Lecture 2 - Introduction (cont.

) [January 15, 2009]

Chapter 1. Introduction [00:00:00]
Professor Paul Fry: Last time we introduced the way in which the preoccupation with
literary and other forms of theory in the twentieth century is shadowed by a certain
skepticism, but as we were talking about that we actually introduced another issue which isn't
quite the same as the issue of skepticism--namely, determinism. In other words, we said that
in intellectual history, first you get this movement of concern about the distance between the
perceiver and the perceived, a concern that gives rise to skepticism about whether we can
know things as they really are. But then as a kind of aftermath of that movement in figures
like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud--and you'll notice that Foucault reverts to such figures when
he turns to the whole question of "founders of discursivity," we'll come back to that--in
figures like that, you get the further question of not just how we can know things in
themselves as they really are but how we can trust the autonomy of that which knows: in
other words, how we can trust the autonomy of consciousness if in fact there's a chance--a
good chance, according to these writers--that it is in turn governed by, controlled by, hidden
powers or forces. This question of determinism is as important in the discourse of literary
theory as the question of skepticism. They're plainly interrelated in a variety of ways, but it's
more to the question of determinism I want to return today.
Chapter 2. Anton Chekhov and Henry James [00:01:52]
Now last time, following Ricoeur, I mentioned Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as key figures in
the sort of secondary development that somehow inaugurates theory, and then I added
Darwin. It seems particularly important to think of Darwin when we begin to think about the
ways in which in the twentieth century, a variety of thinkers are concerned about human
agency--that is to say, what becomes of the idea that we have autonomy, that we can act or at
least that we can act with a sense of integrity and not just with a sense that we are being
pulled by our strings like a puppet. In the aftermath of Darwin in particular, our
understanding of natural selection, our understanding of genetic hard-wiring and other
factors, makes us begin to wonder in what sense we can consider ourselves, each of us, to be
autonomous subjects. And so, as I say, the question of agency arises.
It's in that context, needless to say, that I'd like to take a look at these two interesting passages
on the sheet that has Anton Chekhov on one side and Henry James on the other. Let's begin
with the Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard, you know, is about the threat owing to
socioeconomic conditions, the conditions that do ultimately lead to the Menshevik
Revolution of 1905, to a landed estate, and the perturbation and turmoil into which the cast of
characters is thrown by this threat. Now one of the more interesting characters, who is not
really a protagonist in the play for class reasons, is a house servant named Yepihodov, and
Yepihodov is a character who is, among other things, a kind of autodidact. That is to say, he
has scrambled into a certain measure of knowledge about things. He is full of a kind of
understandable self-pity, and his speeches are in some ways more characteristic of the
gloomy intellectual milieu that is reflected in Chekhov's text really than almost anyone else's.

I want to quote to you a couple of them. Toward the bottom of the first page, he says, "I'm a
cultivated man. I read all kinds of remarkable books and yet I can never make out what
direction I should take, what it is that I want, properly speaking." As I read, pay attention to
the degree to which he's constantly talking about language and about the way in which he
himself is inserted into language. He's perpetually seeking a mode of properly speaking. He is
a person who is somewhat knowledgeable about books, feels himself somehow to be caught
up in the matrix of book learning--in other words, a person who is very much preoccupied
with his conditioning by language, not least when perhaps unwittingly he alludes to Hamlet.
"Should I live or should I shoot myself?"--properly speaking, "To be or not to be?" In other
words, he inserts himself into the dramatic tradition to which as a character he himself
belongs and shows himself to be in a debased form derived from one of those famous
charismatic moments in which a hero utters a comparable concern.
So in all sorts of ways, in this simple passage we find a character who's caught up in the
snare--if I can put it that way--the snare of language. To continue, he says at the top of the
next page, "Properly speaking and letting other subjects alone, I must say"--everything in
terms of what other discourse does and what he himself can say, and of course, it's mainly
about "me"--"regarding myself among other things, that fate treats me mercilessly as a storm
treats a small boat." And the end of the passage is, "Have you read Buckle?" Now Buckle is a
forgotten name today, but at one time he was just about as famous as Oswald Spengler who
wrote The Decline of the West. He was a Victorian historian preoccupied with the dissolution
of Western civilization. In other words, Buckle was the avatar of the notion in the late
nineteenth century that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. One of the texts that
Yepihodov has read that in a certain sense determines him is Buckle. "Have you read Buckle?
I wish to have a word with you Avdotya Fyodorovna." In other words, I'm arguing that the
saturation of these speeches with signs of words, language, speaking, words, books, is just the
dilemma of the character. That is to say, he is in a certain sense book- and languagedetermined, and he's obscurely aware that this is his problem even as it's a source of pride for
him.
Turning then to a passage in a very different tone from James's Ambassadors. An altogether
charming character, the elderly Lambert Strether, who has gone to--most of you know--has
gone to Paris to bring home the young Chad Newsome, a relative who is to take over the
family business, the manufacture of an unnamed household article in Woollett,
Massachusetts, probably toilet paper. In any case, Lambert Strether, as he arrives in Paris, has
awakened to the sheer wonder of urbane culture. He recognizes that he's missed something.
He's gone to a party given by a sculptor, and at this party he meets a young man named Little
Bilham whom he likes, and he takes Little Bilham aside by the lapel, and he makes a long
speech to him, saying, "Don't do what I have done. Don't miss out on life. Live all you can. It
is a mistake not to. And this is why," he goes on to say, "the affair, I mean the affair of life"-it's as though he's anticipating the affair of Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet, which is
revealed at the end of the text--"couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me for it's"--"it"
meaning life--"[life is] at the best a tin mold either fluted or embossed with ornamental
excrescences or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's

