I left Oxford four years ago, as a fresh-faced English graduate, clutching my First and ready to take the world by storm. The first things that happened were
1) I got fired several times in quick succession for being more interested in writing than business
2) I wrote the usual abortive Bildungsroman-type first attempt at a novel, and then realised it was rubbish
3) I wrote another one, close but no cigar
4) I stopped trying to ‘be a writer’, and suddenly discovered myself writing more than ever.
But I’ve stopped wanting to write books. Perhaps, in the light of Ben’s post on Vidal and the role of authors, I should explain why.
Part of the problem is that between events 1) and 4) above, I discovered the Internet. I found myself co-editing a collaboratively-written email newsletter that covered the kinds of grass-roots creative and political stuff I wanted to be involved in. I thrashed out swathes of cultural theory in a wiki. I blogged for a while in sonnet form. As a side-effect, I nearly started an art collective in France. I found exciting projects and got involved in them. I’m now working on a startup based on (real and virtual) discussions I had with people I met this way. These days, my writing goes into emails, proposals, and the blogosphere. If I get the yen to write fiction, I do so, in collaboration with friends, on the vintage typewriter in my sitting room.
You could say that I just don’t have time to write a whole book. But it’s not just about time. In the process of learning all these new reasons for writing, I stopped aspiring to be an Author.
To backtrack a bit. In the process of frogmarching me through most of the English literary canon from 10AD to the twentieth century, my tutors put a lot of effort into making me consider the relationship between literary theories and their sociopolitical contexts. So I learned how, in Elizabethan England, the writer’s job was to improve politics by providing aspirational images of political leaders. These days, it looks like sycophancy, but back then they (at least say they) believed that the addressee would be moved by poems describing their ideal self to try and become that self, and that this was a valid contribution to the social good.
Fast-forward a hundred or so years. Print technology is taking off in a big way, and in post-Civil War England, aristocratic patronage is declining, and rhetoric is deeply suspect. So writers such as Pope retroengineered the writings of Shakespeare (and, by implication, their own) to represent an ‘eternal’ canon of ‘great’ writing supposedly immune to the ravages of time. This enabled them to distinguish ‘great’ writing from ‘hack’ writing independent of the political situation, thus conveniently providing themselves with a job description (‘great writer’) that didn’t depend on sucking up to a rich patron under the guise of laus et vituperatio but instead sold directly to the public through the burgeoning print industry.
That, then (if you’ll forgive the egregious over-simplification), is the model of what and who an ‘author’ is. We’ve been stuck with it pretty much since then. It depends on the immutable, printed page, requires authors to turn themselves into a brand in order to make a living by marketing their branded ‘great’ prose to the great unwashed for – of course – the improvement not of the authors but of said unwashed, and supports a whole industry in the production and sale of books.
And then came the Internet. All of a sudden, writing is infinitely reproducible. Anyone who wants to write can self-publish. There are tools for real-time collaborative writing. And yet the popular conception of who or what an Author is still very much alive, in the popular mind at least. The publishing industry, meanwhile, has responded to the threat posed by the Net by consolidating, automating, and producing only books guaranteed to sell millions.
So I found myself, a few years out of university, considering the highly-industrialised modern print industry, in the context of the literary theories and social contexts that have created it. And comparing it to the seemingly boundless possibilities – and attendant threats to intellectual property as an economic model – offered by the Internet. And once I’d thought it through, I stopped wanting to author books.
I’m 27. I write well. I have plenty to say. I ought to be the ‘future of the book’. But I want to introduce myself on if:book by proposing that perhaps the future of the book is not a future of books. Or at least it’s not one of authorship, but of writing. Now, please don’t get me wrong: I don’t think print publishing has nothing to offer. I’m an English graduate. I like the physicality of books, the way you can annotate them, the way they start conversations or act as a currency among friends. But I feel deeply that the print industry is out of step with the contemporary cultural landscape, and will not produce the principal agents in the future of that landscape. And I’m not sure that ebooks will, either. My hunch is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.
Collaborative writing experiments such as Charles Leadbeater’s We-Think venture begin to explore some of the potential open to writers willing to share authorship with an open-sided group, and able to handle the tools that facilitate that kind of work.
Perhaps less obviously, the Elizabethans knew that telling stories changed the cultural landscape, and used that for political purposes. But we live – at least ostensibly – with the Enlightenment notion that storytelling is not political, and that the only proper medium for political discussion is reasoned argument. And yet, the literary theories of Sidney are the direct ancestors of the modern PR and marketing landscape. Today’s court poets work in PR.
