Commodification and Subjectivization Toward a Critique of the Authorship Discourse

a bstr act What does it mean that the author increasingly turns into a commodity? The article contains a discussion of some academic responses – taken from celebrity studies and autofiction studies – to this tendency. The texts discussed share an effort to rethink authorship, but nonetheless the implicit result is a reinforcement of a traditional, romantic notion of the author. Above all there is a lack of reflection on subjectivity in the authorship discourse, where concepts like “author”, “subject”, “self” often are treated as synonymous. In that sense the academic responses are part of the commodification they ought to be studying. On another level this commodification could be understood as an expression of a more general crisis of subjectivity: there is a need of stories about autonomous subjects just because of a more extensive desubjectivation. Finally the article turns to Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Rancière in order to find a more dynamic and apt understanding of subjectivity.

rize the form of subjectivity that is intrinsic, or perhaps absent, in the commodification of authorship.If "all commodification is a forgetting", as Theodor W. Adorno remarked, what, in the case of the commodified author, is being forgotten? 2 The article's primary object of investigation is neither the literary institution nor the current literary trends; instead, the analysis focuses on the critical, academic responses to these trends.I want to draw attention to a recurring aspect in a number of critical attempts -taken from the field of celebrity studies and the discourse on autofiction -to reconsider the author figure.I argue that there is a general tendency in the contemporary author discourse to reinstate or presuppose a Romantic notion of the author.More specifically, the attempts to reconsider the role of the author tend to re-establish the autonomous author subject as a given, something that exists prior to the literary institution. 3Since it is the general tendency I want to capture, it should be clear from the beginning that I don't pretend to do full justice to the texts discussed.
If the tone of the first half of the article -sections two through four -is critical, the second half -sections five and six -is an attempt to articulate an alternative conceptual framework, in order to step away from the Romanticism implicated in the first half.Instead, the question of subjectivity will be examined, in a discussion starting in Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of the notion of subjectivity.To open up for another perspective on creativity, the article finally turns to Adorno's critical discussion of "genius" and Jacques Rancière's concept of "subjectivization".
What I'll attempt to demonstrate is that literary scholarship is not unaffected by the commodification of authorship; on the contrary, it is something we contribute to.

Example One: Celebrity Studies
It is tempting to object to the depiction above, arguing that the commodification of authorship is not a new trend.Didn't the author-subject receive a market value already in the nineteenth century? 4 Since the beginning of the twentieth century if not longer, Timothy W. Galow argues in Writing Celebrity, celebrity culture "helped transform all aspects of the literary field, from the production and marketing of a book to the way in which it was received by consumers and professional critics.It also changed how authors presented themselves to the reading public." 5However, the validity of his comment doesn't mean that the phenomenon hasn't become more acute lately.The growing field of celebrity studies also points to a historical change in this respect.
In any case, a consequence of the transformation Galow discusses is that "celebrity" must be seen as a crucial "interpretive paradigm in modernist studies".According to his understanding, there is no conflict between the celebrity function and the authorial intention.Regarding Gertrude Stein, one of his examples, he states that her "authorial identity, which, she claims, exists only in the act of creation, lets her downplay overt signs of difference -including femininity, lesbianism, and Jewishness -in her textual persona without altogether rejecting them as constitutive elements of her consciousness." 6So, in short, Stein consciously makes use of her own celebrity function in her writing.This means that we can neither isolate the textual artefact from the authorial instance, nor can we find the explanation of the artefact in the biography of its writer.The relationship must be understood in a more dialectical manner.
The English scholar Loren Glass makes a similar point in his book on literary celebrities: "The individual authorial consciousness as elaborated by the practice of modernist authorship stubbornly persists as something more than an empty structure, complicating the easy dismissal of the celebrity's subjectivity in so much recent celebrity theory." 7In other words, the creativity of the author cannot be dismissed as something illu sory.A bit surprisingly Glass turns to Foucault and Barthes in order to strengthen his argument.In short, he contends that the cult around Foucault himself disproves his idea of the author function: Foucault and Barthes "have become famous authors precisely by announcing the death of the author." 8Reality disproves theory.But isn't it just as possible to argue the opposite?The fact that even Foucault has become a celebrity illus trates exactly his point: the acclaimed author -or in Foucault's words, the author function -including "Foucault", "Barthes" and "Derrida", is always a product of structures that the empirical person who has written the text doesn't control.The potential substance of the ideas in their texts doesn't make their author names immune to commodification.
