Author Function

From Metapedia

The “author function” as presented by Michel Foucault in his essay “What is an Author” is a concept which helps explain how certain discourses are allowed to circulate in our society. To begin to understand the notion of author function we need to stop thinking of the author as the one and only origin of a text. The author of a literary text does not have the ultimate answer or interpretation to it. According to Foucault we have been accustomed to endow the author with great power over the generation of meanings. However, Foucault, claims that on the contrary, the author function serves the purpose of limiting the proliferation of meaning in society by giving certain individuals the right to write and to be read while numerous others are denied this possibility: “The author does not precede his work, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction” (Foucault, 159). The important thing for Foucault, therefore, is not to think of the author in Cartesian terms, as a transcendental subject but instead, to think of the ways certain discourses are created and given authority through the status that a particular author’s name has. In a similar fashion, Roland Barthes attempts to make a distinction between the notion of work and the notion of text. The “work” of an author is tied to the author function because it is fixed and liable to be classified and categorized. The work may be determined by the “outside world” or context in which it was produced, it may also be determined or interpreted in the light of other works and finally because it is tied to its author: “The author is regarded as the father and owner of his work; literary research therefore learns to respect the manuscript and the authors declared intentions” (Barthes, 78). On the other hand, the text is free from its author and from his work. Texts are fluid and may be interpreted without taking its author into account. The author himself does not determine the text’s meaning, he may only give his personal interpretation of it and come back into the text as a mere “guest” (Barthes, 78).