The Death of the Author is a fucking great piece of literary criticism

The Death of the Author is a fucking great piece of literary criticism

>it has always seemed obvious to us that an author is a person who is responsible for a particular piece of work
>a writer, for example, would probably claim that he or she who the book, and therefore they were the author
>barth theorises that the whole notion of authorship needs to be rethought
>he argues that when a text is created, it is a multi-faceted manifestation of different cultures, ideas, languages, beliefs, theologies, philosophies etc
>so when a writer puts their pen to paper they believe that the ideas are their own, and when the book is finalised they claim to be the author of their creation
>the problem is that the self-proclaimed author has borrowed everything from previously existing texts that he or she has become aware of
>an example is, every word a writer has used is already in existence; these words on their own already have meaning derived from the earlier cultures and human expression
>so when we evaluate texts we tend to focus on the author, their ideas, methods, beliefs and ideologies
>however, Barthes explains none of the author's ideas are their own and probably belonged to no one in particular
>that being said, if it is not the author we should be looking towards to understand our art, then where should we turn?
>if the author is irrelevant, what gives such power to the text, what allows it to have such incredible purpose when we read or gaze upon it?
>Barthes believes we should look inside ourselves for the ultimate author
>we author the world; art, film, photography etc through our own interpretations and belief systems
>we ourselves ultimately decide what a text means, therefore creating new ideas and meanings in our mind
>the meaning of a text can only exist when interpreted, and anything can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways
>

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I'm 14 and this is deep

It took nearly 4000 years of literature for humanity to finally realise this

No, humanity realized this since at least Nagarjuna.

fuck off to reddit you swine

Well, that discounts the author as the independent variable. This sounds like a big deterministic thing where the author is just a conduit for the culture he/she accumulates, whereas I think the power that people have is a kind of free will, you're looking at things through the lens of the person (be it genetic or divine) which is totally different from for instance a factual recording.

Not wrong, and you knew the reference.

First of all, this idea that people used to think that creativity flowed completely free of any surrounding context or influence is a strawman of former notions of creativity. Nobody ever claimed that creativity didn't happen within (or depart from) some degree of influence. But Barthes is wrong to put all of the weight on that said influence / context.

It's this overemphasis on the social that leads to that postmodern mentality that soon starts to see only things in terms of reference or relationality. Critics who do this can only critique in terms of references: "this is JUST this combined with this combined with this."

This view is a kind of poststructuralist, relational reductionism that (I think intentionally) overlooks the distinctness and thingness / thing-in-itselfness of new works, and very real fact of mutation, and tries to reduce things to the social.

And as for the question of authorship shifting to the reader/ viewer... this is again placed too much on one side. It ignores the reality of the object as itself and its own affordances, and it also ignores that yes, the author or artist does play a part too and it was in fact their talent / genius through which that object synthesized and coagulated into itself, questions of 'meaning' aside (I think getting too much into single questions of meaning and textuality is the problem here, Barthes, like so many writers, places too much primacy in textuality).

That poststructuralist idea of all 'reality' only being made up of textual/relational constructions made by the subject is profoundly limited and anyone clinging to that stupid dead-end notion is irrelevant at this point.

Literally what I said but with more words

fuck off, commie.

No, I repeatedly made the distinction that "authorship" does not reside in the viewer, but rather that there is reality beyond the viewer, and also that the creative artist was a distinct talent who the object necessarily came through, without whom, Barthes' exalted reader would have nothing to derive meaning from.

Barthes is a cunt, poststructuralism and postmodernism is over.

>look inside yourself
there is no fucking utility in this. i'm still going to read great books and listen to great music and look at great art. i'm not interested in "the author within" because that's utter bullshit. without the author to help mold culture, we would lose a significant method of communication with each other, the self is limited, and no damned solipsist is going to convince me not to appreciate the art of the other, and to do my best to comprehend those around me. this man has offered no use, no comprehensible strategy to usurp that ideal of communication.

I see the point, but wouldn't you say that authors still deserve credit for arranging and organizing all of this pre-existing knowledge into a cohesive and interesting work? In the same way a legendary painter creates masterpieces without having a claim on inventing brushes or paint or anything like that, authors are still doing something unique that takes skill and individuality, so I don't think it's fair to write them off as irrelevant.

>You don't need an artist to sculpt the marble for you! Look inside yourself!

This.

Here's a hint where poststructuralism came from:

See, when you're in school, there are those really intelligent, good students who are good at retaining and repeating the knowledge given to them, but they're basically just academics, not original thinkers or talents themselves.

Then you have that fucking kid who doesn't seem as serious about it and yet can come up with original ideas, or can make fascinating, brilliantly-rendered art seemingly without anyone really imparting the ability on him. You might ask him how he learned it, and sure, he put in a little time, but basically overall it's just something he has, something he can do.

The second kid goes on to be an artist or musician or original thinker. The first one becomes an academic, maybe a teacher, or a critic or journalist. He compiles and presumes to 'interpret' the works made by people like the second guy. The first guy, however, has taken some pride in his own career too, has something of a superiority complex around his intelligence, and secretly harbors a resentment towards that asshole talented motherfucker who could actually create and never seemed to study in the serious, "right" way.

Wouldn't a lot of academics, then, be glad to adopt an interpretation that says that there isn't actually any talent or originality out there? That says rather that everything is more like what the unoriginal, untalented academic does - merely sorting through others' ideas and presenting them? How gratifying and reassuring for him, to have a theory that brings the artist he despises down to his unimpressive level. After all, it's not FAIR that some people would have the gift and others (himself) wouldn't. Yes, surely there is no brilliance or creation ever and we're all just a bunch of archivists and critics. Well, those who have to assure themselves with this idea are at best critics, and frankly, they don't even merit that role if they can't recognize the means through which their objects of discussion arrive.

Aye. Commies I say. Communizing creativity ffs. Know they no bounds?

I know i'm probably not that super talented kid, that creative bastard that he is, but I do know I'm rooting for him, and I want to see what he can create, why stand in his way? I'll only be harming myself.

>any philosophy from mid 20th century onwards when discussed on Veeky Forums turns into a /pol/ debate

just fuck off seriously

You did this, should have put Bernie in charge.

>pol debate
You're an idiot.

>muh naive eurocentrism

Next you're going to tell me humanity invented autobiography when Europeans picked it up, and humanity discovered the Americas with a Spanish expedition.

Here's a nice 15 minute summary of Barthes' death of the author:

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pxnjq

The way I see this is that the external cannot teach you why but how. The internal knows why, it only needs to learn how.

I'm really glad if this piece brought you to a lot of these conclusions.

I think some of them are pretty profound. But they are also competing with mind-blowing (really try to construct "what that means" as best you can) revelations from incredible gods, who I mostly ignored.

All of those mediocre and errant and trifling bits of words I heard or thought I might have, from these gods, all of just, that, that nonsense.

All of that combined with your words, makes me think that whoever you are praising, that he might have some tiny second-hand knowledge.

Which is still revelational, to a huge amount of people, but to men who are about to hug their sweaty possibly gay roommate and leave themselves vulnerable and tell everything that they are and live every lifetime with them there-- what, you think all of this trite nonsense compares?

aaaaah so many fucking idiots in this thread. Can't any of you read his essay and think about what it actually says and means - without distorting his claims to fit the ideological structures of argumentation you like to run through masturbating fifty times a day?
It's obviously correct that the center of textual interpretation is the reader, and that the interpretation of the text involves engaging with more than just the authors intentions (if you even know what they might have been) - that is, engaging with literary and cultural context.
But there's nothing in the essay claiming Barthes doesn't think writers are artists, or that they aren't essential for artistic production.
Do yourselves the favour of trying to actually construe Barthes critical intentions fairly (since that seems to be something you're all about), and maybe you'll begin to appreciate just how much you can benefit from his work.

