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Muzaffer Derya Nazlpnar

Dr. Gamze Sabanc

Contemporary Approaches in Literary Criticism

28th April 2012

MICHEL FOUCAULT: WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?

Even with his title, Foucault is being provocative, taking a given and turning it into a

problem. In the first few paragraphs, Foucault responds to some of our most basic assumptions

about authorship, and then reminds us that although we regard the concept of authorship as

"solid and fundamental," that concept hasn't always existed but "came into being".

In addition to touching on our tendency to view the concept of authorship as "solid,"

Foucault also seems to take up our habit of thinking about authors as individuals, heroic figureswho somehow transcend or step outside history. Why, he wonders, are we so strongly inclined

to view authors in that way? Why are we often so resistant to the notion that authors are

products of their times? To make the answers of these questions clear, Foucault does some

jousting. First, he mixes it up with Roland Barthes, a very famous literary critic, who had

recently proclaimed the "death of the author." According to Foucault, Barthes had urged other

critics to realize that they could "do without [the author] and study the work itself" This urging,

Foucault implies, sounds a lot more radical than it really is. Next, Foucault turns his attention to

Derrida by claiming that although Derrida (like Barthes) presents his views as radical, they are

in truth quite conventional. Indeed, Foucault suggests, Derrida never really gets rid of the

author, but instead merely reassigns the author's powers and privileges to "writing" or to

"language itself."

If so, why does he bother to do all this? I think he doesn't want his readers to assume

that authorship is a "dead issue," a problem that's already been solved by Barthes and Derrida.

His aim here is to show that, despite all of their bombast, neither Barthes nor Derrida has

broken away from the question of the author--much less solved it.

Then, Foucault asks us to think about the ways in which an author's name "functions" in

our society. After raising questions about the functions of proper names, he goes on to say thatthe names of authors often serve a "classifactory" function. To get a sense of what he means,

just think about how the average bookstore is laid out. If you were to go to the fiction section

looking for a copy of Oliver Twist, for example, you'd search for books written by Charles

Dickens, not the workhouses, or books written in 1837 that are 489 pages long. Here, Foucault

asks, why do you--why do most of us--assume that it's "natural" for bookstores to classify books

according to the names of their authors? While you're mulling over that one, think about this:

What would happen to Oliver Twistif scholars were to discover that it hadn't been written by

Charles Dickens? Wouldn't most bookstores, and wouldn't most of us, feel that the novel would

have to be reclassified in light of that discovery? Why should we feel that way? After all, the

words of the novel wouldn't have changed, would they?

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Foucault moves to concept of the "author function, which is not a person and is not to

be confused with either the "author" or the "writer." The "author function" is more like a set of

beliefs or assumptions governing the production, circulation, classification and consumption of

texts. It is linked to the legal system and arises as a result of the need to punish those

responsible for transgressive statements. Moreover, the "author function" does not affect all

texts in the same way. For example, it doesn't seem to affect scientific texts as much as it affects

literary texts. If a chemistry teacher is talking about the periodic table, you probably wouldn't

stop her and say, "Wait a minute--who's the author of this table?" If I'm talking about a poem,

however, you might very well stop me and ask me about its author. Next, Foucault mentions

about the editorial problem of attribution-- the problem of deciding whether or not a given text

should be attributed to a particular author. This problem may seem rather trivial, since most of

the literary texts that we study have already been reliably attributed to an author. Imagine,

however, a case in which a scholar discovered a long-forgotten poem whose author was

completely unknown. Imagine, furthermore, that the scholar had a hunch that the author of the

poem was William Shakespeare. What would the scholar have to do, what rules would she have

to observe, what standards would she have to meet, in order to convince everyone else that she

was right? These questions remind of the "criteria of authenticity Lastly, Foucault suggests

that the term "author" doesn't refer purely and simply to a real individual. The "author" is much

like the "narrator," in other words, he or she can be an "alter ego" for the actual flesh-and-blood

"writer."

Here, Foucault takes off in a different direction, and his aim now is to show that the

"author function" applies not just to individual works, but also to larger discourses. This, then,

is the famous section on "founders of discursivity"--guys like Marx or Freud who produce theirown texts, plus "the possibilities or the rules for the formation of other texts. According to

Foucault, scientists can't really be "founders of discursivity." In making that statement, Foucault

seems to be distinguishing scientific discourses (in which there are, he suggests, a limited

number of possible statements) from discourses like that of psychoanalysis (in which the

number of possible statements is not and cannot be limited). I'm not sure that I understand

everything he has to say about this issue, but I do feel pretty sure of that much.

Near the end of the essay, Foucault argues that the author is not a source of infinite

meaning, as we often like to imagine, but rather part of a larger system of beliefs that serve to

limit and restrict meaning. In pondering this idea, think about how we might appeal to ideas of

"authorial intention" in order to limit what someone might say about a text, or mark some

interpretations and commentaries as illegitimate. In other words, there will always be some

"system of constraint" working upon us as Foucault insists.

Work Cited

Foucault, M. What is an Author. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Norton & Company: USA. 2001. 1623 - 1636.