Here is where authorship may not be something to covet. The early discussion deals with difficult situations the children have in school, and much of their plight is blamed on the media, yet media could be used for good, to help the children.
It reminds me of Marchand. The advertisers saw themselves as lifting the masses to the world of modernity—that is, what they thought were the masses. Here, the media and others purport to help the child—or rather, their view of the child. Also, as in Marchand with the advertisers, the media especially through Walt Disney helped the public deal with the changes in the country, and were most effective (13).
Competing for authorship in the matters of children are the –media, which reach the children for miles, parents, who raise children, the Church, seeking to regulate the media and instill its moral values upon children, and the State through elected officials and teachers
The author, though, seeks to focus on the media, especially Disney, and one of the points is how Disney contributes to constructing the concept of the child. In doing this, Mr. Sammond touches on an earlier point in the course. He deals with Disney as the author and Disney as subject. Both Disney the auteur, who I remember seeing alive (yes, I am ancient) and Disney the institution have made tremendous inroads to influence how to mold children.
Another issue is that now that Disney is long dead, are his wishes still being carried out? Does authorship extend to his corporate descendants? It is safe to say that even with his success while he was alive, Disney the man could not have grasped how powerful his company had come to be, and as well, the challenges that came with such power. The leaders of the institution today have to make decisions based on that power, and thus will be acting differently from the founder, thus, they do receive credit for authorship
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
ADVERTISING EVANGELISM AND AUTHORSHIP
The average citizen may look upon advertisers as a group of vandals best to be kept under house arrest, but, according to Roland Marchand, advertisers, at least those in the 1920s, look upon themselves as guardians of the progress of modernity, the catalysts needed to bring the products from manufacturers to the eager consumer. More on that in my presentation
As we always delve into the subject of authorship, with Madison Avenue, the situation is complex. In the 1920s, the copywriters would write copy, then it must be approved within the ad agency, then it must be approved by the client, the seller of the product. Do the copywriters earn full authorship, or does the head of the agency deserve it, or is authorship shared, perhaps as in the corporate world of Kompare?
Or does the client deserve the authorship of the copy, as they have a vested interest in the result of the copy?
Does the researcher, who delves into the mind of the consumer for the agency to mine it for profits, have a say in authorship, since his reports are vital to the advertisers?
We must not forget the consumer. His inputs to the researchers give him a bid for authorship. Even more, the very lives of the agency, the client, and to some extent, the researcher depend upon the buying whims of the consumer. Could he not demand authorship? I would side with the corporate approach. Being sole author is not helpful should the sales campaign fail!
Returning to the copywriters, they did try to wrest authorship by insisting upon signing the copy and making themselves known to the public. More conservative heads stopped this. The primary reason was agencies were not free of the hand of Bourdieu, and there was that tension between the autonomous principle of hierarchization, and the heteronomous principle of hierarchization. With the first, the copywriters were proud of their work and interested in art for art’s sake, and wished to be recognized. With the second, the cooler heads understood that the primary mission of the advertising agency, even above that of evangelizing modernity, is to compel the consumer to buy something. Anything that could distract from that primary mission must, to them, be considered heresy.
As we always delve into the subject of authorship, with Madison Avenue, the situation is complex. In the 1920s, the copywriters would write copy, then it must be approved within the ad agency, then it must be approved by the client, the seller of the product. Do the copywriters earn full authorship, or does the head of the agency deserve it, or is authorship shared, perhaps as in the corporate world of Kompare?
Or does the client deserve the authorship of the copy, as they have a vested interest in the result of the copy?
Does the researcher, who delves into the mind of the consumer for the agency to mine it for profits, have a say in authorship, since his reports are vital to the advertisers?
We must not forget the consumer. His inputs to the researchers give him a bid for authorship. Even more, the very lives of the agency, the client, and to some extent, the researcher depend upon the buying whims of the consumer. Could he not demand authorship? I would side with the corporate approach. Being sole author is not helpful should the sales campaign fail!
Returning to the copywriters, they did try to wrest authorship by insisting upon signing the copy and making themselves known to the public. More conservative heads stopped this. The primary reason was agencies were not free of the hand of Bourdieu, and there was that tension between the autonomous principle of hierarchization, and the heteronomous principle of hierarchization. With the first, the copywriters were proud of their work and interested in art for art’s sake, and wished to be recognized. With the second, the cooler heads understood that the primary mission of the advertising agency, even above that of evangelizing modernity, is to compel the consumer to buy something. Anything that could distract from that primary mission must, to them, be considered heresy.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Editorship: the Power to Raise Up or to Destroy
I have found a site called http://www.zetetics.com/mac/abort.htm
The author is a Wendy McElroy and her featured essay is on the safe topic of abortion.
There is a title and there is an author. She also states her point of view early on, so the reader has a clear idea as to what she is about. She takes an abortionist stand, and it appears that she is a libertarian.
