Foucault- What is an Author

MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 1984)

PART FOUR
What is an Author? (1969)
To read Michel Foucault, is to feel the grounds of ones belief systems shift underneath ones feet. For
Foucault, as for Roland Barthes (1916-1980), the notion of the author must come into question. Although
Foucault was not a literary theorist, he, like Barthes, was a theorist of history, and What is an Author?
echoed many of the thoughts of Barthes on the subject of authorship. Over a decade earlier,
in Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes laid out how the Author came into being during a certain historical
period and discussed how the term author was privileged due to the concept of what Foucault would call
individuation. The notion of the author as a proper name produced the author function that became
characteristic of certain kinds of discourses, such as fiction, and not others, such as letter writing. The system
that produced the author function is a system of ownership and, by the end of the 18th century, the author
was placed at the center of a system of property. Given at the Societ Francais de philosophie on 22 February
1969, this talk was published in 1969 in Bulletin de la Socit franaise de Philosophie.
Foucault turned the concept of author inside out by examining the text points to the author and not, as
is assumed, vice versa. He began by quoting Samuel Beckett, who wrote, What matter whosspeaking,
someone said, what matter whos speaking? The question connoted an indifference, Foucault noted,
towards writing that had become an immanent rule that precluded expression. Like Barthes, Foucault
was acting against Structuralism or a formal reading of a literary work and was opposed to the concept of
expression, a holdover of Romantic thinking. Foucault understood writing to be freed from the need to
express and was able to represent only itself. Writing was identified with its own unfolded exteriorlyan
interplay of signs arranged to the nature of signifiers. As Foucault wrote,
Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits.
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject
within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly
disappears.
Like Barthes, Foucault used drastic language to get his point across. Writing, he stated, is linked to
sacrifice: Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now
avoluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the
writers very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses
the right to kill, to be its authors murderer.
Writing for Foucault was like Text for Barthes and thus, writing possesses the right to kill the author, to
be the authors murderer. Writing cancels out signs of particular individuality so that, ironically, the sign of
the writer is the singularity of absence. The writer has the role of the dead person involved in a game of
writing. But, as Foucault warned,
It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the
same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death. Instead,
we must locate the space left empty by the authors disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps
and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.
Foucault pointed to exceptions to his assertion that the author is an ideological construct and made note
of transdiscursive writers, such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and Ann Radcliffe, all of whom established
paradigms or what Foucault called discursive instaurations. These are rare figures in the field of writing
who created a genre that spawned writing in their particular area. Like Ann Radcliffe, who created the Gothic
Novel which inspired a genre that continues to this day, like Karl Marx whose followers created Marxist
theory, these individuals started discourses and disappeared into the discourse. That being said, Foucault
considered it dangerous to reduce either non-fiction or fiction to the notion of the author. Most authors are
fictive and Foucault reverted to his familiar stance of defining the author in terms of what it was not:
The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a
world where one is thrifty not only with ones sources and riches, but also with ones discourses and
their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result we
must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author..the author is not an indefinite source of
significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional
principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes
the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of
fiction.
Literary discourses were opposed to truth discourses, that is, discourses linked to a culturally affirmed
truth in the sense that a literary discourse was a fiction. The distinction between truth and fiction
necessitated an author to avoid the kind of appropriation that overtook the discourses of the sciences. In
other words, the author function was obliterated in the sciences so that anonymity (disinterest) guaranteed
truth but accelerated in fiction in order to guarantee sales. Foucault made his point, not to cement the idea
of the author as an owner of ideas, but to destabilize the idea of establishing a bounded and constrained
field, for in all of the cases set forward by Foucault, the discourse exceeded the writersMarxism, Freudian
thinking and Romanticism.
In separating the author from his or her body of work, Foucault shifted literature into discourse, so that
individual works become part of a larger body of texts. As Foucault wrote,
Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal
transformations but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization,
attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each.The
manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily
understood, I believe, in the activity of the author function and in its modifications than in the themes
or concepts that discourses set in motion.
Foucaults attack on the author is much more powerful than that of Barthes. Barthes kept within the
boundaries of literary theory in his essay The Death of the Author and merely wanted to activate the reader.
