Here's the Author! (jk)

“What is an Author”

I’d like to start by saying that Michael Foucault’s essay was hard to read. That’s why I wikipedia’d him and then looked up a reading guide for “What is an author,” and I still found him hard to read. Rather I should say that I found “it” hard; considering that according to Foucault there isn’t really an author anymore and the author function as traditionally understood is a thing of the past. He claims that, “Criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance- or death- of the author some time ago,” and that, “The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence.” Foucault goes on to say that even though it is well understood that the author is dead, we have not yet followed that logic to its ultimate end, which leads him to question what is meant by the author function, what exactly constitutes a text, several other very big questions. I think that Foucault is trying to get us to question why we put such an emphasis on the author, and how authorship is so important in legitimising literary texts, when we have examples over time of authorship loosing and gaining significance, therefore authorship as a value is not static and permanent. I found it interesting that Foucault noted how between the Middle Ages and now the value of having a cited author has completely reversed between literary and scientific/non-literary texts, and how knowing that that is true, then clearly the value of the author is derisible. His dissection of our societies emphasis on authorship goes even further as he breaks down the fact that there is no set “theory” as to define what is and is not a text and what consequences that has when trying to discern authorship. I believe that Foucault was basically trying to make the point that in our modern literary world, where literary theories have shaken the very foundation of literary studies and where the traditional concept of the author has been established to be dead, it does us no good to continue treating texts in a way in which authorship is still so highly regarded.

Foucault defines the author function to some degree as being, “Therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” In trying to define exactly what an author (and therefore what an author function) truly is, Foucault cites St. Jerome and his four qualifications for distinguishing authorship. I didn’t like these at all, as they seemed incredibly easy to twist into dangerous inaccuracy in the wrong hands. The first criteria claimed that if a text was considered to be attributed to an author, and it was considered by whoever gets to make these decisions, below the level of the author’s canon, it would not be credited to the creator. There are huge problems with this idea. First, what if it’s one of the author’s earliest pieces, or what if it was written in a low period of their life. What if they just had a bad poem day or something? Better yet, what if their work is brilliant and it was actually written by the author in question, and the critic simply didn’t like it and therefore chose not to acknowledge it. This criteria of author accreditation is so flawed and open to corruption that it opens the door for a very narrow view of literature. While St. Jerome’s fourth criteria, the idea that if the alleged author quotes people who wrote after s/he died then it’s not really by that author, only makes logical sense, his second and third are also up for debate. They basically say that if there is anything that the analyst doesn’t like or doesn’t conform to what they all ready think they know, they can disregard the text as not being by the author. This is unacceptable in a place, like, I don’t know, literary studies, where the ability to interpret a text in different ways is kind of important.

Also, I had a great deal of difficulty in trying to find a post in an academic blog that I could link to that in some way pertained to Foucault and the author function. However, I did find this funny misinterpretation of Foucault's work here at Too Funny in a blog that links to a group of Foucault based bloggers. Hope you enjoy!