A critical summary of Michael Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?

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Foucault begins by introducing the idea of an author as an individualisation within a field such as literature
or philosophy. As the notion of an author quite obviously arose within literature originally, work on
authorship focuses heavily on literature, and this is something that also features in work on genre.
Because of this, it often means that it is harder to apply the theories to film.
However, Foucault believes that when studying theories of genre and other similar concepts, it becomes
clear that they are of inferior quality, and not as useful as studying work through the lense of authorship.
It could be argued that authorship lets us define meaning more clearly, because if we accept the author as
the solitary producer of meaning within a work, perhaps we can define and understand the piece more
completely. However, Foucault’s dismissal of genre theory disregards the importance of studying a piece
within a group of similar works to understand how conventions create meaning.
Foucault seems to suggest that a works significance and meaning is made not from the subject matter,
but by how it is communicated by the arrangement of elements that make up the work. 
Something that could be criticised within some theories of authorship is the almost worshipful nature they
apply to an author, as the ‘sole creator of meaning’, disregarding outside influences, unintentional
meaning and for example, audience, as creators of meaning.
Foucault presents an interesting idea that could oppose this, suggesting that the writing of or creation of a
piece of work is almost a sacrifice, a voluntary disappearance into your creation, the ‘death of the author’.
He criticises a theory that attempts to support this idea, arguing that while it intends to displace the
author, it in fact does the opposite, upholding it and suppressing the real reasons for an author’s literary
‘death’. This theory proposes we study a piece not through, or to understand, the work’s relationship with
the author, but through analysing the work’s form and content. The issue with this theory is that, as
Foucault reminds us, that to consider a piece of writing a ‘work’, we have to first have an author,
otherwise would not every piece of writing be a work, and worthy of analysis? He then interestingly points
out that even if we do consider someone an author, we can surely not believe that everything they wrote
in their lives constitutes a ‘work’. This evidently means that when studying a work in the way the theory
proposes, you must be aware of the context of the author, and Foucault states that it is inadequate to
claim we should study the work and disregard the author. In these theories, however, surrounding the
‘death of an author’, he draws our attention to the importance of studying the space left behind, and the
possibilities this presents, for example, the ‘birth’ of the audience, and the recognition of them as
fundamental to finding significance within a work.
Foucault also raises the issues surrounding an author’s name, but although he explores these and the
difficulties that arise, he does not fully resolve the issues, as he himself admits. The issues lie in what the
name signifies, and Foucault explains that an author’s name is, like all other names, a description of the
person, without just one signification but of endless meanings, resulting in it being unable to be turned
into a singular reference. However, the issues raised by an author’s name are more complex that that of
an ‘ordinary name’, they function as a representation of the author’s body of work. An author’s name, as
Foucault puts it, has a role, performing a ‘classificatory function’. This name, in a manner similar to genre,
creates the ability to group together a number of works and ‘define them, differentiate them from, and
contrast them to others.’ Foucault’s well-expressed summary of the function a name has, can help us
understand the idea of an author having a persona or being a symbol, rather than an ordinary individual.
He offers an example here of Hermes Trismegistus – he did not exist, but had a number of works placed
under his name because of a sense of homogeneity throughout them, and this surely again has to be
comparable to the ideas of genre that Foucault earlier dismissed.
Foucault also discusses ideas of ownership in relationship to works, and how this has developed through
history. Before the seventeenth or eighteenth century, works with narratives, such as tragedies or
comedies were accepted for their content and didn’t appear to ‘need’ an author, their apparent
ancientness placing enough of a guarantee of quality upon them. Works of scientific content, dealing with
subjects such as cosmology, geography and natural sciences were only accepted and seen to be accurate
if they included their author’s name. Subsequently this seems to be reversed, with scientific discourses
being accepted for their own merits, and with literary creation being dependant on the author function,
anonymity becoming an enigma to decode, and audiences becoming desirous of an author for the work
they experienced.

Foucault eloquently sums up the function of the author, stating that it is inextricably linked to the
‘universe of discourses’, although effecting said discourses differently depending on the civilisation in
which they are present, and that the supposed ‘author’ does not have to refer to a individual but can refer
to ‘several selves’.
Although the ‘death of an author’ and suppressing the privileged position of an author has been discussed,
Foucault does not dismiss the importance of the author and presents the idea that they are not only the
author of their own text but can exceed that with the possibilities they present. It appears apparent, then,
that there are conflicting ideas within Foucault’s piece.

Foucault establishes the idea that to understand a text, the study of the relationship between itself and its
author, or lack of, is necessary, and although he discusses opposing concepts and calls for a culture
without the necessity of authorship, he admits himself that this is ‘pure romanticism.’ Foucault longs for
the day when a work’s importance is governed by its content, not by who is speaking, and although he
contemplates the moment that he believes will one day come, where the author function will disappear,
his piece arguably does not dispel the need for one.

From Work to Text: Roland Barthes

Over the past several years, a change has been taking place in our ideas about language and, as a
consequence, about the (literary) work, which owes at least its phenomenal existence to language. This
change is obviously linked to current developments in, among other fields, linguistics, anthropology,
Marxism, and psychoanalysis (the word "link" is used here in a deliberately neutral fashion: it implies no
decision about a determination, be it multiple and dialectical). The change affecting the notion of the work
does not necessarily come from the internal renewal of each of these disciplines, but proceeds, rather,
from their encounter at the level of an object that traditionally depends on none of
them. Interdisciplinary activity, valued today as an important aspect of research, cannot be accomplished
by simple confrontations between various specialized branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is not
a peaceful operation: it begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down--a process
made more violent, perhaps, by the jolts of fashion--to the benefit of a new object and a new language,
neither of which is in the domain of those branches of knowledge that one calmly sought to confront.

It is precisely this uneasiness with classification that allows for the diagnosis of a certain mutation. The
mutation that seems to be taking hold of the idea of the work must not, however, be overestimated: it is
part of an epistemological shift [glissement] rather than of a real break [coupure], a break of the kind
which, as has often been remarked, supposedly occurred during the last century, with the appearance of
Marxism and Freudianism. No new break seems to have occurred since, and it can be said that, in a way,
we have been involved in repetition for the past hundred years. Today history, our history, allows only
displacement, variation, going-beyond, and rejection. Just as Einsteinian science requires the inclusion of
the relativity of reference points in the object studied, so the combined activity of Marxism, Freudianism,
and structuralism requires, in the case of literature, the relativization of the scriptor's, the reader's, and
the observer's (the critic's) relationships. In opposition to the notion of the work--a traditional notion that
has long been and still is thought of in what might be called Newtonian fashion--there now arises a need
for a new object, one obtained by the displacement or overturning of previous categories. This object is
the Text. I realize that this word is fashionable and therefore suspect in certain quarters, but that is
precisely why I would like to review the principal propositions at the intersection of which the Text is
situated today. These propositions are to be understood as enunciations rather than arguments, as mere
indica- tions, as it were, approaches that "agree" to remain metaphoric. Here, then, are those
propositions: they deal with method, genre, the sign, the plural, filiation, reading (in an active sense), and
pleasure.

(1) The Text must not be thought of as a defined object. It would be useless to attempt a material
separation of works and texts. One must take particular care not to say that works are classical while
texts are avant-garde. Distinguishing them is not a matter of establishing a crude list in the name of
modernity and declaring certain literary productions to be "in" and others "out" on the basis of their
chronological situation. A very ancient work can contain "some text," while many products of
contemporary literature are not texts at all. The difference is as follows: the work is concrete, occupying a
portion of book-space (in a library, for example); the Text, on the other hand, is a methodological field.

This opposition recalls the distinction proposed by Lacan between "reality" and the "real": the one is
displayed, the other demonstrated. In the same way, the work can be seen in bookstores, in card
catalogues, and on course lists, while the text reveals itself, articulates itself according to or against
certain rules. While the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only as discourse.
The Text is not the decomposition of the work; rather it is the work that is the text's imaginary tail. In
other words, the Text is experienced only in an activity, a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop,
at the end of a library shelf, for example; the constitutive movement of the Text is a traversal [traversee]:
it can cut across a work, several works.

(2) Similarly, the Text does not come to a stop with (good) literature; it cannot be apprehended as part of
a hierarchy or even a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or
precisely), its subversive force with regard to old classifications. How can one classify Georges Bataille? Is
this writer a novelist, a poet, an essayist, an economist, a philosopher, a mystic? The answer is so
uncertain that manuals of literature generally chose to forget about Bataille; yet Bataille wrote texts--
even, perhaps, always one and the same text.

