Foucault’s “What is an Author:” A Retrospective

I thought it would be interesting to revisit the notion of author discussed at the beginning of the semester in retrospect to Godard’s later work. In light of Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema screened in class, I was curious to make a few parallels between Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and the issue of history, ownership and citation given Godard’s referencing to other films in this work, especially in Historie(s). This is not a claim to right an argument for or against the notion of  “author,” but merely to pose a few rhetorical thoughts on the intention of authorship, and history. Foucault brings attention to the historical relevance of ownership to text arguing that discourse was not always just a thing, but an act of decent in some cases (108). However, the most interesting claims are his explanations of the “author function.” Foucault writes, “the author function is therefore a characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (108). In short Foucault goes on to describe the issues that pertain to the author function; however his fourth characteristic of the author function seems to be an intriguing parallel to thinking about Histoire(s) du Cinema and Godard. Foucault states the fourth characteristic as follows: “it [the author function] does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects—positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals” (113). This characteristic describes the complexity of authorship and influence of a given work. Foucault has mentioned earlier of the plural nature an individual because when one hears the name, one also relates the name to multiple references.  In regards to the plurality of the self or “several selves” it is interesting to think about influence being a part of authorship. For Foucault there is a distinction between ownership and authorship. While ownership suggests an inherent right to the work, authorship suggests a beginning or a process set in motion. With this quotation in mind, it is curious the role of ownership/authorship in regards to Historie(s). 

Godard composes a film that is entirely composed of references to other films, but simultaneously Godard put the project into motion. It is not just films that are referenced; it is individuals, media and art. Here, the question of ownership of these referenced texts are sometimes obscure, but other times familiar. The question is: Is it important for Godard to claim ownership or authorship to the film? Leading up to Historie(s), especially in his earlier films, he has laid claim to authorship in his work. However, this claim does not mean for Godard a method set completely in stone. Historie(s) is an interesting example because is lies in the somewhere in the in-between. One could trace the extensive references in the film; however, that only seems to be one component of the larger whole. Godard seems to be one step ahead of critics because it takes time before one finally catches up to his work, and as one does Godard has moved on to something else. That said, one final parallel to Foucault and Godard that needs mentioning is a line in the concluding paragraphs of the essay, Foucault writes,

“…as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint—one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determine or, perhaps, experienced” (119).

It seems as though Foucault is speculating a time when the term author is no longer used to describe a work, but examined by, what he calls “the modes of existence” (120). It is interesting to draw attention to how history is portrayed in Histoire(s) du Cinema because it is everything, but simple. The title is a double if not triple meaning, but the content too has multiple meanings because each individual experiences the references a number of ways due to their own personal histories. It means something different for Godard as well. Histoire(s) becomes this working example of a work that could be examined using “the modes of existence.” One possible meaning or application of existence to the film could be the way the references function in the terms of personal memory to the viewer or someone writing about the film. However, this would be only one of many possible modes. The film is unique to those who experience it, an experience that goes beyond the individual who set it in motion, but more importantly how it exists. 

