The Uncertain Virgin (was- Evan & Hugh)

[Dave Monroe]

On authorship, the author as a legal construct, as
perhaps a prosopopoetic mask for the copyright of the
corporate publisher, see ...

Rose, Mark.  "The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v.
   Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,"
   Representations 23 (1988): 51-8

__________.  Authors and Owners: The Invention of
   Copyright.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994.

Woodmansee, Martha.  "The Genius and the Copyright:
   Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of
   the Author," Eighteenth Century Studies 17 (1984):
   425-88.

__________.  The Author, Art and the Market:
   Rereading the History of Aesthetics.  New York:
   Columbia UP, 1996.

Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jaszi, eds.
   The Construction of Authorship: Textual
   Appropriation in Law and Literature.
   Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

... but note also the palindrome of Stencil ("The
plaindrom of Bolton is Notlob ..."), "licnets,"
"license," as in "poetic."  Hm ...

--- jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net> wrote:
 
> Stencil is a fig. A shared fig, but a fig
> nonetheless. The stories are a
> negotiated space between the publisher and any given
> reader. The author is
> just another reader. After publication an author may
> come to completely
> disagree with what is now being mechanically
> reproduced and distributed en
> mass, but now is helpless to alter, except through
> drastic enforcement of
> copyrights, or other rearguard actions. Hence,
> Stencil is a figure for the
> latent drive toward self-annhilation (cf. Laius)
> inherent in the legal trope
> known as a copyright (ownership of copy), hence the
> name: Stencil. Stencil
> also represents "boundary conditions" which both
> permit and constrain the
> reproduction of a story in any given context. But
> while Stencil may encode a
> specific ordering of subsystems that make up the
> whole text, Stencil cannot
> hope to completely control the cultural field in
> which the copies will be
> shared, i.e., the context.
 
"Stencil is a Fig"--Jody Porter

"My mother is a fish"--William Faulkner ...

> to make use of ubiquitous uncertainty, especially to
> outsmart the t......o,
> which would seek to copyright uncertainty, and tax
> all transmission of
> messages. Without mistakes there is no meaning. By
> embracing uncertainty and
> "incorporating" uncertainty into the encoding
> process, the encoder allows
> itself to be aligned with unforeseen and changing
> contingencies of the
> context into which its offspring will be released.
> But the price for opening
> "the code" to the vagaries of the context is a loss
> of control. Is such a
> sacrifice justified? It's probably the price of
> doing business.
  
Was it Sir Karl Popper who pointed out that, without
difference, under, say, a perfectly (...) totalitarian
regime, there is, strictly speaking, no politics?

Popper, Karl.  The Open Society and Its Enemies,
   Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato.  Rev ed.  Princeton,
   NJ: Prnceton UP, 1950.

This is not unrelated to the necessity of
misunderstanding to understanding, miscommunication to
communication, mistaking to taking, et al., I think. 
Here see the various works of Jacques Derrida ...  
 
> Indeed. I would find it difficult to function in a
> context where uncertainty
> were not tolerated. Speaking of which, isn't it time
> we started to
> demonstrate a little Sympathy for the Inanimate
> around these parts? Who's to
> say what challenges our own children might have to
> cope with, when we're
> long gone.
> 
> jody
> 

And I think that this "sympathy" for the presumably
diabolic "inanimate" is somhow related to that
"convergence" of "the curves of research and
development in artificial intelligence, molecular
biology and robotics" Pynchon claims "will be amazing
and unpredictable," which will catch "flat-footed"
"even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope,"
"certainly something for all good Luddites to look
forward to if, God willing, we should live so long"
(and note the "God" and "we" there).  See, again ...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

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