Foucault and Authors

TEMPLE BAR -- There are four features of texts or books which have authors. In Foucault's terms, these are texts which create the author function.

1. Objects of appropriation, forms of property. Speeches and books were assigned to real authors, Foucault argues, only when the authors became subjected to punishments for what the speech or book said.
2. The "author function" is not a universal or constant feature of every text. Texts that do not require an "author" include myths, fairy tales, folk stories, legends, and jokes.
3. The author function is not formed spontaneously, through some simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. Rather, it results from various cultural constructions, in which we choose certain attributes of an individual as "authorial" attributes, and dismiss others.
   • Texts are eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author if they are markedly superior or inferior to other texts on the list. This means the "author function" is a quality label.
   • A text is eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author when the ideas in that text contradict or conflict with the ideas presented in other texts; thus the "author function" denotes a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence.
   • A text is eliminated from belonging to a particular author when the style is different from that of other texts belonging to that author, when it uses words and phrases not found in other texts. Hence "author function" requires a stylistic uniformity.
   • Texts are eliminated which refer to events after the death of the author. Hence "author function" means a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge.
4. The text always bears signs that refer to the author, or create the "author function."

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