User:Paudelpradeep/Foucault, Barthes, and the Debate on Authorship

There is an ongoing debate in literary theory about whether an author is an individual genius or a social product. In their polemical articles Michel Foucault and Roland Bathes argue that an author is neither an individual agent nor a creative genius. Foucault’s article "What is an Author?" and Barthes’ article “The Death of the Author” lie at the center of the debate. Both of them take a poststructuralist standpoint, but they have considerable differences about the formation and function of authorship.

Both Barthes and Foucault share the view that the author is essentially an invention of the modernist and capitalistic enterprise that sought to make profit through commodification and commercialization of the text. This enterprise made patent and copy right so important a condition that the birth of an author became inevitable. Additionally, Barthes argues that the western intellectual tradition after Middle Ages (from Renaissance to Reformation to Enlightenment) gave more and more emphasis on individuality and individual creative genius. The end result developed by such economic, cultural, and intellectual conditions was a full-fledged—and of course for Barthes misguided—birth of an author. For Foucault, it also marks the advent of an age of production and propagation of discourse, discursive practices, and exercise of power. In the past creative genius existed and circulated in the performance of oral narrative, and it, virtually, did not matter who created or produced what, in the new age of individualization, by contrast, the question of authorship became central to any text and discourse.

It is important to take note that neither Barthes’ nor Foucault’s theories stand in isolation: they largely derive from, engage with, and respond to the prevalent theories—both linguistic and sociopolitical—of our age to further carry on the discussion about the questions of authorship—the questions which have far-reaching ramifications. Since Barthes heavily relies on Sassure, it is important to bring an analogy from structuralism to better understand his arguments. In his linguistic theory Sassure postulates that every language is a system of structures, which he calls ‘langue’. All the language users acquire and internalize the rules that bind the structures together into a system. Once the rules are learned, one becomes capable of generating infinite number of grammatically correct utterances. Sassure terms the individual utterances as ‘parole’. Hence, it is not so much that an individual user produces language as language finds an expression through the individual. What an individual does is producing what is already there in language, what is potentially utterable, or has been uttered many a times by different people. It is exactly what Barthes claims about authorship. By extrapolating the Sassurian concepts into his theory, Barthes argues that the author is not so much as an inventor of an original voice as an imitator of what his predecessors have produced or what language itself offers him to produce. Moreover, Barthes also relies on speech act theory to assign an author only the role of an interlocutor and, consequently, what he produces as an individual text becomes meaningful only when it is put in a larger conversational context. A text then is like a speech produced to fill a certain conversational gap and to produce a certain effect in relation to what has already been spoken or might be spoken later. Sassure says every word has oppositional relation to other words (no word can be meaningful by itself in language system as no single light will be meaningful in traffic light system); according to Barthes the same is true about an author and his writing. So far as the meaning of the text is concerned, Barthes claims that no text has inherent meaning in itself or in isolation. It is neither the author, nor the immediate circumstances about him when writing that bring a meaning to the text. Instead, it is the circumstances about the reader (the conventions of discourse and interpretative communities), which help them to construct the meaning to the text. Since every reading is a misreading, every text incorporates multiplicity and plurality. The author dies as soon he has produced the text; he has no claim to the production of the text and no claim to its meaning. The readers write or construct meanings to it, and thus they are born. Hence, “the birth of the reader must be required by the death of the Author” (1133).

Foucault also problematizes the modern concept of authorship, but he does so differently. His way of defining authorship is genealogical. In his genealogical study, he finds the evolution of authorship—or rather the concept of authorship—converging with the evolution discourse and discursive practices. Discourse of our time, in Foucault’s view, has a lot to do with the compartmentalization of knowledge and disciplines and individualization of authorship. Architectural reformation, Foucault argues, has largely altered the exercise of power, surveillance, and discipline in the modern societies. With introduction of differently fortified jails and lunatic asylums (in which creating a fear of being constantly observed is the key to exercise and maintain order), the modern era of power and discourse begins. In today’s society, nothing (not even the individual citizens) escapes the complex and localized structures of power and discourse. The systematic study of mental diseases as a discipline of science, for example, is not as innocent of power politics and discursive practice as it is generally conceived and represented to be. It has its roots in the management of lunatic asylums, and today it has well-defined discourses on mental disorders in hand to study every anti-social or unusual behavior in terms of psychopathology. Every dissenting voice or action in our time is liable to be branded as a psychic disorder and thus be confined in the cells of mental hospital by the disciplining authorities. Foucault argues that discourse is meant to generate knowledge and knowledge is meant to generate and exercise power. Since discursive practice and power are exercised through their localization, power is everywhere. The compartmentalization of academic disciplines in the form of area studies, for example, not only helps to generate and propagate discourse and knowledge but also serves to function as a local body to monitor what is going on in and around in the area concerned, to inform about and, ultimately, to contain the counter-discourses. Counter-discourses and subversive power, Foucault says, become effectual only by challenging and usurping the localized power. Foucault has a lot to share with Gramasci’s theory of hegemony, Althussier’s theory of ideology, and neo-Marxist theory of contentment, all of which contribute to the development of New Historicism. Edward Said heavily relies on Foucault to develop his theory of orientalism, in which he discusses how orientalist discourse informed and aided the European colonial enterprise. Today we find Foucault almost in every theory in currency—from feminism to subaltern studies.

To come back to the main issue in question, Foucault, like Marxists, believes that all the authors and their works are politically and ideologically implicated. He does not deny that the author is a modern invention, but he denies that the author is dead altogether, or authorship is a dead issue as Barthes claims. Instead, for Foucault, an author is less of a person and more of a function, which is why he uses the term ‘author-function’ in the place of author. The author-function exists in different forms: as a category, as a landmark, as a trendsetter, as a point of reference and as a name to a body of discourse. The name of an author has far more implications than the name of a person. In Foucault’s’ view, an author is referred to and remembered neither only because he is a name of a person, nor because he has written certain texts, but because he has entered into and engaged with the mass of discourses, become a part of the discursive practice, and instigated further discourses. In his futuristic hopes, Foucault imagines of a “culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” (148).

Bringing this discussion into context, I feel it safe to say that an author is a socially conditioned and constructed being: even his consciousness, his language, his thoughts and emotions have a lot to share with what already exists in the society. But I am not convinced that writers are simply the faceless agents through whom language speaks and writing is always and already devoid of personal signature of its author. Barthes’ theory to me seems too nihilistic an argument: it tends to erase all the faces of writers from the history of writing and make all the writing a monolithic mass of written language. In this context, Foucault’s arguments are more convincing but not without controversy; they pose us more questions than answers. But again, Foucault seems to favor the authors of tradition or trendsetters like Marx and Freud against the authors of less known works. The fact is many authors emerge from long neglect and oblivion while many others fade away as time passes. Shakespeare and Ben Johnson are the example. It can be safely said that the authors will be irrelevant only when knowledge is no longer relevant. Certainly, authors need to be studied in collectivity, like the Brontes, to find the styles and milieus in common in a given historical period, but individual traits are equally important in literary studies. New Historicist approach of studying non-canonical texts in relation to the canonical ones and in relation to the extra-literary contexts in which the writer produced a text is an answer to the to post-structuralist call for forgetting the author.