the ways in which hierarchies of race and class have shaped authorial rights, she makes a compelling argument about the inadequacy of copyright and issues a call for alternative structures that ‘‘recognize borrowing as a norm and incorporate better delineation of the scope of acceptable borrowing and mechanisms for compensation that better recognize the reality of sharing and collaboration in creation.’’ Jonathan Gray follows this critique of copyright’s racial hierarchies with a similar attempt to uncover the contingency and selectiveness of authorship discourses. Seeking to understand the temporality of authorship, Gray sees authority over a text as a something of a moving target, constructed in specific discursive circumstances but reconfigurable and reconstructed in successive moments. His argument, ultimately, centers upon the idea of authorial flux, in which clusters of authorship and authority are continuously built and rebuilt. Equally concerned with this idea of flux is Colin Burnett, who problematizes the notion of fixed authorial vision and worldview in examining the collaborations between film director Robert Bresson and his frequent cinematographer L´eonce-Henri Burel. Studying production materials, Burnett theorizes an ‘‘intentional flux’’ in Bresson’s work that can account for the historical and social conditions in which individual creators’ intentions are negotiated and in which solutions to creative problems are found. Pointing to the ‘‘hidden hands at work’’ in film as well as television and videogames Burnett explodes the concept of intention often assumed as the basis for authorship while paying close attention to the specific choices made by human agents working in social relations. Together, these five chapters push us to understand authorship in terms of shifting social relations, specific contexts, and systems of power.

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The second section of the book, Part II: Contesting Authorship, builds upon these theoretical interventions to posit authorship as a field of contestation. This means correcting utopian rhetoric about creativity and free expression – particularly in a digital age defined by social media and participatory culture – and engaging in questions of conflict based in ownership, creative constraints, competing claims to authority, and above all, marginalization within the kinds of hierarchies that so often mark the cultures of media authorship. In concert with one another, these chapters examine authorship as something asserted amid the power relations of industry and other social institutions, in which multiple claims to authorship circulate in tension with one another. Looking at the ways in which contemporary media culture is understood to be a site of co-creativity, participation, and collaboration on the part of consumer-users, Derek Johnson considers the politics of collaboration and asks how the discursive imagination of audiences in those terms reinscribes them and their creative practices within dominant hierarchies and markers of legitimacy. Putting the gendered devaluation of toy/television property My Little Pony in tension with claims of authorship surrounding producer Lauren Faust and the franchise’s participatory audience, Johnson complements Foucault’s notion of the ‘‘author function’’ with an ‘‘audience function’’ in which certain gendered, sexed, and aged audiences serve as a prop in the process of constructing and imagining authorial legitimacy. Brian Ekdale continues this corrective to the utopian rhetoric of participation, arguing that marginalization and difference persist even when removed from the industrialized realm of Hollywood. Focusing on young producers of non-profit self-representational media in Nairobi slums, Ekdale describes authorship as a battle between creativity and constraint where personal stories are not produced or owned by individuals or communities, but ‘‘constructed at the intersection of individual autonomy, personal histories, existing stories, and circumstances.’’ Even in self-representational media, therefore, authorship is something fought for, negotiated out of the constraints of production. Returning to the commercial realm, Michele Hilmes offers in her chapter a historical examination of how claims of authorship have been attributed and arbitrated in the broadcasting industry by trade organizations such as the Radio Writer’s Guild. In addition to its relevance to debates about seriality and writing for broadcast media today, Hilmes’ history offers insight into how authorship has been asserted in the face of institutional structures and forms aimed at effacing the work of creativity. In radio broadcasting, she identifies the emergence of what she calls ‘‘streaming seriality,’’ in which ongoing production and the lack of a closed, individual text has troubled traditional notions of originality and authorship. Moving from broadcast history to the contemporary moment, Matt Hills explores what he calls discourses of ‘‘counter-authorship,’’ wherein competing claims to television authorship emerge in response to industry power relations. Hills argues that ‘‘[a]nalyzing processes of TV authorship in this manner means starting not from the end-product’s credits, but rather addressing the

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journey whereby a range of authors are effectively written out, or opt out, along the way.’’ Offering a case study of the BBC series Torchwood, and the authorship claims made by and attributed to figures like ‘‘absentee landlord’’ Russell T. Davies, showrunner ‘‘tenant’’ Chris Chibnall, and US networks like FOX, Hills suggests that the identities of channels, programs, and author cannot all be aligned without compromise, contestation, and struggle. Closing this section is Ian Gordon’s analysis of multiple authorship in comic books, wherein he argues that industry structures have been set up to deny the authorship of figures like Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, and Jerry Robinson with moral claims to characters like Superman and Batman, in favor of contractual obligations to other parties. Gordon offers an account of moral authorship, legal limbos, and negotiation over corporately owned resources shared by for-hire labor over long periods of time. In positioning authorship as a site of multiplicity, and offering a detailed account of how rights to authority are assigned, Gordon – like each of the authors in this section – understands media authorship as a site of cultural tension. While many of the above chapters recognize authorship as a phenomenon made meaningful in and by industrial forces, the third section of the book, Part III: Industrializing Authorship, works to push these observations further, focusing on how corporate structures shape and are shaped by authorship. This means that these chapters aim to rethink some of our common assumptions about authorship, rejecting ideas that it might be tied to art free of industrial constraints and that the most commercial of popular culture is not authored in its market-driven purpose. Instead, these chapters put authorship in direct relation to the commodification of culture and the reification of social identities; they situate collaboration as a site of compromise and institutional control; they think about authorship as a kind of identity suited to product differentiation; and above all, they consider authorship as a strategy and practice tied up in commercial and institutional demands. To open this discussion, Anamik Saha explores how, in the commodification of production by the culture industries, diasporic subjects find their work undermined and their alternative or oppositional narratives of cultural difference reified. Drawing from an ethnography of British South Asian cultural production in the theater, and critiquing works of cultural studies that would divorce study of texts from their context of production, Saha argues that non-white playwrights and theater companies working in the West find their work impeded and subverted in such a way as to demand that we consider those industrial structures as authorial forces in and of themselves. To position industry as author, Saha argues that ‘‘the increasingly standardized and rationalized processes of contemporary cultural production limit and restrict creative freedom and that thereby takes on authorial powers in itself.’’ Following Saha, Stephen Teo too seeks to understand what happens when cultural production occurs within highly rationalized systems, exploring the work of film director Li Hanxiang in the Shaw Brothers studio system of 1950s and ’60s Hong Kong. Unsatisfied with approaches based in either auteurism or collective collaboration and seeking to account for non-Western

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modes of cinematic authorship, Teo theorizes Li’s erotic films at Shaw not as Romantic authorship, but as Cynical authorship, where Li was no solitary genius, but someone whose authorship was tied up in the ‘‘problem of the system.’’ Situating Li’s authorship in relation to both studio and generic constraints, Teo’s understanding of collaboration marks negotiated compromise not in opposition, but instead as an ‘‘innate element of authorship.’’ Moving from film studios to television networks, Catherine Johnson’s chapter considers authorship as a site at which conflicts in ownership and authority in broadcasting and television programming are enacted. She sees the branded television channel as a central paratext that, through ‘‘idents’’ and other markers, constructs an identity for television programming, authoring it in the process. Authorship, in this sense, is an ‘‘augmentation’’ of pre-existing programming and our experience of it – something that shapes it and makes it identifiable in certain ways. By tracing a history of network branding into the cable/satellite era and also into the contemporary moment of digital convergence, Johnson shows how the branding of MTV, FOX, and ITV offers a clear authorial voice and has attracted audiences in service of those networks’ commercial needs. Similarly concerned with branding is Lindsay Hogan, who in her chapter examines the ‘‘star machine’’ with which Disney has cultivated a stable of young female stars and used them to target ‘‘tween’’ audiences. This puts authorship in tension not just with branded corporate identity, but also with branded star texts – the intertextual tensions of which Disney seeks to maintain and manage in their branding practice. Focusing on the discrete motivations and strategies within different subsidiaries and divisions in the Disney empire, Hogan paints a picture of corporate struggle to maintain dominance, figuring that corporate authorship as ‘‘a constant process of meaning production among various groups (or authors) competing for control.’’ Corporate hierarchies and brands play a crucial role in Mia Consalvo’s chapter as well, where she considers how Square Enix, the Japanese developer of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest videogame franchises, have approached the creation, sales, distribution, and marketing of their product on a transnational level. Consalvo situates corporate authorship not just with globalization, but specifically within a disposition of cosmopolitanism that positions hybrid subject positions as the ideal. This corporate cosmopolitanism, she argues, provides a ‘‘polymorphic vision’’ in which games are conceived of as something to be reauthored for different contexts. These critical studies of the institutions of authorship are also complemented by an interview with Ivan Ask with, a producer of transmedia narratives and platforms. This interview gives insight into how authorship might figure into corporate strategy defined by opportunity cost, management principles, architectures, and discourses, and the value of controlling access. If authorship has been the subject of competing claims and monopolistic seizures, we offer in the fourth section of the book, Part IV: Expanding Authorship, a lens through which the boundaries of authorship might be rethought and made to be more expansive. Indeed, if authorship can be considered a kind of hoarding

