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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Michel Foucault "What is an Author?" (1969-70) |
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(text of
a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophie on 22 February 1969
(Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970).
This translation by Josué V. Harari has been slightly modified.
The
coming into being of the notion of "author" constitutes the
privileged
moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature,
philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the
history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories
seem relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with
the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work.
I shall
not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author's persona. Certainly, it
would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like
ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and
attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was
involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather
than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of "the-man-and-his-work
criticism" began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with
the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text
points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes
it.
Beckett nicely formulates the theme with which I would like to begin:
"What does it matter who is speaking;'
someone said; 'what does
it matter who is speaking.'" In this indifference appears one of the fundamental
ethical principles of contemporary writing [écriture].
I say
"ethical" because this indifference is really not a trait characterizing the
manner in which one speaks and writes but, rather, a kind of immanent rule,
taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as
something completed, but dominating it as a practice. Since it is too familiar
to require a lengthy analysis, this immanent rule can be adequately illustrated
here by tracing two of its major themes.
First of
all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of
expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the
confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded
exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less
according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the
signifier. 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.
The
second theme, writing's relationship with death, is even more
familiar. This link subverts an old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic,
which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero: if he was willing
to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might
pass into immortality; the narrative then redeemed this accepted death. In
another way, the motivation, as well as the theme and the pretext of
Arabian narratives—such
as The Thousand and One Nights—was
also the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in
order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence
the narrator. Scheherazade's narrative is an effort, renewed each
night, to keep death outside the circle of life.
Our
culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something
designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the
sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be
represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence.
The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the
right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust,
and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death
is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual
characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and
what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his
particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is
reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the
role of the dead man in the game of writing.
None of
this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance—or death—of the author some time ago.
But the consequences of their
discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been
accurately measured. A certain number of notions that are intended to
replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that
privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. I shall
examine two of these notions, both of great importance today.
The first
is the idea of the work [oeuvre].
It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the
work's relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a
thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its
structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal
relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work?
What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it
composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately.
If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left
behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called
a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his
papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies
during his imprisonment.
Even when
an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether
everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem
is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of
Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be
published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself
published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously.
The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the
bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one
finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry
list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define
a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of
the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake
the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory.
We could
go even further. Does The Thousand and One Nights constitute a work?
What about Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies or Diogenes Laërtes'
Lives? A multitude of questions arises with regard to this notion of
the work. Consequently, it is not enough to declare that we should do without
the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity
that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's
individuality.
Another notion which has hindered us from taking full
measure of the author's disappearance, blurring and concealing the moment of
this effacement and subtly preserving the author's existence, is the notion of
writing [écriture]. When rigorously applied, this notion should allow
us not only to circumvent references to the author, but also to situate his
recent absence. The notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with
neither the act of writing nor the indication – be it symptom or sign – of a
meaning that someone might have wanted to express. We try, with great effort, to
imagine the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in
which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds.
In
current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical
characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to
efface the more visible marks of the author's empiricity by playing off, one
against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and
the religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of
retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its
sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character. To
admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible,
subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in
transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which
requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit signification,
silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rise to commentary).
To
imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental
terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled
tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation
beyond the author's death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him.
This
usage of the notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the author's
privileges under the protection of the a priori: it keeps alive, in the gray
light of neutralization, the interplay of those representations that
formed a particular image of the author. The author's disappearance,
which, since Mallarmé, has been a constantly recurring event, is subject to a
series of transcendental barriers. There seems to be an important dividing line
between those who believe that they can still locate today's discontinuities
[ruptures] in the historico-transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century
and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition.
§
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 author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps
and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.
First, we
need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author's name.
What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I
shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents.
The
author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the
problems
common to all proper names. (Here I refer to Searle's analyses, among
others.') Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple
reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a
gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description.
When one says "Aristotle," one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, or
a series, of definite descriptions, such as "the author of the
Analytics,"
"the founder of ontology," and so forth. One cannot stop there, however, because
a proper name does not have just one signification.
When we
discover that Arthur Rimbaud did not write La Chasse spirituelle, we
cannot pretend that the meaning of this proper name, or that of the author, has
been altered. The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two
poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what
they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in
that of description; it must be a specific link. However—and
it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise—the
links between the proper name and the individual named and between the author's
name and what it names are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way.
There are several differences.
If for
example, Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, or was not born in Paris, or is
not a doctor, the name Pierre Dupont will still always refer to the same person,
such things do not modify the link of designation. The problems raised by the
author's name are much more complex, however. If I discover that Shakespeare was
not born in the house we visit today, this is a modification that, obviously,
will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that
Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would
constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name
functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's
Organon by
showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of
Shakespeare, that would be a third type of change that would entirely modify the
functioning of the author's name. The author's name is not, therefore, just a
proper name like the rest.
Many
other facts point out the paradoxical singularity of the author's name. To say
that Pierre Dupont does not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer or
Hermes Trismegistus did not exist. In the first case, it means that no one has
the name Pierre Dupont; in the second, it means that several people were mixed
together under one name, or that the true author had none of the traits
traditionally ascribed to the personae of Homer or Hermes. To say that X's real
name is actually Jacques Durand instead of Pierre Dupont is not the same as
saying that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. One could also question the meaning
and functioning of propositions like "Bourbaki is so-and-so, so-and-so, and
so-forth," and "Victor Eremite, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Prater Taciturnus,
Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard."
These
differences may result from the fact that an
author's name is
not simply an element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object,
of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with
regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function.
Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts,
define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In
addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. Hermes Trismegistus did
not exist, nor did Hippocrates—in
the sense that Balzac existed—but
the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that
there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation,
authentication of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or
concomitant utilization. The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode
of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author's name, that
one can say "this was written by so-and-so" or "so-and-so is its author," shows
that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes,
not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech
that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must
receive a certain status.
It would
seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the
interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it;
instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text,
revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name
manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of
this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it
located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that
founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As
a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there area certain
number of discourses endowed with the "author function" while others are
deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an
author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An
anonymous text posted on a wall probably has an editor – but not an author. The
author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence,
circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.
§
Let us
analyze this "author function" as we have just described it. In our culture, how
does one characterize a discourse containing the author function? In what way is
this discourse different from other discourses? If we limit our remarks to the
author of a book or a text, we can isolate four different characteristics.
First of
all, discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which
they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many
years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been
subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation.
Texts, books, and
discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralized and
sacralizing figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment,
that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our
culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product,
a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act—an
act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the
illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture
fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.
Once a
system of ownership for texts came into being, once strict rules concerning
author's rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related
matters were enacted—at
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century—the
possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and
more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. It is as if the author,
beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that
characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by
rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practicing
transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing that was now guaranteed
the benefits of ownership.
The
author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way,
however. In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts
that have required attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts we
today call "literary" (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were
accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the
identity of their author, their anonymity caused no difficulties since their
ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of
their status. On the other hand, those texts we now would call scientific—those
dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences
and geography— were
accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as "true," only when marked with the
name of their author. "Hippocrates said," "Pliny recounts," were not really
formulas of an argument based on authority; they were the markers inserted in
discourses that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated
truth.
A
switch takes place in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Scientific
discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an
established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic
ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as
their guarantee. The author function faded away, and the inventor's name served
only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property, body,
group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the same token,
literary
discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function. We
now ask of each poetic or fictional text: From where does it come, who wrote it,
when, under what circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning
ascribed to it and the status or value accorded it depend on the manner in which
we answer these questions. And if a text should be discovered in a
state of anonymity—whether
as a consequence of an accident or the author's explicit wish—the
game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not
tolerable, we can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result, the
author function today plays an important role in our view of literary works.
(These are obviously generalizations that would have to be refined insofar as
recent critical practice is concerned. Criticism began some time ago to
treat works according to their genre and type, following the recurrent elements
that are enfigured in them, as proper variations around an invariant that is no
longer the individual creator. Even so, if in mathematics reference to
the author is barely anything any longer but a manner of naming theorems or sets
of propositions, in biology and medicine the indication of the author and the
date of his work playa rather different role. It is not simply a manner of
indicating the source, but of providing a certain index of "reality" in relation
to the techniques and objects of experience made use of in a particular period
and in such-and-such a laboratory.)
The
third characteristic of this author function
is that it does
not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It
is, rather, the result of a complex operation that
constructs a certain
being of reason that we call "author." Critics doubtless try to give
this being of reason a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a
"deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which writing
originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as
making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing
terms, of the operations we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the
traits we establish as pertinent, the continuities we recognize, or the
exclusions we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types
of discourse. We do not-construct a "philosophical author" as we do a "poet,"
just as in the eighteenth century one did not construct a novelist as we do
today. StilI, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of
author construction.
It seems,
for example that the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author—or,
rather, constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and
discourses—is
directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or
rejected) the texts at its disposal. In order to "rediscover" an author in a
work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those that Christian exegesis
employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness.
In De Viris Mustribus, Saint Jerome explains that homonymy is not
sufficient to identify legitimately authors of more than one work: different
individuals could have had the same name, or one man could have, illegitimately,
borrowed another's patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not enough
when one works within a textual tradition.
