The following is a transcript of the second lecture in Professor Paul Fry’s course, Introduction to Theory of Literature, at Yale University.
Introduction
Last time, we introduced the way in which the preoccupation with literary and other forms of theory in the twentieth century is shadowed by a certain skepticism. But as we were talking about that we actually introduced another issue which isn’t quite the same as the issue of skepticism, namely determinism. In other words, we said that in intellectual history first you get this movement of concern about the distance between the perceiver and the perceived – a concern that gives rise to skepticism about whether we can know things as they really are.
But then, as a kind of aftermath of that movement, in figures like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – you’ll notice that Foucault reverts to such figures when he turns to the whole question of “founders of discursivity” – we’ll come back to that – in figures like that, you get the further question not just how we can know things in themselves as they really are, but how we can trust the autonomy of that which knows. In other words, how we can trust the autonomy of consciousness, if in fact, there’s a chance – a good chance, according to these writers – that it is, in turn, governed by, controlled by, hidden powers or forces. And this question of determinism is as important in the discourse of literary theory as the question of skepticism and plainly interrelated in a variety of ways, but it’s more that question to which I want to return today.
Anton Chekhov and Henry James
Now, last time, following Ricoeur, I mentioned Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as key figures in this sort of secondary development that somehow inaugurates theory, and then I added Darwin. And it seems particularly important to think of Darwin when we begin to think about the ways in which, in the twentieth century, a variety of thinkers are concerned about human agency. That is to say, what becomes of the idea that we have autonomy. That we can act. Or at least that we can act with a sense of integrity and not just with a sense that we’re being pulled by our strings like a puppet. In the aftermath of Darwin, in particular, our understanding of natural selection, our understanding of genetic hardwiring, and other factors, makes us begin to wonder in what sense we can consider ourselves, each of us, to be autonomous subjects.
And so, as I say, the question of agency arises, and it’s in that context, needless to say, that I’d like to take a look at these two interesting passages on the sheet that has Chekhov on one side and James on the other.
Let’s begin with the Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard, you know, is about the threat owing to socioeconomic conditions, the conditions that do ultimately lead to the Menshevik Revolution of 1907, to a landed estate and the perturbation and turmoil into which the cast of characters is thrown by this threat. Now, one of the more interesting characters, who’s not really a protagonist in the play for class reasons, is a house servant named Yepikhodov. And Yepikhedov is a character who is, among other things, a kind of auto-didact. That is to say he has scrambled into a certain measure of knowledge about things. He is full of a kind of understandable self-pity. And his speeches are, in some ways, more characteristic of the gloomy intellectual milieu that is reflected in Chekhov’s text, really, than almost anyone else’s. And I wanted to quote to you a couple of them.
Toward the bottom of the first page, he says, “I’m a cultivated man. I read all kinds of remarkable books. And yet I can never make out what direction I should take. What it is that I want, properly speaking.”
And as I read pay attention to the degree to which he’s constantly talking about language and about the way in which he himself is inserted into language. He’s perpetually seeking a mode of properly speaking. He is a person who is somewhat knowledgeable about books, feels himself to be somehow caught up in the matrix of book learning. In other words, a person who is very much preoccupied with his conditioning by language. Not least when, perhaps, unwittingly, he alludes to Hamlet. “Should I live or should I shoot myself?” Properly speaking, “to be or not to be.”
In other words, he inserts himself into the dramatic tradition to which, as a character, he himself belongs and shows himself to be in a debased form, derived from one of those famous charismatic moments in which a hero utters a comparable concern. And so, in all sorts of ways, in this simple passage, we find a character who’s caught up in the snare – if I can put it that way – caught up in the snare of language.
To continue, he says:
“Properly speaking – top of the next page – properly speaking, in letting other subjects alone, I must say everything in terms of what other discourse does and what he himself can say, I must say…of course, it’s mainly about me, regarding myself among other things that fate treats me mercilessly as a storm treats a small boat.” And at the end of the passage: “Have you read Buckle?”
Now, Buckle is a forgotten name today, but at one time, he was just about as famous as Oswald Spengler who wrote The Decline of the West. He was a Victorian historian preoccupied with the dissolution of Western civilization. In other words, Buckle was the avatar of the notion in the late nineteenth century that everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
One of the texts that Yepikhedov has read, that in a certain sense determines him, is Buckle. “Have you read Buckle? I wish to have a word with you [of deutsche, Fyodor Rolphe?].” In other words, I’m arguing that the saturation of these speeches with signs of words, language, speaking, words, books is just the dilemma of the character. That is to say he is in a certain sense book- and language-determined, and he is obscurely aware that this is his problem even as it’s a source of pride for him.
