The Author[’s] Remains:
Christina Hendricks
Foucault and the Demise of the
“Author-Function”
In “What is an
Author,” Michel Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett: “What matter who’s speaking,
someone said, what matter who’s speaking?” (Foucault 1977a, 115). Foucault
cites this statement in reference to an “indifference” that characterizes
contemporary writing, an indifference that reveals “an opening where the
writing subject endlessly disappears” (1977a, 116). Alternatively, and
similarly, it signals a modern tie between writing and death, where the writer
is sacrificed in the murderous process of writing itself, “a victim of his own
writing” (1977a, 117).
Yet this
“indifference” is introduced in a decidedly nonindifferent way: though the
statement proclaims itself as anonymous—“what matter who’s speaking, someone
said . . .”—its source is explicitly identified in Foucault’s text as
Beckett.
Why does Foucault name his source for the indifference that “someone” has
expressed, when this indifference signals the death of the author? Why not
attempt to preserve the potential anonymity implied by the purposeful
identification of the original author as unknown, lost, or intentionally hidden
behind the word “someone”? Perhaps because, despite Foucault’s own indications
to the contrary, it does (still) matter who is speaking; because if it
was simply “someone,” few might be willing to listen in the way they would to
Beckett, or to Foucault himself.
There may
also be another dimension to Foucault’s name-dropping, to his citation of
Beckett as an author: in tracing to an anonymous source Beckett’s (and his own)
statement of the author’s demise, Foucault points to a lack at what is supposed
to be the origin of the idea. Someone has said it, though “the signs of
[the author’s] particular individuality” have been cancelled out, effaced by
“the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and
his text” (Foucault 1977a, 117). The author, in the sense of an originary,
autonomous, creative power is dead, continually lost in the work. Foucault’s
repetition of Beckett’s repetition of the anonymity of the above-cited question
works to enact the point that at the origin of the cited quote is no author in
particular, even though Beckett’s name is explicitly cited. All that exists at
the source of the question is an empty place-holder, the authorial role with an
anonymous “someone” playing it.
Yet this
place-holder, the space where the author is expected, looked for, is still
significant. If there is no proper name to fill this space, it is labeled
merely as “someone”—signaling, in Foucault’s terms, the continued existence of
the “author-function.” The author-function remains alive and well, though
Foucault seems to hope for its demise along with the author, for the disappearance
of the place-holder still indicated by the insistence that “someone has
said, what matter who’s speaking?” We may be witnessing the death of the author
as a specific individual into the movements of the text, but the
author-function remains to the degree that we speak of the author at all, even
as only an anonymous “someone.” That Foucault looks towards a day when even
that last vestige of the author-function disappears is expressed in the last
line of “What is an Author?”, where “someone” is now silent, replaced by
“little more than the murmur of indifference: ‘What matter who’s speaking?’”
(Foucault 1977a, 138). This time, there is a murmur without an author, without
even the expectation of one that would result in an insistence that “someone” had
uttered it.
But working
to bring about the demise of the author-function is not an easy task, and it is
not clear how it might best be brought about. Foucault seems at times to
suggest a strategy of anonymity on the part of the author, a succumbing to
one’s own death as an author at the hands of the text, “a victim of [one’s] own
writing” (Foucault 1977a, 117). To accept and further the effacement of his or
her identity, the author might refuse to be named as an author at all. Though
such gestures seem to be indicated at times throughout Foucault's writings they
may not, I argue, produce the desired change in the institutions and
individuals calling for an author for texts. A further difficulty is brought up
by the question of reconciling Foucault’s occasional calls for authorial
anonymity with his tendency to reiterate in interviews what his concerns are
and what he is trying to say— thereby indicating “who he is” as an author. In
what follows I argue that if one hopes to change the author function, even to
the point of its elimination, one is more likely to succeed by taking up this
function in order to transform it from within than by negating it altogether.
This strategy is expressed in Foucault's later work on the aesthetic creation
of self, and provides a more promising strategy for changing the author
function than an attempt at authorial anonymity.
In this essay I suggest a way that the
demise of the author-function Foucault seems to hope for in "What is an
Author?" may be approached by moving through this function itself,
undermining it from within. I argue that an effective model for such a strategy
may be found in Foucault’s later work on the aesthetic creation of the self. My
conclusion is that efforts to achieve the (eventual) loss of the
author-function may actually be furthered by the continued expression of
"who one is" as an author, at least temporarily. Along the way I
discuss why Foucault may have thought such a change in the author-function
would be a worthy ethical and political goal, thereby indicating why we might
wish ourselves to take it up.
I
Foucault
answers the question, “What is an Author?” by arguing that it is “a function of
discourse” (Foucault 1977a, 124). The name of an author does not simply refer
to a particular individual; it signifies a role that is created by the ways
discourse is treated in the culture, and it serves a particular function in the
circulation of texts.
One important aspect of this function is that “the author’s name characterizes
a particular manner of existence of discourse,” meaning that texts connected to
an author’s name exist, are circulated and received, in specific ways that
differ from those that are not so connected:
Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be
immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary
attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and manner of
reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates. (1977a, 123)
Texts that bear an author’s name are
treated differently, operate differently within some cultures than texts that
do not—and one significant way in which this is often the case is that those
texts with authors are not to be simply “consumed and forgotten,” but are more
likely to be given attention and respect comparable to the status of the author
him/herself as s/he has been created and sustained through power relations in
the culture.
The
author-function, according to Foucault, is a product of the power relations
that exist within a particular society, relations that determine which texts
will have authors and why, how such texts will circulate, etc.: “the
‘author-function’ is tied to the legal and institutional systems that
circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses” (Foucault
1977a, 130).
