Why write?
Before I go into this question, I would like to throw in my own personal bet into the discourse I’m going to set up for myself. Being in a situation wherein I will soon project myself upon a world with which I am not familiar with brings me to a very reflective and consequently self-referential state. With that in mind, I will try to not let it determine my discourse since there is a need to focus on the texts of Foucault and Barthes regarding authorship. I believe that putting my own flavor into such a paper that talks about the author is something formally apt. If I were to create a title for the dream profession I would like to see myself have after a couple of years after my graduation, it would have the title of essayist on Filipino political psychology. I would like to see myself studying the Filipino psyche and how it deals with the particularities of the structures and discourses of the political reality it faces.
Enough of that.
This is the move that Foucault and Barthes would probably say to budding writers such as myself. To interrupt the infusion of personal identity and expression might in a symbolic manner express what they have done in their texts of What is an Author? and The Death of the Author respectively. In a nutshell, they said that preoccupations with the author and the notions of work that derive from a conception of the author as a unified internality from which the text originates from hinder the proper consideration of the proper place of the author and the text within discourse.
It is interesting that Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett in usage of his words “What matter who’s speaking?” (Foucault, 117). By posing this question, he questions the importance of putting an identity behind the speaking subject, or for that matter of the realm of writing, the writing subject. This is echoed by Barthes in his words: “language knows a subject, not a person.” (Barthes, 1467). Both Foucault and Barthes depicts that the notion of author which then presupposes that a text is as if a record of the person of the author with which the discourse available in the text should be projected against. This notion derives from a notion of the author as a point of origin which Foucault and Barthes would want to question. For them, The author is merely a function in and of discourse.
According to Barthes (p. 1468): “(The author) His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” No matter what an author writes, what he said will most probably be citing. If any semblance of originality can be achieved, an author can only have this by establishing relationships among other texts-- inter-textuality. This runs contrary to the notion of work which assumes a unity within a certain text on its own anchored on a notion of the author as an expressing person with a defined internality. In a sense, the only unity that a text can assume is the mere physical boundaries of the page/s that is set upon it. If the originality of meaning should be the criterion of unity, then no text should be considered a work. Although it must be mentioned that the text does not lose its integrity via its divorce from a unified creator, but in fact it assumes a stronger and more dynamic integrity since it is now projected upon a framework of authors in the plural rather than an author in the singular. Barthes says it well in this statement: “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (p. 1468).
Although I admit that this could be a digression, I pursue it nonetheless. This notion of the text within an inter-textuality can be compared to the pluralistic philosophy of the human person wherein the identity of a person is not anymore emerging from an “essence” that reveals itself in interaction with others, but built through and within its interaction with others. The integrity of the human person is not within it, but is always constructed in relation with others. This makes a human person in a position in communion with others.
Foucault develops this point as well when he writes: “authors occupy a ‘transdiscursive’ position” (p. 31). It can be seen here that every author is not an originator of discourse, but merely occupies a position in it. This can be likened to Barthes’ notion that a writer is a dictionary that develops his own idiom so to speak with the usage of language. The writer cannot create a dictionary, but at his or her very best, can create a way of constructing language in discourse. This could be seen in Foucault’s terminology that authors are “initiators of discursive practices” (p. 131).
Personally, I do adhere to what Foucault and Barthes said with regards the author, but the violence with which the usage of the word “death” still strikes as lacking in fairness for my own taste. I do adhere to the notion that due to the author as only occupying a transdiscursive position and being able only to initiate discursive practice rather than starting a whole discourse on their own, they do not necessarily die upon writing. Yes, quoting Barthes: “Every text is eternally written here and now.” (p. 1468), but I believe that the author still lives on after his or her text. If they must die, I believe there should be moments of resurrection made available to them.
I believe that although authors are not able to be originators of their own discourse, but they are still inexhaustible agents of discourse. I would want to relate this to Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of history in the Human Condition that history is not a faceless narrative nor built by main heroes and villains, but a multitude of faces within a confluence of dialogue and inter-action that build a historical narrative. In relation to writing, authors are important in their plurality and the multitude of writing subjects are necessary to build a discourse. I go against the structuralists when they say that language lives beyond its speakers. Latin is still alive today not because of its own strength, but because medical doctors chose to use Latin in their medical discourse. Many languages have died due to the death of its agents and though it could be argued that specs of it still exists via sheer transmission in unknown moments of discourse within history, what of it? If it is unavailable to our scrutiny due to its inexistence to our records and hence our consciousness, why bother with it? Let’s just deal with what we can actually study.
Enough of that.
To say it bluntly: language is still human artifice though the admission of its strength must be confessed. I would like to think of writing as a stake-placing on a gambling table of discourse wherein stakes assume a fluid value ruled by the rules of a game. The rules of the game, we can only know with practice and it might come to us to be as arbitrary as a throw of the dice. But as Mallarme’s poem said “A Throw of the Dice Never will Abolish Chance,” if we use discourse to try to create THE DISCOURSE, it will be futile. We use discourse because we love to be in it. If an author aims to create THE DISCOURSE, then I would say to them: a text in discourse never will abolish discourse. Authors should simply be thankful that they get to join discourse and get their 2 cents worth in the table. We should not fool ourselves that in gambling, we aim to win the grand prize, but at best, what we can get from it is the joy of playing the game. We write not to make THE TEXT, but because we love to write.
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