What is a subject

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What is a subject?

• Inhumanities 201
• Day 17

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Itinerary today

• Evaluate Michel Foucaults What is an Author?
• Evaluate the role of subjectivity in contemporary
  society-indeterminacy
• What is an individual?
• What constitutes agency, observation, and
  embodiment

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The impossible task

• Convince you of the loss of the subject
• Involves understanding the complexity of our
  social environment
• How important are you?
• Interpret all through our selves
• We start and end with the body . . . It is not
  all our body
• Think of times when our view of the world depends
  on something besides the body
• Panoramic vision
• Photography

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• Comes to importance during the 1960s
• What does it mean to be human in such a vast
  system?
• Economic
• Political
• Cultural
• human is a product of history
• Not the other way around

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What is the point?

• To get us to make strange the notion of the
  modern author
• Erase the simplistic notion of writing as pure
  expression
• Authors are always already embedded in discourses
  and certain means of production
• What does it matter who is speaking?
• Replaces author with author function

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The author function 1

• Writing is always an appropriation
• Not expression, per se
• Writing unfolds like a game
• An author is always embedded in language and
  discourse . . . A reorganization
• Author function links writing with property
• Punishment
• Ownership
• Responsibility

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Author Function 2

• Not universal and not constant
• Some stories dont need authors (fairy tales)
• Bifurcation of science and literature
• Scientific texts now expected to stand on own
  merits
• Early on, credibility in science comes from who
  speaks it
• Now agency removed from observation in science
• Literature now depends on who wrote it
• Authorship arises at a specific time in Western
  History
• Authorship impossible in some cultures

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Author function 3

• Author function not a simple attribution of
  discourse to an individual
• Construction in culture where we choose certain
  attributes of a person and not others
• Melville-whaler not bowler
• When is a text eliminated from consideration?
• Inconsistent, contradictory, stylistically
  inappropriate, etc.

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Author function 4

• The author function refers to the narrator or
  writer
• Has to continually stress who is producing the
  text
• Think of this as an instability that needs to
  continually be stabilized
• One writes in order to forestall death
• the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing
  more than the singularity of his absence. 102

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The death of the author

• No knowledge is formed without a system of
  communication, registration, accumulation, and
  displacement that is in itself a form of power,
  linked in its existence and its functioning to
  other forms of power.
• Not who influences whom, but who gets to speak?
• The subject more as an element of organization
  than a creative agent.
• Mark contours not influences (Cage)

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Subjects in systems

• Although we begin and end with the body what
  happens in the middle world of perception that
  brings new experiences to the fore?
• What about others bodies
• Including non-human bodies

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