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of creative and cultural authority, this section might be imagined as the realityTV-style intervention into that oftentimes problematic habit. These chapters each work to bring an inclusiveness and diversity to our recognition of creative contributions in the spaces and work routines of cultural production, often in opposition to auteurism and other dominant discourses of authorship that would deny them. Together these chapters expand the range of sites and practices at which we might look for creativity, authority, and legitimacy. Beyond pointing to new authors, however, these chapters are also concerned with theorizing the creative pleasures of collaboration and putting these in tension with the conflicts highlighted in the Part III of the book. Of particular concern here is the role of the audience, both as a site of interaction and collaboration with professional media workers (and the discourses surrounding them), and as a site of authorial activity on their own. John Caldwell looks to expand our study of authorship by looking at belowthe-line labor of craft and technical workers in Hollywood production cultures, where expressive control and creative identities might be constructed and operate in opposition to those of recognized auteurs at the above-the-line level of writers, directors, and producers. Looking at contracts, industry policies, and practices of paying overworked labor in ‘‘authorial capital,’’ Caldwell sees authorship as something dictated by industrial structures but also produced and negotiated through professional rituals and everyday work routines. Considering the claims that workers make to authorship through texts from sizzle reels to tweets, Caldwell considers below-the-line labor as an ‘‘authorship brokerage’’ in which workers try to affirm their creative agency even as it is blurred and erased by top-down forces. Caught himself within these forces, professional production designer David Brisbin offers his own perspective on these issues by focusing our attention on one specific site of labor ignored by these traditional above-the-line auteurist claims. But rather than place production design in tension with auteurism, Brisbin notes that ‘‘[e]mbedded in the idea of the auteur is shared authorship’’ (original italics), figuring the relationship between director and production designer as a marriage. In provocatively suggesting that this marriage often involves directorial affairs with visual effects supervisors, however, Brisbin captures the tensions in these collaborative relationships as new industrial relationships form in response to new technologies, and furthermore, he identifies production design as a site of continued dependence on the part of directors, as they that design can imagine the worlds and spaces increasingly in demand by participatory audiences. Louisa Stein’s chapter follows this possibility to a logical conclusion by placing additional creative agents in the role of collaborator: both actors in the professional realm, and fan audiences in the realm of grassroots cultural production. Examining the cult television series Supernatural, Stein explores how its authorship cannot be understood without reference to the social networking platform of Twitter, which has been used both by recurring cast member Misha Collins as a means of performing a particular counter-authorial identity, and by fans to allow them the

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ability to participate in the ongoing co-creation of that identity. Stein reads Collins’ performance as a marginal site at which fans might be allowed to play, and in doing so, ‘‘the mostly female fans perform and thus author their own fan personae as transgressive, aggressive, and overtly sexual, yet intellectual, digitally skilled, and self-aware.’’ Yet Stein complicates this performed authorship by putting it in tension with the disciplinary power of writers and producers, identifying a push and pull between the authorized and the unauthorized in this new frontier of co-creation. The audience also figures as a primary concern for Suzanne Scott, who looks at how the authorial identity of Zach Snyder, director of Watchmen and Sucker Punch, has been tied up in how audiences are both imagined into and excluded from hegemonic forms of cultural production. Scott identifies Snyder as one of several ‘‘fanboy auteurs’’ who is figured to straddle the line between professional producer and amateur fan, negotiating several cultural contradictions in the process. The fanboy auteur, she argues, is a gendered performance that allows the fanboy auteur to ‘‘evade the feminizing stigma of fandom and paternalistic arrogance of the auteur simultaneously.’’ In offering a vision of authorship that ‘‘thrives within tensions between the commercial and the subcultural, the mass and the niche, the recognizable and the intertextual,’’ Scott’s case study explores the new, expanded models of authorship we might consider while also remaining critical of those possibilities. Along with these four chapters come two additional interviews meant to expand the horizons at which we might continue that critical research in the future. The first is an interview with Bear McCreary, a music composer most recognized for his work on television series including Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. As with Brisbin’s chapter, this interview turns our focus to an often ignored category of creative work; but it also puts into relation (and often tension) with authorship the construction of professional identities, the pleasures of working in a collaborative medium, and the dynamics of engaging with fan audiences through blogging and other digital media practices increasingly embraced by media professionals. Megan Sapnar Ankerson’s interview with Molly Wright Steenson, a digital studies scholar with a long history of working in the web industries, works to consider authorship in terms of networked creativity. Because web production – whether professional or amateur – involves a significant amount of remixing (whether at the level of code or content), web work at once stretches the limits of authorship while also relying on traditional foundations in intellectual property. The interview thus helps us to understand what web authorship might be, and how it might be located at the level of code, infrastructure, and new communicative forms such as Twitter and Pinterest. By pointing to the new online spaces in which we might look for authorship, we can transition into the final set of critical interventions made by this book, in that we can conceive of authorship as something to be relocated. The question ‘‘where might we find authorship?’’ may seem geographic as much as anything else, in that the spaces in which authorship is considered range from South Asia to North America to Africa. Yet we do not imagine Part V: Relocating Authorship as defined

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by ‘‘globalization,’’ or at least not anymore than in any other part of the book (as we have strived for international and transnational diversity throughout). Instead, this section might be thought of as an attempt to locate authorship outside of the traditional, commonsense bounds of creativity and production culture. To what other spaces – physical or conceptual – might we move our study of media authorship? The chapters in this final section offer a wide range of possibilities – from thinking about media authorship at the site of retail exchange, to the offices of promoters and marketers, to the legal and juridical realm of the nation, to the space of the almighty divine, and self-reflexively to the arena of scholarship itself. This final section begins with Aswin Punathambekar’s examination of the Hindilanguage film industry in Mumbai, and the ascendance to power and authority of in-house marketing divisions, public relations firms, and advertising agencies over the past two decades. Although these categories of media labor remained relatively marginal to that industry prior to the 1990s, the rise of new technologies and new media platforms brought with it a shifting set of industrial relations in which these upstart professional fields were able to reposition themselves as centrally important by virtue of their ability to ‘‘facilitate interactions and exchanges among professionals in film, television, and advertising despite what appeared to be incommensurable regimes of value and modes of knowing the audience that defined those industries.’’ Crystallizing the relationship between authorship and audience explored in the previous section and elsewhere in this volume, Punathambekar identifies the discursive role of the audience in legitimating new classes of workers and imagining new kinds of authorships and authorities – even for those outside of the creative realm. Dan Herbert makes a similar move, but locates authorship not in the audience per se so much as in the practices of media workers who organize the shelves at independent video stores. In Herbert’s analysis, authorship is an organizational category within the retail space that works to position directors as auteurs; the authorship of film directors is thus something operative and disseminated through these commercial spaces as much as the practice of producing the films themselves. As such, Herbert considers the work of video store clerks as a kind of authorship based in making selections and devising ways to organize and make production work meaningful – although, as he also points out, directors such as Quentin Tarantino have subsequently laid claim to the video store as a means of constructing their own authorial identities. In this way, Herbert convincingly positions video store culture as ‘‘co-constitutive of contemporary practices of auteurism.’’ Hector Amaya moves the discussion of authorship even further from questions of creativity, individuality, and agency within film, television, or new media production cultures. Instead, he seeks to define authorship in a legal way, ‘‘one that defines authorship as ownership of action that establishes legal responsibility and legitimate authority.’’ His case study considers Mexican narcocorridos, hiphop forms that narrate the lives of drug dealers and have been subject to state censorship out of concern for their normalization of drug violence. Amaya asks

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what this censorship tells us about the nation-state, and ultimately concludes that in its affirmative attempts to define juridical and aesthetic forms, censorship acts as a means through which the nation works to author citizenship. But while ‘‘the nation-state authors citizens,’’ Amaya suggests that this authorship/censorship fails because our transnational relationships with media are often divorced from a specifically national identity. While Katrien Pype moves to resituate the study of media authorship in relation to discourses of the divine – a move toward cultural authority that some may see as higher than even the nation – she nevertheless returns our examination of media authorship to the place where John Hartley began. Through her participant ethnography of Congolese television serial production, in which she performed herself with CINARC, the most popular performance troop in Kinshasa, Pype explores questions of ownership, originality, and inspiration in improvisational forms, explaining how they were attributed in this context to a sacred and holy force. In her analysis, Pype wrestles with the way that attributions of African authorship by scholars in the West have both reproduced stereotypical perceptions of primitivism and imposed Western concerns and value over that cultural production. Yet instead of presenting this attribution of authorship as the quaint superstition of an Other – or legitimating the idea of authorship from a higher power – Pype allows us to see authorship as something contextual and socially constructed that we can denaturalize in critical scholarship. In concert with the other chapters in this section, therefore, this work encourages us to see authorship as something not inherently tied up in creativity, practice, and individual agency in industrial structures, but rather as something that we have often imagined into being there and in numerous other cultural realms. And finally, an interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in the exploration of how digital technology might enhance the production of scholarship, offers a self-reflexive glimpse into how scholarship itself is authored, and how that authorship might change in the future. Advocating for change in the way that scholarship is communicated via emerging communication technologies, Fitzpatrick points to how the production of knowledge is in transition, and allows us to consider how all our claims about media authorship are themselves mediated practices of authorship.

