Foucault's 'Author-Function' and Ong's 'Writer'

In Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author,” he lays out the criteria for what he calls the author-function. These criteria specify that the author-function is linked to the institutional system that determines and articulates the universe of discourse. The criteria also state that the author-function does not affect all discourse in the same way, and that it is not defined by a spontaneous attribution of a discourse to one person, but is rather a complex series of operations (Foucault 910). By stating these criteria, Foucault attempts to define the author’s role beyond the mere implementation of language. In Walter Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” he expands that definition. To begin, Ong cites Henry James’s claim that an author “makes his reader very much as he makes his character” (Ong 9). In this light, Foucault’s ‘author-function’ and Ong’s ‘writer’ take on many of the same characteristics.

Ong argues that the word “audience” is misleading when it comes to the written word. For a speaker, the audience is right in front of him. For a writer, however, the audience is further away, both in space and in time (Ong 10). There is no collective noun when it comes to readers as there is when it comes to an audience. Instead there is only the abstraction of the readership. A readership cannot listen as an audience can, and does not provide immediate feedback as an audience does. For this reason, a writer does not address his audience in the same way that a speaker does, but instead writes to them (Ong 11). He cannot write with each individual reader in mind. Instead, a writer fictionalizes his audience. This falls under the definition of the author-function according to Foucault.

For a writer to successfully ‘create’ his own audience, he must use the audience he has learned to know from reading earlier writers, who also fictionalized their own audiences based on their readings of writers before them, and so on. After he has created this audience in his imagination, the writer must then cast his audience in some sort of role, and the audience must in turn play that role. Ong uses Hemingway as an example, because Hemingway used definite articles as an indication to his audience that they were expected to know what he was talking about without being given specifics (Ong 13). It is in this way that Ong’s ‘writer’ takes on the role of Foucault’s ‘author-function’—he determines and articulates the universe of discourse. That is, he creates his audience and assigns them their roles in relation to the text being written.

Ong’s writer also meets the criteria which states that the author-function does not affect all discourse in the same way. Since writers are fictionalizing their audiences based on the audiences they have come to know from reading earlier works, each writer’s audience will be different. In fact, the same writer’s audience may even differ depending on the content, message, and style of his writing.

Ong even states that a successful and very original writer can do more than project earlier audiences—he can, in fact, alter them (Ong 11). This would fall under Foucault’s criteria that the author-function is a complex series of operations. First, the writer must read works by writers who came before him, then he must familiarize himself with the fictionalized audience of those works, then he must imagine his own audience, and finally, to be considered successful or original, he must alter that audience.

-Jessica Gonzalez