Algorithmic Authorship and Its Discontents

This paper examines the relationship between AI and authorship in the context of algorithmic governmentality. First, it is argued that, in order to understand recent reconfigurations of authorship, one must view the concept of the author from a post-semiotic perspective and, second, through the lens of world-systems analysis. Pivoting beyond critique and against the liberal human subject, this paper further suggests that academia ought to focus on the cultural ecotechnics of authorship, a global socio-cultural and economic dispositif, spanning across different fields, disciplines, institutions, and practices. Algorithmic capitalism, understood as the post-neoliberal phase we’re presently inhabiting, requires us to mount a defence of authorship against a literary culture of self-developing and self-devouring autonomous cyber-capitalistic processes. Defining three (3) modes of authorship (ecto-authorship, mezzo-authorship, and endo-authorship), the paper ends by suggesting how AI autofiction might afford decolonial counterpublics and diffractive reading practices.

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