The existence of mathematics problematizes the deconstructionist idea that “meaning inhabits the very activity of the search.” If I understand numbers correctly, they do refer to a fixed reality — thus, it is possible for a language to refer absolutely to a fixed reality, with varying degrees of success (phoenetic writing being the most unstable mode). Galileo per Derrida: “It [the book of Nature] is written in a mathematical language.”
How is what Derrida calls ‘theoretical mathematics’ different from writing? Is mathematics the same as “natural and universal” writing?
On page 15, Derrida writes that “intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor” — but how can mathematics ever be metaphorical?
How can we ( can we?) apply a deconstructive approach to works of autofiction? I am thinking of Knausgaard for instance. If we “kill” the author, we are just left with the -fiction side. Doesn’t this mean that the writing we will be accessing is in truth lacking a huge part of what was meant for it to be in the first place?
What about applying Barthes on Barthes. If Garbo’s face is the idea, and Hepburn the event, how can we ( can we really?) subtract Garbo-the-person and Hepburn-the-person from idea and event they represent?
In “What is an Author?”, Foucault writes that “speeches and books were assigned real authors … only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive” (305). In “The History of Sexuality,” Foucault identifies a similar paradigm shift in the cultural categorization of homosexuality as moving something one does to something one is by “strew[ing] reality with [a] thousand aberrant sexualities and incorporat[ing] them into the individual” (44). The homosexual was now stamped with a tangible identity that could lend itself to new intensities of scrutiny.
It seems as though the same congealment of person/action is occurring in Foucault’s conceptualization of “the ‘author’ as a function of discourse” (305). The author becomes (intentionally) tethered to the work, impeding any reading or understanding beyond its being “stamped” by transgression. Is this repression an attempt to deny the work its ability to signify freely, to quote Barbara Johnson, “signify something more, something less, or something other than it claims to, or … to different degrees of explicitness, effectiveness, or coherence”? (141).
Barthes asks, “Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work?” This question is interesting when applied to the archive: what purposes do trinkets, miscellaneous scrap paper, and Christmas cards, for instanace, serve when placed within an author’s archival papers? Aside from the goal of totality, what are the broader goals of both the archivist and the researcher when it comes to materials that are unrelated to written texts?
Obviously, Derrida’s challenging of the implied presence of the signified via deconstruction is at once revolutionary, extremely abstruse, and foundational for post-structuralism, but my question is related to deconstruction as it is applied in Johnson’s “Teaching Deconstruction.”
I found my approach to literary analysis/criticism to almost perfectly coincide with what Johnson propounds as deconstructive reading (which may again be a luxury of entering the field after the deconstructive moment). However, I was almost hesitant to endorse her pedagogy as deconstructive because it was so eminently readable and clear, which often tends to almost necessarily entail some degree of (over-)simplification. I read the complexity of these texts as virtually an enactment of the critique of the paradigm of thought they are explicating. My question is thus: Are the cases Johnson enumerates truly deconstructive? Or were they not always present in the historical practice of literary criticism, i.e. interrogating how texts mean?
Perhaps it is! The follow-up question would be: if Derrida’s complex philosophical concept can be distilled so straightforwardly into this pedagogical approach, must something be sacrificed?
Foucault and Barthes seem to be heading in different directions in this week’s batch of essays. Towards the end of “What is an Author,” as he builds the ‘author-concept’ argument, Foucault says “the author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some ‘importance’…his influence can have significant ramifications.” He mentions Anne Radcliffe, who with The Mysteries of Udolpho, makes possible “the appearance of Gothic Romances at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” How can we reconcile this point of view with Barthes’s description of text in “The Death of the Author” as “a variety of writings, none of them original…a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture? (146)”
Even if they aren’t necessarily conflicting or diametrically opposed, did one of these points of view regarding authorship win out? How can we apply them to other forms of artistic expression besides writing?
I’m wondering, particularly in Barthes’ essay, about the role of the reader. He writes that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constitued.” Is this even possible? What then does the reader bring to the table if not what is personal (I’m thinking here of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and how the reader’s context necessarily comes into their interpretation)? And how then does this “birth of the reader” look like? Is what the reader “holds together” just the allusions to other texts etc. if it cannot be personal?