As an editor I would publish this in the Opinion page in a newspaper. The author has handled the controversial issue very well, laying out her arguments and treating the anti-abortionist objections, and the piece would most certainly attract equally refined counterarguments.
It would not do for a research journal, for then the author would have to back up her statements with references, and I would look for evidence that it has been refereed. In this case the authorship would depend on other researchers, and as I see no sign of such review, I would reject it. Of course, as editor, I also have power, and I would exercise it in killing the piece.
I would fear to accept it as editor of a Christian magazine, as I may lose the subscribers over it. Authorship—and the longevity of the magazine—is in the power of the readers. Still, I might have enough spine to publish it and ask the readers to comment on it, in which case I would have no shortage of responses.
I could also raise up her website by giving contact information, thus giving her more publicity.
I give you the entire essay below:
"When I was eighteen, I chose to have an abortion. Accordingly, the question I am addressing here is nothing less than whether I have committed murder. If the fetus is a human being with individual rights, then I am among millions of women who have committed first degree, premeditated murder, and I should be subject to whatever penalties are imposed upon that crime. The fact that I did not know I was killing a human being is irrelevant, just as the state of knowledge of a racist who kills blacks while believing them to be animals is irrelevant to the fact that he has committed murder. If you shy away from such prosecution, you are shying away from the antiabortionist position.
Before advancing the pro-choice position--to which I subscribe--it is necessary to distinguish between morality and rights, between the moral and the legal.
Peaceful activities may be moral or immoral, but they never violate rights. Taking drugs, gambling, or lying to a friend may or may not be immoral, but they are not a violation of rights. In libertarianism, the purpose of law is to protect rights, not to enforce virtue; as such, the law does not concern itself with the morality of an action but asks only if it is invasive.
Many people oppose abortion on moral grounds without considering it to be a violation of rights which should be addressed by law. I have no argument with this particular antiabortion position. My argument is with antiabortionists who attempt to translate their personal moral convictions into laws restricting what I may do with my body ... those who advocate mandatory motherhood.
Although libertarianism is often expressed as 'the noninitiation of force" or 'anything that's peaceful,' there is a more fundamental theme running through libertarian thought. The Levellers in seventeenth-century Britain called it 'self-proprietorship'; Josiah Warren, the first American anarchist, referred to 'the sovereignty of the individual"; abolitionists in opposing slavery used the concept of 'self-ownership'-that is every human being simply by being a human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. The principle underlying libertarianism--the reason it is wrong to initiate force against anyone--is that it violates that person's self- ownership. This moral jurisdiction is what I mean by the term individual rights.
The concept of rights is key to the abortion issue. Antiabortionists claim that abortion violates the rights of the fetus. I contend that antiabortion legislation violates the rights of the pregnant woman. I also contend that the fetus is not a human being. It possesses no rights. Up until the point of birth, it is not a self-owner.
To say this is not to deny that the fetus is in some sense alive, or that the zygote is a potential human being. A potential is not an actual, however; it is a hypothetical possibility. To their credit, Libertarians for Life (the libertarian antiabortionist organization) do not ascribe individual rights to the fetus on the basis of its potential, but on the assumption that at the instant of conception--at the moment there is a fertilized egg-there is a human being with individual rights.
The essential question becomes: 'What does it mean to be an individual?" For only by being an individual can the fetus possess individual rights. When defining a thing, it is necessary to discover the core characteristics-the characteristics without which it would be something else. With human beings, you subtract accidental characteristics such as race, sex, and hair color until you are left with the things which cannot be subtracted without destroying humanness itself. One such characteristic is a rational faculty.
An essential characteristic--indeed, a prerequisite--of considering something to be individual is that it be a discreet entity, a thing in and of itself. Until the point of birth, however, the fetus is not a separate entity; it is a biological aspect of the pregnant woman which possesses the capacity to become discrete. At birth, the fetus is biologically autonomous and is a self-owner with full individual rights. Although it cannot survive without assistance, this does not affect its biological independence; it is simply the dependence that any helpless individual experiences.
Let's rephrase this argument: having a DNA encoding, which is all that is probably present at the point of conception when rights are assigned, is not sufficient grounds upon which to claim individual rights.
What is missing? The missing piece is individuality ... auton- omy ... a biologically discrete person. As long as the fetus is physically within the woman's body, nourished by the food she eats, sustained by the air she breathes, dependent upon her circulatory and respiratory system, it cannot claim individual rights because it is not an individual. It is part of the woman's body and subject to her discretion.
Birth is the point at which the fetus becomes an actual human being in the legal sense of that term. There is no point, other than conception, at which such a clear, objective change occurs in the status of the fetus. All other changes are a matter of degree rather than of kind and, thus, are inadequate for legal theory which demands a definable point of enforcement.
Antiabortionists often detail the physical development of the fetus, the development of toes and brainwaves, in order to give weight to the claim that it is human. But this development, by their own standards, is irrelevant, since they have already assigned individual rights to the zygote, which has no discernible features.