Foucault, however, seemed to view the author as being implicated in a system of thought that was mired in
personification and personalization that got in the way of the preferred object of study: the discourse.
Foucault wrote that the author was an ideological figure that is linked to a cult of personality:
The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction
threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation
of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not
only with ones resources and riches but also with ones discourses and their significations.
The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely
reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that
the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an
inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all
other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning
begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.
The question was why had the author become an ideological figure? Foucault answered that in conceiving
of the author as the source of meaning, meaning is confined to the authors intention. This artificial
containment is why both Foucault and Barthes were both suspicious of the exercise of closereading. Close
reading and the mystification of the author as a creator, closes off what we fear, something Foucault called
the proliferation of meaning. The author has therefore the function as a regulator of meaning and this
function as an element (not as someone) that controls meaning is closely linked to the control of distribution
and profits. In the end Foucault imagined that in the future the author function and/or the author him or
herself would disappear in a proliferating discourse. But as was usual in Foucaults writings, the actual
mechanisms of such a change are never explained. He merely ended his essay by stating,
All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be
subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions
that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With
what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest sell did he express in his
discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this
discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What
are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject
functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of
an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?
To women and people of color, who have been denied the privilege of writing, who writes makes a
difference. Foucault must be compared to his female counterparts who were asserting not only the possible
uniqueness of criture fminine but who were also attempting to subvert a male-made language. Although
Foucault, like Barthes, was writing against the social constraints against meaning, his last sentence would be
taken out of context and used to obliterate the writing of the Other and to elide the fact that the canon of
writers and artists still consisted of the white male. Foucault, like most of the men of his era, did not spend
much time considering women or emphasizing with people of color. In reading the text of the Other/Woman,
Foucault would dispense with interpretation. Interpretation sets up a play against the original text and leads
to infinite regression. For Foucault, it was always too late to recover an original meaning and a stable
context for everything is already interpretation. However, it is important to know who is writing in
order to interpret a statement in the context of gender and race. Without this contextual tool, critique
becomes difficult and Foucault, as did his colleagues, carefully neutered critique and rendered social criticism
mute, coincidentally or not, at the time of a struggle for the rights of women and people of color.
FOUCAULT

Michel Foucault: "What is an Author?"
Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, a Marxist, a structuralist, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or
a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all of these areas or
disciplines. Rather, think of Foucault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own
"school" of thought. He is a poststructuralist thinker, with affinities to most all the other theorists
we've read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all his
own.
Foucault starts off this essay, "What is an Author?," by discussing criticisms of a previous
book, The Order of Things In this book Foucault had started an investigation into the conditions
of possibility under which human beings become the objects of knowledge in certain disciplines
(what we might call the "human sciences" or the "social sciences"). He was working to discover
and explain the rules and laws of formation of systems of thought in the human sciences which
emerge in the nineteenth century. His main method for looking at these disciplines, and how they
constitute the objects of their study, was through examining "discourses," or "discursive
practices."
For Foucault, a "discourse" is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common
object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common terms and ideas; the idea of
discourse thus allows Foucault to talk about a wide variety of texts, from different countries and
different historical periods and different disciplines and different genres. For example, the
"discourse" on blindness would include writings by schools for the blind, writings by doctors
who work with vision and blindness, novels with blind characters, and autobiographies of blind
people, as well as writing about blindness from other disciplines.
In The Order of Things, Foucault discussed several naturalists, including Buffon, a French 18th
century writer, and Charles Darwin, a British 19th century writer, as belonging to the same
"discourse," or discursive family. Critics questioned this association, asking Foucault how he
could put two authors who were so different, in time and place, together in one grouping.
Foucault responds, in this essay, by asking why we are concerned with the idea of authors at all,
rather than seeing "discourse" as the groupings of texts and ideas. Why, Foucault asks, do we
always want to trace ideas back to specific authors? Why do we insist that ideas or concepts, or
even literary works, are the creation of a single individual?
