An emergent pattern of accountability and credit enacted within specific assemblages of humans, tools, discourses, and materials, where agency, meaning, and intention are materially distributed and momentarily cut together-apart as a text.
In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, authorship is a relational effect of practices that materialize texts, attributions, and responsibilities, rather than a property an individual owns. Following Foucault, the author-function organizes discourse, legalities, and regimes of truth by operationalizing attribution and responsibility across institutions and genres; following Barthes, meaning is woven intertextually, decentering origin and emphasizing the text as a tissue of citations. With Barad, authorship becomes performative: apparatuses and agential cuts enact temporary separations between writer, tool, text, and audience, producing boundaries of originality, voice, and liability. Authorship thus names how particular configurations render agency perceptible and accountable at a moment in an ongoing entanglement.
New materialist and feminist technoscience perspectives amplify this more-than-human picture. Haraway’s cyborg figuration foregrounds hybrid writing bodies entangled with machines and infrastructures; Deleuze & Guattari approach writing as an assemblage whose territorializations and deterritorializations redistribute forces, styles, and capacities; Bennett and Massumi draw attention to lively matter and affective currents composing textual events; Braidotti frames subjectivity as becoming, distributed across human and technological strata. On this view, authorship is carried out to stabilize accountability and value, to channel affects and capacities, and to provisionally fix a locus of response-ability in knowledge-making worlds that remain fundamentally entangled.
Treating authorship as an emergent, material-discursive practice shifts inquiry from attributing intention to mapping how apparatuses configure agency. Research designs attend to how prompts, platforms, archives, policies, and analytic lenses enact agential cuts that make “author,” “data,” and “text” legible. Analysis traces performativity rather than representation, asking how meaning, intention, and responsibility are distributed across intra-actions and how the phenomenon of “a text” congeals as a textual materialization within a specific apparatus. Ethics centers situated accountability for these cuts, since decisions about authorship reconfigure what and who can be made to matter.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, authorship is enacted across interfaces, prompts, training data sediments, revision trails, and assessment rubrics, not simply located in a singular human origin. This lens clarifies the lived stakes of intention and agency when composing with models: which cuts in a classroom apparatus—policy language, assignment design, disclosure norms, platform affordances—stabilize originality, credit, and responsibility, and which reopen them. It also reframes “the text” as a situated materialization emerging from human–AI intra-actions, feedback, and material supports, enabling inquiry into how creativity, authorship claims, and accountability are being reconfigured in practice.