Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices (How Copyright is Destroying Collective Practice)
Creators: name: Weinmayr, Eva
Publisher: name: Open Book Publishers
Year: 2019
Subjects: subject: Authorship
subject: Decolonization
subject: Postcolonialism
subject: Copyright
subject: Arts
subject: Feminist criticism

description: In this chapter I investigate the coercive relationship between authorship and copyright from the perspective of intersectional feminist and de-colonial knowledge practices. Examining three artistic strategies (Richard Prince, Cady Noland and the Piracy Project) which all try to challenge the close ties between copyright and authorship – although with very different outcomes – I will show how the concept of authorship grounded in possessive individualism creates considerable blockages for critical art, education and collective practice. 

Trying to politicise individual authorship and to escape its construction through legal, economic and institutional frameworks, I discuss how this chapter would circulate in current systems of dissemination, validation and authorisation, if I did not assign my name to it, if it went un-authored so to speak. From a de-colonial feminist perspective, however, authorship after all marks the positionality of the speaking subject in order to account for the often unacknowledged eurocentrism of western philosophy (Gayatry Spivak). Acknowledging this double bind, I wonder, how we might eventually be able to invent modes of being and working together that recognise the difference of the 'who' that writes, and at the same time might be able to move on from the question 'how can we get rid of the author' to inventing processes of subjectivation that we want to support and instigate.
description: In this chapter I investigate the coercive relationship between authorship and copyright from the perspective of intersectional feminist and de-colonial knowledge practices. Examining three artistic strategies (Richard Prince, Cady Noland and the Piracy Project) which all try to challenge the close ties between copyright and authorship – although with very different outcomes – I will show how the concept of authorship grounded in possessive individualism creates considerable blockages for critical art, education and collective practice. Trying to politicise individual authorship and to escape its construction through legal, economic and institutional frameworks, I discuss how this chapter would circulate in current systems of dissemination, validation and authorisation, if I did not assign my name to it, if it went un-authored so to speak. From a de-colonial feminist perspective, however, authorship after all marks the positionality of the speaking subject in order to account for the often unacknowledged eurocentrism of western philosophy (Gayatry Spivak). Acknowledging this double bind, I wonder, how we might eventually be able to invent modes of being and working together that recognise the difference of the 'who' that writes, and at the same time might be able to move on from the question 'how can we get rid of the author' to inventing processes of subjectivation that we want to support and instigate.