consciousness, is poured so that one takes the form, as the great cook says"--the great cook,
by the way, is Brillat-Savarin--"one takes the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less
compactly held by it. One lives, in fine, as one can. Still one has the illusion of freedom."
Here is where Strether says something very clever that I think we can make use of. He says,
"Therefore, don't be like me without the memory of that illusion. I was either at the right time
too stupid or too intelligent to have it. I don't quite know which." Now if he was too stupid to
have it, then of course he would have been liberated into the realm of action. He would have
been what Nietzsche in an interesting precursor text calls "historical man." He simply would
have plunged ahead into life as though he had freedom, even though he was too stupid to
recognize that it was an illusion. On the other hand, if he was too intelligent to, as it were,
bury the illusion and live as though he were free, if he was too intelligent to do that, he's a
kind of an avatar of the literary theorist--in other words, the sort of person who can't forget
long enough that freedom is an illusion in order to get away from the preoccupations that, as
I've been saying, characterize a certain kind of thinking in the twentieth century. And it's
rather charming at the last that he says--because how can we know anything--"I don't quite
know which."
Chapter 3. Author and Authority [00:11:26]
That, too, strikes me as a helpful and also characteristic passage that can introduce us to
today's subject, which is the loss of authority: that is to say, in Roland Barthes' terms, "the
death of the author," and in Foucault's terms, the question "What is an author?" In other
words, in the absence of human agency, the first sacrifice for literary theory is the author, the
idea of the author. That's what will concern us in this second, still introductory lecture to this
course. We'll get into the proper or at least more systematic business of the course when we
turn to hermeneutics next week.
Now let me set the scene. This is Paris. It wouldn't have to be Paris. It could be Berkeley or
Columbia or maybe Berlin. It's 1968 or '69, spilling over in to the seventies. Students and
most of their professors are on the barricades, that is to say in protest not only against the war
in Vietnam but the outpouring of various forms of authoritative resistance to protest that
characterized the sixties. There is a ferment of intellectual revolt which takes all sorts of
forms in Paris but is first and foremost perhaps organized by what quickly in this country
became a bumper sticker: "Question authority." This is the framework in which the then most
prominent intellectual in France writes an essay at the very peak of the student uprising,
entitled "What is an Author?" and poses an answer which is by no means straightforward and
simple. You're probably a little frustrated because maybe you sort of anticipated what he was
going to say, and then you read it and you said, "Gee, he really isn't saying that. In fact, I
don't quite know what he is saying" and struggled more than you're expected to because you
anticipated what I've just been saying about the setting and about the role of Foucault and all
the rest of it, and were possibly more confused than you might have expected to be. Yet at the
same time, you probably thought "Oh, yeah, well, I did come out pretty much in the place I
expected to come out in despite the roundabout way of having gotten there." Because this
lecture is introductory, I'm not going to spend a great deal of time explicating the more

difficult moments in his argument. I am going to emphasize what you perhaps did anticipate
that he would say, so that can take us along rather smoothly.
There is an initial issue. Because we're as skeptical about skepticism as we are about anything
else we're likely to raise our eyebrows and say, "Hmm. Doesn't this guy Foucault think he's
an author? You know, after all, he's a superstar. He's used to being taken very seriously. Does
he want to say that he's just an author function, that his textual field is a kind of set of
structural operations within which one can discover an author? Does he really want to say
this?" Well, this is the question raised by the skeptic about skepticism or about theory and it's
one that we're going to take rather seriously, but we're going to come back to it because there
are ways, it seems to me, of keeping this question at arm's length. In other words, Foucault is
up to something interesting, and probably we should meet him at least halfway to see, to
measure, the degree of interest we may have in it. So yes, there is the question--there is the
fact that stands before u--that this very authoritative-sounding person seems to be an author,
right? I never met anybody who seemed more like an author than this person, and yet he's
raising the question whether there is any such thing, or in any case, the question how difficult
it is to decide what it is if there is.
Let me digress with an anecdote which may or may not sort of help us to understand the
delicacy of this relationship between a star author, a person undeniably a star author, and the
atmosphere of thought in which there is, in a certain sense, no such thing as an author. An old
crony and former colleague of mine was taking a course at Johns Hopkins in the 1960s. This
was a time when Hopkins led all American universities in the importing of important
European scholars, and it was a place of remarkable intellectual ferment. This particular
lecture course was being given by Georges Poulet, a so-called phenomenological critic. That's
one of the "isms" we aren't covering in this seminar. In any case, Poulet was also a central
figure on the scene of the sixties. Poulet would be lecturing along, and the students had
somehow formed a habit of from time to time--by the way, you can form this habit, too--of
raising their hand, and what they would do is they would utter a name--at least this is what
my friend noticed. They would raise their hand and they would say, "Mallarm." And Poulet
would look at them and say, "Mais, oui! Exactement! A mon avis aussi!" And then he would
go on and continue to lecture for a while. Then somebody else would raise his hand and say,
"Proust." "Ah, prcisment! Proust. Proust." And then he'd continue along. So my friend
decided he'd give it a try [laughter] and he raised his hand and he said, "Voltaire," and Poulet
said "Quoi donc Je ne vous comprends pas," and then paused and hesitated and continued
with his lecture as though my friend had never asked his question.
Now this is a ritual of introducing names, and in a certain sense, yes, the names of authors,
the names of stars; but at the same time, plainly names that stand for something other than
their mere name, names that stand for domains or fields of interesting discursivity: that is to
say--I mean, Poulet was the kind of critic who believed that the oeuvre of an author was a
totality that could be understood as a structural whole, and his criticism worked that way.
And so yes, the signal that this field of discursivity is on the table is introduced by the name
of the author but it remains just a name. It's an author without authority, yet at the same time
it's an author who stands for, whose name stands for, an important field of discourse. That's

of course what my friend--because he knew perfectly well that when he said "Voltaire,"
Poulet would [laughs] have nothing to do with it--that's the idea that my friend wanted to
experiment with. There are relevant and interesting fields of discourse and there are
completely irrelevant fields of discourse, and some of these fields are on the sides of angelic
discourse and some of these fields are on the side of the demonic. We simply, kind of
spontaneously, make the division.
Chapter 4. "The Founders of Discursivity" [00:19:36]
Discursivity, discourse: that's what I forgot to talk about last time. When I said that
sometimes people just ultimately throw up their hands when they try to define literature and
say, "Well, literature's just whatever you say it is. Fine. Let's just go ahead," they are then
much more likely, rather than using the word "literature," to use the word "discourse" or
"textual field," "discursivity." You begin to hear, or perhaps smell, the slight whiff of jargon
that pervades theoretical writing. It often does so for a reason. This is the reason one hears so
much about discourse. Simply because of doubt about the generic integrity of various forms
of discourse. One can speak hesitantly of literary discourse, political discourse,
anthropological discourse, but one doesn't want to go so far as to say literature, political
science, anthropology. It's a habit that arises from the sense of the permeability of all forms
of utterance with respect to each other, and that habit, as I say, is a breakdown of the notion
that certain forms of utterance can be understood as a delimited, structured field.
One of the reasons this understanding seems so problematic is the idea that we don't appeal to
the authority of an author in making our mind about the nature of a given field of discourse.
We find the authority of the author instead somewhere within the textual experience. The
author is a signal, is what Foucault calls a "function." By the way, this isn't at all a question of
the author not existing. Yes, Barthes talks about the death of the author, but even Barthes
doesn't mean that the author is dead like Nietzsche's God. The author is there, sure. It's a
question rather of how we know the author to be there, firstly, and secondly, whether or not
in attempting to determine the meaning of a text--and this is something we'll be talking about
next week--we should appeal to the authority of an author. If the author is a function, that
function is something that appears, perhaps problematically appears, within the experience of
the text, something we get in terms of the speaker, the narrator, or--in the case of plays--as
the inferred orchestrator of the text: something that we infer from the way the text unfolds. So
as a function and not as a subjective consciousness to which we appeal to grasp a meaning,
the author still does exist.
So we consider a text as a structured entity, or perhaps as an entity which is structured and
yet at the same time somehow or another passes out of structure--that's the case with Roland
Barthes. Here I want to appeal to a couple of passages. I want to quote from the beginning of
Roland Barthes' essay, which I know I only suggested, but I'm simply going to quote the
passage so you don't have to have read it, The Death of the Author. It's on page 874 for those
of you who have your texts, as I hope you do. Barthes, while writing this--he's writing what
has perhaps in retrospect seemed to be his most important book, it's called S/Z. It's a huge

book which is all about this short story by Balzac, "Sarrasine," that he begins this essay by
quoting. This is what he says here about "Sarrasine":
In his story "Sarrasine" Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the
following sentence: "This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims,
her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings and her delicious sensibility."
[Barthes says,] "Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant
of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his
personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing
"literary" ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never
know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of
origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject [and this is a
deliberate pun] slips away ["our subject" meaning that we don't quite know what's being
talked about sometimes, but also and more importantly the subject, the authorial subject, the
actual identity of the given speaking subject--that's what slips away] the negative where all
identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
So that's a shot fired across the bow against the author because it's Barthes' supposition that
the author isn't maybe even quite an author function because that function may be hard to
identify in a discrete way among myriad other functions.
Foucault, who I think does take for granted that a textual field is more firmly structured than
Barthes supposes, says on page 913 that when we speak of the author function, as opposed to
the author--and here I begin quoting at the bottom of the left-hand column on page 913-when we speak in this way we no longer raise the questions:
"How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning? How can it
activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs which are
properly own--its own?"
In other words, we no longer say, "How does the author exert autonomous will with respect
to the subject matter being expressed?" We no longer appeal, in other words, to the authority
of the author as the source of the meaning that we find in the text.
Foucault continues,
Instead, these questions will be raised: "How, under what conditions, and in what forms can
something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each
type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?" In short, it is a
matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) [That is to say, when we speak in this way
of an author function,] it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) [a character, for
example, or a speaker, as we say when we don't mean that it's the poet talking but the guy
speaking in "My Last Duchess" or whatever] of its role as originator, and of analyzing the
subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.
"The subject" here always means the subjectivity of the speaker, right, not the subject matter.
You'll get used to it because it's a word that does a lot of duty, and you need to develop

context in which you recognize that well, yeah, I'm talking about the human subject or well,
I'm talking about the subject matter; but I trust that you will quickly kind of adjust to that
difficulty.
Chapter 5. Critique of the "Author Function" [00:28:20]
All right. So with this said, it's probably time to say something in defense of the author. I
know that you wish you could stand up here and say something in defense of the author, so I
will speak in behalf of all of you who want to defend the author by quoting a wonderful
passage from Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare, in which he explains for us why it is
that we have always paid homage to the authority of the author. It's not just a question, as
obviously Foucault and Barthes are always suggesting, of deferring to authority as though the
authority were the police with a baton in its hand, right? It's not a question of deferring to
authority in that sense. It's a question, rather, of affirming what we call the human spirit.
This is what Johnson says:
There is always a silent reference of human works to human abilities, and as the inquiry, how
far man may extend his designs or how high he may rate his native force, is of far greater
dignity than in what rank we shall place any particular performance, curiosity is always busy
to discover the instruments as well as to survey the workmanship, to know how much is to be
ascribed to original powers and how much to casual and adventitious help.
So what Johnson is saying is: well, it's all very well to consider a textual field, the
workmanship, but at the same time we want to remind ourselves of our worth. We want to
say, "Well, gee, that wasn't produced by a machine. That's not just a set of functions-variables, as one might say in the lab. It's produced by genius. It's something that allows us to
rate human ability high." And that, especially in this vale of tears--and Johnson is very
conscious of this being a vale of tears--that's what we want to keep doing. We want to rate
human potential as high as we can, and it is for that reason in a completely different spirit, in
the spirit of homage rather than cringing fear, that we appeal to the authority of an author.
Well, that's an argument for the other side, but these are different times. This is 1969, and the
purpose that's alleged for appealing to the author as a paternal source, as an authority, is,
according to both Barthes and Foucault, to police the way texts are read. In other words, both
of them insist that the appeal to the author--as opposed to the submersion of the author in the
functionality of the textual field--is a kind of delimitation or policing of the possibilities of
meaning.
Let me just read two texts to that effect, first going back to Roland Barthes on page 877.
Barthes says, "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite
futile." By the way, once again there's a bit of a rift there between Barthes and Foucault.
Foucault wouldn't say "quite futile." He would say, "Oh, no. We can decipher it, but the
author function is just one aspect of the deciphering process." But Barthes has entered a
phase of his career in which you actually think that structures are so complex that they cease

to be structures and that this has a great deal to do with the influence of deconstruction. We'll
come back to that much later in the course.
In any case, he continues.
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism [and criticism is a lot like policing, right-"criticism" means being a critic, criticizing] very well, the latter then allotting itself the
important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psych, liberty)
beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is "explained"--a victory to the
critic.
In other words, the policing of meaning has been accomplished and the critic wins, just as in
the uprisings of the late sixties, the cops win. This is, again, the atmosphere in which all of
this occurs--just then to reinforce this with the pronouncement of Foucault at the bottom of
page 913, right-hand column: "The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one
marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning."
Now once again, there is this sort of the skepticism about skepticism. You say, "Why
shouldn't I fear the proliferation of meaning? I want to know what something definitely
means. I don't want to know that it means a million things. I'm here to learn what things mean
in so many words. I don't want to be told that I could sit here for the rest of my life just sort
of parsing one sentence. Don't tell me about that. Don't tell me about these complicated
sentences from Balzac's short story. I'm here to know what things mean. I don't care if it's
policing or not. Whatever it is, let's get it done." That, of course, is approaching the question
of how we might delimit meaning in a very different spirit. The reason I acknowledge the
legitimacy of responding in this way is that to a certain extent the preoccupation with--what
shall we say?--the misuse of the appeal to an author is very much of its historical moment.
That is to say, when one can scarcely say the word "author" without thinking "authority," and
one can definitely never say the word "authority" without thinking about the police. This is a
structure of thought that perhaps pervades the lives of many of us to this day and has always
pervaded the lives of many people, but is not quite as hegemonic in our thinking today
perhaps as it was in the moment of these essays by Barthes and Foucault.
All right. With all this said, how can the theorist recuperate honor for certain names like, for
example, his own? "All right. It's all very well. You're not an author, but I secretly think I'm
an author, right?" Let's suppose someone were dastardly enough to harbor such thoughts.
How could you develop an argument in which a thought like that might actually seem to
work? After all, Foucault--setting himself aside, he doesn't mention himself--Foucault very
much admires certain writers. In particular, he admires, like so many of his generation and
other generations, Marx and Freud. It's a problem if we reject the police-like authority of
authors, of whom we may have a certain suspicion on those grounds, when we certainly don't
feel that way about Marx and Freud. What's the difference then? How is Foucault going to
mount an argument in which privileged authors--that is to say, figures whom one cites
positively and without a sense of being policed--can somehow or another stay in the picture?

