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.
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.
'Madness, the Absence of Work' excerpt
'What is an Author?' more excerpts
Noam
Chomsky and Michel Foucault, "Human Nature: Justice Versus Power" Excerpt
from a
televised dialogue
Discourse
and truth: the problematization of parrhesia. There you are Vincent!
'Pour en finir
avec les mensonges' Nouvel Observateur 2228, 21.-27.6. 1985, 76-77