There is no need to enter more deeply into Glass's and Galow's works here since the point is sufficiently clear: while both scholars show how celebrity culture transformed the literary field, there is one aspect that isn't transformed after all, namely the authority of the author.Quite the contrary, the revelation of the play with persona and celebrity status brings us back to the consciousness belonging to the person behind the stage, so to speak.From that perspective, all other forces, agencies or interests inherent to the celebrity logic become secondary.
It would be unfair to deny the awareness of such forces in the field of celebrity studies.When Eric Eisner, in another example, writes that "[t]he concept of celebrity connects the social and experiential terrain on which individual writers and readers encounter one another with the abstract, institutional structures informing writer-reader transactions", there is clearly an awareness that the formation of literature goes beyond the consciousness of the single author.There is always a transaction taking place; "celebrity" is not just a "possible version of authorship but rather […] a historically determinate form of the relationship between readers and writers". 9And yet, as a matter of course, Eisner throughout his work treats the literary expressions, the poems, as results of decisions made by the poets (i.e. the empirical subjects behind the literary works) in question.Examples of this model of thought can be found on virtually every page of his book: "Byron in Don Juan looks back on his fame as something already past"; Keats, Shelley and Landon "all must deal with the example of Byron as they negotiate the relationship between poetic identity and celebrity"; "these poets also work out their own models of celebrity in a literary culture where the phenomenon of Byron has had a signal impact". 10The grammatical subjects are always the poets.This observation may appear mundane, but, especially in a context of celebrity culture, there are certainly reasons to turn this causality around: isn't it Byron, not Don Juan, that is looked back upon?Aren't Keats, Shelley and Landon the objects of the negotiation?Aren't the "models" mentioned by Eisner worked out in the transactions between editors and authors, customers and salesmen, publishing houses and people in need of money?In other words, isn't the subject behind the predicates more difficult to locate than the quotes indicate?

Example Two: Autofiction Studies
Another area to consider when discussing the return of the author and the commodification of authorship is the current trend of autofictive writing, i.e. a form of writing that deliberately makes use of the indefinite relation between fiction and facts, between the novel and the autobiography.As Manuel Alberca remarks in his book on autobiographic fiction, El pacto ambiguo, it is not difficult to find examples of autofiction avant la lettre, before Serge Doubrovsky invented the term in 1977. 11And yet it is clear that this is a trend that has gained momentum during the last few decades and characterises a large part of the prose written in the first decade of the twenty-first century.Autofiction is suddenly everywhere, often in the shape of very thick books, often by male writers, often dealing in a Proustian manner with their own stories of becoming authors, often highly praised by the critics.