Is there any sense in which Johnson’s text was performing the very oscillation between allegory and literality that she sought to “bring out” in her readings of Hawthorne and Andersen?
(I personally got the sense she is doing this by the end of the essay, but maybe I’m reading too much into things. It seemed, in my view, that she shows how to read allegory and literality together – both at the same time – not only by displaying how Hawthorne’s and Andersen’s stories run back and forth between allegory and literality but also by showing that her reading itself was doing the very same thing. That is to say, in showing how allegory and literality “appear” in their stories, it seems to me that she allegorically and literally read them in such a way that we, readers of HER text, would have to approach our OWN (deconstructive) reading of HER reading of Hawthorne and Andersen in incessant oscillation between allegory and literality, on the plane of what she is trying to show about “teaching deconstructively.” Even if this is not what Johnson is doing, that seems to be, possibly, something that literary theory and/or criticism must always take into account in and about their own reading and teaching of certain texts – and this need not be the case only for the dyad of literality-allegory, but maybe between other terms as well.)
Barthes claims that “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French nationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.” (142-143)
I guess my question is very “simple”, but I am having trouble understanding what he is trying to say here. Is he arguing that those who wrote before the Middle Ages were not authors? If so, then what were they? On page 145 he also makes a distinction between an author and a modern scriptor, which was also rather confusing. Are “modern scriptors” those who started writing after the Reformation? Why is he making a distinction between the two if ultimately, the “author” doesn’t matter, and it is in fact the reader that does?
I find Foucault’s historicization of notions of authorship (though certainly abbreviated here–I want to learn more about this history) important to help us consider where we are at currently with this issue of what authorship indicates. For instance, he writes:
“Texts, however, that we now call ‘scientific’ (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of ‘Hippocrates said. . . ‘ or ‘Pliny tells us that . . . ‘ were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification” (306).
How have our social notions of “truth” and “authenticity” evolved, and how does this situate the role of the author differently? How has the Internet changed this role?
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11 Comments
Serena
The existence of mathematics problematizes the deconstructionist idea that “meaning inhabits the very activity of the search.” If I understand numbers correctly, they do refer to a fixed reality — thus, it is possible for a language to refer absolutely to a fixed reality, with varying degrees of success (phoenetic writing being the most unstable mode). Galileo per Derrida: “It [the book of Nature] is written in a mathematical language.”
How is what Derrida calls ‘theoretical mathematics’ different from writing? Is mathematics the same as “natural and universal” writing?
On page 15, Derrida writes that “intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor” — but how can mathematics ever be metaphorical?
Irene
How can we ( can we?) apply a deconstructive approach to works of autofiction? I am thinking of Knausgaard for instance. If we “kill” the author, we are just left with the -fiction side. Doesn’t this mean that the writing we will be accessing is in truth lacking a huge part of what was meant for it to be in the first place?
What about applying Barthes on Barthes. If Garbo’s face is the idea, and Hepburn the event, how can we ( can we really?) subtract Garbo-the-person and Hepburn-the-person from idea and event they represent?
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
In “What is an Author?”, Foucault writes that “speeches and books were assigned real authors … only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive” (305). In “The History of Sexuality,” Foucault identifies a similar paradigm shift in the cultural categorization of homosexuality as moving something one does to something one is by “strew[ing] reality with [a] thousand aberrant sexualities and incorporat[ing] them into the individual” (44). The homosexual was now stamped with a tangible identity that could lend itself to new intensities of scrutiny.
It seems as though the same congealment of person/action is occurring in Foucault’s conceptualization of “the ‘author’ as a function of discourse” (305). The author becomes (intentionally) tethered to the work, impeding any reading or understanding beyond its being “stamped” by transgression. Is this repression an attempt to deny the work its ability to signify freely, to quote Barbara Johnson, “signify something more, something less, or something other than it claims to, or … to different degrees of explicitness, effectiveness, or coherence”? (141).
Francesca
Barthes asks, “Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work?” This question is interesting when applied to the archive: what purposes do trinkets, miscellaneous scrap paper, and Christmas cards, for instanace, serve when placed within an author’s archival papers? Aside from the goal of totality, what are the broader goals of both the archivist and the researcher when it comes to materials that are unrelated to written texts?
