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”.

Roland Barthes –The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes –The Death of the Author

Lecture notes by Dr. S. Sree Kumar

Barthes—the most brilliant of his generation—Writing Degree Zero—Mythologies[analysis of popular and high culture]—depends heavily on structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Saussure and Jakobson—The Elements of Semiology, Image-Music-Text—S/Z, a very important work—an exhaustive commentary on a Balzac short story ‘Sarrasine’—illustrates the method of Barthes—breaking down the text into small units or ‘lexias’—show how they carry different meanings simultaneously on different levels or in different codes—

 S/Z distinction between two types of texts—‘lisible’ or ‘readerly’ classic text [ readers are passive consumers]

 ‘scriptible’ or ‘writerly’ modern texts which invites readers to an active participation in the production of meanings that are infinite and inexhaustible.