The academic discussion of the autofiction phenomenon is to a large degree aimed at reaching clarity -clear distinctions and tenable definitions that help answer questions like these: How are we to distinguish between an autobiography and a novel?Which is a subcategory of the other, and vice versa? 12(Most of the attempts are variants of Philippe Lejeune's efforts in the seventies.)Alberca's position is typical in that respect: In light of the elusiveness of this literary phenomenon he argues for a rather narrow, technical definition of the concept: autofiction consists of stories that present themselves as fiction but where the narrator and the protagonist nevertheless have the same name as the author. 13In that sense autofiction may be understood as a new genre, a hybrid form evolving in the areas between the boundaries of the novel and the autobiography but belonging to neither category.At the same time, Alberca argues for a wider perspective, relating the genre to contemporary capitalism, economic factors, individualism, and other broader socio-political ideas: "The incessant construction and reconstruction of the I, fundamentally identified with the body, has turned into the main imperative of the capitalism of fiction.In a hyperindividualized society, the I knows neither limits nor barriers." 14From that perspective the autofictive trend is an expression of the victory of individualism over the collective and of a new configuration of subjectivity: "All this con figures a narcissist -or rather neonarcissist -society and subject: that is, a detached, godless, distanced narcissus; a subject in crisis, split, doubtful, without force." 15It's not difficult to agree with this interpretation of the historical situation.However, Alberca's reasoning is problematic in that, despite the awareness of the structural changes in both society and subjectivity, in the end everything tends to be derived from the agency of the author in a traditional sense.No matter how fragmentary and vague the concept of the individual has become, "we all identify a human being in the author" and we understand this relationship as natural, if only to avoid becoming insane, according to Alberca. 16In other words, individualism is not only understood as a cause of autofiction; it is also reinforced in Alberca's own theorizing.The author, the I, the subject, the human being -they all appear as synonymous in Alberca's writing -is still presupposed as the outset of writing (as when it is said, about a novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina, that he "took the family history as a novelistic reference", or in the more general comment about a "Spanish novelist who has had the guts to display his disgraces" 17 ).All in all, the author is still the guarantor for the new genre that has been let loose.In the end it is as if all the distinctions were made just to maintain the authority of the Romantic author.
The concept of "performative biographism", introduced by the Danish scholar Jon Helt Haarder some four years ago, is interesting from that perspective.His argument draws on Lejeune's theory of autofiction, Hal Foster's idea of the return of the real and Seán Burke's critique of the post-structural discourse of the author; the literary examples include a number of contemporary Scandinavian novels (by writers such as Claus Beck Nielsen and Carina Rydberg), where the protagonist and narrator bear the same name as the authors.What characterises these literary examples, according to Helt Haarder, is "that the biographical reference, on the one hand, functions as the return of the real in the form of credible holes through every representation, just as undeniably real as the bloody wounds the disciple Thomas stuck his fingers through.On the other hand, the biographical reference appears as a mouldable material." 18In short, Helt Haarder's point is that the wide trend of autofictive writing should be understood not in terms of authenticity but, rather, as a conscious play with both reality and the medium -a performative biographism.The strength of his argument is that it reveals the dialectic between matter and mediation, reality and fiction; the problem is that Haarder himself betrays this dialectic: at the same time as the author is said to be performed in the work, he or she is also presupposed as something standing outside of the dialectic, controlling the game this author is said to be a part of.This is a tendency that unites all the examples -both from celebrity studies and from the autofiction discourse -discussed so far: they all relate to the author as an entity which, in the end, is a given, someone whose autonomy is presupposed from the outset.
A similar logic can be detected in the authorship discourse.As historical phenomena, as forms of writing, and as products for a market, both the cult of celebrities and the trend of autofictive writing imply, in two different ways, a destabilizing of the instance -and hence authority -of the author, in the case of autofiction by disclosing the fictive character of the author, in the case of celebrity cult through the capitalist logic that produces the authors.Ironically, however, the effect, at least on the surface, is the reverse: the traditional notion of the author has been strengthened.And what's worse is that academic research to a large extent is playing along in this reversal of logic. 19his is arguably true for all the academics cited so far; for Galow, Glass and Eisner, as well as for Helt Haarder and Alberca: their attempts to complicate, deepen or reconfigure the question of authorship don't really abandon the Romantic idea of authorship that was the outset; quite on the contrary, this idea seems to be strengthened through their discussions.In the end we're facing another version of the traditional authorial intention that somehow is understood to control the game it is a product of.
