Looking through this article about the idea of intertextuality in semiotics, I found a couple quotes about the concept of authorship which I thought had some cool ideas in them:
- ‘Authorship’ was a historical invention. Concepts such as ‘authorship’ and ‘plagiarism’ did not exist in the Middle Ages. ‘Before 1500 or thereabouts people did not attach the same importance to ascertaining the precise identity of the author of a book they were reading or quoting as we do now’
I think that’s super interesting and its something that is actually coming back into vogue nowadays thanks to the internet. I did a post about part of that same thing before, about how plagiarism points to a new model of knowledge and education. Also, I just came across an article which deals a bit more closely about how hyperlinking and the way the internet is structured and traversed relates to some semiotic and cultural theory stuff.
The other quote I was interested in:
- Theorists of intertextuality problematize the status of ‘authorship’, treating the writer of a text as the orchestrator of what Roland Barthes refers to as the ‘already-written’ rather than as its originator (Barthes 1974, 21). ‘A text is… a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations… The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them’
Again, I think this is perfectly illustrated on the internet - actually, in particular by blogs. Most blogs consist of links and quotes from other writings, most of which the operator of the blog did not themselves write. Of course, they mix this in with their own commentary, as well as original material about their own personal experiences. But the theory described above would say that even this personal material necessarily is an amalgam of other patterns and sources which already exist within a culture.
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