Michel Foucault

Author Function

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 cultureand undoubtably
in others as welldiscourse 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 textshave
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 inventors 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 authors 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
individuals "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.