There is a point in relating these observations to the well-known narrative of the death and return of the author. 20If the author was obliterated in the 1960s, as the story goes, he or she now reappears, not only in the form of biographies and autofiction but as an essential aspect of hermeneutical reading: "Out of the ashes of that 'death' and in spite of the desire of the critics to see the subject disappear, the author is reborn, not without contradictions, as an autobiographical subject and the new wave of biographism testifies to this." 21 Alberca's description reads like a summary of Seán Burke's influential narrative of the death and return of the author: after having been repressed in the sixties and seventies, the author subject has returned.Several aspects of this narrative can be questioned (I'll return to the issue later), but as an account of a general shift in interests, it is hard to object against the author's return.However, one detail deserves further scrutiny: As indicated above, Alberca argues as if "subject" and "author" were the same thing; at the very least, he isn't interested in distinguishing between them.
He is not alone in making that identification.For example, in his book The Author, Andrew Bennett describes in passing, "the 'modern' sense of the author as a personalized individual expressing intentions and a particular subjectivity". 22This is arguably a concise description of how the author typically is understood today: the individuality of the author is presumed as a given, an essence or feature that has the capacity to express itself and intend something, which is then understood as "sub-jective".The author is, in short, understood as the source of subjectivity.Along the same lines, while discussing Chaucer and the rise of authorial consciousness, Bennett writes that "Chaucer clearly expresses an emergent authorial self". 23ne could argue that the truth is the opposite: "Chaucer" is the expression of the authorial instance.However, the point is that in either case -i.e. if you tend toward Philippe Lejeune or Paul de Man (is it the psychological person who expresses himself by making use of the grammatical person, or is the "psychological person" merely an effect of the expression as such? 24) -the focus stays the same.The discussion typically follows along two lines of questioning: that of the relationship between fiction and reality and that of the relationship between reader and writer. 25The outcome may very well be an increased understanding of the dialectic between one and the other (i.e.there is no fiction without reality and vice versa), but at the same time the very discussion tends to give the cat egories a natural character and reinforce an assumption that these are the only dimensions that exist.When the editors of the German an thology Rückkehr des Autors declare, at the end of their long introduction, that the aim is to reach a synthesis between an authororiented praxis and an author-critical theory, the primary outcome is clear: the import ance of the author is strengthened, not so much through the argument as through the categories and concepts in which the whole discussion is framed. 26The author is reified, not only by the market logic but also by the academic circulation of concepts.
Adorno's remark that "all commodification is a forgetting" is not an assertion that the commodification should be overcome through recollection.The forgetting is objective; that which is forgotten is concealed in the objects that can no longer express their hidden content. 27What, in that case, is hidden or forgotten in the commodity of the author?Perhaps the fact that the word "author", as Thomas Götselius demonstrates in a study of writing and subjectivity in sixteenth-century Europe, can be derived from the word "authority" or auctoritas.Götselius quotes Thomas M. Greene, who remarks that "[t]he author (auctor, actor, autor) at a medieval university was a writer whose work had commanded respect for so many centuries as to have become an authority (autorità), to be read as an authentic source of knowledge." 28In other words, authority was something a reader could experience via authors and reproduce as a commentator, but for a person to claim to be an author himself was out of the question.The authority was always already established, ages ago, irrespective of the field of knowledge, Götselius states: "As a consequence of this there are no contemporary 'authors' in the medieval discursive system.The author is always an other, belonging to history." 29With the advent of book printing, all this changes, as Götselius scrupulously demonstrates.Around 1500 C.E. the well-known metaphor of the author as a creator started to spread.Today the notion is so well-accepted that it is no longer a metaphor at all.This is what has been forgotten.

The Subject Dissolved
When there is talk of the subject in the authorship discourse, the concept is often used rather unreflectively, almost as a synonym to identity, the self, the author, the person, the individual, the ego.While there is a high degree of technical awareness of the nuances of the institution of the author (concepts like "author function", "implied author", "model author", "abstract author" and "narrator" are indications of that, for example 30 ), subjectivity is normally used in a less reflective way.
