What is a subject?

“Inhumanities” 201Day 17

Itinerary today

• Evaluate Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”

• Evaluate the role of subjectivity in contemporary society-indeterminacy– What is an individual?– What constitutes agency, observation,

and embodiment

The impossible task

• Convince you of the loss of the subject• Involves understanding the complexity of our

social environment• How important are you?

– Interpret all through our selves• We start and end with the body . . . It is not all our

body

– Think of times when our view of the world depends on something besides the body

• Panoramic vision• Photography

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• Comes to importance during the 1960s

• What does it mean to be human in such a vast system?– Economic– Political– Cultural

• “human” is a product of history– Not the other way around

What is the point?

• To get us to make strange the notion of the modern author– Erase the simplistic notion of writing as pure

expression– Authors are always already embedded in

discourses and certain means of production

• “What does it matter who is speaking?”• Replaces “author” with “author function”

The author function 1

• Writing is always an appropriation– Not expression, per se

• Writing unfolds like a game

– An author is always embedded in language and discourse . . . A reorganization

• Author function links writing with property– Punishment– Ownership– Responsibility

Author Function 2

• Not universal and not constant– Some stories don’t need authors (fairy tales)– Bifurcation of science and literature

• Scientific texts now expected to stand on own merits– Early on, credibility in science comes from who speaks

it– Now agency removed from observation in science

• Literature now depends on who wrote it

– Authorship arises at a specific time in Western History

– Authorship impossible in some cultures

Author function 3

• Author function not a simple attribution of discourse to an individual– Construction in culture where we choose

certain attributes of a person and not others• Melville-whaler not bowler

– When is a text eliminated from consideration?• Inconsistent, contradictory, stylistically

inappropriate, etc.

Author function 4

• The author function refers to the narrator or writer– Has to continually stress who is

producing the text• Think of this as an instability that needs to

continually be stabilized

– One writes in order to forestall death• “the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing

more than the singularity of his absence.” [102]

The death of the author

• “No knowledge is formed without a system of communication, registration, accumulation, and displacement that is in itself a form of power, linked in its existence and its functioning to other forms of power.”– Not who influences whom, but who gets to

speak?– The subject more as an element of

organization than a creative agent.– Mark contours not influences (Cage)

Subjects in systems

• Although we begin and end with the body what happens in the middle world of perception that brings new experiences to the fore?– What about others’ bodies

• Including non-human bodies

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