Bartering Barthes

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu)
Fri, 30 Jan 1998 15:32:31 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, WILL HOCHMAN wrote:

     Salinger's work is not beyond or above theory.  In fact, Matt's claim
     about Barthes "disappearing author" for me, is linked to Mr. Salinger's
     desire to remove his public self from his work...I read his cryptic
     statements on the subject to possbily be about his belief that his
     authorial presence is phony compared to his textual presence...and in f
     
I've always understood Barthes, like Foucault (who, in "What is an
Author," was essentially trying to clarify this very point) to deny the
author *and his hypostases* altogether--that is, to deny not only the
author, but what Foucault calls the "author function."  

Criticism, says Barthes, allots itself "the important task of discovering
the Author (or its hypostases:  society, history, psyche, liberty)."  So
we're not only getting rid of the author's person/persona; we're getting
rid of the idea of an author.  Authors are constructions that readers and
critics use to limit a text, to stop the play of differance, to pierce the
surface and locate the referent, the trascendental signified.  And if we
think we've done away with the author--we, in the age of disabuse, who
know better than to admit talk of the author--we're probably just fooling
ourselves.  We've probably just displaced the author's text-limiting
function onto something else (like, say, New Historicism's "social
energies").  Getting rid of the author means getting rid of him
entirely, such that there is no trace of him remaining.  His hypostases
(the underlying idea of the text-limiter) has to go, too.

So what about the Barthean reader?  the reader is the location of meaning,
but the reader can't have an identity, either (identity is hypostases of
author!!). The Barthean subject must live in an epistomological vacuum
where nothing is known but the cold steel of the structure of language.  I
wonder if he really can have it both ways.  Barthes wants to eat his cake
while denying the existence of flour and water. 

Apologies for the theory-speak,

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mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu