Foucault's "What Is an Author?"

Opener:
Look back over your notes and annotations to the Foucault essay "What Is an Author?" and speculate about the ways these observations and insights specifically connect and resonate with our other readings thus far in the course. Cast your mind back to the early readings--what connections emerge? How does Foucault's thinking fit with Russ, Pavic, or Borges??

Foucault suggests, for instance, that writing is "an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes byond its own rules and transgresses its limits" (264). How does this connect with our class discourse?

You might also reflect on Marc Hutcheson's Spec 4 posting about Foucault, particularly with reference to Marc's question "why can't we judge a book <solely> by its content?" How does this question link with our readings and/or with Foucault??


Drew Zwicke:
Foucoult questions the necessity of determining whose discourse a reader is interpreting. He believes that the very nature of capitalistic society serves to lock a fiction "writer" into a specific genre because a successful "author" sells books with his or her name. Creativity/diversity/originality is stifled . It seems that the only way an "author" can escape the rigidly structured atmosphere of publishing in the Western world is to adopt a pseudonym. The notion of an "author's" identity is one which Borges explored in his rewriteof Quixote.

Amanda Kathleen Pedersen:
I noticed the passage (p.267) in which Focault writes that "the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it." This sentence makes me think of "Female Man," since that text has four speakers and one author, none of whom are Joanna Russ. Additionally, Focault adds that the presence of the author's name "indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture." If "Female Man" had been written by an anonymous author, would I have reacted differently to it? Most definitely.

Len Hatfield:
Drew: interesting....how do you see Borges reflecting on capitalist "author" determinations? And where does Foucault suggest that using pseudonyms will allow this escape you mention?


Stacey Dittmar:
Foucault says, "Writing unfolds like a game" (264). This completely reminds me of Pavic. He creates his book in a fashion that is similar to a game, winning would mean full understanding, and yet, in order to achieve this, the game must be played over and over again. The odd part about DOK is that the reader is led to believe that he/she can make is/her own rules; read it from front to back, or back to front, or even backwards - it doesn't matter.
He also says that one way of characterizing writing is through a religious approach. I, some of you expressed a different view, saw this as true in the DOK , and, quite frankly, I see this in most books, although Russ dealt more with the critical approach that Foucault also speaks of.

Len Hatfield:
Amanda: Good! but are there only four speakers in FM? what about the narrator, say, ?

Jason Booth:
One connection I can draw between Foucault's thoughts and Russ's is the following: At the end of _Female Man_, the text seems to make a plea for its own "demise". It essentially casts a vector towards a place/time where it would loose meaning. As Foucault writes, "the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works: he is a certain functional principle by which , in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which ojne impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction" (274). FM operates on this assumption. The text speculates on its own death in that it will cease to be understood. Of course, in order for this "death" to happen, the text (author) must have "excluded" and limited the choices of the culture. The text "dies" at the moment it is absorbed into the cultural unconcious.

Fleunge:
Stacey: does it merely "seem" like the reader can make his/her own rules, or is it actually the case?? Aside from the direction of the reading, what other reading rules might be made or apply in DK?

Jenn Lindberg:
I look at the quote on writing with what I perceive as understanding, and yet I don't. It is an elusive movement out of the corner of my eye I try and grasp. It seems to be saying that writing is an interplay of signs / metaphors/ images that are arranging in a work more to show off the greater meaning, than to show off the image itself. I hold up Joanna Russ as an example. She seem to desire to create a more realistic portrayal of woman, and thus she creates her four women. While each one is a symbol and unique in their own way, it is the universal "I" that is the central image in the book. The writing begins and does expand out, like a snowball out of control.

Fleunge:
Jenn: would this outward expansion apply to other, less innovatively structured narratives? How so?

David Baird:

If we don't need to "judge" a book, but instead "read" it, its "content", although limited to the squiggles the author made, has nearly unlimited resonant potential within our own minds.
Authors have as much power as readers have sensuality.
Foucalt's text, signifying a perceptual web like unlike anyone else's, hints that our appearance, the "interplay of signs" we give the world, is dependant less on the rules of style, "signified content", than on our very own reality, "the nature of the signifier."
Any discourse between two such texts (or organisms) invariably "goes beyond its own rules" or is more interesting than any one text alone.
More interesting to the detatched observer, but not to either one of the texts, which will remain frozen, or the organisms, whose perceptions and beliefs are more resultant of historical developments than the present drama, whose implications may be realized in the future, if at all.

Stacey Dittmar:
Drew: This idea of a pen name is interesting, although I would assume that what Russ is aiming towards is a complete destruction of this behavior - since it was most women writers who had to depend on it. She advocates a society that probably wouldn't/couldn't consider a society with, perhaps, male writers.

Marc Petersen:
Foucault's reference to writing as a game reminds me of an idea from Derrida--"free play." We can think of 'free play' as a kind of game wherein the purpose of the game is to keep playing. A closed game might be something like Monopoly, where the the point of playing is to win. With free play, though, rules and limits cease to apply. This idea is very akin to Game Theory, a theory generally applied to mathematics, which revolves around concepts of finite and infinite games, with the infinite game being analogous to Derrida's "free play." Like 'free play,' the infinite game breaks its own rules and creates new rules as it goes on. The point is to keep playing; don't let the game end. This, I think, has a great deal to do with what Foucault is getting at.

In terms of our course, we can see many of the texts here as operating under free play. Isn't the whole point of DoK to keep reading (i.e. playing)? Even when a reading is "finished," the text invites another reading, another set of structures and ordering that change the interpretive nature of the text. Taken from an even larger view, not only isn't the text the same after each reading, but the reader who picks up the text once again is never the same reader as before. This constant changing of the rules and parameters (and, yes, even the paradigms) constitutes an infinite game.

Marc C. Hutcheson:
We have seen writing in this class that "goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits". I think it is safe to say that _Dictionary of the Khazars_ falls in this category. I for one am used to reading linear texts from front to back and those which have an easily readable plot, however it may have some deeper meanings to it. I know we have almost discussed the difficulties with Pavic to the point of mootness but it does fall into the category of the limit transgressing forms of literature.
As far as the other texts are concerned, Russ and Borges are also quite different in their style of writing. All three go beyond what we consider the conventional book. Has Foucault read any of them? He must have.
As we analyze the structure of these texts, we come to an understanding that they are indeed different. But what about other "normal" linear texts? Can something that can be easily read front to back and has nore of simple plot transgress the limits of writing? What about Brunner or Delany? Are their works not normal writings?

Fleunge:
But David, it seems like what you're offering are just variations on the old relativist claim that a text can mean anything. Is that all Fouc's on about? what else might he mean by 'nature of the signifier' than 'our very own reality'? Can you be more specific??

Jason Michael Tice:
The only way I can think to lead into this is to explain what I think about when reading one of our texts. I often use the text as a stepping stone to alluded ideas such as the one about time and the creation stories I mentioned in Spec 4. So the meaning of the text then becomes something greater than the message presented my the actual written text. As a down side I tend to dismiss the tangible ideas somewhat and spend more time exploring the tangent, but often the tangent leads right back to ideas in the text. The author has to have some direction, some goal to push for but often, as mentioned before, the meaning comes from what is not attuned to in the text itself.

Amanda Kathleen Pedersen:
Mmm. Shouldn't have said that about the four voices, I forgot about "I". My point was that none of the voices, including that of the author presence is that of Joanna Russ. However, her "author function" establishes the presence of this text within the society.

Fleunge:
Yes, Marc H....what if Fouc is thinking about writing and narratives that aren't just oddly shaped like DK and Borges? How would what he's talking about--this notion of the author function--apply to Delany, say??

Fleunge:
Amanda: good emendation. . . now how would you say that this absence (the author function) is represented in the worlds of FM? How is it fictionalized there?

Jenn Lindberg:
MARC C.: I would argue that Delany and Brunner *DO* go beyond mundane linearity. Brunner provided us with a constant shift in time that kept the reader off balance. Delany provides the reader with a comfortable space, but one in which differences, and statements are made. The barbarian king becomes the slave, while the slave becomes the dominant. Raven is a woman who goes around with no top on (If I remember correctly). Delany challanges culteral norms as much as Russ challenges Patriarchical societies.


Fleunge:
Jenn: yeah, but is the going beyond that Fouc's talking about really just about the content of the stories?

Stacey Dittmar:
I guess its actually the case .... I mean, the whole basis of the game is that by playing it (or by reading it), answers will be gained. I don't know if there are any real answers, and I think that's why I felt so strongly about this being in some ways like a Bible. The people and their stories were for me pretty unbelievable, just like they are in the Bible. Faith plays a huge role in this - the player in the game should have faith in what is being said in order to win - the Bible, appears crazy, and so maybe it is, but faith is what gives it that small fraction of believeability. But I guess in both your always questioning, so what's the point of this .... I don't know.

Amanda Kathleen Pedersen:
In response to Stacey's comment about the reader of DOK making his/her own rules - I felt like Pavic gave me the freedom to choose "how" I read the book. I mean, not just front to back, or back to front - but, I felt like I was given the freedon top either read deeply or to skim lightly. Reading deeply meant work and confusion and question. Skimming lightly meant taking everything with a grain of salt (no pun intended) - not really trying to grasp at anything. That book really makes you work, if you want to understand - I would agree with Stacey there... I'm not finished with this thought...

Rat Korga:
Old Venn shows us an example of the sort of "free play" that goes on in terms of texts. She tells us that the sea creature she encountered is not the one her tale describes. Moreover, the creature other people talk about is not the creature from her story either. The interpretive games, and indeed the play of signification, keep shifting. The signifier "sea creature" comes to point to a variety of signifieds. The game, the play changes with the teller, the listener, and the signs involved.

Fleunge:
Ah, so! Rat: is that what you meant when you asked what they meant by giving you a world?