How Does a Poststructuralist Lens Alter the Relationship Between the Author and Their Reader?
- Will
- Jan 27
- 19 min read
The ability to be an author was once exclusive to certain intersectionalities of class, gender and ethnicity. This circulated a specific perception of what writing, and the language within writing, should be. In contrast, a contemporary author can be anyone, saying anything, across any platform. While this is positive for the increase of inclusivity, it has opened up channels for saturating the writing industry. One of these channels emerges from artificial intelligence: a technology which has already replaced a large sum of creative roles, and has even contaminated the educational system, with anti-AI software being used to detect its presence in university essays. AI is getting closer towards forming its own “creative writing”, which would inevitably result in the extinction of the author. Therefore, to obtain the true value of the modern author, I have placed it on trial. As prosecution, I have selected the arguments of two critics who have also aimed to take the author out of the frame.
The first critic involved in this debate is Foucault, whose essay written in 1969, entitled ‘What is an Author’, draws attention to the question, as he phrases it: 'What matter who's speaking?' (Foucault 1969, 314). Foucault was born in 1926, France, to a ‘solidly bourgeois family’ (Faubion 2019), and remained in France to study psychology and philosophy. There, he ‘embraced and then abandoned communism’ (Faubion 2019), then argued against structuralism in favour of a philosophy which was later assigned to him (and some of his fellow critics of structuralism), called ‘poststructuralism’.
Foucault provides context to the origin of authorship by detailing how ‘speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment’ (Foucault 1969, 305), however, the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s mechanised printing press in Europe (during the fifteenth century) established authorship in a more expansive way (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018). Prior to its arrival, books were produced as hand-written manuscripts by ‘scribes, monks and other church officials’ (Editorial 2018). They took a long time to make; were rare, expensive, and consisted of classic literature and religious works written in Latin. The circulation of information was centralised under the control of the ruling classes and the church, who held a monopoly over print production. Foucault ‘uses the term “power/knowledge” to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and “truth”’ (Gaventa 2003). Those who controlled the formation of knowledge exercised their authority over those unable to obtain knowledge from books due to their cost, and education required to read them.
When the printing press came to Europe, it ‘became possible for more people to buy books and for more types of books to be commonly published and sold’ (Editorial 2018). The printing press allowed authors to share their writing to a wider audience, with higher quantities of their work being printed. According to Foucault, ‘the naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories’ (1992), and this archaeological approach is what made the arrival of the printing press so significant. The printing press came ‘at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, which breached the religious monopoly of the Catholic Church’ (Moodie 2019), weaving a new system of thought over the bias of the ruling hegemony. Norton and Morgan State that ‘in poststructuralist theory, language is seen as central to the circulation of discourses—systems of power/knowledge that define and regulate our social institutions, disciplines, and practices’ (2012, 1). Therefore, through the production and communication of language that spreads away from the restrictions of those original latin manuscripts, people who were previously unable to access this channel of thought were then able to create their own channels, and their own archaeology of knowledge.
This freedom from a dependent structure resembles Marx’s own base-superstructure model. In this model, the base ‘refers to the production forces, or the materials and resources, that generate the goods society needs’ (Cole 2020). Before the printing press, we know that the ruling class and the church had control over the production of the literary, hence why production was restricted to those privileged to have learnt Latin and wealthy enough to afford books. The superstructure ‘grows out of the base and reflects the ruling class' interests’ (Cole 2020), which includes religion. Hence the production of the religious works feeds into a cycle whereby religious ideology and an archeology of knowledge surrounding religion thrives in its own cycle. When the printing press arrived, no longer did just the ruling class have access to the means of literary production, therefore the market became saturated with radical perspectives from unknown authors (Moodie 2019). Moodie writes that ‘competition among printers promoted the spread of business practices that drove individual achievement and local growth’ (Moodie 2019), overcoming the authority that religion had over social institutions.
As an example of how the two periods, before and after the printing press, might be compared, we can look at Foucault’s example of ‘when one is faced with the task of writing an animal’s history’ (Foucault 1992, 44). He states that ‘it is useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of compiler’ (Foucault 1992, 44): ‘one has to collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets’. This process of compiling information is similar to the process by which artificial intelligence ‘combin[es] large sets of data with intelligent, iterative processing algorithms to learn from patterns and features in the data that they analyze’ (CSU 2021). Where AI recycles from the archaeology of knowledge, I contribute to that same knowledge from my real experiences, shaped by the lens of my positionality [a term defined by Adsit and Byrd as ‘a critical approach to who you are and where you speak from that also acknowledges power relations’ (Adsit and Byrd 2019, 165)]. When I write the story of a queer character who has undergone some form of oppression, I am lifting information from my experiences, which are shaped by the intersectionalities of my positionality, and contributing it to a narrative of queer voices. I may be queer, but I am also white and middle class; I am oppressed in many senses and privileged in many others. Whilst writing ‘Masculine Starvation’ (UP2244108 2024)-a memoiristic essay discussing how intersections of weight and masculinity are influenced by feminist criticism- I write that I was ‘forced to choose between hunger and the cold, steamed vegetables with an unseasoned chicken breast that roosted in front of me’ (UP2244108 2024), but follow on to say that it ‘wasn’t real hunger, just a childish disposition against our diet-style meals’ (UP2244108 2024). The intersectionalities focussed on in the essay are not that of class, therefore, I chose to specify that my hunger was not ‘real hunger' in order to focus the attention onto the theme of weight. My class has not had adverse affects on my life experiences, hence, without specifying that it ‘wasn’t real hunger’, I would be fabricating a false positionality. The product of this falsification is an inauthentic recollection, which can damage the reader’s impression of my positionality; the accuracy of my contribution to the archaeology of knowledge surrounding queerness; and hinder the activism that I am trying to achieve by sharing my experiences. Artificial intelligence ‘learns from patterns and features in the data that they analyze’ (CSU 2021), recycling the already established; I am creating new data to change established patterns. Said patterns are what poststructuralism uses to ascertain values from information, ‘central to the circulation of discourses’, ‘that define and regulate our social institutions, disciplines, and practices’ (Norton & Morgan 2012, 1). Despite agreeing that the consequences of this change in authorship are greater for the circulation of discourses, the increase of authors does not reduce their individual significance regarding their texts.
Foucault goes on to provide other purposes for authorship which keep them on the outside of their texts, describing the label as: ‘functional in that it serves as a means of classification’ (Foucault 1969, 304) to ‘group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others’ (Foucault 1969, 304). Suggesting that the author serves as a passive label to encompass their text, as seen on the outside of a written work and rarely within the main body, the implication is that, if the author’s name does not exist within the text, its readership need not regard their existence. He develops this point further with the example of ‘an author in biology and medicine,’ (Foucault 1969, 306) whose work is ‘more than simply indicating the source of information’ (Foucault 1969, 307), and whose label of authorship ‘attests to the “reliability” of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory’ (Foucault 1969, 307). Foucault deems authorship to be a label of standard and reliability, with ‘the name of the author remain[ing] at the contours of texts’ (Foucault 1969, 305) as an external, contextual affirmation of their ability. If this context is influencing the way that the reader perceives the contents of the text, would it still be true to say that ‘the author remains at the contours’ (Foucault 1969, 305)? Taking this into consideration, where would Foucault place the critical author? He states that ‘criticism should concern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms, which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships’ (Foucault 1969, 301). Rather than making a plea for the external positioning of the author, he situates the text in an ‘intrinsic and internal’ space where the text exists separate from external context, although I’m not sure that this is the case.
Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’ Own’ (Woolf 1929), for example, not only contains external contexts, but actively involves them. Within the text, Woolf uses her experiences to discuss the subject of ‘women and fiction’ (Woolf 1929), and examines the position that female writers had during her time as a writer. Woolf’s positionality provides the internal and external structure to ‘A Room of One’ Own’ (Woolf 1929), in that it both shapes the subject within the text, and has influenced the way in which she has written it. Commenting on the relationship between the author and the reader, Woolf states that ‘One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker’ (Woolf 1929). Her statement posits a balance between the value of authorship and readership; the author must give their audience the opportunity to draw their own conclusions, informed by the positionality of the author. For example, although Woolf provides the context of her gender as a key intersectionality to the text, there are further aspects of her positionality that are not discussed, such as the privilege of her race. In fact, Woolf refers to ‘one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her’ (Woolf 1929). In spite of what we would consider now to be racial discrimination, Woolf’s active contribution to the feminist movement isn’t overlooked because of the historical context surrounding her authorship. If a more modern context was assigned to Woolf’s work, her ideology and her perspective on race would be vastly outdated. How, then, can the external intersectionalities of positionality be disregarded when they are not only capable of contributing a vital part of a text’s ‘intrinsic and internal relationships’ (Foucault 1969, 301), but can also be essential to the preservation of literature?
Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of an Author’, exhibits this need for preservation, stating that ‘he [the reader] is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which written text is constituted’ (Barthes 1977, 148). Born in 1915, France, Barthes ‘helped establish structuralism’ (Encyclopedia Britannica 2019), which later influenced Foucault’s poststructuralist philosophy. His perspective rejects the author as the sole authority in interpretation, and favours the reader’s interpretation as equally as valuable. This democratisation of interpretation highlights Barthes' belief in the agency of the reader in the construction of meaning, moving the reader from a position of passivity to an active participant in constructing meaning. When Barthes writes ‘he is simply that someone’ (Barthes 1977, 148), he is not making a gender-specific remark about how men create the meaning of texts, rather his use of the ‘generic “he”’ (Baron 2015) demonstrates the influence of male dominance on the structure of scholarship during the time of his writing. An author’s context allows the preservation of their text, while the organic boundaries of language evolve. Barthes insists that ‘it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”’ (Barthes 1977, 143).
On the other hand, the contemporary author often remains involved with their text even after its publishing, as demonstrated by Margaret Atwood who, in a 2019 interview, responded to a statement about her novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985), stating that she ‘made nothing up’ (The View 2019) and ‘just relocated it to Cambridge, Massachusetts’ (The View 2019). By speaking definitively on her writing process, Atwood’s audience are forced to consider the political activism implied by the book’s context and content, including themes of female autonomy, gender, theocracy, power and sexuality. Although Atwood appoints ‘the brutal Communist reign of Ceaușescu in Romania to the battles waged over female rights in America during the 1980s’ (Penguin Random House 2019) as some of the events that informed her writing, she extends her authorship by discussing how ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985) signifies modern or still existing conflicts in our society, including ‘when they suspended the Constitution’ (Allardice 2019) and ‘there wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television’ (Allardice 2019). Atwood’s ability to apply the representational meaning of her text (written almost forty years ago) to these modern conflicts exemplifies the repeating cycle of oppression and her capacity to produce it in her fiction. Even though this may feed into Foucault’s post structuralist view on authorship, because the text’s meaning is socially constructed by common understanding of meaning, it rejects the idea that authorship is separate from the ‘intrinsic and internal relationships’ (Foucault 1969, 301) as Atwood demonstrates her organic relationship with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985). This relationship allows her to contribute further context from outside of the text to enrich the internal, despite the language remaining the same. There are, however, examples of how an organic relationship between an author and a text can be less successful.
