More on authors and authorship

by Chris Schatz

The notion of authorship is an important theme of post-structuralist thought. Michel Foucault reacts to the assertion of Roland Barthes that the author is dead because writing has superseded the voice. The concept of the author was equated by Barthes with a contextual explanation applied to works of literature, art, or music. Barthes rejected the notion of associating an author with a work in order to attain a degree of closure which would facilitate criticism. To Barthes, the author could no longer be considered as the deep structure in a particular text, the uniting force which creates meaning in that text. Barthes's conclusion is that unity is not prescribed by an author of a text, rather it is formed by the reader who interprets the multiple relations and meanings suggested by the text.

Michel Foucault reacts to Barthes's assumptions about the absence of the author and suggests that Barthes has prematurely declared the author dead. Though Foucault believes that the absence of the author is desirable for discourse about works of literature, art, and music, he gives two reasons why the notion of the author cannot yet be considered completely absent from writing.

First is the "idea of the work": Foucault claims that a structural analysis cannot properly investigate a work of literature, music, or art without resorting to explanation of the internal componenets of that work in terms of their creator (Foucault, 103). An understanding of a work divorced from understanding of the author would thus be incomplete.

Second is the idea that writing supposes the absence of author. Foucault suggests that the idea that writing supersedes its author, thereby murdering the author, is a synchronic perspective on the written work which neglects the "space in which [the work] is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds" (104). However, Foucault does not endorse the traditional notion of authorship. Rather he suggests that if the author is considered somehow vanished, then something else must assume the features previously equated with the author's name. Without the prevalence of the author, discourse about literature, art, and music would be able to attend to principles of subject instead of author.