Materiality, Authorship, and Networks

Susan Adams' The Erotics of Authorship examines Authorship, language, and composition instruction in relation to her assumption that materiality pervades non-Authors, language, and discourse. She first argues that Authorship, as deployed in recent and ancient history, is contingent upon a divorce of the material (bodily, physical humanness) from the immaterial (author-function). From Plato to Foucault, theorists have understood/articulated Authorship as a disembodied experience; we might even argue that the Romantic conception placed the genius not in the material body but in some higher-level functioning of the "self" (or wherever genius happens to be located). Adams seeks to reveal the material nature of Authorship and to remind readers (in a familiar way, if we consider the last couple of weeks of class) that if the contradictions in composition theory/practice are to be overcome, we ought to take corrective measures at the level of instruction.

Adams' argument is largely rooted in familiar soil: Foucault's author-function, Barthes' author death, yet she also introduces us to some new (and refreshing) ideas. Namely instead of focusing on what the Author is, she focuses on what the non-Author is. Adams argues that if the author function is indeed discursive and removed from the body of the person who wrote the text, Authored texts become immaterial. And so what do we make of texts that are not produced by Authors? Adams suggests that these writers (students, marginalized populations) become rooted in the material, in the body, in the person. She extends this argument quite well, venturing into queer theory and talking about specific practices, implications, and possibilities of composition that might usefully disrupt the old guard of composition.

Yet for purposes here I'd like to explore a useful expansion of her work that borrows from new media scholars and....you guessed it, Bruno Latour. Adams' analysis, while thorough in examining the material author, fails to embellish on the consequences of textual immateriality, or, what happens when the system, author, values, and production of a text are hidden, or in Latour's words, "black boxed." In other words, most media we consume (and here I'm speaking to the medium of transmission rather than the "content," if you can make a distinction) are packaged in a way that obscures the network of structures (comprised, of course, of both human and nonhuman actors) that underlie and contribute to their production and proliferation. Anne Wysocki, in Writing New Media, defines new media not in terms of whether or not the media are "online," but whether they were made by composers who highlight the materiality of their own texts. So if we extended Adams' argument, calling on Latour's "black boxes" and Wysocki's "materiality," we might articulate implications of current notions of authorship (rather than provide alternatives, which of course is needed). I'll frame these implications in the form of questions for discussion:

1. Think of a text, any text. How is it packaged to hide, or black box, its production and values? How does this affect your reading? What happens to your reading once you begin to un-black box it?
2. What does it mean when we remove the body from the text, and replace it with a name (or author function)? What good comes of it? Bad?
3. How can we talk to students about the materiality of language, of texts, of authorship? I use Google as an example. How would you illustrate it?