Because the power relations that govern the author-function are not static,
neither is this function itself: “it does not operate in a uniform manner in
all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture” (1977a, 130).
Accordingly, Foucault points to a potential change in the author-function in
the future, even to the extent of eliminating this function altogether:
“considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the
complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from
immutable” (1977a, 138; italics mine). That the existence of the
author-function may eventually disappear is expressed in what appears to be a
vision of a better future by Foucault:
We
can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need
for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and
regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive
anonymity. (1977a, 138)
There would be no more authors, no more
need to designate, by whatever changing rules and procedures, who had written
what and to whom a particular text belongs. There would simply be texts in
existence.
Foucault
attempted anonymity himself in an interview with Le Monde in 1980, where
his identity was not divulged when the interview was published (Foucault
1996b). But his own anonymity didn’t last, obviously, since we now know that he
was the subject of this interview. Perhaps his identity was rooted out by an
insistence on upholding the current manifestation of the author-function, the requirement
that the author be identified through the use of what Foucault calls “tiresome”
questions: “‘Who is the real author?’ ‘Have we proof of his authenticity and
originality?’” (Foucault 1977a, 138). That “someone” had given the interview
was not enough—it was necessary to discover who; and it is the existence and
character of the author-function that drives the need not only to name the
author specifically, but to insist that there must be “someone” behind the text
at all.
It is the
demise of the author as “someone” that Foucault seems to envision in his hope
for a future of anonymous discourse, where the tiresome questions about the
identity of the author would disappear. But Foucault’s own attempt at anonymity
brings up one of the difficulties of undermining the author-function: if one
attempts to step out of it into anonymity, this gesture alone may not do much
to change the ways that the culture approaches and handles discourse, including
its insistence that one’s identity as an author be rooted out and solidified.
Working to remain anonymous may not manage to transform the ways one’s words
are received, the expectation and the requirement that someone must be
their author, and the drive to attach a particular identity to that
currently-empty authorial role. Taking on an authorial anonymity may manage
only to bring out the emptiness of the “someone” that still signals the
author-function, a space that one’s audience may continue to insist must be
filled by a particular individual as an author. Accordingly, I argue below that
the attempt to eliminate the author-function altogether, by removing one’s name
from texts and discourse, may not be the most efficacious way to initiate
change in current conceptions of this function. Instead of changing the way we
now view the author-function, such a gesture may merely uphold it by filling
its role with an anonymous “someone” as author.
Further,
Foucault’s attempt at and desire for anonymity seem undermined by the fact that
he also takes great pains, in numerous interviews, to explain what he is
thinking and writing about—even to the point of trying to tie it all together
into a coherent whole:
[M]y
problem has always been . . . truth. (Foucault 1996h, 215)
If
I look today at my past, I recall having thought that I was working essentially
on a “genealogical” history of knowledge. But the true motivating force was
really this problem of power. (Foucault 1991, 145)
Why
continually insist on which problems inform his work when this could so easily
be a way to pin him down as an author with a specific identity and particular
views? How can we reconcile this with his statements elsewhere that his work
cannot be, nor does he want it to be, unified into a systematic whole?
Foucault claims to avoid universalizing what he says, and to hope for authorial
anonymity; and yet he speaks at other times in ways that would undermine these
claims. I argue that one way to explain such tensions may be to read Foucault
as struggling to transform the author-function while remaining within it
himself. But rather than seeing this as a problem, I argue that it may be the
most effective way to achieve eventual change in this function, in the role of
the “author” in the modern West.
First,
however, it is important to consider just why a change might be needed. What
might be problematic about assigning texts to authors, so problematic that
Foucault looks toward a future where this practice will no longer exist?
II
Working
towards the demise of the author-function may be partly a matter of taking the
death of the author seriously, of fully exploring the consequences and
implications of this event (Foucault 1977a, 117). If the author continually
disappears in the work, then there seems no good reason to continue to hold
open a place for him/her, a place filled, if not by a particular name, then by
an anonymity that yet rests upon the possibility and hope of a future
identification—“someone,” we know not (yet) whom. The author-function works to
uphold a system of identifying and circulating texts as if their authors could
and ought to be identified, for whatever purposes the culture deems necessary.
If this need not be the case—if, as Foucault suggests, we are coming to recognize
that the very notion of the “author” and the ways in which it functions are
created, contingent, and malleable—then with the disappearance of the
particular author within the text could also come the elimination of the
insistence that “someone,” even if no one in particular, has written it.
Otherwise we may continue to consider nostalgically the empty place where the
author should be, expecting an identification of the “someone” who fills the
author-function.
The goal of
authorial anonymity may also be tied to Foucault's concerns about the political
role of intellectuals. Intellectuals in the modern West, according to Foucault,
are closely tied to the current "régime of truth" as agents who are
entrusted with the location and dissemination of universal truth and knowledge.
Those who are established as speakers of truth achieve that status through
structures and practices of power, and they exercise a certain amount of power as
authorities on the “truth.” Accordingly, intellectuals and other speakers of
truth have the power to alter the thought and actions of those who wish to
conform to the true—and in a society that reveres truth, many people are likely
to fall into this category.
According to Foucault, the political role of intellectuals is best conceived as
a critical one: rather than acting as agents of the régime of truth, modern
intellectuals could effectively act as its critics. In an interview first
published in 1977, Foucault suggests a role for theory today (and for the
theorizing intellectual): “to analyse the specificity of mechanisms of power,
to locate the connections and extensions, to build little by little a strategic
knowledge” (Foucault 1980d, 145). It is clear from various statements in
interviews and discussions from around the same time period that Foucault hoped
this “strategic knowledge” could be put into play by those already engaged in
struggles against various practices of power.