If the Text raises problems of classification, that is because it always implies an experience of limits.
Thibaudet used to speak (but in a very restricted sense) about limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's Life
of Rance, a work that today indeed seems to be a "text"): the Text is that which goes to the limit of the
rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, and so on). The Text tries to situate itself exactly behind the
limit of doxa (is not public opinion--constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass
communication--defined by its limits, its energy of exclusion, its censorship?). One could literally say that
the Text is always paradoxical.
(3) Whereas the Text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign, the work closes itself on a
signified. Two modes of signification can be attributed to this signified: on the one hand, one can assume
that it is obvious, in which case the work becomes the object of a "science of the letter" (philology); on
the other hand, one can assume that the signified is secret and ultimate, in which case one must search
for it, and the work then depends upon a hermeneutic, an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic,
thematic, for example). In brief, the work itself functions as a general sign and thus represents an
institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite
deferral of the signified [le recul infini du signifie]: the Text is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier. The
signifier must not be conceived as "the first stage of meaning," its material vestibule, but rather, on the
contrary, as its aftermath [apres-coup]. In the same way, the signifier's infinitude does not refer back to
some idea of the ineffable (of an unnamable signified) but to the idea of play. The engendering of the
perpetual signifier within the field of the text should not be identified with an organic process of
maturation or a hermeneutic process of deepening, but rather with a serial movement of dislocations,
overlappings, and variations. The logic that governs the Text is not comprehensive (seeking to define
"what the work means") but metonymic; and the activity of associations, contiguities, and cross-
references coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy. The work (in the best of cases) is moderately
symbolic (its symbolism runs out, comes to a halt), but the Text is radically symbolic. A work whose
integrally symbolic nature one conceives, perceives, and receives is a text.

In this way the Text is restored to language: like language, it is structured but decentered, without closure
(here one might note, in reply to the scornful insinuation of "faddishness" which is often directed against
structuralism, that the epistemological privilege presently granted to language proceeds precisely from our
discovery in language of a paradoxical idea of structure, a system without end or center).

(4) The Text is plural. This does not mean just that is has several meanings, but rather that it achieves
plurality of meaning, an irreducible plurality. The Text is not coexistence of meanings but passage,
traversal; thus it answers not to an interpretation, liberal though it may be, but to an explosion, a
dissemination. The Text's plurality does not depend on the ambiguity of its contents, but rather on what
could be called the stereographic plurality of the signifiers that weave it (etymologically the text is a
cloth; textus, from which text derives, means "woven").

The reader of the Text could be compared to an idle subject (a subject having relaxed his
"imaginary" [1]): this fairly empty subject strolls along the side of a valley at the bottom of which runs
a wadi (I use wadi here to stress a certain feeling of unfamiliarity). What he sees is multiple and
irreducible; it emerges from substances and levels that are heterogeneous and disconnected: lights,
colors, vegetation, heat, air, bursts of noise, high-pitched bird calls, children's cries from the other side of
the valley, paths, gestures, clothing of close and distant inhabitants. All these occurrences are partially
identifiable: they proceed from known codes, but their combination is unique, founding the stroll in
difference that can be repeated only as difference. This is what happens in the case of the Text: it can be
itself only in its difference (which does not mean its "individuality"); its reading is semelfactive (which
renders all inductive-deductive sciences of texts illusory--there is no "grammar" of the text) and yet
completely woven with quotations, references, and echoes. These are cultural languages (and what
language is not?), past or present, that traverse the text from one end to the other in a vast stereophony.

Every text, being itself the intertext of another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be
confused with a text's origins: to search for the "sources of" and "influence upon" a work is to satisfy the
myth of filiation. The quotations from which a text is constructed are anonymous, irrecoverable, and
yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks. The work does not upset monistic
philosophies, for which plurality is evil. Thus, when it is compared with the work, the text might well take
as its motto the words of the man possessed by devils: "My name is legion, for we are many" (Mark 5:9).

The plural or demonic texture that divides text from work can carry with it profound modifications in the
activity of reading and precisely in the areas where monologism seems to be the law. Some of the "texts"
of the Scriptures that have traditionally been recuperated by theological (historical or anagogical) monism
may perhaps lend themselves to a diffraction of meaning, while the Marxist interpretation of the work,
until now resolutely monistic, may be able to materialize itself even further by pluralizing itself (if, of
course, Marxist "institutions" allow this).
(5) The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Three things are postulated here: a determination of
the work by the outside world (by race, then by history), a consecution of works among themselves, and
anallocation of the work to its author. The author is regarded as the father and the owner of his work;
literary research therefore learns to respect the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while
society posits the legal nature of the author's relationship with his work (these are the "author's rights,"
which are actually quite recent; they were not legalized in France until the Revolution).

The Text, on the other hand, is read without the father's signature. The metaphor that describes the Text
is also distinct from that describing the work. The latter refers to the image of an organism that grows by
vital expansion, by "development" (a significantly ambiguous word, both biological and rhetorical). The
Text's metaphor is that of the network: [2] if the Text expands, it is under the effect of a combinatorial,
a systematics [3](an image which comes close to modern biology's views on the living being).