Authoring a Book about Authors . . . With Many Authors So by way of further scratching the surface of authorship, and putting these questions and conceptual lenses into some practice here before letting the following chapters develop them, let us begin by contemplating this book as authored product, and how it challenges us to consider the politics of collaboration, who ‘‘truly’’ is an author, and why this matters. As an edited collection, not a ‘‘single-author’’ tome, the authorship is thoroughly collaborative. And yet even that collaboration is marked by power lines and

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hierarchies. As editors, we played a key role in selecting who would contribute, and when receiving first drafts we had the power to call for revisions, with the implicit threat of dropping a contribution if it did not toe a line that we set. Each contributor gave us a first draft, which we then commented upon. Sometimes this process involved suggesting ideas that we felt should be included in the chapters, offering us the chance to add our own voices to their chapters. At other times, we found ourselves disagreeing with a writer’s argument, or arriving at different conclusions, which forced us then to determine whether we would like to intervene and insert our authorship more determinedly, or whether to sit back and honor the writer’s authorship. This collaborative process of revision was moreover a mediated process of authorship itself, taking place through communication technologies such as email, embedded comments in word processing software, and extending into dialogue on social media platforms. Surely this mediation shaped how our suggestions, intended to be helpful pushes toward productive transformation, may have alternatively read as overbearing or constraining notes from meddling managers. Practically, though, and especially in a field such as academic writing, where one receives little direct remuneration for most written work, we could only ask for so many changes anyway: should we ask for more, an annoyance factor would definitely set in for some writers and they would abandon us. Thus we mention our own ‘‘powers’’ not to claim authorship over the constituent chapters here, but instead to point to an interplay. This interplay extended to ourselves, too, as the two of us were never in perfect agreement and would often need to hash out differences of opinions or strategy – again, with the mediation of that process both enabling and constraining resolution. Wiley-Blackwell, meanwhile, had powers as publisher to set overall word length, to make its own demands with regards to the contributor composition, and as we typed these words, we knew that they could in theory reject them and refuse to print them. We also knew that the their reviewers could similarly play such a role, as it is common for reviewers to request the deletion of entire chapters. What we did not predict was that Wiley-Blackwell would demand that our preferred authorial order for the collection – Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray – be reversed to the order you now see on the cover. Following submission of the manuscript, on the rationale that Jonathan was the more senior and published author, and hence the one they felt would be more marketable, the press insisted that Jonathan’s name should come first. Our editor explained that for a commercial press such as WileyBlackwell, marketability was the key consideration in determining authorial order and, thus, who might be perceived to be in a lead position. Our own impassioned arguments that Derek had in fact put more blood and sweat into the editing were not received well, and we were left with the option of sticking with ‘‘Gray and Johnson’’ (while inserting this passage here and giving Derek his due by placing his name first for this Introduction) or trying to dissolve our contract with Wiley-Blackwell, and finding another publisher. And thus we witnessed first-hand how attribution isn’t just about who did what, as the (perceived) discursive value

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of ‘‘Gray’’ trumped the greater productive and intellectual value brought to these many pages by Johnson. Instead, in the face of (and arguably constituted by) two completely different logics of attribution, our authorship was as much about a struggle over power, authority, and the politics of intellectual work. All of our acts of authorship, moreover, occur within an even broader institutional context that dictates what we are likely to say and how we are likely to say it. Senior contributors, for instance, found it easier to agree to write whatever they wanted to, whereas our initial conversations with junior contributors were marked by concerns (theirs and ours) that they had other projects and statements earmarked for peer-reviewed journals or for monographs that needed to take priority, or that they needed to reserve some of their material for such venues. For readers who are not aware, within academia a firm hierarchy of which venues ‘‘count’’ more than others exists for hiring and tenure committees (due to commercial considerations such as the one we experienced), and not only are chapters seen to count less than blind peer-reviewed journal articles, but commercial presses are occasionally regarded as less prestigious than university presses. Thus some of our contributors had institutional forces impacting their authorship in serious ways, while other potential contributors’ authorship was impacted so forcefully as to ensure it never occurred in the first place. We are also conscious of the role that distribution will play in authoring this book. Wiley-Blackwell will price the initial hardback release of the book at a rate not conducive to everyday sales or even classroom sales. They also have a certain profile as a publisher. Thus, we have been aware of a likely audience, and have at times written to that audience. Sometime between now and the release of the book, moreover, Wiley-Blackwell will design a cover, one that we will likely have limited ability to contest, and yet one that will play its own role in communicating to audiences what the book is about, and hence in authoring it. As with many acts of authorship, the cover will, whether intentionally or not, make a claim of some kind of authority. The back cover, meanwhile, will list our institutional affiliation and some other books by us, to insist on our authorial heft, and on a specific type of authorial heft (how differently might you feel if those small bios listed us both as having spent fifty years working in Hollywood, for instance, or if they listed us as carnival workers whose other books were collections of jokes about the circus?). At conferences, Wiley-Blackwell will then put it next to other books, thereby suggesting it is such-and-such a type of book. And they will likely send out email notices to announce its publication, and their choice of which mailing lists, who to send notices to, which representative authors they list, and what they say about us will itself play a role in creating ideas of what the book is about. The discourses of authorship created about this book, in other words, will aim to perform what it is and will make numerous claims about its value, meaning, and relevance. Yet, perhaps you will not be reading Wiley-Blackwell’s or our preferred version of the book. Perhaps instead you have a photocopied version of it, or of only some of it, thereby rendering moot the meanings of the cover or of other chapters. If

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so, in theory Blackwell (and its corporate parent Wiley) may wish to take steps to protect their and our ‘‘authorial rights,’’ since they are (very literally) invested in a certain version of the book, a version that is closely tied to, and fronted by, a specific notion of authorship. In the meantime, though, we could then ask questions about who re-authored the book and how, toward what ends? Why were certain chapters omitted and others featured? Perhaps an instructor with a focused intended use for the book decided to patch together only those chapters that served that use. Perhaps, moreover, those chapters have now been lifted from their ‘‘original’’ context and put in a reader that includes other materials, as the hypothetical instructor has included them in his or her act of authoring another collection. In sum, our authorship is not just our authorship. It is not now as we write this, it will not be when this book goes to press, nor will it be at any point in the future. If this is the case with an academic book with many contributors, surely it is even more the case with all of the products analyzed by those contributors. When we turn to the products of the media industries, we often see items worked on by hundreds of individuals. Not only will each of these individuals work within constraints set by those above them in power hierarchies, but they will conduct their acts of authorship aware of being surveilled by superiors, potential employers, friends, and so forth. If our acts of authorship in this book are circumscribed while also being performative, so too are theirs, and yet the networks of power, collaboration, and surveillance within which most of them work are significantly more complex and intricate than with this current book. However, just as each modification of authorship to this book forces the question of why – why this modification and what purpose does it serve? – and how – who has the power to modify authorship, and in what circumstances? – so can and should these questions be asked of the media industries. A great deal could be learned about the power hierarchies and about notions of creativity and value within academia by examining the authorship of this book (see the interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick in this volume for more discussion of academic authorship), and while that exploit may seem more or less interesting to any given reader, we should all care about learning the power hierarchies and notions of creativity and value that surround and support the production cultures of today’s media industries. These industries serve millions, hope to serve millions more, generate billions of dollars, and are often some of the key industries in any society. They network considerable power, and their products become, perforce, some of the most prominent, known, and common, communal messages and stories. To ask about their authors is to ask about how these industries work, what they do, how and why they do it, and how and why audiences bother with them. * Precisely because our authorship is not just ours, we would like to end this introduction by thanking the many people who have authored alongside us. Like

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the end of a summer blockbuster, we’d love to let a very long set of credits roll now. Instead, we’ll simply say thank you to you all, and single out especially the contributors to this collection, who have been a joy to work with, and who have been consummate professionals, as has Wiley-Blackwell’s editorial staff, led by the inimitable Jayne Fargnoli. Jennifer Smith also deserves credit for careful attention given to proofreading and formatting, and further thanks go to our families, our colleagues, and our grad students who willingly batted some of these ideas around with us.

Notes 1

Russ Fischer, ‘‘ ‘Cosmopolis’ Clip: What, Exactly, is Haunting the World?’’ Slash Film May 3, 2012, http://www.slashfilm.com/cosmopolis-clip-haunting-world/. 2 Dave Itzkoff, ‘‘A Film’s Superheroes Include the Director,’’ New York Times April 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/movies/joss-whedon-directs-the -avengers.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share. 3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd edn (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008).

Part I

Theorizing and Historicizing Authorship

2

Authorship and the Narrative of the Self John Hartley

Introduction: Three Acts This chapter conforms to the plot scheme recommended by Frances Taylor Patterson, instructor of silent-movie photoplay composition at Columbia University in the 1920s, who summarized it as follows: Act I – get a man up a tree; Act II – throw stones at him; Act III – get him down.1 In this case, the ‘‘man’’ in question is ‘‘the author.’’ Act I sees our hero transform historically from divine status (in oral media) to economic institution (in print media); Act II ‘‘throws stones’’ by questioning the need for such a figure at all (in modern visual media); Act III restores a certain level of narrative equilibrium by describing the return of the author – now expanded to whole populations (in contemporary digital media). This plot structure enables a conceptual and textual investigation of authorship under three headings: God is an Author (Shakespeare); No-one is an Author (Vogue); Everyone is an Author (Jefferson Hack). That each of these apparently mutually exclusive propositions may be true, even at the same time, and also contestable, is the problematic addressed by the chapter as a whole. The long history to which this brief plot gestures may, it is argued, indicate profound shifts in what it is that authorship creates: Nature, the world, and truth (pre-modern); Intellectual property and thus economic wealth (modern); The self (contemporary). As with all good plots, this one features a birth (Act I), conflict resolved by marriage (Act II), and death followed by renewal (Act III).