What, then, happens when writers choose to operate outside the strictures of the print industry (or the PR copywriting serfdom that claims many of them at the moment) and become instead court poets for the cultural, social, political interest groups of their choice? What happens when we reclaim rhetoric from the language of ‘rationality’ and ‘detachment’? Can we do that honestly, and in the service of humanity?
I find myself involved in both kinds: writing as orchestration/quality control, and writing as activist tool. But in both cases, I remain unsatisfied by the print industry’s feedback loop of three to five years from conception to publication. So instead, I co-write screenplays, proposals, updates. I write emails to my collaborators; I blog about what I’m up to; I tell stories designed to reproduce virally via the ‘Forward’ button. Perhaps foolishly, I still dream of changing the world by writing. And I want to be around when it happens.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Very insightful post and introduction, Sebastian. I think the same thing is true of art and artists. When you do what you love and forget about defining yourself in other people’s terms, what you produce has more impact and weight. It comes across differently. You are fortunate though in that you came to this conclusion at a time when you could reach an unbelievably broad-based audience. Before the Internet, most artists, authors, musicians could not have expected to do what they loved and really be noticed, really make much of a contribution. It is indeed a very exciting time to be alive.
Good to see you posting on here! After I read this, I went back to an interview with Ivan Illich, from soon after he published ‘In the Vineyard of the Text’. I haven’t read that book, but in the interview he talks about ‘hospitality’ – for Illich, a great source of hope – as ‘deeply threatened by the idea of personality, of scholastic status’. By extension, I guess the idea of the Author which you’ve sketched here leads to an inhospitable kind of book. There is, anyway, something awkward about the element of human relationship in the experience of reading an Author’s work – it may seem to address me as directly as my most intimate friends, yet the Author remains a stranger, and it is inappropriate for me to respond directly to the experience of having been touched by their words. So, the new kinds of writing you’re exploring, do you think they have more room for hospitality, for friendship?
I was thinking this morning that one of the elements of Authorship with a big A is the way in which other contributors to the writing process are erased in the privileging of a single creating mind. But it’s not as if authors do it all by themselves. What about the editor who trims off the loose flab? The agent who advises on book structure, tone, or marketing pitch? The bookstore who stocks the finished product? To say nothing, of course, of the collective enterprise of language in which the august Author works. So far, so obvious – but the fact that this is erased in most cases precludes, as you say, an actual relationship with the writer of the book. Rather, the privileged personality dispenses wisdom from on high, and there is little room for a face-to-face relationship with the Author. After all, if the words are supposed to be eternal and the meaning self-evident, then what need is there to speak to their originator?
Last year I was credited with writing a short film. I say ‘credited with’, because the jokes and storylines in it emerged out of a lively online messageboard and the offline community it supports. I developed the story with the filmmaker, drafted it, passed it back to him for tinkering, reworked it again and then finally – with the help of the community who spawned the jokes in the first place – shot it in 6 hours in someone’s back garden. It went on to screen at the National Film Theatre and National Portrait Gallery, to an appreciative audience mostly composed of the actors, their friends, and the wider (queer/trans) community we inhabit.
I felt a little guilty about the fact that the film was credited to me: as far as I was concerned, all I did was arrange material that was already there. I wish there was a way of crediting it to its community instead. But I am also aware that by capturing the running jokes from a summer’s ‘scene’ I helped create an artefact that has since become a reference point for other interactions within the community whose stories it articulates.
The process of making that film shares with the Author who writes for an abstract Reader a somewhat disingenuous focus on the work of a single organising mind. But where it differs is that I knew exactly who I was writing for (to the point of not showing the actors the script beforehand, in case they refused to take part); and I know I couldn’t have come up with it by myself. That admission alone renders me unfit for Authorship in the detached sense. What it hints at, though, is the possibility of re-framing writing as a practice that takes place in the context of its specific social group. The point is then less to treat the words as immutable, or attempt to write for everyone, but to see the activity of writing as part of a process that draws overtly from and aims to be of service to its community.
Though ‘hospitality’ is an abstract notion itself, the kind of writing that I aspire to is not motivated by self-expression but by a desire to articulate and help constitute social groups, and thus to be of service to them. Where I express myself is in choosing which social groups to write with. If ‘hospitality’ means an interdependence of relationships, needs, interests and aims, then yes, I think there’s more room for it outside the industries of print and Authorship.
Congratulations on a provocative first post to if:book. I’d like to focus on just two of the many interesting points you’ve made, both of which say something we haven’t said before but should have. At the end you write, “Perhaps foolishly, I still dream of changing the world.” We often talk about the book being (amongst other things) the vehicle humans used to move important ideas around time and space and that the reason for moving them around is to encourage conversation about those ideas. What we fail to add, which you have artfully reminded us of, is that the reason for moving the ideas around and talking about them is to MOVE people to action, to change the world in some possible and necessary way. The other thing you’ve done which we’ve i guess never quite had the courage to do is to call the publishing industry out for being the moribund institution that it is. Surely there are terrific people in publishing and many worthy books are being published, but the structures and rhythms of the industry as a whole are an obstacle to what is possible. Much more on that in the weeks and months to come.