How,
then, can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can
one use the author function to determine if one is dealing with one or several
individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four criteria: (i) if among several books
attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from
the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined as a constant
level of value); (2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the
doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a
field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one must also exclude works
that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not
ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a
stylistic unity); (4) finally, passages quoting statements made or mentioning
events that occurred after the author's death must be regarded as interpolated
texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a
certain number of events).
Modern
literary criticism, even when—as is now customary—it is not concerned with
questions of authentication, still defines the author in much the same way:
the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of
certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and
diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his
individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation
of his basic design). The author is also the principle of a certain unity of
writing—all
differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of
evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the
contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be—at
a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious—a
point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last
tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction.
Finally, the author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less
completed forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in
works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. Clearly, Saint Jerome's four
criteria of authenticity (criteria that seem totally insufficient for today's
exegetes) do define the four modalities according to which modern criticism
brings the author function into play.
But the
author function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a
text given as inert material. The text always contains a certain number of signs
referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal
pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not
play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those
lacking it. In the latter, such "shifters" refer to the real speaker and to the
spatio-temporal coordinates of his discourse (although certain modifications can
occur, as in the operation of relating discourses in the first person). In the
former, however, their role is more complex and variable. Everyone knows that,
in a novel offered as a narrator's account, neither the first-person pronoun nor
the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he
writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often
changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the
author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the
author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this
division and this distance.
One might
object that this is a characteristic peculiar to novelistic or poetic discourse,
a game in which only "quasi discourses" participate. In fact, however, all
discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self. The
self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics - and that
indicates the circumstances ofthe treatise's composition identical neither in
its position nor in its functioning to self speaks in the course of a
demonstration, and that appears the form of "I conclude" or "I suppose." In the
first case, the "I" refers to an individual without an equivalent who, in a
determined place and time, completed a certain task; in the second, the "I"
indicates an instance and a level of demonstration which any individual could
perform provided that he accepted the same system of symbols, play of axioms and
set of previous demonstrations. We could also, in the same treatise locate a
third self; one that speaks to tell the work's meaning, the obstacles
encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is
situated in the field of already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical
discourses. The author function is not assumed by the first of these selves at
the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than a fictitious
splitting in two of the first one. On the contrary, in these discourses the
author function operates so as to effect the dispersion of these three
simultaneous selves.
No doubt,
analysis could discover still more characteristic traits of the author function.
I will limit myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most
visible and the most important. They can be summarized as follows:(1) the author
function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses,
determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect
all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization;
(3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its
producer but, rather, by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it
does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise
simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be
occupied by different classes of individuals.
Up to
this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author
function in painting, music, and other arts should have been discussed; but even
supposing that we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem
to have given the term "author" much too narrow a meaning. I have discussed the
author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a
book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. It is easy to see that in the
sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be
the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and
authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position that I
will call "transdiscursive." This is a recurring phenomenon – certainly as old
as our civilization. Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, as well as the
first mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition, all
played this role. Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century, there
appeared in Europe another, more uncommon, kind of author, whom one should
confuse with neither the "great" literary authors, nor the authors of religious
texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call
those who belong in this last group "founders of discursivity."
They are
unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have
produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of
other texts. In this sense they are very different, for example, from a
novelist, who is, in fact, nothing more than the author of his own text.
Freud is not just the author of
The Interpretation of
Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious;
Marx is not just the author of the
Communist Manifesto
or Das Kapital: they both have
established an endless possibility of discourse.
Obviously, it is easy
to object. One might say that it is not true that the author of a novel is only
the author of his own text; in a sense, he also, provided that he acquires some
"importance," governs and commands more than that. To take a very simple
example, one could say that Ann Radcliffe not only wrote
The Castles of
Athlin and Dunbayne and several other novels but also made possible the
appearance of the Gothic horror novel at the beginning of the nineteenth
century; in that respect, her author function exceeds her own work.
But I think there is an answer to this objection. These founders of discursivity
(I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first
and the most important cases) make possible something
altogether
different from what a novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffe's texts
opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have
their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic signs,
figures, relationships, and structures that could be reused by others. In other
words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novel means that in
the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Radcliffe's works,
the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden
castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world
expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, when I
speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made
possible not only a certain number of analogies but also (and equally important)
a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for
something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they
founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not (simply)
mean that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis
in the works of Karl Abraham, or Melanie Klein; it means that Freud made
possible a certain number of divergences—with
respect to his own texts, concepts and hypotheses—that
all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself.
This
would seem to present a new difficulty, however, or at least a new problem: is
the above not true, after all, of any founder of a science, or of any author who
has introduced some transformation into a science that might be called fecund?