A Companion to Media Authorship, First Edition. Edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Act I. God – or is it Mammon? – is an Author ‘‘I think that, as our society changes . . . the author function will disappear,’’ Michel Foucault2

A matter of life and death There’s an eons-old mystery at the heart of authorship – that of life and death. In pre-modern societies, the mystery of origination belonged to gods; and from the gods authorship gained its own existence and authority. The author, godlike, is a giver of life. But in modern society, gods have died.3 The death of the author has also been proclaimed.4 However, as Mark Twain nearly said, reports of these deaths may have been exaggerated.5 The author remains alive and well, outliving the gods and retaining a certain generative mystique. If we are to understand contemporary authorship we shall need to be mindful of this myth of origins, because it continues to animate the otherwise strongly institutional and economic context in which the term operates. Despite the mysteries hinted at here – life, death, gods, eons, rebirth – there is a reasonably straightforward way to demonstrate the relation between gods and authors, simply by looking at the way that the word entered the English language. From the original Latin word ‘‘augere’’ (‘‘to make to grow, originate, promote, increase’’ – think ‘‘augment’’), the word ‘‘author’’ signifies ‘‘the person who originates or gives existence to anything.’’6 It appeared in English around 1380 in the writings of John Wyclif (theologian and Bible translator) and Geoffrey Chaucer (English poet): Chaucer (c. 1374): ‘‘But oh thou Jove, oh author of nature!’’7 Wyclif (c. 1380): ‘‘If holy writ be false, truly God author thereof is false’’8

‘‘The author’’ is thus a figure of great antiquity, linking mortal people to the divine attribute of immortality and the ability of nature to create anew. It was the personification of singular origin: the beginning or first cause of everything that was made; and of nature itself with its own life-giving or generative properties of germination, growth, and increase. This mystique still resonates in the ideas that authorship immortalizes a writer and that authors have the power to immortalize the characters they create, whether our hero/ine is factual or fictional. Thus, authorship as causal agency assures the immortality of one who can bring to life a world imagined in words; and it confers immortality, or life without death. In Judeo-Christian tradition, God is not only understood to be the ‘‘author’’ of all things but, as the quotation from Wyclif makes clear, is also taken as the literal author of specific written texts, called simply The Books (from the Greek βιβλiα; thence the Bible), known to Christians as ‘‘holy writ.’’ From this sacred or originating model, a more mundane sense of authorship emerged, as ‘‘one who sets forth written statements; the composer or writer of a treatise or book.’’9

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That such a being, albeit mortal, remains invested with some of the mystery of the divine original cannot be doubted. It was standard procedure in medieval rhetoric to deny personal originality. Another name for that, in those days, was heresy; for which the consequences could be fatal for the author. From the love letters of Abelard (d. 1142) and Heloise (d. 1162) to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (d. 1400), it was important to link ideas to authorized figures in the system, by ascribing them to ancient or venerated authors, sanctioned by Church or State as the authority for both words and action. ‘‘Authority,’’ in turn, is the ‘‘power to enforce obedience,’’10 but its etymology is the same as that of ‘‘author’’ – an authority that belongs to God but can be represented by others such as the Pope, since ‘‘authority’’ includes ‘‘Derived or delegated power; conferred right or title; authorization.’’11 Thus, the very history of the word itself shows that an ‘‘author’’ never was a simple individual, but one who channels system-level or institutional authority into text. The ‘‘one who sets forth written statements,’’ as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, is endowed with an ‘‘authority’’ conferred by the textual system of writing itself, reaching back through previous masters to its natural and ultimately divine origins.

Adventurers in ‘‘setting forth’’ Of all mortal authors, William Shakespeare is perhaps the most famous ‘‘one who sets forth,’’ in the English tongue at least. He attained this status despite the fact that he produced rather few ‘‘written statements.’’ Most of his output comprised plays, whose published versions were notoriously uncertain in terms of provenance and textual accuracy. One set of ‘‘written statements’’ that used the authority of his name in his own lifetime was published in 1609 under the title of Shake-speares Sonnets.12 The first edition bears an enigmatic inscription, thought to have been written, not by Shakespeare himself, although it is impossible to be sure, but by the book’s publisher, Thomas Thorpe (‘‘T. T.’’):

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS Mr. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH. T. T.

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This strange dedication seems to preserve the promise of authorial godhead: the ‘‘only begetter’’ (echoing the ‘‘only begotten’’ son of the Christian God); the immortality or ‘‘eternity promised’’ by our equally immortal or ‘‘ever-living’’ poet. But at the same time, the inscription is beset with doubts about its own and the sonnets’ authorship, the identity of the author (is ‘‘Mr. W. H.’’ William Shakespeare?), and even the meaning of the words – an uncertainty that has sustained 400 years of unresolved speculation.13 It seems that authorial authority and immortality alike are compromised and undermined by the very means of their own expression: we have it on good authority that authors are immortal; but we don’t really know who the author is, even when he’s the most celebrated author of all time. Why would anyone be so careless as to have the means of immortality at their fingertips and yet fail to capitalize on it? William Shakespeare is instructive in this regard. He lived in a period of turbulent transformation between the medieval and modern eras, and while he might earn undying repute as an ‘‘ever-living poet,’’ he actually earned his daily crust as a commercial entertainer, not as an author. This early modern period saw the organizational emergence of many nowfamiliar features of the ascendant market economy, even as it retained strongly medieval characteristics and beliefs. Shakespeare displays medieval and modern characteristics at once. He writes, but only rarely as a published author in the tradition of Classical learning. His published books, The Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece, were poetic meditations on the vicissitudes of courtly love. Some say that ‘‘Mr. W. H.’’ was William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, a poet himself, who went on to sponsor the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1623; or alternatively the handsome Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, to whom both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated, the latter fulsomely. In all of this, Shakespeare’s mode of authorship is aristocratic, amateur, and part of the web of courtly patronage that sustained great families. As an author, he remained carelessly medieval, content for the most part with what Richard Lanham would call, for a later age, ‘‘the economy of attention’’14 – an economy in which literary fame and reputation are valued, but not directly convertible to cash. Thus, the value of Shakespeare’s books was cultural rather than pecuniary, connecting his name to established status-based learning and aristocratic culture, which was itself on the make in this period, transforming from medieval arms (the sword) to modern administration (the pen), motivating some aristocratic patrons to add poets – like Shakespeare – to their adornments. Shakespeare showed little personal interest in his books as publications, except perhaps in lean years when the bubonic plague closed the theaters and income could be augmented by publication, as indeed occurred with The Sonnets in the plague year of 1609.15 If this type of authorship was all there was to Shakespeare, he may well have gained poetic immortality, but most of us would never have heard of him.

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The play’s the thing Of course, this was not all there was to Shakespeare. His plays are the cause of his enduring reputation, but at the time they were, for practical purposes, unauthored. They were written for performance, not publication, and were staged under the ‘‘brand name’’ of licensed companies of players like Pembroke’s Men or the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Only half were published in his lifetime, often in pirated editions based on actors’ or prompter’s copies (known as ‘‘foul papers’’). Shakespeare, the famous actor and part-owner of the companies that staged his plays, does not appear to have had a direct hand in the publication of any of them; and the first collected edition, edited by fellow-actors, was not published until seven years after his death. Shakespeare the dramatist was not an author but a media producer. In that respect he was altogether modern. He was a shareholder in one of the first English capitalist joint stock companies, and he combined with others – writers, actors, entrepreneurs, and shareholders – to make money by providing commercial entertainment to anonymous consumers for profit. He was, in short, among those who gained first-mover advantage in the commodification of culture. We tend to call such folk not ‘‘authors’’ but ‘‘capitalists.’’ Among the emergent features of the era was a new conceptualization of both property and authorship, leading eventually to the modern notion of ‘‘intellectual property.’’16 What had been a ‘‘common pool resource’’17 in medieval culture, including common land, common learning (in Latin), and a common stock of popular culture, began to be ‘‘enclosed,’’18 giving rise to the notion of an individual owner of expression as well as estates. As James Hamilton has pointed out, the Elizabethan theaters in London pioneered new modes of commercial organization, and were uniquely sensitive to the demands of the market, because ‘‘box office receipts were collected and tallied each night, thus immediately linking revenues to audience sizes in ways unavailable to then-current print modes.’’19 This enabled the commercial value of individual plays to be realized (in both senses of that word) immediately. That capability remains in place to this day for popular drama, when TV ratings and first-weekend cinema box-office takings still organize production decisions in a way that publishers have never been able to match, at least until the launch of Nielsen’s BookScan in 2001. Then as now audience size was influenced by multiple considerations other than authorship – drawcards included the reputation of the theater, the company, the actors and the play, as well as that of the playwright. However, immediate feedback on individual productions did hasten the ‘‘professionalization of writing,’’ which ‘‘only emerged when authors saw themselves as having something valuable to sell and conducted themselves accordingly, and when the legal, economic, and cultural frameworks were present which enabled such a validation.’’20 In other words, Shakespeare was ahead of the game as a playwright, but behind it as an

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author: he made his money, and plenty of it – enough to buy himself the status of a gentleman – in the popular, commercial theaters as an entrepreneur-actor-writer, not through book sales, as an author. Shakespeare followed the money when he pursued success in the popular media of the day. Perhaps this is also why he neglected his status as a literary author. There was little money in literary publishing, at least for authors. The real ‘‘adventurers in setting forth’’ were publishers, like Thomas Thorpe, who may or may not have secured his author’s consent to publish Shake-speares Sonnets. No-one knows whether Shakespeare himself was paid. As yet the book trade was not developed as a popular commercial industry, in the way that the London theaters were, not least because the reading public was small (albeit expanding). Paper was expensive, so books were priced according to the number of pages, without economies of scale, or pricing according to demand. Compared with the theaters, where a play might attract a thousand or more paying customers a day at a penny a person, books were rare, slow, and expensive.21 Some books were profitable, including popular plays that were published as books. But here again the author was not necessarily the organizing figure for an œuvre, or even for the meaning of a given play. Zachary Lesser has argued that some publishers sought that status for themselves. They wanted to be known for a certain type of play (no matter who it was written by), and so their catalogues ‘‘form a corpus as much as any author’s work does.’’22 In Shakespeare’s day, the idea that strings of words were heritable by writers alone, and thus tradable in their name, was not well established, which is presumably why he took no action to protect his strings of iambic pentameters. However, publishers were quicker off the mark.

