Research Commons

In the wake of his trip to Japan, Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay “The Death of the Author” (1968). Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the ‘knowable text’ acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. “The Death of the Author” is sometimes considered to be a post-structuralist work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms. Indeed the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

There was actually a time, not so long ago, when academic researchers regarded the patenting of their discoveries as a contemptible affront to the mission of science. Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and John Enders did not seek to claim ownership of their pioneering polio vaccine research in the 1940s and 1950s. Cesar Milstein, who shared a Nobel Prize for helping develop monoclonal antibody technology in 1975, did not even ask if the method should be patented. Nor did Stanford University's Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer think about patenting the gene-splicing techniques they developed in 1973 until a university attorney urged them to do so. "My initial reaction," said Cohen, "was to question whether basic research of this type could or should be patented and to point out that our work had been dependent on a number of earlier discoveries by others." Cohen later agreed to file for a patent, but only if the university would be named as the exclusive beneficiary.

+ full essay

Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age - bodies which function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, which Foucault argues, was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is Habermas's examination of a kind of publicity that originated in the eighteenth century, but still has modern relevance. It begins by attempting to demarcate what Habermas calls the bourgeois public sphere. He defines the public sphere as the sphere of private people who join together to form a "public." He traces the history of the division between public and private in language and philosophy.

http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/public/

The term "hacker ethic" was coined by journalist Steven Levy and used for the first time in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). Levy's account of the hacker ethic is in large parts based on the values of the "old school" hackers at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Among these hackers were Richard M. Stallman, whom Levy at the time called the last true hacker. The similarities between the Hacker Ethic and values existing in open scientific communities is, therefore, no coincidence.

The Hackers Ethic.pdf

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) and Code 2.0 (2006). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired.