Post-Authorial Musings of Barthes and Foucault

 According to both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, as a social construct, the notion of the “Author” is the product of convenience and self-interest – to literary critics, to the assumed author’s capitalistic pursuit of “ownership,", and to theological tradition’s conditioned adherents. It is an opportunistic reduction, and one that has been thoroughly exploited by its beneficiaries.

In their theories, Barthes and Foucault both demonstrate the importance of understanding the origins, function and social conditions giving rise to authorship, in order to arrive at the conclusion that the Author is irrelevant in contemporary modes of discourse. Each theorist concerns himself with the origins of capital-A Authorship, parsing the many corners from which this significant authorial privileging is born, all the while declaring it a disingenuous and limiting projection of meaning. Though Barthes’ and Foucault’s respective essays spend a great deal of time waxing historically and analytically on authorship and (in Foucault’s case) the origins of “Author-function” (perhaps as ownership), neither stops short of offering replacements to the broken system of false meaning.  Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author” each ask and attempt to answer the inevitable question arising from this discourse on authorship: “What is left behind in the Author’s place?” following his or her symbolic death in our discourse? It is not sufficient, writes Foucault, “to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared.” However, the void left in the author’s place, he offers, is not where we find the ‘meaning’ that authorship initially tries to ascribe a work, but rather, where we interact with a text. In this way, Barthes and Foucault seek to replace the system of authorial privileging with a more open discourse, free of assumptions outside of the reader’s perception of the text.

One historical function of the author, writes Foucault, has been to help “explain” a text through associations with the author’s life or other works, as though the author’s larger body of work could contextualize the work in question, or that the author’s life contains allegorical parallels to the work in question. He offers that a discourse bearing an author’s name automatically penetrates the reader’s freedom to perceive the text with any degree of personal significance, and indicates that such works “must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” – thereby inhibiting the number of ways it can be received.

He goes on however, to state that the very notion of a text holding the capacity to be “explained” – that it contains a fixed, objective theme, or set of meanings – renders it profoundly limited. Though neither uses the term, it is safe to say that Barthes and Foucault instead call for readers to focus their criticisms and experiences on a sort of ‘surface,’ encouraging them to, “range over,” as Barthes writes, not “pierce” the work in question – not making any assumptions that hidden meanings lie beneath the surface.

In “killing the author,” Barthes and Foucault’s ideas transfer agency from the author to the reader. Barthes frames this in revolutionary terms, stating that the refusal to fix meaning is “to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” an appropriate synthesis of authorship’s historical role in combination with the new “authorless” paradigm he seeks. Theology and scientific inquiry, though seemingly contrary ideas, both have very specific functions in ways that fiction does not, he argues. For example, when one is encouraged (as high school students often are) to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby under the condition that they take it as a commentary on the American dream, and accept the green light on Daisy’s dock is a somehow universal “sign” of something that Fitzgerald directly sought to convey, they are asked to interpret a piece of literature with the theoretical rigidity of science (as discussed by Foucault in regard to the Renaissance), and doctrinal absolutism of religion. This isn’t without purpose, however.

The power-players who teach or push these methods in the first place are not without ulterior motives – critics in particular, Barthes writes, have benefitted immeasurably from the reign of the author. In the same way that applying theological principles of significance to fiction undermines its multiplicity, so has the critic, who Barthes seems to indicate has been more or less neglectful and borderline-abusive in regard to the reader – in favor of the Author. “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature.” By destroying the myth around the Author, he sees society freeing itself from a despotic special interest.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 868, 874-877.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 904-914.

-Addison Kane