Enclosures and clearances of culture Following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the accelerating enclosure of common land in the seventeenth century, ‘‘private property’’ among the landed gentry (e.g., one W. Shakespeare of Warwickshire23 ) rapidly extended. It entailed the right to put up ‘‘KEEP OUT’’ notices over land previously held and worked in common. The effect was not only to privatize the produce of the land (chiefly wool), but also to ‘‘buttress the master-servant relationship’’ by forcing commoners to become employees.24 Enclosure was an important catalyst of the modern industrial workforce, separating work from land and creating a pool of available labor. In the same way, and at the same time, ‘‘intellectual property’’ began to take shape, conferring the right to privatize creations of the mind, and to exclude others from the use of that property. Here began the very modern ‘‘clearances’’ of non-owners from both real and intangible properties, including assets previously regarded as common pool resources, resulting in an increasing dissociation between ‘‘producers’’ (construed as active, owners, generative agents of growth,

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firms) and ‘‘consumers’’ (seen as individual, passive recipients of products that they may purchase but not make their own). This process was spearheaded not by writers but by publishers, who acted on behalf of authors. At the heart of the system was a (legal) fiction – that of the author as agent of creation – because the real ‘‘producer’’ was the publishing firm. In fact, the ‘‘producer-consumer’’ pairing does not map very convincingly on to the ‘‘author-reader’’ one. Authors played only a limited role in the establishment of intellectual property rights compared with the corporate agencies to whom they assigned those rights; and readers do not ‘‘use up’’ (i.e., consume) what they read. But this was a necessary fiction, required to organize the chain of causation, from creation to consumption, as a property right. Henceforth, authors were construed as agents of creation; consumers and readers were effects. This division of labor between producers and consumers reproduced in abstract, secular, and economic form the status differential between gods and humans (ancient), and master and servant (medieval). Thereby a glimmer of pre-industrial mystique – and mystification – is preserved in a modern, institutional system. Authorship emerged into modernity not as an attribute of persons but as a device for the efficient operation of a market. In other words, the author is a device for limiting rather than expanding meaning, reducing what any text or discourse means to the intentions of its designated originator, including their pecuniary intentions; the very opposite of the godlike polysemic liberality of the premodern author . . . and postmodern reader.25 This kind of ‘‘author-function,’’ as Foucault calls it,26 was itself the product of a system of commodification that, even as it limited signification, vastly increased the productivity of the domain of writing, just as land clearances increased the economic productivity of land, bringing more publications, from more authors, across more subjects, to more readers, than ever before in recorded (written) history. The primary agents weren’t authors but publishers, now operating through the persona of the author. As the commercial book trade developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, publishers ‘‘found in the assertion of authors’ rights to reap the fruits of their labors a convenient cloak for their own interests.’’27 Hence, the mark of modernity is the corporatization of authorship as an economic institution. The publishing industry required the concept of authors, as the originators of something that could be held as private property in order to be exploited. Once established, by the time of Dr Johnson, authorship became an increasingly entrenched social institution, comprising a professional elite working for public prestige or the commercial market, sometimes both. What counted as authorship became both more specialized and more abstract. The relationship between authors and readers was itself highly mediated, because the specialist work of the author was routinely accompanied by other skills that enhance it but never ‘‘count’’ as authorship, including the minutiae of font design and the other crafts of bookmaking, graphic design, illustrations and layout, all the way out to marketing and distribution, without which few books would prosper as they may deserve.

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‘‘The author’’ is but one part of this industrialized system, and an abstract one at that, because the sign of the author (the name on the cover) works not to identify a corporeal person but as a branding device for a specific market niche.

Act II. No-One is an Author ‘‘The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning,’’ Michel Foucault28

Turning from early modern to ‘‘late modern’’ society, but staying with popular entertainment, we must also turn from the written word to pictorial publications like magazines, audiovisual forms like film, TV, and digital media, and non-literary genres such as news, science, the movies, and games. Here, even though it is recognized that such forms and genres rely on the talents of writers, the concept of authorship dwindles to the point of meaninglessness. In the most prolific, popular, and pervasive media of the press and broadcasting, no-one is an author. It seems that the ‘‘death of the author’’ can be observed as an empirical fact. So it might be worth pausing here to explore just how the modern media manage without it. This is necessary before moving on to discuss the ‘‘return of the author’’ in another guise, as ‘‘new’’ media emerge with a different dynamic (see Act III). Although the most prominent of the contemporary media are audiovisual ones like TV and cinema, for the purposes of this chapter I will stick to the press, simply to show that here too the concept evaporates, just where you might expect to see it claimed, at the very place where capital investment is highest. Authorship falters where a print publication can work at the top level of professional creativity and name-branded talent without needing the concept to organize the way that readers respond to the text.

‘‘There’s gold in those hills’’ I’m looking at Vogue (USA) for September 2011.29 At 758 pages this is undoubtedly a book, and of course it is published: the print form of Vogue is still dominant. The online version is used to persuade browsers to buy the ad-laden print edition (although times are said to be changing). The cover proclaims that here is ‘‘SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE,’’ thereby ‘‘hailing’’ (as Althusser would have put it), everyone as the reader – an act not of possessive enclosure but of journalistic disclosure. The authority for – and, in terms of copyright, the legal author of – all that follows is Vogue, which has its own carefully nurtured identity, an accumulated ‘‘point of view,’’ a position in the expectations of readers . . . and a © sign over the entire contents of every issue.30 Despite the cover’s interpellation of the reader through that familiar masthead, no-one would expect to find an author here, as Barthes seemed to predict.31 Indeed,

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the occlusion or endless displacement of any point of origin for the meanings broached by this cover, never mind those let loose within, serves to exemplify the general point of how fugitive the causal agent of creative generation, the agent previously known as ‘‘the author,’’ has become in contemporary media. It’s not that there are no candidates for authorial status here, if by that is meant the creative genius behind the words and images on the page; rather, there are too many. Here too are stories, the traditional province of the author, even though the primary medium of communication is visual and graphic. But while these stories and images are produced by creative individuals, many of whose names are well known in the fashion world and carefully credited in the magazine, none of them qualifies as an author. It isn’t wise to divide the people responsible for meaning-creation into those on the business side (publishers) and those on the editorial side (‘‘suits’’ or creatives). More than a century after Cond´e Montrose Nast bought Vogue in 1909, each side understands and works to the needs of the other. Thus, on the business side, there is Si Newhouse, octogenarian billionaire and co-owner of Advance Publications, Cond´e Nast’s parent company.32 In the September 2011 issue he is listed as Chairman, along with CEO Charles Townsend and recently hired President Robert Sauerberg.33 These corporate grandees had brought in Susan Plagemann as Publisher of Vogue magazine, who had worked on the business side of Marie Clare, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Mademoiselle. Despite being the real bosses, these people would not be well known to Vogue’s readers, and do not produce the magazine itself. They are not its ‘‘authors,’’ even though they have godlike powers of life and death: they cause the title to exist in the first place and they have the power to close it. Between those extremes, they create its ‘‘narrative’’ in the marketplace, deciding on its position, strategy, and performance as a corporate asset. They are also the corporate custodians of its ‘‘goodwill’’ – its ‘‘story’’ in the heads of the public – accumulated over many years by Vogue’s brand name and reputation. Where does Vogue fit into the Cond´e Nast equation – what is its ‘‘meaning’’ as a business proposition? CEO Townsend recently spoke to Women’s Wear Daily on a change in corporate strategy, from the title’s reliance on print advertising, at 70% of revenue, toward a 50/50 split between ads and direct income from ‘‘consumers’’: In a nutshell, the publishing company now wants to wring ‘‘as much out of our consumer margin generation potential’’ as possible, Townsend told WWD. [ . . . ] ‘‘I’m charging [Sauerberg] with leading the company in the creation of a new business model, which is technology-enabled, consumer-centric and concerned with the monetization of that consumer relationship.’’ [ . . . ] He emphasized the importance of digital initiatives in this model. [ . . . ] There’s gold in those hills somewhere,’ Townsend said. ‘‘How do I mine it?’’34

That question remains open, but, for the time being, the ‘‘gold standard’’ of fashion publishing remains the September issue on the newsstands.

