OVERCOMING AUTHORSHIP AND THE END OF LIBERAL MEANING. TOWARD A WORLD-SYSTEMIC THEORY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2025.3.01

Keywords:

post-authorship, world-systems, the overcoming of authorship, authorial ecologies, post-semiotic, post-novel

Abstract

Overcoming Authorship and the End of Liberal Meaning: Toward a World-Systemic Theory of Literary Production. We explore the transformations of authorship in the algorithmic age, investigating literary production from a world-systems perspective in the larger context of both posthumanism and computational regimes of meaning, questioning the interpretive methods grounded on semiotics and liberal theory. Lightly drawing on various theoretical frameworks, our intervention offers a swift but comprehensive and historicist framework for conceptually understanding authorship beyond the limits of both ethico-political autonomy and poststructuralist intertextuality. Our central concept—the overcoming of authorship—describes a trans-individual, oscillatory, and eco-technological configuration of authorship shaped by affective systems, platform dynamics, and epistemological shifts located well beyond the confines of postmodernism.

REZUMAT. Depășirea autorului și sfârșitul sensului liberal: spre o teorie a producției literare din perspectiva analizei sistemelor-lume. Această lucrare examinează transformările auctorialității în epoca algoritmică, situând producția literară în cadrul analizei sistemelor-lume, dar și în raport cu postumanismul și regimurile computaționale ale semnificației. Punem sub semnul întrebării practicile interpretative liberale fundamentate pe semiotică argumentând necesitatea de a conceptualiza autorul atât dincolo de autonomia etico-politică, cât și de intertextualitatea poststructuralistă. Mobilizând, în mod selectiv, o serie de tradiții teoretice, intervenția noastră propune o lectură istoricistă asupra condițiilor în schimbare ale auctorialității. Centrală acestei lecturi este ideea de depășire a autorului: definim auctorialitatea ca o nouă formațiune trans-individuală, oscilantă și eco-tehnologică, produsă prin intermediul econo­miilor afective, a dinamicilor de platformă, dar și în urma transformărilor epistemologice ce depășesc granițele postmodernismului.

Cuvinte-cheie: post-autor; sistem-lume; depășirea autorului; ecologii auctoriale; post-semiotic; post-roman.

Article history: Received 15 June 2025; Revised 10 September 2025; Accepted 12 September 2025; Available online 24 September 2025; Available print 30 September 2025

References

Abrams, M. H. 1965. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, 527–560. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alexander, Cameron. 2025. “What Is 4E Cognitive Science?” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences.

Badiou, Alain. 2007. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berensmeyer, Ingo. 2023. Author Fictions: Narrative Representations of Literary Authorship since 1800. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2016. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3: 393–419.

Bouju, Emmanuel. 2023. Epimodernism: Six Memos for Literature Today. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Boyer, Dominic, and Timothy Morton. 2021. Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. London: Open Humanities Press.

Bourriaud, Nicholas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Paris/Dijon: Presses du réel.

Braun, Rebecca. 2022. “World Author: On Exploding Canons and Writing towards More Equitable Literary Futures.” In Globalization and Literary Studies, edited by Joel Evans, 000–00. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2024. Authors and the World: Literary Authorship in Modern Germany. London: Bloomsbury.

Bridy, Annemarie. 2012. “Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author.” Stanford Technology Law Review, no. 5.

Breu, Christopher. 2017. “Of Markets and Materiality: Financialization and the Limits of the Subject.” Cultural Critique 96 (Spring): 154–77.

Burke, Seán. 1992. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ciorogar, Alex. 2024. “The Pursuit of Post-Authorship: The Ascending Ecology of the World-Author.” Transilvania no. 9: 1-13.

Copjec, Joan, ed. 1994. Supposing the Subject. London and New York: Verso.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2014. The Systems Model of Creativity. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht: Springer.

Darnton, Robert. 1982. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (Summer): 65–67. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20024803.

Deckard, Sharae, and Stephen Shapiro. 2025. World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System. Berlin: Springer.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Alessandra Mularoni. 2025. Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis. London and New York: Verso.

Eatough, Matthew. 2012. “World-Systems, Literature, and Geoculture.” In Globalization and Literary Studies, edited by Joel Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1996. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, Michel, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Glăveanu, Vlad Petre. 2014. Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual. Dordrecht: Springer.

Ginsburg, Ruth, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. 1999. “Is There a Life after Death? Theorizing Authors and Reading Jazz.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Haines, Christian P. 2024. “Up in the Cloud: Digital Infrastructure, Lyric Poetry, and Late Capitalism.” symplokē 31, nos. 1–2: 58–80.

Haines, Christian P., and Sean Grattan. 2017. “Life after the Subject.” Cultural Critique 96 (Spring): 3–5.

Hartley, Daniel. 2019. “Keeping It Real: Literary Impersonality under Neoliberalism.” In World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2024. “Detoxifying Cybernetics.” In Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstructions, edited by Yuk Hui, 95–110. Hong Kong: Hanart Press.

Helle, Sophus. 2019. “What Is an Author? Old Answers to a New Question.” Modern Language Quarterly 80, no. 2 (June): 133–57.

———. 2024. “Janus-Faced Authors: Production or Presentation?” In Authorial Fictions and Attributions in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Chance E. Bonar and Julia D. Lindenlaub. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Hui, Yuk. 2024. Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2024. “Why Cybernetics Now?” In Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction, edited by Yuk Hui, 16–30. Hong Kong: Hanart Press.

———. 2024. “Machine and Ecology.” In Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction, edited by Yuk Hui. Hong Kong: Hanart Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2004. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 403–8.

Joque, Justin. 2022. Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Kozova, Katerina. 2014. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ladyman, James, and Karoline Wiesner. 2020. What Is a Complex System? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lang, Mengchen. 2022. Rethinking the Concept of Literary Authorship through Vladimir Nabokov and W.G. Sebald. PhD diss., University of York.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Leitch, Vincent B. 2014. Literary Criticism in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury.

Lévy, Pierre. 1997. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Perseus Books.

Lopes, Ana Catarina, Paula Tavares, and Jorge Teixeira Marques. 2018. “Approaches to Authorship in Video Games: The Director, the Studio and the Player.” Jogos Digitais/Digital Games.

McGowan, Todd. 2016. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press.

McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Newen, Albert, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

North, Michael. 2001. “Authorship and Autography.” PMLA 116, no. 5: 1377–85.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2017. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.

Parisi, Luciana. 2019. “The Alien Subject of AI.” Subjectivity 12 (January).

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2023. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London: Verso.

———. 2024. “Theories of Automation from the Industrial Factory to AI Platforms: An Overview of Political Economy and History of Science and Technology.” In Matteo Pasquinelli, Cristina Alaimo, and Alessandro Gandini, “AI at Work: Automation, Distributed Cognition, and Cultural Embeddedness.” Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 15, no. 1: 108–35.

Phelan, James. 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progression, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Phelan, James, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Robyn Warhol, David Herman, and Brian Richardson. 2012. “Authors, Narrators, Narration.” In Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, edited by David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, 30–47. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1rv6256.

Potts, John. 2022. The Near-Death of the Author: Creativity in the Internet Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Punday, Daniel. 2020. “Digital Writing: Authorship and Platform.” In World Authorship, edited by Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun, and Emily Spiers, 118–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Richardson, Brian, and Susan Stepney, eds. 2018. Narrating Complexity. Dordrecht: Springer.

Rouvroy, Antoinette. 2012. “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process.” In Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja De Vries. London: Routledge.

Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. 2013. “Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation.” Réseaux 177.

Shapiro, Stephen. 2019. “Foucault, Neoliberalism, Algorithmic Governmentality, and the Loss of Liberal Culture.” In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

———. 2024. “What Is World-Systems for Cultural Studies?” In Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture, edited by Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, and Stephen Shapiro. Albany: SUNY Press.

Simon, Daniela. 2019. Copyright and Collective Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skains, R. Lyle. 2019. Digital Authorship: Publishing in the Attention Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stepney, Susan, and Richard Walsh, eds. 2019. Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Tenen, Dennis Yi. 2017. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

———. 2018. “The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Williams, Alex. 2020. Political Hegemony and Social Complexity: Mechanisms of Power after Gramsci. Dordrecht: Springer.

Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

———. 2014. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

Downloads

Published

2025-09-24

How to Cite

CIOROGAR, A., & SHAPIRO, S. (2025). OVERCOMING AUTHORSHIP AND THE END OF LIBERAL MEANING. TOWARD A WORLD-SYSTEMIC THEORY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia, 70(3), 15–39. https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2025.3.01

Issue

Section

Articles

Similar Articles

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 > >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.