After all, Galileo made possible not only those discourses which repeated the
laws he had formulated, but also statements very different from what he himself
had said. If Georges Cuvier is the founder of biology, or Ferdinand de Saussure
the founder of linguistics, it is not because they were imitated, nor because
people have since taken up again the concept of organism or sign; it is because
Cuvier made possible, to a certain extent, a theory of evolution diametrically
opposed to his own fixism; it is because Saussure made possible a generative
grammar radically different from his structural analyses. Superficially, then,
the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any
scientific endeavor.
Still,
there is a difference, and a notable one. In the case of a science, the act that
founds it is on an equal footing with its future transformations; this act
becomes in some respects part of the set of modifications that I makes possible.
Of course, this belonging can take several forms. In the future development of a
science, the founding act may appear as little more than a particular instance
of a more general phenomenon that unveils itself in the process. It can also
turn out to be marred by intuition and empirical bias; one must then reformulate
it, making it the object of a certain number of supplementary theoretical
operations that establish it more rigorously, and so on. Finally, it can seem to
be a hasty generalization that must be retraced. In other words, the founding
act of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those
transformations which derive from it.
In
contrast, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its
subsequent transformations. To expand a type of discursivity such as
psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it a form generality it would
not have permitted at the outset but, rather, open it up to a certain number of
possible applications. To limit psychoanalysis as a type of discursivity is, in
reality, to try to isolate in the founding act an eventually restricted number
of propositions or statements to which, alone, one grants a founding value, and
in relation to which certain concepts or theories accepted by Freud might be
considered as derived, secondary, and accessory. In addition, one does not
declare certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead,
when trying to seize the act of founding, one sets aside those statements that
are not pertinent, either because they are deemed inessential, or because they
are considered "prehistoric" and derived from another type of discursivity. In
other words, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive
practice does not participate in its later transformations. As a result, one
defines a proposition's theoretical validity in relation to the work of the
founders—while, in
the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in relation to what physics or cosmology
is in its intrinsic structure and normativity that one affirms the validity of
any proposition those men may have put forth. To phrase it very schematically:
the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science
defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to
their work as primary coordinates.
In this
way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of
discursivity, for a "return to the origin." This return which
is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is
not a historical supplement that would be added to the discursivity, or merely
an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes a effective and necessary task of
transforming the discursive practice itself. Reexamination of Galileo's text may
well change our understanding of the history of mechanics, but it will never be
able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud's texts
modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx's would modify
Marxism.
What I
have just outlined regarding these "discursive instaurations" is, of course,
very schematic; this is true, in particular, of the opposition I have tried to
draw between discursive initiation and scientific founding. It is not always
easy to distinguish between the two; moreover, nothing proves that they are two
mutually exclusive procedures. I have attempted the distinction for only one
reason: to show that the author function, which is complex enough when one tries
to situate it at the level of a book or a series of texts that carry a given
signature, involves still more determining factors when one tries to analyze it
in larger units; such as groups of works or entire disciplines.
§
To
conclude, I would like to review the reasons why I attach a certain importance
to what l have said.
On the
one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an
approach to a typology of discourse. It seems to me, at least at first glance,
that such a typology cannot be constructed solely from the grammatical features,
formal structures, and objects of discourse: more likely, there exist properties
or relationships peculiar to discourse (not reducible to the rules of grammar
and logic), and one must use these to distinguish the major categories of
discourse. The relationship (or non-relationship) with an author, and the
different forms this relationship takes, constitute – in a quite visible manner
– one of these discursive properties.
On the
other hand, I believe that one could find here an introduction to the
historical analysis of discourse. 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.
It would
seem that one could also, beginning with analyses of this type, reexamine the
privileges of the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and
architectonic analysis of a work (be it a literary text, philosophical system,
or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological references,
one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding
role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in
order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the
subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies.
Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the
questions: How can a free subject penetrate the density of things and give it
meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give
rise to the designs that are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be
raised: How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a
subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type
of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short,
it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as
originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of
discourse.
Second,
there are reasons dealing with the "ideological" status of the author. 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 one's resources and riches but also with one's 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 truth
is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations
that 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.
In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a
perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function
in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an
ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically
real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure
that inserts it, one has an ideological production.
The author is
therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear
the proliferation of meaning.
In saying
this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited
by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a
culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which
fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without
passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although,
since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of
the fictive; a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois
society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical
modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author
function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think
that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of
changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction
and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but
still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but
will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced [expérimenter].
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 self 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?
§
NOTES
Note 1. John Searle, Essay in the philosophy of language
(Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969) pp. 162-74
[ ]
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