Therefore these features are beside the point. Moreover, this development actually supports the pro-choice position; i.e., that the fetus is a potential rather than an actual human being.
One means by which antiabortionists attempt to load the issue of abortion against the woman and in favor of the fetus is by ascribing responsibility to the woman. But there are two senses in which you can use the word responsibility. The first is as an acknowledgment of an obligation to another person. This is the sense in which antiabortionists use the word, and it begs the question. It assumes as a given the point in contention; namely, is the fetus an individual toward whom obligations can be incurred?
In contrast, the other sense of the word responsibility does not involve another person. It refers to the acknowledgment that a certain situation results from your actions and to the acceptance in terms of money, time and moral accountability of handling the situation. When a woman uses her own money to pay for an abortion, she has assumed full responsibility for the pregnancy.
There is something odd and inconsistent about the way antiabortionists use responsibility. The pregnant woman is said to be responsible for the fetus because it resulted from her choice to have sex. How then does the antiabortionist handle the rape pregnancy?
An individual is not morally responsible for a situation in which there was no choice. The consistent position is that the fetus is still a human being and abortion is still murder, in which case one wonders why the issue of responsibility has any relevance. Whether or not the woman is responsible, she is prohibited from having an abortion. On the other hand, if an exception is made in cases of rape pregnancies, antiabortionists must explain how their libertarian theory can sanction willful, permeditated murder.
Similar problems exist in the contract model of pregnancy by which the woman is assumed to have contractual obligations to the fetus. This assumes that the fetus is not only an individual who can contract, but that it was present at the point of sex from which the obligation is said to have arisen.
In a more fundamental sense, however, the issue of contract is irrelevant. Individual rights are attributed to the fetus and the protection of rights is independent of contract. I do not have to contract with neighbors not to kill me or steal from me; my body and property are mine by right. Contract enters the picture only when I desire something to which I have no right, such as another's labor. Through contract, I acquire a negotiated claim over that person. If individual rights are granted to the fetus, then a contract is superfluous to the protection of those rights. If individual rights are not being claimed, then no contract is possible since a contract is a voluntary exchange between two human beings.
But what if, for the sake of argument, the fetus were acknowledged to possess individual rights? What consequences would this have for the pro-choice position?
The principle of self-ownership states that every human being, simply by being a human being, has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. Thus, even if the fetus possesses rights, those rights could never include living within and off of the woman's body, for this would be tantamount to asserting that one human being could own the bodily functions of another ... that two people can have rights in one body. The word used to describe a system in which one man has property rights in another is slavery.
One of the concepts upon which 'rights" rest, from which the word derives meaning, is the concept of 'a natural harmony of interest." This does not mean that all men feel benevolence toward each other and their desires never come into conflict. It means that the exercise of my self-ownership, mv rights, in no way violates the similar exercise of your rights. My right to believe in God does not conflict with your right to be an atheist. If it did conflict, it could not be an inalienable right which all men possess; rather it would be a privilege which I possessed at your expense. Two fundamental characteristics of individual rights are that all human beings have them and that they do not conflict.
Imagine a world in which the act of swallowing a pill murdered another human being. In what sense could I claim the right to swallow? On the one hand, in what sense could I claim the right to my own body when I cannot properly control what is put into it?
This is the dilemma posed by the antiabortionists who grant the fetus a right to control the woman's body which competes and conflicts with her own right. The result is not conflicting rights, but the destruction of the framework from which rights derive meaning. Unlike gray areas of libertarian theory in which disputes arise because rights are not well defined, the alleged rights are clear and in direct contradiction. The fetus's life requires a claim on the woman's bodily functions; the woman's right to her body requires the fetus's death.
In Randian terms, this is 'the fallacy of the stolen concept." In this fallacy, a word is used while the conceptual underpinnings which are necessary to the definition of the word are denied. Thus, the antiabortionists use the concept of 'rights' without regard for the fact that the fetus is not a discrete individual, the alleged rights conflict, and the rights involve two people claiming control of one body. Whatever version of rights is being attributed to the fetus, it is not the natural rights championed by libertarianism.
Antiabortionists often counter that the fetus should have a right to the woman's body because it is a matter of life and death. But rights are not based on how important it is to have them. Nor is there a costibenefit chart giving us how much pain balances how much use of force. Rights are not granted or open to adjustment; they are inalienable. And they derive from only one source--the right to control your own body. The antiabortionists are not depriving the pregnant woman of some percentage of her rights; they are denying the right of self-ownership altogether.
The important thing about the antiabortionist position is not that it is wrong, but that it has disastrous consequences. Antiabortionists dislike dealing with these consequences and consider such discussion to be 'scare tactics.' As long as the basic thrust of their position is "there ought to be a law,' however, it is reasonable to ask what this law would look like.
