Desktop versionMobile version

Whose Book Is it Anyway?

 | 
Janis Jefferies
, 
Sarah Kember

Part I. Opening out the Copyright Debate: Open Access, Ethics and Creativity

3. The Ethics of Emergent Creativity: Can We Move Beyond Writing as Human Enterprise, Commodity and Innovation?

Janneke Adema

Full text

  • 1 The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society is a British membership organisation for writers, es (...)
  • 2 This survey was an update of an earlier survey conducted in 2006 by the Centre of Intellectual Pro (...)
  • 3 ‘New Research into Authors’ Earnings Released’, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, 2014, h (...)
  • 4 Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson, and Gaetano Dimita, The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of (...)

1In 2013, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS)1 commissioned a survey of its members to explore writers’ earnings and contractual issues in the UK. The survey, the results of which were published in the summary booklet ‘What Are Words Worth Now?’, was carried out by Queen Mary, University of London. Almost 2,500 writers — from literary authors to academics and screenwriters — responded. ‘What Are Words Worth Now?’ summarises the findings of a larger study titled ‘The Business Of Being An Author: A Survey Of Authors’ Earnings And Contracts’, carried out by Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita and published in April 2015 by Queen Mary University of London.2 The ALCS press release that accompanies the study states that this ‘shocking’ new research into authors’ earnings finds a ‘dramatic fall, both in incomes, and the number of those working full-time as writers’.3 Indeed, two of the main findings of the study are that, first of all, the income of a professional author (which the research defines as those who dedicate the majority of their time to writing) has dropped 29% between 2005 and 2013, from £12,330 (£15,450 in real terms) to just £11,000. Furthermore, the research found that in 2005 40% of professional authors earned their incomes solely from writing, where in 2013 this figure had dropped to just 11.5%.4

  • 5 ALCS, Press Release. What Are Words Worth Now? Not Enough, 8 July 2014, https://www.alcs.co.uk/new (...)

2It seems that one of the primary reasons for the ALCS to conduct this survey was to collect ‘accurate, independent data’ on writers’ earnings and contractual issues, in order for the ALCS to ‘make the case for authors’ rights’ — at least, that is what the ALCS Chief Executive Owen Atkinson writes in the introduction accompanying the survey, which was sent out to all ALCS members.5 Yet although this research was conducted independently and the researchers did not draw conclusions based on the data collected — in the form of policy recommendations for example — the ALCS did frame the data and findings in a very specific way, as I will outline in what follows; this framing includes both the introduction to the survey and the press release that accompanies the survey’s findings. Yet to some extent this framing, as I will argue, is already apparent in the methodology used to produce the data underlying the research report.

  • 6 Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, p. 35.
  • 7 M. Kretschmer and P. Hardwick, Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: A Surve (...)
  • 8 ALCS, Press Release, 8 July 2014, https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-
  • 9 Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, p. 35.
  • 10 Ibid.
  • 11 In the survey, three questions that focus on various sources of remuneration do list digital publi (...)

3First of all, let me provide an example of how the research findings have been framed in a specific way. Chief Executive Atkinson mentions in his introduction to the survey that the ALCS ‘exists to ensure that writers are treated fairly and remunerated appropriately’. He continues that the ALCS commissioned the survey to collect ‘accurate, independent data,’ in order to ‘make the case for writers’ rights’.6 Now this focus on rights in combination with remuneration is all the more noteworthy if we look at an earlier ALCS funded report from 2007, ‘Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: a Survey of 25,000 British and German Writers’. This report is based on the findings of a 2006 writers’survey, which the 2013 survey updates. The 2007 report argues conclusively that current copyright law has empirically failed to ensure that authors receive appropriate reward or remuneration for the use of their work.7 The data from the subsequent 2013 survey show an even bleaker picture as regards the earnings of writers. Yet Atkinson argues in the press release accompanying the findings of the 2013 survey that ‘if writers are to continue making their irreplaceable contribution to the UK economy, they need to be paid fairly for their work. This means ensuring clear, fair contracts with equitable terms and a copyright regime that support creators and their ability to earn a living from their creations’.8 Atkinson does not outline what this copyright regime should be, nor does he draw attention to how this model could be improved. More importantly, the fact that a copyright model is needed to ensure fair pay stands uncontested for Atkinson and the ALCS — not surprising perhaps, as protecting and promoting the rights of authors is the primary mission of this member society. If there is any culprit to be held responsible for the study’s ‘shocking’ findings, it is the elusive and further undefined notion of ‘the digital’. According to Atkinson, digital technology is increasingly challenging the mission of the ALCS to ensure fair remuneration for writers, since it is ‘driving new markets and leading the copyright debate’.9 The 2013 study is therefore, as Atkinson states ‘the first to capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’ working lives’.10 This statement is all the more striking if we take into consideration that none of the questions in the 2013 survey focus specifically on digital publishing.11 It therefore seems that — despite earlier findings — the ALCS has already decided in advance what ‘the digital’ is and that a copyright regime is the only way to ensure fair remuneration for writers in a digital context.

Creative Industries

4This strong uncontested link between copyright and remuneration can be traced back to various other aspects of the 2015 report and its release. For example, the press release draws a strong connection between the findings of the report and the development of the creative industries in the UK. Again, Atkinson states in the press release:

  • 12 Ibid., p. 35.

These are concerning times for writers. This rapid decline in both author incomes and in the numbers of those writing full-time could have serious implications for the economic success of the creative industries in the UK.12

  • 13 Ibid.
  • 14 Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amst (...)
  • 15 See: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-201 (...)
  • 16 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015 (...)
  • 17 Therefore Lovink and Rossiter make a plea to, ‘redefine creative industries outside of IP generati (...)