The process of making that film shares with the Author who writes for an abstract Reader a somewhat disingenuous focus on the work of a single organising mind. But where it differs is that I knew exactly who I was writing for (to the point of not showing the actors the script beforehand, in case they refused to take part); and I know I couldn’t have come up with it by myself. That admission alone renders me unfit for Authorship in the detached sense. What it hints at, though, is the possibility of re-framing writing as a practice that takes place in the context of its specific social group. The point is then less to treat the words as immutable, or attempt to write for everyone, but to see the activity of writing as part of a process that draws overtly from and aims to be of service to its community.
Yes, but such a system still runs on authorship. Maybe not authorship of the published text, but authorship of your creativity, because that’s why we labor. If your community won’t know you’ve done it, or if the doing doesn’t yield you monetary or other social currency that works elsewhere, you don’t do the doing. Your name as label establishes your authorship of your work only if there exists a custom or a community rule for what a label affixed there signifies, and only to those who know that rule. “Best Boy: Bill Buford” isn’t for the audience but for film industry, who don’t even need to witness your credit roll by, only to know the custom according to which certainly it will roll or will have rolled.
I think the question that needs to be asked – and which if:book seems to be trying to answer – is how can we combine the best of the physical book with the immediacy and broad reach of the internet to make an impact on people’s lives leading to real change in the world.
The two points that you mention regarding physical books – currency among friends, and the ability to annotate and have a discussion with the book – need to be better incorporated into electronic media. Blogs are an excellent proto-type of this type of interactiveness. Forward a good blog post to your friends, leave a comment. At times, the comments can outweigh the original text – in volume, quality, and number of new ideas.
This is the power of a broad audience adding value for everyone, and this is the power that, if directed, will lead us in new directions for the book and for writers – even for Authors!
Instead of a book club each reading their own copy of a book, then meeting up – in real life or on-line – they could read the book together, leaving notes/comments as they go along. A whole discussion could be carried throughout the book making for a richer experience of the text.
The larger question then becomes: If the reader’s experience of the text is enhanced, so what? Does that mean action is more likely to result? One could argue both ways. But the question points to an underlying need for quality of thought on the part of both the writer and the readers. This seems to be a puzzle which isn’t solved adequately by either print books, nor internet publishing.
Yes, but such a system still runs on authorship. Maybe not authorship of the published text, but authorship of your creativity, because that’s why we labor. If your community won’t know you’ve done it, or if the doing doesn’t yield you monetary or other social currency that works elsewhere, you don’t do the doing. Your name as label establishes your authorship of your work only if there exists a custom or a community rule for what a label affixed there signifies, and only to those who know that rule. “Best Boy: Bill Buford” isn’t for the audience but for film industry, who don’t even need to witness your credit roll by, only to know the custom according to which certainly it will roll or will have rolled.
Indeed. I’m still struggling to find a way of making it clear that I’m not suggesting that authorship disappears. I think that’s what I was trying to get at when I talk about writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or as activist rhetoricians. It’s not as if people don’t know what my contribution is: what I’m arguing for is a better foregrounding of the context within which a text is created, and a more explicit avowal of what a text is supposed to do and/or who it might be useful to. The ‘branding’ of the writer obscures the activities of the print industry; the myth of ‘eternal’ texts so easily perpetuated by the medium of print obscures the political context and orientation of a book.
So I’m not saying authorship goes away, just that it’s interesting to explore ways of making it more honest about its surroundings. I see this as a practical response to the familiar debate about the (projected but by no means widely self-evident) demise of the Cartesian subject as privileged unit of cultural production. For instance, I find it paradoxical that theses about the demise of the Enlightenment subject have so often been articulated in a print medium whose industry, marketing and conditions of production enact precisely the premises critiqued.
I find it paradoxical that theses about the demise of the Enlightenment subject have so often been articulated in a print medium whose industry, marketing and conditions of production enact precisely the premises critiqued.
Indeed – and isn’t this part of where the mournfulness of a certain kind of postmodernist theorizing comes from? “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of metanarratives…” Those who have pronounced the Enlightenment dead have often remained inseperably attached to its forms – of publishing or of thinking.
As I see it, the challenge you’re setting isn’t to escape ‘authorship’, but to find ways of working that make less of a big deal about it. Does that sound right?
