Are You an Author?

“Author” is one of those terms that, unfortunately, New Keywords does not describe. (The book is—as its editors freely admit—a necessarily selective and incomplete “collection” of terms.) If there were to be an entry for this term, however, it would have to address Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” (The essay was later included in his 1977 book Image-Music-Text. Here are some notes on it). This phrase should remind you of Mitchell’s “art” entry in New Keywords; remember how he talks about the many twentieth-century announcements of the “death” of various art forms? Barthes declares that the idealized author is “dead” because “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” This conception of “text” should be familiar to you too, by now.

What Barthes means by an “author” is mostly a nineteenth-century figure, although he does not really note this historical condition. (Nor does he bother to seek out examples of authorship to support his argument beyond those who are iconic in France.) Another key ingredient of the term “author” would be Michel Foucault’s 1970 essay “What Is an Author?” (Here is an excerpt from the essay, and here is a summary.) Foucault, in describing his notion of the “author-function,” fills in some of the historical gaps in Barthes’ essay, by looking at authorship beginning in the Middle Ages as a way of controlling ideas and defining intellectual property. In other words, it was only when “a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.” Huh? I think what he’s saying here is that governing forces have always kept tabs on who is writing in order to regulate what is written; it was only when this regulation eventually gave authors ownership of their work (thus enabling authorship as a profession) that authors took on a heroic cultural role. Here you might think of the distinction, as marked perhaps in the aisles of the mega-bookstore, between capital-L “Literature,” where you find “great books,” and plain old “literature,” as it would appear in the phrase “travel literature” or “scientific literature,” i.e., a body of writing. Like the difference between “art” and “Art,” this distinction implies cultural status: great Authors write great Literature.

It would also be important that our prospective entry for the term “author” address the contemporary textual phenomena of email, text messaging, and of course the web, with many kinds of sites, including social networking sites, discussion groups, virtual reality games and blogs like this one, that are “authored” by all kinds of folks. These forms of authorship seem to confirm Barthes’ idea that a text is nothing but “a tissue of quotations from innumerable centres of culture”—think of the abbreviations used in text messages, which practically constitute a new dialect; the many cultural references we make in our emails (“Did you see last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica???”); and of course the quotations from and links to other sources that comprise the web.

Please comment on this post to indicate you have successfully signed on as a co-author of this blog. In your comment, why don’t you name one of your favorite Authors? Or, if you want to resist validating that particular form of authorship, link us up to a virtual author you admire?