5This connection to the creative industries — ‘which are now worth £71.4 billion per year to the UK economy’,13 Atkinson points out — is not surprising where the discourse around creative industries maintains a clear bond between intellectual property rights and creative labour. As Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter state in their MyCreativity Reader, the creative industries consist of ‘the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’.14 Here they refer to a definition created as part of the UK Government’s Creative Industries Mapping Document,15 which states that the creative industries are ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’. Lovink and Rossiter point out that the relationship between IP and creative labour lies at the basis of the definition of the creative industries where, as they argue, this model of creativity assumes people only create to produce economic value. This is part of a larger trend Wendy Brown has described as being quintessentially neoliberal, where ‘neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities’ — and this includes the realm of politics and rights.16 In this sense the economization of culture and the concept of creativity is something that has become increasingly embedded and naturalised. The exploitation of intellectual property stands at the basis of the creative industries model, in which cultural value — which can be seen as intricate, complex and manifold — becomes subordinated to the model of the market; it becomes economic value.17

  • 18 Next to earnings made from writing more in general, the survey on various occasions asks questions (...)

6This direct association of cultural value and creativity with economic value is apparent in various other facets of the ALCS commissioned research and report. Obviously, the title of the initial summary booklet, as a form of wordplay, asks ‘What are words worth?’. It becomes clear from the context of the survey that the ‘worth’ of words will only be measured in a monetary sense, i. e. as economic value. Perhaps even more important to understand in this context, however, is how this economic worth of words is measured and determined by focusing on two fixed and predetermined entities in advance. First of all, the study focuses on individual human agents of creativity (i. e. creators contributing economic value): the value of writing is established by collecting data and making measurements at the level of individual authorship, addressing authors/writers as singular individuals throughout the survey. Secondly, economic worth is further determined by focusing on the fixed and stable creative objects authors produce, in other words the study establishes from the outset a clear link between the worth and value of writing and economic remuneration based on individual works of writing.18 Therefore in this process of determining the economic worth of words, ‘writers’ and/or ‘authors’ are described and positioned in a certain way in this study (i. e. as the central agents and originators of creative objects), as is the form their creativity takes in the shape of quantifiable outputs or commodities. The value of both these units of measurement (the creator and the creative objects) are then set off against the growth of the creative industries in the press release.

7The ALCS commissioned survey provides some important insights into how authorship, cultural works and remuneration — and ultimately, creativity — is currently valued, specifically in the context of the creative industries discourse in the UK. What I have tried to point out — without wanting to downplay the importance either of writers receiving fair remuneration for their work or of issues related to the sustainability of creative processes — is that the findings from this survey have both been extracted and subsequently framed based on a very specific economic model of creativity (and authorship). According to this model, writing and creativity are sustained most clearly by an individual original creator (an author) who extracts value from the work s/he creates and distributes, aided by an intellectual property rights regime. As I will outline more in depth in what follows, the enduring liberal and humanist presumptions that underlie this survey continuously reinforce the links between the value of writing and established IP and remuneration regimes, and support a vision in which authorship and creativity are dependent on economic incentives and ownership of works. By working within this framework and with these predetermined concepts of authorship and creativity (and ‘the digital’) the ALCS is strongly committed to the upkeep of a specific model and discourse of creativity connected to the creative industries. The ALCS does not attempt to complicate this model, nor does it search for alternatives even when, as the 2007 report already implies, the existing IP model has empirically failed to support the remuneration of writers appropriately.

8I want to use this ALCS survey as a reference point to start problematising existing constructions of creativity, authorship, ownership, and sustainability in relation to the ethics of publishing. To explore what ‘words are worth’ and to challenge the hegemonic liberal humanist model of creativity — to which the ALCS adheres — I will examine a selection of theoretical and practical publishing and writing alternatives, from relational and posthuman authorship to radical open access and uncreative writing. These alternatives do not deny the importance of fair remuneration and sustainability for the creative process; however, they want to foreground and explore creative relationalities that move beyond the individual author and her ownership of creative objects as the only model to support creativity and cultural exchange. By looking at alternatives while at the same time complicating the values and assumptions underlying the dominant narrative for IP expansion, I want to start imagining what more ethical, fair and emergent forms of creativity might entail. Forms that take into consideration the various distributed and entangled agencies involved in the creation of cultural content — which are presently not being included in the ALCS survey on fair remuneration, for example. As I will argue, a reconsideration of the liberal and humanist model of creativity might actually create new possibilities to consider the value of words, and with that perhaps new solutions to the problems pointed out in the ALCS study.

Relational and Distributed Authorship

  • 19 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and (...)
  • 20 The ALCS survey addresses this problem, of course, and tries to lobby on behalf of its authors for (...)

9One of the main critiques of the liberal humanist model of authorship concerns how it privileges the author as the sole source and origin of creativity. Yet the argument has been made, both from a historical perspective and in relation to today’s networked digital environment, that authorship and creativity, and with that the value and worth of that creativity, are heavily distributed.19 Should we therefore think about how we can distribute notions of authorship and creativity more ethically when defining the worth and value of words too? Would this perhaps mean a more thorough investigation of what and who the specific agencies involved in creative production are? This seems all the more important given that, today, ‘the value of words’ is arguably connected not to (distributed) authors or creative agencies, but to rights holders (or their intermediaries such as agents).20 From this perspective, the problem with the copyright model as it currently functions is that the creators of copyright don’t necessarily end up benefiting from it — a point that was also implied by the authors of the 2007 ALCS commissioned report. Copyright benefits rights holders, and rights holders are not necessarily, and often not at all, involved in the production of creative work.

  • 21 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 195 (...)
  • 22 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (...)

10Yet copyright and the work as object are knit tightly to the authorship construct. In this respect, the above criticism notwithstanding, in a liberal vision of creativity and ownership the typical unit remains either the author or the work. This ‘solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’ as Foucault has qualified it, albeit challenged, still retains a privileged position.21 As Mark Rose argues, authorship — as a relatively recent cultural formation — can be directly connected to the commodification of writing and to proprietorship. Even more it developed in tandem with the societal principle of possessive individualism, in which individual property rights are protected by the social order.22

  • 23 Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte, and Rosemary J. Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A (...)