I invoked “status” and “notoriety” as motivators in my comment in the Vidal thread, but actually I consider “influence” more on-target and want to mention it after-the-fact, at least, because it’s a tie with the change-the-world urge that’s partly at issue here. For some reason I also feel like recommending Malcom Gladwell’s musings about plagiarism.
…and for more timely albeit derivative thoughts on plagiarism here’s Isherwood in the NY Times.
Gore Vidal’s affirmation: “I don’t think the novel is dead. I think the readers are dead,” might refer to the novel in the USA. People do still write novels, and become or maintain their fame in other parts of the world. In Spain and Latin America, novelists like García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Jorge Amado, Juan Goytisolo enjoy celebrity status with a twist; their political opinions are also taken quite seriously. And they are widely read. The literary activity of newer generations such as the Crack Group in Mexico, demonstrates that people still read. In those countries, the power of television is undeniable, but it has not taken away the pleasure of reading. Television, interestingly enough, has become the entertainment of older generations. In places where part of daily life is going to the town square or strolling in the main streets at the end of the day, socializing as ritual increases the interest in reading as a means of exchange. In the so-called developed world the Internet has taken that role.
When Sebastian Mary says “. . . . I just don’t have time to write a whole book. But it’s not just about time. In the process of learning all these new reasons for writing, I stopped aspiring to be an Author,” I still see her writing as an individual who introduced herself in a very personal way. And, the Internet has allowed her to be both, author and collective voice.
On the other hand, the notion of authorship has served us well. If there is a canon, those who are elevated to it are usually worth reading. Thanks to the printing press there is a canon. Book production has become an industry, but if it has, it is in part because there are people buying. How many of the books one buys remain unread depends upon financial capabilities, but I suspect that a good percentage of books bought today are actually read. If the book industry is interested only in books that sell by the millions, then the networked book and the democratization of the whole process it offers, is a refreshing development.
How to advance this inevitable change in the right direction is the challenge of the future of the book, without this there is no book of the future. Contrary to Bob, I believe that if:book has been saying all along that the print industry is out of step with our days. The Institute’s mere existence is testimony to this. And, by devoting your efforts to this enterprise you are fostering change.
There is nothing wrong with the notion of writers as orchestrators of a new rhetoric, the future needs that urgently. Collaborative writing, on the other hand, presents the problems all collaboration does. However, the immediacy that the Internet provides facilitates collaboration in a way no meeting of minds in a cafe or railroad apartment ever had. This facilitates a communality that approaches that of the oral tradition, now we have a system that allows for true universality. To make this work requires action, organization, clarity of purpose, and yes, a new rhetoric. New ways of collaboration entail a novel approach. The world is changing, and the writer(s) continue to be the record keeper. More and more the creative act becomes appropriation, mashup, remix; in other words, collaboration of an eminently subversive nature. A highly humanized activity collectivity mediated by the machine.
I’ve been thinking for three days now about how to respond adequately to the above rather wonderful post.
Very briefly, I think there are two overlapping issues being discussed here.
1) The material conditions of production of writing: the economics of ‘being a writer’, various publishing media, the industries that support them, and the specific roles that different media play in supporting the text;
2) The role of a given piece of text as cultural artefact, whether political pamphlets, community news, fiction, academic text etc.
That is, how writing is disseminated, and its effect once this has happened.
Literary history often foregrounds the second at the expense of the first. While, as you say, most of the books in the canon are ‘worth reading’, this is the case not in some abstract sense but specifically in the context of how they were produced, how they came to be canonical, and how the theories of authorship implicit in their format are informed by and help constitute the process of their publication.
I was taught always to ask why a piece of writing takes the form it takes. The answers are invariably partial, and the questioning problematic, but the mode of questioning and the awareness of context is essential. So, in that light, when we talk about ‘new kinds of collaboration’, why are these happening? ‘Because we have the internet’ is a short answer, but is it enough? Surely the internet is itself as much an effect of new kinds of collaboration as its cause.
Perhaps these questions are unanswerable. But I agree absolutely with your call for a ‘new clarity of purpose’ in seizing the opportunities afforded us by these media. And if we are to do so, I think it is helpful to ask not just how, but also why new kinds of collaboration are emerging as an important force in contemporary writing.
Why? That’s simple: information flows along the path of least resistance.
I am on the brink of being post-book, not in my appreciation for books but in my willingness to write them. But I wonder how permanent a state this all is. Perhaps it’s just a wrinkle in the literary blanket, a fractious moment in history that deserves fractured choruses of text.
blogging restructures consciousness?
The following story suggests that it does. Last month, Chris Bowers of the progressive political blog MyDD, underwent a small existential crisis brought on by a ham-fisted story on public television about political blogging that bungled a number of bas…