The Death and Return of the creative subject

Past its sell-by date or not? 'The death of the author' might be considered too literal, (too obvious and final, even morbid) a metaphor to offer a critique of the productive apparatus by which contemporary creative operations are organised and regulated - perhaps in particular, when using computers. In reverse historical turn, this examination of the apparatus makes reference to Russian Formalism and Structualism (pre- post-Structuralism) and the mere role of the author as a function of discourse. Both these movements sought to uncover the structural formations of language, and to establish a science of language that might be applicable to all cultural phenomena - in such a way that it would be possible to 'read' written, audio and visual 'texts' and discover how meanings are produced (within signifying systems in other words). Post-Structuralism follows this formalist trajectory but additionally considers the ways in which subjectivity is constituted (influenced by anthropology and psychoanalysis in particular; Barthes was heavily influenced by Lˇvi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Lacan's work on the unconscious both applying linguistic structures to 'natural' phenomena - making it cultural of course). Therefore it may be useful to start with some competing definitions of 'subjectivity' that require some understanding before reading the supplied essays - the reading of which requires the recognition that all essays (and any cultural phenomena for that matter) are subject to the historical and cultural conditions of their production. The creative subject - author, artist, designer, programmer - is thus only ever part of the story. As Benjamin puts it (in 'The Author as Producer', in Understanding Brecht): 'Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.' (1973: 94)  

Commonsense understanding of the 'subject' is in opposition to object, alternatively cast as the self and other. However this viewpoint assumes a fixed, stable identity, a rational, centred, individual subject. The 'individualism' of this philosophical position fails to account for the role played by social relations and language in determining, regulating and producing the 'thinking subject'. Subjectivity is best understood through a collision of definitions: 1. From political theory, the citizen is a subject of the state; subjected to power and lack of freedom; 2. From idealist philosophy, the thinking subject as the site of consciousness; and 3. From grammar, the subject of a sentence, text, and discourse - that which the action is determined by. Clearly we are all subjects of various agencies (those of parents, legal apparatus, commerce, cultural characteristics) - a range of competing, multiple, decentred, unstable identities according to orthodox post-structuralist theory. 

Examining subjectivity is therefore an effective way of conceptualising text/reader relations without taking either as fixed unitary definitions. It is also a way of recognising that cultural products employ strategies to try to fix subject positions (to persuade, to sell, to interpellate, etc). In some textual analysis this is taken to an extreme in suggesting that texts produce our subjectivity (as false consciousness, for instance in the work of Althusser) - as subjects in ideology. Similarly, the author-function is undoubtedly an ideological invention designed to grant the text more authenticity and authority. There are many examples of the creative use of deferred authorship and appropriation techniques; perhaps most notoriously the artist Sherrie Levine, who literally 'takes' (other people's) photographs, as an extreme version of the 'readymade' of language (and there is an obvious reference here back to Benjamin on reproduction as throwing associated concerns like authenticity into crisis). These kinds of examples assert that in the end, whatever the text is/has been about, the subject, like meaning, is always produced in the act of reading, viewing or hearing. Meanings are coded, but that does not mean they are simply encoded by the writer for the reader to decode - communication is far more complicated and unstable, and prone to miscommunication and misunderstanding. 

Western epistemology has been proved to be full of dubious methods and ideas, invented to legitimate all kinds of dodgy practices. For instance, any notion of a superior or abstract order behind things has been laid to rest in the definitive metaphor - 'God is dead' proclaimed Nietzsche. In recognition of this, the decentred, fragmented, subject is left rather unstable with no longer an objective, rational or universal framework left intact to believe in, or seek to change; no longer confident of an assured progressive story or stance. Contemporary theory is a morbid affair, full of 'ends' and 'deaths' leaving subjectivity in a poor state of health. This is what the seminal essay 'The Death of the Author' seems to encapsulate - Barthes says: 'Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give the text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.' (1977: 147)

At the risk of offering too obvious and too linear a prehistory of the 'Death of the Author' thesis, anti-authorial ideas are often evoked through Mallarmˇ's view of compositional aesthetics. For instance: 
'The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet-speaker who yields the initiative to words animated by the inequality revealed in their collision with one another; they illuminate one another and pass like a trail of fire over precious stones, replacing the audible breathing of earlier lyrical verse or the exalted personality which directed the phrase.
The structure of a book of verse must arise throughout from internal necessity - in this way both chance and the author will be excluded...' (Mallarmˇ, quoted in Burke, 1992: 8-9)

Through derived from a discourse more about inspiration, the passage neatly describes a situation where language itself has autonomy over the writer, where words are arranged in such a way that subjective intention does not figure. On the removal of the Author, and citing Mallarmˇ as a precursor to this line of thinking, Barthes says: '(... the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all levels the Author is absent).... The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after.' (Barthes, 1977: 145). This is further explained in response to Foucault's question 'Who is speaking?': 'Mallarmˇ replies... the word itself... in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself.' (Foucault, quoted in Burke, 1992: 9) Language, conceived of in this way, is auto-generative. But where does authorship lie in all this, it has not simply disappeared but is recast surely in recognition of its own constructedness. To state the obvious, even Mallarmˇ is the author of his own position on the author's disappearance.    

