Ownership
From »Death of the Author« to Withering Away of Author*ity?
Gal Kirn
My contribution will shed some light on the post-structuralists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, which despite some critical reservation – and legal inefficiency – should not be dismissed. I will argue that those authors are still important in locating one relationship that is often overlooked, namely the relationship between author and authority. The text’s first part will respond to the question of what were/are the real objects of their criticism; its second part will sketch additional notes that we can critically expand upon.
Barthes: from Author to Text
Barthes’s militant phrase »the death of the author«[1] can be found in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nonetheless, Barthes found confirmation for death of the (literary) author by detecting the major shift in certain currents in the French literary canon. Barthes refers to Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, Marcel Proust and the Surrealists, who to a different extent practiced the disappearance of the Romantic author, but also their last grand highlight. Some of them explored counter narrative strategies, while others focused on the techniques that open the text to readership. Barthes doesn’t simply carve these authors out of tradition for fun, but establishes a critical reading that locates a very precise object of critique: he attacks a persistent long durée reading that stems from the Christian exegesis of the Bible. In the Christian exegesis – and in other holy scripts – words are inhabited by a major presence of author, which we write with a capital A, Author = God. For Barthes it is vital to locate the remainder of the religious reading in contemporary literary criticism. This religious extension is found in the »tyranny of the author,« meaning that literary criticism always returns to the author, and explains the consistency of the text with the author’s intentions, his biography, and so forth. This is why Barthes calls for the replacement of the author with text, which is necessary, accompanied by the polysemic character of any text: a multitude of interpretations. Rather than authorial tyranny, it is now the text that is truly open for discussion amongst the text’s readership.
Despite the importance of Barthes’s critique, one should be aware of at least three contradictions in his reading: First, despite his good intentions to bury the author, as Sean Burke has already highlighted, the so-called death of the author resulted in an ironic return to other authors, who, one should add, were normalized in the French and general literary canon of the twentieth century; also thanks to the authorial work of Barthes. Second, we should make a critical bracket around the structural necessity of the »open« and polysemic character of (any?) text; it is clear at least from the work of Émile Benveniste that linguistic analysis should differentiate between »enunciation« and »position of enunciation.«[2] In more simple words, not every “I” in text or speech is equal: if something, no matter how true, is said by Karl Marx, or Gal Kirn, despite being equal statements on a purely linguistic plane, they will have very different symbolic power. The reading can never be only a simple, even if plural, analysis of enunciations in the text; but shall always refer to the authority of an author, be it the one from the text, or from another text. This might prove the point of presence on the »intertextuality,« but the place of the author shall not simply disappear. Third, we should be reminded of discussions between Russian formalists and Marxist linguists in the 1920s–1930s in the Soviet Union, who developed a far more elaborate arsenal of concepts that worked on literary functions and forms. Think of someone like Michail Bachtin, who back then demonstrated and demanded a polysemic interpretation and the dialogic nature of language, be it speech or text.[3] Moreover, his Marxist partners (Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov) went even further, positing that even the sign itself, the signifier, is traversed by the struggle, which brought these discussions to the analysis of ideology, politics, and other arts.[4] In this light, a part of French structuralism can be seen as a repetition, or a literary echo of Soviet discussions.
What Bachtin and Barthes do share, something I believe is still worth defending, is their attack on the bourgeois and Romantic conception of the author. This Romantic conception is neatly tied to the ideology of authenticity, which is supported by the humanist complicity between author and (cultural) critic. The work of alternative readings and critical procedures, among other technological and educational processes, helped to dismantle the narrow literary universe of the educated elite with specific taste and norms of bourgeois autonomy. But if Barthes’s object of critique is limited to the field of literature and the bourgeois sphere – doesn’t his critique of the Romantic author and autonomy of the author ironically bring back another autonomy – this time the autonomy of text, which places greater autonomy to readership? Doesn’t this return to the other side of bourgeois autonomy? If we as readers now co-constitute the text after the death of the author and (literary) critic, doesn’t that bring us again to the safe grounds of art autonomy? Plurality of interpretations and readings of one text, as if we can avoid the real question that Barthes seemed to have touched, but missed at the end, namely, the space of a invisible and »decentered« center. We should then pose the question how the author, and now the text, are related to authority?
