I should start this by saying that I love Foucault. I am not a follower but there is no one who brings it harder, is more brilliant, or fun, than him. That being said I have some problems. I noticed a tension (contradiction?) in Foucault’s “What is an Author.” Here are some breif thoughts for which, I am sure, the masses are clamoring. I mean come guys. Keep your shirts on.
The tension is between what I would call what the text is vs. the way history has treated the text. Early on, its difficult to say whether he is offering an ontology or a history of ontologies. Is he telling us how to read, or is he telling us how others have read? At the beginning of the essay, I think this is an open question. But he definitely closes the loop in a way that makes me suspicious of his argument.
Foucault begins by saying, “the notion of the author constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.” Obviously, to say the author was “privileged,” is to say that she is a construction. This is what he argues later on when he discusses the author-myth discourse. But, in just a paragraph he asserts a different project when he says, “I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure, that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.”
Hold on. To say the author antecedes the text only “in appearance” is to do more than simple archeology. In this sentence, Foucault seems to come down on the Barthian side of the “death of the author” debate—this is where his real commitments are.
But, he switches this tact in the following paragraph. Quoting Samuel Beckett, he makes the point that the question “what does it matter who is speaking” amounts to an ethic of modern writing. Back to archeology. According to Foucault, modern writing is defined by two major themes. 1.) Content is arranged “less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of its signifier;” and 2.) the subject of writing is destined for death (Kafka, Proust, Flaubert) instead of life (The Thousand and One Nights). This amounts to the canceling out of individuality, and thus the death of the author in the work’s interpretation.
In the absence left by these negations, two things have replaced it both of which Foucault wants to question: oeuvre and writing. Oeuvre refers to the body of the work (the limits of which are set arbitrarily and according the ends of certain powers according to Foucault); and writing refers to individual instances of text. These, he argues, are concepts which fill the empty throne of the author in modern discourse, giving us strait forward signification, and a creative “person” for free.
Here we see Foucault criticizing the spirit of the age, calibrating his archeological work to deconstruct the modern replacement of the author. I see a critique of New Criticism here. He claims that its not enough to simply affirm the disappearance of the author. We must also critique the space left in its absence.
The rest of the essay is an exploration of the deficiencies of the way we use the term “author” (again, probably New Critical ways). But its in this criticism that he periodically shifts from assessing the “spirit of the age” to making hard, basically post structural claims about textual ontology. In critiquing our use of the “author’s name.” Here he claims authors' names are problematic because they do “not have just one signification,” undermining any claim that they are isomorphic. This, to my ear, is a strait forward claim about language and the mechanics of signification, and not archeology.
At this point, the argument sees not a switch between ontology and archeology, but a fusion of the two. Using post structural arguments to critique common uses, he grounds the usage of an author’s name in “discourse,” the way social groups exert power in history. Is he describing pragmatic use or is he telling us how language works per se? I think both.
The contradiction is rooted, not in the critique itself (one to which I am loosely sympathetic), but in the basis by which he makes the critique. It seems rooted in unproved, or uncited, assertions of post structuralist argument.
Near the end of the essay he basically wants to say that language is used in discourse to make arguments about direct signification by an individual mind. At this point he is at his most Barthain (even Sausurrian). The reason why we can deconstruct this notion is because of the variability of signification, that pronouns, etc., can signify many things simultaneously. We’ve heard it before.
At the very end he lets his full colors fly and uses this post structural line of thought to justify a full textual ontology, and drops the pretense of archeology all together. He tells us that real interpretation is not finding an “originating subject,” but rather by “depriving the subject of its role as originator and…analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.” In other words, the meaning of the text is not, by his score, a matter of determining the intention of the author. Its by determining the movement of discourse. Discourse is the ontological bedrock of texts and its only by understanding them that we know what a text means.
My problem with this is that in order to dethrone former modes of interpretation, Foucault must make recourse, not to an analysis of discourse in the first place, but to other modes of inquiry established by Barthe and Saussure. His eyes are bigger than his stomach. Discourse cannot stand on its own two feet in establishing what a text is, and therefore what it means. Moreover, what keeps post structuralism from being eaten by the discourse of powers. What antecedes it? It seems like what Foucault really wants is some kind of good ol' fashion Pragmatism. And that is a bullet no theorist should bite.
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