237 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
237 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
# Don't come with those tales
|
|
|
|
> @published 2019/05/05, 20:00 {.published}
|
|
|
|
I love books. I love them so much that I even decided to make
|
|
a living from them---probably a very bad career decision. But
|
|
I can't idealize that love.
|
|
|
|
During school and university I was taught that I should love
|
|
books. Actually, some teachers made me clear that it was the
|
|
only way I could get my bachelor's degree. Because books are
|
|
the main freedom and knowledge device in our shitty world, right?
|
|
Not loving books is like the will to stay in a cave---hello,
|
|
Plato. Not celebrating its greatness is just one step to support
|
|
antidemocratic regimes. And while I was learning to love books,
|
|
of course I also learn to respect its “creators” and the industry
|
|
than made it happened.
|
|
|
|
I don't think it is casual that the development of what we mean
|
|
by book is independent from the developments of capitalism and
|
|
what we understand by author. Maybe correlation; maybe intersection;
|
|
but definitely not separates stories.
|
|
|
|
Let's start with a common place: the invention of printing. Yeah,
|
|
it is an arbitrary and problematic start. We could say that books
|
|
and authors goes far before that. But what we have in that particularly
|
|
place in history is the standardization and massification of
|
|
a practice. It didn't happen from day to night, but little by
|
|
little all the methodological and technical diversity became
|
|
more homogeneous. And with that, we were able to made books not
|
|
as luxury or institutional commodities, but as objects of everyday
|
|
use.
|
|
|
|
And not just books, but printed text in general. Before the invention
|
|
of printing, we could barely see text in our surroundings. What
|
|
surprise me about printing it is not the capacity of production
|
|
that we reached, but how that technology normalized the existence
|
|
of text in our daily basis.
|
|
|
|
Newspapers first and now social media relies on that normalization
|
|
to generate the idea of an “universal” public debate---I don't
|
|
know if it is actually “public” if almost all popular newspapers
|
|
and social media platforms are own by corporations and its criteria;
|
|
but let's pretend it is a minor issue. And public debate supposedly
|
|
incentivizes democracy.
|
|
|
|
Before Enlightenment the owners of printed text realized its
|
|
freedom potential. Most churches and kingdoms tried to control
|
|
it. The Protestant Church first and then the Enlightenment and
|
|
emerging capitalist enterprises hijacked the control of public
|
|
debate; specifically who owns the means of printed text production,
|
|
who decides the languages worthy to print and who sets its main
|
|
reader.
|
|
|
|
Maybe it is a bad analogy but printed text in newspapers, books
|
|
and journals were so fascinating like nowadays is digital “content”
|
|
over the Internet. But what I mean is that there were many people
|
|
who tried to have that control and power. And most of them failed
|
|
and keep failing.
|
|
|
|
So during 18th century books started to have another meaning.
|
|
They ceased to be mainly devices of God's or authority's word
|
|
to be _a_ device of freedom of speech. Thanks to the firsts emerging
|
|
capitalists we got means for secular thinking. Acts of censorship
|
|
became evident acts of political restriction instead of acts
|
|
against sinners.
|
|
|
|
The invention of printing created so big demand of printed text
|
|
that it actually generated the publishing industry. Self-publishing
|
|
to satisfy internal institutional demand opened the place to
|
|
an industry for new citizens readers. A luxury and religious
|
|
object became a commodity in the “free” market.
|
|
|
|
While printed text surpassed almost all restrictions, freedom
|
|
of speech rised hand-to-hand freedom of enterprise---the debate
|
|
between Free Software Movement and Open Source Initiative relies
|
|
in an old and more general debate: how much freedom can we grant
|
|
in order to secure freedom? But it also developed other freedom
|
|
that was fastened by religious or political authorities: the
|
|
freedom to be identify as an author.
|
|
|
|
How we understand authorship in our days depends in a process
|
|
where the notion of author became more closed to the idea of
|
|
“creator.” And it is actually a very interesting semantic transfer.