By addressing, analyzing, and publicizing the specific operations of truth and
power within their own areas of expertise, intellectuals can offer assistance
to those who hope to and/or are already resisting the workings of the current
régime of truth. Rather than acting as “universal intellectuals,” as
spokespersons for universal truth (and telling others what to do on the basis
of this), intellectuals are instead to offer criticism of present conceptions
of truth and power.
The
connecting of a text with a specific author may work to support, rather than
undermine, the ways truth and power are currently connected in modern, Western
societies. As Foucault notes, a text with an "author" may presently
be treated with more respect than one that cannot be traced to someone whose
credentials as an authority on truth can be verified. Further, the more
respected the author him/herself as an authority on truth, the more likely it
is to be that his/her text is taken seriously. The practice of appending an
author's name to a text can thus perpetuate a system of truth and power wherein
truth is located, analyzed, disseminated, and to a certain extent owned by
discreet individuals who are accorded the status of its “authorities.” Carrying
on the social role of “author” can help to ensure that there continue to be
individuals who act as agents of truth, whose status as authorities on truthful
discourse continue to affect how their texts are received, and who continue to
mold the thoughts and actions of their audience through their power as speakers
of the true. By eliminating "authors," we may be able to help break
down the connection between truth and particular social roles— intellectual,
expert, professional, etc.—that allow individuals to act as authorities on
truth.
But perhaps
the most important reasons why the elimination of the author-function may have
been a goal for Foucault can be located by exploring the connection he makes at
the end of “What is an Author?” between authorship and subjectivity: the
author-function, he claims, is “one of the possible specifications of the subject
(Foucault 1977a, 138). In other words, modern conceptions of subjectivity are
closely related to modern conceptions of the author such that both may function
similarly. Both may also, according to Foucault, fall together (1977a, 138). In
his later work on subjectivity and ethics, Foucault delves more deeply into an
analysis of modern conceptions of the subject, and argues for ways it might be
fruitfully transformed. Considering how and why Foucault suggests altering our
notion of subjectivity might help to clarify why he also suggests that a
society without authors would be a worthy goal. In addition, I argue that the
notion of aesthetic self-creation that emerges in Foucault’s later work can be
beneficially applied to his earlier work on the author-function, as a
suggestion of how this function may be transformed.
For Foucault,
the subject, like the author, is a function of relations of power: we become
subjects through “subjection” in power relations, with others and with
ourselves. Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish and The History
of Sexuality Vol. I how subjects are constructed through power— through
disciplinary and confessional practices, respectively. These practices work to
create individuals as subjects with static, unified “true selves,” in part
through writing. One's "truth" as an individual is deciphered through
its putting into discourse, through mechanisms of confession and through the
documentation of individuals in disciplinary practices such as surveillance and
examination. In
confession as well as discipline one’s “truth” as an individual is deciphered
through its putting into discourse, through the writing of the self in speech
and text. Both practices continue today, according to Foucault, having spread
throughout society to the extent that we are all, essentially, created as
individual subjects with static “truths” through power (Foucault 1995, 209-217;
1990a, 59). Further, the construction of the subject by power through the
requirement of putting its truth into discourse is forgotten as the ubiquity of
this practice makes it eventually appear as if it is the “natural” and
universal state of the individual that it is a subject with an inner “truth.”
What both
disciplinary mechanisms and confessional practices have done, according to
Foucault, is to produce an identifiable, stable individual through the
operation of relations of power. In an essay first published in 1982, Foucault describes
the kind of power that creates subjects:
This
form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the
individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his identity,
imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to
recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. . . .
(Foucault 1983a, 212)
Discipline ties us to our individual
identity by documenting it and asserting it as the “truth” of the self, one’s
true nature and character; and confession enjoins us to find our “true self”
deep inside and express it to others, where the status of “truth” can be
conferred upon it by those in authority. In both cases one’s true self is
deciphered out of the discourse into which one’s life is translated, under the
auspices, the procedures, and the rules of some governing authority.
Discipline
and confession also operate to create individuals who are responsible for their
actions, who not only possess an “inner truth,” but also a kind of autonomous,
creative power to choose or refuse to follow the law, to act on impure impulses
or to resist them. Through the documentation of the self in discourse and
writing, one learns to take a step back and view one’s “truth” from a certain
distance, as something towards which one can take a critical or positive
stance. The distance from one’s “true nature” made possible by its fixation
through writing seems to allow one the space to choose whether or not to adhere
to it. In other words, what is created through processes of discipline and
confession is not simply a subject with an inner “truth”—what I term here a
“subject in truth”—but one that views itself as capable of autonomous decision
and action. This
now-familiar conception of the subject, according to Foucault, is not the
universal, final truth of its nature, but rather a product of particular
practices of power.
This version
of the subject, moreover, is one that is currently undergoing resistance
because of its constraining tendencies, Foucault claims (Foucault 1983a,
211-212). He complains that the view of the subject as possessing an inner
“truth,” having originated through practices of power such as discipline and
the confession, “forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own
identity in a constraining way” (1983a, 212). In other words, by insisting that
the self has a truth to be discovered within, one that is truly our own and
that we must therefore adhere to—that “we have to be ourselves—to be truly our
true self” (Foucault 1983b, 237)—we
become tied to an identity that is difficult to escape. It seems the constraint
that is problematic, the enclosing of the self within an identity that is fixed
within the confines of a static “truth.” Foucault terms the process by which
individual subjects are created through power the “government of
individualization,” in which the subject is the result of a type of
“governmentality” (1983a, 212). To be “governed,” in the sense that Foucault
uses the word in this context, is to have one’s actions and conduct directed,
to have one’s “possible field of action” designated and structured (1983a,
221). From his discussion of discipline and confession, we can see that the
individual subject has been and continues to be governed by others, according to
Foucault.
But he also
emphasizes, in his later work on the “care of the self,” that one can be
governed by oneself as well—one can, in a sense, bring a relation of power to
bear on oneself: “Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word . . . is
always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity between techniques which
impose coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified
by himself” (Foucault 1997c, 181-182).
Indeed, as Daniel Palmer points out, the very act of analyzing and designating
the "truth" of a specific subject or of human subjectivity in general
tends to lead individual subjects to conform themselves to this
"truth": unlike what happens when we build up a body of knowledge
about entities that are not self-conscious, "since human beings are
self-interpreting beings they will conform their behavior to the
classifications that are used to analyze them" (Palmer 1998, 405). If
those in authority say that x or y is true about human subjects
or myself in particular, I am likely to tend to conform myself to this— since
it is presented, after all, as my “truth.” The construction of the subject,
Foucault emphasizes in his later work, results from “a subtle integration of
coercion-technologies and self-technologies,” where the latter play an
important role in supporting and furthering the creation of the “true self”
(Foucault 1997c, 182). One can thus view oneself, and act upon the self, as if
one is conforming to a “true nature” within, thereby helping to construct
oneself as a subject with a fixed “truth.”
The
possibility of work on the self by the self, of self-modification, may be said
to be the result of the construction of self as an autonomous, responsible
subject through the operation of power. As procedures such as discipline and
confession work to locate and fix one’s “true self” through discourse and
writing, a distance is created that allows one to view it with a critical eye,
and to respond to it in various ways. One can thus take up a relation of power
with oneself, attempt to “govern” oneself in the sense of directing one’s own
actions. Many may choose to govern the self in the direction of discovering,
designating, and conforming to who and what one is, in truth.
This need not
be the case, however. Foucault suggests that we might now take a different
route:
Perhaps
the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.
We have to imagine and to build up what we could be. . . . We have to promote
new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality
which has been imposed on us for several centuries. (Foucault 1983a, 216)
Noting that the view of ourselves as
individuals with a “true nature” is a construct of external and internal power
relations, we might now realize that we need not be tied to our “truth,” but
can work to construct ourselves differently. Specifically, Foucault suggests
that we might create the self aesthetically: “From the idea that the self is
not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have
to create ourselves as a work of art” (Foucault 1983b, 237). As I argue in the
next section, Foucault’s suggestion that we engage in aesthetic self-creation
may be read as a movement through the notion of the subject as
possessing an inner truth and autonomy, using this view of the subject in order
to disturb it from within. In other words, we might be able to use our ability
to govern ourselves in order to move away from a government directed towards
our own truth, and instead towards creating ourselves as works of art.
Foucault’s
later work on aesthetic self-creation may be connected back to his early
discussions of authorship, both to show why the loss of the author-function may
be considered a worthy goal, and to conceive of a way to achieve it. Foucault’s
analysis of the constraints experienced by a subject in truth can be seen to
carry over to the author. An author of published texts, like the author of the
self, may feel constrained by an author-function that insists upon, searches
for, fixes, and expects conformity to a “truth” of who the author “really” is.
Foucault himself expressed frustration at times with such expectations in the
reception of his work. He claims to write so as to “tear” himself from himself,
“to prevent [himself] from always being the same”: “When I write, I do it above
all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before” (Foucault 1991,
32, 27). He also claims that the work of an intellectual is to “modify not only
the thought of others but one’s own as well,” to “render oneself permanently
capable of self-detachment” (Foucault 1996g, 461). Thus, when people comment
that his work has changed over the years, he replies: “‘Well, do you think I
have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be
changed?’” (Foucault 1996c, 379).
The author,
like the subject, may experience both external and internal constraints to be
faithful to some notion of his/her "true self" as an author. If the
institutions, individuals, and relations of power that work to circulate one’s
texts and oneself as an author expect and insist that one be someone in
particular, one may end up constrained in what one can write and publish, and
how one is read. One may get tied to a particular, individual “truth” as an
author to which one is expected to conform. This could potentially lead to a
tendency to govern the self by the self in a way that lives up to these
expectations. Further, the continued emphasis on the author-function in regard
to texts is supported by and supports the emphasis on the self as a subject
with a singular “truth”: if the subject as author of self has a discoverable
“true nature,” then it makes sense to continue to expect the author of texts to
have a discoverable “true self,” and vice versa. The author-function constrains
authors of texts as well as, and along with, its constraint of authors of the
self.
As noted above, Foucault seems to have
tried to avoid the constraints of a singular identity as an "author,"
consciously working to change his own thought and his own projects, and asking
others to give him the freedom to do so as well. At the beginning of The
Archaeology of Knowledge he requests that his audience not demand to know
who he is nor demand that he remain consistent: “I am no doubt not the only one
who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to
remain the same” (Foucault 1972, 17). But will the attempt to have “no face”
manage to alter the author-function? Such an appeal to utter anonymity may not
ultimately be effective, as I argue in the next section.
III
I have
discussed a few of the reasons why Foucault may have thought the demise of the
author-function a beneficial goal, the most important of which seems to center
on the connections between authorship of texts and authorship of the self as
subject, and the constraints that both experience when governed in view of
their “truth.” More needs to be said about whether or not authors of texts and
selves are indeed best served by moving away from a governmentality that pins
them to a true identity. It seems clear that Foucault thought this was the
case, and I believe a more thorough investigation can show that he may be
right. My main concern here, however, is to discuss whether or not Foucault
himself seems to have suggested, or even taken, the best route towards the
death of the author-function.
