Author, History, Affect

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Author, History, Affect

• Lecture 9 10

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• Michel Foucault, What is an Author? (1969)
• Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the
  Quixote (1941)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605 1615).

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• In the story by Borges, the fictional character
  Menard is a writer among whose works are the
  ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don
  Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII. (p.36)

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• Did Menard want to re-write the novel by
  Cervantes?
• Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted
  his life to writing a contemporary Quixote
  besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard
  did not want to write another Quixote, which
  surely is easy enough

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• - he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely,
  need one be obliged to note that his goal was
  never a mechanical transcription of the original
  he had no intention of copying it. His admirable
  ambition was to produce a number of pages which
  coincided word for word and line for line
  with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (37)

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• How does he do it? Through painstaking work and
  none of the drafts survive.
• The premise My general recollection of the
  Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and
  indifference, might well be the equivalent of the
  vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book. (39)

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• For Menard to reconstruct the book on this basis
  is without a shadow of a doubt, much more
  difficult than the problem that faced Cervantes.
• Menards technique This game of solitaire I
  play is governed by two polar rules the first
  allows me to try out formal or psychological
  variants the second forces me to sacrifice them
  to the original text and to come, by
  irrefutable arguments, to those eradications.
  (39)

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• The result, two Chapters, and a fragment of a
  third. BUT
• The Cervantes text and the Menard text are
  verbally identical, but the second is almost
  infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his
  detractors will say but ambiguity is
  richness.) (p.40)

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• Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the
  slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a
  new technique the technique of deliberate
  anachronism and fallacious attribution. That
  technique, requiring infinite patience and
  concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey
  as if it came after the Aeneid(p.42)

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• We can relate this idea to the following
  suggestion in Foucaults essay
• The author is the principle of thrift in the
  proliferation of meaning. (p.221)
• What does this mean?
• and, What would it mean to abandon this
  principle?

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• The coming into being of the notion of author
  constitutes the privileged moment of
  individualisation in the history of ideas,
  knowledge, literature, philosophy and the
  sciences (p.205).
• Foucaults opening premise is that the notion of
  the author is already disappearing (in 1950s
  1960s literature and criticism) this
  disappearance makes it possible for us to
  understand what had been the function of the
  author.

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• But, he also notes that some concepts have
  emerged to take the place, and adopt the same
  function as author.
• These are work oeuvre and writing
  écriture.

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• So, what is (was) an author?
• First, we need to consider the unique status of
  the name of the author. It is a proper name, but
  not like any other proper names.
• Why, because it functions as a way of grouping
  texts together it allows us to define them,
  differentiate them from and contrast them to
  others. (p.210)

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• In effect
• The authors name serves to characterise a
  certain mode of being of discourse the fact that
  the discourse has an authors nameshows that
  this discourse is not ordinary everyday speechOn
  the contrary it is a speech that must be received
  in a certain mode and that, in a givgen culture,
  must receive a certain status (211)

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• in a civilisation like our own there are a
  certain number of discourses endowed with the
  author function while others are deprived of
  it. (211)
• This author function has four features

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• 1. It is linked to the juridical and
  institutional system that encompasses,
  determines, and articulates the universe of
  discourses. In our society, discourses are
  objects of appropriation (property). (216)
• 2. It does not affect all discourses in the same
  way at all times and in all types of
  civilisation. (216)

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• 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. There are a series of operations
  through which critics, textual analysts, etc,
  constructs a certain being that we call author.

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• 4. The author is not pure reconstruction based on
  the inert material of the text. In fact, the text
  points to a range of levels of author. Here,
  the author function 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 (216)

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• Digression (?) into the idea of an author of an
  entire discipline (eg. Marx and Freud)

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• Why is this important?
• Firstly, it might offer a way of developing a
  typology of discourse and, in particular,
  could allow the historical analysis of
  discourse in terms of its mode of existence.
  (220)

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• But, also, on its basis, one couldreexamine the
  privileges of the subject. This would be a
  matter of depriving the subject (or its
  substitute) of its role as originator, and of
  analysing the subject as a variable and complex
  function of discourse. (221)

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• Next, one can investigate the ideological
  status of the author.
• We are told that the author is a genius, a
  source of invention and meaning, but in reality,
  the author functions in exactly the opposite way.
  
• The author is the principle of thrift in the
  proliferation of meaning. (p.221)

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• It is as if the author function responded to this
  question How can one reduce the great peril,
  the great danger with which fiction threatens our
  world? (221)
• Hence, the author allows a limitation of the
  cancerous and dangerous proliferation of
  significations

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• It is, Foucault suggests, now possible to imagine
  that this author function will shift and change,
  and perhaps disappear in such a manner that
  fiction and its polysemous texts will once again
  function according to another mode, but still
  within a system of constraint one that will no
  longer be the author but will have to be
  determined or, perhaps, experimented (222)

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• In this new mode of existence, we would be
  indifferent about who was actually speaking