Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship

Abstract

Cogito, ergo sum.—Rene DescartesI yam what I am.—Ralph EllisonWho am we?—Sherry Turkle1What does it mean to be an author? this question has been interrogated from just about every imaginable angle, as the status of the author has been problematized, deconstructed, and challenged to such an extent that discussions of the author problem now seem decidedly old-hat. Scholars now understand—in theory, at least—that the notion of author (like that of the founding or sovereign subject on which it depends) is a peculiarly modern construct, one that can be traced back through multiple and overdetermined pathways to the development of modern capitalism and of intellectual property, to Western rationalism, and to patriarchy. Foucault's assertion that “[t]he coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” no longer surprises (141). The author, like the autonomous individual of Descartes's cogito, is, we understand with Raymond Williams, “a characteristic form of bourgeois thought” (192), one that Ralph Ellison parodies, for instance, when his protagonist, in a fleeting moment of self- and cultural integration, proclaims “I yam what I am” (260). The relentless intertextuality of Web culture, the rapid proliferation of multiple selves online, and the development of what Sherry Turkle has called “distributed selves” of postmodernity would seem to have moved us well beyond autonomous individualism (Life 14).