To return to Bennett's example, when he writes that "Chaucer clearly expresses an emergent authorial self", the model of subjectivity that is implied in his argument belongs to what Stefan Jonsson, in his Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity, describes as the "expressivist paradigm".In this paradigm the subject is assumed to consist of an inner true self, corresponding to an external bourgeois identity.According to Jonsson this split subject may be traced back to the antinomies of the Kantian transcendental subject.However, the problem with the Kantian model of subjectivity (and here Jonsson relies on Georg Lukács) is that reason may only perceive that in reality which it itself projects on it -everything that doesn't correspond to reason's principles is theoretically unknowable.It is exactly these neglected aspects (the particular, individual, moral, intuitive, sensible) that later on are raised and affirmed in the expressivist paradigm, where they are assigned to the interiority of the subject.In this way, Jonsson concludes, the modern individual is constituted by means of the division of the subject.Or, from another angle, the centred subject, preserving an inner true self, is an ideological construction whose purpose is to conceal the division. 31ccording to Jonsson, this paradigm undergoes a crisis in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the model of subjectivity breaks down.To a certain extent that is probably true -Musil, Kafka, Woolf and other writers of the time anticipate a critique of the subject that is to be formulated philosophically half a century later.But on the other hand it is clear that the "expressivist paradigm" has all but dissolved -the author discourse is still one of the places where it is most visible.
It would be unfair to say that there is no awareness of this discussion in the authorship discourse.For example, Lejeune remarks on one occasion that we're all familiar with the indeterminacy that we try to neutralize with the help of the proper name, the name of the author.This calls, he adds, for an analysis "of the discourse of subjectivity and individuality as the myth of our civilization". 32(Italics added.)To some extent his comment is as an echo of a passage in The Genealogy of Morality, where Friedrich Nietzsche talks about a "changeling" (Wechselbalg) that is smuggled into thinking by way of language: the notion of the subject. 33The problem with the modern notion of the subject, according to Nietzsche, is that it facilitates a self-delusion: "The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment." 34What we regard as a free action, "an accomplishment" of the subject, is always a secondary reaction -the subject is actually subject to forces that are not his or hers.
Nietzsche makes this remark in 1887, at a time when the notion of the freely acting subject -that is, the modern subject -had just begun to reach a broader audience. 35Still, Nietzsche anticipates the postmodern critique of the subject that was to follow eighty years later.An important aspect of the argument is the inevitability of the illusion: even though the subject is merely "a seduction of language", we can't get rid of it. 36In a way Jacques Derrida stressed this same point in the discussion following his famous lecture in Baltimore in 1966: "The subject is absolutely indispensable.I don't destroy the subject; I situate it.That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of the subject.It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions." 37It is necessary to emphasise this distinction because there is a widespread misunderstanding on this point: the so-called postmodern theorists did not "do away with", "kill" or "destroy" the subject (How on earth could they have done that?); they just saw the need to rethink the premises, logic and genealogy of the predominant conceptions of subjectivity.If there was something they wanted to do away with, it was the existing, widespread assumption about the givenness of the liberal idea of the autonomous subject, as well as the routine-like identification of subject and individual.
It is tempting to transfer Nietzsche's critical point to the authorship discourse: isn't there a similar self-delusion, a belief in the accomplish-ments of the subject, still involved in the current critical engagement with the author?My hypothesis is that the strong interest in -what could even be called an obsession with -the author today is a reaction not so much to postmodern theorizing as to a historical crisis of the subject.In short, there is a desire to confirm the autonomy and power of the self today precisely because it is dissolving.We crave authors because they are the epitome of the active, self-constituting subject, and we crave this today because of the increasing powerlessness of the individual.This is a problem above all for a liberalist world view, founded on the belief in the free will of the individual.Accordingly there is a strong and ongoing need to convince us all of the unbroken vigour and autonomy of the selfconstitutive subject.And that's where literature is useful: literature can very effectively provide not only authors to be admired but also images of subjects constituting their own circumstances.P. David Marshall's description of the celebrity holds true for the author as well: "The celebrity is the independent individual par excellence; he or she represents the meaning of freedom and accessibility in a culture.[…] As a system, celebrities provide a spectacle of individuality in which will itself can produce change and transformation.The spectacular quality of the code of individuality that is enacted by public personalities works ideologically to maintain the idea of continuity and the disenfranchised rest of society." 38n the context of these ideas, what does it mean to say that we are witnessing a historical crisis of the subject?The modern subject may very well have become something belonging to the past.What distinguishes this modern subject from a pre-modern subject is, in broad terms, the claim to be what the term "subjectum" denoted in pre-modern times: something fundamental, substantial, and self-constituting."The subject is someone who attributes his conduct to himself", as Christoph Menke puts it. 39That which used to be a subaltern in God's creation is now transformed into an active, thinking, autonomous, creative I, establishing himself with his own will.The modern subject is in control, so to speak, at least until Freud enters the scene.
