Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
114-5. the guiding question here: "why did i use the names of authors in the order of things" if he didn't intend to explain & be held accountable for everything those authors' work might mean, imply, connect to, complicate? the answer, he says, will show up somewhere else; what's interesting to this essay is "the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figured who is outside and precedes it"
117. cultural context & (?) that whole barthes business (?): "we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. if we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing"
118. "the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change"; killer questions: "what is necessary to its composition, if a work is not something written by a person called an 'author?'"; "if an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or comunicated to others?"; "assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said...to be included in his work?....if we wish to publish the complete works of nietzshce, for example, where do we draw the line?...can we agree on what 'everything' means?" & what about his laundry lists?
119-20. the mystical "notion of écriture"--which "stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment" but not "the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text, of an author's meaning"..."has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. the extremely visible signs of the author's empirical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of religious and critical modes of characterization. in granting a primordial status to writing, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin or a critical belief in its creative nature?"
121. so what? "it is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; god and man died a common death. rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance....in this context we can briefly consider the problems that arise in the use of an author's name? what is the name of an author? how does it function?" (& he has no answers, of course); "obviously not a pure and simple reference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) has other than indicative functions. it ismore than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is...the equivalent of a description" and "a proper name has other functions than that of signification: when we discover that rimbaud has not written la chasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of the proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and...they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions"
122. "the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author's name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way"--things we found out about a person we think of as an author could change our impressions of him/her as a person but not an author or as an author but not a person.
123. "these differences indicate that an author's name is not simply an element of speech....its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification" doing 3 things: it "can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others"; it "establishes different forms of relationships among texts"; & it "characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse"; from another perspective, "unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts--separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. it points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. the author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence"
124. therefore "in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and...an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author"; "in dealing with the 'author' as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses." 4 features characterize "only those books or texts with authors": (1) "they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago"
125. (2) "the 'author-function' is not universal or constant in all discourse....the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call 'literary' (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author"
127. (3) "this 'author-function'...is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. it results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power....nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author...are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts" (& where's 4?)
128. st. jerome's 4 "norms" that "will disclose the involvement of several authors" or give away inconsistencies in an author's presentation: (a) consistent quality, (b) expressed ideas don't disagree, (c) "stylistic uniformity," & (d) a lack of anachronistic disconnects; in modern criticism the same concerns appear
129. but it's more complicated: "it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive amterial, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author" (pronouns etc.)
130-1. "the 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and imply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy."
131. "even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of much more than a book--of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate....we could say that such authors occupy a 'transdiscursive' position" such that "the distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts"
132. his examples, "marx and freud, as 'initiators of discursive practices,' not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but...they also made possible a certain number of differences. they cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated"
137-8. why he cares: in addition to helping categorize discourse, "the 'author-function' could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships"; thus questions about who exactly the subject/author/originator is are less useful/important/valuable than these:
"'what are the modes of existence of this discourse?'
'where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?'
'what placements are determined for possible subjects'
'who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?'"