11Some of the more interesting recent critiques of these constructs of authorship and proprietorship have come from critical and feminist legal studies, where scholars such as Carys Craig have started to question these connections further. As Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, IP and copyright are premised on liberal and neoliberal assumptions and constructs, such as ownership, private rights, selfinterest and individualism.23 In this sense copyright, authorship, the work as object, and related discourses around creativity continuously re-establish and strengthen each other as part of a self-sustaining system. We have seen this with the discourse around creative industries, as part of which economic value comes to stand in for the creative process itself, which, according to this narrative, can only be sustained through an IP regime. Furthermore, from a feminist new materialist position, the current discourse on creativity is very much a material expression of creativity rather than merely its representation, where this discourse has been classifying, constructing, and situating creativity (and with that, authorship) within a neoliberal framework of creative industries.

  • 24 Ibid., p. 8.
  • 25 Ibid., p. 9.
  • 26 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Pr (...)
  • 27 Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access?, p. 27.
  • 28 Ibid., p. 14.

12Moving away from an individual construct of creativity therefore immediately affects the question of the value of words. In our current copyright model emphasis lies on the individual original author, but in a more distributed vision the value of words and of creative production can be connected to a broader context of creative agencies. Historically there has been a great discursive shift from a valuing of imitation or derivation to a valuing of originality in determining what counts as creativity or creative output. Similar to Rose, Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue that the individuality and originality of authorship in its modern form established a simple route towards individual ownership and the propertisation of creative achievement: the original work is the author’s ownership whereas the imitator or pirate is a trespasser of thief. In this sense original authorship is ‘disproportionately valued against other forms of cultural expression and creative play’, where copyright upholds, maintains and strengthens the binary between imitator and creator — defined by Craig, Turcotte and Coombe as a ‘moral divide’.24 This also presupposes a notion of creativity that sees individuals as autonomous, living in isolation from each other, ignoring their relationality. Yet as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, ‘the act of writing involves not origination, but rather the adaptation, derivation, translation and recombination of “raw material” taken from previously existing texts’.25 This position has also been explored extensively from within remix studies and fan culture, where the adaptation and remixing of cultural content stands at the basis of creativity (what Lawrence Lessig has called Read/Write culture, opposed to Read/Only culture).26 From the perspective of access to culture — instead of ownership of cultural goods or objects — one could also argue that its value would increase when we are able to freely distribute it and with that to adapt and remix it to create new cultural content and with that cultural and social value — this within a context in which, as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe point out, ‘the continuous expansion of intellectual property rights has produced legal regimes that restrict access and downstream use of information resources far beyond what is required to encourage their creation’27To move beyond Enlightenment ideals of individuation, detachment and unity of author and work, which determine the author-owner in the copyright model, Craig puts forward a post-structuralist vision of relational authorship. This sees the individual as socially situated and constituted — based also on feminist scholarship into the socially situated self — where authorship in this vision is situated within the communities in which it exists, but also in relation to the texts and discourses that constitute it. Here creativity takes place from within a network of social relations and the social dimensions of authorship are recognised, as connectivity goes hand in hand with individual autonomy. Craig argues that copyright should not be defined out of clashing rights and interests but should instead focus on the kinds of relationships this right would structure; it should be understood in relational terms: ‘it structures relationships between authors and users, allocating powers and responsibilities amongst members of cultural communities, and establishing the rules of communication and exchange’.28 Cultural value is then defined within these relationships.

Open Access and the Ethics of Care

  • 29 Ibid., p. 26.
  • 30 Janneke Adema, ‘Open Access’, in Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities (Lueneburg: Centre f (...)
  • 31 Florian Cramer, Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and New York: nai010 publisher (...)
  • 32 Especially within humanities publishing there is a reluctance to allow derivative uses of one’s wo (...)

13Craig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement, where as they state, ‘rather than adhering to the individuated form of authorship that intellectual property laws presuppose, open access initiatives take into account varying forms of collaboration, creativity and development’.29 Yet as I and others have argued elsewhere,30 open access or open access publishing is not a solid ideological block or model; it is made up of disparate groups, visions and ethics. In this sense there is nothing intrinsically political or democratic about open access, practitioners of open access can just as well be seen to support and encourage open access in connection with the neoliberal knowledge economy, with possessive individualism — even with CC licenses, which can be seen as strengthening individualism —31 and with the unity of author and work.32

  • 33 In 2015 the Radical Open Access Conference took place at Coventry University, which brought togeth (...)
  • 34 Julien McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter: There Is Value in What Cannot Be Evaluated’, Impact of Social S (...)
  • 35 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Mean (...)
  • 36 Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, 1st ed. (London and Ne (...)

14Nevertheless, there are those within the loosely defined and connected ‘radical open access community’, that do envision their publishing outlook and relationship towards copyright, openness and authorship within and as part of a relational ethics of care.33 For example Mattering Press, a scholar-led open access book publishing initiative founded in 2012 and launched in 2016, publishes in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and works with a production model based on cooperation and shared scholarship. As part of its publishing politics, ethos and ideology, Mattering Press is therefore keen to include various agencies involved in the production of scholarship, including ‘authors, reviewers, editors, copy editors, proof readers, typesetters, distributers, designers, web developers and readers’.34 They work with two interrelated feminist (new materialist) and STS concepts to structure and perform this ethos: mattering35 and care.36 Where it concerns mattering, Mattering Press is conscious of how their experiment in knowledge production, being inherently situated, puts new relationships and configurations into the world. What therefore matters for them are not so much the ‘author’ or the ‘outcome’ (the object), but the process and the relationships that make up publishing:

  • 37 Sebastian Abrahamsson and others, ‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS Books’, The EASST Re (...)

[…] the way academic texts are produced matters — both analytically and politically. Dominant publishing practices work with assumptions about the conditions of academic knowledge production that rarely reflect what goes on in laboratories, field sites, university offices, libraries, and various workshops and conferences. They tend to deal with almost complete manuscripts and a small number of authors, who are greatly dependent on the politics of the publishing industry.37

  • 38 McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter’.

15For Mattering Press care is something that extends not only to authors but to the many other actants involved in knowledge production, who often provide free volunteer labour within a gift economy context. As Mattering Press emphasises, the ethics of care ‘mark vital relations and practices whose value cannot be calculated and thus often goes unacknowledged where logics of calculation are dominant’.38 For Mattering Press, care can help offset and engage with the calculative logic that permeates academic publishing:

  • 39 Ibid.

[…] the concept of care can help to engage with calculative logics, such as those of costs, without granting them dominance. How do we calculate so that calculations do not dominate our considerations? What would it be to care for rather than to calculate the cost of a book? This is but one and arguably a relatively conservative strategy for allowing other logics than those of calculation to take centre stage in publishing.39

  • 40 Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm S (...)

16This logic of care refers, in part, to making visible the ‘unseen others’ as Joe Deville (one of Mattering Press’s editors) calls them, who exemplify the plethora of hidden labour that goes unnoticed within this object and author-focused (academic) publishing model. As Endre Danyi, another Mattering Press editor, remarks, quoting Susan Leigh Star: ‘This is, in the end, a profoundly political process, since so many forms of social control rely on the erasure or silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations of the work’.40

Posthuman Authorship

  • 41 Lori Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, Loss (...)
  • 42 Dani Spinosa, ‘“My Line (Article) Has Sighed”: Authorial Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pro (...)
  • 43 Spinosa, ‘My Line (Article) Has Sighed’.
  • 44 Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, p. 89.

17Authorship is also being reconsidered as a polyvocal and collaborative endeavour by reflecting on the agentic role of technology in authoring content. Within digital literature, hypertext and computer-generated poetry, media studies scholars have explored the role played by technology and the materiality of text in the creation process, where in many ways writing can be seen as a shared act between reader, writer and computer. Lori Emerson emphasises that machines, media or technology are not neutral in this respect, which complicates the idea of human subjectivity. Emerson explores this through the notion of ‘cyborg authorship’, which examines the relation between machine and human with a focus on the potentiality of in-betweenness.41 Dani Spinosa talks about ‘collaboration with an external force (the computer, MacProse, technology in general)’.42 Extending from the author, the text itself, and the reader as meaning-writer (and hence playing a part in the author function), technology, she states, is a fourth term in this collaborative meaning-making. As Spinosa argues, in computer-generated texts the computer is more than a technological tool and becomes a co-producer, where it can occur that ‘the poet herself merges with the machine in order to place her own subjectivity in flux’.43 Emerson calls this a ‘break from the model of the poet/writer as divinely inspired human exemplar’, which is exemplified for her in hypertext, computer-generated poetry, and digital poetry.44

  • 45 Rolf Hughes, ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-Human Creativity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic (...)
  • 46 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poe (...)

18Yet in many ways, as Emerson and Spinosa also note, these forms of posthuman authorship should be seen as part of a larger trend, what Rolf Hughes calls an ‘anti-authorship’ tradition focused on auto-poesis (self-making), generative systems and automatic writing. As Hughes argues, we see this tradition in print forms such as Oulipo and in Dada experiments and surrealist games too.45 But there are connections here with broader theories that focus on distributed agency too, especially where it concerns the influence of the materiality of the text. Media theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker have extensively argued that the materiality of the page is entangled with the intentionality of the author as a further agency; Drucker conceptualises this through a focus on ‘conditional texts’ and ‘performative materiality’ with respect to the agency of the material medium (be it the printed page or the digital screen).46

  • 47 Nick Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss (...)
  • 48 Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, p. 202.
  • 49 Lori Emerson, ‘Materiality, Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated Poem: Reading Walter Benn M (...)

19Where, however, does the redistribution of value creation end in these narratives? As Nick Montfort states with respect to the agency of technology, ‘should other important and inspirational mechanisms — my CD player, for instance, and my bookshelves — get cut in on the action as well?’47These distributed forms of authorship do not solve issues related to authorship or remuneration but further complicate them. Nevertheless Montfort is interested in describing the processes involved in these types of (posthuman) co-authorship, to explore the (previously unexplored) relationships and processes involved in the authoring of texts more clearly. As he states, this ‘can help us understand the role of the different participants more fully’.48 In this respect a focus on posthuman authorship and on the various distributed agencies that play a part in creative processes is not only a means to disrupt the hegemonic focus on a romantic single and original authorship model, but it is also about a sensibility to (machinic) co-authorship, to the different agencies involved in the creation of art, and playing a role in creativity itself. As Emerson remarks in this respect: ‘we must be wary of granting a (romantic) specialness to human intentionality — after all, the point of dividing the responsibility for the creation of the poems between human and machine is to disrupt the singularity of human identity, to force human identity to intermingle with machine identity’.49

Emergent Creativity

  • 50 Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Johanna Drucker (...)
  • 51 We have to take into consideration here that print-based cultural products were never fixed or sta (...)
  • 52 Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’ s Feminist About Open Access?’, p. 2.
  • 53 Ibid.

20This more relational notion of rights and the wider appreciation of the various (posthuman) agencies involved in creative processes based on an ethics of care, challenges the vision of the single individualised and original author/owner who stands at the basis of our copyright and IP regime — a vision that, it is worth emphasising, can be seen as a historical (and Western) anomaly, where collaborative, anonymous, and more polyvocal models of authorship have historically prevailed.50 The other side of the Foucauldian double bind, i. e. the fixed cultural object that functions as a commodity, has however been similarly critiqued from several angles. As stated before, and as also apparent from the way the ALCS report has been framed, currently our copyright and remuneration regime is based on ownership of cultural objects. Yet as many have already made clear, this regime and discourse is very much based on physical objects and on a print-based context.51 As such the idea of ‘text’ (be it print or digital) has not been sufficiently problematised as versioned, processual and materially changing within an IP context. In other words, text and works are mostly perceived as fixed and stable objects and commodities instead of material and creative processes and entangled relationalities. As Craig et al. state, ‘the copyright system is unfortunately employed to reinforce the norms of the analog world’.52 In contrast to a more relational perspective, the current copyright regime views culture through a proprietary lens. And it is very much this discursive positioning, or as Craig et al. argue ‘the language of “ownership,” “property,” and “commodity”’, which ‘obfuscates the nature of copyright’ s subject matter, and cloaks the social and cultural conditions of its production and the implications of its protection’.53 How can we approach creativity in context, as socially and culturally situated, and not as the free-standing, stable product of a transcendent author, which is very much how it is being positioned within an economic and copyright framework? This hegemonic conception of creativity as property fails to acknowledge or take into consideration the manifold, distributed, derivative and messy realities of culture and creativity.