If the fetus is a human being, then abortion is clearly first-degree, premeditated murder and should be subject to whatever penalties that category of crime merits. Aborting women and doctors would be liable to punishment up to, and perhaps including, the death penalty. If this is 'scary,' the fault lies not with the person who points it out, but with the one who advocates it. Antiabortionists sometimes backpedal on this issue by stating that, since abortion has not been subject to such penalties historically, there is no reason to suppose they would occur in the future. But this is evasion. The debate does not concern history, but moral theory. By antiabortionist standards, abortion is premeditated murder and they should be decrying the tradition of slap-on-the-wrist penalties rather than using them to reassure us.
Moreover, if you admit the idea that the fetus is a human being for whom the woman is legally responsible, then the woman cannot take any action to imperil the life and well-being of the fetus. Almost everything she puts into her system is automatically introduced into the system of the fetus and, if the substance is harmful, it constitutes assault upon the fetus on the same level as strapping me down and forcing drugs into my body. Moreover, life-endangering acts, such as parachute jumping, would place the unconsenting fetus in unreasonable danger. If the woman has no right to kill the fetus, she can have no right to jeopardize its life and well-being. Thus, if the fetus has rights, it is not merely a matter of prohibiting abortion; it means that the woman is criminally liable for harm befalling the fetus on the same level as she would be for harming an infant.
The important question about protecting the fetus is, of course, how will this be accomplished? There is no way that this can be done short of massive interference with the pregnant woman's civil liberties. Again, antiabortionists protest that enforcement problems are not properly part of the abortion issue, that we are simply investigating the right and wrong of the matter. But antiabortionists themselves go beyond this line by advocating laws to remedy the situation. Pro-choice advocates merely insist that this solution be clearly defined, especially with regard to whether anti-abortion legislation can be enforced without violating rights. For even if the fetus merited protection, such protection could not be rendered at the expense of innocent third parties. The impact of the antiabortionist position on birth control is another unexplored implication of that argument. Since an individual with full human rights is said to exist at the moment of fertilization and since IUDs work by disrupting fertilized eggs, women who use these devices must be guilty of attempted murder, if not murder itself. Other forms of birth control which work not by preventing fertilization but by destroying the zygote would be murder weapons and doctors who supplied them would be accessories. As absurd as this sounds, it is the logical implication of considering a zygote to be a human being.
The antiabortionist position is weak, riddled with internal contradictions, and dangerously wrong. It is a sketchy argument which does not address key issues. It uses the word 'rights" in a self-contradictory manner which denies the framework from which the concept derives meaning. Although the message is 'there ought to be a law,' antiabortionists refuse to address the question of what this law would entail or how it would be enforced. I believe this refusal serves a purpose. It permits antiabortionists to argue on the side of compassion and children without having to face the truly inhumane and brutal consequences of their theory. Self-ownership begins with your skin. If you cannot clearly state, "Everything beneath the skin is me; this is the line past which no one has the right to cross without permission," then there is no foundation for individual rights or for libertarianism."
The author is a Wendy McElroy and her featured essay is on the safe topic of abortion.
There is a title and there is an author. She also states her point of view early on, so the reader has a clear idea as to what she is about. She takes an abortionist stand, and it appears that she is a libertarian.
As an editor I would publish this in the Opinion page in a newspaper. The author has handled the controversial issue very well, laying out her arguments and treating the anti-abortionist objections, and the piece would most certainly attract equally refined counterarguments.
It would not do for a research journal, for then the author would have to back up her statements with references, and I would look for evidence that it has been refereed. In this case the authorship would depend on other researchers, and as I see no sign of such review, I would reject it. Of course, as editor, I also have power, and I would exercise it in killing the piece.
I would fear to accept it as editor of a Christian magazine, as I may lose the subscribers over it. Authorship—and the longevity of the magazine—is in the power of the readers. Still, I might have enough spine to publish it and ask the readers to comment on it, in which case I would have no shortage of responses.
I could also raise up her website by giving contact information, thus giving her more publicity.
I give you the entire essay below:
"When I was eighteen, I chose to have an abortion. Accordingly, the question I am addressing here is nothing less than whether I have committed murder. If the fetus is a human being with individual rights, then I am among millions of women who have committed first degree, premeditated murder, and I should be subject to whatever penalties are imposed upon that crime. The fact that I did not know I was killing a human being is irrelevant, just as the state of knowledge of a racist who kills blacks while believing them to be animals is irrelevant to the fact that he has committed murder. If you shy away from such prosecution, you are shying away from the antiabortionist position.
Before advancing the pro-choice position--to which I subscribe--it is necessary to distinguish between morality and rights, between the moral and the legal.
Peaceful activities may be moral or immoral, but they never violate rights. Taking drugs, gambling, or lying to a friend may or may not be immoral, but they are not a violation of rights. In libertarianism, the purpose of law is to protect rights, not to enforce virtue; as such, the law does not concern itself with the morality of an action but asks only if it is invasive.
