WHAT IS AN AUTHOR ? Michael Foucault

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR ?

[Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?]

Michael Foucault

[Critical summary of the essay for Students of Indian Universities]

Dr. S. Sreekumar

Overview

This is a lecture on literary theory given at the Collège de France on 22 February 1969 by Michel Foucault. It considers the relationship between author, text, and reader; concluding that: “The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”  Foucault's lecture responds to Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author".

Works

Mental Illness and Psychology (1954), Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963),  Death and the Labyrinth (1963),  The Order of Things (1966),  The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975),  The History of Sexuality (1976–1984).

Michel Foucault uproots all our conventional notions about the relationship between a book and its author.  However, the element of surprise is not there in Foucault’s position as Roland Barthes (1916-1980) has traversed the same ground before him. “What is an Author?” echoes many of the thoughts of Barthes on the subject of authorship expressed a decade earlier in Writing Degree Zero (1953).Foucault’s concept of author-function is characteristic of some discourses like fiction but it is not the trait of discourses like letter writing. Author function is connected to the system of property ownership that became common in eighteenth century.

Foucault’s attack on the concept of author is much stronger than that of Barthes. Barthes did not transgress the boundaries of literary theory. He merely wanted to activate the reader and place him at the center of discourse.

Let us conclude this overview with an observation that to women and people of color the question, “What does it matter who is speaking?” is relevant. For them ‘who writes’ makes a difference. As one commentator puts it, “it is important to know “who is writing” in order to interpret a statement in the context of gender and race”.

 

The notion of author came into existence when ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences became individualized.  Even today many concepts like literary genres, schools of philosophy etc. are weak when compared to the solid and fundamental concept of the author and the work.

Foucault says that he wants to deal with the relationship between text and author and the way in which the text points to the author who is outside it and antecedes¹ it.

What does it matter who is speaking? ²

This is the indifferent attitude of Samuel Beckett towards writing. Foucault says that in this question, there is also an ethical angle. This is a kind of inherent rule in writing. Writing is considered as something not completed. It is a practice. Foucault illustrates the inherent rule by tracing two of its major themes.

1. Today’s writing is free from the task of expression. [Writing is not for communication. writing is self-referential, writing about writing, or about language itself, rather than writing for/about social communication.]. Writing refers only to itself. Writing is interplay of signs. The signifier is more important than the signified.³ [How is more important than what]. Writing is like a game that violates its own rules and goes beyond its limits. Writing is not to exalt the act of writing. It is not to pin a subject within language. It is for “creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears”.

2. Writing’s relationship with death

The Greek Epics were written to immortalize the hero. The narrative redeemed the accepted death. Similarly, the theme and motivation of The Thousand and One Nights is also eluding death. Stories were told till morning to postpone death. Scheherazade’s narrative is an effort to keep death outside the circle of life.

Writing linked to sacrifice

Writing is linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life. “It is a voluntary effacement [To rub or wipe out; erase] which need not be represented in books, since it is brought out in the writer’s very existence. [The author enters into his own death, writing begins”—Roland Barthes—‘Death of the Author. refer to earlier post].

·   The work provided immortality once. ·        It now has the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer [Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka].

·        The writer’s individual characteristics are effaced.

·        The writer uses all contrivances to cancel out the signs of his particular individuality.

·        As a result “the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence”.

·        He “must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing”.

Philosophy and criticism took note of the death of the author some time ago. But the consequences of the death/disappearance have not been clearly understood. Some notions against the privileged position of the author actually help to preserve the privilege and suppress the real meaning of the death/disappearance. Foucault examines just two of the notions.

The Idea of the Work

What is a work? Is it not something an author has written? When we try to find answers to these questions difficulties crop up immediately.

·        If an individual is not an author, could we say that what he wrote (the papers left behind by him etc.) constitutes a work? For example, when Sade⁴ was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Were they simply rolls of papers in which he scribbled down his fantasies?

