The Near-Death of the Author

The tidiest description of The Near-Death of the Author by John Potts might say that it tracks the author-function from the anonymous auctor of the scriptorium, to the copyright empowered modern author dominant in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, to the contemporary author, who, “deprived of the exclusive rights to exploit their works” by the chaotic liberties of the internet era, adapts along several divergent evolutionary axes—or simply goes extinct (112). However, Potts also explores the author-function laterally, considering graffiti artists, open-source coders, shamans, choreographers, and, perhaps unavoidably in a post-Lessig world, DJs. What develops is a wide-ranging and comprehensive history of the discourse surrounding authorship, even as that concept dissolves into something so proliferate as to perhaps benefit from a set of new and distinct terminology.Potts opens with the claim that Barthes’s post-structuralist account only provided light foreshadowing for the legal and economic destruction the internet is currently inflicting upon the author. Now, the familiar specters of illegal downloading, AI, and the reduction of art to computer readable data have diluted the singular genius to an array of humble but more resilient subspecies that, Potts muses, are still technically alive. This position is clarified in the first chapter, wherein the merger of Foucault’s “narrow sense of the author as writer” (12) with the legal conception of copyright allows Potts to assemble the figure of the modern author, a “hero with a name” onomastically linked to a work to derive material benefit from its commercial success (if such success occurs). This is the most succinct definition of authorship on offer in Near-Death.Chapter 2 begins to deconstruct the author with case studies in anonymity including erasure poetry, found art, and the anonymous medium of graffiti. Banksy, especially, provides an example of a complex author figure who remains anonymous due to the illegal nature of his work, while still managing to profit. This suggestion of an anonymous author at first runs contra to Potts’s “hero with a name.” Yet the slightly altered logic leads to similar results: an individual author is able to capitalize on his name to profit from his work. In Chapter 3, Potts follows the question of authorship to collaborative contexts where the term “author” loses some of its resolution. In the context of film, for instance, he writes that Truffaut’s auteur theory turns the modern author-function in the form of a visionary director even as no single person is responsible for the totality of the film. Potts’s hand-wringing over “the author of a film”—“Is it the director? Is it the scriptwriter or writers, without whom there would be no film? Is it the producer. . . ? Or is it a form of collective authorship. . . ?” (44)—emphasizes that authorship does little to describe any given role on a film set. Other more specific terms are available, including producer, director, and screenwriter. Each of these terms serve their own function and even in sum may point more to the obsolescence of the author-function in this field than its continued applicability. If the term author is applicable in the context of a film production, it is polyvalent, or “collective,” to use Potts’s term.Chapters 4 and 5 take a step back and provide a more thorough history of the author from prehistory, to the first literate, credible author, Enheduanna of Akkad circa 2250 BCE, through the modern author and the attempts made on his life by Barthes and other post-structuralists. These chapters convincingly map a complex history with an assortment of case studies including St. Bonaventure, Chaucer, and of course Shakespeare, whose plays were owned by his troupe and edited freely to fit narrow performance windows. Though these chapters focus primarily on European authorship, they resist a completely Eurocentric account, noting that the dark ages for Europe were “The golden age of classical poetry” for China (74). In this history the printing press is the catalyst for copyright legislation, which, as Potts says, “effectively transfer(s) the ownership of a literary work from its printer and publisher to the individual who had created the work: its author” (84). From here, Potts provides a dizzying but encompassing account of the Romantics, the Russian Formalists, and finally even David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity movement. These chapters serve as an excellent primer on authorship and the history of the discourse surrounding it.Potts departs from the written word again in chapter 6 to suggest that the current moment has made content creation a risky proposition. Here Potts provides several examples of musicians (Kim Deal, Martin Bradstreet, The Band) who, thanks to a post-Napster environment of downloading and copyright infringement, gave up on music because they could no longer support themselves. Potts continues to move laterally through media in his critique of YouTube’s business model and its supposedly lax (many YouTubers would likely disagree) treatment of copyright in terms of film and music. These examples are meant to illustrate the downfall of the “creative class,” which eventually winds its way back to novelists. Potts provides statistics from the U.S. Author’s Guild, which state that the income of writers of literary fiction has dropped 27% since 2013, blaming the era of book resale on Amazon (available since 2006) and the mass digitization of texts via Google Books, which allows for copyright holders to opt out (114). One can’t help but wonder if the novel may be suffering more from the online attention economy than teenagers downloading illegal eBooks, but Potts doesn’t consider this avenue. His expansive approach succeeds with a broader view of the media landscape the internet has engendered. However, the fundamental differences in consumer demand and the material variance in the media Potts addresses make for the occasional uneasy analogy.In the final three chapters, Potts offers several novel views that adjust and clarify the state of the author, now on life support in the internet age. In one especially effective intervention in chapter 7 Potts contrasts the creator figure of the modern author, a godlike savant, to what he refers to as the contemporary author-as-demiurge, an author who maintains an algorithm or dataset that produces texts over which the author has no direct control. This is only one modality of the contemporary author according to Potts, who in these final chapters goes on to address the distinctions between author and AI, fan fiction, and—once again—remix culture.Attempting to chart the internet as it reforms cultural paradigms at an unchartable pace makes the definitive account Potts attempts Sisyphean. Those interested in a more detailed account of Amazon’s effect of publishing might refer to Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less (2021). David Golumbia’s article “Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities” in Workplace: An Open Journal for Academic Labor (2016) precedes some of Potts’s argumentation on writing as labor, though Golumbia’s focus is academic writing. Those interested in the digital archiving of copyrighted materials might find Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s The Politics of Mass Digitization (2018) interesting. Still, for the widest perspective on the dissolution and re-formation of the author-function, Near-Death fares well. The argumentation is particularly strong on the exploitation of authors, artists, and content creators by publishers, platforms, and corporations that end up owning the copyright, or simply ignoring copyright to facilitate art as grist for computer learning systems. This migration of copyright from the individual author to large profit-driven conglomerates certainly disempowers creatives and may, as Potts claims, drive them into other professions or the patronage model of Renaissance Europe (via the aptly named Patreon). Overall, The Near-Death of the Author is a current and comprehensive history of a storied and no doubt ongoing discourse.