Plurality of Authorship

The plurality of authorship is a dilemma which seeks to address the legitimacy or authority one person can have over an entire text. In other words, is it possible to tribute a text to an individual?

## Background

Famed economist F. A. Hayek infamously wrote that "the individualist tradition... has created Western civilisation".

Many theorists have disagreed with this contentious statement, but the fact that it has been said and continues to echo arguably says more than the quote itself does. We, in the west, value the concept of individualism. We like to believe that one man labors and produces independently, and then much contention is held around the idea of what should be done with the wealth that that labor engenders.

However, in the process, we devalue the the commons, as all forms of labor are a transformational use of something originally available to all of us in the commons. How, then, do we attribute what is from the commons (property of us all) and what is independently created?

## Why Does It Matter?

### Economics

Obviously, there is the economic reason. When a book carries one man's name, that man receives that book's fame. We all speak of J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, or any other famous author you can think of, but seldom do the masses care about the publishers, editors, or other inspirations that might have contributed to the gestation and production of the book. For this reason, to have the claim that you are the sole creator of a successful piece of art means that you wield a lot of social clout.

As food for thought, consider these excerpts from Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford's piece "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship":

```
"Almost all the routine forms of marking an academic career - CVs, annual faculty activity reports, tenure and promotion reviews - militate against [collaboration] by singling out for merit only those moments of individual "productivity," the next article or grant or graduate course, creating a version of professional life that oddly yet almost seamlessly merges the roles of subaltern dissident and intellectual entrepreneur."

```

### Ethos

In our culture, theft is seen as amoral. Hence, taking intellectual property and reshaping, sometimes even with acknowledgment, is seen as a lesser act of creation. Why couldn't you have come up with an idea yourself?

### Philosophically

As most modern philosophy is based upon Descartes' "I think, therefore I am", it is very important for western philosophy to treasure the idea that our thoughts are our original conceptions (rationalism rather than empiricism), because if we are merely capable of reacting rather than generating, it suggests that we are at least somewhat lesser than we think ourselves.

## Intertextuality

*See also: Intertextuality*

Intertextuality suggests you are using an idea, you have in someway been influenced by it. Your reference then is inherently a transformative use of that work.

## The Internet

With the Internet comes a rise in networks of communication, and these networks of communication create communally. For example, how do you cite a website? Do you cite the programmer?

Is it enough to cite "Wikipedia" as a whole, to represent the collective of editors? But certainly not every Wikipedia editor edits every page. But, then again, not every real-life book editor edits every page, either, and sometimes not every author writes every page.

Why, then, don't we just cite books to their publishing houses rather than their authors? After all, that's what we do for other texts like Wikipedia or other databases.

### Hypertext

Furthermore, with hypertext and the possibility of the all-encompassing "omnitext", it becomes infinitely more accessible for authors to link to other databases and host other creators' content. At that point, how do you consider what is part of a work and what is not? When everything is connected, like on the Internet, when does it end?

And, with intertextuality, *is* this phenomenon even limited to the Internet?

## References

1. ↑ Hayek, 2001, p. 20
2. ↑ Ede and Lunsford, 2001, pp. 354-369
3. ↑ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

*To see the full list of references for this entire project (and not this specific page), see Works Cited.*

## See Also

* Death of the Author
* Surrogate Author
* Plato#Midwifery
* Auteur Theory