·        When an individual is accepted as an author could we call every thing he/she had written works? When we undertake to publish the works of Nietzsche, for example, should we include everything he has written, (rough drafts, notes on the margins, notation of a meeting, an address, or a laundry list) ⁵ as works.

·        A theory of work does not exist; those who undertake the editing of works suffer from the absence of such a theory.

Notion of Writing

The notion of writing

·        Prevents us from evaluating the full impact of the author’s disappearance.

·        Conceals and blurs the moment of effacement (erasure) of the author.

·        Subtly preserves the author’s presence.

If we strictly apply the notion of writing (as author’s death) we can avoid references to the author and can also ‘situate his absence’. However, Foucault says that the “the notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication ...of a meaning which someone wanted to express”. On the other hand we try with great effort to imagine the general condition of each text –the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds.

In the current usage the notion of writing transposes the empirical [testable by observations using the physical senses, verifiable by means of scientific experimentation] qualities of the author into ‘transcendental anonymity’.  The more visible marks of the author are wiped out. We characterize writing in two ways—critical and religious. By giving writing a primal [first in time or history] status we provide theological affirmation of its sacred character (God’s word) and critical affirmation of its creative character.

·         Writing is subject to the test of oblivion and repression. [All written works will disappear one day. In all works there is repression—certain ideas are suppressed]

·        Hence writing is bestowed with the religious principle of hidden meaning (which needs interpretation) , and

·        The critical principle of implicit signification (inherent meaning which the word of God has), silent determinations and obscured contents. Therefore commentary becomes necessary.

The religious principle in writing makes it inalterable (as the word of God). Yet it is always a never fulfilled tradition (the promised Heaven on Earth is always a promise). Aesthetic principle in writing makes it survive beyond the author. It has also meanings which the author never knew/or capable of knowing. (“enigmatic excess”)

Thus this notion perpetrates the presence of the author. There are barriers in the author’s disappearance.

It is meaningless to repeat that the author has disappeared. Similarly, it is meaningless to keep repeating after Nietzsche that God and man have died a common death. Instead of this we must try to locate the space left empty by the disappearance of the author. We have to watch for the openings created by the disappearance of the author.

Author’s Name——problems

What is an author’s name? How does it function? Foucault is not offering any answer to these questions. He is only indicating the difficulties involved in the concept.

The author’s name is a proper name. It raises problems common to all proper names.

A proper name is not a simple reference. It has more than an indicative function. When one says ‘Aristotle’, it has more than one meaning. It means ‘the author of Poetics’, ‘the founder of ontology’[the branch of metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics of being and of things that exist] etc. However the links between the proper name and the individual named and between the author’s name and what it names are not isomorphic [having a structure preserving a one to one correspondence] and do not function in the same way.

For example, if we discover that Shakespeare was not born at Stratford-on-Avon, it will be a modification but it will not alter the function of the author’s name. But if we prove that Shakespeare did not write the sonnets which are attributed to him, that will certainly alter the function of the author’s name. Similarly, if we prove that Bacon’s Organon was in fact written by Shakespeare that would again change the function. Thus the author’s name is not just a proper name.

There are other factors also pointing to the paradoxical singularity of the author’s name.

To say that Shakespeare did not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer did not exist. In the first case it means that nobody has the name Shakespeare. In the second case it means that several people were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the qualities traditionally ascribed to Homer. One could also question the meaning of propositions like ‘Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantinus, all of these are Kierkegaard’⁶.

·        An author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse.

·         It performs a certain role assuring a classificatory function. It permits to group together texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. [Shakespeare’s History Plays, for example]

·         Author’s name characterizes a certain mode of discourse. One can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so is its author ’. This means that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, nor that it is immediately consumable. On the other hand this discourse has in a given culture a certain status.

The author’s name does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it. Instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or characterizing its mode of being. The author’s name indicates the status of a discourse within a society and a culture. It is not located in the fiction of the work. In our civilization, there are certain types of discourses endowed with the ‘author-function’ while others are deprived of it. A private letter may have a signer——but it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer —— but it does not have an author. “The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society”.