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The september issue The September issue is important to all the glossy monthlies, because it launches the fashion year. It faces the future and sets trends. In terms of advertising, which is what fills most of those many hundreds of pages, it can set records. For corporate Vogue, a lot rides on it: it is a statement of – and an investment in – their confidence in the magazine’s editorial direction. Vogue’s way of doing ‘‘the September issue’’ has been immortalized in R.J. Cutler’s 2009 film of the same name.35 The film followed the magazine’s production process for the September 2007 issue. At 832 pages, that was the biggest fashion magazine ever published to that date. The job of producing each issue falls to the Editor-in-Chief, Anna Wintour, who is much better known than her corporate bosses. An Englishwoman from a journalistic family, she has held that post since 1988.36 Wintour has become a celebrity in her own right, partly through portrayal in two films: Cutler’s documentary and The Devil Wears Prada, a rom-com based on a tell-all novel by Lauren Weisberger (the only author in this story, and not necessarily admired for that).37 The movie, with Meryl Streep as the Wintour-like ‘‘Miranda Priestly,’’ ruthless editor of fictional Runway magazine, and Anne Hathaway as the ing´enue with a lot to learn, was a surprise box-office hit. A speech about a cerulean blue sweater, delivered with withering contempt by Streep to Hathaway, has become justly famous: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same]: Miranda Priestly [Meryl Streep]: Something funny? Andy Sachs [Anne Hathaway]: No. No, no. Nothing’s . . . You know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know, I’m still learning about all this stuff and, uh . . . Miranda Priestly: ‘‘This . . . stuff’’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select . . . I don’t know . . . that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of . . . stuff.38

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This speech has been widely cited as an accurate depiction of how the fashion system works, still channeling divine authority down to the individual as in medieval times, such that even fashion ‘‘laity’’ can’t escape its sway. It’s not simply that what goes into the magazine is decided by ‘‘the people in this room’’; it’s also, much more significantly, that a consumer’s entire look, and with it her very personality, may be determined not by her own choices but by theirs. That kind of ‘‘authorship’’ goes well beyond the creation of strings of words. The word ‘‘author’’ doesn’t really catch it unless you remember the pre-modern origins of the term. The real Anna Wintour is known to exercise tight control over photographs published in Vogue,39 especially the cover photo, a genre that she had reinvented with her debut issue: In her first year at Vogue, Wintour gave the magazine a facelift. In contrast to the bland headshots of mostly blond models favored by [outgoing editor Grace] Mirabella [ . . . ] Wintour’s covers were fresh: The frame was almost always pushed back to encompass more of the model’s body, and the shoot itself was often done al fresco, in natural light.40

In short, Wintour has a ‘‘signature’’ style and the magazine’s covers are recognizably hers, including the September 2011 one to hand, which conforms exactly to the specifications quoted above. Even the headlines bear comparison over a span of 23 years: Wintour’s 1988 debut featured a cover story called ‘‘Color Catches On,’’41 while September 2011 has one called ‘‘How to Wear Color.’’ She will have decided in advance just what the cover would ‘‘say,’’ down to the last details of color, composition, and graphic design; of mood, model, and make-up; of garment, stylist, and photographer. But she was no more its ‘‘author’’ than were her Cond´e Nast bosses or her fictional alter ego. A sizable company of talented creative personnel was needed to create the reality. From the reader’s point of view, the most important element is the ‘‘cover girl’’42 who embodies and personifies of the look of the month. Kate Moss would be a safe bet, you might think, despite the fact that, at 37, she was well above the average age for a contemporary fashion model. Since her debut in The Face in 1990, Moss has graced innumerable covers worldwide, including 31 Vogues in her native UK.43 Although now diversified into other areas of the business, she remains one of the best-known faces in fashion – an ‘‘icon.’’ She is a thriving business brand in her own right. Her company, Skate, posted £2,400,000 pre-tax profits for 2010.44 It was not for her iconic value alone that she was chosen for the all-important September cover. This time, Moss was newsworthy, because she had just married, and Vogue had the story. The cover copy duly proclaims: ‘‘EXCLUSIVE: KATE MOSS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MOST ROMANTIC WEDDING OF THE YEAR.’’ Quite a claim, considering, as Wintour’s customary ‘‘letter from the editor’’ puts it, that ‘‘she wasn’t the only famous Kate to marry this year,’’45 the other having been Kate Middleton,

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marrying into the British royal family. But the tone is set; the word is not ‘‘royal’’ but ‘‘romantic.’’ Kate Moss married a musician called Jamie Hince. Her daughter Lila Grace was a bridesmaid at the wedding and prominent model in the fashion shoot. Lila Grace’s father, Jefferson Hack, himself editor of fashion bibles Dazed & Confused and An Other Magazine, was pictured as a guest in Vogue’s online photo-gallery – but not in the print edition – in company with Vogue writer Hamish Bowles. No mention is made of his relationship to Moss or their daughter. He is merely captioned as ‘‘journalist.’’46 We’ll meet him again, in another role, in Act III.

A corporately authored story of redemption Model mother marries musician: so what? Without an individual author, a clear storyline nevertheless emerges. In her editorial letter, Wintour muses on the romance of ‘‘experience’’: ‘‘simply engaging in real life can lead us somewhere delightful and magical.’’47 Specifically, it can lead to the extensive coverage of the ceremony and associated fashions in the magazine’s main fashion section.48 Here, we see something not shown on Vogue’s cover, namely, the wedding dress.49 The only nuptial sign on the cover is a glimpse of Moss’s outsize engagement ring. She wears not bridal white but a maroon hand-frayed organza-and-ostrich feather dress by Alexander McQueen.50 Inside, however, she models several wedding outfits, specially created for this set to channel previous iconic wedding pictures. As one celebrity blog reported, even before the ‘‘highly anticipated’’ issue was published: ‘‘Anna told about 10 designers to pick out their ideal dresses for Kate. [ . . . ] Since Anna made the request, that meant they had to do it.’’51 All this seems predictably generic, but that only masks the true meaning of the story. In fact, ‘‘real life’’ proves a little too gritty to be shown on the cover, because Kate Moss’s actual wedding dress was made by British designer John Galliano. This too was highly newsworthy, but not in a ‘‘romantic’’ way. At the time of the wedding and Vogue’s publication, Galliano was awaiting trial in France on charges of ‘‘casting public insults based on origin, religious affiliation or ethnicity’’; in other words, anti-Semitic and anti-Asian hate speech, which is illegal in that country.52 This celebrated story, scooped by the Murdoch tabloid The Sun in the UK in March 2011, had already cost Galliano his job as chief designer for Dior. It was dealt with by the French courts in September, while the September issue itself was still on the world’s newsstands. Galliano was convicted. How does Vogue deal with such a tricky story? As far as Galliano’s racial abuse is concerned, it keeps absolutely schtum: not a word on the case. But is it embarrassment that keeps the Galliano dress off the cover, and its details unlisted in the customary list of suppliers?53 We’ll never know. The scandal isn’t ignored, however: a very particular and corporately authored meaning is constructed across the different elements of Vogue – the cover, editor’s letter, feature story,

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and fashion-shoot. Kate’s wedding dress emerges as the agent of redemption for Galliano. It is modeled by Moss with Galliano himself holding up the veil.54 In the accompanying feature, by Hamish Bowles, we learn: In the flurry of pre-wedding madness and nerves, the one thing that is keeping Kate sane is the dress. With her characteristic loyalty, she has asked her beleaguered friend John Galliano to work on this. ‘‘When I put the dress on, I’m really happy,’’ says Kate. ‘‘I forget about everything.’’55

That single word – ‘‘beleaguered’’ – is the only concession to the ‘‘real life’’ story throughout this issue of Vogue. The romance of the dress, it seems, magically makes everyone ‘‘forget about everything.’’ And Kate’s ‘‘loyalty’’ engenders nothing less than a rebirth for Galliano: ‘‘ ‘She dared me to be John Galliano again,’ the designer tells me. ‘I couldn’t pick up a pencil. It’s been my creative rehab.’ ’’56 Apparently the dress works its magic at both wedding and reception. In Bowles’ words: [At the wedding]: When Kate appears in her Galliano finery, with her flotilla of bridesmaids and flower girls in their Bonpoint dresses, there are wolf whistles and applause in the church.57 [At the reception]: When Kate’s father, Peter, thanks John Galliano for ‘‘the beautiful dress’’, every guest stands in a spontaneous ovation, and John’s eyes well up.58

The ultimate beneficiary of the experience, then, is not the new ‘‘Mrs Jamie Hince,’’59 but John Galliano. In telling Galliano’s story as a romance of redemption, Vogue is on its own. More typical was the generally hostile reaction when he was sentenced to a token fine and costs rather than doing 6 months in chokey. The Sun fulminated about the court’s lenience: ‘‘The soft treatment of Brit Galliano – worth £20 million and a close pal of top models including Kate Moss – triggered uproar last night.’’60 News of Galliano’s conviction reached New York on the very day of Fashion’s Night Out, culmination of the season for which the September issue is the ‘‘bible.’’61 Despite its editorial line, Vogue remained institutionally tight-lipped. A reporter for New York magazine canvassed reactions from, among others, Vogue’s photo director Ivan Shaw: Q: What was the mood in the Vogue office today with the Galliano verdict? A: I couldn’t tell you. Q: Is the magazine planning on addressing the story? A: No comment.62

The rest, as Shakespeare knew, is silence.

