Can you imagine if someone painted a building and then took credit for the entire finished product? It would be absurd. However, something analogous to this seems to happen all the time when someone authors a work–say for example a simple printed text or a more complicated multimodal text such as a movie–and claims credit for the entire work. It’s a ridiculous assumption. And, yet it happens all the time when we say that any work is an author’s work, such as: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, George Lucas’ Star Wars, and David Bowie’s “Heroes”. But, in all of these examples, the “author” of the text has built upon a foundation much like the painter of the building. Perhaps each author’s final contribution to the product is most evident, but it is a thin façade applied over, not only the work of individuals within a specific culture but, the work of all cultures known to everyone who contributed to either the foundation for the physical building or to the development and foundation of the text. The concept of a singular author being solely responsible for any text is certainly not an indisputable truth but rather it is a social construct with political implications. Keep, McLaughlin and Panmar (1995) all allude to the absurdity of the assumption that authors are the originators of text when they say that, “His only power is to mix writings…Thus, the author cannot claim any absolute authority over his or her text.”
But, should we, and do we, say the text is authored or authoritative if no one understands it? No, if no one understands any aspect of a text other than the originating “author” we wouldn’t even consider it a text. Certainly, a text remains non-existent, dead and inert unless more than one person can find some aspect of meaning within it. So, it is not so much the author that gives the text life as it is the reader, or a number of readers, so that the text becomes of cultural significance. As revolutionary as such claims as the death of the author may appear, there must be acknowledgement of the reader as author, as if this were not possible (i.e. if the reader couldn’t author an understanding) the text would be inert without any individual or cultural value or significance.
Social constructivists have long known that the vast majority of knowledge that we individually acquire about the world is primarily a social product that took years to develop. Fosnot (2005) notes: “We cannot understand an individual’s cognitive structure without observing it interacting in a context, within a culture. But neither can we understand culture as an isolated entity affecting the structure, since all knowledge within the culture is only, to use Cobb’s terminology, “taken-as-shared”. As noted elsewhere throughout our readings, language seems to be one of the most important developments of any particular culture, or civilization, as it allows its members to communicate ideas so as to hopefully achieve agreement, mutual understanding and acquire knowledge that is “taken as shared”. Languages can take thousands of years to develop as concepts, ideas and knowledge develops with language concurrently so as afford one the ability to express such understanding. So in Shakespeare’s case he not only inherited the language that allowed him to express ideas found within his plays, he also inherited an understanding of the vast history of experiences that allowed him to create such works. Thus Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not so much an individual product as a cultural product, and this is because the greater portion of meaningful material in it is derived from a foundation of language, ideas and experience that took thousands of years, and millions of people, to create. In respect to Macbeth we can not talk about the “Great Chain of Being” without an understanding of both what the terms mean and where such socially defining structure originates. “The Great Chain of Being” clearly lies between competing alternatives, both before and after its acceptance, and these alternatives serve much in the manner of hypertext, in the catalogue of human experience, in respect to our understanding of Macbeth and its inherent themes and issues of exploration. Likewise, not only is Star Wars built on a historical foundation of language and human experience ,but as Joseph Campbell and others have noted, Lucas’ work is considered to be of mythological proportions that rely on archetypes of heroes and villains, good and evil, rewards and consequences that are readily found, and therefore can be considered hypertextual, within a considerable canon of mythological literature. Lastly, when David Bowie was asked about his inspiration, or muse, he answered that he merely considers himself a thief with good taste. He borrowed from others who of course borrowed from a multitude.
Still, all aforementioned authors and their respective texts are only commonly referred to as being “authors”, and authoritative, because many people have individually constructed meaning from their work. In the constructivist paradigm, there exists no objective reality, only that which each individual perceives based on the process of accommodation within their own schema. If there is no accommodation, there is no understanding, no relevance and in essence no creation of shared knowledge and/or no creation or re-creation of text. From the constructivist perspective it is the reader who authors meaning from the text; however, the text that the reader authored isn’t necessarily the same as the person whom we credit as “author”. We all construct meaning differently based on our understanding, experiences and many other attributes that make us individuals and not clones. Fosnot speaks of these competing readings of the same text by different individuals, further characterized by different interpretations, and therefore created, ultimately, by different authors of meaning: “Since the process of construction is adaptive in nature and requires self-reorganization, cultural knowledge that is assumed to be held by members of the culture is in reality only a dynamically evolving, negotiated interaction of individual interpretations, transformations, and constructions. At most, cultural knowledge can only be assumed, or “taken-as-shared,” by its members.”
As noted earlier, there are political implications concerning the word “author”. For David Bowie, and his estate, it is financially advantageous for him, and only him, to receive acknowledgement and credit for what he is claimed to author. We live in a liberal capitalist culture where individualism is seen as sacrosanct often at the expense of the common good; consequently, many contributing members of society have not been acknowledged for their efforts, of what they helped create under David Bowie’s name. By signalling out one individual, we assign success and failure to individuals and negate the impact of an entire culture upon such outcomes. Moving the focus away from individual author as originator of the text and placing it on a subject’s ability to comprehend the text makes it so that the originator is no longer lauded so much for his efforts as the readers are examined for either their ability or inability to authorize the text, as this just like the creation of the text is a cultural product. And, it seems to me that just as the seeming originator of a text is a cultural product deserving of focus so too are the illiterate members a cultural product equally deserving of focus. Why do only a few have access to the vast wealth of what has been achieved within the longstanding history of a culture and why are they, without the proper education or access, removed from the possibility of creating with it and being authoritative?
Sources:
Fosnot, Catherine Twomey. Constructivism (2005): Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, Second Edition (Kindle Locations 676-681). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (1995). The electronic labyrinth. Retrieved from: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab//hfl0240.html
