#('essay' in this context meaning multiple paragraphs on a discord server that are wrong because you clearly didn't actually read the book)

[warblingandwriting]

Some folks have got to stop trying to analyze books based on a 3 hour youtube video they saw. I get that it was in-depth, but some things you simply cannot glean just from watching someone else talk about it. Something that sound ridiculous in the video's contextless context might actually have build up in the text itself, something that sounds could good in theory could be written terribly, but someone else telling you that, one way or the other, can't tell you how it will come off to you. And people are always biased.

[codariidoescrimes]

Arden Talks Media Studies: Death of the Author

Intro/Disclaimer

Ok so I do try to keep this blog largely for swtor in specific and star wars in general content, but I’m going to make an exception here because I like to talk. @lilquill brought up some posts about death of the author in a discord server we share and her, another friend who I don’t want to name without their explicit permission, and myself ended up having a conversation about the misconceptions people seem to have around this topic. So because I’m a media studies student I figured I’d make this post about death of the author from my perspective of studying this stuff. 

Feel free to reblog this post if there’s anything you want to add or challenge me on! This isn’t meant to be a callout or a vague about any specific person, more a general idea that seems to be spread around. And I could be totally wrong. I’ll link my sources at the end. 

So what is Death of the Author?

The original Death of the Author essay was written by an academic named Roland Barthes and later translated into English. It’s not super long so y’all should definitely give it a read if you’re curious about this stuff, but it IS quite dense so I’m going to summarize it here, paragraph by paragraph.

Barthes opens by quoting from the book Sarrasine and asking the question “who is saying this?”. He goes on to say that there is no clear answer whether it is being said by the protagonist, the Author, or the social context the Author is writing in. To Barthes, literature is a place where multiple voices (the Author and the various influences on their life) combine into a whole new voice that can’t be fully attributed to any one of the original factors. 

In the next paragraph Barthes talks about how the idea of the Author is a modern, Western, one. The concept of the Author, therefore, is one that hyper focuses on an individual, and (usually) his personality and thoughts due to the the importance of individualism in our society. “The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work”. The fiction produced by an individual, under “author-culture” (because we don’t already have enough [x]culture going around) is therefore seen as a both direct insight into the mind of the Author AND a direct expression of his ‘voice’.

The next paragraph talks about a few previous criticism of Author-culture. A bunch of different writers have argued that language, systems, symbols, and codes are the lens a work should be viewed by rather than tools of the Author. Surrealism directly opposed the idea of an authors intentions via automatic writing. And the school of linguistics talks about how the Author isn’t any sort of dramatic figure, but simply a person who writes.

Barthes goes on from this to speak about how the death or absence of the Author™ changes the modern text. First of all, rather than the Author being a ‘before’ state and the text being an ‘after’ state where the Author can be viewed as the ‘parent’ of the text, instead the writer exists simultaneously with the text. “In grammar the person or thing we speak about is called the subject. What we say about the subject is called the predicate”, and to Barthes the text is no longer the predicate of the Author. It therefore directly counters the idea of the tortured genius Author whose hand is slower than his mind. 

To Barthes, the text is not just the words being written with one meaning coming directly from the Author, but a “tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”. The writer is therefore an imitator not a creator, with their role being to combine and contrast already existing ideas and concepts into a new form. The words used by an Author largely already exist, and only have meaning in relation to other words that also already exist. 

The Author™ and the Critic™ therefore have a symbiotic relationship. The Author provides the text with one set meaning, and the Critic therefore uncovers the meaning by explaining the Author. The death of the Author also becomes the death of the Critic. “The space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning”. Barthes believes that death of the author liberates writing from needing to have a final meaning.

 Writing is therefore the domain of the reader or the spectator. Barthes provides the example of a Greek tragedy, where the text of full of words with double meanings. Within the text each character only understands one of the meanings, creating the tragic misunderstanding. However the reader understands not only the double meanings of each word, but also the limited understanding of the characters. Texts are a dialogue between cultures and writings, which the reader combines through the act of reading. “The reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted”.

Barthes concludes by explaining that classical criticism is centered around the Author, not the reader and that therefore “The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”.

Context of the original text.

Welcome to the bit of this already longass post where I death of the author the ‘death of the author’ text itself. As in, to fully understand this text we need to look at the context it was written in.

Roland Barthes was a French linguist who lived in the 21st century. If you’re like me and have done any media studies classes at all, you’ve probably already heard of him as being “that sign guy”. As in, he wrote a LOT on semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs, and to discuss it in detail would be a WHOLE other post, but it is quite important so here goes: 

The main concepts within semiotics are the sign, and signification. A sign is a word, image, sound, act, object, etc which has no intrinsic meaning, but has been given meaning. It is made up of the signifier, a written or spoken word, and the signified, a concept. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is signification. For example, a cat is a sign as it consists of the word “cat” (signifier) and the physical animal (signified). 

Barthes also talked about mythologies, and not as in the Greek sense. Basically, denotation is the literal meaning of a sign, while connotation is a deeper or cultural meaning. Rose denotes rose; rose connotes romantic love. Myth in this sense is when those two words are combined and the connotation BECOMES a denotation. 

He was also heavily involved in structuralism. There’s a lot of types of structuralism because a lot of different disciplines use it in various ways, but in Barthes context it involved looking at the cultural and social structures that determine human behaviour, and using this in the context of literature.

And this isn’t as off topic as it might seem, because Barthes Death of the Author text can therefore be looked at through these lenses. As in, Barthes is the guy who literally wrote a whole essay collection called “Mythologies” to analyse the societal connotations of new signifieds to ordinary objects as signifiers. And by ordinary stuff I literally mean wrestling, wine, and plastic among others. So to Barthes, the Author is a sign, and the text written by the Author is another sign.

Conclusion

The most important thing to remember about Death of the Author is that it’s a particular concept, that discusses a particular idea (the Author™) in a particular context (structuralism, and a critique of individualism and the Culture of the Time). So therefore, even when used correctly, there’s still no requirement to AGREE with this particular theory. Thanks for reading!

Sources

Roland Barthes - Death of the Author

Predicate and Subject

No source for the semiotics stuff because it was all written class notes :(

Structuralism

Further Reading

Roland Barthes - Mythologies (1957)