By Benjamin Goh
The materiality of literature, and its implications on copyright law’s central categories of author and work, is a recurrent question in the theory and history of intellectual property. In my recent article ‘From Paratexts to Print Machinery’ published in Law and Critique, I attend to some peripheral matters of Immanuel Kant’s 1785 essay, ‘On the Wrongfulness of Reprinting’ (Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks), as indices of its medial-material conditions of possibility. This medial reading is guided by Gérard Genette’s notion of the paratext, defined as ‘what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.’ Originally appearing in the May 1785 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Kant’s publication materially encompassed not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks, and various front matter. I argue that the periodical was deeply involved in the operations of a print machinery preceding the authorial figure, the existence of which perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship.
This article derives from my book project, The Materiality of Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant (under contract with Cambridge University Press). The monograph is an extended study of the material form of Kant’s essay. Other paratexts of interest include the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface and printed authorial name ‘I. Kant’, which I note to be no less integral to literary production in the German Enlightenment. Against a certain misreading of Kant as an intellectual property proponent, I suggest that Kant is better understood to be a media theorist and practitioner, whose critical negotiation with the evolving print machinery of his time helps illuminate our present struggle with digital technology and the mounting pressures borne by copyright as a proprietary institution.
In regard to the project’s own medial conditions, my doctoral supervisor had handed me copies of Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology early in my training. These classics in German media theory prompted a shift in my attention from the materiality of language to the materiality of communications. Subsequent turns to key works in authorship studies (Roland Barthes; Michel Foucault), copyright history (Martha Woodmansee; Mark Rose), book theory and history (Gérard Genette; Roger Chartier), and Kant studies (John Christian Laursen; Chad Wellmon) further led to my present proposal of a medial perspective on authorship and copyright. Kant understood that the courage to use one’s own understanding (sapere aude!) pertained to one acting amidst books, rather than above them. Whilst books may threaten to usurp our thinking, they are also the medial basis of our critical interventions and emancipatory practices. As one of the most enduring technologies in which knowledge has been recorded and transmitted, books continue to rework culture within, and notwithstanding, the digital present.
As a law and literature scholar, I have grown to appreciate the privilege and freedom of moving across fields, unbound by disciplinary prescriptions. My hope is that other legal scholars would find the excursions and returns in this contribution to copyright history to be as transformative.
Keywords: Copyright History, Authorship, German Enlightenment
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Benjamin Goh is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore.
Email: b.goh@nus.edu.sg