It is only partly true that I never know where to begin or even what to say when responding to anything written by Barthes or Foucault. And quite obviously this statement needs to be explained right away. My problem isn’t really that I have nothing to say (quite the contrary), but, instead, that what I have to say is so often derogatory. Generally speaking, my reaction to anything produced by either of them is to observe that they seem to be doing little more than playing semantic and linguistic games in order to disguise the reality that, yes, children, the Emperor is in fact naked. These are not the sorts of comments that tend to endear me to my colleagues, particularly those with poststructuralist interests.
In any case, since I can’t say that my opinions have really changed all that much (unless we want to consider an intensification or sharpening a change), I’m not going to deal with them here – plenty of opportunity for that in class, should anyone be interested. Instead, I prefer to concentrate on Martha Woodmansee, whose scholarship and rigor and freedom from ideological pronouncements is rather refreshing when compared to what I’m afraid I can’t refrain from calling the intellectual posturing of Barthes and Foucault.
Woodmansee’s article is a fine and detailed historical account of the parallel developments in European (and specifically German) conceptions of authorship and copyright. Beginning (almost) with the genuinely useful statement that “the author in its modern sense is a relatively recent invention” (426 in our online edition), she proceeds to delineate both premodern and early modern legal conceptions of authorship as well as the whys and hows by which they gradually – in the German states through the course of the eighteenth century – evolved into the idea of the Author which Barthes and Foucault (not incidentally) are so assiduously trying to kill (don’t ask me why – I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what their problem is with what Foucault rather snottily keeps referring to as “the author function,” especially considering the inescapably monolithic status both have achieved as Authors of their respective Works – but I digress).
The history Woodmansee lays out provides invaluable context for our discussion of the complexities of the authorship/copyright issue in our own time: if the idea of the Author is so comparatively recent, then it follows that the notion of legal protection of authorial ownership of texts is even more recent (and yes, I am aware that I am totally avoiding the question of how precisely we define the idea of "text"). I would add that it is important to recognize that what Woodmansee describes are parallel developments: as the concept of authorial ownership of what Fichte called the “form” of ideas – the particular expression of thoughts and ideas which belongs solely to the individual creator – gradually takes hold, so develop legal protections safeguarding the rights of those creators over the dissemination of their expressions, or of the concrete textual forms of which they are identified as authors. Thus Fichte seems to advocate a concept of authorship not unlike that which we articulated in class last week: one of the key elements allowing a creator to exert some ownership over her ideas is the specific expression or form of those ideas that she alone has been responsible for constructing (and by the by, the use of the feminine pronoun here raises some interesting wrinkles that I'd like to address some time -- namely, how from the seventeenth century onward the participation of women in the creation of texts both through writing and publishing them helped evolve the modern concept of authorship, which I would think raises for feminist critics all sorts of interesting implications re: Foucault and Barthes).
As you’ve probably guessed, I have no particular problem with what for us is a traditional notion of authorship, nor do I question the right of individual authors to control who uses their creations, or how. And as a theater artist I also don't question the right of directors and actors and designers to be identified as authors of their own work, even when that work involves what may conventionally be seen as an infringement of the original author's work (good actors and directors understand that on some level they must rewrite the texts they choose to interpret). In my view, to return to the particular bugaboo with which I began this discussion, Barthes and Foucault, in railing against the tyranny of the Author, have only succeeded in replacing it with the tyranny of the Critic. Woodmansee at least provides solid historical reasons for why we conceive of authorship in the way we do. After all, whatever else they may be, texts are products of the human brain, expressions of human thought, human choice, and human will. Perhaps, as Foucault seems to suggest in one of his more lucid moments, our goal should not be to destroy the idea of the author, but to explore our own changing notions about just who the author is and what exactly it is that she does. This strikes me as far more useful than proclaiming the death of the author, especially considering the extent to which the reports of that death have been so greatly exaggerated.
6 comments:
Sober and sage Malvolio, so prudent to avoid Foucault. Nevertheless, since he has "privileged" an heuristic approach to author that has about as much to do with author as his linguistics does with linguistics, I would like to briefly address his essay. Initially, when I noticed Foucault mentioned in the first paragraph of Woodmansee's article, I cringed, preparing myself for yet another intellectual exercise in discursive digressions. I was pleased, however, when I ended up reading a cogent and informative essay. How refreshing in comparison with Foucault's twisted logic.
Obviously, I, too do not appreciate Foucault's awkward linguistics and the constant "privileging" it has spawned in our discipline. I have often wondered how a philosopher/historian could feign such an insight into human nature and linguistics. Nearly all the post-modernists I've encountered begin (if they approach theory from linguistics) by citing Saussure's assertions about the sign and the signified - the arbitrariness of language in general. What they often omit, however, is that Saussure recognized the conventions by which those arbitrary signs attain a level of meaning. Without the convention, then indeed communication would be impossible. By ignoring the convention that allows language to "mean" something, anyone could create any theory one wanted, including something as silly as there is no objective reality. (I believe it was Bertrand Russell who suggested that he would like to see anyone who disbelieved in objective reality to charge against a wall with the force of that conviction). It is indeed highly probable that one could pass through a wall provided one had an infinite amount of time to attempt it.