|
|
_In one way_ the invention of printing mechanized and improved
|
|
a practice that it was believed to be done with God's help. Trithemius
|
|
got so horrified that printing wasn't welcome. But with new Spirits---freedoms
|
|
of enterprise and speech---what was seen even as a demonic invention
|
|
became one of the main technologies that still defines and reproduces
|
|
the idea of humanity.
|
|
|
|
This opened the opportunity to independent authors. Printed text
|
|
wasn't anymore a matter of God's or authority's word but a secular
|
|
and more ephemeral Human's word. The massification of publishing
|
|
also opened the gates for less relevant and easy-to-read printed
|
|
texts; but for the incipient publishing industry it didn't matter:
|
|
it was a way to catch more profits and consumers.
|
|
|
|
Not only that, it reproduces the ideas that were around over
|
|
and over again. Yes, it growth the diversity of ideas but it
|
|
also repeated speeches that safeguard the state of things. How
|
|
much books have been a device of freedom and how much they have
|
|
been a device of ideological reproduction? That is a good question
|
|
that we have to answer.
|
|
|
|
So authors without religious or political authority found a way
|
|
to sneak their names in printed text. It wasn't yet a function
|
|
of property---I don't like the word “function,” but I will use
|
|
it anyways---but a function of attribution: they wanted to publicly
|
|
be know as the human who wrote those texts. No God, no authority,
|
|
no institution, but a person of flesh and bone.
|
|
|
|
But that also meant regular powerless people. Without backup
|
|
of God or King, who the fucks are you, little peasant? Publishers---a.k.a.
|
|
printers in those years---took advantage. The fascination to
|
|
saw a newspaper article about books you wrote is similar to see
|
|
a Wikipedia article about you. You don't gain directly anything,
|
|
only reputation. It relies on you to made it profitable.
|
|
|
|
During 18th century, authorship became a function of _individual_
|
|
attribution, but not a function of property. So I think that
|
|
is were the notion of “creator” came out as an ace in the hole.
|
|
In Germany we can track one of the first robust attempts to empower
|
|
this new kind of powerless independent author.
|
|
|
|
German Romanticism developed something that goes back to the
|
|
Renaissance: humans can also _create_ things. Sometimes we forget
|
|
that Christianity has been also a very messy set of beliefs.
|
|
The attempt to made a consistent, uniform and rationalized set
|
|
of beliefs goes back in the diversity of religious practices.
|
|
So you could accept that printing text lost its directly connection
|
|
to God's word while you could argue some kind of indirectly inspiration
|
|
beyond our corporeal world. And you don't have to rationalize
|
|
it: you can't prove it, you just feel it and know it.
|
|
|
|
So german writers used that as foundations for independent authorship.
|
|
No God's or authority's word, no institution, but a person inspired
|
|
by things beyond our world. The notion of “creation” has a very
|
|
strong religious and metaphysical backgrounds that we can't just
|
|
ignore them: act of creation means the capacity to bring to this
|
|
world something that it didn't belong to it. The relationship
|
|
between authorship and text turned out so imminent that even
|
|
nowadays we don't have any fucking idea why we accept as common
|
|
sense that authors have a superior and inalienable bond to its
|
|
works.
|
|
|
|
But before the expansionism of German Romanticism notion of author,
|
|
writers were seen more as producers that sold their work to the
|
|
owners of means of production. So while the invention of printing
|
|
facilitated a new kind of secular and independent author, _in
|
|
other hand_ it summoned Authorship Fog: “Whenever you cast another
|
|
Book spell, if Spirits of Printing is in the command zone or
|
|
on the battlefield, create a 1/1 white Author creature token
|
|
with flying and indestructible.” As material as a printed card
|
|
we made magic to grant authors a creative function: the ability
|
|
to “produce from nothing” and a bond that never dies or changes.
|
|
|
|
Authors as creators is a cool metaphor, who doesn't want to have
|
|
some divine powers? In the abstract discussion about the relationship
|
|
between authors, texts and freedom of speech, it is just a perfect
|
|
fit. You don't have to rely in anything material to grasp all
|
|
of them as an unique phenomena. But in the concrete facts of
|
|
printed texts and the publishers abuse to authors you go beyond
|
|
attribution. You are not just linking an object to a subject.
|
|
Instead, you are grating property relationships between subject
|
|
and an object.
|
|
|
|
And property means nothing if you can't exploit it. At the beginning
|
|
of publishing industry and during all 18th century, publishers
|
|
took advantage of this new kind of “property.” The invention
|
|
of the author as a property function was the rise of new legislation.
|
|
Germans and French jurists translated this speech to laws.
|
|
|
|
I won't talk about the history of moral rights. Instead I want
|
|
to highlight how this gave a supposedly ethical, political and
|
|
legal justification of _the individualization_ of cultural commodities.
|
|
Authorship began to be associated inalienably to individuals
|
|
and _a_ book started to mean _a_ reader. But not only that, the
|
|
possibilities of intellectual freedom were reduced to a particular
|
|
device: printed text.
|
|
|
|
More freedom translated to the need of more and more printed
|
|
material. More freedom implied the requirement of bigger and
|
|
bigger publishing industry. More freedom entailed the expansionism
|
|
of cultural capitalism. Books switched to commodities and authors
|
|
became its owners. Moral rights were never about the freedom
|
|
of readers, but who was the owner of that commodities.
|
|
|
|
Books stopped to be sources of oral and local public debate and
|
|
became private devices for an “universal” public debate: the
|
|
Enlightenment. Authorship put attribution in secondary place
|
|
so individual ownership could become its synonymous. A book for
|
|
several readers and an author as an id for an intellectual movement
|
|
or institution became irrelevant against a book as property for
|
|
a particular reader---as material---and author---as speech.
|
|
|
|
And we are sitting here reading all this shit without taking
|
|
to account that ones of the main wins of our neoliberal world
|
|
is that we have been talking about objects, individuals and production
|
|
of wealth. Who the fucks are the subjects who made all this publishing
|
|
shit possible? Where the fucks are the communities that in several
|
|
ways make possible the rise of authors? For fuck sake, why aren't
|
|
we talking about the hidden costs of the maintenance of means
|
|
of production?
|
|
|
|
We aren't books and we aren't its authors. We aren't those individuals
|
|
who everybody are gonna relate to the books we are working on
|
|
and, of course, we lack of sense of community. We aren't the
|
|
ones who enjoy all that wealth generated by books production
|
|
but for sure we are the ones who made all that possible. _We
|
|
are neglecting ourselves_.
|
|
|
|
So don't come with those tales about the greatness of books for
|
|
our culture, the need of authorship to transfer wealth or to
|
|
give attribution and how important for our lives is the publishing
|
|
production.
|
|
|
|
* Did you know that books have been mainly devices of ideological
|
|
reproduction or at least mainly devices for cultural capitalism---most
|
|
best-selling books aren't critical thinking books that free
|
|
our minds, but text books with its hidden curriculum and
|
|
self-help and erotic books that keep reproducing basic exploitable
|
|
stereotypes?
|
|
* Did you realize that authorship haven't been the best way
|
|
to transfer wealth or give attribution---even now more than
|
|
before authors have to paid in order to be published at the
|
|
same time that in the practice they lose all rights?
|
|
* Did you see how we keep to be worry about production no matter
|
|
what---it doesn't matter that it would imply bigger chains
|
|
of free labor or, as I prefer to say: chains of exploitation
|
|
and “intellectual” slavery, because in order to be an
|
|
scholar you have to embrace publishing industry and maybe
|
|
even cultural capitalism?
|
|
|
|
Please, don't come with those tales, we already reached more
|
|
fertile fields that can generate way better stories.
|