  • 54 Johanna Gibson, Creating Selves: Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Aldershot, UK (...)
  • 55 Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 7.

21It is therefore important to put forward and promote another more emergent vision of creativity, where creativity is seen as both processual and only ever temporarily fixed, and where the work itself is seen as being the product of a variety of (posthuman) agencies. Interestingly, someone who has written very elaborately about a different form of creativity relevant to this context is one of the authors of the ALCS commissioned report, Johanna Gibson. Similar to Craig, who focuses on the relationality of copyright, Gibson wants to pay more attention to the networking of creativity, moving it beyond a focus on traditional models of producers and consumers in exchange for a ‘many-to-many’ model of creativity. For Gibson, IP as a system aligns with a corporate model of creativity, one which oversimplifies what it means to be creative and measures it against economic parameters alone.54 In many ways in policy driven visions, IP has come to stand in for the creative process itself, Gibson argues, and is assimilated within corporate models of innovation. It has thus become a synonym for creativity, as we have seen in the creative industries discourse. As Gibson explains, this simplified model of creativity is very much a ‘discursive strategy’ in which the creator is mythologised and output comes in the form of commodified objects.55 In this sense we need to re-appropriate creativity as an inherently fluid and uncertain concept and practice.

  • 56 Ibid.

22Yet this mimicry of creativity by IP and innovation at the same time means that any re-appropriation of creativity from the stance of access and reuse is targeted as anti-IP and thus as standing outside of formal creativity. Other, more emergent forms of creativity have trouble existing within this self-defining and sustaining hegemonic system. This is similar to what Craig remarked with respect to remixed, counterfeit and pirated, and un-original works, which are seen as standing outside the system. Gibson uses actor network theory (ANT) as a framework to construct her network-based model of creativity, where for her ANT allows for a vision that does not fix creativity within a product, but focuses more on the material relationships and interactions between users and producers. In this sense, she argues, a network model allows for plural agencies to be attributed to creativity, including those of users.56

  • 57 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia Un (...)
  • 58 Ibid., p. 15.
  • 59 Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 81.
  • 60 Ibid.
  • 61 It is worth emphasising that what Goldsmith perceives as ‘uncreative’ notions of writing (includin (...)

23An interesting example of how the hegemonic object-based discourse of creativity can be re-appropriated comes from the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who, in what could be seen as a direct response to this dominant narrative, tries to emphasise that exactly what this discourse classifies as ‘uncreative’, should be seen as valuable in itself. Goldsmith points out that appropriating is creative and that he uses it as a pedagogical method in his classes on ‘Uncreative Writing’ (which he defines as ‘the art of managing information and representing it as writing’ 57). Here ‘uncreative writing’ is something to strive for and stealing, copying, and patchwriting are elevated as important and valuable tools for writing. For Goldsmith the digital environment has fostered new skills and notions of writing beyond the print-based concepts of originality and authorship: next to copying, editing, reusing and remixing texts, the management and manipulation of information becomes an essential aspect of creativity.58 Uncreative writing involves a repurposing and appropriation of existing texts and works, which then become materials or building blocks for further works. In this sense Goldsmith critiques the idea of texts or works as being fixed when asking, ‘if artefacts are always in flux, when is a historical work determined to be “finished”?’ 59At the same time, he argues, our identities are also in flux and ever shifting, turning creative writing into a post-identity literature.60 Machines play important roles in uncreative writing, as active agents in the ‘managing of information’, which is then again represented as writing, and is seen by Goldsmith as a bridge between human-centred writing and full-blown ‘robopoetics’ (literature written by machines, for machines). Yet Goldsmith is keen to emphasise that these forms of uncreative writing are not beholden to the digital medium, and that pre-digital examples are plentiful in conceptual literature and poetry. He points out — again by a discursive re-appropriation of what creativity is or can be — that sampling, remixing and appropriation have been the norm in other artistic and creative media for decades. The literary world is lagging behind in this respect, where, despite the experiments by modernist writers, it continues neatly to delineate avant-garde from more general forms of writing. Yet as Goldsmith argues the digital has started to disrupt this distinction again, moving beyond ‘analogue’ notions of writing, and has fuelled with it the idea that there might be alternative notions of writing: those currently perceived as uncreative.61

Conclusion

  • 62 Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 27.
  • 63 For example, animals cannot own copyright. See the case of Naruto, the macaque monkey that took a (...)
  • 64 Anna Munster, ‘Techno-Animalities — the Case of the Monkey Selfie’ (presented at the Goldsmiths Un (...)

24There are two addendums to the argument I have outlined above that I would like to include here. First of all, I would like to complicate and further critique some of the preconceptions still inherent in the relational and networked copyright models as put forward by Craig et al. and Gibson. Both are in many ways reformist and ‘responsive’ models. Gibson, for example, does not want to do away with IP rights, she wants them to develop and adapt to mirror society more accurately according to a networked model of creativity. For her, the law is out of tune with its public, and she wants to promote a more inclusive networked (copy) rights model.62 For Craig too, relationalities are established and structured by rights first and foremost. Yet from a posthuman perspective we need to be conscious of how the other actants involved in creativity would fall outside such a humanist and subjective rights model.63 From texts and technologies themselves to the wider environmental context and to other nonhuman entities and objects: in what sense will a copyright model be able to extend such a network beyond an individualised liberal humanist human subject? What do these models exclude in this respect and in what sense are they still limited by their adherence to a rights model that continues to rely on humanist nodes in a networked or relational model? As Anna Munster has argued in a talk about the case of the monkey selfie, copyright is based on a logic of exclusion that does not line up with the assemblages of agentic processes that make up creativity and creative expression.64 How can we appreciate the relational and processual aspects of identity, which both Craig and Gibson seem to want to promote, if we hold on to an inherently humanist concept of subjectification, rights and creativity?

  • 65 Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations (...)

25Secondly, I want to highlight that we need to remain cautious of a movement away from copyright and the copyright industries, to a context of free culture in which free content — and the often free labour it is based upon — ends up servicing the content industries (i. e. Facebook, Google, Amazon). We must be wary when access or the narrative around (open) access becomes dominated by access to or for big business, benefitting the creative industries and the knowledge economy. The danger of updating and adapting IP law to fit a changing digital context and to new technologies, of making it more inclusive in this sense — which is something both Craig and Gibson want to do as part of their reformative models — is that this tends to be based on a very simplified and deterministic vision of technology, as something requiring access and an open market to foster innovation. As Sarah Kember argues, this technocratic rationale, which is what unites pro-and anti-copyright activists in this sense, essentially de-politicises the debate around IP; it is still a question of determining the value of creativity through an economic perspective, based on a calculative lobby.65 The challenge here is to redefine the discourse in such a way that our focus moves away from a dominant market vision, and — as Gibson and Craig have also tried to do — to emphasise a non-calculative ethics of relations, processes and care instead.

26I would like to return at this point to the ALCS report and the way its results have been framed within a creative industries discourse. Notwithstanding the fact that fair remuneration and incentives for literary production and creativity in general are of the utmost importance, what I have tried to argue here is that the ‘solution’ proposed by the ALCS does not do justice to the complexities of creativity. When discussing remuneration of authors, the ALCS seems to prefer a simple solution in which copyright is seen as a given, the digital is pointed out as a generalised scapegoat, and binaries between print and digital are maintained and strengthened. Furthermore, fair remuneration is encapsulated by the ALCS within an economic calculative logic and rhetoric, sustained by and connected to a creative industries discourse, which continuously recreates the idea that creativity and innovation are one. Instead I have tried to put forward various alternative visions and practices, from radical open access to posthuman authorship and uncreative writing, based on vital relationships and on an ethics of care and responsibility. These alternatives highlight distributed and relational authorship and/or showcase a sensibility that embraces posthuman agencies and processual publishing as part of a more complex, emergent vision of creativity, open to different ideas of what creativity is and can become. In this vision creativity is thus seen as relational, fluid and processual and only ever temporarily fixed as part of our ethical decision making: a decision-making process that is contingent on the contexts and relationships with which we find ourselves entangled. This involves asking questions about what writing is and does, and how creativity expands beyond our established, static, or given concepts, which include copyright and a focus on the author as a ‘homo economicus’, writing as inherently an enterprise, and culture as commodified. As I have argued, the value of words, indeed the economic worth and sustainability of words and of the ‘creative industries’, can and should be defined within a different narrative. Opening up from the hegemonic creative industries discourse and the way we perform it through our writing practices might therefore enable us to explore extended relationalities of emergent creativity, open-ended publishing processes, and a feminist ethics of care and responsibility.

27This contribution has showcased examples of experimental, hybrid and posthuman writing and publishing practices that are intervening in this established discourse on creativity. How, through them, can we start to performatively explore a new discourse and reconfigure the relationships that underlie our writing processes? How can the worth of writing be reflected in different ways?

Bibliography

Works Cited

(2014) ‘New Research into Authors’ Earnings Released’, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504001652/http://www.alcs.co.uk/About-Us/News/News/What-are-words-worth-now-not-much.aspx

Abrahamsson, Sebastian, Uli Beisel, Endre Danyi, Joe Deville, Julien McHardy, and Michaela Spencer (2013) ‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS Books’, The EASST Review 32.4, http://easst.net/easst-review-volume-32-4-december-2013/mattering-press-new-forms-of-care-for-sts-books/

Adema, Janneke (2017) ‘Cut-Up’, in Eduardo Navas (ed.), Keywords in Remix Studies (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 104–14, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:16745/

— (2014) ‘Embracing Messiness’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/

— (2015) ‘Knowledge Production Beyond The Book? Performing the Scholarly Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture’ (PhD dissertation, Coventry University), https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/8222ccb2-f6b0-4e5f-90de-f4c62c77ac86/1/ademacomb.pdf

— (2014) ‘Open Access’, in Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities (Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC)), https://meson.press/keywords/

— and Gary Hall (2013) ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1, 138–56, https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF.78.07.2013

— and Samuel Moore (2018) ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3, https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.399

ALCS, Press Release (8 July 2014) ‘What Are Words Worth Now? Not Enough’, https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-worth-now-not-enough

Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N. C., and London: Duke University Press).

Boon, Marcus (2010) In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Brown, Wendy (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Chartier, Roger (1994) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Craig, Carys J. (2011) Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing).

— Joseph F. Turcotte, and Rosemary J. Coombe (2011) ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law 1.1, http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/7

Cramer, Florian (2013) Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and New York, NY: nai010 publishers).

Drucker, Johanna (2015) ‘Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice and the Authoritative Text’, in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 83–94.

— (2014) ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura 2.1, 11–29.

— (2013) ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 [n.p.], http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford (2001) ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA 116.2, 354–69.

Emerson, Lori (2008) ‘Materiality, Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 34, 45–69.

— (2003) ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 88–106, http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/index.php?browsebook=2

Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’ (1998) in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press).

Gibson, Johanna (2007) Creating Selves: Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Routledge).

— Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita (2015) The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of Author’s Earnings and Contracts (London: Queen Mary University of London), https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/FinalReport-ForWebPublication.pdf

Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011) Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press).

Hall, Gary (2010) ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ (presented at the Research Without Borders, Columbia University), http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/2011/01/18/radical-open-access-in-the-humanities/

— (2008) Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

Hayles, N. Katherine (2004) ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1, 67–90, https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-1-67

Hughes, Rolf (2005) ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-Human Creativity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic Conference (Linköpings universitet: University Electronic Press).

Jenkins, Henry, and Owen Gallagher (2008) ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”: An Interview with Total Recut’ s Owen Gallagher’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2008/06/interview_with_total_remixs_ow.html

Johns, Adrian (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Kember, Sarah (2016) ‘Why Publish?’, Learned Publishing 29, 348–53, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1042

— (2014) ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1, 99–116.

Kretschmer, M., and P. Hardwick (2007) Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: A Survey of 25,000 British and German Writers (Poole, UK: CIPPM/ALCS Bournemouth University), https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ALCS-Full-report.pdf

Lessig, Lawrence (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press).

Lovink, Geert, and Ned Rossiter (eds.) (2007) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures), http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/32.pdf

McGann, Jerome J. (1992) A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press).

McHardy, Julien (2014) ‘Why Books Matter: There Is Value in What Cannot Be Evaluated.’, Impact of Social Sciences [n.p.], http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/30/why-books-matter/

Mol, Annemarie (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge).

Montfort, Nick (2003) ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17, http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/index.php?browsebook=2, pp.201–17.

Moore, Samuel A. (2017) ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, Revue Française des Sciences de l’information et de la Communication 11, https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220

Munster, Anna (2016) ‘Techno-Animalities — the Case of the Monkey Selfie’ (presented at the Goldsmiths University, London), https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=9990

Navas, Eduardo (2012) Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New York: Springer).

Parikka, Jussi, and Mercedes Bunz (11 July 2014) ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes Bunz Explains Meson Press’, Machinology, https://jussiparikka.net/2014/07/11/a-mini-interview-mercedes-bunz-explains-meson-press/

Richards, Victoria (7 January 2016) ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque Who Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/monkey-selfie-judge-rules-macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-cannot-own-copyright-a6800471.html

Robbins, Sarah (2003) ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property’, College English 66.2, 155–71, https://doi.org/10.2307/3594264

Rose, Mark (1993) Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Spinosa, Dani (14 May 2014) ‘“My Line (Article) Has Sighed”: Authorial Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pronoun, https://genericpronoun.com/2014/05/14/my-line-article-has-sighed/

Star, Susan Leigh (1991) ‘The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm Leonard Strauss and David R. Maines (eds.), Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Grutyer).

Notes

1 The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society is a British membership organisation for writers, established in 1977 with over 87,000 members, focused on protecting and promoting authors’ rights. ALCS collects and pays out money due to members for secondary uses of their work (copying, broadcasting, recording etc.).

2 This survey was an update of an earlier survey conducted in 2006 by the Centre of Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University.

3 ‘New Research into Authors’ Earnings Released’, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504001652/http://www.alcs.co.uk/About-Us/News/News/What-are-words-worth-now-not-much.aspx

4 Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson, and Gaetano Dimita, The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of Author’s Earnings and Contracts (London: Queen Mary University of London, 2015), p. 9, https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/FinalReport-ForWebPublication.pdf

5 ALCS, Press Release. What Are Words Worth Now? Not Enough, 8 July 2014, https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-worth-now-not-enough

6 Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, p. 35.

7 M. Kretschmer and P. Hardwick, Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: A Survey of 25,000 British and German Writers (Poole: CIPPM/ALCS Bournemouth University, 2007), p. 3, https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ALCS-Full-report.pdf

8 ALCS, Press Release, 8 July 2014, https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-

worth-now-not-enough

9 Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, p. 35.

10 Ibid.

11 In the survey, three questions that focus on various sources of remuneration do list digital publishing and/or online uses as an option (questions 8, 11, and 15). Yet the data tables provided in the appendix to the report do not provide the findings for questions 11 and 15 nor do they differentiate according to type of media for other tables related to remuneration. The only data table we find in the report related to digital publishing is table 3.3, which lists ‘Earnings ranked (1 to 7) in relation to categories of work’, where digital publishing ranks third after books and magazines/periodicals, but before newspapers, audio/audio-visual productions and theatre. This lack of focus on the effect of digital publishing on writers’ incomes, for a survey that is ‘the first to capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’ working lives’, is quite remarkable. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, Appendix 2.

12 Ibid., p. 35.

13 Ibid.

14 Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007), p. 14, http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/32.pdf

15 See: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-2015/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-2015-key

16 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 31.

17 Therefore Lovink and Rossiter make a plea to, ‘redefine creative industries outside of IP generation’. Lovink and Rossiter, MyCreativity Reader, p. 14.

18 Next to earnings made from writing more in general, the survey on various occasions asks questions about earnings arising from specific categories of works and related to the amount of works exploited (published/broadcast) during certain periods. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, Appendix 2.

19 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, 1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford, ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA 116.2 (2001), 354–69; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 1992); Sarah Robbins, ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property’, College English 66.2 (2003), 155–71, https://doi.org/10.2307/3594264

20 The ALCS survey addresses this problem, of course, and tries to lobby on behalf of its authors for fair contracts with publishers and intermediaries. That said, the survey findings show that only 42% of writers always retain their copyright. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, p. 12.

21 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 205.

22 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

23 Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte, and Rosemary J. Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law 1.1(2011), http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/7

24 Ibid., p. 8.

25 Ibid., p. 9.

26 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2012); Henry Jenkins and Owen Gallagher, ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”: An Interview with Total Recut’s Owen Gallagher’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2008, http://henryjenkins.org/2008/06/interview_with_total_remixs_ow.html

27 Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access?, p. 27.

