CONCEPT
Authorship as Entanglement
The Baradian reframing of authorship as a cut-making practice performed on an entangled process — necessary for institutional purposes, but concealing what it claims to record.
The act of attributing a book to a named author — placing a single name on a cover, assigning copyright to a specific person, crediting a particular mind with the ideas the text contains — is, in Barad's framework, an agential cut performed after the fact on a process that was, during its unfolding, entangled. The cut is real and necessary: someone must be accountable for the claims a book makes, the errors it contains, the effects it produces. But the cut is also a practice, not a discovery, and it conceals as much as it reveals. In the AI age, when language models participate as active contributors to the process of composition, the concealment becomes visible in ways the previous authorship regime could keep hidden.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept of the individual author, as McGann, Foucault, and others have documented, is historically specific — a relatively recent construction tied to copyright regimes, the commodification of texts, and the Romantic