Answer: The Author is an Agency

Answer: The Author is an Agency

“What is an author?”  Foucault asks.  Answer:  it’s someone who writes something.  End of article. 

That is how I felt when I first glanced over Foucault’s article.  I am familiar with the idea of an author.  I’m an English major, so I’ve put in my time with various authors and their works. Until I read this article, I didn’t realize what type of author I’m familiar with.  For in his article, Foucault addresses the traditional ways that society defines an author (this definition pertaining to my simplistic definition), and he further challenges us to look at an author in a different light.  Thus, he takes away the agent associated with an author and turns the author into an agency.

Foucault sees the author as a function, instead of a figure.  “The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (908).  This statement immediately questions my perception of an author.  I saw an author as an individual, whereas Foucault is making the author a means of action or an activity.  Activity being the key word, I am wondering if the author or author-function is an agency.

This leads me to challenge to my original perception of the author as an agent.  The Oxford English Dictionary online defined agent as “one who (or that which) acts or exerts power as distinguished from the patient, and also from the instrument”.  Therefore I would have seen the author as the agent who uses his or her writings or works as an instrument in order to influence their reader which would be the patient.  My original construction of an author would have shown their reason for agency through their instrument of works.

So, if Foucault’s author is an agency, then who is the agent?  If traditionally, we are to see the author using writing to influence the reader… then, according to Foucault, we would see the reader using the author as a way of understanding the writing.  So to answer the question, the reader would be the new agent. 

As Foucault says, "why does itmatter?" (904).  It matters because it seems that we generally accept an author to be a particular construction.  Foucault wants a "form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author" (914).  In an ever changing world, it only limits us to have a stagnant definition or way of reading a text or way of considering an author's role to a text, etc.  What Foucault is trying to do is to shift our way of thinking so that we may be able to look at pieces from a different angle to challenge our thoughts as well as the thoughts of others. 

-Alessandra M.