What is an Author? (Foucault)
Short summary
France, 1969. The essay examines the concept of authorship and its function within discourse.
The philosopher critiques his earlier work for naively using authors' names without analyzing their function. He argues that contemporary writing has freed itself from the necessity of expression and that the relationship between writing and death has transformedâwhere works once created immortality, writing now involves the voluntary obliteration of the self. The author's disappearance, however, has not been fully explored; concepts like 'work' and 'Ă©criture' merely transpose the author's characteristics into transcendental terms rather than genuinely confronting this disappearance.
The essay proposes examining the 'author-function'âhow an author's name operates differently from a proper name, serving as a means of classification and characterizing a particular mode of discourse. This function has four key features: it relates to legal systems of ownership, it is not universal across all discourse types, it results from complex construction rather than simple attribution, and it gives rise to multiple subjective positions rather than referring to a single individual.
We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author...would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions: 'Who is the real author?'
Detailed summary
Division into chapters is editorial.
Introduction: reconsidering the role of the author
In 1969, a philosopher presented an essay that questioned the fundamental concept of authorship in discourse. He acknowledged that his previous work, particularly The Order of Things, had employed authors' names in a naive fashion without properly analyzing what an author actually represented.
He had analyzed verbal clusters as discursive layers in works on natural history, analysis of wealth, and political economy, but failed to examine how authors' names functioned within these discourses. This oversight led to two pertinent objections: that he had not properly described individual authors like a naturalist or an economist, and that he had created artificial groupings by placing disparate thinkers together. He clarified that his intention had never been to reproduce statements or establish genealogical tables, but rather to determine the functional conditions of specific discursive practices. The essay proposed to address this gap by examining the singular relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which a text points to the figure who precedes it.
Contemporary writing: the death of the author
The philosopher began by citing a writer who provided direction for understanding contemporary writing.
What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking.' In an indifference such as this we must recognize one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing.
This principle characterized not just a way of speaking and writing, but stood as an immanent rule that dominated writing as an ongoing practice. Two major themes illustrated this principle. First, contemporary writing had freed itself from the necessity of expression, referring only to itself in its exterior deployment.
Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind...it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.
The second theme concerned the kinship between writing and death. This relationship inverted the ancient Greek conception where narrative guaranteed a hero's immortality. Stories like The Arabian Nights had used narrative as protection against death, with the storyteller delaying the inevitable moment of silence. Modern culture had transformed this conception.
Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself...it is a voluntary obliteration of the self...Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill.
Writers like those who created major novels had become examples of this reversal. The link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of individual characteristics, with the writer known through the singularity of his absence and transformation into a victim of his own writing.
Critiquing replacements: the problems with work and Ă©criture
The philosopher argued that themes meant to replace the privileged position of the author had merely arrested genuine change. He examined two particularly important concepts. First was the thesis concerning a work. While criticism had moved to study structures and internal relationships rather than reconstituting an author's thought, the concept of a work itself remained problematic. What constituted a work if not something written by an author? Practical questions arose: should everything an individual wrote be included, even appointment reminders or laundry bills found in notebooks? The empirical activity of publishing complete works suffered from lacking a theoretical framework. Works like The Arabian Nights or ancient collections posed questions about what unity they designated.
The second problematic concept was Ă©criture. This notion should have allowed circumventing references to an author while situating his recent absence. It stood for an attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text's spatial dispersion and temporal deployment. However, this concept had merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. The visible signs of authorial activity were effaced to allow religious and critical modes of characterization. Granting primordial status to writing reinscribed in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of sacred origin and critical belief in creative nature. The conception of writing as absence transposed religious belief in continuous tradition and aesthetic principles of the work's survival beyond the author's death. This sustained the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priori, holding the author's disappearance in check by the transcendental.
The authors name as more than a proper name
Rather than repeating empty slogans about the author's disappearance, the philosopher proposed examining the empty space left by this disappearance. He focused on problems arising from the use of an author's name. The name of an author posed all problems related to proper names generally. Obviously not a pure reference, a proper name had other than indicative functionsâit was equivalent to a description.
When using such a name, one employed a word meaning one or a series of definite descriptions. A proper name had functions beyond signification. The link between a proper name and the individual named, and the link between an author's name and what it named, were not isomorphous and did not function the same way. Learning that an ordinary person did not have certain characteristics would not invalidate the name's reference to that person.
With an author's name, however, problems were more complex. Discovering a playwright was not born in a tourist house would not modify the author name's functioning, but proving he had not written attributed sonnets would constitute significant change. Establishing he wrote another's philosophical work would introduce a third type of alteration completely modifying how the author's name functioned. Consequently, an author's name was not precisely a proper name among others.
The name of an author is not precisely a proper name among others...it points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture.
An author's name was not simply an element of speech. Its presence was functional, serving as a means of classification. A name could group texts together and differentiate them from others. It established different forms of relationships among textsâhomogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentication, or common utilization. The author's name characterized a particular manner of existence of discourse, regulating its status and manner of reception within culture. Unlike a proper name moving from discourse interior to the real person outside, the author's name remained at the contours of texts, separating one from another, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence.
Four defining characteristics of the author-function
In dealing with the author as a function of discourse, the philosopher isolated four different features. First, texts with authors were objects of appropriation. The form of property they became had a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years prior. Importantly, this status as property was historically secondary to the penal code controlling appropriation.
Discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous...charged with risks.
Speeches and books were assigned real authors only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that discourse was considered transgressive. When a system of ownership and copyright rules were established toward the end of the eighteenth century, the transgressive properties intrinsic to writing became the forceful imperative of literature. The author, accepted into the social order of property, compensated for this new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse through systematic transgression.
Secondly, the author-function was not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within civilization, the same types of texts had not always required authors. There was a time when literary texts were accepted without question about their author's identity. Their anonymity was ignored because their age guaranteed authenticity. However, texts now called scientific were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the author's name was indicated. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new conception developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits within an anonymous conceptual system. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who produced them. Simultaneously, literary discourse became acceptable only if it carried an author's name. Every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the circumstances of writing. Literary works became totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.
The third point was that the author-function was not formed spontaneously through simple attribution of discourse to an individual.
The 'author-function' is not formed spontaneously...It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author...these aspects...are projections.
These aspects designated as an author were projections of ways of handling textsâin comparisons made, traits extracted as pertinent, continuities assigned, or exclusions practiced. All these operations varied according to period and form of discourse. A philosopher and a poet were not constructed in the same manner. There were, nevertheless, transhistorical constants in rules governing the construction of an author. In literary criticism, traditional methods for defining an author derived largely from those used in Christian tradition to authenticate texts.
A church father maintained that homonymy was not proof of common authorship. He established four criteria: eliminating texts inferior to others, those with conflicting ideas, those in different style, and those referring to subsequent events. Although modern criticism did not have the same suspicions, its strategies for defining the author presented striking similarities. The author explained the presence of certain events within a text through biography or social position. The author constituted a principle of unity where unevenness was ascribed to evolution or outside influence. The author served to neutralize contradictions found in texts. The belief governed this function that there must be a point where contradictions resolved around a fundamental originating contradiction. Finally, the author was a particular source of expression manifested with similar validity in texts, letters, fragments, and drafts.
However, it would be false to consider the author-function as pure reconstruction, since texts always bore signs referring to the author. These textual signsâpersonal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, verb conjugationâhad different bearing on texts with and without authors. When discourse was linked to an author, the role of these shifters was more complex and variable. In a first-person novel, neither the pronoun nor present tense referred directly to the writer or the time of writing. They stood for a second self whose similarity to the author was never fixed and underwent alteration within a single book. The author-function arose out of the scission in the division and distance of the two. In a mathematical treatise, the ego indicating circumstances of composition in the preface was not identical to the one concluding a demonstration. The author-function operated to effect the simultaneous dispersion of three egos.
Fourth, the author-function was tied to legal and institutional systems that circumscribed discourse. It did not operate uniformly in all discourses, times, and cultures. It was not defined by spontaneous attribution but through precise and complex procedures. It did not refer purely to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gave rise to a variety of egos and subjective positions that individuals of any class may occupy.
Initiators of discursive practices: Marx and Freud
The philosopher acknowledged restricting his analysis to discourse, giving the term author an excessively narrow meaning. However, within discourse a person could be the author of much more than a bookâof a theory, tradition, or discipline within which new books and authors could proliferate. Such authors occupied a transdiscursive position. Ancient thinkers, church fathers, first mathematicians, and originators of medical tradition played this role. The nineteenth century in Europe produced a singular type of author who should not be confused with great literary authors or founders of sciences. These were initiators of discursive practices.
The distinctive contribution of these authors was that they produced not only their own work but the possibility and rules of formation of other texts. Their role differed entirely from that of a novelist.
Marx and Freud...as 'initiators of discursive practices'...established the endless possibility of discourse...made possible a certain number of differences...which remain within the field of discourse they initiated.
A novelist who acquired importance might make possible the appearance of a genre, putting into circulation resemblances and analogies patterned on her work. However, these two thinkers made possible not only analogies but importantly a certain number of differences. They cleared space for introduction of elements other than their own, which nevertheless remained within the field of discourse they initiated. This differed from founding a science.
In a scientific program, the founding act was on equal footing with future transformations. It might appear as a single instance of a more general phenomenon, be questioned for being too intuitive, or be thought a hasty generalization. The founding act could always be rechanneled through the machinery of transformations it instituted. On the other hand, initiation of discursive practice was heterogeneous to its ulterior transformations. To extend psychoanalytic practice was not to presume a formal generality but to explore possible applications. There were no false statements in the work of these initiators. The initiation overshadowed and was necessarily detached from later developments. Theoretical validity of a statement was defined with respect to the initiator's work, whereas in science it was based on structural norms established in the field. The work of initiators was not situated in relation to a science; rather, science or discursive practice related to their works as primary points of reference. This distinction explained why practitioners of such discourses must return to the origin.
Implications and future directions for discourse analysis
The philosopher acknowledged the absence of positive propositions but gave reasons for continuing this work. Developing similar analysis could provide the basis for a typology of discourse. Such typology could not be adequately understood in relation to grammatical features or formal structures because there existed specific discursive properties irreducible to rules of grammar and logic. These properties required investigation to distinguish larger categories of discourse. The different forms of relationships an author could assume were evidently one of these discursive properties. This investigation might also permit introduction of historical analysis of discourseâstudying not only expressive value and formal transformations but mode of existence, modifications and variations of modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation. The author-function could reveal the manner in which discourse was articulated on the basis of social relationships.
It was possible to reexamine the privileges of the subject. In undertaking internal analysis of a work and delimiting biographical references, suspicions arose concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject.
The subject should not be entirely abandoned...but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies...analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse.
Rather than asking how a free subject penetrated the density of things and endowed them with meaning, one should ask under what conditions and through what forms an entity like the subject could appear in the order of discourse. The author-function was undoubtedly only one possible specification of the subject. Considering past historical transformations, it appeared that the form, complexity, and even existence of this function were far from immutable. One could easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses would unfold in pervasive anonymity. No longer would there be tiresome repetitions about who the real author was or what he revealed of his profound self. New questions would be heard about modes of existence of discourse, where it came from, how it circulated, who controlled it, what placements were determined for possible subjects, and who could fulfill these diverse functions of the subject.
Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference: 'What matter who's speaking?'