WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?
From Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?"
Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon.
In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.
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MICHEL FOUCAULT (1977)
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Michel Foucault born Paul-Michel Foucault
(15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984), was a French
philosopher and historian of ideas. He held
a chair at the prestigious Collège de France
with the title "History of Systems of
Thought," and also taught at the University
at Buffalo and the University of California,
Berkeley. Foucault is best known for his
critical studies of social institutions,
most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human
sciences, and the prison system, as well
as for his work on the history of human sexuality.
His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse
have been widely influential. In the 1960s
Foucault was associated with structuralism,
a movement from which he distanced himself.
Foucault also rejected the poststructuralist
and postmodernist labels later attributed
to him, preferring to classify his thought
as a critical history of modernity rooted
in Kant. Foucault's project was particularly
influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy
of knowledge" a direct allusion to Nietzsche's
"genealogy of morality". In a late
interview he definitively stated: "I
am a Nietzschean." Foucault was listed
as the most cited scholar in the humanities
in 2007 by the ISI Web of Science.
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In dealing with the "author" as
a function of discourse, we must consider
the characteristics of a discourse that support
this use and determine its differences from
other discourses. If we limit our remarks
only to those books or texts with authors,
we can isolate four different features. First,
they are objects of appropriation; the form
of property they have become is of a particular
type whose legal codification was accomplished
some years ago. It is important to notice,
as well, that its status as property is historically
secondary to the penal code controlling its
appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned
real authors, other than mythical or important
religious figures, only when the author became
subject to punishment and to the extent that
his discourse was considered transgressive.
In our culture and undoubtably in others
as well discourse was not originally a thing,
a product, or a possession, but an action
situated in a bipolar field of sacred and
profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and
blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with
risks before it became a possession caught
in a circuit of property values. But it was
at the moment 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.
Secondly, the "author-function"
is not universal or constant in all discourse.
Even within our civilization, the same types
of texts have not always required authors;
there was a time when those texts which we
now call "literary" (stories, folk
tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted,
circulated and valorized without any questions
about the identity of their author. Their
anonymity was ignored because their real
or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee
of their authenticity. Text, however, that
we now call "scientific" (dealing
with cosmology and the heavens, medicine
or illness, the natural sciences or geography)
were only considered truthful during the
Middle Ages if the name of the author was
indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates
said..." or "Pliny tells us that..."
were not merely formulas for an argument
based on authority; they marked a proven
discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a totally new conception was developed
when scientific texts were accepted on their
own merits and positioned within an anonymous
and coherent conceptual system of established
truths and methods of verification. Authentication
no longer required reference to the individual
who had produced them; the role of the author
disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,
where it remained as an inventor's name,
it was merely to denote a specific theorem
or proposition, a strange effect, a property,
a body, a group of elements, or a pathological
syndrome.
At the same time, however, "literary"
discourse was acceptable only if it carried
an author's name; every text of poetry or
fiction was obliged to state its author and
the date, place, and circumstance of its
writing. The meaning and value attributed
to the text depended upon this information.
If by accident or design a text was presented
anonymously, every effort was made to locate
its author. Literary anonymity was of interest
only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our
day, literary works are totally dominated
by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly,
these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism
has been concerned for some time now with
aspects of a text not fully dependent upon
the notion of an individual creator; studies
of genre or the analysis of recurring textual
motifs and their variations from a norm ther
than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics
the author has become little more than a
handy reference for a particular theorem
or group of propositions, the reference to
an author in biology or medicine, or to the
date of his research has a substantially
different bearing. This latter reference,
more than simply indicating the source of
information, attests to the "reliability"
of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation
of the techniques and experimental materials
available at a given time and in a particular
laboratory).
The third point concerning this "author-function"
is that it is not formed spontaneously through
the simple attribution of a discourse to
an individual. It results from a complex
operation whose purpose is to construct the
rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly,
this construction is assigned a "realistic"
dimension as we speak of an individual's
"profundity" or "creative"
power, his intentions or the original inspiration
manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these
aspect of an individual, which we designate
as an author (or which comprise an individual
as an author), are projections, in terms
always more or less psychological, of our
way of handling texts: in the comparisons
we make, the traits we extract as pertinent,
the continuities we assign, or the exclusions
we practice. In addition, all these operations
vary according to the period and the form
of discourse concerned. A "philosopher"
and a "poet" are not constructed
in the same manner; and the author of an
eighteenth-century novel was formed differently
from the modern novelist.
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