Foucault, Michel. “What is An Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, 101-120.
Foucault’s question that serves as the title of this essay is interesting in that most people have a modern sense of what an author is, and yet the question is still relevant and worth asking because it still has not been answered. The problem of authorship has not been solved by assuming the author is “dead” or by separating the author from the “work.” Foucault states, “In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (102).
The author as an individual, Foucault reminds us, is a relatively new concept in the great scheme of Western literature. The author has now become a classification system, “The proper name and the author’s name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link” (106).
He uses Dickens as an example of this. There is a body of literature that is associated with Dickens, but Foucault asks what would happen if we came to know that Dickens had not written the work attributed to him. Would there need to be reclassification if Shakespeare’s sonnets were discovered to be written by another of his contemporaries? How does the name influence what is written? Foucault then discusses the author function, which is not the same as the author’s name. The author function is the ideals and set of beliefs, and the commercial value that comes with the association of a body of texts with a proper name, or the identification system. Again, due to the relatively new advent of copyright law, the author function has become more complex and subject to contention. “Once a system of ownership came into being, once strict rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted . . . the possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. It is as if the author, beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing which was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership” (108-109).
He lists the four characteristics of the “author function” “1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; 2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilizations; 3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; 4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects—positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals” (113).
Foucault goes on to expand the discussion from just the author’s works, to include the concept of discourse and discourse community. “The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” (107).
Once an author sets a subject into the sphere or discourse, the subject is open and mutable based on those who take up the author’s original idea and interprets and/or adds to it. He uses Marx and Freud as examples here. He concludes with the idea that the notion of author and author function changes according to time and place, and the needs and demands of society. “The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each” (117).
Of particular interest is the question “What is An Author?” in new media studies. He asks, “At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed?” (103). No doubt Foucault would have to revisit these questions in light of all the new digital publishing venues now available to anyone with a computer, internet access and something to say. Interestingly, he uses the example of text written on a wall, “An anonymous test posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (108). But what about a post on a virtual wall? Is a blogger with an extensive audience considered an author? Why or why not? Foucault seems to recognize that the concepts of the author and author function must change with technology and the times. This is why his line of questioning is still relevant and important today.
“I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint—one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined, or perhaps, experienced” (119).
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