Logie – “The (Re)Birth of the Composer” from Composition and Copyright

• Logie notes that composition is the antitheological activity par excellance because it dissolves the author into an accumulation of public ideas, interpretations and claims (176).  In this sense, composition challenges God “and his hypostases – reason, science, law.”
• “Classic [humanist] criticism has obscured the networked composer in order to celebrate the Author: for that criticism, there is no other person in literature than the one who authors”
• In short, Logie posits that following Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” the composer must be (re)born.
• I like that Logie connects contemporary copyright law with the notion of the Romantic “author.”  It’s something that my composition students are doing pretty effectively so far this semester.
• Logie recognizes Woodmansee’s three key elements of the Romantic construction of authorship:
  • Author is solitary (think Inge’s piece here).  Because of this solitude, the author can be inspired by the muse.
  • Author is originary.  So there is a level of originality not granted to hack writers and journalists (most journalists).
  • Author is proprietary.  Traced to Fichte’s philosophy, this is the idea that the author takes control of their work at least long enough to be sold.

• I think there is a lot to chew on in Crowley’s claim that “One paradoxical task facing the teaching of writing or public speaking is to make students aware of the discursive agency that works through them, and of it’s possible effects on others, while at the same time helping them to grasp the art or craft that can lead to their assumption of authorship” (181-2).  This seems to contradict the sort of liberation that Marx had in mind for the worker – is our making them “aware” really just another imperialism?
• Great stuff here on print-focused copyright laws and their ability to hinder free culture or Borges’ “Library of Babel” (183).
• Logie draws attention to the capitalist imperative underlying print-based publication.
• Logie advocates Creative Commons as a way to move beyond traditional proprietary models of copyright. Woot!
• Logie sees blogging as a form of journalism – sometimes – that is social/capital/istic.  In other words, the social capital garnered from blogging is a reasonable impetus to continue composing in that digital environment.
• What does this look like for the classroom?  A composing space would “develop creative and strategic responses to the assignment without necessarily fully embracing the obligations of full ownership and full originality” or in other words, a low risk zone that embraces entropy and risk to create modified, multi genre pieces.
• For Logie “strategies of cutting, pasting, extracting, subverting, and decontextualizing extant works are (or will be) at least as important as the Author’s supposed sparkings of original genius” (188).