Many people oppose abortion on moral grounds without considering it to be a violation of rights which should be addressed by law. I have no argument with this particular antiabortion position. My argument is with antiabortionists who attempt to translate their personal moral convictions into laws restricting what I may do with my body ... those who advocate mandatory motherhood.
Although libertarianism is often expressed as 'the noninitiation of force" or 'anything that's peaceful,' there is a more fundamental theme running through libertarian thought. The Levellers in seventeenth-century Britain called it 'self-proprietorship'; Josiah Warren, the first American anarchist, referred to 'the sovereignty of the individual"; abolitionists in opposing slavery used the concept of 'self-ownership'-that is every human being simply by being a human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. The principle underlying libertarianism--the reason it is wrong to initiate force against anyone--is that it violates that person's self- ownership. This moral jurisdiction is what I mean by the term individual rights.
The concept of rights is key to the abortion issue. Antiabortionists claim that abortion violates the rights of the fetus. I contend that antiabortion legislation violates the rights of the pregnant woman. I also contend that the fetus is not a human being. It possesses no rights. Up until the point of birth, it is not a self-owner.
To say this is not to deny that the fetus is in some sense alive, or that the zygote is a potential human being. A potential is not an actual, however; it is a hypothetical possibility. To their credit, Libertarians for Life (the libertarian antiabortionist organization) do not ascribe individual rights to the fetus on the basis of its potential, but on the assumption that at the instant of conception--at the moment there is a fertilized egg-there is a human being with individual rights.
The essential question becomes: 'What does it mean to be an individual?" For only by being an individual can the fetus possess individual rights. When defining a thing, it is necessary to discover the core characteristics-the characteristics without which it would be something else. With human beings, you subtract accidental characteristics such as race, sex, and hair color until you are left with the things which cannot be subtracted without destroying humanness itself. One such characteristic is a rational faculty.
An essential characteristic--indeed, a prerequisite--of considering something to be individual is that it be a discreet entity, a thing in and of itself. Until the point of birth, however, the fetus is not a separate entity; it is a biological aspect of the pregnant woman which possesses the capacity to become discrete. At birth, the fetus is biologically autonomous and is a self-owner with full individual rights. Although it cannot survive without assistance, this does not affect its biological independence; it is simply the dependence that any helpless individual experiences.
Let's rephrase this argument: having a DNA encoding, which is all that is probably present at the point of conception when rights are assigned, is not sufficient grounds upon which to claim individual rights.
What is missing? The missing piece is individuality ... auton- omy ... a biologically discrete person. As long as the fetus is physically within the woman's body, nourished by the food she eats, sustained by the air she breathes, dependent upon her circulatory and respiratory system, it cannot claim individual rights because it is not an individual. It is part of the woman's body and subject to her discretion.
Birth is the point at which the fetus becomes an actual human being in the legal sense of that term. There is no point, other than conception, at which such a clear, objective change occurs in the status of the fetus. All other changes are a matter of degree rather than of kind and, thus, are inadequate for legal theory which demands a definable point of enforcement.
Antiabortionists often detail the physical development of the fetus, the development of toes and brainwaves, in order to give weight to the claim that it is human. But this development, by their own standards, is irrelevant, since they have already assigned individual rights to the zygote, which has no discernible features.
Therefore these features are beside the point. Moreover, this development actually supports the pro-choice position; i.e., that the fetus is a potential rather than an actual human being.
One means by which antiabortionists attempt to load the issue of abortion against the woman and in favor of the fetus is by ascribing responsibility to the woman. But there are two senses in which you can use the word responsibility. The first is as an acknowledgment of an obligation to another person. This is the sense in which antiabortionists use the word, and it begs the question. It assumes as a given the point in contention; namely, is the fetus an individual toward whom obligations can be incurred?
In contrast, the other sense of the word responsibility does not involve another person. It refers to the acknowledgment that a certain situation results from your actions and to the acceptance in terms of money, time and moral accountability of handling the situation. When a woman uses her own money to pay for an abortion, she has assumed full responsibility for the pregnancy.
There is something odd and inconsistent about the way antiabortionists use responsibility. The pregnant woman is said to be responsible for the fetus because it resulted from her choice to have sex. How then does the antiabortionist handle the rape pregnancy?
An individual is not morally responsible for a situation in which there was no choice. The consistent position is that the fetus is still a human being and abortion is still murder, in which case one wonders why the issue of responsibility has any relevance. Whether or not the woman is responsible, she is prohibited from having an abortion. On the other hand, if an exception is made in cases of rape pregnancies, antiabortionists must explain how their libertarian theory can sanction willful, permeditated murder.
Similar problems exist in the contract model of pregnancy by which the woman is assumed to have contractual obligations to the fetus. This assumes that the fetus is not only an individual who can contract, but that it was present at the point of sex from which the obligation is said to have arisen.