28 Ibid., p. 14.

29 Ibid., p. 26.

30 Janneke Adema, ‘Open Access’, in Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities (Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), 2014), https://meson.press/keywords/;JannekeAdema,‘EmbracingMessiness’,LSEImpactofSocialSciences,2014, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/embracing-messinessadema-pdsc14/; Gary Hall, Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 197; Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116; Samuel A. Moore, ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, Revue Française des Sciences de l’information et de la Communication, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220

31 Florian Cramer, Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and New York: nai010 publishers, 2013).

32 Especially within humanities publishing there is a reluctance to allow derivative uses of one’s work in an open access setting.

33 In 2015 the Radical Open Access Conference took place at Coventry University, which brought together a large array of presses and publishing initiatives (often academic-led) in support of an ‘alternative’ vision of open access and scholarly communication. Participants in this conference subsequently formed the loosely allied Radical Open Access Collective: radicaloa.co.uk. As the conference concept outlines, radical open access entails ‘a vision of open access that is characterised by a spirit of on-going creative experimentation, and a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly communication and publishing practices, together with the institutions that sustain them (the library, publishing house etc.), to rigorous critique. Included in the latter will be the asking of important questions about our notions of authorship, authority, originality, quality, credibility, sustainability, intellectual property, fixity and the book — questions that lie at the heart of what scholarship is and what the university can be in the 21st century’. Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1 (2013), 138–56, https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF.78.07.2013; Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore, ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience In Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.399; GaryHall, ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ (presented at the Research Without Borders, Columbia University, 2010), http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/2011/01/18/radical-open-access-in-the-humanities/; Janneke Adema, ‘Knowledge Production Beyond The Book? Performing the Scholarly Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture’ (PhD dissertation, Coventry University, 2015), https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/8222ccb2-f6b0-4e5f-90de-f4c62c77ac86/1/ademacomb.pdf

34 Julien McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter: There Is Value in What Cannot Be Evaluated’, Impact of Social Sciences, 2014, n. p., http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/30/why-books-matter/

35 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N. C. and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

36 Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

37 Sebastian Abrahamsson and others, ‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS Books’, The EASST Review 32.4 (2013), http://easst.net/easst-review-volume-32-4-december-2013/mattering-press-new-forms-of-care-for-sts-books/

38 McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter’.

39 Ibid.

40 Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm Leonard Strauss and David R. Maines (eds.), Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1991). Mattering Press is not alone in exploring an ethics of care in relation to (academic) publishing. Sarah Kember, director of Goldsmiths Press is also adamant in her desire to make the underlying processes of publishing (i. e. peer review, citation practices) more transparent and accountable Sarah Kember, ‘Why Publish?’, Learned Publishing 29 (2016), 348–53, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1042. Mercedes Bunz, one of the editors running Meson Press, argues that a sociology of the invisible would incorporate ‘infrastructure work’, the work of accounting for, and literally crediting everybody involved in producing a book: ‘A book isn’ t just a product that starts a dialogue between author and reader. It is accompanied by lots of other academic conversations — peer review, co-authors, copy editors — and these conversations deserve to be taken more serious’. Jussi Parikka and Mercedes Bunz, ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes Bunz Explains Meson Press’, Machinology, 2014, https://jussiparikka.net/2014/07/11/a-mini-interview-mercedes-bunz-explainsmeson-press/. For Open Humanities Press authorship is collaborative and even often anonymous: for example, they are experimenting with research published in wikis to further complicate the focus on single authorship and a static marketable book object within academia (see their living and liquid books series).

41 Lori Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 88–106, http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/index.php?browsebook=2

42 Dani Spinosa, ‘“My Line (Article) Has Sighed”: Authorial Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pronoun, 2014, https://genericpronoun.com/2014/05/14/my-line-article-has-sighed/

43 Spinosa, ‘My Line (Article) Has Sighed’.

44 Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, p. 89.

45 Rolf Hughes, ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-Human Creativity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic Conference (Linköpings universitet: University Electronic Press, 2005).

46 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1 (2004), 67–90, https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-1-67; Johanna Drucker, ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 ( 2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html; Johanna Drucker, ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura 2.1 (2014), 11–29.

47 Nick Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17 (p. 201), http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/index.php?browsebook=2

48 Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, p. 202.

49 Lori Emerson, ‘Materiality, Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels with Erin Moureacute’ s Pillage Land’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 34 (2008), 66.

50 Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice and the Authoritative Text’, in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 83–94.

51 We have to take into consideration here that print-based cultural products were never fixed or static; the dominant discourses constructed around them just perceive them to be so.

52 Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’ s Feminist About Open Access?’, p. 2.

53 Ibid.

54 Johanna Gibson, Creating Selves: Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington: Routledge, 2007), p. 7.

55 Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 7.

56 Ibid.

57 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 227.

58 Ibid., p. 15.

59 Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 81.

60 Ibid.

61 It is worth emphasising that what Goldsmith perceives as ‘uncreative’ notions of writing (including appropriation, pastiche, and copying), have a prehistory that can be traced back to antiquity (thanks go out to this chapter’s reviewer for pointing this out). One example of this, which uses the method of cutting and pasting — something I have outlined more in depth elsewhere — concerns the early modern commonplace book. Commonplacing as ‘a method or approach to reading and writing involved the gathering and repurposing of meaningful quotes, passages or other clippings from published books by copying and/or pasting them into a blank book.’ Janneke Adema, ‘Cut-Up’, in Eduardo Navas (ed.), Keywords in Remix Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 104–14, https://hcommons. org/deposits/item/hc:16745/

62 Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 27.

63 For example, animals cannot own copyright. See the case of Naruto, the macaque monkey that took a ‘selfie’ photograph of itself. Victoria Richards, ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque Who Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The Independent, 7 January 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/monkey-selfie-judge-rules-macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-cannot-own-copyright-a6800471.html

64 Anna Munster, ‘Techno-Animalities — the Case of the Monkey Selfie’ (presented at the Goldsmiths University, London, 2016), https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=9990

65 Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116.

Author

A Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communication and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post Office Press (POP).

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search