- Jun 2016
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Whilecriticaltheoristsmayquestionthe“prestigeofauthorship”and“allmanifes-tationsofauthor-ity”(Birkerts,1994,pp.158–159)—whichhelpsexplainthepredilectionforpostmodernistandeschatologicaltitlessuchasTheDeathoftheAuthor(Bar-thes,1977),WhatisanAuthor?(Foucault,1977),andTheDeathofLiterature(Kernan,1990)—thereislittledoubtthatboththesymbolicandmaterialconsequencesofauthor
Critical theorists may question the "prestige of authorship," but there is little doubt that the material consequences are more far reaching than they were in ancient times.
Actually, this is a misreading of Foucault, who discusses the economic implications of authorship.
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screen.oxfordjournals.org screen.oxfordjournals.org
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What is an Author? fMichel Foucault
Foucault, Michel. 1979. “Authorship: What Is an Author?” Screen 20 (1): 13–34. doi:10.1093/screen/20.1.13.
Really interesting and far ranging essay about authorship. Shows how literary authorship is really a function: i.e. a thing we use to capture assumptions about ethical background to an oeuvre. Makes a number of useful distinctions among genres and the like in this regard,
A very interesting discussion has to do with "initiators of discursive practices," which are in a certain sense the Humanities equivalent of Kuhn's paradigm shifters. He argues though, that people like Freud and Marx establish practices to which we "return," rather than disciplines that we refine (as he argues they do in science). This is not 100% true, in the sense that evolution is a theory in the Freudian sense, especially when it manifests itself as evolutionary psychology. But it is largely true, in the sense that there is less to be gained in rereading Galileo than in rereading Freud. (Although these line up roughly on a humanities/science division, it isn't 100%: I'd argue that oral formulaicism is more like Galileo than Freud, for example, while Darwin is more like Freud).
An interesting companion to this is Fish 1988, where he argues against blind peer review in the humanities. He uses examples of other discourse initiators, like Frye, for example, to argue that their opinions are more important than others because of who they are.
In my own notes, thinking about the article on scientific authorship, I developed the idea of Oeuvre as a key distinction between this kind of authorship and scientific authorship.
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my objective in The Order of Things1 had been toanalyse verbal clusters as discursive layers which fall outside thefamiliar categories of a book, a work, or an author. But while Iconsidered 'natural history', the 'analysis of wealth', and 'politicaleconomy' in general terms, I neglected a similar analysis of theauthor and his works; it is perhaps due to this omission that Iemployed the names of authors throughout this book in a naiveand often crude fashion. I spoke of Buffon, Cuvier, Ricardo, andothers as well, but failed to realize that I had allowed their namesto function ambiguously. This
Goal of "Order of things" was to analyse verbal clusters as discursive layers that are not books but other types of discourse: natural history, wealth, political economy and so on.
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t "[ilf Northrop Frye should write an essay attacking archetypal criticism, the article would by definition be of much greater significance than an article by another scholar attack- ing the same approach" (Schaefer 5). The reason, of course, is that the approach is not something in- dependent of what Northrop Frye has previously said about it; indeed, in large part archetypal criticism is what Northrop Frye has said about it, and therefore anything he now says about it is not so much to be measured against an independent truth as it is to be regarded, at least potentially, as a new pronouncement of what the truth will hereafter be said to be
author-function at work: Frye is an author-concept and his work is a coherent whole--an Oeuvre.
This is absolutely fine for literary criticism and the humanities. The same is in practice true of the sciences--what Steven Hawking says about physics is more interesting than other people, especially if he reverses his previous claims. But in contrast to Frye, where a reversal is a change in the discursive practice (cf. Foucault), in the case of science, it should not be the case that hearing a "great man" reverse himself is more significant than hearing an unknown post-doc. The reversal should be evidence-based.
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www.movementresearch.org www.movementresearch.org
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What Is an Author?
A published text of this can be found here: Foucault, Michel. 1979. “Authorship: What Is an Author?” Screen 20 (1): 13–34. doi:10.1093/screen/20.1.13.
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Searle's analyses
John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, 1969.
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The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality
Foucault on the problem of unity of work as well as author; this is perhaps something that could be brought back to scientific authorship.
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First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. 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.
Be interesting to try to say this of scientific authorship!
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What does it matter who is speaking
From Text 3
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I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes it.
Idea that the author antecedes the work
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www.jstor.org www.jstor.org
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WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING/' SOMEONE SAID, "WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING": Beckett, Foucault, Barthes Alastair Hir
Hird, Alastair. 2010. “‘WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING,’ SOMEONE SAID, ‘WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING’: Beckett, Foucault, Barthes.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 22: 289–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781931.
Picks up point that Beckett features very strongly in both Barthe's Death of an Author and Foucault's "What is an Author."
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