CONCEPT
The Romantic Authorship Construct
The invented idea — late-eighteenth-century in origin — that a text originates in an individual author's unique consciousness and therefore belongs to that individual as intellectual property.
The Romantic authorship construct is the cluster of assumptions that govern Western understanding of creative production: that a text originates in a single mind, that it expresses something unique about that mind, and that the mind therefore owns the text in a legally and morally binding sense. Woodmansee's four-decade project demonstrated that this construct is not a discovery about human nature but an invention — assembled in the late eighteenth century under specific economic pressures, naturalized by Romantic aesthetic theory, and embedded in copyright law, publishing, and the university with such thoroughness that its constructedness became invisible. AI exposes the construct by producing competent text without an individual mind behind it, forcing a reckoning the construct cannot survive intact.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The construct operates as what fishbowl assumptions do in any discipline: invisible infrastructure so deeply held that challenging it feels like challenging reality. Copyright law rests on it. Publishing contracts assume it. Tenure committees enforce it. The