Evidently, the author has not simply disappeared, and there is a pressing need to examine new demarcations, and the functions released by this alleged disappearance. Foucault, this time from the appropriately titled 'What is an Author? (in The Foucault Reader)' explains: 'It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.' (1984: 105). Foucault, here, like Althusser too, are asking what humanism might be after the 'death of man' - Spinoza similarly contested that the laws of human nature could not be falsely separated from the laws of nature. Hardt and Negri further suggest that 'Donna Haraway carries on Spinoza's project in our day as she insists on breaking down barriers we pose among the human, the animal, and the machine. If we are to conceive man as seprate from nature, then man does not exist.' (2000: 91) In a history of ideas, this is the recognition of the idea of the death of man that Barthes is clearly responding to. 

Although the 'author-god' might be dead (according to Barthes's thesis), we are forced to accept this 'death' as a metaphoric gesture: 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' (1977: 148) - as an over-stated expression of the author's inability to claim the privileged source of meaning or value of a work of art. This was simply meant strategically - to shift emphasis on to the words on the page, or the nature of the surrounding language and discourse - and away from associated myths of originality and genius. Thus, a certain rejection of certainty is enforced in relation to all kinds of 'hypostases' such as 'society, history, psyche, liberty... reason, science, law' (1977:147). From 'The Death of the Author', Barthes states:

'We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.[...] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His [sic] 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. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely...' (1977: 146)

So what about these words, how have they been arranged so persuasively, and from where do they derive? Sean Burke, in 'A prehistory of the Death of the Author' (1992) suggests that an existential reading of phenomenology is an important precursor to the question of subjectivity in Barthes (his focus is Barthes, Foucault and Derrida by the way). In particular, in the 1940s the work of Jean-Paul Sartre argued for the idea of free subjectivity, offering the figure of the politically committed author. This is to say, that the influence on 'the death of the author' is partly informed by an idea of consciousness rather than exclusively linguistic structures as is commonly supposed (Cognitive science might figure here too). Post-structuralist thinking would tend towards seeing consciousness and cognition as merely effects of language. The return of the author would appear regressive (and a little contradictory) but it serves to throw a different point of emphasis for effect (see Slavoj Zizek's The Ticklish Subject on the recentring of subjectivity for more on this argument). A leap of faith is required as it's more a question of whether the death or return of the author-figure is productive at this point in time. How productive is the metaphor? For my purposes this line of thought might be further traced back to Walter Benjamin in his essay 'The Author as Producer', first presented as a lecture in April 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris (1973). Benjamin who claimed that: 

'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.' (1973: 98) 

Its significance lies in requiring the author to act as an active agent, to intervene in the production process, and property relations, to change 'technique' and transform the apparatus. This is the 'organising function' that Benjamin proposes demanding the author to reflect upon the production process - setting the laboratory in opposition to the finished work of art. 

Over the years, this thesis has been extensively reworked as the opposition of theory versus activism. Hal Foster reckons this has been more recently reinscribed as 'the artist as ethnographer' to take account of the institution; now working on behalf not exclusively of the proletariat but of the cultural or ethnic other (from exclusively economic relations to include cultural identity). For Foster evoking Benjamin once more, the difficulty is that these paradigms consistently inscribe otherness, with the danger of working as an 'ideological patron' on behalf of the oppressed without due attention to the production process; Benjamin, says this is 'an impossible place' to operate from (1973: 93). Foster calls for reflexivity advocating 'work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other' (Hal Foster, 'The Artist as Ethnographer', in, The Return of the Real, 1995: 203). In other words, subjectivity needs to be thoroughly inscribed into the very process of production. 

What sense of authorship does this evoke? - perhaps, one where subjectivity and technology are bound together in recognition of the organising function of computer apparatuses. It is somewhat ironic to note that both machines and humans are more or less programmed. This is a recognition that subjectivity is determined by other destabilising forces and that creative-subjectivity itself is socially-encoded. Echoing one definition of subjectivity that lays emphasis on discursive frameworks, the author is revealed to be a rhetorical invention operating in much the same way as a coded machine that follows a crude rule-based system, auto-generating what already exists (more on this in 'The Authorship of Generative Art' essay). It occurs to me that 'The Author as Producer' essay might be recoded to take account of these intricate procedures.


More on 'The Author as Producer' essay:

It is often overlooked that the essay was first delivered as a lecture address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris in 1934. It unsurprisingly expresses a committed politics (of aesthetics - remembering that Fascism seeks to aestheticise politics by 1936 in Benjamin's writings).

