The Authorless 'We': On the Soliloquy, the Signal, and the Evacuation of the One Who Answers
Year: 2026
Type: book
Abstract: The Authorless We examines a structural transformation in which acts retain their outward forms while the person who makes them answerable is progressively removed. The essay describes this process as a genealogy of substitution rather than a historical chronology. Beginning with Segismundo in Calderón’s La vida es sueño and the contemporary Like as two poles, the argument traces six substitutions: wisdom becomes information, reflection becomes reaction, the utterance becomes the meme, the meme produces the appearance of a “we”, the person becomes the signal, and shared memory becomes a substituted record. The essay’s invariant is the occupied crossing point: a self that receives what arrives, answers for what issues from it, and bears the cost of its act. “Authorless” therefore does not mean anonymous or without an originator. It describes a condition in which no occupant remains answerable where the operative act performs its work. A central distinction separates transmission from relation. Transmission establishes that something passed between people; relation requires something to stand between them as a real and mutually bearing bond. Fuenteovejuna provides the essay’s test of this distinction: a genuine “we” must survive the removal of the crowd in individuals capable of bearing a common answer at cost. Artificial intelligence appears as a corollary of this structure rather than the essay’s primary subject. If authorship requires an occupied crossing point whose occupant can answer for an act at cost, AI can produce the form and yield of a verdict without satisfying authorship in that defined sense. The essay concludes that the answer to this descent is not improved representation but presence: the return of the occupant to the position from which a genuine “we” can be spoken.
Author: Gaitan, Oscar
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7208830333