In a more fundamental sense, however, the issue of contract is irrelevant. Individual rights are attributed to the fetus and the protection of rights is independent of contract. I do not have to contract with neighbors not to kill me or steal from me; my body and property are mine by right. Contract enters the picture only when I desire something to which I have no right, such as another's labor. Through contract, I acquire a negotiated claim over that person. If individual rights are granted to the fetus, then a contract is superfluous to the protection of those rights. If individual rights are not being claimed, then no contract is possible since a contract is a voluntary exchange between two human beings.
But what if, for the sake of argument, the fetus were acknowledged to possess individual rights? What consequences would this have for the pro-choice position?
The principle of self-ownership states that every human being, simply by being a human being, has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. Thus, even if the fetus possesses rights, those rights could never include living within and off of the woman's body, for this would be tantamount to asserting that one human being could own the bodily functions of another ... that two people can have rights in one body. The word used to describe a system in which one man has property rights in another is slavery.
One of the concepts upon which 'rights" rest, from which the word derives meaning, is the concept of 'a natural harmony of interest." This does not mean that all men feel benevolence toward each other and their desires never come into conflict. It means that the exercise of my self-ownership, mv rights, in no way violates the similar exercise of your rights. My right to believe in God does not conflict with your right to be an atheist. If it did conflict, it could not be an inalienable right which all men possess; rather it would be a privilege which I possessed at your expense. Two fundamental characteristics of individual rights are that all human beings have them and that they do not conflict.
Imagine a world in which the act of swallowing a pill murdered another human being. In what sense could I claim the right to swallow? On the one hand, in what sense could I claim the right to my own body when I cannot properly control what is put into it?
This is the dilemma posed by the antiabortionists who grant the fetus a right to control the woman's body which competes and conflicts with her own right. The result is not conflicting rights, but the destruction of the framework from which rights derive meaning. Unlike gray areas of libertarian theory in which disputes arise because rights are not well defined, the alleged rights are clear and in direct contradiction. The fetus's life requires a claim on the woman's bodily functions; the woman's right to her body requires the fetus's death.
In Randian terms, this is 'the fallacy of the stolen concept." In this fallacy, a word is used while the conceptual underpinnings which are necessary to the definition of the word are denied. Thus, the antiabortionists use the concept of 'rights' without regard for the fact that the fetus is not a discrete individual, the alleged rights conflict, and the rights involve two people claiming control of one body. Whatever version of rights is being attributed to the fetus, it is not the natural rights championed by libertarianism.
Antiabortionists often counter that the fetus should have a right to the woman's body because it is a matter of life and death. But rights are not based on how important it is to have them. Nor is there a costibenefit chart giving us how much pain balances how much use of force. Rights are not granted or open to adjustment; they are inalienable. And they derive from only one source--the right to control your own body. The antiabortionists are not depriving the pregnant woman of some percentage of her rights; they are denying the right of self-ownership altogether.
The important thing about the antiabortionist position is not that it is wrong, but that it has disastrous consequences. Antiabortionists dislike dealing with these consequences and consider such discussion to be 'scare tactics.' As long as the basic thrust of their position is "there ought to be a law,' however, it is reasonable to ask what this law would look like.
If the fetus is a human being, then abortion is clearly first-degree, premeditated murder and should be subject to whatever penalties that category of crime merits. Aborting women and doctors would be liable to punishment up to, and perhaps including, the death penalty. If this is 'scary,' the fault lies not with the person who points it out, but with the one who advocates it. Antiabortionists sometimes backpedal on this issue by stating that, since abortion has not been subject to such penalties historically, there is no reason to suppose they would occur in the future. But this is evasion. The debate does not concern history, but moral theory. By antiabortionist standards, abortion is premeditated murder and they should be decrying the tradition of slap-on-the-wrist penalties rather than using them to reassure us.
Moreover, if you admit the idea that the fetus is a human being for whom the woman is legally responsible, then the woman cannot take any action to imperil the life and well-being of the fetus. Almost everything she puts into her system is automatically introduced into the system of the fetus and, if the substance is harmful, it constitutes assault upon the fetus on the same level as strapping me down and forcing drugs into my body. Moreover, life-endangering acts, such as parachute jumping, would place the unconsenting fetus in unreasonable danger. If the woman has no right to kill the fetus, she can have no right to jeopardize its life and well-being. Thus, if the fetus has rights, it is not merely a matter of prohibiting abortion; it means that the woman is criminally liable for harm befalling the fetus on the same level as she would be for harming an infant.
The important question about protecting the fetus is, of course, how will this be accomplished? There is no way that this can be done short of massive interference with the pregnant woman's civil liberties. Again, antiabortionists protest that enforcement problems are not properly part of the abortion issue, that we are simply investigating the right and wrong of the matter. But antiabortionists themselves go beyond this line by advocating laws to remedy the situation. Pro-choice advocates merely insist that this solution be clearly defined, especially with regard to whether anti-abortion legislation can be enforced without violating rights. For even if the fetus merited protection, such protection could not be rendered at the expense of innocent third parties. The impact of the antiabortionist position on birth control is another unexplored implication of that argument. Since an individual with full human rights is said to exist at the moment of fertilization and since IUDs work by disrupting fertilized eggs, women who use these devices must be guilty of attempted murder, if not murder itself. Other forms of birth control which work not by preventing fertilization but by destroying the zygote would be murder weapons and doctors who supplied them would be accessories. As absurd as this sounds, it is the logical implication of considering a zygote to be a human being.
The antiabortionist position is weak, riddled with internal contradictions, and dangerously wrong. It is a sketchy argument which does not address key issues. It uses the word 'rights" in a self-contradictory manner which denies the framework from which the concept derives meaning. Although the message is 'there ought to be a law,' antiabortionists refuse to address the question of what this law would entail or how it would be enforced. I believe this refusal serves a purpose. It permits antiabortionists to argue on the side of compassion and children without having to face the truly inhumane and brutal consequences of their theory. Self-ownership begins with your skin. If you cannot clearly state, "Everything beneath the skin is me; this is the line past which no one has the right to cross without permission," then there is no foundation for individual rights or for libertarianism."
Agency and the Author
I see more confusion in who is the author. Selznick, a film director, for example, maintained his independence to make his own pictures. Still, he needed the big companies to distribute the films.
To stay independent, he needed to create a brand name and link certain developments in his films to the brand, so that anyone who watched his films would associate them with it, or what I see as an early version of a logo. He needed income, so he began to market items related to the film Rebecca (37). On one hand, his ingenious marketing lessened his dependence on the larger movie companies, but on the other hand, he faced dependency on the manufacturers for the marketed items, such as fashions and furniture.
As he was working on Gone with the Wind, Selznick grasped that he could not do it himself, but needed help. As a result, he brought in Alfred Hitchcock, another director.
He did not have the illusions of working by himself. Indeed, Selznick “understood…that individuals did not make movies but corporations did” (45). He now had Hitchcock, as well as the actors and the stage crew. The complexity of Selznick’s successful gamble rivaled that of the world of Kompare, in that authorship had become a more corporate affair.
Schatz also shows that the authorship was also a corporate thing. He explains that the movie industry changed, in that the parent company did not make films, but relied on the independents to do so. In one case, he stated that the financial giants in the East depended on the movie magicians in the West. For discussion, authorship is not only in hands of the top chieftains of the film companies, but even unto the directors and producers, let alone the screenwriters.
The idea of auteur is somewhat chastened by all this help. My understanding is that the auteur needed little assistance to craft a film masterpiece, but I can see now that this is hardly the case.
From the little I can understand of Bourdieu, he also deals with a question I asked last week as to who determines what work is legitimate. He points to a “collective belief” (35), which proclaims what a work of art is. The collective voice is dependent on those who the artist presents his work to. If he insists on making art for art’s sake, then he presents it to fellow artists. Bourdieu is biased here, and seems to say that this is the best idea. One possible reason is that the fewer people the artist presents to, the greater his autonomy, and the less money. The artist could also present to the elite, and receive praise and money from them, or—and what appears heinous to Bourdieu—the author could present to the commoners, and sink into “popular” art, and receive money and encouragement from them. In the latter two cases, the artist is dependent upon what the audience considers good art, and his autonomy is nil. From Bourdieu’s view, the author then sold out to the baser “collective belief.”
So, authorship depends on the ingenuity of the author as seen with Selznick, but it is also dependent on the staff the author worked with, and authorship is controlled to some extent by the audience of concern.
To stay independent, he needed to create a brand name and link certain developments in his films to the brand, so that anyone who watched his films would associate them with it, or what I see as an early version of a logo. He needed income, so he began to market items related to the film Rebecca (37). On one hand, his ingenious marketing lessened his dependence on the larger movie companies, but on the other hand, he faced dependency on the manufacturers for the marketed items, such as fashions and furniture.
As he was working on Gone with the Wind, Selznick grasped that he could not do it himself, but needed help. As a result, he brought in Alfred Hitchcock, another director.
He did not have the illusions of working by himself. Indeed, Selznick “understood…that individuals did not make movies but corporations did” (45). He now had Hitchcock, as well as the actors and the stage crew. The complexity of Selznick’s successful gamble rivaled that of the world of Kompare, in that authorship had become a more corporate affair.
Schatz also shows that the authorship was also a corporate thing. He explains that the movie industry changed, in that the parent company did not make films, but relied on the independents to do so. In one case, he stated that the financial giants in the East depended on the movie magicians in the West. For discussion, authorship is not only in hands of the top chieftains of the film companies, but even unto the directors and producers, let alone the screenwriters.
The idea of auteur is somewhat chastened by all this help. My understanding is that the auteur needed little assistance to craft a film masterpiece, but I can see now that this is hardly the case.