The essay is centrally concerned with questions of autonomy - freedom of expression. A progressive writer acknowledges the choice of in whose service, or more particularly class interests, the writing operates. This, Benjamin explains, is usually called pursuing a tendency, or expressing 'commitment' and he takes this to be a key word (1973: 86) He explains that more often than not, commitment is seen in opposition to quality and suggests they might be synthesised to be one and the same - and sets out to prove it so using a dialectical method of argument. As a result, he argues that for a work to be 'politically correct', it must simultaneously be correct in the literary sense. The first principle he establishes is that the work is not autonomous in itself and must be inserted into the context of 'living social relations' themselves determined by production relations according to materialist criticism (1973: 87). Instead of making the usual opposition of whether a work is reactionary or revolutionary, he simply asks: what is its position within the production relations of its time - and this is a question of 'technique' for Benjamin. 

Technique has a particular sense in German derived from Technik (check Esther Leslie on translation again) but serves the purpose here to collapse the false separation of form (or method) and content. It also allows for the synthesis of commitment and quality that Benjamin proposes. He cites the Russian writer Tretyakov who as an 'operative' writer typifies suitable technique and lies outside the established canon of literary forms as a journalist. This is the part of the argument for Benjamin who thinks that the category of literature should evolve according to the energy of the time and include new forms and confusions (1973: 89). He calls this the 'melting-down process' of established forms - the temperature of which is determined by class struggle (1973: 96). In this way new forms can be cast (evoking 'all that is solid melts into air' perhaps). His example of this regenerative process is the newspaper, because it throws into question established separations - of academic and popular modes, of descriptive and creative writing, but particularly the separation between writer and reader:    

'For as literature gains in breadth what it loses in depth, so the distinction between author and public, which the bourgeois press maintains by artificial means, is beginning to disappear in the Soviet press. The reader is always prepared to become a writer, in the sense of being one who describes or prescribes. As an expert - not in any particular trade, perhaps, but anyway an expert on the subject of the job he happens to be in - he [sic] gains access to authorship. Work itself puts in a word. And writing about work makes up part of the skill necessary to perform it. Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one, and so becomes common property.' (1973: 90)

This exists in potential for Benjamin as he recognises that property is crucial here - and look what's happened since then in terms of media ownership. Along with this, he is keen to criticise the intelligentsia's attitude of mind as of little practical use: 'the important thing in politics is not private thinking but, as Brecht once put it, the art of thinking inside other people's heads' (1973:92). He further stresses the important distinction between theory and activism: that it is simply not enough to have political commitment however revolutionary it may seem, 'without at the same time being to think through in a really revolutionary way the question of their own work, its relationship to the means of production and its technique.' (1973: 91) This is what Benjamin defines as a producer (and definitely not consumer). 'Technical progress is, for the author as producer, the basis of his political progress' (1973: 95).

Merely to be at the side of the proletariat is no place to be: 'the place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible place. (cf. Foster's artist as ethnographer). What is required is 'functional transformation', Brecht's phrase to describe the 'transformation of forms and instruments of production' (1973: 93) - not merely engaging with the apparatus or being satisfied with finished works but seeking to transform the apparatus - to propose technical innovation and revolutionary use-value over mere 'modishness' (by this he is thinking of photographers who depict poverty as spectacle - human misery as an object of consumption in his words, 1973: 96 - what in more contemporary terms, Zizek would describe as 'interpassivity'). The problem of course, even then, is that technical innovation happens all the time but without putting into serious question the ruling interests (this is what Benjamin sought to expose later in the artwork essay). Improvement of the production apparatus for Benjamin, necessarily means in terms of Socialism - the combination of commitment and quality in technique, so to speak. A further example of good technique is that of Dadaism, that sought to test art for its authenticity by ideas of the 'readymade' and photomontage. He describes this as follows: 'You put a frame round the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than a painting. Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.' (1973: 94)

Benjamin further suggests that cultural production requires a pedagogic function. It must have the function of a model (1973: 98) turning consumers and readers alike into collaborators. His example is Brecht again. He used the apparatus of epic theatre to reveal the 'functional relationship between stage and audience, text and production, producer and actor. Epic theatre, he declared, must not develop actions but trepresent conditions. A we shall see it obtains its 'conditions' by allowing the actions to be interrupted.' (1973:99) The infamous Brechtian 'alienation' technique (with the emphaisis on 'technnique' in this context) works against the illusion of theatre, allowing the audience to recognise real and present conditions. Thus the mediated (ideological) artifice is uncovered through a process of testing and observing through practice and dramatic actions the alienation of the audience - hopefully in a lasting manner. Brecht 'opposes the dramatic laboratory to the finished work of art' (1973: 10O).   

The writer must reflect upon their position within the production process like a technician, demonstrating expertise alongside solidarity. This alliance is necessary to 'transform him, from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus' (1973: 102) reconciling the means of intellectual production with technical quality and class conflict. Opinions matter but like commitment holds no relevance in itself. He reiterates:
'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.' (1973: 98)

The importance here is that Benjamin stresses an identification with work - the work involved in producing art.