The Singular Self, Autonomy, the Death of the Author and... Students

I don't want to drag us from moving forward with ideas, but all this structuralist and post-structuralist talk is, while interesting for me The Writer (says me), highly problematic, or seemingly so, as a teacher.

It might help to understand how I teach, or my main 'ethic', if there is one. I instruct Basic Skills and Composition. But that isn't really what I teach or what I see myself as teaching. Those were terrible classes to take, I wouldn't do that to someone else. In my version, it is more or less a combination of critical ethics, critical thinking, and critical and personal writing. You can't write well without thinking well or speaking well or vice versa, so the whole English 1A...B...C cycle is silly, inmho.

Anyway, one of the first things we talk about is the sentence. Subject, predicate, right? Usually a couple people get that. But I ask again. Ok. Noun, verb. And maybe a couple more people get that. And what is that? Things doing. There is your basic sentence, the one you see everywhere or hear people talking about: things doing. Everything else is just a build off of that, right?

Well, not exactly. I mean, not for practical purposes anyway. When you think about it, all communication is someone telling someone else something. It is about people over here telling people over there. But what? Things doing? Not really. I mean, yeah: if you write botany papers, ok. But the overwhelming majority of what we say, tell, read, communicate, isn't about things doing at all. It is about us. People.

Someone is always doing (something to someone for some ends and to some effect). Even if it isn't in any one sentence, it is there. A good reader finds out. A good writer just shares in the first place.

That is the real sentence. But we screw it up. Often with plain 'ol passive voice, refusing to reveal directly the actor of the sentence or to make them the subject. Passive aggressively not holding them accountable. But it gets worse than that. If you look at journalistic writing you especially see this problem. "Deficit talks broke down Friday." Really? Wow, cause I thought people were doing stuff. It is stand in, lazy, passive metaphor, almost innuendo for a supposedly knowing reader. Code: John Boehner stopped talking to the President Friday. And you can go further. The consequence of him doing so is that maybe the large group of mostly men who have the job "congress" attached to their name, won't vote to increase the deficit. But even that needs to be unpacked. The news says: "US about to default on debt if the debt ceiling isn't raised." All like it is in some sort of vacuum. The US nothing. If those dudes do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, which is really about saying they agree to pay for stuff they already bought, then the President believes that he will not be able to tell the Treasury Secretary to keep writing checks and sending them out to creditors, which are groups of people who lent us money in the past. And, so what? Well, other bad things, because then other people, and those people, won't lend money back to us, and really, yes, us. And that means no nothing. No school, no Pell Grants, no Student Loans, no unemployment, no check to grandma, no healthcare. Everything just sorta stops. And why didn't people get that? Cause no one would just say that these people doing this thing will effect these people. Or why. Because that is the republican agenda and that is a longer conversation.

All of this being a long way to get to the ethics part, which comes later, about being autonomous sentient beings either treating other people, in any given moment, as tools toward some end, or as also other sentient beings and thus ends in themselves. I somehow got very Kantian.

Anyway, the writer died is a terrible way to teach. Foucault helps somewhat, but not entirely. I don't just teach this way because I think it works. But it does. These kids don't see themselves as authors, as autonomous. It is why they haven't taken the whole schooling thing seriously. They have been taught to be good little cogs, tools of the system. This is true of the spoiled rich kids in Alabama, the farm kids in Kentucky, the inner city kids in San Francisco and Berkeley, and the suburban kids in Fremont. I want them to see that as insulting and do something about it. Talking about responsibility and autonomy excites them. It works, and I am inclined to believe it is right.

But that is... perhaps too simplistic. It does not seem to mesh with these other ideas about the complexity of the author. Or, god don't let me get started on human systems. Or even, actually, the autonomy of the reader. I hope for it as a happy side effect, but unlike other teachers I have observed, I do not start out emphasizing the reader as such. The way they come in is that if the author doesn't do a good enough job, they have let the reader own their story, which means they can do whatever they like. So, I tell them that the author should own it. The author is.... kinda a dictator. Which seems highly problematic.

I am not at all convinced that these ideas are all mutually exclusive. But they do seem problemizing.

Here is my pre-language, poetic reaction

:(

Going to go read more Freire. For some comfort.

Foucault and the "Author" as "Creator-God"

I am curious about Foucault’s discussion/deconstruction of the construction of the author as “a transcendental anonymity” (Theory and Criticism 1479). It seems like he both affirms and deconstructs the idea of the author as creator-God at the same time. He affirms by conceding that “The disappearance of the author […] is held in check by the transcendental” (1479), and then undercuts the power of the transcendental by drawing the line that separates modern twentieth-century ideology with nineteenth-century “historical and transcendental tradition” (1479). He obviously characterizes himself as among the self-liberated, thus divorcing himself from the power of the transcendental.

In light of this, I am curious how such a position relates to Whitman in particular since it could be argued that he can be read as positing himself as author/creator-God, while at the same time undercutting the notion of God on a theological level (I am thinking specifically of Leaves of Grass). Additionally, Foucault himself could be seen as positing himself as author/creator-God because of the theories he posits in What Is an Author? concerning his conception of the “author-function.”