Kazimir Malevich, 1915, Black Suprematic Square, oil on linen canvas, 79.5 x 79.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Foucault’s Silent Critique of the Author
Michel Foucault’s text could be read as a silent critique of Roland Barthes.[5] Foucault demonstrates how the function of the author has changed in time and space. He is especially interested in changes regarding some specific discourses: 1) science, 2) literature, and 3) discursivity – Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud. For him, the research on the author’s function can discover specific protocols, the way how the reference to the author is inscribed in discursive space and the way, how it legitimizes discursive practice, which in turn also generates meaning for people, regulates the order of things. Despite not entering into detailed discussion, Foucault pointed out that the most dramatic change occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was in this time that the serious legal disputes over authors’ rights took place, and its point of condensation should be found in the synthesis of the individual Romantic author that becomes a proprietor. Obviously, from the beginning, there was a major difference between the holder and proprietor of author rights; publishing houses did want to guarantee their exclusive rights after certain time, or after the author’s death. Foucault, only briefly, makes a direct link between author and economic authority, which carries a specific capitalist property regime. For Foucault there was a transition from the author as the space, which could be disciplined and censored (absolute monarchy) and place of liberal-capitalist state, which speaks of the author as a space that produces activity that yields profits. Foucault does not enter into the field of property – he is not a Marxist – but it is important to address the relationship between rent and profit (cf. Perelman). However, instead of a more politico-economic account, Foucault decides to pursue the development of his discipline on the history of discourse, which would epistemologically make a case for a different history: history that takes as its core the limit-marginal case (punishment, excluded), and analysis of specific medical discourses.[6]
The more we enter into a discussion of the authorship of the text, the more we touch a complex network of relations that tie literary, theoretical, and artistic production closer to the fields of ideological formations, economy, political authority, and law. There are three points that I would like to contribute to our symposium, which expand on (post)structuralist arguments: 1) ideology (Althusser), 2) media (Kittler), and 3) a return to Benjamin.
Author as Ideology?
Often overlooked, because it is such a self-evident procedure in authorship, is the historical inscription of the author into law – the way the author became a legal subject. This inscription immediately brings us to the question of insistence of ideology within law: law which is often thought to be part of the third independent branch of our democratic system, law that is beyond the partial interests and that is neutral. But once we analyze the most simple »legal transaction,« the signing of a paper, when we as individuals enter into contractual relations, as Oswald Ducrot pointed out, the subject of contract is not easily identified with the one that signs it, but rather reflects a whole series of protocols, legal history, cultural, and economical norms.[7] Who wrote that contract, for what purposes? We just sign it, while the general text and small print is usually skipped fast.
Louis Althusser is also helpful in researching how different fields interact within ideology. For him, the real question was not that of the death of the author, but relativization of humanism in regard to the thesis that »the human being makes history.« What Althusser shows is actually that the individual dies even before it is born into society; that we are simply effects of ideology. In his lesser-known book Sur la Reproduction, one can find his famous essay »Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.«[8] For Althusser, ideology is not false consciousness, or the world of ideas in the sky, but oppositely, ideology has material existence, meaning that ideas have material effects. As individuals become ideological subjects, we become inscribed into an order before we are born. Our authors give us our name; we enter into institutions and discourses, where we learn to speak and sign the contracts, we receive education and learn how »to integrate« well in the »dominant culture,« acquire »habitus,« et cetera. There is a vast array of the ideological processes, which – according to Althusser – should be analyzed through the mechanism of »ideological interpellation,« in other words, in the manner that individuals are turned into ideological subjects. The more we think of ourselves as free, rational individuals that enter into equal contractual relations with others, the more we are drowned in the liberal ideology of legal subject.