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‘‘The photographs will be forever’’ Returning to the season’s ‘‘energy and optimism,’’63 and to Vogue’s cover, various people may qualify as its potential authors, should any ‘‘principle of thrift’’64 be required. Chief among them is the Peruvian photographer Mario Testino, responsible for the cover photo, ‘‘Kiss Me, Kate’’ feature, and Kate’s wedding portfolio. Like Wintour and Moss, Testino is a celebrity in his own right, so well known that Moss, we are told, has ‘‘shifted her [wedding] date from Saturday to Friday to accommodate his schedule, reasoning, with a model’s canny logic, that the ceremony will last minutes but the photographs will be forever.’’65 Testino is no author, even though the art/photography publisher Taschen had recently released a book of his photos called Kate Moss by Mario Testino. That book’s online blurb quotes Testino’s own story of how he first met Kate . . . wearing Galliano. Mario says: I met Kate very early on. Shortly after her first Galliano show I went backstage to congratulate her, only to find her crying: she was disappointed that she had only been given one outfit to model in the show. My answer to her was this: ‘In life there are perfumes and colognes. You need to use lots of cologne as the scent fades away; with a perfume you just use a drop and it lasts all night. You are a perfume, you will go on and on.’ Little did I know just how true that would become! And that I had made a friend for life. 66

In Vogue, Hamish Bowles recycles the same story: Mario has known her since she was a fragile sixteen-year-old, crying her eyes out backstage at John Galliano’s first Paris show. In that dim, distant past, when a model’s success was judged by the number of changes she had in a show, Kate had been given only one outfit and was feeling unloved. Mario comforted her. ‘You know, in life, there’s perfume and there’s cologne,’ he told her. ‘Cologne, you have to spray every fifteen minutes. Perfume, you put a drop and it lasts a week. You’re perfume.’67

Here we encounter another kind of ‘‘authorship’’ – Bowles’ rather free rendition of words from a book that Testino had published. Bowles recasts Testino’s personal anecdote into the form of an interview with himself. His story in Vogue continues with ‘‘Mario’’ saying: ‘‘ ‘I had seen her out, and she had nothing of the waif,’ he remembers.’’68 In Taschen’s online blurb, this line goes to Kate Moss herself, who reports: ‘‘He was the first to say ‘Oh, she’s quite sexy. I’ve seen her out! I know she’s not just that grungy girl.’ ’’ Where in scholarly authorship this sort of thing might look suspiciously like plagiarism, in Vogue it is simply promotion, for Bowles gives Testino’s book a plug at the end of the next paragraph, and Testino gets to be the guy who invented Kate Moss’s image.69 Nonetheless, Testino is not the ‘‘author’’ of the September cover. Like any professional, Testino works to the brief: on this occasion, as dictated by Anna Wintour, it was to be ‘‘romantic.’’ On another occasion, he might be called upon to urge his models to ‘‘look Breeteesh!’’70

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Helping him to fulfill the brief is a small army of specialists, some of whose contributions are acknowledged by Vogue. Most important is the stylist who chooses the outfit (under Wintour’s watchful eye), in this case Vogue’s contributing fashion editor Camilla Nickerson. The Rimmel make-up is by Charlotte Tilbury (Art Partner), hair is by Sam McKnight (Pantene), and manicure by Sophy Robson (Streeters). The technical grades include production by 10–4 Inc. and set design by Gideon Ponte (Magnet Agency). Those responsible for graphics and printing are not credited; the only such information given is that the magazine is ‘‘printed in the U.S.A.’’71 Thus, like any other commercial media product of our time, the cover of Vogue, like a medieval potentate, is attended by expert and expensive talents in depth; all renowned in their own field, some celebrities, and many of them represented by agencies which would also have a stake in the game. Everyone’s a maker; everyone’s on the make, with no sign of thrift in sight. They all assist in telling the story, but not one of them is an author.

Act III. Everyone is an Author ‘‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’’ Michel Foucault72

Where there is death, there is often also a birth. The ‘‘death of the author’’ was announced by Roland Barthes in his influential essay of that name.73 This death turned out to be highly contagious: ‘‘the author’’ was done for, among a whole complex of disciplines and a whole generation of critics, one of whose number, Jane Gallop, has observed: ‘‘The last clause of Barthes’ manifesto is taken as the definitive statement – not only Barthes’ but poststructuralism’s – on the question of the author.’’74 Citing Se´an Burke,75 she sees it as ‘‘the single most influential meditation on the question of authorship in modern times.’’ It was ‘‘so perfect that it has been taken as the last word.’’76 However, this death was not so final. Even when it was first announced, Barthes did not proclaim it as a stand-alone event. What he actually wrote in that ‘‘definitive’’ last clause was about a birth: ‘‘we know that to give writing its future [ . . . ] the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’’77 (my emphases). Gallop takes Barthes’ ‘‘manifesto’’ as a call to critical action – ‘‘critics should no longer be concerned with the author; he should be dead to us’’78 (my emphases); a call that was taken up in the discursive experiments of avant-garde postmodernism. But I want to consider a different way of thinking about Barthes’ provocation; as an emancipationist expansion of the categories of ‘‘writing’’ and the ‘‘reader’’ (albeit at the expense of that of the author) to include, in principle, everyone. In announcing a death, Barthes was facing the future; the future of writing. He was interested in a birth; the birth of the reader. Since his intervention, both writing and the reader have superseded the author in a spectacular way: partly aided

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by game-changing technological developments unimagined in his day, associated with digital media, online connectivity and the internet; and partly abetted by the economic and political ascendancy of individualism in the wake of ReaganThatcherism and the end of the Cold War. These epochal changes wrought their own effects on authorship, because now, for the first time, everyone linked to digital media, including all those who were previously confined to the status of readers or consumers, are endowed with the agency of publishers for every single utterance they make online, from phatic chatter to elaborate artifice. In this context, authorship – as the sign for one who is responsible for published writing – expands to the point of meaninglessness. The accumulated assumptions associated with the modern socio-economic institution of authorship are set at naught when, in principle, everyone is an author. Where, here, is the scarcity value on which price must be based? Where does this leave the investment of publishers? What happens to copyright? How is it possible to retain professional status for authors? These are economic questions, and the turbulence of the publishing industry tells us that answers are still at the experimental stage.

The G¨otterd¨ammerung scenario; or citizen authors?79 Over on the cultural side, equal havoc is wrought by the now-possible direct link between an individual person and everyone on the Net: ‘‘We live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens.’’80 Billions of people are authors,81 producing more works than anyone could possible imagine, archive or classify, much less ‘‘consume.’’ Many of these utterances are published within the confines of social networks, whether small-world groups like family-and-friends, or giantscale operations like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, which themselves are not authored by any single individual, but nonetheless share creative agency with their users. However, in principle, billions of people are also the market for any one of these publications. Semiotic productivity shifts from author to reader to system, and is shared among them. Readers (users) are productive of meanings, interpretations and uses for text, none of which is causally connected to the person or even the function of the author. Instead, discourses or textual systems – complex dynamic languagenetworks – could be said to ‘‘speak us’’ even as we speak them. Here, as Barthes and Foucault saw, the meaning of a given work – its interpretation in the mind of the reader – is no longer determined by an author; it is an effect of the system, in which both author and reader are agents, and where the system itself imposes the rules of the game. In short, publishing has begun to take on the characteristics not of an industry but of language. Thus we are witnessing another of those ‘‘one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’’ moments; an increase in productivity of even greater scale than the modernizing property enclosures of Shakespeare’s era. Then, the combination

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of print technology, publishing industry, and authorial function served to increase the productivity of textual systems in line with an industrial model. Now, the combination of online-mobile technology, complex systems, and the user function has increased the productivity of expression in line with a network model. In fact, following the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, which dethroned humanity from the center of the physical and the biological universe respectively, the emerging revolution in culture, presaged by the structuralists, has decentered the individual from the ‘‘universe of the mind.’’82 Meaningfulness is not an outcome of individual intentions, authorial or otherwise. Methodological individualism, the analytical system based on being able to identify the ‘‘author’’ of actions and meanings, fails in its grasp just at the very moment when the agency of individuals as micro-producers is extended from a few privileged professionals to encompass whole populations. Not surprisingly, the extension of authorship to whole populations troubles many observers. Surely, more means worse? Here’s Clay Shirky: This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.83

The ‘‘shock of inclusion’’ that Shirky describes here is of course felt by current beneficiaries of the modern industrial system, not by the ‘‘influx of amateurs’’ themselves. They are not bent on the ‘‘destruction of existing models’’ but are simply exercising new-found opportunities for ‘‘participation.’’ So if a process of Schumpeterian ‘‘creative destruction’’ of existing models is underway, it isn’t intended by ‘‘entrepreneurial’’ (or ‘‘authorial’’) individuals; nor is anyone seeking to hasten the decline and fall of ‘‘public thought,’’ or to bring on another ‘‘Dark Age’’. Interestingly, those who seem to have adopted this G¨otterd¨ammerung scenario most enthusiastically are authors and publishers. Here’s a typical sample, this one from author Ewan Morrison,84 speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival: Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of ‘‘the writer’’ as a profession . . . The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.85

To which lament, one unsympathetic reader added this comment: ‘‘Well, might as well give up then. [ . . . ] Alternatively [ . . . ] use your bloody imagination. I understand that writers are supposed to be quite good at this.’’86

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Can we imagine something other than the end of the world as we know it? What if those billions of new authors are not ‘‘barbarians at the gate’’ but citizens? Unlike authorship, citizenship is a concept where more participation is generally valued positively. But like authorship, citizenship is experiencing radical changes in the wake of technological and social dynamics.87 Here too an emergent change is occurring that massively expands the practice of citizenship even while displacing some of its existing or elaborate modernist manifestations. Zizi Papacharissi has called attention to the ‘‘emerging model of the digitally enabled citizen,’’88 a model that is ‘‘liquid and reflexive’’ in relation to ‘‘contemporary civic realities,’’ but also ‘‘removed from the civic habits of the past.’’89 Papacharissi is arguing for a re-conceptualization of the public sphere, where the Habermasian tradition would place authors, and its relocation into the erstwhile private sphere, where one would previously have looked only for amateurs and consumers. She writes: Privately contained activities with a public scope, like online news reading, lurking in on political conversations, or following opinion leaders’ blogs or tweets, take place within the locus of the private sphere. Publicly oriented activities, like posting a blog, sharing a political opinion, voting or signing a petition to support a cause, or uploading exclusive news content on YouTube, are also increasingly enabled within the locus of a digitally equipped private sphere.90

It should be noted that these two types of activity, ‘‘privately contained’’ and ‘‘publicly oriented,’’ are – respectively – reading and writing: they are two sides of the authorship coin, albeit stripped of its association with IP-grabbing publishers. That is, public and private are not two warring systems, and everyone can practice both of them. Papacharissi goes on to argue that digital literacy is practiced with ‘‘greater autonomy, flexibility, and potential for expression’’ in private than in public, which ‘‘challenges the fundamental supposition that humans, in order to be social, and by consequence political, must possess public face.’’91 Within the private sphere, as traditionally conceived, people are more often seen as consumers than as citizens; but now, in order to practice digitally enabled citizenship, people must also be consumers. Papacharissi examines ‘‘the centrality of consumption in emerging civic behaviors, enabling individuals to claim citizenship through the possession of commodities and thus blurring democratic and capitalist narratives.’’92 In this world, ‘‘public face’’ and private identity are one and the same. Thus it is arguable that authorship too is evolving beyond the need for ‘‘public face’’ . . . and publishers. It is another of those seeming paradoxes, where citizenship, the public sphere, authorship, and politics are all conducted in what used to be thought of as the sphere of private, amateur, personal consumption. What’s new is that this private space of identity is the locus for digitally enabled micro-productivity, where one-person creativity is scalable through digital connectivity.

