21 What is the difference between being authorless and being unauthored?

This question should be tattooed on my wrist in black ink.

While reading a friend’s memoir of her father’s imprisonment under the Romanian dictatorship, I come across a few lines that force me to pause. There is an invisible caesura in the text: a space where the past ruptures the continuity of narrative. In early December 1989, this friend, Carmen Bugan, arrived in the U.S. with her family. They were given asylum as political refugees from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. A few weeks later, they sat in front of a donated American television and watched the spectacular global event called “the Romanian revolution.”

“Romanian demonstrators gathered in front of the headquarters of the Romanian Communist Party on December 22, 1989. Photo taken by Radu Sigeti/Reuters.^[1]

In these newsreels, the dictator looks down from a balcony at the staged demonstration of support. The image shifts—a few boos from the crowd alter the site of the spectacle —a flash of surprise crosses the dictator’s face. And then, the dictator continues speaking. He warns the crowds that “fascist agitators” in Timisoara are trying to destroy Romanian socialism.

The controlled fiction of utopia is replaced by the controlled screening of an internal coup staged by Communist Party members. But for now, the usual scripts are upended.

Who wrote the revolution?

Was it authored by the Romanian people rising up against the dictator?

Was it authored by the international media that placed the event alongside similar uprisings in other Eastern bloc states?

Was it co-created by Party apparatchiks and prominent writers and artists who wanted reform?

Was it scripted? If so, who wrote the script? And which parts were left to improvisation?

Who knew a script existed?

These films and photographs commit me to a materialist history, or one that knows the story of an object can never be told completely or exhaustively unless time stops. As long as time continues, the object will be available for conversations with others. The object will continue speaking. There is no definitive, final story.

You asked about authorlessness, a subject that implicates textuality itself in relation to how we describe authorship. The author is the name to which a particular story is credited. But writers often think in dialogue with other writers whom they have read. We don’t make the world from scratch again with every text: we simply decide who to invite into it. Maybe each book is a room that gets written so certain conversations can take place?

In this view, quotation is a means of expanding the temporal possibilities of the conversation within a text. Walter Benjamin‘s unfinished book, The Arcades Project, used montage as a form in which to curate a social and visual history of 19th century Paris. By assembling a collection of fragments, images, and textual scraps, Benjamin served as both curator and author of the materials originally made by others. The pictures of Paris resemble postcards or quotations from the public images that circulated among Parisians then. Images are knowledge that attach to memories and evoke recognition.

Since the book was never published in Benjamin’s lifetime, we don’t have his final word on how the book should end. But the nature of his project committed the book to inconclusiveness. Against the performance of argument built into scholarly and historical texts, Benjamin’s arcades resisted the urge to perform conclusion, to say: this is finished and here is what you should believe after reading my book. Instead, the Arcades creates conditions for encountering the future within this montage of materials, while also acknowledging the historian’s own fiction, his role as both object and subject of historical reading.

Because the The Arcades Project is composed of quotations, there is no Archimedean perspective outside of time from which to “view” it. Even Benjamin’s own reflections read as quotations in the context of a montage.

And this was Benjamin’s point when he wrote that “the history that showed things ‘as they really were’ . . . is the strongest narcotic of the century.” The conventional historical narrative narrowed knowledge into what we call a “take,” a conclusion with an aura of certainty, rather than what Benjamin called an “illumination.” The impossibility of performing a single, accurate narration of the past opens the door to the possibilities of multiple readings.

On the television screen, the camera keeps rolling across the authorless revolution.

The dictator fleeing the crowds in a helicopter on December 22, 1989.^[2]

Authorize means “to give official permission for or approval to (an undertaking or agent).”

But who authorized the revolution?

Like many other Romanian refugees (including my parents), Carmen Bugan’s family oscillated between joy, fear, and disbelief in the months that followed.

The impossible had happened.

The unmovable had moved.

When Ceaușescu’s bullet-marked body was broadcast on international television, as if to provide concrete evidence of the dictatorship’s death, the Romanian diaspora cheered.

And then the diaspora paused. The whispers began. The ghosts of home wandered into the American corridors. No other Eastern bloc states displayed live executions of their leaders on television during the 1989 revolutions. Only the Romanian stage featured blood from the citizens in the square, blood in Timișoara, and blood from the firing squad’s guns.

By serving as the site of symbolic death, the dictator’s televised corpse made it possible for other Party apparatchiks to take power, recasting themselves as the Opposition, beating their chests with grief for the nation while platforming national unity.

The official narrative existed in documentary form. The secret police surveillance files of dictatorships exemplify this epistemic and perspectival complexity.