The Author Disappears

“When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.”

– Søren Kierkegaard (1843)

Image – St. Isidore’s, Rome, Italy. May 22, 2023. Photo: Gavin Keeney.

I.

What would it mean for authors to “disappear” by renouncing their intellectual property rights?

When I showed up at St. Isidore’s College, in Rome, Italy, in May 2023, to meet a Franciscan scholar there and discuss my appropriation of Franciscanism toward the elective abolition of intellectual property rights, he told me that the Carthusians – or maybe it was the Cistercians – editioned all written works collectively, with no particular interest in authorial privileges. He seemed to be saying that the precedent certainly did exist, and that the precedent was not particularly “Franciscan.” My visit coincided with a visit to Assisi, to visit St. Francis, in his tomb at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. It followed my then-recent studies of El Greco, Giotto, and Cimabue – three artists claimed by art historians as “Franciscan.” We discussed various other things, but the abolition of intellectual property rights was the main “red thread” running through those “other things.”

This problem (authorial privileges) ran like a red thread through my work as artist-scholar, for roughly ten years (2013-2023). Those years also covered two PhDs and numerous post- and pre-doctoral studies. Being between two PhDs is a rather strange story … In 2023, I had more or less closed up the second PhD and only needed to submit it and wait out the review, before defending it on May 31, 2024.

It was this long-ish, sustained engagement with academia that alerted me to the generally accepted “truth” that all works had to have authors. Certainly, academic works had to have authors, since the author was the student or professor engaged in the game of collecting points to advance up the proverbial (careerist) ladder. Yet, it was the mostly fabricated history of authorial rights that fascinated me the most as I headed for the second PhD following collectivist-based works in transmedia produced across the period 2017-2021. These works had illustrated for me the elusive rite of passage for another set of works that defied normative authorship. At the conclusion of each project, it was more or less impossible to determine who had “authored” what. Additionally, in editioning the time- and performance-based works for publication, we were always forced back into the box of authorship, having to state “who” the authors or co-authors were, plus affiliations. The academic and art establishments loved “authorship,” and authors tended to love “authorship” insofar as they could leverage that symbolic capital for privileges – financial or otherwise. This had very little to do with the formal origin of authorial privileges in the Late Renaissance – to be “amped up” in the Enlightenment with the addition of moral rights – other than that it was all buried in the crypt known as “copyright law.” Indeed, copyright law was where moral rights were buried and rendered useless, given that rights generally belonged to publishers no matter what an author’s contract might stipulate. “Rights” had become, inter alia, the right to commodify knowledge (through works). These problems all came into play and re-play across the second PhD, which was entitled “Works for Works: ‘No Rights’” – a detailed exposition of this cooked history and the justification, on behalf of artists and scholars, for ignoring it all and proceeding into the wild blue yonder of “No Rights.”

Fast forward to Autumn 2023, following submission of the PhD for review, and something utterly magical arrived out of conversations regarding this conundrum. That something magical was The Edition of One. It first appeared in discussions following the thesis presentation in mid-September 2023, when the committee reviewing the thesis submission asked some very canny questions about how to avoid recuperation by Capital of the works editioned under the “No Rights” status, plus some very uncanny questions about how to prevent the entire methodology from not being undermined by the art-academic industrial complex as new radical-chic posture. These questions prompted an illustration: The work (whatever the edition is, whether video, text, or multimedia dossier) could, if you like, become an edition of one. There would only be one copy. That one copy could then be given to an archive or library and “accessioned” in such a way that it could not be copied. (This, of course, went up against Silicon Valley’s edict to digitize everything, including libraries and archives, not so much for “universal access” by readers but as “universal access” for AI, etc.) “Readers” would have to visit the library to access the work. This seemed patently ridiculous due to the fact that most authors want the most readers possible, and utterly ridiculous because most works are editioned in such a way so that someone involved can (try to) make the most money possible for those works. The Edition of One model was absurd. Yet, it also made total sense.

The edition of one model then became the Edition of One (EO1) project – a literary agency for artists and scholars (artist-scholars) wishing to explore this wild blue yonder (the next step beyond OA and CC licensing). EO1 then became a “campaign,” with proposals written for grants, fellowships and such to sponsor its development. In early 2024, the initial architecture was conceived for the project, which included setting up a multi-nodal, international or borderless collective to undertake projects. Each project would include a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), with the use of blockchain and cryptocurrency to make it all work. Satellite operations were planned for the US, the UK, Slovenia, and India.

Reality returned in the form of “no takers” for supporting the project. All applications for support either failed or went unanswered (which amounted to the same thing as “failed”). Nobody could see the merits of the operation. Most were probably scared by it. Occasional interest appeared through individuals, who then did nothing to help build the operation. Occasional interest appeared to present the work via conference, but without any funding to help facilitate the presentation.