From the little I can understand of Bourdieu, he also deals with a question I asked last week as to who determines what work is legitimate. He points to a “collective belief” (35), which proclaims what a work of art is. The collective voice is dependent on those who the artist presents his work to. If he insists on making art for art’s sake, then he presents it to fellow artists. Bourdieu is biased here, and seems to say that this is the best idea. One possible reason is that the fewer people the artist presents to, the greater his autonomy, and the less money. The artist could also present to the elite, and receive praise and money from them, or—and what appears heinous to Bourdieu—the author could present to the commoners, and sink into “popular” art, and receive money and encouragement from them. In the latter two cases, the artist is dependent upon what the audience considers good art, and his autonomy is nil. From Bourdieu’s view, the author then sold out to the baser “collective belief.”
So, authorship depends on the ingenuity of the author as seen with Selznick, but it is also dependent on the staff the author worked with, and authorship is controlled to some extent by the audience of concern.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Author Individuality Under Attack
1) On the spectrum between humanism and materialism; author and subject, where do you fall and why?
I fall in the middle, leaning toward humanism
The reasons, however sentimental, are these: In the spectrum the extreme humanist side is a worship of man, which is not warranted. At the extreme of materialism, the individual has no place in the world, equally unwarranted and repugnant. I would like to believe that there is some human agency in writing, but that we are not gods.
Becker and Benjamin seem to entrench themselves solidly in the soil of materialism saying in effect that the individual is dead, Benjamin saying that the individual cannot be autonomous but must put himself in some system (220), and Becker saying that the artist cannot create in a vacuum, but needs many other hands (768). Intheir framework of socialism, I can see teir point, but teycouod not account for the great number ofpubications tere are today by free authors not entrenched in any system (I ignore the pulishers, editors, typesetters, and so forth).
2) How do the readings for this week carve out a middle space between humanism and structuralism, Hitchcock and "Hitchcock" so to speak?
There seems to be a way in which the individual can still function as an individual in the system. The Kompare article was most instructive on this, in that different groups of people do get credit for their work. HOW much they receive depends on what they do and how much they do it, but while it looks like a beehive, the workers are not absorbed into one mass.
How do the current readings connect to Tomashevskij?
He would say that there are many ways to obtain authorship, even concocting biographies to do so, that he would not have difficulties with the multi-author contingencies for television production.
Becker would shrug and say that the individuality has no place, and would also agree that television production follows necessary lines of intense collaboration similar to art (768)
Benjamin would state that assigning credit perpetuates the illusion of individuality. At the same time, with so many people involved in the production of a show, he might seem to show grudging acceptance to the notion that television is part of the way into his idea that the producers must create more producers (233). Yet if he considers the logistical nature of theatre and radio to be “means against the producers” (234) he might also look at television with a jaundiced eye. As for Foucault, he would consider anything to do with the individual author as irrelevant, but that if anything should be saved from the irrelevant author’s works it should be only that which will further production (220)
I fall in the middle, leaning toward humanism
The reasons, however sentimental, are these: In the spectrum the extreme humanist side is a worship of man, which is not warranted. At the extreme of materialism, the individual has no place in the world, equally unwarranted and repugnant. I would like to believe that there is some human agency in writing, but that we are not gods.
Becker and Benjamin seem to entrench themselves solidly in the soil of materialism saying in effect that the individual is dead, Benjamin saying that the individual cannot be autonomous but must put himself in some system (220), and Becker saying that the artist cannot create in a vacuum, but needs many other hands (768). Intheir framework of socialism, I can see teir point, but teycouod not account for the great number ofpubications tere are today by free authors not entrenched in any system (I ignore the pulishers, editors, typesetters, and so forth).
2) How do the readings for this week carve out a middle space between humanism and structuralism, Hitchcock and "Hitchcock" so to speak?
There seems to be a way in which the individual can still function as an individual in the system. The Kompare article was most instructive on this, in that different groups of people do get credit for their work. HOW much they receive depends on what they do and how much they do it, but while it looks like a beehive, the workers are not absorbed into one mass.
How do the current readings connect to Tomashevskij?
He would say that there are many ways to obtain authorship, even concocting biographies to do so, that he would not have difficulties with the multi-author contingencies for television production.
Becker would shrug and say that the individuality has no place, and would also agree that television production follows necessary lines of intense collaboration similar to art (768)
Benjamin would state that assigning credit perpetuates the illusion of individuality. At the same time, with so many people involved in the production of a show, he might seem to show grudging acceptance to the notion that television is part of the way into his idea that the producers must create more producers (233). Yet if he considers the logistical nature of theatre and radio to be “means against the producers” (234) he might also look at television with a jaundiced eye. As for Foucault, he would consider anything to do with the individual author as irrelevant, but that if anything should be saved from the irrelevant author’s works it should be only that which will further production (220)
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