Foucault makes a list (on p. 139a) of some questions about authorship which he will not address
directly. Rather, he wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the
manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who
precedes the text (and creates it). Eventually, Foucault will talk about the author as a Derridean
"center" of the text, the place which originates the text yet remains outside it. (Then, of course,
he will "deconstruct" that center/author).
But before he does that, Foucault talks about Samuel Beckett (the modernist novelist and
playwright), and particularly about a line from Beckett, "what matter who's speaking?" Foucault
sees this sentence as an expression of some of the major principles of contemporary writing, or
what Foucault calls ecriture. (This ecriture is related to the French feminist idea of "l'ecriture
feminine," but Foucault doesn't choose to give it a gender). One of the hallmarks of ecriture is
the interplay of signifiers; language in thiskind of writing is not about reference to a signified,
but rather it's about the play among signifiers. The ecriture that Foucault is discussing tends
toward the monologic, rather than the dialogic, in Bakhtin's terms; it is writing that is self-
referential, writing about writing, or about language itself, rather than writing for/about social
communication. As such, this writing is always working against the grammatical rules and
structures within which meaning (or sense) is made. Because of this, Foucault concludes,
such ecritureis not about "the exalted emotions related to the act of composition." Writing is not
the vehicle for the author's expression of his/her emotions or ideas, since writing isn't meant to
communicate from author to reader, but rather writing is the circulation of language itself,
regardless of the individual existence of author or reader: "it is primarily concerned with creating
an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears" (p. 139b).
Another major theme or principle of ecriture that Foucault sees expressed in the Beckett quote is
the idea of a connection between writing and death. Throughout most of Western cultural
history, writing has been a means of staving off death, of becoming "immortal;" Foucault points
to the Greek epic, where the hero can die young because his epic feats have guaranteed his
immortality, and also to a non-Western text, The Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade's
storytelling night after night kept her from being killed. In modern times, however, writing
(ecriture) reverses the equation; rather than guaranteeing immortality, or keeping death away,
writing "kills" the author.
Why? Foucault says that a writer's particular individuality is canceled out by the text, by writing,
because we now see "writer," or "author," as the function of language itself. In the humanist
model, the categories of author, text, and reader seemed self-evident and separate: an author is
someone who produces a text, which is then read by a reader; the author was the source and
origin of some creative power, which was unique to him or her, and out of which s/he created
something entirely new. In the poststructuralist view, however, relations between author, text,
and reader are replaced by an understanding of the relations between language (as a structure)
and subjects (positions we inhabit within the structure of language). Althusser showed us how
we are interpellated as subjects into ideological structures, and we discussed how that applies to
literature: as readers, each of us becomes an interpellated subject within one or more textual
ideologies. Foucault uses the same premises to conclude that "author," like "reader," is the name
of a subject position within language, or, more specifically, within a text (or textual ideology).
So why does Foucault say the author is "dead"? It's his way of saying that the author is
decentered, shown to be only a part of the structure, a subject position, and not the center. In the
humanist view, remember, authors were the source and origin of texts (and perhaps of language
itself, like Derrida's engineer), and were also thus beyond texts--hence authors were "centers." In
declaring the author dead, Foucault follows Nietzsche's declaration (at the end of the nineteenth
century) that "God is dead," a statement which Derrida then reads as meaning that God is no
longer the center of the system of philosophy which Nietzsche is rejecting. By declaring the
death of the author, Foucault is "deconstructing" the idea that the author is the origin of
something original, and replacing it with the idea that the "author" is the product or function of
writing, of the text. (Foucault also borrows the idea of "the death of the author" from
poststructuralist literary critic Roland Barthes; his essay "The Death of the Author" appears in a
collection of Barthes' essays entitled Image-Music-Text.)
An "author" only exists as the product of a text, or of writing. That is primarily what Foucault's
article explores. What an author produces, according to Foucault, is a "work." The task of
(humanist) criticism used to be to trace the ties between an author and the work s/he created, by
reading the work as an illustration of the author's individual life history, of his or her particular
concerns, thematics, etc. Foucault says that, once we throw the idea of "author" as individual
creator into question, what do we mean by "work"?
