Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is An Author

Michel Foucault on the "Author Function"
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.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is An Author

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is An Author

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is An Author

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Michel Foucault on the "Author Function"

From Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and

disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's

You might also like