“The distinguishing characteristic of the modern author . . . is that he is a proprietor, that he is conceived as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the ‘work.’”
—Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor”
“The idea that a text belongs naturally and uniquely to the person who wrote it has been much criticized over time for romanticizing writers, masking the collaborative nature of writing, and impoverishing the cultural commons.”
—Deborah Brandt, “When People Write for Pay”
Hyperlinks. Copy-paste. Two of the most common forms of digital circulation. And yet the political and economic implications of different ways of hyperlinking, different ways of copy-pasting, remain under-explored. So, let’s explore them.
First, a premise: In capitalist societies, large-scale violence, injustice, exploitation, and environmental degradation are built-in structural features, not bugs. (There’s no such thing as “humane,” “sustainable,” or “socially conscious” capitalism.)1
Second, an observation: Ostensibly “original” sentences are too often fetishized so as to maximize the likelihood that one’s “own words” (or “personal voice”) will be shared or cited by others, thus growing one’s “followers” or boosting that coveted “impact factor” (a perennial obsession of academic professionals with nothing more serious than publication credits to worry about).
Finally, some claims:
- Assiduous citation practices sometimes have an unfortunate tendency to reinscribe academic class hierarchies, proprietary models of authorship, and the commodification of knowledge.
- We urgently need alternative ways of thinking about and practicing circulation in writing of all kinds: ways that are less entrepreneurial, more self-consciously socialist. Less about the individualistic ascent of capitalist career ladders, more about collectively dismantling them. (Not “classism” but class itself is the real problem, after all.)
- Textual appropriation of one kind or another is (as I argue below) inevitable. But there are two very different kinds of appropriation:
- exploitative and self-serving (top-down)
- emancipatory and communal (bottom-up)
This blog post critiques capitalist textual appropriation and affirms socialist textual appropriation. (While I’m not advocating shameless, ChatGPT-style data theft, concepts like “plagiarism,” “single authorship,” and “intellectual property” are monopolistic legal constructs that should be dispensed with.)
Taking my bearings from Vijay Prashad’s argument that “socialist writing is about democracy, about seeing readers as part of our process and not as consumers who must buy the commodities we produce,” I argue here that—when practiced in particular ways—intensive, strategic quotation and hyperlinking (i.e., a collage approach to composing) can form the basis for a decommodified, socialist writing practice.
Despite what trademark law would have us believe, there’s no such thing as “your own words.” Language is not a proprietary medium, nor is the self a fixed, discrete, textually representable essence.
According to this Bakhtinian view of language, “all discourse is inhabited by meaning from other contexts and uses.” All texts (and selves) are intertextual, whether the intertextual traces are made explicit (via quotation and direct citation) or not. Every individual is an “ensemble of the [historically specific]social relations,” as Marx puts it.2 Or, as Shelley Jackson writes:
We are all collage artists. You might make up a new word in your lifetime . . . but your real work will be in the way you arrange all the stuff you borrow, the buttons and coins, springs and screws of language, the frames and machinery of culture.
Citation, then, should be understood to “include not only explicit allusions, references, and quotations within a discourse, but also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, phrases in the air, and traditions,” all of which are “‘traces,’ pieces of other texts that help constitute [any single text’s]meaning,” as James Porter argues.
These traces, these “unannounced” citations, will always be tacit, implied, unspoken, unwritten—no matter how hard we might try to list them all. “Alongside each utterance . . . off-stage voices can be heard,” Roland Barthes writes.
These off-stage voices, meanwhile, have their own off-stage voices. What the samplers sample is itself a sampling. All word counts are disingenuous. There’s a story behind every story. “The originals are not original,” Emerson writes in “Quotation and Originality”:
Our benefactors are as many as the children who invented speech, word by word. Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
While many writers and artists have demonstrated the merits of collage, bricolage, pastiche, ragpicking, and rewriting as composing strategies, few are explicit about the political import of these strategies.