Turning then to a passage in a very different tone from James’ Ambassadors. An altogether charming character, the elderly Lambert Strether, who has gone to, most of you know, has gone to Paris to bring home the young Chad Newsome, a relative who’s to take over the family business, the manufacture of an unnamed household article in Woollett, Massachusetts, probably toilet paper. In any case, Lambert Strether, as he arrives in Paris, has awakened to the sheer wonder of urbane culture. And he recognizes that he’s missed something. And he’s gone to a party given by a sculptor, and at this party, he meets a young man named Little Bilham, whom he likes, and he takes Little Bilham aside by the lapel, and he makes a long speech to him, in effect saying, “Don’t do what I have done. Don’t miss out on life. Live all you can. It is a mistake not to.”
And this is why, he goes on to say, the affair – I mean the affair of life – it’s as though he’s anticipating the affair of Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet, which is revealed at the end of the text – the affair of life couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me. For it’s – “it” meaning “life” – life is at the best, a tin mould either fluted or embossed with ornamental extressances or else smooth and dreadfully plain into which a helpless jelly one’s consciousness is poured so that one takes the form as the great cook says – the great cooke by the way is [Briant St. Laurent?] – one takes the form, as the great Cooke says, and is more or less compactly held by it. One lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom, and here is where Strethers says something very clever that I think we can make use of.
He says:
“Therefore, don’t be like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either at the right time too stupid or too intelligent to have it. I don’t quite know which.”
Now, if he was too stupid to have it, then, of course, he would have been liberated into the realm of action. He would have been, what Nietzsche in an interesting precursor text calls, “historical man.” He simply would have plunged ahead into life as though he had freedom, even though he was too stupid to recognize that it was an illusion.
On the other hand, if he were too intelligent to, as it were, bury the illusion and live as though he were free, if he was too intelligent to do that, he’s a kind of avatar of the literary theorists. In other words, the sort of person who can’t forget long enough that freedom is an illusion in order to get away from the preoccupations that, as I have been saying, characterize a certain kind of thinking in the twentieth century.
And it’s rather charming, at the last, that he says, “Because how can we know anything? I don’t quite know which.”
Author and Authority
And so that, too, strikes me as a helpful and also characteristic passage that can introduce us to today’s subject which is the loss of authority. That is to say, in Roland Barthes’ terms, the death of the author in Foucault’s terms the question, “What is an author?”
In other words, the first sacrifice in the absence of human agency, the first sacrifice for literary theory, is the author. The idea of the author. And that’s what will concern us in this second, still introductory lecture to this course. We’ll get into the proper or at least more systematic business of the course when we turn to hermeneutics next week.
Now, let me set the scene: This is Paris. It wouldn’t have to be Paris. It could be Berkeley or Columbia or it may be Berlin. It’s 68, 69, spilling over into the seventies. Students and most of their professors are on the barricades. That is to say in protest not only against the war in Vietnam but the outpouring of various forms of authoritative resistance to protest that characterized the sixties. There is a ferment of intellectual revolt, which takes all sorts of forms in Paris, but is first and foremost perhaps organized by what quickly in this country became a bumper sticker “Question Authority.” This is the framework in which the then most prominent intellectual in France writes an essay at the very peak of the student uprising, “What is an author?” and poses an answer which is by no means straightforward and simple.
You’re probably a little frustrated, because maybe you sort of anticipated what he was going to say and then you read it and you said, “Gee, he really isn’t saying that. In fact, I don’t quite know what he is saying.” And struggled more than you expected to, because you anticipated what I’ve just been saying about the setting and about the role of Foucault and all the rest of it and were possibly more confused than you might have expected to be. And yet at the same time you probably felt, “Yeah, well I did come out pretty much in the place I expected to come out in despite the roundabout way of having gotten there.”
Because this lecture is introductory, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time explicating the more difficult moments in his argument. I am going to emphasize what you perhaps did anticipate that he would say. And so that can take us along rather smoothly.