Already for Marx, the ultimate horizon of bourgeois society was a legal ideology, which he famously described along three major legal determinations: freedom, equality, property, and Jeremy Bentham, one of the main founders of utilitarianism, as the utilitarian ether of liberal ideology.[9] At least in the German context, these four figures could be joined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his essential guidance for Bildung. Ideological interpellation is a theoretical space that allows Althusser to bring together individual and collective ties. For Althusser, ideology does not reside in the clouds, or in some evil men manipulating us in the background; it should rather be located in the ideological state apparatuses – school, media, church, and family – and in their everyday practices. The ideological subject enters into those institutional frames on a daily basis, and is thus normativized. This is how Althusser contributes to the understanding of general reproduction of social relations, and not only to the production relations. In this scheme the real authors of ideological processes are apparatuses and not individuals. It was Pierre Macherey, one of Althusser’s disciples, who took the relationship between ideological processes and artistic practices seriously.[10]
Not Arts, but Media (Kittler)
Apart from ideology research, an important post-structuralist contribution to the discussion came later from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler. For Kittler, the »technical reproducibility of artworks« might be a problem for the arts, but what should be registered is the fact that this major shift was actually enabled by media technologies. Media took a decisive upper hand from the arts; media not only represent or imitate reality, but rather construct our reality, as Marshall McLuhan said »the medium is the message,« where medium (form) becomes primary, and will in a dominant way determine the message (content).[11] In a series of ironic twists, Kittler deploys a fascinating narrative of the end of the Gutenbergian galaxy, the end of printed culture and books, and its replacement with the autonomization of sound, text, image in the apparatuses of typewriter, film, and gramophone. According to Kittler, the late nineteenth century marks an epochal shift in how we see, read, listen, and write. It is also here that the Romanticist universe of »male authorship« for »female audiences«, as in Goethe’s work, eroded. Kittler in this respect shares something with Barthes, but he radicalizes the point and announces the death of literature with the advent of technological media. Well, if it is correct to evaluate how ideological subjectivity gets captured in the media apparatus, what are new modes of perception, of jouissance and of Bildung, one cannot say that literature is dead, but that its role and its form were transformed, and integrated into other media.
The Death of Authorship by Yoon Her
New Return to Benjamin’s Text »The Author as Producer«[12]
For Benjamin, in the fight against fascism, it was clear that art needs to assume a standpoint of political art; but assuming a tendency is not enough – that would just mean to propagate. Instead, tendency should be practiced in content and form. The core of Benjamin’s text advocates that the author should not be a genius, or worse, only producing for entertainment, or aesthetization of politics; rather, authors should radically intervene in their practice. First of all, for authors to become producers means that they need to relate directly to the oppressed, to the proletariat, not only from the exterior, to educate them, to agitate; but as the famous third thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach goes, to become self-educated. Secondly, authors need to rework their own position within the production system, which means they need to develop organizational frames and formal devices that subvert the capitalist division of work. In the best scenario, this would mean that people (new audiences) themselves become coproducers that collectively dismantle the capitalist system. Benjamin related to Brecht, and even more so to the Soviet avant-garde; he took the experiment of Sergei Tretjakov »writers to the collective farms!« to heart. But we could also add Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein’s theater, which wanted to overcome the border between the producers and audience, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, Aleksandr Medvedkin’s cinema-train, Persimfans as a conductorless orchestra that decided collectively without a central authority – all of these were experiments, in which the audience became politicized and an active subject in the process.[13]
To be clear, even if Benjamin was right at the time, it would be wrong today to blindly repeat what he demanded from the »authors.« Let’s meditate for a moment on the current Post-Fordist cognitive frame of capitalism. As Paolo Virno and other post-operaist thinkers suggest, the critical diagnosis should take into account the major political recomposition after 1968 due to changes in the mode of production and distribution, where the organic recomposition of capital has minimized the part of »labor power« that produces »surplus value« and maximized the machinic part of the production process. Furthermore, for post-operaists all activities, especially those Marx deemed as unproductive, have become productive and generate value. We, as consumers, in the sphere of free time, have become productive, and of course integrated into capitalist work. In this ironic twist, capitalism has fulfilled the Benjaminian mission – we have all become »authors as producers.« Let me take one limited but illustrative example – Facebook. Its core is based on the constant affective and communicative construction of the community, where all the members are constant authors of life on/of Facebook reality, while the management of Mark Zuckerberg sustains the platform and adds new designs, it does not produce the content. The situation is reversed; Facebook, not the authors, owns our content. While we are authors, we are not paid for it, yet we help to generate amazing profits for Facebook. Should we then start the fight »wages for Facebook work?« Perhaps, even though we systematically fall under and continue to support capitalist valorization. My conclusion doesn’t follow the post-operaist trope that so often claims that Marx’s theory of value is not valid/operational any more today. Opposite to this I see a need to sketch the ways how the alleged noneconomic activities that start outside enter capitalist exploitation, or how contractual relations still sustain precarious employments, which, at least in the intellectual and artistic work, become increasingly based on »symbolic« habitus and (personal) networks. Along these lines, we cannot simply return to the »author as producer,« while we should also pose the question as to whether the mode of »authors as not producing« can show us the path beyond privatization? The mode of »not producing« has become a recent fashion in some artistic and political currents, which is usually identified with the more nihilist attitude toward capitalist recuperation and a shift away from active subjectivation. Let us remember both the ending lines from Foucault’s text on the author function, where a bright future might bring »indifference« to the fact of who is speaking, or Giorgio Agamben’s »de-subjectivation.«[14] It is not surprising that two current major heroes and literary reappropriations are Franz Kafka’s Before the Law and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. They both demonstrate how radical the gesture of a certain inactivity, evacuating subjective forces from legal apparatus and political institution, can be. I’d prefer not to, waiting forever, not for Godot, but waiting with a cause, for the doors of the law/state to close. I believe that the strategy of desubjectivation and deauthorization, if you will, is fruitful in the frame of literature and arts. In contrast, I believe that the dialectical model and understanding of politics with active subjectivation brings us into a more concise relationship with the current neoliberal predicaments, which could undermine the private ownership of corporate authorship and would strive for the collective democratic organization of production and distribution of work.
