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Jill Walker Rettberg

What is an Author? - Mark Tribe - Brown University Wiki - 0 views

wiki.brown.edu/...viewpage.action

shared by Jill Walker Rettberg on 21 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the 'author function:' while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer- it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor - it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer - but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 21 Sep 09
       
      Neva noted in her reading reflections post on this that this is important for our understanding of remix culture and anonymous or collaborative art - do mashups and remix culture have an author function?
  • In our culture, how does one characterize a discourse containing the author function?
  • four different characteristics.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation.
  • authors became subject to punishment
  • discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act
  • The author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way, however. This is its second characteristic
  • it has not always been the same types of texts which have required attribution to an author
  • There was a time when the texts that we today call 'literary' (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 21 Sep 09
       
      An alternative to the author function: ancientness.
  • Scientific discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always re-demonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 21 Sep 09
       
      Another alternative to the author function: - re-demonstrable truth (as in science) - membership in a system (e.g. professor at X University)
  • literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function
  • literary anonymity is not tolerable
  • The third characteristic of this author function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual.
  • It is, rather, the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call 'author'.
  • directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal
  • trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness
  • the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value
  • the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence
  • the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity
  • the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events)
  • The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing
  • The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts
  • signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 21 Sep 09
       
      Do we see such signs in remix?
  • Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.
  • all discourses endowed with the author function do possess this plurality of self.
  • (1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that compasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.
  • in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place
  • transdiscursive
  • 'founders of discursivity
  • They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.
  • The relationship (or non-relationship) with an author and the different forms this relationship takes, constitute - in a quite visible manner - one of these discursive properties.
  • First, there are theoretical reasons. On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse.
  • an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse
  • modes existence
  • re-examine the privileges of the subject
  • Second, there are reasons dealing with the 'ideological' status of the author
  • How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: one can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches, but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.
  • the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and re-composition of fiction
  • It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure
  • I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint -one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced.
  • We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?
  • What are the modes of existence this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?
Jill Walker Rettberg

The Medium - The Hitler Meme - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26wwln-medium-t.html

remix text subtitles parody YouTube

shared by Jill Walker Rettberg on 10 Sep 09 - Cached
  • It turns out you could play make-out music, show slow-mo clips of any two male actors interacting, throw up suggestive title cards (“a truth they couldn’t deny”) and — presto — any American blockbuster could be shown to chronicle love between two men
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 10 Sep 09
       
      Interesting - and this is also relevant to Kurdin's trailer where she shows an example of Harry Potter as a Brokeback Mountain spoof. I also like the way in which the author of this article draws a conclusion that CROSSES all the remixes - the many similar remixes make an argument as a group, in a way?
  • what’s the larger point of the “Downfall” remixes?
  • satirists who for years have been snatching video and audio from “Downfall,” the 2004 German movie of Hitler’s demise, and doctoring it to tell a range of stories about personal travails and world politics.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • subtitles
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 10 Sep 09
       
      This should be useful for Kim's project!
  • the lesson of the parodies seems to be that “Downfall” was a closeted Hitler comedy. Having seen the spoofs before seeing the movie, I find it virtually impossible now to watch the film with a straight face
  • many of the “Downfall” parodies choose not to have Ganz-as-Hitler directly ventriloquize another politician or figure of derision. Instead, as with the Malaysian parody, the spoofs often make the new speaker a disappointed supporter of a public figure.
  • Jill Walker Rettberg on 10 Sep 09
     
    Interesting NYTimes article about the many creative subtitlings of the scene from Downfall (a 2004 movie about Hitler's demise) - this article is a wonderful example of how you can analyse a whole group of remixes. If this were an academic article you'd also want to include more context about this (what is remixing? what kinds of other video/subtitle remixes exist? what sort of things are scholars writing about remixes like this?) but the ANALYSIS of what the remixes means would be perfect. I especially like how the author makes interpretations across the whole group - see some of my annotations/comments.
Jill Walker Rettberg

Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author. Aspen no. 5+6, 1967. - 0 views

www.ubu.com/...threeEssays.html

author literary theory authorship

shared by Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology?
  • all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
  • in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius"
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person,"
  • once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09
       
      See the discovery of would-be-pseudonymous video "authors": Lonelygirl16, karen26, ParkRidge47
  • Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless.
  • To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09
       
      Very close to Foucault's analysis in What is an Author? (1970)
  • utterly transforms the modern text
  • he reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic,
  • by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:'
  • no one (that is, no "person") utters it:
  • he true locus of writing is reading.
  • the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.
Jill Walker Rettberg

Edwards/Tryon: Political video mashups as allegories of citizen empowerment - 0 views

firstmonday.org/...2305

political remix video analysis scholarly

shared by Jill Walker Rettberg on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Subsequently, inspired after watching another user’s mashup, still more users may choose to participate directly in remix culture, and produce their own video mashups. In terms of empowerment, these further acts of participation are crucial because they signify how users can become more active and more media literate with the online and off–line information they are consuming on a daily basis [4].
  • Just as in the case of a video camera in the hands of a video activist at a street rally, engaged online users can produce mashups as a means for political advocacy (tool), political protest (weapon), and political observation (witness).
  • Jill Walker Rettberg on 14 Oct 09
     
    Scholarly article analysing three political video mashups: "When the viral video "Vote Different" broke into the mainstream media in March 2007, the political video mashup became a notable media phenomenon. User-generated mashups threatened to cut through the U.S. news clutter that typically shapes election discourse. In this paper, political video mashups are examined as allegories of citizen empowerment during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Political video mashups can act as tools of political advocacy, forms of political protest, and modes of political commentary. Finally, though they are already being co-opted by mainstream political campaigns, the paper addresses the potential of mashups to re-interpret political messages in ways that may encourage the active re-framing of political issues among twenty-first century citizens."
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