Last time, I began the to make the case that there is evidence of an engagement with Deleuze in Foucault’s “What is an Author.” Specifically, I made the case that there is an implict Platonism behind the concept of authorship as Foucault articulates it. This time, I will look at the way that Barthes overturns authorship, and how Foucault’s language distances himself from that, while of course beginning with the proposition that the author is, in fact, a fiction. For Deleuze, the question of difference, when posed against Platonism, is substantially a question of attending to the “swarming” differences that lie outside the Platonic metaphycial schema, and which are accordingly illegible wihtin it, insofar as they cannot be referred back to the anchoring eidos.
This language of swarming differences that are inexpressible and illegible from within a representative schema is also found in Barthes, who is often Foucault’s presumed interlocutor in “Author.” As Barthes sees clearly, “writing” and “text” radically exceed this space of authorship, bringing into play indefinitely many differences and ways of thinking difference. Writing is, to revert to Deleuzian terms, “a world of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities” (DR 277). Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the most obviously relevant contribution here, and he famously opens “Death of the Author” with praise of “writing:”
“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (in Image, Music, Text, 142)
He further emphasizes the plurality of connections and relations in which writing appears. Thus, “we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). Consider also how he characterizes “text” in a different essay from the same period:
“The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination” (“From Work to Text,” IMT, 159).
Slightly earlier in that essay, Barthes distinguishes between a “work” and a “text.” A work, he suggests, “closes on a signified” (158). This happens in one of two ways, depending on the signified. Either the signified is something evident, in which case the work is science, or it refers to something secret, in which case the work is interpretation; he cites Freudianism and Marxism in the latter category.
The basic Foucauldian reference points, in other words, are all here. First, there is the question of a system of representation imposing order on a set of indefinite and diverse entities. Second, there is the question of how to talk about the diversity of those entities, once one has discarded the representative system or somehow moved beyond it. These are both in Barthes and Deleuze. But, third, there is the question of the moral motivation behind the installation of the representative system. In Barthes, there is far less attention to this. Indeed, Barthes’ celebration of writing almost reads as though he is trying to subvert Platonism by simply celebrating simulacra.
Of course, Barthes is not the only one to celebrate writing. In his comments after Foucault’s lecture, the Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann brings up the question of writing and suggests that he “presumes that we all thought of Derrida and his system” in that regard, since “we know that Derrida tries – a challenge that seems paradoxical to me – to elaborate a philosophy of writing while denying the subject” (D&E 843; not in the English). Goldmann is interested trying to characterize the process as dialectical, which means that “I think, as Foucault does, that we need to ask: ‘who created the traces? Who writes?’” He uses dialectical, however, to bring up materialist concerns. In other words, there is a relevant practical question. Hence, he says that:
“Writing leaves traces which end by being effaced [laisse des traces qui finissent par s’effacer], this is the property of every praxis, whether it is a matter of the construction of a temple which disappears after several centuries or several millenia, of the opening of a route, of the modification of its path, or, more prosaically, of the creation of a pair of sausages which are then eaten” (843)
We want to know how the sausage is made! This is why Goldman closes, by way of an objection, by proposing as “the essence of a critique, both philosophical and scientific, of non-genetic structuralism,” that “the structures do not descend into the street,” i.e., “it is never structures that make history, but men, although the action of the latter always has a structured and significative character” (844; Lacan responds (p. 848) that May 1968 is “precisely” an example of structures descending into the street).
Foucault might appear ambivalent in this regard. On the one hand, he closes “Rèponse” with a reply to the “malaise” of his critics:
“They would prefer to deny that discourse is a complex and differentiated practice, obeying rules and analyzable transformations, rather than being deprived of this tender, consoling certitude of being able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their ‘sense [sens]’ by the mere freshness of a speech which only comes from themselves, and remains close to the source, indefinitely” (D&E, 723).
The essay closes by announcing as a news item that these critics do not want to hear: “Qu'importe qui parle ; quelqu'un a dit : qu'importe qui parle” (723). The event of speech is what matters, not who does it. The preceding paragraph, however, suggests caution in reading this: the target is the notion of an interiority which spontaneously generates speech and meaning, and it is precisely the complexity of what enables speech and the various practices in which it is embedded that make it interesting. On the other hand, and similarly, Foucault opens the “Author” seminar in France by admitting that he has to navigate a space left open by Order, in which he both denies the importance of names as origins, but then uses them indexically.
In any case, Foucault is emphatic that he is not following such structuralist path, and especially not engaging in the sort of celebration of which Derrida or Barthes stands accused. To Goldmann, he responds that:
“The death of man is a theme which allows on to put in pay the manner in which the concept of man has functioned in knowledge …. It is not a manner of affirming that man is deal, it is a matter of starting from the theme … that man is dean … of seeing in what manner, according to what rules the concept of man is formed and functions. I have done the same thing for the notion of the author” (845).
When Goldman presses that perhaps Foucault has reduced “man” or “subject” to a “function,” Foucault underscores that for both of those, as well as for “author,” “I have analyzed the function at the interior of which something like an author is able to exist” (846). So not, in the terms of “Rèponse,” to look for “the structural methods, the laws of construction, but [instead for] the conditions of existence” (710). The reason for this echoes Deleuze; in discourse, Foucault explains in the paragraph immediately preceding, “I do not ask discourses about the sense [sens] which is maintained in them as a perpetual origin, but about the field where they coexist, dwell and fade [s’effacent]” (710).
In other words, Foucault is trying to find a middle space between uncritically using terms like “man” and “author” and the Derridean effort to look purely at writing and play, but without falling into a structuralism. It seems to me that Deleuze is in the same space (this requires resisting a “purely affirmative” reading of Deleuze, something I argued in a much earlier paper). In other words, it turns out that the author function has operated juridically and reductively. But, even when one frees that term from literary romanticism, there are nonetheless instances where writing has both produced material effects in the form of subsequent writing, and where that writing functions according to principles of what Deleuze calls “difference,” where particular discursive formations function as events that drive their own logics, without replicating a structure outside of themselves.
As Foucault says in a much later (1978) interview on method, “It’s a matter of shaking this false self-evidence [of the practice of imprisonment], of demonstrating its precariousness, of making visible not its arbitrariness, but its complex interconnection with a multiplicity of historical processes, many of them of recent date” (Power, 225). The same essay returns us the language of continuity and discontinuity from “Rèponse.” Rather than emphasizing discontinuities, Foucault proposes that “no one is more of a continuist than I am: to recognize a discontinuity is never anything more than to register a problem that needs to be solved” (226). Thus, it is a matter of:
“rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary. In this sense, one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes” (226-7)
In short, Foucault is starting at the same point as Barthes (and maybe Derrida) but drawing the opposite lesson.
More next time…
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