CONCEPT
Judgment, Voice, Responsibility
The three elements of authorial practice that survive the dissolution of the Romantic construct — more honestly described, more precisely identifiable, and more practically cultivable than genius.
If the Romantic construct of authorship is a historical invention, then the question that matters most is what remains when the construct is stripped away. Not everything in the Romantic framework is ideology. Some elements correspond to genuine features of creative practice that persist regardless of the technology through which creation occurs. Woodmansee's scholarship leaves intact three such elements: judgment (the capacity to evaluate, discriminate, and choose wisely among possibilities); voice (the specific quality that accumulates in a person's prose through years of living, reading, and writing); and responsibility (the acceptance of accountability for the creative decisions that bear one's name). These three constitute the surviving core of authorial practice — not less valuable than genius, but more honestly described and more practically cultivable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Judgment was always the operational core of pre-Romantic textual production, from the medieval compiler's choice of which passages to preserve to the Enlightenment editor's determination of which contributions to the Encyclopédie met