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2. Introduction to Theory of Literature: Introduction (cont.)
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Prof: 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--and 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 of
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.
This question of determinism is
as important in the discourse of
literary theory as the question
of skepticism.
They're plainly interrelated in
a variety of ways,
but it's more to the question
of determinism I want to return
today.
Now last time,
following Ricoeur,
I mentioned Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud as key
figures in the sort of secondary
development that somehow
inaugurates theory,
and then I added Darwin.
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 are being pulled
by our strings like a puppet.
In the aftermath of Darwin in
particular,
our understanding of natural
selection,
our understanding of genetic
hard-wiring 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.
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 Anton
Chekhov on one side and Henry
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 1905,
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 is not really a protagonist
in the play for class reasons,
is a house servant named
Yepihodov,
and Yepihodov is a character
who is,
among other things,
a kind of autodidact.
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.
I want 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."
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 somehow to be
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.
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--the snare of language.
To continue,
he says at the top of the next
page,
"Properly speaking and
letting other subjects alone,
I must say"--everything in
terms of what other discourse
does and what he himself can
say,
and 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 the end of the passage is,
"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 Yepihodov
has read that in a certain sense
determines him is Buckle.
"Have you read Buckle?
I wish to have a word with you
Avdotya Fyodorovna."
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's 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's
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 is 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.
He recognizes that he's missed
something.
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, 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--
"couldn't,
no doubt, have been different
for me for it's"--
"it" meaning life--
"[life is]
at the best a tin mold either
fluted or embossed with
ornamental excrescences 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 cook,
by the way, is
Brillat-Savarin--
"one takes the form,
as the great cook says,
and is more or less compactly
held by it.
One lives, in fine, as one can.
Still one has the illusion of
freedom."
Here is where Strether 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 was 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 an avatar of the
literary theorist--
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've 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."
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,"
and in Foucault's terms,
the question "What is an
author?"
In other words,
in the absence of human agency,
the first sacrifice for
literary theory is the author,
the idea of the author.
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 maybe Berlin.
It's 1968 or '69,
spilling over in to 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,
entitled "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're
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.
Yet at the same time,
you probably thought "Oh,
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,
so that can take us along
rather smoothly.
There is an initial issue.
Because we're as skeptical
about skepticism as we are about
anything else we're likely to
raise our eyebrows and say,
"Hmm.
Doesn't this guy Foucault think
he's an author?
You know, 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 we may have in it.
So yes, there is the
question--there is the fact that
stands before u--that this very
authoritative-sounding person
seems to be an author,
right?
I never met anybody who seemed
more like an author than this
person,
and yet he's raising the
question whether there is any
such thing,
or in any case,
the question how difficult it
is to decide what it is if there
is.
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 Johns 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.
This particular lecture course
was being given by Georges
Poulet, a so-called
phenomenological critic.
That's one of the
"isms"
we aren't covering in this
seminar.
In any case,
Poulet was also a central
figure on the scene of the
sixties.
Poulet would be lecturing
along, and the students had
somehow formed a habit of from
time to time--
by the way, you can 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 look at them
and say, "Mais,
oui!
Exactement!
A mon avis aussi!"
And then he would go on and
continue to lecture for a while.
Then somebody else would raise
his hand and say,
"Proust."
"Ah,
précisément!
Proust.
Proust."
And then he'd continue along.
So my friend decided he'd give
it a try
>
and he raised his hand and he
said,
"Voltaire,"
and Poulet said "Quoi
donc… Je ne vous
comprends pas,"
and then 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,
and in a certain sense,
yes, the names of authors,
the names of stars;
but at the same time,
plainly names that 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.
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'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.
We simply, kind of
spontaneously,
make the division.
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's just
whatever you say it is.
Fine.
Let's just go ahead,"
they are then much more likely,
rather than using the word
"literature,"
to use the word
"discourse"
or "textual field,"
"discursivity."
You begin to hear,
or perhaps smell,
the slight whiff of jargon that
pervades theoretical writing.
It often 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.
It's a habit that arises from
the sense of the permeability of
all forms of utterance with
respect to each other,
and that habit,
as I say, is a breakdown of the
notion that certain forms of
utterance can be understood as a
delimited,
structured field.
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,
is what Foucault calls a
"function."
By the way, this isn't at all 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,
or--in the case of plays--
as the inferred 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 and yet at the
same time somehow or another
passes out of structure--
that's the case with Roland
Barthes.
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 so you don't have to
have read it,
The Death of the Author.
It's on page 874 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 S/Z.
It's a huge book which is
all about this short story by
Balzac, "Sarrasine,"
that he begins this essay by
quoting.
