What is an Author?

In his essay What is an Author? Michele Foucault makes a direct reference to, although this is probably more than a reference but rather a reading of, Roland Barthes famous essay Death of the Author. It seems to me that what Foucault undertakes in this text is essentially a deconstruction of the ‘death of the author’. He is in principle not questioning or saying the proposition by Barthes or other critics and philosopher as he says are wrong or inadequate, but rather saying that reality proves that we are far from a real death or disappearance of the author; at least theoretically one cannot subtract him from the study of the text because the author has leaves traces in it that are inescapable at the time of critique. Perhaps the author is dead or has died, and our trying to find THE meaning of the text within him can stop, but not his specter, at least this is how I understood this. This specter is what Foucault calls the author function. Before his death, the author needs to be defined and from that perhaps a horizon for the real death can be seen or hypothesized. This ‘author function’ basically transcends the ideas ‘the death of the author’ and the notions by witch this was signified.

As I read this I thought again of what it is to leave out who the author of a particular text is and thought that when we look at the form of a text, we are looking at the arrangement that someone made. The ‘montage’ that they are making with, yes, as Foucault and the other philosophers think, words and discourses that they did not invent. For instance, the paratextual signs that are included in a novel or a book; for instance the tittle makes reference to someone’s choosing, that, at least as I see it, was the authors, cold be the editors, doing. If an editor changes a tittle we will criticize him for ‘altering’ the original text. This questions his authority and places it into the real author. Another point I thought of was that a narrative will have a ‘narrator’ or a poem a ‘poetic voice’. This device has an author function. Perhaps the author is not one which holds the meaning of a text of literature but just one that arranged the language in a way that we find interesting to study. (Lazarillo de Tormes: why have researchers and critics tried so hard to find out who its author is?)

Orientalism

Edward Said’s book Orientalism is an interesting study of knowledge as power. He situates the knowledge the West has about the Orient as that which intrinsically expresses a hierarchy; a division. The division itself, of the naming, west/east, occident/orient, is allowing the possibility of difference, hence hierarchy; and hegemony as Said demonstrates. The parts of these binaries are charged, or packed, with different connotations or meanings that will be interpreted as us vs. them. The interesting part as Said points out, is that all of these connotations are a mere construction, even that of the west itself. Itself… This concept is of importance. In the history of the relations between west and east nothing stands as a symbol of equality. These two geographical areas are not on equal terms; one stands higher than the other. Said traces the instances of colonization of the Orient by the West and says that in the later there is also a correlative undertaking in culture. He gets to the position that acknowledges a reciprocal feeding of interpretations of the Orient, between the political discourse and the cultural discourse. Itself… or rather just ‘self’. Who’s self? The West’s self. At the heart of the practice of Orientalism there is a construction more of this self than that of the other. According to Said Orientalism tells us very little about the Orient, it rather tells us about occident. So what is known about the other is constructed, it is fictionalized, to legitimize the construction of ourselves, the West, and legitimize our superiority, our legitimate and godly power over the East. So knowledge about someone can give you power over them; knowing them better than they know themselves is the key to maintaining hegemony over a region or a certain people.

Cultural hegemony is basically how Said is pointing out the overall project of western culture and its creation of Orientalism. He says that the Orient is not just a simple fantasy but rather a reality in western culture. That is to say, the fiction, or fantasy as Said calls it, is not experienced as unreal but as reality; perceived as the reality of the Orient. Said points this out very precisely with his example of the French journalist that references his knowledge of the Orient to Chateaubriand and Nerval as the real Orient instead of what he was seeing and living himself.   So, when cultural hegemony has been consolidated, political domination will be an easy task.