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EXERCISE

Consider the following questions:

1. What is the ‘author function’ and how does it differ from a more traditional idea of ‘the author’?
2. In Foucault’s view, what kind of author does the critic invent, and why does the critic fixate on the author?

3.     What does Foucault mean by the ‘discourse’ surrounding an author?

4.     What does Foucault’s account do to the idea of the author as a stable point of origin, a concept fundamental both to the model of the genius artist and to the genre of the art-historical monograph?

1.      The author function is that ‘ideological product’ which acts within the text to marshal its meanings / significations into a repository that tames its tendency to discontinuously propagate excess of meaning. It classifies meaning under a ‘name’ that owns and therefore unifies those meanings and takes responsibility for them and a right to control them. This is likely to be complex because we are not imagining here an active control by a ‘person’ or ‘agent’ but a limiting or regulating filter which suggests that responsibility and rigt to allot meaning is owned 'elsewhere' than in a text's multiple and multiplying readers. It is a ‘principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’.

2.      The critic aims to establish an author’s canon and ascribe unity to that canon (in the name of the author, through limiting criteria which discern the ‘author’ as the source of rights and responsibility for the meanings appropriate (and appropriated) to that work. In that sense the role is similar to connoisseurship in art. The critic thus invents and maintains author-function, repairing it when it is ruptured (by re-reading). Foucault sees the critic fixating on the author as a criteria for:

a.      Safe attribution of works to an author – as part of his canon (not Henry VIII for Shakespeare);

b.      Unity of meaning that acts as a control against erratic (uneducated) readings.  

c.      A means of explaining diversity in a work because such diversity mocks biographical or contingent information associated to an author.

d.      A means of resolving contradictions in and between canonical texts – giving it a non-contradictory unitary source (cp. Bakhtin).

e.      It defines what in other writings or sources of expression can be given ‘authority’ as evidence for a singular interpretive act.

3.      Discourses proceed from social institutions and ideologies supportive of those institutions, as well as the power structures & dynamics which support and are supported by institutions. Subjects are inserted into this frame but an ‘author’ escapes such insertion (and therefore ideological identifications) by a discourse of artistic technique. The author function suppresses the ability to identify the interplay of power and interest of the social discourses writing instantiates.

4.      Foucault’s account sees the social processes of discourse about art as a production and maintenance of author-function. In art this the individual genius (whether Raphael or Rothko). The purpose of such processes is the maintenance, in as far as is possible of current distributions of power in society and of the ideologies that sustain that power to self-maintain. It argues that the radical potential of seeking meaning in art is thus lost and the power and authority to read / interpret / understand of the viewer is deferred to the author-function – the latter’s private ownership denies collaborative meaning-making or limits it.