At any rate, as for Foucault's assertions about authorship, or the author-function, my sense is that he has done a great deal of harm to our discipline, and should (if he weren't dead) apologize.
O Paglians (everybody). Fine. I will play the role of devil's advocate since it's swinging out wide open in the wind. (Clears throat.)
The death of the author, as a proposed concept, encourages a more democratic approach, even a kind of return to a pre-copyright understanding of the text and its raison(s) d'etre (shared/communal, equivalent of religious ritual, etc.). Yes, the author creates; however, no, she doesn't do so in a vacuum, and the text she produces doesn't exist in a vacuum.
*Dethroning* the author is righteous; all thrones should be done away with. Our frogs here are chivvying a strict hierarchical patriarchal dualistic etc. system. You know the fairy-tale analogy is in play here. Kiss my frog! ;)
The death of the author, the death of god, the death of the white man, the death of the king. Not the death of the individual author, but of the YHWH concept.
Ironic that many of us are inspired by The Death of the Author to call for the excommunication of *these* figures.
I like the emotionalism and irrationalism of what you call twisted logic. I like the Bacchic transport. I like the mazy poetry of this criticism, the incommunicably personal nature of it, the Kristevan ashpit.
Sixteenth century onward.
The Bacchic, the mazy, the personal -- these are all things I appreciate as well -- in fiction, poetry, and drama. So perhaps such criticism should more accurately be called fiction or poetry or drama -- because to me it bears a similar illusory or at least subjective relationship to reality. It's the same problem I had the first time I read the French feminists (Cixous especially) -- if you want to write poetry, write poetry. I for one will take it a lot more seriously than linguistic game-playing disguised as criticism.
Further, while I think it WANTS to encourage a more democratic approach, I'm not sure that, A. Such an approach is desirable (why must the experience of literature be democratic anyway? Doesn't that also deny individual subjective response -- I mean, isn't democracy just another way of describing mindless mass conformity to a culturally or politically determined norm?); or, 2. What happens in reality is the demagoguery of the monolithic Author is replaced by the demagoguery of the monolithic Critic -- and it doesn't matter if the associated authorial identity (and we're kidding ourselves if we really think that Foucault's attempt to detatch any kind of objective reality from the concept of the author's name is somehow not itself an assertion of his own individual and very real ego) goes by the signifier of Aristotle, Descartes, Wiggentstein, Saussure, Frye, Foucault, or Cixous. Most of us accord them exactly the same sort of concrete authorial (and usually rather totalitarian) status as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, or Woolf -- hence the dominance of postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist critical approaches within our own discipline (tell me that those of us with specializations in those specific privileged critical families are not considered more desirable than those of us whose focus lies elsewhere).
So we simply replace one set of hierarchical relationships with another one, and our apparent freedom remains illusory. Instead of democratizing the experience of reading, all we do is reorient ourselves toward a new tyrannical center. Perhaps Stephen Jay Gould is right and we humans are incapable of conceiving of the world in anything other than completely binary, dichotomous terms -- my way of defining the author must be right THEREFORE everyone else's must be wrong ("The opposite of left is right; the opposite of right is wrong; so anyone who's left is wrong. Right?"). It's not enough to locate ultimate interpretive authority with the reader, or even to deny that authority to the creator, we must go the whole distance and declare the author to be dead. But it seems to me all that does is reinscribe an objective definition of authorship onto a new subject: the creator is not the author, the reader is, because it is the reader who creates meaning. But isn't that just redefining the author? Surely the real relationship between artist and audience is more complicated and collaborative and reciprocal than Barthes and Foucault allow.
Just one further comment: It occurs to me as I read over my contributions here that I'm perhaps coming across as a tad aggressive. I hope it's clear that my criticisms of any of these ideas are in no way personal or directed at anyone here or in class. Most of the time in my comments and responses I'm just free-associating, articulating ideas as they occur to me. So if I ever seem to growl at anyone, I hope you won't be shy about growling back.
Literary critics have had some twenty or thirty years to prove that Marx rules (he obviously does not), or that the bourgeois middle class relies on bourgeois "authors" to articulate its needs and desires (I should think television does a much better job), or that Freud really was on to something when he claimed that all human dysfunction results from problems with a penis or lack thereof (again, decidedly wrong). In short, literary critics have had about as much influence on politics and culture as the average voter or blogger.
Look, I'm all for democracy, and I'm all for promoting it as often and in as many ways as one can. Doing so, however, by creating false analogies does not advance democracy or promote the reader; it merely confuses issues that might be better understood if we started holding individuals accountable for their inaccuracies. For example, at one point in his essay Foucault claims that Marx and Freud (author-function, discursivity function) can be said to be authors of branches of science, whereas Galileo and Newton cannot because any looking back does not change the science. I would think Einstein would disagree, eh? One would be hard-pressed to suggest relativity did not change our understanding of gravity. This comparison, though, begs the question of whether or not Marx and Freud were scientists. They were not. All Foucault does here is "privilege" an unverifiable theory over objective, scientific knowledge, which of course is in his interest because he himself has asserted an unverifiable theory.
I simply cannot understand why in our discipline any ridiculous assertion can rise to the level of theory, much as theologians assert God by divine logic, when the truth is that most of what has been claimed has been falsified by science.
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