Individuals arent' the people who read; they're the people who get hit
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Sun, 13 Sep 1998 17:08:16 -0400
This is long, but necessary. We're not all on the same page, so to
speak.
Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but I'd recommend to anybody interested in
this thread that she or he find a personal copy of Barthes's "The Death
of the Author" and Foucault's "What is an Author." They are good
background reading, and they will help with these terms, which so far
have been the source of much confusion: "lisible" ("readerly"),
"scriptible" ("writerly"), "individual," "author."
Jim Rovira wrote:
> I'm not espousing the death of the author as the death of meaning in
> literature--
I realize that you aren't; my point is that Barthes *is*, and it's
important to distinguish between reader-response type theories and the
more poststructural Death of the Individual theories.
When one starts pushing these particular author-boulders over the edge
of the cliff, one is working, whether one realizes it or not, to start
an avalanche, and in that avalance are all the major components of the
western individual. Point one: the Death of the Author, as most people
conceive it, does not entail the death of the individual. This is good
and useful, on some level, because students can grab hold of the general
idea of the death of the author and it can be liberating, without
approaching the death of the individual (readers are timeless and
placeless in Barthes), which is more complex and more unsettling. But
the death of the individual does loom. I'm very serious, though nobody
really seems aware of it. Barthes erases not only the individuality of
the author, but of the reader, too. Everyting is a tissue of
quotations, and there are no anterior ideas. We are spoken through,
interpellated--subjects not in the sense of agency, but in the sense of
subjection.
The idea that meaning is located in the reader is a simplified, not
entirely accurate redepeployment of Barthes. This is point two. Most
people, through little fault of their own, elide the difference.
As quickly as you can kill them, authors spring up (like so many
Banquo's ghosts?) and reinstall themselves in the form of "author
function." To liberate the text truly, you have to kill the author
function, too. Consider: "Literature ... by refusing to assign a
'secret,' and ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as a
text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is,
in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law"
(Barthes, "The Death of the Author," trans. Geoff Bennington)
> but as I said in a previous post, and as you mentioned at the
> end of your post, the author becomes the reader of a text once the text
> is published. I don't think you **intended** this (a loaded word, now :)
> ), but I will say that the "author" dies at that point and becomes just a
> reader.
If I understand *you* correctly, it's exactly what I intended.
> You need to establish your line of reasoning from death of author to loss
> of meaning. It was affirmed, but not demonstrated to be true.
Authors are constructions imposed upon texts in order to limit their
freeplay, their jolly cavorting about in the great tissue of freeform
quotations. We supply texts with authors in order to grant them a final
meaning, an ultimate, stable signified. Authors are metanarratives that
legitimate one reading or "meaning" over other possible "meanings" by
the fact that they produced a text with something in mind. If you can
tell me what Wyatt was thinking when he wrote "Thanked be fortune it
hath been otherwise," your reading is more "true" than mine.
Barthes goes this far without ambiguity. But he also pretty much
announces clearly that the Author, in the end, is the same thing as
God. The author-God and all its hypostases: reason, science, law,
society, history, liberty, etc. These are the institutions Foucault
calls "author functions"--they are used in creating "meaning" in a text
after the author has been removed. The point is that they, too, are
metanarratives, and that by replacing the author with an "author
function," we've missed the idea of dead authors. A person can feel he
has got around the author and all that, but he still creates a meaning
for whatever he is reading. That meaning is a function of other
incarnations of the author.
Getting rid of the author means getting rid of those damned hypostases,
those other manifestations, which are God, reasons, science, law,
society, history, liberty, etc. Getting rid of western values, which we
use to create meaning in texts and in the world (which, itself made of
innumerable narratives, is ultimately only a text).
Somewhere in this chain of reasoning, Barthes gives way to Foucault and
the poststructuralists. I'm not sure where. As I said last time we had
this discussion, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea of Barthes
as a structuralist, since he seems to stretch the boundaries--he appears
to have at least two or three toes, if not a whole French-booted foot,
in poststructuralism. When Barthes recognizes that meaning is socially
constructed--a construction, rather than a stable, anterior sort of
structure--he is being poststructural. Whatever. He starts the ball
rolling with the death of the author, and he expands the realm of the
author to include other centers of western culture (God, reason,
science, law). Although he doesn't make the move explicitly, he implies
that the death of the author is also the death of western ways of making
meaning.
Note that the reader, the beloved, meaning-generating reader, is
supposed to leave his wistful, quixotic individuality at home when he
reads with Barthes:
"a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this
destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without
history, biography, psychology; he is simply that *someone* who holds
together in a single field all the traces by which the text is
constituted." (Trans. Geoff Bennington)
All this is quite beyond simple reader-response theory.
> There's a way in which your argument can work both ways. In a sense,
> anchoring meaning in the author is similar to putting all the authority
> in a priest figure--the author. This disempowers the individual by
> submitting all individual readings to One Reader.
The author and the "individual" are the same phenomenon. Foucault notes
somewhere that the author came into being the moment he was in a
position to be punished for what he had written. An author is somebody
responsible for a text. When the state could single out one person as
the source of a text, we had an author. Texts have meaning in the same
way that texts have transgressive potential.
The author and the individual are the same, meaning-making machines.
Other people in this discussion are talking about an "individual" who
stands as a phenomenon distinct from the "author." But Barthes's
"reader" doesn't have an individual identity--he isn't an individual.
it is precisely because he leaves his individuality behind that the
individual can become a reader; it is precisely because she leaves
behind her experience with society, history, reason, science, law, etc.
that an individual can read a text without imposing on it a final
signified.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu