By Gordon Hull
I’m teaching a Foucault seminar this term, and one of the things I’m trying to do is get better on the doxography of his essays. That led me to a discovery about “What is an Author” that I’m going to share on the (hopefully not hubristic) assumption that other folks didn’t know it either. The essay has been of interest to me for a while, largely because of my work on intellectual property. There, the link between copyright and the juridico-political function of authorship Foucault identifies is fairly clear, and has been ably explored in the context of trademark by Laura Heymann.
What I didn’t know is that Foucault’s essay was originally presented as a seminar (Feb. 1969) – with responses from the likes of Lucien Goldmann and Lacan. The version translated into English and that makes its way into the Rabinow-edited Foucault Reader and subsequent English editions is based on a revised version that Foucault gave the following year in Buffalo. As a result, we don’t get the commentaries. The version in Dits & Écrits I (#69) is thus worth a look for a few reasons.
First, Foucault situates the text in the context of controversies surrounding Order of Things (1966). “What is an Author” is prompted in part by the criticism that Foucault uses author names in Order, despite apparently disavowing any sort of importance for authorship. He defends himself by saying that he needed some way to organize his text, but notes that the controversy poses the question of what role authorship has and how it came to be important. Give that “author” treats authorship as a way of classifying texts (107, in the Reader) or even as a founding moment of a discursivity (in the case of Marx and Freud; more about that in a moment), and is a way of reducing texts into manageable chunks, the need for this essay in the context of Order is clear: Order proposes another way of classifying texts, and so Foucault needs not just to declare the author dead or irrelevant, but to explain what authorship does and how it serves as its own classificatory system. This sense of authorship as doing something also serves as a reminder that Foucault is very interested in speech act theory – for example, Searle gets cited in “Author,” and in a 1978 lecture makes extended reference to late Wittgenstein.
The most difficult part of “Author,” for most of Foucault’s auditors, was his attempt to say that some authors seem to found entire discourses, and his effort to say that Freud and Marx this happens differently. A moment’s reflection will show that this is a tricky point: after all, J. K. Rowling has founded an entire universe of discourse with the Harry Potter series, and it's hard to say why Freud and Marx are different in kind, even if they are different in sphere of influence and so on. Foucault begins by noting that:
“It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book – one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position which we shall call ‘transdiscursive’” (113)
He then cites Aristotle, Homer, Freud and Marx; the latter two “have established an endless possibility of discourse” (114). Specifically, they “created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (114). This sounds reasonable enough, but Foucault then immediately distinguishes such a founding from the scientific founding of a discourse by, e.g., Galileo. He insists that Marx and Freud create “the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a ‘return to the origin.”” (116) and concludes that:
“Reexamination of Galileo’s text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism” (116).
Foucault’s comments are difficult, and the English edition omits considerable text expanding on this – text which is also vital to Lacan’s comments in particular. Most of the comments about the lecture gravitate around this passage, and how Foucault locates Marx and Freud – and how their founding principle differs from prophets, Aristotle, or Galileo. Foucault underscores in answer to a question that he really does want to say that Freud and Marx are something new – not like Aristotle (whose texts were of course the basis of large parts of medieval philosophy). Goldmann, a Lukacsian theorist best-known today for his thesis that Heidegger wrote Being and Time in response to Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, wonders whether Foucault is uncritically repeating a 19c German distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Foucault doesn’t respond to this directly, but the question suggests how difficult Foucault’s construction is.
Lacan’s questions basically show (for us, looking on with the benefit of hindsight) why Freud will be such a problem for Foucault, far more than the narrow question of sexuality would suggest. As one knows, Foucault spends a lot of time on psychoanalysis, as evidenced by the sustained critique in History of Sexuality I. Lacan starts from the question of whether Foucault is a structuralist, which Foucault disavows but which he is often labeled. Lacan uses the occasion to suggest that the point of structuralism isn’t the negation of the subject, but its dependence on something more elementary, as in the case of Freud (“Je voudrais faire remarquer que, structuralisme ou pas, il me semble qu'il n'est nulle part question, dans le champ vaguement déterminé par cette étiquette, de la négation du sujet. Il s'agit de la dépendance du sujet, ce qui est extrêmement différent; et tout particulièrement, au niveau du retour à Freud, de la dépendance du sujet par rapport à quelque chose de vraiment élémentaire, et que nous avons tenté d'isoler sous le terme de «signifiant»”)
One point to underscore is that this also shows why Marx is a problem for Foucault, and why Marx shows up in the same context. Both Marx and Freud argue that subjectivity is the effect of processes that are largely invisible to the subject itself. This is one way of reading “ideology” in Marx, and Foucault knows that he has to show why his own account is not just different but better in some way. As I have suggested, I think the relation between Marx and Foucault on subjectification is an important and underexplored one, one that can easily be masked by Foucault’s caustic dismissals of Marxism.
Foucault answers some of the questions by gesturing precisely in this direction. Thus to another question of Goldmann, he underscores that he does not reduce the subject to a “function,” but is interested in the conditions in which a subject can appear (i.e., here, in which someone can become an “author”). To an earlier question, he had said that it was the same as with the death of man in Order – he wanted to know how “man” had functioned. In all of this, Foucault is marking a territory that becomes the space for his distinct contribution, one that takes on board a lot of the post-structuralist critique of authorship and other categories, but that takes the dissolution of metaphysical categories as only part of an analysis, which needs to focus on the material, political work they do. This political function is interestingly underscored by Lacan, who suggests that the events of May 1968 show “précisément la descente dans la rue des structures [precisely the descent of the structures into the street].” In a sense, Lacan has pointed to the entire project of works like Discipline and Punish: how do the more abstract epistemes identified in works like Order manifest themselves in concrete subjects who undertake politically meaningful action? In short, and as Foucault will say retrospectively of his own work, the entire question is how we should understand subjectification. The “subject” is dead, which is why we need to ask the question of subjectification.
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