Conclusion
Thus, rather than placing our attention on the »death of the author,« we should look at the »withering away of authority« in all its aspects. To bridge the gap between producer and audience was not only a question of technique for Benjamin and the avant-gardists, because these demands were done in the light of a general social transformation. Let me finish by referring to one example, which was a concretization of the politics of the common; as you know commons are defined to go beyond public (state) and private ownership. I have in mind the social property in the times of socialist Yugoslavia, practiced from the 1950s to the 1970s. In order to differentiate itself from Stalin, and Soviet nationalization of property with its command economy, the Yugoslav political-economic orientation consisted of workers’ self-management and social ownership. The means of production were socialized, while property was conceptualized as nonproperty, being neither from the state nor in the hands of single capitalists. Property was from society, from nobody and everybody. Gradually factories became social, housing, and infrastructure too, thus social reproduction. This is why the capitalist transition in the 1990s took a different, more gradual pace – since the property first needed to be »nationalized.« Without a doubt, social property entered into its own contradictions, but some lessons can be learned from these. One lesson being that there is a need to retain central authority over scarce resources and commodities; and in times of crisis sustain some popular sovereignty over economic matters as austerity shows. Conceptually, »social ownership« was designed to move toward the abolition of the capitalist valorization process on the one hand, and state control with its legal apparatus on the other. The question is thus not only the need for differentiation of authorship (collective, alternative), but about differentiation of property regime (not only private), and collective organization of use and ownership.
Notes
[1] Roland Barthes: »Death of the Author,« in: Aspen, no. 5–6 (1967).
[2] Émile Benveniste: Problems in General Linguistics. Miami 1971.
[3] Michail Bachtin: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist (ed.). Austin 1992.
[4] Michail Bachtin, Pavel N. Medvedev: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Baltimore 1978.
[5] Michel Foucault: »What is An Author?« in: The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow (ed.), New York 1984, pp. 101–120.
[6] Both Foucault and Barthes push for new epistemological units of analysis – text, discourse – while their co-traveler Jacques Derrida disclosed, among many other things, an important dimension of the triad between text–author–authority. When he analyzes »archive,« the origin of archive shall lead us to the religious-mystical element. In ancient Greek, arche has a double meaning: beginning and commandment. Furthermore, arche was closely related to the archonts – the political leadership of polis; the archonts assured the continuation of beginning, by certain commandment over beginning. Arche – archive has to do with a certain political space, where the archive holders held both property and interpretation over various documents, even giving them form of law. Today the space of polis has been long divided between the one of the nation-state and the private space of the corporation, which with the advent of TTIP and TPP finally gives ground to the corporate space with an offshore judiciary system and secret negotiations over past and future archive. Jacques Derrida: »Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,« in: Diacritics, 25, no. 2 (summer 1995), pp. 9–63.
[7] Oswald Ducrot: Slovenian lectures: Introduction into Argumentative Semantics. Ljubljana 2009.
[8] Louis Althusser: »Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,« in: Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York 1972, pp. 121–176; Louis Althusser: Sur la reproduction. Paris 1995.
[9] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Capital Vol. 1. New York 1996.
[10] More specifically, this field was taken over by Pierre Macherey in the book Theory of Literary Production, where he showed how the dominant ideology is reflected and refracted within literary-artistic forms. This doesn’t speak of some direct reflection economic base-superstructure, but on contradictory movements within literature. Pierre Macherey: Theory of Literary Production. London/Boston 1978.
[11] Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford 1999.
[12] Walter Benjamin: »The Author as Producer,« in: New Left Review 1/62 (July–August 1970), p. 83.
[13] Richard Stites: Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York 1991.
[14] Giorgio Agamben: »Bartleby, or On Contingency,« in: Daniel Heller-Roazen (ed.): Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford 1999, pp. 243–271.