This is what he says here about
"Sarrasine":
In his story
"Sarrasine"
Balzac,
describing a castrato disguised
as a woman,
writes the following sentence:
"This was woman
herself,
with her sudden fears,
her irrational whims,
her instinctive worries,
her impetuous boldness,
her fussings and her delicious
sensibility."
[Barthes says,]
"Who is speaking thus?
Is it the hero of the story
bent on remaining ignorant of
the castrato hidden beneath the
woman?
Is it Balzac the individual,
furnished by his personal
experience with a 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]
slips away ["our
subject"
meaning that we don't quite
know what's being talked about
sometimes,
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 the author
isn't maybe even 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,
says on page 913 that 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 own- its
own?"
In other words,
we 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 (or its
substitute)…
[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]
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,
right, 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 that
well,
yeah, I'm talking about the
human subject or well,
I'm talking about the subject
matter;
but I trust that you will
quickly kind of adjust to that
difficulty.
All right.
So with this said,
it's probably time to say
something in defense of the
author.
I know that you wish you could
stand up here and say something
in defense of the author,
so I will speak in 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,
of 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.
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
adventitious 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,
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
vale of tears--and Johnson is
very conscious of this being a
vale 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, that's an argument for
the other side,
but these are different times.
This is 1969,
and 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--
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 would say, "Oh, no.
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 you
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.
We'll come back to that much
later in the course.
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
signified, to close the writing.
Such a conception suits
criticism [and criticism is a
lot like policing,
right--"criticism"
means being a critic,
criticizing]
very well, the latter then
allotting itself the important
task of discovering the Author
(or its hypostases:
society,
history, psyché,
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 sixties,
the cops win.
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 therefore
the ideological figure by which
one marks the manner in which we
fear the proliferation of
meaning."
Now once again,
there is this sort of the
skepticism about skepticism.
You say, "Why shouldn't 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.
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 of 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."
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 misuse
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 us to this day and
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.
All right.
With all this said,
how can the theorist recuperate
honor for certain names like,
for example,
his own?
"All right.
It's all very well.
You're not an author,
but I secretly think I'm an
author, right?"
Let's suppose someone were
dastardly enough to harbor 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 if we reject the
police-like authority of
authors,
of whom we may have a certain
suspicion on those grounds,
when 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 whom 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.
It would have been a perfect
symmetry because last time we
quoted Paul Ricoeur to the
effect that these authors,
Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud, were--and this is
Ricoeur's word--
"masters."
Whoa!
That's the last thing we want
to hear.
They're not masters.
Foucault couldn't possibly
allow for that because plainly
the whole texture of their
discourse would be undermined by
introducing the notion that it's
okay to be a master,
and yet Ricoeur feels that
these figures dominate modern
thought as masters.
How does Foucault deal with
this?
He invents a concept.
He says, "They aren't
authors.
They're founders of
discursivity,"
and then he grants that it's
kind of difficult to distinguish
between a founder of
discursivity and an author who
has had an important influence.
Right?
And then he talks about the
gothic novel and he talks about
Radcliffe's, Anne
Radcliffe's--he's wrong about
this, by the way.
The founder of discursivity in
the gothic novel is not Anne
Radcliffe;
it's Horace Walpole,
but that's okay--
he talks about Anne Radcliffe
as the person who establishes
certain tropes,
topoi, and
premises that govern the writing
of gothic fiction for the next
hundred years and,
indeed, even in to 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
influence is not at all unlike
sort of speaking or writing in
the wake of a founder of
discursivity,
but we can let that pass.
On the other hand,
Foucault is very concerned to
distinguish figures like this
from scientists like Galileo and
Newton.
Now it is interesting,
by the way, maybe in defense of
Foucault,
that whereas we speak of people
as Marxist or Freudian,
we don't speak of people as
Radcliffian or Galilean or
Newtonian.
We use the adjective
"Newtonian"
but we don't speak of certain
writers who are still interested
in quantum mechanics as
"Newtonian writers."
That's interesting in a way,
and may somehow or another
justify Foucault's understanding
of 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 place holders 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,
but 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.
That is the special category
that Foucault wants to reserve
for those privileged figures
whom he calls founders of
discursivity.
All right.
Very quickly then to conclude:
one consequence of the death of
the author,
and the disappearance of the
author into 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.
Copyright arose as a bourgeois
idea.
That is to say,
"I possess my writing.
I have an ownership
relationship with my
writing."
The disappearance of the
author, like 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 traditional
idea of the author--
so much under suspicion in the
work of Foucault and Barthes in
the late sixties--
can be turned on its ear.
It can be understood as a
source of new-found 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,
or many of the things we're
going to be reading during the
course of this 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--
those for whom this alternative
notion of the undermining of any
sense of that which is
authoritative is in its turn a
possible source,
finally, of freedom.
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.
All right.
So much for the introductory
lectures which touch on aspects
of the materials that we'll 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.
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.
