Barthes, Foucault and the Death of the Author

Shooting the messenger

Barthes, Foucault and the Death of the author

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

In the first session, we have discussed the idea of the Death of the Author in the sense that, as Rolland Barthes said, "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author".  (Barthes, 1968)
So, in order to stop thinking about the author of a piece of art and their personal context, we must put the reader forward, and unfortunately, their context. So by neglecting the author when interpreting a work of art,  you will have to substantially take into account the reader's position, context and personal interpretation. So, this way, every single work of art will be interpreted differently by every reader/viewer.

The concept of Meta-narrative came into the conversation, and by this we are referring to narratives that explain things as they are, they will give you matter of fact information that will not be questioned, such as religion, philosophy, science.

We have been talking about the author not necessarily being the person that created the text/work of art, but the one that gives meaning to the text. Barthes is actually freeing the author, when he says that " It is language that speaks, not the author". The meaning of a text, film, painting, changes every time the text is read by someone else. Barthes says here that "every text is eternally written here and now"

Now, when this subject, of lack of "authorship" is being discussed,  the first artist that comes to mind, is Tracey Emin.

http://www.platonphoto.com/portraits/arts/index.html

 Her artwork is extremely controversial and depending on the viewer, it is not only wide open to interpretation, but it is viewed differently by every single critic, every single exhibition visitor. Depending on the viewer, Emin's artwork will be either brilliant, exquisite, or a complete mess, not understood and debated whether it should actually be considered art.

Tracey Emin -  My Bed - shown at Tate Gallery as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner prize in 1999

My Bed, was shown in the Tate Gallery and was shortlisted for a Turner prize in 1999. Just by looking at it, it is sure to create controversy, as it is a bed, a messy one of them, stirring mixed emotions for the viewer.

Without knowing the background, her work will hardly ever be understood or appreciated at its value.
It seems, somehow, that Tracey Emin has got multiple personalities, which, each, had an influence in her art works. She has got a degree in Fine Arts from Maidstone College of art, she has been awarded an MA in painting by the Royal College of Art, and also, she has been awarded " an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, a Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University and Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent" http://www.egs.edu/faculty/tracey-emin/biography/) . But, at the same time,Emin had a "difficult childhood, Tracey Emin squatted in London after dropping out of school at thirteen. " (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/tracey-emin/biography/ ).

So, of course, all these mixed emotions and situations that Emin has been experiencing, throughout her life, have modelled her character, have created her style, a very unique one, a style that will possibly never be understood by some, but at the same time will be highly acclaimed by others. 

So, to come back to Roland Barthes and The Death of The Author, Tracey Emin's persona is intrinsically associated with her artwork, one couldn't exist without the other, so by removing the author (Tracey Emin) from the work (art), we would open the gates for a completely different perspective every time.



Below, are the extracts from The Death of Author by Roland Barthes (1967) and Michel Foucault, The Author Function (1970), which were the base for this discussion.

The Death 

of the Author

(Extract)

-

Roland Barthes

 The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real “alienation:’the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level,the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author,
when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks,suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born
simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate;there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here
and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation
of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writersput it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxfordschool, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it isuttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; themodern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, accordingto the “pathos” of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly “elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.—We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a ready made dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, “he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes” (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
—Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society,history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is “explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only
that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even “new criticism”) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered;structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in orde rto evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meanings finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.— Let us return to Balzac’s sentence: no one (that is, no “person”) utters it: its source,its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus
of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent
investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings,each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by “the tragic”); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of
multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with eachother, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost,
all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without
history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the
birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.— translated by Richard Howard

Michel Foucault, The Author Function (1970),

From Foucault, Michel "What is an Author?", translation Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp.124-127.

In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses. If we limit our remarks only to those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features.
First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtably in others as well discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.
 Secondly, the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Text, however, that we now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates said..." or "Pliny tells us that..." were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or a pathological syndrome.
 At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology or medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliability" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory).
 The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. (...)