“She wears shorts skirts/ I wear t-shirts/ She’s cheer captain/ And I’m on the bleachers,” Taylor Swift sings once again (Taylor’s Version). The instrumentation is different and so is her voice but that’s not really what makes the song different.
In the short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges mocks several conceits at the same time: a positivism that believes that the present knows more than the past, a critical perspective that thinks itself superior to the work of art, and an over emphasis on authorial intention in literary analysis. In the story, a fervent admirer of the clearly limited symbolist poet Pierre Menard recounts how Menard set out to write Cervantes’ Don Quixote. That is, Menard meant to write, not copy, the Quixote word for word, relying on his own imagination and compositional power.
The anonymous author believes that although no copy survives, Menard was able to write a couple of the chapters of the Quixote and perhaps parts of other chapters. The author believes Menard’s version of the Quixote to be far superior to the original for he contends it was much easier for Cervantes to write the first version since he was an early modern man of letters and a former soldier, so Cervantes drew from materials he knew. Menard on the other hand had to invent the language, the events, and the ideas from his own imagination and could not rely on the crutch of first-hand experience.
It's a pretty funny gag. When recounting the famous philosophical debate in the novel on the relative merits of arms versus letters, the author maintains that of course Cervantes ultimately sided with arms because, after all, Cervantes was an old soldier. When Menard, a contemporary poet, takes the side of arms (don’t forget, the two texts are identical), this proves how much richer Menard’s Quixote is, full of ambiguity and irony, drawing not on experience but from the philosophical works of Bertrand Russell and Nietzsche. Menard’s work is thus “much more subtle” than the original.
Ironically, there is something similar in the two versions of “You Belong with Me.” They were written and performed by the same author and the lyrics are the same. But the latter version does not create the same illusion. When young Swift sings about being on the bleachers, one can imagine her as an awkward teen who has spent so much time performing and has so much ambition that she has very little in common with her peers. The song convinces us that even though Swift is tall, pretty, and talented she nonetheless struggled to make romantic connections and that period of loneliness is in the recent past. Who knows if any of that is true, but the song tells that story effectively. But when the older, much more famous and successful Swift sings those words the story falls apart and the whole thing comes across as a lie. I could maybe believe that young Taylor sat in the bleachers but when older Taylor says it, it makes me not believe either one of them.
Older Swift singing the words of younger Swift destroys the illusion. Here one recalls Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where he argues that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” By this Benjamin means that mechanically reproducing a work of art, like say turning a painting into a poster and making lots of copies of the poster, democratizes art, removing it from ritualistic display in a museum, where pilgrims visit and stand before it in reverential awe. Mass producing art negates the almost religious power of authenticity. Warhol was barking up the same tree when he made paintings with a bunch of Mona Lisas on them. Maybe something similar happens when Swift reproduces her own work: we no longer see the character she wants to portray and instead see the artifice of someone trying to sell us something. The cult of Taylor Swift dissolves and is replaced by the business of Taylor Swift.