The exact moment of this change may of course be discussed -while Menke places the shift around 1700 and Heidegger highlights Descartes, Stephen Greenblatt finds the origin in the Renaissance.Naturally, every commentator focuses on different aspects of this new subject, depending on his or her interests. 40In any case, the crucial point is that the subject is not a given but a historical product, the sedimented result of processes and structures that existed prior to the subject.So if the subject arose in history, we must also take its possible end into consideration.
But on the other hand, as Derrida points out, it is hard to imagine the subject being obliterated -it would be like obliterating "left" in favour of "right".There are two aspects of subjectivity at stake here.On the one hand, the subject is a grammatical and logical category, the antithesis of the object, the agent of the predicate.It wouldn't really make sense to say that this subject is in crisis.On the other hand, the subject is a historical and social entity, something that comes close to the figure of the modern man, the individual, the bourgeois citizen inhabiting the secularized modern world.And as many commentators have suggested, this figure may very well be in crisis. 41his distinction suggests that we should be careful not to confuse these two concepts of subjectivity; we must keep separate the subjectivity of an a-historic grammatical phenomenon and the subjectivity as a historic entity and experience.However, as Nietzsche points out this clear distinction may very well be illusory.Language and reality cannot be separated that easily; how we talk about things, the grammar and concepts we use, inevitably affects how we think about them and, thus, what they become.
There is always subjectivity, in the sense that there will always be agency -the question is how we conceptualize it.Agency doesn't necessarily belong to an autonomous individual; there may be subjectivity without the modern, self-constituting individual.

Subjectivization -Desubjectivization
In the chapter on "Subject-Object" in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno reflects on the notion of genius.Not surprisingly, he is critical of the concept, and yet he admits that there is some truth in it: "If anything is to be salvaged of this concept it must be stripped away from its crude equation with the creative subject, who through vain exuberance bewitches the artwork into a document of its maker and thus diminishes it.The objectivity of artworks -a thorn in the side of the inhabitants of a society based on barter because they mistakenly expect that art will mollify the alienation -is translated back into the person who stands behind the work, even though he is usually only the character mask of those who want to promote the work as an article of consumption." 42This rich passage sums up the most important points of this article: our society has a commercial need for the author-figure; the problem is that this figure obliterates the objective qualities of the work (with Adorno: the "truth content"), and reduces it to a document about the person behind it.
This doesn't mean that the author is redundant from Adorno's per-spective.Subjectivity is a necessary condition for the artwork, he writes, but the creativity or spontaneity of the author is merely the medium of an objectivation that is produced by society.However, our interest in the author-genius diverts our attention from that production.Adorno goes as far as stating that the artwork is not creation and the human being, not a creator.If there is indeed genius, it is rather a moment or place where the work happens, so to speak."To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective". 43lready this brief account of Adorno's aesthetic theory makes one thing clear: it relies heavily on the categories subject and object.To Adorno the subject is clearly a historical entity -over and over again he returns to the observation that the subject is in crisis, in decay, or dis solution. 44At the same time the subject is maintained -almost postulated -as a necessary condition for critical theory per se.In that sense there is an undeniable conservative side to his argument, if not to his whole theory: What is this subject, if not the bourgeois individual made transcendent?
But this is why his critical account of genius is so interesting: here it becomes clear that "subjectivity" may be understood as something more open.Ironically, Adorno actually tries to salvage the notion of genius by liberating it from individualism.Genius doesn't belong to the empirical subject, the individual or the author; rather, it points to something in the aesthetic object that is alien to the consciousness of the author.And yet this objectivity wouldn't be there without the subjective moment.
In his essay "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" Jacques Rancière discusses Hannah Arendt's and Giorgio Agamben's analyses of human rights, and, more precisely, the paradox inherent in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man from 1789.The paradox, as pointed out by Arendt, is that those most in need of human rights are those who are deprived of them.Rancière reflects on the same paradox, but he doesn't quite understand it in the same way as Arendt.He is critical of his predecessor's rigid distinction between politics and the apolitical life of the individual.This distinction, he argues, leads both Arendt and Agamben into an "ontological trap" where the concrete problems -the situation of the refugees, concentration camps, etc. -are reduced to an ethical conflict between Good and Evil, and every possibility that political change could hold is ruled out from the outset.
It could be argued that Rancière doesn't really do justice to Arendt's analysis and that the difference between them isn't as significant as he contends. 45Nevertheless I believe that Rancière accomplishes a small but significant shift in the way he conceptualizes the holder of the rights.At the centre of Arendt's attention is the rightless human being, Agamben's more bio-politically influenced reasoning focuses on the bare life produced by the concentration camps, but in Rancière's discussion there is nothing but the subject of rights. 46In this conceptual move he abandons the idea of a lowest common denominator (a human essence, a bare life), for an open subject position.Or not even that: "The subject of rights is the subject, or more accurately the process of subjectivization, that bridges the interval between two forms of the existence of those rights." 47The focus is shifted from one of two subject positions (human or citizen) to the subjectivization that he discerns in between these two forms.
This process of subjectivization, Rancière states in another essay, is a "formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other". 48In other words, the process of subjectivization opens a difference within the subject that appeared to be self-identical; a non-identity appears in my own subjectivity.In yet another text he remarks that the Cartesian "ego sum, ego existo" still is the prototype for the existing Western forms of subjectivity. 49However, following Rancière's logic through, these Cartesian forms -the human being, the autonomous individual, the creative genius, the outstanding celebrity, the modern author -conceal processes and multiplicities that can't be identified within the current order.When we limit agency to figures like these, we implicitly reproduce a Cartesian subjectivity, and hence the very processes, openings and interspaces that constitute our subjectivity are concealed.Rancière's ideas about subjectivization can be seen as an attempt to open an uncertainty in the autonomous subject, whereupon both modern humanism at large and the liberal ideology are founded, to facilitate an uncovering of the percepts and affects preceding the conscious self.
Questioning the autonomous subject has direct implications for our conception of authorship.When we mechanically identify subjectivity and authorship -or even treat subjectivity as a product of the author's creativity -we're concealing the subjectivization involved in writing and reading, what Adorno calls the genius in the artwork.The identification of subjectivity and authorship also leads to a simplified notion of the emergence of literature: the history of literature appears to be a result of the intended achievements of certain author subjects, rather than as a sequence of forms of subjectivization produced by factors outside of the writing person.
If we focus on the logic of celebrity culture or the trend of autofictive writing, it is thus necessary to distinguish two movements: first, the authorial performance of individual freedom, which, according to Adorno, actually reveals an objective lack of freedom; and, second, the revelation of new forms of subjectivization, which to some extent makes Adorno's theory obsolete.From this perspective, the crucial question when looking at a piece of literature is not "Which author wrote this?" but, rather, "What form of subjectivity is crystallized here?How does it differ from the familiar identities at hand?"All this points toward the necessity to move attention away from the creative individual called "author".Instead, if we want to understand the creative forces behind literary works, we should focus on the conventions, relations and material premises that both make creation possible and limit it as well as on the micrological events that take place in the act of reading, transgressing our own subjectivity.Subjectivity in its fixed, crystallized forms always conceals something more dynamic and undefined.It ought to be the task of criticism to uncover this dynamic, not to cover it up.