1. 20c Cultural
Perspectives
CCR 747: S 13
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2. Molly Nesbit
“What Was an Author?”
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3. In the law, the term author did not and does not carry
with it a mark of supreme distinction, nor did it
designate a particular profession, like poet. It was only
meant to distinguish a particular kind of labor from
another, the cultural from the industrial. This is the gist,
the germ, the deep essential crudeness (234).
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4. According to the law the privileged, cultural form of
labor exhibited certain qualities. First, it took shape only
in the certified media. Second, its privilege was justified
by the presence of a human intelligence, imagination,
and labor that were legible in the work, meaning that
such work was seen, a little more crudely, to contain
the reflection of the author’s personality. The cultural
forms of labor could, conversely, be identified from the
material used and by the imprint of the author’s
personality which would follow from working in this
material. These two qualities of material and reflected
personality were linked; they became inseparable. (234)
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5. To give these producers the status of authors involved granting
the new technologies (the technologies we have come to
associate with mass culture) the status of the materials of
aristocratic culture (the culture we have come to call high). The
law, for all its apparent elasticity, could not handle such a
request overnight. Curiously, the problem lay not with the
lower order of culture, but with the nature of the labor
involved, a labor integrally connected to machines. (236)
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11. what counts as
creative work? (238)
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12. market economy
Tamara:
She writes, “Modern culture existed as an economic distinction, in
effect a protected market that functioned within the regular
economy. Authored work was always understood to be circulating in
the market, generally in printed form” (235). I’m not sure what this
means.
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13. In part this stems from the fact that the series of
agreements between culture and industry has seemed
to prohibit any real analysis by legitimate culture of its
relations to the industrial complex: culture is to leave
industry alone. Culture is to be theorized in the
abstract, detached from the working definition that the
law provides. This is one of the keys to its ideality. When
the ideal could no longer be maintained, the discourse
on the author, forever, repressed, turned morbid. (244)
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14. By dissecting the authorial parts of a work, it is possible
to cut into the illusion of seamlessness, so powerful in
the rhetoric around the new technologies and to
propose roles for the individual subject. It is possible to
plot a politics of cultural labor and possible to imagine a
collective of authors, individuals who do not lose
themselves when working with others. All of which
assumes the existence of authors who have left their
mirrors for more responsible positions. (257)
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15. Jess:
Indeed, when I first thought about “authorship,” I did not think of a rhetor. I was
not thinking of a rhetorical situation. Instead, I was thinking about a solitary person,
at a desk, or even walking through a garden, imagining and thinking about life in the
capacity of perhaps Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Virginia Woolf. They are authors to
me because they seem bigger than the writing—more poetic, more imaginative. In
this definition, I made my idea of an author very different from the “rhetor” work I
actually do, and I’m curious why I shy away from “genius” and “inspiration” and
“natural” when thinking about rhetorical work. It seems I’ve hierarchized author to
have a higher connotation than rhetor, and I’m wondering if anyone else has
separated these terms. Is an author a naturally a rhetor? If not, where do you see
these separations?
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