Then, as if out of the blue, there arrived yet another puzzle in the form of “In absentia.” Why not let the work be presented in absentia, with the author(s) stepping back and more or less disappearing. The works could be converted with ease to media that could then be screened, such as at conferences, reducing the carbon footprint of these generally self-indulgent meet-ups, which were more for networking than anything else. This certainly is a form of an “edition of one.” The screening could occur through proxies, or by people interested in the work but not involved in the work. Does not a book or a film already do this? Are the authors of a book or film present when you read a book or watch a film?

Yet the reality is that the Web 3.0 architecture of the EO1 project also needs actually existing collegia. The projects need to be developed in real time and real space. They can be developed and produced through the absurd irreality of Web 3.0 and Education 4.0, but they also need real time and real space to be grounded. The use of NFTs could also be a means for funding projects, without violating the larger agenda of voiding commodification of method and product. They would be but a snapshot of the project, bought by supporters of the project, as humanitarian gesture. “Method and product” are relative to the project’s trajectory. For, if the study of works-based agency as associated with the multimedia work of 2017 to 2021 (plus the hyper-rationalist excursion into moral rights via the PhD) produced anything, it produced a warning to all “subscribers” to the “No Rights” agenda that you will be left twisting in the wind if you do no outfox or outmaneuver the art-academic apparatuses fast closing in on defining, once and for all, what scholarship is, or what constitutes art, all the while feeding the results back to the tech industries which have long since colonized academia and the art world to extract value and/or make artists and scholars slaves to the creative industries.

II.

An absurdist Proof of Concept (PoC) phase began in June 2023 for the “No Rights” agenda. The thesis was closed up in April 2023, in Venice (with research on El Greco), and the manuscript only needed minor tweaking in advance of submitting it in September 2023 for review. That PoC phase was absurdist because it was based on product-development rhetoric, and I knew that the entire process (submissions for grants, etc.) was more or less doomed to fail. Silence was proof that the project was valid. Acceptance would have signaled errors or problems with the agenda. It was all premature. Double negations applied, anyway, across the entire discursive operation of the thesis, with a “Yes, Yes” only coming after a withering round of “No, No.”

The PoC was supplemented by a dive into Web 3.0 via Medium, one of the new platforms for writers wishing to leverage their work. This was also absurdist. I chose Medium over Substack due to the model being less dependent upon an established audience. If I was looking for new fellow travelers for the “No Rights” project, I could not assume the academic networks I engaged in would provide them. But could I depend on Medium to provide them? It took about six months to conclude “No.” In January of 2024, having mostly only grifters and pornographers as supposed “followers” (which I kind of enjoyed anyway because they never read anything I wrote and I never read anything they wrote), I took out a membership on Medium (at a discounted rate) and turned on the paywall. I made a few cents if anyone ever finished reading a post. I had, by then, perhaps several dozen posts. I had also begun experimenting with editioning long-form works in “episodes.” I heavily redacted the episodes posted such that whatever I posted was not the full story. “That” (the full story) remained off-screen (withheld). This serialization campaign came from the early model of novelists in the late-nineteenth century issuing episode-by-episode releases of works that would eventually be published as novel. My withholding of the full story was intended to prevent the work from being pirated.

It was all to no avail. Medium proved useless to the “No Rights” agenda. It was mostly an old-fashioned blog masquerading as something new. The only thing new was that authors did not need their own website and Medium would provide readers (or so they claimed) and remunerate authors accordingly.

In July 2024, I switched to Substack, having decided against it in June 2023. The PoC was mostly over, and I was now pitching the EO1 project. Would I find fellow travelers on Substack? Maybe. There was a slightly more literary membership, and “free subscribers” (versus “followers”) appeared quickly. Perhaps the Substack algorithm was more sophisticated than Medium. I did not turn on the Substack paywall. But I did offer paid subscriptions. Having launched the Substack operation on July 31 (including importing all posts from Medium, which was so easy it made me suspect both were owned by the same San Francisco entity), I had my first subscriber on August 7. I made more money with that one subscriber than I had made over thirteen months on Medium. But that one subscriber was also an old friend. My goal of raising funds and recruiting fellow travelers for the EO1 project via Medium or Substack was not intended to hit up friends (old or new) and colleagues (old or new) for financial, logistical, and spiritual support. (I could do that “offline.”) It was, instead, an experiment in locating people whom I did not know, who were willing perhaps to take a risk and join a patently “blue-sky” operation for collectively produced works editioned anonymously and under the “No Rights” status. EO1 was not meant for academia or the art world per se. It was meant for individuals engaged in the lonely arts of literature and visual art. They might be academics, but they would have to leave their academic baggage behind. For EO1 to return to academia, from whence it came, or for it to be lodged in the greater art-academic industrial complex (i.e., institutionalized), would make it appear to be what it was not – e.g., yet another radical-chic operation with no real agency. Something did not add up, and it was not simply the numbers. There needed to be yet another level in the cascading agenda – “No Rights,” “EO1,” “In Absentia.” What would it be? It would have to protect the agenda from recuperation by/to the art-academic machinery, even if it did end up being funded through that machinery, through grants or fellowships, or use that machinery to change that machinery. For the author to truly disappear, something else would need to appear. Circling back, I decided to call it “Rome” (which also included my visit to Assisi) …

OUTTAKES