It seems like all of these instances reject the transcendental entity of a theological God while relating that subject position to the author as creator of a text, at the same time pronouncing themselves in creator-God roles as authors of their own texts (i.e. Whitman and Foucault). It almost seems like they topple one tyrannical figure, while assuming the position they just deposed. It is almost arguable that the entire concept of “the death of the author” is related to the twentieth-century declaration of the death of God. If God, the transcendental does not exist, then all relatable subject position, like the author, must also disappear. Just a thought.

Borges and Issues of Authorship

"If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is more significant."


"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

...

As I have been thinking about questions of authorship both leading up to and since our class last Thursday I found myself continually returning back to some thoughts by Borges that have been a major influence in my own views on the topic. At just about two pages or so "Kafka and His Precursors," is more evocative than explanatory, and can hardly be called high theory in any sense of the term, but considering that he is writing more than a decade before Barthes and Foucault, I think he possibly provides an interesting bridge between postmodern theories of authorship and more traditional conceptions of the author.

The purpose of the essay, according to Borges, was to try and sketch out some precursors to Kafka, in his view a "singular" voice in literature. Borges then goes on to compose a surprising list of possible precursors: Zeno, Kierkegaard and Browning, as well as Bloy and Lord Dunsany (who?). An eclectic and in some ways surprising list (Browning?) jumbling together ancient and modern, the well known and the comparatively obscure. "If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other," he writes, "the second fact is more significant." He briefly fleshes out this idea: "in the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry," followed by the now-famous phrase: "the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

To our postmodern minds this might not seem a particularly radical statement (though if you're Harold Bloom they might constitute fightin' words). But it's the type of paradox that Borges loved, a complete disruption of the type of linear filial lines traditionally used to analyze history and literature and the tracing of authors and movements and their subsequent influence over time. In Borges's conception, a work is not simply an endpoint in a long and complex tangle of history, society, art, etc., but rather the starting point where, streaming backwards, alternative histories can be constructed filled with links and connections that might not have been accounted for, if they had previously been there at all.

Thinking of all of this within the context of our discussions of Barthes and Foucault, it struck me how I think this conception accounts for structuralist thought, but it doesn't kill the Author outright, something most of us still can't quite bring ourselves to do. Borges is in line with structuralism as he admits that as unique as Kafka's writing might seem, he's not, in fact, singular. Rather, his work draws from the vast body of knowledge(s) that historically preceded him, regardless of whether these influences were intentional or purely chance affinities. But Borges also seems to have no intention of considering Kafka-as-Author dead either, but seems to hold that his texts are indeed sites of individuality, that Kafka negotiates and arranges influences in a way that was never done in quite the same way. It is in that specific way he might truly be considered singular.

As I said in class last week, I am not convinced of the autonomy of the author, of the implicit Descartian "I" who maintains God-like control over her/his own work (and even processing his her/his own experiences). But on the other hand, I must admit, I'm not willing to kill and completely erase the presence of the author either. Borges has helped me negotiate this—for me, the author is certainly not an autonomous or singular entity/presence, but rather composes any work out of the tiny bits and pieces (or the morphemes, if you will) of art and history, and also language. In that sense, nothing that an author writes can ever be truly unique. But a singularity perhaps is possible, but of a particular type: singularity in the particular, idiosyncratic arrangement of the morphemes we-the-Author have been provided and can never escape from.

Kafka and His Precursors in its entirety can be read here (yes, it's that short).

Is the Author Really Dead?

For this posting, I am going to focus on Barthes with particular focus on his declaration of "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end…the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding in us.'" Barthes states that a text is separate from the author, deriding academia's focus on the author's life and time period they are in. As an undergraduate student in literature, this was how we were taught to disseminate texts, with a focus on the 'text itself.' That's all well and good (and incredibly simplified, I know) but what happens in the case of the 'death of the author' when they are writing about themselves. In particular, the genre of the memoir and biography? Some authors have made entire careers based on writing about their lives (see David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Michelle Tea), forming their anecdotes in short stories or collections of thematic vignettes. Other others write about a significant time period in their lives, such as a turbulent adolescence or memorable event. What comes to mind is Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which is sold fiction, but is based on Kerouac's true life experiences. Is there a death of the author, Jack Kerouac, and a birth of a character "Kerouac" in the alter-ego of "Sal"? Does On the Road fit in with other texts that are largely autobiographical but not one hundred percent accurate, such as Audre Lorde's Zami? I'm confused as to where the author stops and the text begins in cases such as these.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I hope that we can discuss it tomorrow in class.

The Perks of Being an English Major

Here is the other thing that I mentioned in class on Thursday.

Jersey Shore Gone "Wilde"

As I mentioned in class last week, here it is! Jersey Shore Gone "Wilde", the cast of "The Important of Being Ernest" reenacted lines of dialogue from the reality show, Jersey Shore, in the style of Oscar Wilde.

http://youtu.be/Mhk5Rjz7xk0

There are 5 parts total, make sure you watch them all!

Fun with Chatbots

Here is a link to the segment on Chatbots from NPR that Prof. Goodwin and I were talking about yesterday in class. Not only interesting, but hilarious. Enjoy!

Robot-To-Robot Chat Yields Curious Conversation

-jesse