There is an initial issue. And because we’re as skeptical about skepticism as we are about anything else, we’re likely to raise our eyebrows and say, “Hm. Doesn’t this guy Foucault think he’s an author?” You know, I mean after all, he’s a superstar. He’s used to being taken very seriously. Does he want to say that he’s just an author-function? That his textual field is a kind of set of structural operations within which one can discover an author. Does he really want to say this? Well, this is the question raised by the skeptic about skepticism or about theory, and it’s one that we’re going to take rather seriously, but we’re going to come back to it, because there are ways, it seems to me, of keeping this question at arm’s length. In other words, Foucault is up to something interesting, and probably we should meet him at least halfway to see, to measure, the degree of interest.
And so, yes, there is the question, there is the fact that stands before us that this very authoritative-sounding person seems to be an author, right? I mean, never met anybody who seemed more like an author than this person, and yet he’s raising the question of whether there is any such thing or in any case the question of how difficult it is to decide what it is if there is.
And so let me digress with an anecdote, which may or may not sort of help us to understand the delicacy of this relationship between a star author – a person undeniably a star author – and the atmosphere of thought in which there is, in a certain sense, no such thing as an author.
An old crony and former colleague of mine was taking a course at John Hopkins in the 1960s. This was a time when Hopkins led all American universities in the importing of important European scholars, and it was a place of remarkable intellectual ferment. And this particular lecture course was being given by Georges Poulet, a so-called phenomenological critic. It’s one of the -isms we aren’t covering in this seminar, but in any case, Poulet was also a central figure on the scene of the 60s. And Poulet would be lecturing along, and the students had somehow formed a habit of from time to time – by the way, you could form this habit, too – of raising their hand, and what they would do is they would utter a name. At least, this is what my friend noticed. They would raise their hand and they would say, “Mallarmé!” and Poulet would say, “Mais, oui, exactement!” and he would go on and continue to lecture for a while and somebody else would raise his hand and say, “Proust!” Poulet: “Précisement, précisement!” And then, you know, he would continue along. So my friend decided he would give it a try. And he raised his hand and he said, “Voltaire!” And Poulet said, “Quoi donc? Je vous comprends pas!” And he paused and hesitated and continued with his lecture as though my friend had never asked his question.
Now, this is a ritual of introducing names, but, in a certain sense, yes the names of authors. The names of stars. But at the same time, names that, plainly, stand for something other than their mere name. Names that stand for domains or fields of interesting discursivity. That is to say, I mean, Poulet was the kind of critic who believed that the oeuvre of an author was a totality that could be understood as a structural whole, and his criticism worked that way. And so, yes, the signal that this field of discursivity is on the table is introduced by the name of the author. But it remains just a name. It’s an author without authority, yet at the same time, it’s an author who stands for, whose name stands for, an important field of discourse. And that’s of course what my friend, because he knew perfectly well that when he said Voltaire, Poulet would have nothing to do with it, that that’s the idea that my friend wanted to experiment with. There are relevant and interesting fields of discourse and there are completely irrelevant fields of discourse and some of these fields are on the sides of angelic discourse, and some of these fields are on the side of the demonic, and we simply kind of spontaneously make the division.
The Founders of Discursivity
Discursivity – discourse – that’s what I forgot to talk about last time. When I said that sometimes people just ultimately throw up their hands when they try to define literature and say, “Well, literature is just whatever you say it is! Fine! Let’s just go ahead.” are much more likely, rather than using the word “literature”, to use the word, “discourse” or “textual field.” “Discursivity.” We begin to hear the slight…or perhaps smell the slight whiff of jargon that pervades theoretical writing. It always does so for a reason. This is the reason one hears so much about discourse, simply because of doubt about the generic integrity of various forms of discourse. One can speak hesitantly of literary discourse. Political discourse. Anthropological discourse. But one doesn’t want to go so far as to say “literature,” “political science,” “anthropology.” And so it’s a habit that arises from this sense of the permeability of all forms of utterance with respect to each other and that habit, as I say, is a kind of breakdown of the notion that certain forms of utterance can be understood as a delimited, structured field.
And one of the reasons this understanding seems so problematic is the idea that we don’t appeal to the authority of an author in making our mind about the nature of a given field of discourse. We find the authority of the author instead somewhere within the textual experience. The author is a signal. The author is what Foucault calls a function. The author certainly appears – by the way, this isn’t a question of the author not existing. Yes, Barthes talks about the death of the author, but even Barthes doesn’t mean that the author is dead like Nietzsche’s God. The author is there, sure. It’s a question, rather, of how we know the author to be there, firstly, and secondly, whether or not, in attempting to determine the meaning of a text, and this is something we’ll be talking about next week, we should appeal to the authority of an author. If the author is a function, that function is something that appears – perhaps problematically appears – within the experience of the text. Something we get in terms of the speaker, the narrator, and in the case of plays – the orchestrator of the text. Something that we infer from the way the text unfolds.
So as a function, and not as a subjective consciousness to which we appeal, to grasp a meaning, the author still does exist. So we consider a text as a structured entity or perhaps as an entity which is structured or, at the same time or another, passes out of structure. That’s the case with Roland Barthes, and in so doing, and here I want to appeal to a couple of passages. I want to quote from the beginning of Roland Barthes’ essay, which I know I only suggested, but I’m simply going to quote the passage. You don’t have to have read it.
The death of the author. It’s on page 74 for those of you who have your texts as I hope you do.
Barthes, while writing this, he’s writing what has perhaps, in retrospect, seemed to be his most important book. It’s called SZ. It’s a huge book, which is all about this short story by Balzac, Sarrasine, that he begins this essay by quoting, and this is what he says about Sarrasine:
“In his story, describing a Castratto disguised as a woman writes the following sentence, “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries. Her imperious boldness. Her fussings. And her delicious sensibility.” End quote.
Barthes says, “Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the Castratto hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual furnished by his personal experience with the philosophy of woman? Is it Balzac the author professing literary ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know. For the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice. Of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject – and this is a deliberate pun – our subject slips away. Our subject meaning that we don’t quite know what’s being talked about some time. But also, and more importantly, the subject, the authorial subject, the actual identity of the given speaking subject, that’s what slips away. The negative, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”
So that’s a shot fired across the bow, against the author, because it’s Barthes’ supposition that we really, that the author maybe isn’t quite an author-function because that function may be hard to identify in a discrete way among myriad other functions.
Foucault, who I think does take for granted that a textual field is more firmly structured than Barthes’ supposes, Foucault says on page 913, “When we speak of the author function, as opposed to the author, and here I begin quoting at the bottom of the left-hand column on page 913, “When we speak in this way, we no longer raise the questions, “How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs which are properly its own?”
In other words, we can no longer say, “How does the author exert autonomous will with respect to the subject matter being expressed?” We no longer appeal, in other words, to the authority of the author as the source of the meaning that we find in the text.” Foucault continues, “Instead, these questions will be raised: ‘How, under what conditions, and in what forms, can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse? What functions can it assume? And by obeying what rules?”
In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject, that is to say when we speak in this way of an author-function, it is a matter of depriving the subject or its substitute, a character for example, or a speaker as we say when we don’t mean that it’s the poet talking, but the guy speaking in My Last Duchess or whatever is depriving the subject or its substitute of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.
The subject here always means the subjectivity of the speaker, not the subject matter. You’ll get used to it, because it’s a word that does a lot of duty and you need to develop context in which you recognize, “Yeah, I’m talking about the human subject” or “Yeah, I’m talking about the subject matter.” But I trust that you will quickly, kind of, adjust to that difficulty.
Critique of the Author Function
Alright, so with this said, probably it’s time to say something in defence of the author. I mean, I know that you wish you could stand up here and say something in defence of the author, so I will speak on behalf of all of you who want to defend the author by quoting a wonderful passage from Samuel Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare in which he explains for us why it is that we have always paid homage to the authority of the author. It’s not just a question, as obviously Foucault and Barthes are always suggesting, deferring to authority as though the authority were the police with a baton in its hand, right? It’s not a question of deferring to authority in that sense. It’s a question rather of affirming what we call the human spirit, and this is what Johnson says:
“There is always a silent reference of human works to human abilities. And as the inquiry how far man may extend his designs or how high he may rate his native force is of far greater dignity than in what rank we shall place any particular performance. Curiosity is always busy to discover the instruments as well as to survey the workmanship. To know how much is to be ascribed to original powers and how much to casual and advantageous help.”
So what Johnson is saying is, “Well, it’s all very well to consider a textual field ‘the workmanship.’ But at the same time, we want to remind ourselves of our worth. We want to say, well, gee, it’s not just sort of…that wasn’t produced by a machine. That’s not just a set of functions. Variables as one might say in the lab. It’s produced by genius. It’s something that allows us to rate human ability high and that, especially in this veil of tears, and Johnson is very conscious of this being a veil of tears, that’s what we want to keep doing. We want to rate human potential as high as we can, and it is for that reason, in a completely different spirit, in the spirit of homage, rather than cringing fear, that we appeal to the authority of an author.