Francesca
Oops, I meant Foucault, not Barthes.
Alex Lleras
Obviously, Derrida’s challenging of the implied presence of the signified via deconstruction is at once revolutionary, extremely abstruse, and foundational for post-structuralism, but my question is related to deconstruction as it is applied in Johnson’s “Teaching Deconstruction.”
I found my approach to literary analysis/criticism to almost perfectly coincide with what Johnson propounds as deconstructive reading (which may again be a luxury of entering the field after the deconstructive moment). However, I was almost hesitant to endorse her pedagogy as deconstructive because it was so eminently readable and clear, which often tends to almost necessarily entail some degree of (over-)simplification. I read the complexity of these texts as virtually an enactment of the critique of the paradigm of thought they are explicating. My question is thus: Are the cases Johnson enumerates truly deconstructive? Or were they not always present in the historical practice of literary criticism, i.e. interrogating how texts mean?
Perhaps it is! The follow-up question would be: if Derrida’s complex philosophical concept can be distilled so straightforwardly into this pedagogical approach, must something be sacrificed?
Peter
Foucault and Barthes seem to be heading in different directions in this week’s batch of essays. Towards the end of “What is an Author,” as he builds the ‘author-concept’ argument, Foucault says “the author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some ‘importance’…his influence can have significant ramifications.” He mentions Anne Radcliffe, who with The Mysteries of Udolpho, makes possible “the appearance of Gothic Romances at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” How can we reconcile this point of view with Barthes’s description of text in “The Death of the Author” as “a variety of writings, none of them original…a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture? (146)”
Even if they aren’t necessarily conflicting or diametrically opposed, did one of these points of view regarding authorship win out? How can we apply them to other forms of artistic expression besides writing?
Joanna Ligon
I’m wondering, particularly in Barthes’ essay, about the role of the reader. He writes that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constitued.” Is this even possible? What then does the reader bring to the table if not what is personal (I’m thinking here of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and how the reader’s context necessarily comes into their interpretation)? And how then does this “birth of the reader” look like? Is what the reader “holds together” just the allusions to other texts etc. if it cannot be personal?
Alex Riedel
Is there any sense in which Johnson’s text was performing the very oscillation between allegory and literality that she sought to “bring out” in her readings of Hawthorne and Andersen?
(I personally got the sense she is doing this by the end of the essay, but maybe I’m reading too much into things. It seemed, in my view, that she shows how to read allegory and literality together – both at the same time – not only by displaying how Hawthorne’s and Andersen’s stories run back and forth between allegory and literality but also by showing that her reading itself was doing the very same thing. That is to say, in showing how allegory and literality “appear” in their stories, it seems to me that she allegorically and literally read them in such a way that we, readers of HER text, would have to approach our OWN (deconstructive) reading of HER reading of Hawthorne and Andersen in incessant oscillation between allegory and literality, on the plane of what she is trying to show about “teaching deconstructively.” Even if this is not what Johnson is doing, that seems to be, possibly, something that literary theory and/or criticism must always take into account in and about their own reading and teaching of certain texts – and this need not be the case only for the dyad of literality-allegory, but maybe between other terms as well.)
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
Barthes claims that “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French nationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.” (142-143)
I guess my question is very “simple”, but I am having trouble understanding what he is trying to say here. Is he arguing that those who wrote before the Middle Ages were not authors? If so, then what were they? On page 145 he also makes a distinction between an author and a modern scriptor, which was also rather confusing. Are “modern scriptors” those who started writing after the Reformation? Why is he making a distinction between the two if ultimately, the “author” doesn’t matter, and it is in fact the reader that does?
Coco Fitterman
I find Foucault’s historicization of notions of authorship (though certainly abbreviated here–I want to learn more about this history) important to help us consider where we are at currently with this issue of what authorship indicates. For instance, he writes:
“Texts, however, that we now call ‘scientific’ (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of ‘Hippocrates said. . . ‘ or ‘Pliny tells us that . . . ‘ were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification” (306).
How have our social notions of “truth” and “authenticity” evolved, and how does this situate the role of the author differently? How has the Internet changed this role?