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Putting your face on: self-authored bodies Among the commodities produced in this context is personal identity. When you ‘‘put your face on,’’ with the help of products advertised in consumer outlets like Vogue, you are creating an identity, and simultaneously setting yourself up as an actor in a digitally enabled social network that is both your own and ‘‘the’’ public sphere. As a fashion magazine, Vogue is part of a larger world of lifestyle and fashion journalism that occupies a mediating space between public and private life. This isn’t front-line political journalism, although politics may ruffle the glossy surface unexpectedly (as in Act II); nor is it fiction, an interior imaginary world (where you might expect to find a modernist author). From the point of view of the reader, style journalism brings together (i.e., mediates) these external and internal worlds. To that extent, then, Vogue is a participant in the practice of ‘‘privatized’’ citizenship. External sociality, celebrity, and style, with attendant status-competition, attention-seeking, and immersion in the flow of time and trends, connects with internal identity, the formation not just of a personal style but a self with its own ‘‘public face’’ that, in turn, enables the self to connect with the world. Vogue mediates the world and the self, offering ‘‘social learning’’ cues93 for an emergent narrative of the self for every reader, if they so choose. Not only is everyone an author, they are the author of the self . Increasingly, that kind of authorship is being professionalized. Here is where the ‘‘elaborate’’ (professional) practice of authorship links with the ‘‘emergent’’ (user-created) variety – experts of all kinds are on hand to teach myriad emergent selves how to ‘‘inscribe’’ their own story, whether directly on the body or by mediation through online networks. Judith Butler argues, ‘‘If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.’’94 The surface of bodies themselves – the very subject of Vogue – is textualized on each individual body as a ‘‘truth effect’’ of self-authored discourse. How and what to write on that surface is becoming professionalized on both sides of the ‘‘emergent/elaborate’’ pairing: for professional writers it is a business opportunity; for citizen authors it is a competitive arms race in which everyone’s signaling performance is judged, requiring professional input into self-improvement. The Cartesian ‘‘turn to the self’’ in philosophy and religion95 meets the ‘‘production of the self’’ in consumerism. From the resulting textualization, ‘‘self-authorship’’ emerges. It combines lessons from ‘‘top-down’’ style bibles and self-help media, where selfhood is modeled by celebrities, with ‘‘bottom-up’’ or DIY digital literacy, where people exploit textual resources to make themselves up as they go along. Ordinary selves are re-made in the image of expertise, which stands, like Jeeves, at the elbow of every domestic endeavor, from the disciplining and care of the body to its adornment in fashion, extending ever outward to cooking,

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singing, purchasing a house, parenting, dating and gardening.96 Makeover media are thus virtual versions of aristocratic servants: like Jeeves – or Shakespeare – they know more than those they serve, but it’s the patron-client who has to play the game of competitive individualism. Along the way, Cartesian dualism has been overcome: body and consciousness are one. Now, selfhood is an autopoietic outcome of performative actions and interactions, inscribed in, on, and by the body including in its languageperformances, through a creative process that exploits diet, lifestyle, exercise, garments, hair and make-up, and the rest, as well as the discursive, textual, and audiovisual affordances of online media, to produce daily performances of a narrative of the self, via texts, blogs, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Scattered across digital devices and online networks, users establish a transmedia, publicprivate ‘‘cloud self’’ that interacts with the bodily self in unpredictable ways, requiring constant updating and adjustment, and subject to critical scrutiny by both internal and external surveillance. ‘‘Digitally enabled’’ citizens work to integrate consciousness and corporeality into story, in a competitive process of micro-productive creativity. The professionalization of self-authorship is not a new phenomenon in itself. For instance, the avant-garde filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, a contemporary of Barthes and Foucault, caused his on-screen characters to make themselves up as they went along in his movies of the 1960s (e.g., Jean-Pierre L´eaud in Masculin-F´eminin (1966)). What’s new is the extent to which this departure from psychological realism has been driven throughout society, by both market and moral forces: if your ‘‘real’’ self is no good, get a new one. Help is available, not only to present positive role models (often celebrities), but also to teach us the limits beyond which a well-governed self cannot go, often personified by reality TV contestants. Here, Bev Skeggs has argued that discourses and shows about loud-mouthed women, including ‘‘White Trash TV,’’ media portrayals of chavs or Essex Girls,97 and even hen-parties ‘‘out on the town,’’ are a contemporary manifestation of class struggle in the UK: ‘‘We now have the loud, white, excessive, drunk, fat, vulgar, disgusting, hen-partying woman who exists to embody all the moral obsessions historically associated with the working class now contained in one body; a body beyond governance.’’98 Racial politics produces a different unruly subject in the US (e.g., Jerry Springer), although it serves the same discursive purpose. Skeggs argues that such portrayals do more than mock certain taste formations; they also give onlookers a ‘‘position of judgment’’ to set the limits of propriety, by placing these women beyond it: ‘‘it is not just a matter of using some aspects of the culture of the working class to enhance one’s value, but also maintaining the position of judgment to attribute value, which assigns the other as immoral, repellent, abject, worthless, disgusting, even disposable.’’99 The lesson here is that there will be a price to pay for unruly self-authorship that transgresses taste boundaries. That price may be public, provoking old-fashioned divide-and-rule politics, providing a handy image of the ‘‘undeserving’’ poor, who

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‘‘deserve’’ welfare cuts.100 Those targeted may in turn flaunt gross behavior as a sign of co-subjective resistance. On the other hand, those ‘‘beyond governance’’ provide a negative incentive to everyone else, encouraging onlookers to professionalize their self-responsibility further, by ‘‘governing’’ their own narrative of the self. This is the ‘‘generalization of the risky self,’’ where ‘‘life now depends on knowing how to behave in the distance between everything that may happen and what is more probable of happening; it depends on the restriction of possibilities.’’101 Here, as elsewhere in the creative industries, individual choices are determined by the choices of others.102 Foucault’s ‘‘principle of thrift’’ is practiced on the self-authored body. How do you ‘‘script’’ yourself to tell others that you follow fashion but face the future? Luckily, Kate Moss’ daughter’s father is on hand to help. A feature in the London Evening Standard tells all. Jefferson Hack is ‘‘the man who knows everyone, and who everyone wants to know. The Guardian wasn’t joking recently when it asked: ‘Is this the coolest man in the UK?’ ’’ Hack belongs to ‘‘the digital generation, where the boundaries between disciplines and functions have broken down, where producers, customers, commercial sponsors and critics have formed ‘new relationships.’ ’’103 Co-founder of Dazed & Confused and editor-in-chief of AnOther Magazine, Hack knows what this generation needs: ‘‘In this ‘post-postmodern’ world, he says [ . . . ] the ‘ongoing story’ is out there competing in cyberspace. Yet in the age of information-overload, ‘consumers have never had more need for a filter like AnOther.’ ’’104 This guide doesn’t write your story for you, as Vogue might. It ‘‘filters’’ (edits) the digital overload and you create the ‘‘ongoing story’’ for yourself. That story is not about taste discrimination – between the chavs and the chav-nots, as it were – but something more structural: ‘‘ ‘The story we’re always talking about is the bigger divide between the haves and have-nots,’ he says. [ . . . ] AnOther’s mission is ‘not to tell the reader to make themselves feel better by buying stuff they can’t afford but to give value through the reading experience.’ ’’105 Why should you ‘‘filter’’ your ‘‘reading experience’’ through Hack? Because he practices what he preaches: he made himself up as he went along and he’s ‘‘living on thin air.’’106 ‘‘But it cannot be denied that his edge-cutting attitude allows him to punch way, way above his weight.’’107 Jefferson Hack is a new kind of ‘‘model’’: that of the self-author. His person, life, and career all represent his own story. But as with any kind of fashion modeling, the take-out message for onlookers is not about him. His self-authorship stimulates the competitive market in self-authorship. The message is that you – dear reader – can make yourself ‘‘grow, originate, promote, increase.’’ The once godlike power, to be ‘‘the person who originates or gives existence to anything,’’ has democratized, to become everyone’s responsibility, and tradable.

Notes 1 Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1920), 8.

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John Hartley Michel Foucault, ‘‘What is an Author?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 1984), 119. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro, ed. Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Death of the Author,’’ in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8; Michel Foucault, ‘‘What is an Author?’’ Se´an Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Oxford English Dictionary (online version: www.oed.com), ‘‘author,’’ sense 1. Troilus and Criseyde iii. 1016 John Wyclif, English Works (London: Tr¨ubner & Co., 1880), 267. Spelling updated: the quotations are given in the OED as: ‘=if holy writt be fals, certis god autor