Foucault states that ‘an author's name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words’ (Foucault 1969, 305), and this is important to remember when regarding J.K Rowling, author of the children’s book series: Harry Potter. Foucault proceeds to say that the author’s ‘status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates’ (Foucault 1969, 305), and this is no less true than it is to Rowling, as her name continued to circulate while the Harry Potter series rose in fame, obtaining a series of popular film adaptations. As Rowling’s creative works gained traction, her own persona shifted closer to the public eye, and she contributed to this, like Atwood, with her media presence. Using the platform her authorship provided her with, Rowling started to add to the continuity of her books through ‘the official online companion compendium for all things Harry Potter’ (Romano 2019), including the following fact about the wizarding world: ‘Before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the eighteenth century, witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence.’ (Romano 2019). Her actions were deemed controversial, not only for their content, but for the question of her ability to retrospectively construct new information about the world she’d created, through her posts on social media. Rowling did not get into real trouble until she began commenting on topics outside of her works, expressing anti-trans views: ‘“People who menstruate.” I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ (Ward et al. 2024). Rowling proceeds to say that ‘When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside’ (Ward et al. 2024). Even though Rowling’s opinion regarding trans people is just as outdated as Woolf’s is to black people, Rowling does not have the safeguarding of historical context, existing in a society where she is able to educate herself to know better.
Rowling’s comments have permitted people to resurface problematic elements that appear in her writing, such as the names she gives those she tokens for their ethnic diversity, and the characteristics she assigns to certain otherworldly species. The token Asian character is named ‘Cho Chang’ (Rowling 2000); the token Irish character is named ‘Seamus Finnigan’ (Rowling 1997); the token black character is named ‘Kingsley Shacklebolt’ (Rowling 2003). Berlatsky (2022) adds that ‘the hook-nosed, greedy goblin bankers who run Gringotts Wizarding Bank look a lot like the hook-nosed, greedy Jewish caricatures that have been a hallmark of antisemitic propaganda from the Middle Ages to Der Stürmer’ (Berlatsky 2022). Rowling’s use of racist stereotypes is harmful as it perpetuates these stereotypes as the norm. If it were not for Rowling’s organic relationship with the text, it would be easier to separate the two from each other, however, her persistence in adding to continuity weaves her authorship into the text. Misra (2020) points out that there are elements of Rowling’s characters that have been enriched by the reader’s interpretation, such as ‘Tonks’ (Misra 2020) who ‘was considered to be gender fluid’ (Misra 2020) and ‘Lupin’ (Misra 2020), whose ‘struggles as a werewolf were seen as deliberately framed to highlight the plight of HIV/AIDS patients’ (Misra 2020). Misra’s interpretations directly oppose Rowling's own views on gender fluidity, however we can look to Barthes' argument that ‘as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality’ (Barthes 1977, 142), ‘disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin’ (Barthes 1977, 142), to keep Rowling’s texts preserved. Rowling’s fictional children's books make very little attempt to act ‘directly on reality’, however, her active status contributing to the context of the book does, as Barthes’ states ‘impose a limit on that text’.
I have used my own positionality, however, to reflect upon the changes I think are necessary to our society and act ‘directly on reality’ (Barthes 1977, 142). ‘The Moon Surveyor’ (UP2244108 2024) is a short story about how a man finds himself stationed on a moon, observing the solar flares emerging from what we first assume to be a nearby sun. My goal in writing the short story was to normalise queer protagonists across different genres, with the surveyor’s sexuality contributing very little to the plot of the text. On the surface, the narrative addresses the effect of human politics on climate change; however, while reflecting on the story, I have noticed that the narrative is also an extended metaphor for repressed identity. Because of my consciousness in integrating queerness, I subconsciously shaped the story around the experiences I’d had with gender dysmorphia. My role as an author is to guide the reader to draw the conclusions that I intend, but if they establish their own representational meaning, then that is also valuable to the text. The lack of context around my authorship forces my readers to depend more heavily on language, but also permits them to accept their own interpretations. Therefore, I would agree that a text shouldn’t be entirely dependent on the author’s context.
It is not always beneficial for the reader to be able to draw different interpretations from a text, as demonstrated in my personal essay ‘Untitled Docuthem’ (UP2244108 2022), where I combined research-based writing with creative elements to explain the process of developing gender identity in a society that thrives in binaries. The essay looks at the various experiences of trans people around the UK, and draws in statistics to compare quantitative and qualitative data. One specific area I looked into was trans policy in schools. After deconstructing an article where a mother named Marie ‘told her child she loved them no matter how they identified’ (UP2244108 2022), but ‘was not okay with the school accepting her child’s change of pronouns’, ‘Marie continues throughout the article to misgender her son, exemplifying how the threat of queer expression often begins at home’ (UP2244108 2022). In response, I wrote a poem from the perspective of the mother, titled ‘I love you - a sonnet by Marie’, beginning: ‘I love you despite divided ways,//My lovely daughter swaddled by the moon,’. Within the context of the essay, I was taking the role of the mother who was deadnaming her son; however, outside of said context, it could be perceived that I am reinforcing the mother’s perspective. The final line reads: ‘My crescent daughter, soon return to me, // And I will raise you back into the sky’, which refers to her son as a daughter in order to reiterate the ignorance of the mother. There are many elements to the poem that are reflective of my own interpretation of this heartbreaking relationship, whereby the mother cannot understand how loving her son is not enough if she cannot love him as her son. The couplets at the end of the poem, for example, do not rhyme, symbolising the dissonance of the mother-son dynamic. I was aware that there could be people reading who were unfamiliar with the structure of a sonnet, and may not understand the significance of the switch in perspective; however, I made the conscious choice to turn my observation away from the individual mother, and towards the education system to highlight the path that had led this woman to have such prejudices in the first place.
It can be important, regarding this confessional, personal essay, that authors represent themselves within their work, contrary to Foucault’s requirements to ‘collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets’ (Foucault 1992, 44). Some experiences are not so easily heard, or are actively oppressed by the social institutions which require change. There is irony in my personal essay, in that I take on an alternative perspective to my own in order to draw a conclusion that relates to myself. This is because I do not have complete control over my reader’s ideas and opinions, therefore I must sculpt my work to guide the reader to draw the conclusions I intend. I must, as Barthes ascertains, rely on ‘someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him - this someone being precisely the reader’ (Barthes 1977, 148).
Foucault refers to ‘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’ (Foucault 1969, 306), and it is true that, during these times, readership existed despite the absence of authorship. However, when he asks ‘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 communicated to others?’ (Foucault 1969, 300), he reveals that he does not regard everyone who ‘has written’ as an author. The significance of this declaration is that, if an author must be someone of a certain standard of authorship or a certain amount of publications, then we must infer that the author has, at some point, had to consider who their reader may be. If this is true, then there is a point where the author must extend their authorship past their text, and into the context of their readership, but that is not to say that ‘only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”’ (Barthes 1977, 143). Even to the intricacies of an author’s writing style, which is also influenced by the writing styles that they have read and recycled. Like Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, authors and readers alike are filled with contexts and reference points and experiences of place, people, tastes and smells. However, the reader, no matter how contextually informed, will never possess those exact contexts that the author tries to express.
By deconstructing the criticisms of Foucault and Barthes, I have achieved a greater understanding of what their criticisms are, and how they may have gathered their opinions. What we write and print influences those who read, but it also influences those who profit from our authorship, and will continue to do so. However, I think it is important to remember that authors are not only writers, but also readers and re-readers, curators and sculpturists. Their opinions are shaped by the context of their positionality, and their writing is shaped by their interpretation of language. Their ability to perform all of this in their writing influences how their audience perceives it, and even though there are the many variables of context which intersect, it doesn’t mean the author should be made separate. Although I cannot agree that the author should be separated from their text, I can comprehend that there are two sides of the string which the author and the reader stand at opposing ends of, never to meet in the middle.
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Don't be mad, I promise I'm not trying to hook you in with a travel blog so you can read literary essays. This post is taking longer than I thought, and I am finding it difficult to find time and reflect at the moment. It will DEFINITELY be posted next Monday, if not sooner. I am really excited to write about more of my travels, and containing this next one into one blog post has been a struggle.
Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed reading this critical essay and have faith that, as a writer or a reader, long as you look for context and meaning, there will always be a relationship between the two.
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