Archive for the ‘discourse’ tag

REFLECTION: FOUCAULT & BARTHES

Michel Foucault:
What is an Author? 1969
Abstract: An critical view on the notion of an author by looking at various aspects, such as the individualisation of the author, the difficult relationship between an author and his/her work in terms of interpretation and finally, the notion of the author funtion. He opposes the postition of the author with the position of the discourse a writer can bring about.

Roland Barthes:
The Death of the Author 1967
Abstract: Barthes looks into the relationship between the author, the work and the reader. He argues that the notion of an author came into play at the end of the middle ages with the new found focus on the individual, and as a result contemporary culture understands a text through its relationship with the life, hostory, taste and desires of the writer of the text. This view is constricted as an author in many ways is a copyist, a mediater of language and secondly that it ignores the contribution of meaning provided by the reader.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT: PERFORMER, AUTHOR, READER

Barthes argues for a historical development of the author-reader relationship.
Pre-individualistic times (before the Reformation) did not connect a writer with a certain text (much as Tom Pettitt presents in the “Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities” where he states that: “pre-parenthetical culture is [..] dominated by [...]: the re-creative, collective, con-textual, unstable, traditional performance”.) The writer is a mediator, a messenger presenting the collective knowledge in a narrative, and the performer (whether that is the writer himself or someone else, is judged by his her ability to present a good narrative.
Anna Nimus in Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti- Commons states that “The Romantic revolution marked the birth of proprietary authorship” and that “different pre-Enlightenment traditions did not consider ideas to be original inventions that could be owned because knowledge was held in common”.

Barthes continues that the authorative position of the author in terms of understanding, grasping the meaning of a given text is an illusion. It is a tyranny of interpretation – as the text has been given a final meaning – way of understanding. Barthes says: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, [] a final signification”. The illusion lies in not seeing that it is the readers and their endless interpretations of the text that constitues a works total meaning.
He argues that the author is really dead the moment a text comes into to being. He says: “The Author [] is always conceived as the past of his own book”, “the Author is supposed to feed the book – that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it.” At the point of conception it is handed over to the readers who automatically gain ownership of the text through grasping the words and the language behind.
NB: How does this relate to modern hermeneutics and historism as a mean to interpret, understand a text?

THE AUTHOR FUNCTION AND THE DISCOURSE

Foucault sets up four characteristica of the author function:
1. That the function of the author is connected to the system of law and organisation in a society
2. That the way an author function affect the discourse varies over time
3. An author is not immediately attibuted a discourse when a work is produced, it happens in retrospect.
4. The author function does not refer to a single, real individual (as Barthes demonstrates in the introduction of his article through citing Balzak in his story Sarrasine stating that “all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices”. Who is speaking?

Foucault continues by asking: “What difference does it make who is speaking?”

Foucault looks into the function of the author, and how this function is connected to certain discourses, as opposed to others. He claims that the role author and the concept of originality of his/hers works came the introduction of legal systems introducing the notion of property. The author has a distinct impact on the meaning of a text, and authorative figure that even through methods of seperating the author from the work – he/she is still very present in the understanding of text.

Foucault continues to see how this function introduces some types of discourses and limits others.
As Barthes, Foucault introduces a distinction between an author and other types of writers. Barthes points to the modern writer as a sciptor (as I understand it he introduces the writer as a medium, a messenger who performs and handles collective knowledge through language. This is still a bit vague to me), whereas Foucault calls for another system of contraint, other than the author function, to regulate the interpretation and growth of a work (fictional work).

Another interesting point of Foucault is his distinction between fictional and scientific works.
He argues that scientific texts today are not based in authorship/author function, rather in a common ground/principle of truth that constitutes a paradigm that the writers play within. He further argues that writers within scientific disciplines are not founders of discourses as their work is referring back to physical world, that it is defined “in relation to what physics or cosmology is”, whereas the work of founders of discourses refers back to the work itself. He uses the example of Sigmund Freud and coining the idea of psychoanalysis.

NB: How does this relate to Thomas Kuhn and his theory presented in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)? Kuhn postulates that paradigms occurs as a result of discourses when a certain scientific paradigm have difficulties in explaning new observations and experiences. E.g. as in the case of Copernicus and his theory of Earth’s postition in relation to the Sun and the universe. Does this not constitute a new discourse, as it completely altered the way man views himself as a part of creation?)

CONNECTION TO REMIX AND BIOLOGICAL REMIX

What does it mean when the remix has a distinctive impact on the ecosystems we are all part of? Does it really matter who did it, other than in terms of regulation – e.g in knowing who to blame if things go wrong?