Another way of putting this is to ask, once we have an author, does everything s/he wrote belong
to the idea of her/his "work"? For example, think of that writing we discussed with Bakhtin:
"Two pounds ground beef/seedless grapes/loaf bread." If we knew that this was written by T.S.
Eliot, would it count as one of his "works"? Would it matter whether we thought it was a poem
or a grocery list? Why or why not? Foucault says that we need to have some sort of theory to
explain or analyze questions about what counts as an author's "work." A related question is
whether anonymous writings can be considered "works," even though they have no specific
author.
Foucault then takes a bit of a digression (pp. 140b-141a) to discuss how ecriture, in emphasizing
the play of signification over any fixed or stable meaning, doesn't really get rid of the idea of
authorship completely, but rather makes authors "transcendental" rather than historically real.
Don't worry about this part.
On 141b, Foucault takes up the question of "author" as product of "work" again, asking how "the
name of the author" serves a function within literary-social relations. The name of the author (not
to be confused with Lacan's "Name-of-the-Father") is, first of all, a proper name, a signifier that
designates a specific and discrete historical individual (just as your name designates you as a
specific historical individual). But an "author's" name does more than that: when we say
"Aristotle," or "Shakespeare," or even "Foucault," we mean more than just the guy who lived--
we also mean the thoughts he is attributed with, the mode of thinking, the objects of
contemplation, the methodology, and/or the writings (or forms of discourse) associated with that
name.
The proper name of an author oscillates between two poles: between designation, which refers to
the person, and description, which refers to the ideas, the work, associated with the name.
Designation and description are not the same, not isomorphous. The proper name, as a signifier,
can have either the signified of the actual person (the designation) or the signified of the
work/ideas. In each case, the relation between signifier and signified--between proper name and
what it either designates or describes--is arbitrary and separable.
For example: "Shakespeare" can refer to the guy who lived in Stratford-on-Avon in the
seventeenth century, or it can refer to the numerous plays and poems linked under the name
"Shakespeare." The idea of the separability of designation and description becomes clear when
someone argues that "Shakespeare did not write the plays of Shakespeare"--meaning that the
historical figure is not actually the guy responsible for the body of works called "the plays of
Shakespeare." Such a sentence makes sense only if "Shakespeare" signifies two separate things.
This shows that the author's name serves as a means of identification, not simply as an element
of speech. The name "Shakespeare" groups together a number of texts and differentiates them
from others: Shakespeare marks what is not G. Eliot and what is not T.S. Eliot, etc. The author's
name, according to Foucault, characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse; the
texts attributed to an author are given more status, more attention, and more cultural value than
texts which have no author. We would read the grocery list we talked about last week differently
if we knew it was written by T.S. Eliot. The author's name thus remains at the contours of texts,
Foucault says, separating one from another, and characterizing their mode of existence. The
name of the author is thus a variable, a signifier, which accompanies only certain texts to the
exclusion of others.
There are four features of texts or books which have authors--or, in Foucault's terms, texts which
create the author function.
1. Such texts are objects of appropriation, forms of property. Speeches and books were assigned
to real authors, Foucault argues, only when the authors became subjected to punishments for
what the speech or book said. When the writing/speech said something transgressive, something
that broke rules, then systems of authority (like Althusser's RSAs) had to find some locus from
which the transgressive speech came; the cops and courts had to find someone to punish.
Foucault's example is that of heresy: when heresy was uttered, there had to be a heretic behind
the utterance, since you can't punish words or ideas, but only the people who "author" those
words or ideas. From this idea of locating authorship in someone held responsible for writing or
speech came also the idea of ownership of works, and the idea of copyright rules associated with
ownership.
2. The "author function" is not a universal or constant feature of every text. Some texts don't
require, or create, an "author:" myths, fairy tales, folk stories, legends, jokes, etc. It used to be
that literary texts could be anonymous, whereas scientific texts had to be attached to a name, to
an "author function," because the credibility of the scientific text came from the name of the
author associated with it: Pliny says, Aristotle says, Hippocrates says, etc. In the 17th and 18th
centuries, Foucault says, this situation was reversed; scientific texts began to speak for
themselves, to be objective, and thus to be judged on the basis of the arguments presented (and
the reproducibility of results), and not on the authority of an individual author's name. Literary
works, in this era, began to be evaluated on the basis of the notion of the author--hence the
emergence of the idea of "Shakespeare" as "author function," not just as some guy who hung out
in London theaters in the Elizabethan era. In contemporary society, we see this illustrated in the
idea of an anonymous literary work, like Primary Colors, where the goal is to find out who
REALLY wrote it--to be able to associate the text with an "author function."
3. The author function is not formed spontaneously, through some simple attribution of a
discourse to an individual. Rather, it results from various cultural constructions, in which we
choose certain attributes of an individual as "authorial" attributes, and dismiss others. Thus, in
creating "Melville" as an author function, it is important to his status as "author" that he actually
did go on a whaling voyage; it is irrelevant to his status as author that he worked in a bowling
alley in Hawaii (although both are historically true).
Foucault says that philosophers and poets are not constructed as authors in the same way, but
that there are some transhistorical constants in how authors are culturally constructed. He looks
to St. Jerome as "author function" for these constants, examining how several texts are attributed
to a single author:
a. Texts are eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author if they are
markedly superior or inferior to other texts on the list; hence the "author function" is a
label of a certain standard level of quality. (This would keep the grocery list from being
part of T.S. Eliot's "work," i.e. a text which generates an "author function," because the
grocery list is not as good as "The Wasteland.")
b. A text is eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author when the ideas in
that text contradict or conflict with the ideas presented in other texts; thus the "author
function" denotes a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence.
c. A text is eliminated from belonging to a particular author when the style is different
from that of other texts belonging to that author, when it uses words and phrases not
found in other texts. Hence "author function" requires a stylistic uniformity.
d. Texts are eliminated which refer to events after the death of the author. Hence "author
function" means a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge.
Foucault reiterates these ideas (on p. 144a) and modifies them only slightly. The author's
biography explains the presence of certain events in the text; the author is a principle of
unity; the author neutralizes contradictions; the author is a particular source of expression
manifested equally well in texts, letters, fragments, grocery lists, etc.
4. The text always bears signs that refer to the author, or create the "author function." The most
easily recognizable of these signs is a pronoun, "I," though we know better than to assume that
the "I" of a narrator is identical to the "I" of an author. Foucault suggests that the author function
arises out of the difference, and separation, between the "author function" and the writer
signified in the text. This is most easily seen in narrative fiction, but is true of any form of
discourse, according to Foucault.
At the end of the article, Foucault talks about the idea of a transdiscursive position, people who
are initiators of discursive practices, not just individual texts. Such figures as Marx and Freud
(and Foucault) radically shift an entire mode of thinking; the discourses they initiate make them
more than just "authors" or "author functions" in the ways we've been talking about. I won't go
into the details of Foucault's argument about this here; it takes us further into Foucault's own
position as the initiator of analysis of discourses.
He ends his essay with some questions about the relations of subjects to discourse, so we can end
by looking at how Foucault transforms the question of any subject's relation to language via
Bakhtin's notion of discourse, i.e. the idea that language(s) are social-historical formations, rather
than ahistorical structures (as in Saussure's view). In this sense, look over the questions Foucault
poses on p. 148, where he asks first about the relation of subject to discourse, and then rewrites
humanist questions about authors intodiscursive questions about "author functions."

[Bibliography] [Relevant Link] [Other Theories] Cultural
Studies Postmodernism Foucault
Sophia Hsu
19 November 2002
Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"
An Outline
I. Why Foucault feels the need to ask such a question, "What is an author?"
A. Preliminary thinking of "author"
1. Roland Barthes' "death of the author"
2. Samuel Beckett's "What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's
speaking."
B. Originated from The Order of Things
1. Two related objections arise from Foucault's failure to realize the functions
of author in his book.
a. Foucault fails to describe properly Buffon or his work; his mentioning of Marx is also
inadequate in terms of the totality of his thought.
b. Foucault brings seemingly irrelevant names together and creates "monstrous
families" (1622).