To be clear, then: At the heart of the polyvocal collage impulse is a commitment to challenging the accepted difference between “scarce” and “abundant” discourse, as Deborah Brandt argues:
Language challenges the normal calculus of value and scarcity and potentially subverts hegemonic control. On the one hand, language is enormously valuable. It is a human resource fundamental to the production of everything else . . . including consciousness and solidarity . . . But language is not at all scarce. It is abundant in some form in all of us and in all societies. It is free and renewable. One person can give words away to another person without losing them and may even see the value of those words rise as a result of the giving. This inherent quality of language—real, potent value without scarcity—makes it a threat to the political status quo.
Brandt seems to be suggesting, here, that the usefulness of linguistic and/or informational commodities is fundamentally different than that of non-linguistic commodities, which tend to break down or get used up in a way that ideas and arguments, arguably, do not.
Of course, many people’s jobs primarily involve preserving knowledge of one kind or another (academics, archivists, data farm workers, etc.), so the use value of language is not something that endures all by itself. Language—especially language technologies like writing—is not inherently “free and renewable.” As Brandt’s other work makes clear, complex, time-intensive forms of coordinated human labor are always required to keep language alive, to learn how to use it, to train others how to use it, to record and preserve and recirculate it, etc. (and many times, maintaining a monopoly on knowledge, information, or expertise is one of the major ways that expert consultants can get away with charging exorbitant hourly fees).
The larger point, I think, has to do with repetition, redundancy, and recirculating abundance. If these are “the essence of robust systems in engineering, a bank of possibilities stored up against environmental contingencies,” as John Durham Peters writes, then there’s no reason why robust, genuinely sustainable knowledge systems—especially de-commodified, socialized knowledge systems—should be any different.
To be sure, many kinds of “innovative” writing are still vital, especially when writing that is “unconventional,” “experimental,” or otherwise “offbeat” becomes a mode of critique or resistance in the very important fight against the types of rote, transactional human writing that reads like it was written by a Mad Lib chatbot with no desire whatsoever to pass the Turing test.
But, as Antonio Gramsci argues, creating a new, politically potent culture of solidarity “means the diffusion in a critical form of truths already discovered, their ‘socialization’ as it were, and even making them the basis of vital action, an element of coordination and intellectual and moral order.”
Hence Gramsci’s phrase, “permanent persuader.” As The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s dossier on “The New Intellectual” explains, a “permanent persuader” is someone
who is devoted to working to alleviate the grievances of the people, to elaborate popular consciousness, to push the suffocating narrowness of thought outwards and make more and more space for popular struggles to sustain themselves and win. These new intellectuals are not necessarily Marxists, but they are certainly invested in the struggles of the key classes of the people and they are certainly clear about the need to fight to build a socialist world.
The writing of such “permanent persuaders” is, we might say, always pedagogical (in the broad sense)3: to build and sustain the momentum of popular struggle, such writing often must give old ideas new legs, imparting the energy needed for those ideas to do a few more laps around a culture or community—like those speed boosts in Mario Kart. As Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss explain in Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery:
In the inventive thinking of composing, rhetorical velocity is the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short- or long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician. In this sense, the rhetorician weighs the positive and negative possibilities of different types of textual appropriation against desired objectives. (emphasis added)
The insistence on “using your own words” too often suggests that a writer isn’t working hard enough if they rely too much on the words of others. But this view trivializes the enormous amount of time, energy, know-how, and know-why required to sift through huge amounts of data; to locate useful, relevant passages; and to arrange those passages alongside other, different passages, recomposing them to produce politically potent meanings and effects.
The point, of course, is not erudition for its own sake, but the ability to put a wide range of ideas to use. Too often, academic conversations in the humanities and social sciences devolve into pointless exercises in trying to prove who’s read the most things, or who’s read the “right” things—as if having devoted lots of research time to reading a bunch of arcane stuff somehow legitimizes a person’s professional class privileges. But it doesn’t (or shouldn’t, anyway). Everyone’s time is equally valuable, and should be compensated accordingly. The accumulation of credentials and publications doesn’t make it okay to offload the grunt work (like making copies or cleaning up after conferences) onto people without (often, not always) those credentials or publications—namely, administrative and janitorial staff (who have their own job-related expertise as well, of course).