Well, alright, that’s an argument for the other side. But these are different times. This is 69. And the reason, the purpose that’s alleged for appealing to the author as a paternal source, as an authority, is, according to both Barthes and Foucault, to police the way texts are read. In other words, both of them insist that the appeal to the author, as opposed to the submersion of the author in the functionality of the textual field, that the appeal to the author is a kind of delimitation or policing of the possibilities of meaning.
Let me just read two texts to that effect. First, going back to Roland Barthes, on page 877, Barthes says, “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.”
By the way, once again there’s a bit of a rift there between Barthes and Foucault. Foucault wouldn’t say, “quite futile.” He’d say, “You know, we can decipher it but the author-function is just one aspect of the deciphering process.”
But Barthes has entered a phase of his career in which we actually think that structures are so complex that they cease to be structures and that this has a great deal to do with the influence of deconstruction, and we’ll come back to that much later in the course.
But in any case, he continues:
“To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text. To furnish it with a final singled. To close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism and criticism is a lot like policing, right? Criticism means being a critic. You know, criticizing! Such a solution suits criticism very well. The latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the author or its hypostacies, society, history, psyche, liberty, beneath the work. When the author has been found, the text is explained! A “victory to the critic”! In other words, the policing of meaning has been accomplished and the critic wins. Just as in the uprisings of the late 60s the cops win, and this is again the atmosphere in which all of this occurs.
Just then to reinforce this with the pronouncement of Foucault at the bottom of page 913, right-hand column. “The author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”
And once again, the skepticism about skepticism, and you say, “Why should I fear the proliferation of meaning? I want to know what something definitely means! I don’t want to know that it means a million things. You know. I’m here to learn what things mean in so many words. I don’t want to be told that I could sit here for the rest of my life just sort parsing one sentence. Don’t tell me about that. Don’t tell me about these complicated sentences from Balzac’s short story. I’m here to know what things mean. I don’t care if it’s policing or not. Whatever it is, let’s get it done.”
And that, of course, is approaching the question of how we might delimit meaning in a very different spirit. The reason I acknowledge the legitimacy of responding in this way is that to a certain extent the preoccupation with, what shall we say, the mis-use of the appeal to an author is very much of its historical moment. That is to say when one can scarcely say the word “author” without thinking “authority”, and one can definitely never say the word authority without thinking about the police. This is a structure of thought that perhaps pervades the lives of many of this to this day has always pervaded the lives of many people, but is not quite as hegemonic in our thinking today perhaps as it was in the moment of these essays by Barthes and Foucault.
Alright, with all this said, how can the theorists recuperate on honour for certain names, like for example, his own. Alright, it’s all very well, you’re not an author, but I secretly think I’m an author. Let’s suppose someone were dastardly enough to harbour such thoughts. How could you develop an argument in which a thought like that might actually seem to work. After all, Foucault, setting himself aside, he doesn’t mention himself, Foucault, very much admires certain writers. In particular, he admires, like so many of his generation and other generations, Marx and Freud.
It’s a problem! It’s a problem! If we reject the police-like authority of authors, of whom we may have a certain suspicion on those grounds, well we certainly don’t feel that way about Marx and Freud. What’s the difference then? How is Foucault going to mount an argument in which privileged authors, that is to say figures who one cites positively and without a sense of being policed, can somehow or another stay in the picture. Foucault, by the way, doesn’t mention Nietzsche, but he might very well because Nietzsche’s idea of genealogy is perhaps the central influence on Foucault’s work. Frankly, I think it’s just an accident that he doesn’t mention him. Would have been a perfect symmetry, because last time, he quoted Paul Ricoeur to the effect that these authors – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were – and this is Ricoeur’s word “masters.”
That’s the last thing we want to hear. You know, they are not masters. Foucault couldn’t possibly allow for that, because plainly, the whole texture of the discourse would be undermined by introducing the notion that it’s okay to be a master. And yet, Riceur feels that these figures dominate modern thought as masters.
How does Foucault deal with this? He invents a concept. He says, “There aren’t authors. There are founders of discursivity.”
Founders of discursivity. And then he says, he kind of, he grants, that it’s kind of difficult to distinguish between a founder of discursivity and an author who has had an important influence. And then he talks about the gothic novel. And he talks about Radcliffe’s, Ann Radcliffe’s – he’s wrong about this by the way, the founder of discursivity in gothic novel is not Ann Radcliffe, it’s Horace Walpole, that’s okay – he talks about Ann Radcliffe as the person who establishes certain tropes and topoi and premises that govern the writing of gothic fiction for the next hundred years and indeed even into the present, so that she is, Foucault acknowledges, in a certain sense, a person who establishes a way of talking, a way of writing, a way of narrating.