Characteristics of the Author –Function

There are FOUR different characteristics for the author function

1. Discourses are objects of appropriation [elements are borrowed in the creation of a new work. When we write a sonnet, for example, we borrow the sonnet form. We know that all the works of Shakespeare are not original but appropriated]. The ownership of a work is of a particular type, one that has been codified for many years. The ownership of a work is always subsequent to penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors to the extent that authors became subject to punishment. Foucault says that “in our culture (and doubtless in many others) discourse was not a product but an act. It was an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous”.

At the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century strict rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction etc. came into existence.  The possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing became an imperative peculiar to literature. It appeared that the authors by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practiced transgression and thereby restored danger to a writing which had the benefits of ownership.

2. The author-function did not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way. It was not always the same types of texts which required attribution to an author. There was a time when texts which we call ‘literary’ today [narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies] were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized [assess something as valuable] without any question about the identity of the author. Their anonymity caused no difficulties. Their ancientness was considered as sufficient guarantee of their status. On the other hand, those texts dealing with cosmology, medicine, natural sciences and geography (that now we would call ‘scientific’) were accepted as true only when marked with the name of the author. ‘Hippocrates said’, ‘Pliny recounts’ were not mere formulas. They were the markers that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth.

A reversal occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Scientific discourse began to be accepted as always re-demonstrable truth. The author function faded away. The inventor’s name served only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property, body or group of elements. By the same token literary discourse came to be accepted only when endowed with the author-function. If a text is discovered in a state of anonymity, whether by accident or because of the explicit wish of the author, the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not tolerable, we can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result the author-function today plays an important role in our view of literary works.

3. The author-function is a complex operation which constructs a rational human being called the author. Critics give this being a realistic status by finding out in him a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power, or a ‘design’ in milieu in which writing originates. However, the aspects of an individual which make him an author are only projections. These are projections of the operations we force texts to undergo. These operations differ according to periods and types of discourse. We do not construct a ‘philosophical author’ as we construct a ‘poet’. In the eighteenth century one would not construct a ‘novelist’ as we do it today.

4. The author-function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a text given as passive material. The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These signs are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place etc. such elements do not play the same role in discourses. In a novel, the first person need not be the author. But this first person is an alter ego whose distance from the author varies in the course of the work.  The author is not the fictitious speaker in a work. He is also different from the real writer of the book.

This is not a peculiarity of the novelistic form only. In fact all writing endowed with the author- function possesses plurality. Foucault proves this point by quoting the example of a discourse in Mathematics.

Foucault then states:

·        “Up to this point, I have unjustifiably limited my subject. [Because he has not spoken anything about the author function in painting, music and other arts.]

·        “I have given the author...much too narrow meaning”. [The author is much more than the ‘author’ of a book. He can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will also find a place. Foucault calls this position “transdiscursive”.

Another uncommon kind of author appeared in Europe in nineteenth century.

They are unique in that they are not just the author of their own works. They have produced something else, the rules for the formation of other texts.  Foucault calls them “the founders of discursivity”.  Example — Freud and Marx.

Freud is not just the author of Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.

Marx is not just the author of Communist Manifesto or Capital.

Both of them have established an endless possibility of discourse.

Now Foucault throws up an interesting observation:

We can argue that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic Novel in the beginning of the nineteenth century. She made possible a whole genre of fiction that imitated The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayne. Her texts opened the way for a number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle in her works. In many of these imitations, the heroine is in the trap of her own innocence, hidden in a castle and the hero is a under some curse or other.

However, the case of Freud and Marx is different from that of Ann Radcliffe. Freud and Marx created not only analogies but also differences. “They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded”.

Foucault says that the discourse created by Freud and Marx is different from the discourse in science.

How the discursivity of Freud and Marx different from Science

·        In the case of science, the act that finds out an invention/ theory is in equal footing with its future modifications. In the development of science, the invention/theory may appear as little more than a particular instance of a phenomenon. If it is marred by empirical bias, then one must have to reformulate it.

