This week’s readings put me in the mind of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept, which argues that meaning does not originate in authorial intention and is instead found entirely through reader reception and interpretation. And where else could you possibly find more readerly intervention than the Internet? Murray’s account in particular extends Barthes’ implication for me through her discussion of the digital literary sphere, where authorship is increasingly mediated by social platforms (both reader review sites such as Goodreads and the development of algorithmic systems which tailor what you watch and read according to your so-called ‘preferences’). I confess that I count myself guilty of reading a book or watching a film largely for the satisfaction of either singing its praises or tearing it to shreds in online reviews – an exercise that might solely achieve me a like from one of my three Goodreads followers (and only then if it’s a book they’ve actually heard of before).
But it is in this way that Murray proves how the contemporary author functions less as a sovereign source of meaning than as a performative and marketable identity which is shaped by social media visibility. I like her discussion of what Jodi Dean refers to as “communicative capitalism”, because it implies that not only does the author lose their literary identity by maintaining a public, online persona but it also implicates the reader whose “participation” in offering criticism, reviews and interpretations often benefit big corporations such as Amazon. It allows readers to feel empowered by seeing themselves as the ultimate arbiter of meaning in a text, which leaves the author effectively “dead” to their own work and simultaneously benefits corporations who can extract value from the readers unpaid work without them even being aware of doing so.
The idea of authorship operating as an institutional construct rather than the natural origin of textual meaning also put me in the mind of the Hayles article, which similarly destabilises the author by shifting attention away from the writer and towards the way we read texts, arguing that textual meaning emerges through practices of close reading, hyper reading and machine reading. At the same time, these readings expose a tension between humanistic values of interpretation and subjectivity, as I understand them through Drucker, and the logic of digital platforms that increasingly govern literary circulation (where ‘worth’ is increasingly determined by metrics and popularity rather than critical interpretation). And this online popularity contest has, ironically, the ability to ‘go-offline’. If you walk into a real-life bookstore, you will see rows and rows dedicated to ‘Book-Tok’ favourites. And as a bookshop enthusiast myself, I can attest that as much as I enjoyed The Song of Achilles five years ago when I first saw it on a ‘Book-Tok’ shelf, it would be nice to switch things up a little. The real risk here is reducing both authorship and reading to quantifiable forms of engagement, as it raises the question of what becomes of meaning, value and critique when interpretation is subsumed by an economy driven by platforms.