But at the same time, she isn’t a person, Foucault claims, who introduces a discourse or sphere of debate within which ideas, without being attributable necessarily, can nevertheless be developed.
Well, I don’t know. It seems to me that literary influences are not at all unlike sort of speaking or writing in the wake of a founder of discursivity, but we can let that pass. But on the other hand, Foucault is very concerned in distinguished figures like scientists like Galileo and Newton.
Now it is interesting, by the way, maybe in defence of Foucault whereas we speak of people as Marxist or Freudian, we don’t speak of people as Radcliffian or or Galilean or Newtonian. I mean we use the adjective Newtonian but we don’t speak of certain writers who are still interested in quantum mechanics as Newtonian writers. And that’s interesting in a way and may somehow or another justify Foucault’s understanding that the texts of those author-functions, known as Marx and Freud, whose names might be raised in Poulet’s lecture class with an enthusiastic response, as placeholders for those fields of discourse. It may in some sense reinforce Foucault’s argument that these are special inaugurations of debate, of developing thought, that do not necessarily kowtow to the originary figure. Certainly debatable, I mean, we don’t want to pause over it in the case either of Marx or of Freud. Plainly, there are a great many people who think of them as tyrants, right? But within the traditions that they established, it is very possible to understand them as instigating ways of thinking without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking authoritatively.
And that is the special category that Foucault wants to reserve for those privileged figures whom he calls founders of discursivity.
Alright, very quickly then to conclude: one consequence of the author, the death of the author, the disappearance of the author into the author-function is as Foucault curiously says in passing on page 907 that the author has no legal status. And you say, “What? What about copyright? What about intellectual property? That’s a horrible thing to say that the author has no legal status.” Notice once again the intellectual context. It is that copyright arose as a bourgeois function. That is to say, “I possess my writing. I have an ownership relationship with my writing.” The disappearance of the author like the disappearance of a kind of corollary disappearance of bourgeois thought entails, in fact, a kind of bracketing of the idea of copyright or intellectual property. And so there’s a certain consistency in what Foucault is saying about the author having no legal status. But maybe at this point it really is time to dig in our heels.
I am a lesbian Latina. I stand before you as an author articulating an identity for the purpose of achieving freedom. Not to police you. Not to deny your freedom. But to find my own freedom. And I stand before you precisely and in pride as an author. I don’t want to be called an author-function. I don’t want to be called an instrument of something larger than myself, because frankly, that’s what I’ve always been. And I want, precisely, as an authority, through my authorship, to remind you that I am not anybody’s instrument, but that I am autonomous and free.
In other words, the author, the idea, the traditional idea, of the author so much under suspicion in the arc of Foucault and Barthes in the late sixties, the traditional idea of the author can be turned on its ear. It can be understood as a source of newfound authority. Of the freedom of one who has been characteristically not free. And can be received by a reading community in those terms.
It’s very difficult to think how a Foucault might respond to that insistence. And it’s a problem that in a way dogs everything, many of the things that we’re going to be reading during the course of the semester, even within the sorts of theorizing that are characteristically called Cultural Studies and concern questions of the politics of identity. Even within those disciplines, there is a division of thought between people who affirm the autonomous integrity and individuality of the identity in question and those who say, “Any and all identities are only subject-positions discernible and revealed through the matrix of social practices.”
There is this intrinsic split, even within those forms of theory, and not to mention the kinds of theory that don’t directly have to do with the politics of identity. Between those for whom what’s at stake is the discovery of autonomous individuality. And those for whom what’s at stake is the tendency to hold at arm’s length such discoveries, over against the idea that the instability of any and all subject positions is what actually contains within it, as Foucault and Barthes thought as they sort of sat looking at the police standing over against them, that this alternative notion of the undermining of any sense of that which is authoritative, is in its turn, a possible source finally, of freedom. And these sorts of vexing issues, as I say, in all sorts of ways, will dog much of what we read during the course of this semester.
Alright, so much for the introductory lectures, which touch on aspects of the materials that will keep returning to. On Tuesday, we’ll turn to a more specific subject matter. Hermeneutics. What hermeneutics is. How we can think about the nature of interpretation. And our primary text will be the excerpt, in your book, from Hans-Georg Gadamer, and a few passages that I’ll be handing out from Martin Heidegger and E.D. Hirsch.