Foucault
Another text which played an important role in poststructuralist theory was Michel Foucault's essay “What is an Author?” which radically questions the notion of authorship. Foucault denies the privilege of authority to a single author. He does not subscribe to the view that a text written by a particular person is his/her territory over which s/he has the sole interpretive rights. Instead, he suggests that a work is not the creation of a single person, but the product of the mingling of a host of factors including the time and place in which the author is located. It is thus as much a product of the times, as that of a person. “The ‘act of creation' is in reality a series of complex processes that the designation ‘author' serves to simplify” (Gentzler 150). So the author is not really a single individual, but a series of “subjective positions, determined not by any single harmony of effects, but by gaps, discontinuities, and breakages” (Gentzler 150).
Foucault distinguishes between the classical and modern concepts of language. The classical conception was that language could capture reality, that there was a universal principle underlying everyday reality that can be expressed through language, and that there is a subject that knows and expresses itself through language. He points out Linnaeus's painstaking classification of the natural world as symptomatic of this classical tendency to classify and know. But by the end of the eighteenth century, a rupture occurs in this harmony, marking the beginning of the modern age. Language becomes self-conscious, and the subject of discourse is discourse itself. The author does not use the language, language ‘uses' him. According to Gentzler, what Foucault is suggesting is a double break: languages are cut off from the things that they can represent, and they are also broken off from the general continuity found in the natural world. So, language has a life of its own, it is no longer the medium used by us to express things, but rather we are the mediums chosen by language to speak itself. It is not the carrier of meaning but is self-referential. In this context it makes no sense to speak of a particular author's meaning or structure, as everything is fluid.
Foucault, like other deconstructionists, argue that we have to be aware of that which slips through the net of language even as we try to express it in writing. This “other” which is the dark shadow of expressed thought, remains unmentioned or repressed. It is this which deconstruction sought to listen to. Translation in a way bears the imprint of this repressed other, because in the search for equivalence, it unwittingly opens up the plurality of a word, sentence and thereby the entire text. In its search for equivalence, what it comes up with are more words. The translation acknowledges the impossibility of complete equivalence which is also an acceptance of the continuous play of words that give rise to further words. |