·        In contrast to this, the initiation of a discursive practice, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis, is “heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations”. To expand this type of discursivity is not to give it a formal generality but rather to open it up for other possible applications. In addition, one does not consider certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false. These propositions may be considered not pertinent, inessential or prehistoric. Thus, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations.

As a result one defines a proposition’s theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders [Freud, Marx].

In the case of science [Galileo or Newton], the validity is in relation to cosmology or physics.

Foucault formulates the above idea thus:

“...the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates”.

Within these fields of discursivity [Freudian / Marxian] there is always an urge to ‘return to the origin’. The return always modifies the field. The return is not a mere historical supplement or ornament. It constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself.

Re-examination of Galileo’s text may change our knowledge of the history of mechanics, but it will never change mechanics itself. On the other hand, re-examination of Freud’s text will modify psychoanalysis and re-examination of Marx’s text will modify Marxism.

Foucault writes that the opposition he attempted to draw between discursive initiation [Freud/Marx] and scientific founding [Galileo/Newton] is not always easy to decide. He has attempted the distinction for only one reason: to show that the author-function has more determining factors when one considers larger units, such as groups of works or entire disciplines.

In conclusion, Freud tries to review the reasons why he attaches importance to the author-function.

1. Theoretical Reason

a. The analysis outlined here may provide an approach to a typology of discourse. such a typology cannot be constructed from the grammatical features, formal structures and objects of discourse.

b. this could be an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse. Discourses must be studied according to their modes of existence. “The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which discourse works is better understood in the activity of the author-function.

c. Study of the author-function will help us to look into the absolute character and founding role of the subject. The subject will be deprived of its originator status. It will be analyzed as a variable and complex function of discourse.

2. Reason dealing with the ‘ideological’ status of the author.

Foucault says that fiction threatens our world. There is a cancerous and dangerous proliferation of signification. The author limits this. He provides the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.

Generally, we consider the author to be “a genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations”.

The truth is just the opposite. The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work. “He is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction”.

Foucault says that he is speaking about a culture in which fiction is limited by the figure of the author. To imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction is put at the disposal of every one, will be purely romantic. Although from the eighteenth century the author has played the role of the regulator of fiction, we cannot say that the author-function will remain so for ever. “ I think that as our society changes...the author-function will disappear. Fiction and its polysemic texts will function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint. The constraint will no more be the author.

Foucault says that all discourses at the time would develop “the anonymity of a murmur”. We would no longer hear the questions:

Who really spoke?

Is it really he or someone else?

What part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?

Instead of these there will be other questions: 

What are the modes of existence of this discourse?

Where has it been used, how can it circulate and who can appropriate it for himself?

Behind all these questions we would not hear anything but the stirring of an indifference.

What difference does it make who is speaking?

Dr. S. Sreekumar

Prepared as annotated study material for MPhil students of Indian Universities.

Foucault is a difficult writer. Part of the difficulty arises from the translation [French to English]

NOTES

1. To go before, in time, order, rank. Example: Shakespeare antecedes Milton. The word is the opposite of follow, come after.

2. The sentence is from Samuel Beckett’s  Stories and Texts for Nothing. Foucault talks about Samuel Beckett (the modernist novelist and playwright), and particularly about a line from Beckett, "what matter who's speaking?" Foucault sees this sentence as an expression of some of the major principles of contemporary writing, or what he calls ‘ecriture’. [Who is speaking thus?...We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin—refer to the post ‘Death of the Author’—Roland Barthes]

3. Language in this kind of writing is not about reference to a signified, but rather it's about the play among signifiers.

4. Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years

5. For example, think of the writing: "Two pounds ground beef/seedless grapes/loaf bread." If we knew that this was written by T.S. Eliot, would it count as one of his "works"?

6. Kierkegaard—“Søren Kierkegaard is an outsider in the history of philosophy. His peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter, including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian dogmatics, satirical prefaces, philosophical "scraps" and "postscripts," literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic and a dialectical method of "indirect communication" - all designed to deepen the reader’s subjective passionate engagement with ultimate existential issues”. He wrote under several pen names.