The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes 1967

This text was downloaded from www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf.

Barthes' case is similar to that of Foucault. He notes that the concept of authorship is a relatively modern one, arising in Middle Ages. It is part of capitalist ideology that the author's person is important:

"The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions."

Certain writers have attempted to debunk the concept of authorship - Barthes quotes Mallarme and Proust -  then points out that linguistics has dealt the final blow by 

"showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes...."

Thus Barthes lays out his structuralist credentials - explanation is all in the form of the words, no more is needed. The author cannot be seen as pre existing his work:

"Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now."

Barthes cites two corollaries of the demise of the author:

•  the end of the critic. There can be no signification of attribution of a text if the writer's role is simply to translate a 'readymade dictionary' of lexicon;
• the promotion of the reader - writing must be restored by 'reversing its myth': "the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author"

Barthes strikes a chord for those who resist the culture of celebrity. It is an irony of the artistic world that a pursuit which is aimed at the production of works to be admired is prone to the culture of celebrity. Once an artist (or a writer for that matter, "It's the next Dan Brown, it must be good") becomes well-known, there is a tendency almost to deify anything else he or she produces (allegorically described by Craig Brown's take on Tracey Emin's exhibition in My Turd).  This holds true as well for academia - ironically, this essay is undoubtedly read far more widely than it might be if it were written by another author. 

Moreover, from a Marxist perspective, the “author”  is a modern invention, derived from capitalist ideology that granted importance to the author’s person that was part of the wider system of ownership, property and privilege.

The main criticism of this approach is the lack of contextuality - if you see nothing but the words or the images you miss out on the richness of how and why they came about. You are left only with the output, but to understand a piece of work, one needs to understand the inputs, the whys, hows and wherefores. A simple example is Sarah Lucas's work in Assignment 2. She points out that she used simple props to demonstrate her message because she had no money to do anything else; the message cannot be entirely divorced from its context otherwise something is lost in the message itself.

It is interesting also to note how Barthes never mentions females: the writers and the readers are assumed all to be male...