The first blog entry: Michael Foucault's '' What is an Author?''

In this article by Michael Foucault, the concept of authorship is brought up again. Throughout the course, the theme of the importance of authorship keeps recurring, with its stress on cultural value and commodity. Foucault takes this issue further with his exploration of these ideas. What I found interesting was how he compared the way authorship was previously regarded, with modern day ideas about it and then analysed their differences. To this extent, Foucault explained the idea of authorship as being divided into different factions and concepts. There is the common idea of branding and authorship and then there is the notion of how authorship and common perception of it can open up theoretical discourse.

Reading the article, I felt that Foucault blurred the lines between these two concepts; although his ideas are logical and open up a lot of distinctions in the idea of authorship, the way he discusses them still manages to be convoluted. For instance, he starts his discussion with the idea that the disassociation of an author’s name to a text does not render it untrue or worthless; people’s perception and understanding of writing goes beyond a piece’s author. This is not an irrelevant idea, yet I felt that Foucault then contradicted himself slightly by later stating that the author’s name is the only thing that validates a piece’s authenticity and cultural value. With this point, he explained how the author’s name becomes a sort of seal of approval in theoretical discourse, in modern discussions.

 Here was where the article then went into the differences in the way we consider author status today, as compared to previous eras. Foucault discussed how, previously a text’s connection to an author was not seen as important, more of a convenience for readers; locating the author did not add anything to a reader’s perception of the writing. As Foucault maintained, ‘Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solves, as in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.’ This quote goes some way in explaining the distinction between these different times, but Foucault summarises their contrasts by noting that the status of the author’s name and its reception are controlled by the culture it occupies.

Now that I have defined how these differences are discussed in the article, I want to talk about the second interesting point of the article, which is the way the author’s name lends itself to various causes. To this extent, Foucault explains how author’s names may then act as ‘initiators of discursive practises’. With this point, he maintains that an author can become more than just a name or indicator of a product’s worth or content-rather, the author’s critical background and prominence in their areas already certifies them as authorities on the subject. Therefore, with the examples Foucault uses, Marx and Freud have both developed the ‘endless possibility of discourse’. New ideas and theories in both of their fields are thus possible because, through the theories they themselves formulated, they have created a standard against which different ideas can be tested. This notion and the attention Foucault gave to comparing our different ideas of authorship, is what makes the article both compelling and conflicting, in my opinion.