Foucault, by the way, doesn't mention Nietzsche, but he might very well because Nietzsche's
idea of "genealogy" is perhaps the central influence on Foucault's work. Frankly, I think it's
just an accident that he doesn't mention him. It would have been a perfect symmetry because
last time we quoted Paul Ricoeur to the effect that these authors, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
were--and this is Ricoeur's word--"masters." Whoa! That's the last thing we want to hear.
They're not masters. Foucault couldn't possibly allow for that because plainly the whole
texture of their discourse would be undermined by introducing the notion that it's okay to be a
master, and yet Ricoeur feels that these figures dominate modern thought as masters.
How does Foucault deal with this? He invents a concept. He says, "They aren't authors.
They're founders of discursivity," and then he grants that it's kind of difficult to distinguish
between a founder of discursivity and an author who has had an important influence. Right?
And then he talks about the gothic novel and he talks about Radcliffe's, Anne Radcliffe's-he's wrong about this, by the way. The founder of discursivity in the gothic novel is not Anne
Radcliffe; it's Horace Walpole, but that's okay--he talks about Anne Radcliffe as the person
who establishes certain tropes, topoi, and premises that govern the writing of gothic fiction
for the next hundred years and, indeed, even in to the present, so that she is, Foucault
acknowledges, in a certain sense a person who establishes a way of talking, a way of writing,
a way of narrating. But at the same time she isn't a person, Foucault claims, who introduces a
discourse or sphere of debate within which ideas, without being attributable necessarily, can
nevertheless be developed. Well, I don't know. It seems to me that literary influence is not at
all unlike sort of speaking or writing in the wake of a founder of discursivity, but we can let
that pass.
On the other hand, Foucault is very concerned to distinguish figures like this from scientists
like Galileo and Newton. Now it is interesting, by the way, maybe in defense of Foucault,
that whereas we speak of people as Marxist or Freudian, we don't speak of people as
Radcliffian or Galilean or Newtonian. We use the adjective "Newtonian" but we don't speak
of certain writers who are still interested in quantum mechanics as "Newtonian writers."
That's interesting in a way, and may somehow or another justify Foucault's understanding of
the texts of those author functions known as Marx and Freud--whose names might be raised
in Poulet's lecture class with an enthusiastic response--as place holders for those fields of
discourse. It may, in some sense, reinforce Foucault's argument that these are special
inaugurations of debate, of developing thought, that do not necessarily kowtow to the
originary figure--certainly debatable, but we don't want to pause over it in the case either of
Marx or of Freud. Plainly, there are a great many people who think of them as tyrants, right,
but within the traditions that they established, it is very possible to understand them as
instigating ways of thinking without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking
authoritatively. That is the special category that Foucault wants to reserve for those privileged
figures whom he calls founders of discursivity.
All right. Very quickly then to conclude: one consequence of the death of the author, and the
disappearance of the author into author function is, as Foucault curiously says in passing on
page 907, that the author has no legal status. And you say, "What? What about copyright?
What about intellectual property? That's a horrible thing to say, that the author has no legal

status." Notice once again the intellectual context. Copyright arose as a bourgeois idea. That
is to say, "I possess my writing. I have an ownership relationship with my writing." The
disappearance of the author, like a kind of corollary disappearance of bourgeois thought,
entails, in fact, a kind of bracketing of the idea of copyright or intellectual property. And so
there's a certain consistency in what Foucault is saying about the author having no legal
status.
But maybe at this point it really is time to dig in our heels. "I am a lesbian Latina. I stand
before you as an author articulating an identity for the purpose of achieving freedom, not to
police you, not to deny your freedom, but to find my own freedom. And I stand before you
precisely, and in pride, as an author. I don't want to be called an author function. I don't want
to be called an instrument of something larger than myself because frankly that's what I've
always been, and I want precisely as an authority through my authorship to remind you that I
am not anybody's instrument but that I am autonomous and free."
In other words, the author, the traditional idea of the author--so much under suspicion in the
work of Foucault and Barthes in the late sixties--can be turned on its ear. It can be understood
as a source of new-found authority, of the freedom of one who has been characteristically not
free and can be received by a reading community in those terms. It's very difficult to think
how a Foucault might respond to that insistence, and it's a problem that in a way dogs
everything, or many of the things we're going to be reading during the course of this
semester--even within the sorts of theorizing that are characteristically called cultural studies
and concern questions of the politics of identity. Even within those disciplines there is a
division of thought between people who affirm the autonomous integrity and individuality of
the identity in question and those who say any and all identities are only subject positions
discernible and revealed through the matrix of social practices. There is this intrinsic split
even within those forms of theory--and not to mention the kinds of theory that don't directly
have to do with the politics of identity--between those for whom what's at stake is the
discovery of autonomous individuality and those for whom what's at stake is the tendency to
hold at arm's length such discoveries over against the idea that the instability of any and all
subject positions is what actually contains within it--as Foucault and Barthes thought as they
sort of sat looking at the police standing over against them--those for whom this alternative
notion of the undermining of any sense of that which is authoritative is in its turn a possible
source, finally, of freedom. These sorts of vexing issues, as I say, in all sorts of ways will dog
much of what we read during the course of this semester.
All right. So much for the introductory lectures which touch on aspects of the materials that
we'll keep returning to. On Tuesday we'll turn to a more specific subject matter:
hermeneutics, what hermeneutics is, how we can think about the nature of interpretation. Our
primary text will be the excerpt in your book from Hans-Georg Gadamer and a few passages
that I'll be handing out from Martin Heidegger and E.D. Hirsch.
[end of transcript]