Therefore, no vital "respect" is owed to the Text: it can be broken (this is exactly what the Middle Ages did
with two authoritative texts, the Scriptures and Aristotle). The Text can be read without its father's
guarantee: the restitution of the intertext paradoxically abolishes the concept of filiation. It is not that the
author cannot "come back" into the Text, into his text; however, he can only do so as a "guest," so to
speak. If the author is a novelist, he inscribes himself in his text as one of his characters, as another
figure sewn into the rug; his signature is no longer privileged and paternal, the locus of genuine truth, but
rather, ludic. He becomes a "paper author": his life is no longer the origin of his fables, but a fable that
runs concurrently with his work. There is a reversal, and it is the work which affects the life, not the life
which affects the work: the work of Proust and Genet allows us to read their lives as a text. The word
"bio-graphy" reassumes its strong meaning, in accordance with its etymology. At the same time, the
enunciation's sincerity, which has been a veritable "cross" of literary morality, becomes a false problem:
the I that writes the text is never, itself, anything more than a paper I.

(6) The work is ordinarily an object of consumption. I intend no demagoguery in referring here to so-
called consumer culture, but one must realize that today it is the work's "quality" (this implies, ultimately,
an appreciation in terms of "taste") and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences
between books. There is no structural difference between "cultured" reading and casual subway reading.
The Text (if only because of its frequent "unreadability") decants the work from its consumption and
gathers it up as play, task, production, and activity. This means that the Text requires an attempt to
abolish (or at least to lessen) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the reader's
projection into the work, but by linking the two together in a single signifying process [pratique
signifiante].

The distance separating writing from reading is historical: during the era of greatest social division (before
the institution of democratic cultures), both reading and writing were class privileges. Rhetoric, the great
literary code of those times, taught writing (even though speeches and not texts were generally
produced). It is significant that the advent of democracy reversed the order: (secondary) school now
prides itself on teaching how to read(well), and not how to write.

In fact, reading in the sense of consuming is not playing with the text. Here "playing" must be understood
in all its polysemy. The text itself plays (like a door on its hinges, like a device in which there is some
"play"); and the reader himself plays twice over: playing the Text as one plays a game, he searches for a
practice that will re-produce the Text; but, to keep that practice from being reduced to a passive, inner
mimesis (the Text being precisely what resists such a reduction), he also plays the Text in the musical
sense of the term. The history of music (as practice, not as "art") happens to run quite parallel to the
history of the Text. There was a time when "practicing" music lovers were numerous (at least within the
confines ofa certain class), when "playing" and "listening" constituted an almost undifferentiated activity.
Then two roles appeared in succession: first, that of theinterpreter, to whom the bourgeois public
delegated its playing; second, that of the music lover who listened to music without knowing how to play
it. Today, post-serial music has disrupted the role of the "interpreter" by requiring him to be, in a certain
sense, the co-author of a score which he completes rather than "interprets."

The Text is largely a score of this new type: it asks the reader for an active collaboration. This is a great
innovation, because it compels us to ask "who executes the work?" (a question raised by Mallarme, who
wanted the audience to produce the book). Today only the critic executes the work (in both senses). The
reduction of reading to consumption is obviously responsible for the "boredom" that many people feel
when confronting the modern ("un-readable") text, or the avant-garde movie or painting: to suffer from
boredom means that one cannot produce the text, play it, open it out, make it go.

(7) This suggests one final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know if a hedonistic aesthetic
ever existed, but there certainly exists a pleasure associated with the work (at least with certain works). I
can enjoy reading and rereading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, and even--why not?--Alexandre Dumas; but this
pleasure, as keen as it may be and even if disengaged from all prejudice, remains partly (unless there has
been an exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption. If I can read those authors, I also know
that I cannot rewrite them (that today, one can no longer write "like that"); that rather depressing
knowledge is enough to separate one from the production of those works at the very moment when their
remoteness founds one's modernity (for what is "being modern" but the full realization that one cannot
begin to write the same works once again?). The Text, on the other hand, is linked to enjoyment
[jouissance], to pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier, the Text participates in a social utopia
of its own: prior to history, the Text achieves, if not the transparency of social relations, at least the
transparency of language relations. It is the space in which no one language has a hold over any other, in
which all languages circulate freely.

These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the articulation of a theory of the Text. This is not
just a consequence of the presenter's insufficiencies (besides, I have in many respects only recapitulated
what is being developed around me); rather, it proceeds from the fact that a theory of the Text cannot be
fully satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition. The destruction of metalanguage, or at least (since it may
become necessary to return to it provisionally) the questioning of it, is part of the theory itself. Discourse
on the Text should itself be only "text," search, and textual toil, since the Text is that social space that
leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no enunciative subject to hold the position ofjudge,
teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with the activity of
writing.