NOTES ON
Foucault, M.(1979) 'What is an Author?' In
Harari, J (Ed) Textual Strategies:
Perspectives in Post structuralist Criticism,
108 - 19.Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.And
also in Bocock, R.& Thompson, K.(eds)
(1992) Social and Cultural Forms of
Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
The
characteristics of a ‘discourse containing the
author function’ include:
(A)
Property relationships, where authors appear as
the objects of punishment and blame. [Literary] discourses
were once risky, operating between the sacred
and profane, and then they became goods (407).The
situation became secure and legalized, but could
become risky again.
(B)
Unevenness.Once, literary texts did not need
authors, but scientific ones did as some way to
guarantee truth.Then science became institutional, and
eponomy developed as a form of authorship of
theories.
(C)
Authors became constructed by critics, prepared
to attribute deep motives or creative powers to
individuals, in a way that guaranteed the unity
of a piece of writing and neutralized any
possible contradictions.Critics
were able to detect the presence of signs of the
author in the text, like the 'shifters' of
personal pronouns.However there were problems with
fictional narrators.
So
uncertainty and the ideological peril of fiction
became reducible and manageable with the concept
of the author.Authors also help to limit the otherwise
endless proliferation of significations,
offering a thrifty or economic reading.This
view simply contradicts the usual one that a
wealth of creativity is unfolded by an author in
texts.In
fact, the author is a function to limit meaning.The
usual view is an inversion, as in ideology, a
way of managing and coding the fear of the
proliferation of meaning.
Can
culture escape these fixations?It is
pure romanticism to imagine some free fiction
with no constraint.Even
if we come to abandon the notion of an author,
we still have to have some constraint, even
though it is not clear what that might be.