2. Foucault's original purposes/defense:
a. He wants to locate the rules that formed a certain number of concepts and
theoretical relationships in Buffon's and Marx's works, instead of merely describing
them and their thoughts.
b. He tends to determine the functional conditions of specific discursive practices.
II. The purpose of this paper: to set aside a socio-historical analysis of the author as
an individual and the numerous questions that deserve attention in this context.
A. How the author was individualized in a culture such as ours.
B. The state we have given the author.
C. The systems of valorization in which the author was included.
D. The moment when the stories of heroes gave way to an author's biography
E. The conditions that fostered the formulation of the fundamental critical category of
"the man and his work."
III. The ethical principle of contemporary writing: it dominates writing as an ongoing
practice and slights our customary attention to the finished product.
A. The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of "expression"; it only
refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we
recognize it in its exterior deployment.
1. Writing as an interplay of signs.
2. Writing is concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly
disappears.
B. It is the kinship between writing and death.
1. The concept of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death.
2. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to
become the murderer of its author.
3. The author is transformed into a victim of his own writing.
IV. Two theses that have detained us from taking full measure of the author's
disappearance:
A. How can an author's works be defined? What should be included in his
work?
B. The notion of criture
1. It should allow us not only to circumvent references to an author, but to situate his
recent absence.
2. It stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text,
both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment.
3. The conception of criture sustains the privileges of the author through the
safeguard of the a priori.
V. Difficulties and problems related to "what is the name of an author?" and "how
does it function?"
A. It is more than a gesture; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description.
B. A proper name has other functions than that of signification: they alter between the
poles of description and designation.
C. The link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link
between an author's name and that which it names are not isomorphous and so not
function in the same way.
D. The presence of an author's name is functional in that it serves as a means of
classification.
E. The author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Its
status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates
F. The name of the author remains at the contours of texts, pointing to the existence of
certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society
and culture.
G. The function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation
of certain discourses within a society.
VI. Four different features of "author-function" in discourse:
A. Discourses are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of
a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago.
1. Penal code
2. Ownership, copyright
B. The "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse.
1. Authentification no longer required reference to the individual who had produced
them.
2. The role of the author seems to be transformed into an index.
C. This "author-function" 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.
1. Four criteria according to Saint Jerome about textual study
a. The texts that must be eliminated from the list of works attributed to a single author
are those inferior to the others.
b. Those whose ideas conflict with the doctrine expressed in the others.
c. Those written in a different style and containing words and phrases not ordinaril y
found in the other works.
d. Those referring to events or historical figures subsequent to the death of the author.
2. Modern criticism on textual study:
a. The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their
transformations, distortions, and their various modifications.
b. The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of
production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside
influence.
c. The author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts.
d. The author is a particular source of expression who is manifested equally well, and
with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth.
D. The "author-function" is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe,
determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform
manner in all discourses, at all times, an in any given culture; it is not defined by the
spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and
complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual
insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of
subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.
VII. Initiators of discursive practices:
A. These authors produced not only their work, but the possibility and the rules of
formation of other texts.
1. Freud vs. The Interpretation of Dreams
2. Marx vs. Capital
3. Ann Radcliffe vs. Gothic romance
B. The initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any
scientific endeavor.
C. The initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its future transformations.
D. The initiation of a discursive practice, unlike the founding of science, overshadows
and is necessarily detached from its later developments and transformations.
E. Discourses "returning to the origin"
1.Different from scientific "rediscoveries" and "reactivations"
a. Rediscoveries: the effects of analogy or isomorphism with current forms of
knowledge that allow the perception of forgotten or obscured figures.
b. Reactivations: the insertion of discourse into totally new domains of generalization,
practice, and transformation.
2. Features of "return to"
a. Designates a movement with its proper specificity, which characterizes the initiation
of discursive practices.
b. They tend to reinforce the enigmatic link between an author and his works.
c. Form a relationship between "fundamental" and mediate authors, which is not
identical to that which links an ordinary text to its immediate author.
VIII. Conclusion: Partially at the expense of themes and concepts that an author
places in his work, the "author-function" could also reveal the manner in which
discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships. The subject (and its
substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and
variable function of discourse.