How is this
goal to be brought about, according to Foucault? He suggests at times in
interviews that we might try publishing books without authors, thereby
indicating that a refusal on the part of authors to play the part of “author”
might be a step along the way. In an interview conducted in 1984, Foucault
laments that his readers sometimes insist on reading his “new books on the
backs of the earlier ones,” interpreting each through what they have read
before (Foucault 1996a, 454). Foucault claims, rather, that “books ought to be
read for themselves,” and offers a solution: “the only law for book
publication, the only law concerning the book that I would like to see passed,
would be to prohibit the use of the author’s name more than once . . . in order
that each book might be read for itself” (1996a, 454). As noted above, he
attempted anonymity himself in an interview, and there too he proposes the
elimination of the author; but this time he suggests it as a kind of game, to
be taken on only temporarily: “I will propose a game: the year without names.
For one year books will be published without the author’s name” (Foucault
1996b, 302). In these interviews, a combination of authorial refusal and institutional
action is suggested as a means of encouraging others to respond to, interpret,
and evaluate texts on the basis of the ideas contained therein, rather than on
the basis of and through the status and past writings of their authors.
There is,
arguably, some merit to such a suggestion, and the practice of “blind review”
by many academic professional societies in choosing manuscripts for symposia,
meetings, and publication attests to an already-accepted recognition that
sometimes ideas are best judged when their connection to a particular author is
unknown. But would a move towards radical anonymity in publications serve to
bring about a change in the author-function, such that audiences would begin to
no longer require an author for texts, but would instead be contented with the
“murmur of indifference” that Foucault cites at the end of “What is an Author?”
This may not work at all; and even if it does it is not, I argue, likely to
work in a way that would be acceptable to Foucault himself.
Presenting
discourse within an atmosphere of authorial anonymity may, within the current
régime of truth, tend to give it the air of objective, universal, and
scientific truth. Foucault himself points out in “What is an Author?” that
starting in the seventeenth century, scientific texts began to be “accepted on
their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual
system of established truths and methods of verification” (Foucault 1977a,
126). This is to a large extent still the case today in the modern West, where
the measure of truthfulness of scientific discourse lies less with the author’s
name than with the methods used to reach results and the possibility of
objective verification. If texts are published without authors, the measure of
their importance may tend to default to their scientific or objective
verifiability as representations of universal truth. This would replace the
author’s authority as an individual with the authority of an impersonal,
absolute truth for which s/he serves as a conduit; and it would seem to make of
the author precisely the kind of “universal” intellectual figure that Foucault
criticizes.
Alternatively,
if one’s text is not verifiable as “true” through accepted scientific or
logical measures of objectivity and universal truth, then its status is instead
quite often gauged by the status of its author as an authority, as someone
whose words ought to be taken seriously. If the author of such a text is
unknown, then it seems likely that it will not be taken as seriously as it
would if connected to an author of some repute as an “authority.” By insisting
on disappearing within the work entirely, disconnecting oneself from one’s
texts, an author working within the confines of the current system of truth and
power does not alter the search for his/her identity and/or credentials as an
authority on truth. Utter anonymity may not help to bring about the death of
the author-function because this does little to change the expectations of
others that an identifiable author exists and should be located. If one insists
as an author that one has “no face,” then one may become a “someone” in the
eyes of one's audience—someone whose individual characteristics, whose status
as an “authority”—whose “truth”—can and should be discovered and catalogued.
That one (or even a few) author(s) refuse to show their identity does not
necessarily disrupt the structures, institutions, and power relations in a
society that requires and designates authors. Such authors may be refusing to
play the game, but does this gesture change the game itself? The “tiresome
questions” continue: “Who is the real author?” Who is this “someone” without a
face?
As Foucault points out in a revised
version of “What is an Author?” published in 1979, what is needed in order to
change the author-function is a change in society (Foucault 1984, 119)—as long
as one’s audience requires an author, they will work to root one out even if the
author attempts to remain utterly anonymous. But can the author him/herself do
anything to help speed this transformation of society along? I think this is
possible, and Foucault may have agreed (indeed, otherwise why write about and
promote the demise of the author himself?). I argue that we can find in his
later work on creating the subject as a work of art a means by which the author
may be able to help support a change in his/her audience’s expectations of the
author-function, and thereby bring about its transformation. This strategy
involves taking up the current version of the author-function itself, in a
seemingly paradoxical move that might succeed in transforming this function
from within.
IV
In his later
work on ethics and subjectivity, Foucault suggests the creation of self as a
work of art as an alternative to the view of self as a “subject in truth.” This
aesthetic self-creation does not require that individuals attempt anonymity by
refusing to be anything or anyone at all; rather, Foucault seems to suggest a
means of altering the current conception of subjectivity from within. He
connects the notion of aesthetic self-creation with an “attitude of modernity”
that he finds in Charles Baudelaire. For Baudelaire, according to Foucault,
“being modern . . . consists in recapturing something eternal that is not
beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it” (Foucault 1997d,
114). The modern attitude does not reject the present, what is happening right
now, but neither does it simply accept the present without question; rather,
“being modern” means focusing on the present in an effort to change it. But
this attempt at change operates through the present itself:
For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the
present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine
it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by
grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which
extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty
that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (1997d, 117).
Foucault points out that this movement
through the present towards its transformation does not apply only to
traditional art forms for Baudelaire; it also describes an attitude towards
oneself (1997d, 117). Foucault finds in this modern attitude towards the self
an alternative to the conception of self as possessing a “truth” to be
discovered: “Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to
discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to
invent himself” (1997d, 118).