jml

Le Mépris and Authorship

Le Mépris is a good work to use as a test case for auteur theory (la politique des auteurs) and Astruc’s la caméra-stylo. Although it is not the only film directed by Godard with a literary source, it is the one that stays closest to its source material, a novel by Alberto Moravia (Il Disprezzo). Yet, it is hard for me to imagine anyone who has read the book, as I have, and seen the film to claim that the “author” of Le Mépris is Moravia. Il Disprezzo is a work by Moravia, and Le Mépris is a work by Godard. Here I would repeat the comment made by the ex-Surrealist poet Louis Aragon about the film at the time of its release: “I’ve seen [the] novel of today. At the cinema … It’s called Contempt, the novelist is someone named Godard” (qt. in Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema, p. 172). At the same time, what is fascinating is that while the author of the film is undoubtedly Godard, Godard himself acknowledges and explores his works relation to a whole series of other texts, including, of course, the novel upon which it is based. Is this because – as a postmodernist might say – there is no originality, everything has already been said, everything has already been done, et al.? I would say "no", and precisely because Le Mépris, for all its intertextual references, is original – and retains this originality nearly fifty years after its initial release. (The film's exploration of quotation and translation – of quotation as translation – is uniquely Godardian. This doesn't mean it can't be imitated, but the imitation remains precisely that: Godard without Godard.) Godard’s use of citation and allusion is not an acknowledgment that the expressive potential of art has been exhausted; instead, his citations and allusions affirm the enduring power of art, always waiting another chance to provoke, to excite, to disturb. As Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe, “Godard quotes inordinately in his films – through passages projected onto the screen, or through characters who recite bits of literary texts, or directly from books.” And this citational practice works to liberate the texts that he quotes, allowing them to remain in process or in movement. “By citationally picking at literature, he de-monumentalizes it, therefore resurrecting it from the death of finished being, and allows it to circulate – unfinished, always being made – within the open time of film” (Forms of Being, p. 65). Unfinished, always being made, open: all keys to Godard’s particular form of art. All characteristics that we can attribute to the author referred to as "Godard" – a figure who doesn't precede or transcend his art works but who emerges, comes into being, alongside them. (And, if any reminder is necessary, all characteristics described by Eco in "Poetics of the Open Work.")

S I-G

The Practice of Reading

Surely the most unfortunate line that Roland Barthes ever wrote is the one that concludes his essay "Death of an Author": “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Endlessly quoted, yet so poorly understood. I don’t know how many readers have read this as a slogan that what is important is not the literary work itself (and by extension the work of art) but what the intrepid reader does with the text. Thus, while the “author” is cast aside as a useless or outmoded concept, the reader affirms himself or herself as the true creative locus of textual production. (One consequence of this: a shift from “difficult” modernist texts to an emphasis on the artifacts of popular culture, to be pillaged at will. Why does this occur? Precisely because it is believed that creativity is now the art of the beholder. The text is secondary to its usage.) Let’s not forget that the “death of the author” was meant to signal, for Barthes, the death of the sovereign subject, i.e., the belief in the individual as the punctual source for a text’s meaning. It was meant to question the fallacy of the intentional subject – whether this subject is understood as an author, a critic or a reader.  

Barthes statement, it seems to me, should always be accompanied by another, this one by Maurice Blanchot: “What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s ability, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read” (emphasis added). What Blanchot valorizes here is not the reader but the act of reading, and what this act means for both the author and the reader, each destabilized by the same experience or event. This, I would argue, is fundamentally Barthes’ point as well, but his inability to resist a stylistic flourish led him, and several generations of students, down the wrong path. Reading is an encounter between oneself and another. What is affirmed is neither the author nor the reader, but the act that binds one to the other. Blanchot: “To read is thus not to obtain communication from the work, but to ‘make’ the work communicate itself. And if we may employ an inadequate image, to read is to be one of the two poles between which, through mutual attraction and repulsion, the illuminating violence of communication erupts – one of the two poles between which the event comes to pass and which it constitutes by its very passage.” These two poles are the author and the reader, and the event occurs in the (anonymous) passage between them.

Giorgio Agamben makes a similar point in a recent article "The Author as Gesture", which revisits Foucault's essay on authorship. At one point, Agamben considers a poem by César Vallejo. He asks, where does the thought or sentiment expressed in the poem come from? It would be a mistake, he says, to assume that the thought or sentiment first existed "in" César Vallejo, who then diligently transcribed this pre-existent idea or emotion. Rather, "this thought and this sentiment became real for him, and their details and nuances become inextricably his own, only after – or while – writing the poem." This thought or sentiment cannot therefore be said to originate within the poet, but it is equally inaccurate to suggest that it in any way belongs to, or should be attributed to, the poem's reader. The thought or sentiment emanates from neither; it comes from elsewhere. And yet it only exists because, once upon a time, there was a writer who sat down to write a poem, and then, some time later, a reader who sat down to read it. "The place of the poem – or, rather its taking place – is therefore neither in the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): it is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it."

S I-G