Again, class privilege needs to be abolished, not treated as yet another opportunity for professional-class people to indulge in performative displays4 of self-awareness that have no real effect on the hierarchical class structure they benefit from—however tenuous those benefits might be. (I don’t mean to minimize the increasing rates of professional precarity; my point is just that we can’t afford to mistake introspection for politics.)5
Instead, what really matters, as Prashad writes, is the ability to use ideas “to produce a confident community of struggle”:
As socialist writers, we take our lead from the people struggling to improve their worlds. If we can narrate their struggles with honesty, then we can perhaps bolster their confidence. It is this confidence, and not commodities, that we seek to produce. . . These small voices of history are the pebbles thrown into a pond that set in motion the cascading waves of history. Such stories are not taken seriously by mainstream writers, but a socialist writer must make them central. They are, after all, signs of confidence that lead from everyday life to extraordinary events.
Intensive, politically strategic quotation is one potentially effective tool for producing such confidence. It can do this in two ways:
- by countering false self-sufficiency narratives that sap this confidence by depriving individuals and groups of the full range of linguistic, textual, and intellectual resources which should be the shared inheritance of all people, and
- by decommodifying the activities of knowledge production and circulation—activities which, especially in the academy, are too often corrupted by the self-interested pursuit of reductive, bibliometric forms of “prestige” and “influence” (the scholarly equivalent of “likes”).
As Bruce Horner writes in Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique:
In the academy, intellectual labor, in the form of “scholarship,” is deemed to be one’s own work, treated as divorced from material social conditions, a [commodified] product of the autonomous scholar […] Scholarly writing is made to appear to be the product of purely individual mental labor, the result of being a careful, insightful thinker rather than being the product of appropriate time and access to specific people, books and computers, and an institutional position [not to mention, in most cases, a light teaching load subsidized by overworked contingent faculty, who tend to be even more exploited than graduate students].
The collage writing strategies I’ve employed in this essay have the potential to open the door to a more self-consciously socialist form of writing, communication, and textual appropriation—one in which the inherently communal, material work6 of meaning-making is not submerged, but surfaced—along with the fact that, in capitalist society, all technologies (digital and not) are premised on the systematically asymmetrical exchange of resources.
To effectively de-fetishize authorship, it’s necessary to foreground the material conditions and economic arrangements that enable and constrain all writers (and, for that matter, readers). The hyperlink in the previous sentence, for instance, directs readers to an interview about the human and nonhuman costs of so-called “generative AI” (about which there’s nothing particularly generative or intelligent). We stand on the shoulders of the unseen, unsung masses—not giants.
Of course, it doesn’t do any good simply to draw attention to the facts of global poverty, inequality, exploitation, and ecological destruction, which everyone more or less already knows about. As I suggested earlier, performative displays of self-awareness often cost nothing, risk nothing. They are often ineffectual, self-serving, guilt-expiating.
The goal, instead, should be to make collective, material interventions that address the root causes of such problems. And if one of the primary root causes of poverty and inequality is the ongoing capitalist development of underdevelopment, then the solution must be other than a capitalist one.
After all, high-tech means of communication are not just unequally distributed. Their very existence actually depends on inequality. Capitalist technological development is systematically enabled by higher rates of poverty, pollution, extraction, exploitation, and dependency in the peripheral sectors of the global capitalist economy.
As Alf Hornborg argues, “the essence of human technology”—at least in capitalist society—“is the use of time and space to save time and/or space for some social category. Technology or capital thus amounts to a way of [upwardly]redistributing temporal and spatial resources” (land, labor, energy, materials) while downwardly distributing risk and vulnerability.
Thus—to paraphrase Wolfgang Sachs—because we live in a world of finite material resources, the first step toward poverty alleviation will need to be wealth alleviation. A redistributive class politics should thus prioritize not a more equal distribution of technology per se, but rather a more equal distribution of space and time (land, labor, etc.), together with greater public, democratic ownership and control over the design and deployment of technical tools and knowledge (resulting in fewer wasteful luxury technologies, such as iPhones and ChatGPT, and a wider availability of technologies that satisfy basic needs, such as vaccines and public transportation).
Socialist writing tactics can be a means to these ends. They can help foreground the fact that, as Ramaa Vasudevan writes, “capitalist expansion and the mechanisms of imperialism bind workers in both the center and the periphery in common chains of exploitation.” Global capitalism, she writes, is “more vulnerable precisely because of its heightened interconnectedness. Upheavals in different parts of this global network can ricochet around the entire network, disrupting its machinery of accumulation.”
Strategic, politically motivated quotation and hyperlinks can help make visible these networks7 of interrelatedness (and their vulnerabilities), thereby gesturing to the decommodified, socialist world of abundance and being-in-common that capitalism makes both desirable and necessary.
Finally, while democracy’s defenders are right to advocate for more effective deliberation (collective decision-making) in the political sphere, they often fail to mention the structurally undemocratic, anti-deliberative aspects of the economic sphere, particularly the workplace. As William Clare Roberts observes:
Commodity producers [i.e., workers] in a commercial society . . . are subject to a kind of hazard that rules out discursive deliberation except within arbitrarily narrow parameters. If not making or selling x, in y manner, means risking one’s livelihood, then there is not much room for wondering whether making or selling x, in y manner, is worth doing . . . The problem is not that individuals cannot do exactly what they each want to do, but that they cannot get together and talk about what sorts of things should and should not be done, and what sorts of reasons should and should not count as good reasons. . .
The redistribution of rhetorical resources—not only in the political sphere, but in the economic sphere, too—is therefore a necessary (if insufficient) condition for the redistribution of everything else: time, land, money, technology.
If the first step toward organizing people is organizing ideas, then socialist writing can be the first step toward socialist organizing, in which ordinary people feel confident getting together to talk about what sorts of things are (and aren’t) worth doing, and why—and in which we talk about how the economy can be made to serve people, not the other way around.
Notes
- As Noam Chomsky explains, “corporate greed” is “just an absurd phrase. I mean, to talk about ‘corporate greed’ is like talking about ‘military weapons’ or something like that—there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that’s what it is. There is no ‘phenomenon’ of corporate greed, and we shouldn’t mislead people into thinking there is. It’s like talking about ‘robber’s greed’ or something like that.” Greed, in other words, is a structural byproduct of capitalism, which subjects everyone, rich or poor, to its overriding logic of infinite growth. ↩︎
- This link goes to Wikipedia, a great example of socialized knowledge production and a source whose accuracy is too often underestimated. ↩︎
- As critical education theorist Henry Giroux argues, “pedagogy” encompasses not only formal schooling but any cultural practice that involves “putting subject positions in place and linking the construction of agency to issues of ethics, politics, and power.” ↩︎
- Is this essay itself an example of such a performance? I hope not. But it’s possible. ↩︎
- As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, “One might think questions of justice ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions, and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of attention and conversational power.” ↩︎
- Of course, a writer’s options, choices, and motivations are never entirely determined by their social and material contexts. There’s always a co-evolving, dialectical link between an individual and their social, economic, and ecological conditions. “With each act, I change myself and/or my world, however slightly,” John Ramage writes. “I freely choose among options, though I am not free to create all the options from which I choose.” ↩︎
- This socialist “collage” approach to writing is different from a Latourian “assemblage” approach. As Alf Hornborg explains, many posthumanists equate “attempts to dissolve hierarchies” with “attempts to dissolve analytical distinctions […] In other words, political critique is confused with ontological critique. The dissolution of ‘Cartesian’ distinctions between humans and non-humans is perceived as a democratic, if not revolutionary, project, but is tantamount to disarming the very possibility of political critique.” ↩︎