The modern
attitude seems to form a part of Foucault’s suggestion that, as quoted above,
we should “refuse what we are” and instead “imagine and build up what we could
be” by promoting “new forms of subjectivity.”
It would not mean refusing to be anything at all, having no face whatsoever,
but rather (as I explain below) taking up the role of a “someone” who has
multiple, changing faces. If one were to take the modern attitude towards the
self, it would mean moving through the present, through how the self is
currently conceived, in order to transform it—through a process that
“simultaneously rejects this reality and violates it.” More specifically, we
might say that the aesthetic creation of self could involve respecting the
conception of the subject as an autonomous entity possessing a “true nature,”
utilizing this notion and working within it to bring about its transformation.
Foucault
argues that the subject in its present conception is a construct of power, but
it is also the case that the subject plays a role in constituting itself
through power. We are not only told that we are someone in truth, we tell
ourselves the same thing; and through this process we may come to conceive of
the self as possessing an autonomous, creative power to choose to be one thing
or another (though we ought, we are told and tell ourselves, to adhere to what
we really are, “to be truly our true self”). We may then be able to use this
view of ourselves to choose to be something else, to govern ourselves in a new
way through the relation of power we have set up with the self. In other words,
we may use the conception of self as an autonomous, creative unit in order to
construct ourselves differently. If this is a plausible description of how we
may come to create the self as a work of art, then we could be said to be
changing our notion of subjectivity by moving through it, by “grasping
it in what it is.” We would be appealing to the current notion of the self as
an autonomous, “subject in truth” in order to transform it.
There is yet
another way in which the aesthetic creation of self takes up the “modern
attitude” and moves through the present notion of self in order to change it.
It is when we come to recognize that the self is constructed, in part through
practices of power brought to bear upon ourselves, that we may decide to try to
construct it differently. In this way, the aesthetic subject may be said to be
trying to change the self by emphasizing “what it is”—a constructed entity, and
one that is therefore contingent and may be constructed differently.
While the subject in truth may think it possesses, and should adhere to, a
“true self” that simply exists “naturally,” the aesthetic subject recognizes
that this “truth” is constructed and therefore malleable. The aesthetic subject
recognizes that s/he could work to construct a different self, one which would
itself be contingent and malleable, subject to further construction and
re-creation. Creating the self as a work of art by taking on the modern
attitude need not mean refusing the conception of self as subject in truth
altogether; rather, it could mean grasping this view of self in what it
is—constructed and contingent—and using its notion of autonomy and creativity
to construct itself differently, multiply, over and over again.
How might
this notion of aesthetic self-creation be applied to the author of texts as
well as to the author of the self, and thereby help to bring about a change in
the author-function? As noted above, the problem with attempting a pure
anonymity is that if the author asserts that “I am no one,” this does little to
change the sense and the expectation behind the “I am”—one is still utilizing
the requirement that one be one thing in particular, in truth, and
saying that what one is (in truth) is nothing, no one. The rules of the game
governing what one is remain in place, unchanged, when one simply
attaches the “is” to a pure negation. The subject who creates the self
aesthetically does not take on such a refusal: s/he acknowledges that s/he is
someone; it’s just that this “someone” is contingent and in flux. The
aesthetic subject, we might say, plays by the rules in a way that may also work
to transform them. S/he seems to be adhering to the rules of the game,
exhibiting what s/he is, in truth; but this "truth" is
multiple, heterogeneous. In other words, the aesthetic subject is using the notion
that s/he “is” something, but changing the meaning of this claim—“I am
something,” s/he says, “but this something will soon change into something
else.” Rather than keeping the meaning of “I am” static by attaching it to a
negation that keeps its reference to a static truth (“I am nothing”), the
aesthetic subject attempts to change what “I am” means by attaching it to
multiple, temporary and heterogeneous truths.
The author of
texts may do something similar. S/he may acknowledge the requirement that an
“author” be deciphered within the body of texts s/he has produced: “Okay, I am
expected to be someone. I am someone, but someone multiple: I am
one self at one time and another later on.” In so doing s/he may be moving through
the notion that s/he must be someone in order to change this role and its
expectations. S/he could be said to be taking on a “modern attitude” towards
the author-function—simultaneously respecting and violating it by aesthetically
creating his/her identity as an author.
In addition,
the author could utilize another aspect of the author-function in order to
bring about its transformation: s/he could appeal to his/her authority as
author to get others to listen and to follow his/her example in a way that
eventually works to undermine this authority. Recall that one of the aspects of
the author-function is that texts with authors are subject to attention and
respect, to a degree relatively corresponding to the author’s conferred status.
When the author says who s/he is as a multiplicity, others may actually pay
attention in ways they might not do for an aesthetic subject who was not given
the status of an “author” in the culture. The author might use his/her position
of power as an authority on “who s/he is” to express his/her multiplicity, as
well as his/her position of power as an author whose views should be heeded to
express that perhaps we might treat all authors (and indeed all subjects) as
multiple entities. In other words, the author could use the respect and attention
granted his/her texts in order to tell others how to view himself, other
authors, and themselves as subjects. S/he could utilize the power relation
between him/herself and his/her readers to encourage them to change the way
they view authors and subjects—to move away from a discourse of singularity and
truth and towards one of multiplicity and aesthetic self-creation.
In so doing,
the author might be able to also undermine his/her function as an authority, as
someone to be heeded and followed. Using the author-function to tell others how
to view authors and subjects, of course, seems mainly to keep in place that
aspect of this function that makes of the author an authority, someone whose
words are to be given attention. But this might be undermined if the author who
does so also creates him/herself multiply and expresses him/herself as such—the
more heterogeneously the author defines him/herself, the harder it will be to
figure out just “who s/he is,” to locate the specific figure that is to be
followed and whose views are to be adopted. Further, this author as
authority-figure doesn’t fully fit the dominant picture of an authority: this
author is neither an impersonal, objective screen through which universal truth
is spoken, nor a static figure whose credentials, methods and goals are
established as those of an accepted authority. This author’s methods and goals
change with his/her changing identity, and his/her credentials as an authority
may be undermined by this to some extent. As a result, we might say that s/he
may be able to encourage others to follow his/her suggestions such as “create
yourself as a work of art”; but the authority behind these might be brought to
question by an audience who realizes the implications of the author’s own
aesthetic self-creation.
Note that we
could say the author is thereby changing the author-function by taking on a
“modern attitude” towards it, transforming it by emphasizing it in “what it
is,” moving through it. The author is using his/her position of
authority as an author, as part of the current author-function, in order to
undermine this position. In addition, s/he is recognizing and emphasizing that
the author-function is a creation of power—constructed by power relations
within oneself and between oneself and others. Focusing on what the
author-function now is, a creation of power, the author can use power to create
it differently. Not only can s/he change the relation of power s/he has with
herself—deciding to create the self aesthetically—but s/he also works to change
the ways s/he is constructed through power by others, by the culture at large:
s/he can use the power relation s/he has with others to try to alter the ways
they construct him/her as an author.
This is one
way in which some change in the author-function might effectively be brought
about. As I have argued, attempting anonymity is not likely to lead to such
change. Further, refusing to take on the author-function in order to move
through it might mean that one is not taken as seriously as if one were to
appeal to this role in order to change it. If Foucault, for example, did not
speak as if he were someone in particular, did not at times manifest who he is
by explaining what problems have informed his work—if he instead insisted that
he was no one in particular—would those who require authorial identity as a
static “truth” be willing to listen to him? Might they not respond instead by
saying that he is not a good author since he does not fulfill the correct
conception of the author-function, that he therefore need not be heeded? One
cannot change the author-function by simply jumping straight to anonymity, nor
is it likely that that such change will come about if one does not “play the
game” required of authors to some extent, because otherwise the change one
hopes to bring about in others’ views of the author-function might thereby be
ignored.
Further, the
above discussion offers a way to reconcile the tension between Foucault's hope
for the eventual demise of the author-function with the fact that he still
seems to be relying on it to some extent. We might interpret the tension
between (a) Foucault’s statements that he does not try to unify his work, that
he hopes for anonymity, and (b) the times when he does say what he is concerned
about in a general, almost unifying way and thereby gives a good indication of
“who he is,” as symptoms of the difficulty involved in transforming the author-function.
If an author is struggling to change this function from within, then there will
be times when s/he is taking on the current conception of this function in
order to be heeded by those who expect and respect this, acting as if s/he is
one thing in particular and unifying his/her views accordingly. The author
will, however, tend to define his/herself differently at different times.
There will also be times when the author is using his/her authority as an
author to tell others they ought to question this view of authors—e.g., by
pointing out explicitly that one does not, and others should not, try to unify
one’s views as an author.
There is not
space here to develop a more precise depiction of how such an attempt to change
the author-function might work, nor a thorough evaluation of it. I have not
argued that Foucault took on this task explicitly, only that it seems to hold
the best potential for success in changing the author-function, and that we can
find some evidence of movements in this direction in his work. He does seem to
hope for the eventual demise of the author-function while also relying on it,
and it is possible to explain this tension by an analysis of what it might take
to actually bring about effective change in the author-function.
It may be,
then, that while it does not matter precisely who’s speaking, it does matter
that someone is—it is important that, at least for now, authors who hope
to initiate change in the way they are constructed through power work through
their currently-constructed role by admitting that they are, indeed, someone
(even if this “someone” is a multiplicity). Pure anonymity may someday be
possible, but attempting it now is not likely to lead to significant change in
the author-function.
In addition, it may matter very much that it is Foucault citing Beckett when he
says, “What matter who’s speaking?” This authorial appeal to authority help
insure that these words are not “immediately consumed and forgotten,” nor
“accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words” (Foucault
1977a, 123). Foucault must still rely on his status as an author in order to
help bring about the change he envisions in the author-function; and to that
extent, it still matters very much who’s speaking.
_
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I have, of course, here
added another identificatory mark, attaching this anonymous statement to an
author, by here noting that Foucault has said that Beckett has said that someone
has said, “what matter who’s speaking?” The “indifference” Foucault locates in
this statement perhaps fades even further as I connect it with his own work.
Foucault might of
course have given the same quote without identifying Beckett as its source; but
then the statement would have received the authority of Foucault’s own
“author-function,” as he terms it. “What matter who’s speaking” might then have
seemed a statement of some import because it was Foucault himself who chose to
(re-)speak it, rather than simply “someone.” As it stands in Foucault’s text,
this statement may receive a double imprimatur of value due to its repetition
by two authors of some prestige.
It is not only the
question, “what matter who’s speaking?” that rests on a lack where the author should
be. The force of Foucault’s claims about the death of the author (which he
himself insists are already familiar and thus not original to him) imply that
even where an author is directly named, s/he is nevertheless sacrificed within
the text, his/her particularity overrun and obliterated by its excesses and
transgressions: writing “implies an action that is always testing the limits of
its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and
manipulates. . . . [It] unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its
own rules and finally leaves them behind” (Foucault 1977a, 116). In such a
process, whatever the author hoped, meant, or thought s/he was expressing with
his/her words is exceeded, and any clear lines through which we could trace the
particular characteristics, intentions, and meanings of the author through the
text are thereby hopelessly blurred.
Foucault lists three particular characteristics of
this role, this function that the concept of “author” performs. First, it
“serves as a means of classification” in that an author’s name can “group
together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others” (Foucault
1977a, 123). One of our most prevalent means of classifying and ordering texts
is by reference to their “author,” whereby we can set aside a group of texts as
the “work” of Foucault, Beckett, etc. Secondly, the author’s name “establishes
different forms of relationships among texts,” such as “homogeneity, filiation,
reciprocal explanation . . .” (1977a, 123). When a group of texts is connected
as the work of one author, this signals that it is then appropriate to look for
similarities, connections, ways in which one text can be used to supplement and
help explain questions brought up by another. The third characteristic, that
discourse with an author is given a certain status by the society in which it
is disseminated, is discussed in more detail below.
One of the main ways in
which modern, Western culture defines which texts have authors and which do not
is through the system of ownership—those texts that are considered property,
over which one or more individuals has some form of ownership rights, are the
ones with “authors” (Foucault 1977a, 124).
The power relations through which determinations of
authorship are made are heterogeneous across societies and across time within
the same society, and the author-function changes along with them. For example,
Foucault notes that even in Western European civilization there has been a
major change in the author-function: whereas in the past it was the case that
literary texts were not intimately attached to authors while scientific texts
were, the reverse is true today (Foucault 1977a, 125-126).
See also Foucault
(1980a, 53; 1988, 15; 1996g, 456; 1996e, 432). Foucault gives different
summaries and purposes for his work at different times. This point is actually
quite significant for the analysis I give here, and its importance will be
brought out below.
“I wouldn’t want what I may have said or written to be
seen as laying any claims to totality. I don’t try to universalize what I say.
. . . My work takes place between unfinished abutments and lines of dots”
(Foucault 1996i, 275). See also Foucault’s description of his work as
“fragmentary,” “diffused,” “inconclusive,” “an indecipherable, disorganized
muddle” (Foucault 1980b, 78)
Foucault defines
“régime of truth” in an interview: “Each society has its régime of truth, its
‘general politics’ of t ruth: that is, the
types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms
and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the
means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value
in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying
what counts as true” (Foucault 1980c, 131). Clearly, modern intellectuals are
bound up most directly in this definition of a “régime of truth” in their role
as those “charged with saying what counts as true.”
See Foucault (1977b,
207-208) for a discussion of how intellectuals are “agents” of the current
“régime of truth,” of the current system of truth and power that tends to quell
independent thought and action on the part of others.
See, e.g., Foucault
(1977b 207-208; 1980e, 62; 1996h, 225; 1996d, 261).
Foucault indicates that
it would be better for intellectuals to address the workings of truth and power
on a small and local scale, rather than offering a “global systematic theory
which holds everything in place” (Foucault 1980d, 145). See also his discussion of the role of the
“specific” intellectual as opposed to the “universal” one (1980c, 126-133). For a concise and clear discussion of some
of the major tenets of Foucault's view of the ethical and political role of
intellectuals, see Patton (1984).
In “What is an Author?”
Foucault seems to be addressing authorship of many types of discourses, whether
fictional, scientific, philosophical, etc. In my discussion of the link between
intellectuals, authors, truth and power, I am here focusing on authors claiming
“truth” for their discourses. The question of which discourses claim to be
“true” and what that means is itself a complicated matter; and the relationship
between authors of fiction or poetry and truth and power, is even more so.
Neither of these do I have the space to discuss in detail here.
In disciplinary
mechanisms the documentation of an individual as a “case” from evidence
garnered through surveillance and examination produces a body of writing
through which an individual and his/her “truth” can be deciphered and fixed.
This process allowed for “the constitution of the individual as describable,
analysable object . . . in order to maintain him in his individual features . .
. ” (Foucault 1995, 190). Through methods of confession, an individual subject
is constructed when his/her “true self” is required to be expressed to the
confessor (in order that one know and purify oneself), in the form of sexual
desires, fantasies and fears (Foucault 1990a, 21). The injunction to
investigate oneself and to confess what one finds treated this otherwise hidden
content as a kind of “truth” within, an expression of one’s “true self”
(Foucault 1997b, 202-204).
As the practice of
confession has spread, as the ways in which power relations subject us to speak
more and more about our inner truths, we begin to lose track of the idea that
these truths are required to surface by power, and designated as truth by
power; rather, as the power relations that enforce the speaking of these truths
proliferate, it comes to appear as if our deep truths force their way to the
surface unless repressed: “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so
many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive
it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us
that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface; that
if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place . . .”
(Foucault 1990a, 60). In other words, we have come to be created as subjects
with a hidden truth within, one that can be revealed if we can only liberate
ourselves from repression.
Similarly, it has been
and to some extent continues to be common practice to attempt to decipher the
truth of the author’s identity, his/her “true self” out of the discourse that
s/he has produced in his/her texts and speech.
To what degree this is a “true” picture of the modern
subject for Foucault is not clear. This is indeed the view of subjectivity that
has been developed through practices of discipline and confession, according to
Foucault, and to that extent we tend at least to view ourselves as if we “actually”
are independent, autonomous, free subjects. Foucault himself is
ambiguous on the question of whether this picture accurately corresponds to
reality, partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he does not adhere to a
correspondence theory of truth (see, e.g., Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, 120) on
Foucault’s rejection of this theory of truth). In Discipline and Punish
Foucault addresses the question of the “truth value” of our current notion of
subjectivity, in a short but suggestive passage about the “soul” as the harbor
of our inner “truths”: “It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion,
or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is
produced permanently around, on, within the body the functioning of a power
that is e