This

Well why you're at it why not just 100% ego death and admit that no one man is the author, but all men are the author, simultaneously?

hit this blunt man

>This view is a kind of poststructuralist, relational reductionism that (I think intentionally) overlooks the distinctness and thingness / thing-in-itselfness of new works, and very real fact of mutation, and tries to reduce things to the social.

this so much.

holy fuck that was deep
that was deep as fuck

fuckin Veeky Forums

death of author is irrelevant criticism, dishonest even

enjoy your ban

This post is dishonest

lol everyone know it was actually the vikings

If there's no author, should we abolish copyright?

damn dude....

the essay is 50 years old so we should abolish it in 20 years

oh yeah? so books appear out of thin air? Wow!

>this is your bran on leftism

Don't bother man, 80% of Veeky Forums don't read because they're underage, and when they do read they don't read it properly, jump to conclusions and then build up their rabid "criticism" based off the misconceptions they have 0 awareness of having done.

>he hasnt read the pale king

>>If there's no author, should we abolish copyright?
well, only liberals believe in, create and sustain copyrights

empirically wrong

I have read it, as well as all the other canonical post-structuralist / postmodernist / deconstruction / new historicist etc etc works.

I agree that there is the Kantian problem where of course there is a gulf between reader and text, and reader and author, which puts interpretation in a way with each respective reader. I think it was also an important step to acknowledge that there can be more to a work than maybe certain specific notions the author has in mind. I'm not arguing with either of those to an extent.

There's an irony in your post though, which I think gets at the limitation of Barthes' idea... in that you are arguing that "we are reading Barthes' text wrong... which is that interpretation of a text is the job of the reader." Do you see the problem here? That, if there is no authoritative intention or meaning to a text prescribed by the author, then why are you admonishing us for reading him "wrongly"? (of course, I also acknowledge that I'm turning that around in that I'm in a way supporting his idea by hinting we'd have a right to read more into it).

Again, I think there are certain points that were relevant in what he was trying to say, but as I said here I think too much emphasis is on the reader. His theory doesn't explain how one could even understand his own argument, then, or why he should even bother to make an argument. It also doesn't suggest why a Shakespeare has more impact - and a more qualitative or intense impact - on more readers than some other author (and I will not accept the weak "privilege" argument).

The emphasis on social context and influence totally shaping art at the expense of any originality also puts too much power and emphasis on human cultural meaning and the humanity in general. If there is the Kantian gap between text and author, and text and reader, then all cultural material is actually strange, unknowable stuff itself with its own 'life', and there is strange, unknowable, endlessly creative 'life' around it too (that is, there is much more than just what humans think or create). Thus, an artist / inspired author is like a transmitter who can pick up on mysterious, profound signals, not even totally understanding every possible "reading" or impact, but does have enough of a gift (an mysterious object itself) that could determine when the piece he was actively, willfully constructing was "finished" / complete, in order to set it free, sensing its existential quality of something that could 'speak' on its own in endlessly applicable, rich ways. That doesn't mean there aren't certain ranges of affect to that object, but how that range vibrates with any individual subject (somewhat unknowably but still fruitful) is to yet be known.

You don't belong here, faggot.

I wasnt trying to be deep, you asshole.

>the meaning of a text can only exist when interpreted, and anything can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways

this seems valid and the ultimate base for his argument

>*n mysterious object itself
fixing that

and I should have said
>an artist / inspired author is like a *channeler

(sameposter here)

One other point I wanted to make, is that some people in this thread are pointing out where his argument is 'reasonable'. I'm partly agreeing.

But, somewhat building on his argument, given the way his idea is taken and interpreted and used, along with other postmodernist texts, as a license to totally reject reality completely (even if I admit it is mysterious) and put too much power in text and human cultural construction (until, as many of them argue, there is nothing BUT the text - no real at all), I think that poststructuralism and this kind of emphasis on the social and on texts and on overemphasis on human subjectivity really needs to be pushed back on right now.

The way Barthes' and similar thinkers ideas has been used, has been in effect to completely reject genius / inspiration and with it any room for innovation or weirdness. It also has turned into a crisis in critique, where one can only read things in terms of either socio-political relationality, or by breaking them down to ultimately empty signifiers of signifiers. Neither of these will do... they've proven to be dead ends, and leave no room for anything creative or interesting to happen. The answer, very necessarily, for any artist now, is to strongly reject post-structuralism's emphasis on the socio-political and textual grounding to everything, without resorting to some simplistic metaphysics or epistemology that assumes simple, ready-to-hand understanding. Things exist. Yes, they are somewhat strange, but they exist. This itself is a HUGE step away from poststructuralism and its epistemology, ontology, and political arguments, and opens profound room for creativity to happen (because if even the text itself is strange and, contra to the Marxists's smug assertions, irreducible and alive... that is, there is more than economic social relations... and even more crucially, there is much more to reality that human "texts", then the narrow lines thought and activity has been confined to give way to whole new dimensions of occultic possibility).

In short it is a dead end and these sort of post-structural fads are inhabited by dilettantes. Shocker.

This guy gets it.

Barthes """"insight"""" is babby-tier.

Still not banned faggot, I'm (four hundred and...) 14 and this is still 'deep'

>or by breaking them down to ultimately empty signifiers of signifiers
funny enough, this is something Deleuze was saying in his works, to paraphrase him, "don't interpret, experience/evaluate."

this is fucking obvious to any 12 year old with even the slightest amount of introspective ability.

Yeah no

What a juvenile and cynical bunch of fucking nonsense.

i am sick of this as well

Jesus fuck you are stupid. When I tell you I'm not gonna respond, and that what you need to do is go and read Barthes closely and attentively, i'm not being lazy or shying away from discussion. I already told you to do that, and you clearly haven't actually understood the work, so i'm not feeling any obligation here to continue discussing this with you. But I still want to say: jesus fuck you are stupid.

Actually no, I will give you some pointers.
Barthes is not claiming you can just make any text mean anything - it's pretty fundamental you understand that.
Barthes is not centering the critical process on individual readers but on 'the reader', something very different - it's fundamental you also understand that.
There's no fucking irony in my original post.

>utility
Who cares?

Always funny when people make up what death of the author is about and cite death of the author as justification

I wonder how you read Derrida's 'doubling of commentary' as a complete rejection of reality?

>has been in effect to completely reject genius / inspiration and with it any room for innovation or weirdness.

No kidding. Is that a negative? Innovation for its own sake was a hallmark of modernism, leading to its own 'crisis in critique' where critics would only engage with art via labels and -isms and how it fits in with the artists that came before.

>clearly you are wrong as I hold the monopoly on what Barthes, "REALLY SAID!"

>Just be urself

...

To be fair there's no real way you can infer from Barthes what the other user thought if you actually read him. I'd like to see him justify his reading with quotes

...

>>the meaning of a text can only exist when interpreted, and anything can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways

/thread

Medieval writing and art did not usually even name their artist or author. It was made for the glory of God.

>>Barthes believes we should look inside ourselves for the ultimate author
>>we author the world; art, film, photography etc through our own interpretations and belief systems
>>we ourselves ultimately decide what a text means, therefore creating new ideas and meanings in our mind
>>the meaning of a text can only exist when interpreted, and anything can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways
Was good up to here

>peterson meme-ing has resurrected inside the minds of his followers that post-structuralism is somehow still relevant and not a stepping stone
>people in this thread responding to this like they're fighting some sort of postmodern boogeyman

fucking read books Veeky Forums. study basic literary theory

is that beegees?

This shit pisses me off. The author creates the meaning by arranging those ideas. He completely ignores the fact that the author is intelligent enough to mentally register themself as a being in a society. The faggot who wrote this is nothing more than a frustrated brainlet that tries to pseud his way into stealing other people's works because he lacks any sort of artistic talent. Literary criticism is a hack field for people who were too fucking retarded and awful to create their own work.

/thread

Yeah, they're reviving discussions that have been over for decades.

All of philosophy is replying to threads started by dead people dumbfuck. If people are fucking discussing it then there is still more to discuss.

Nabokov was an established writer, and he was big on literary criticism.

user let me be fucking pissed. I want to believe he was a scheming jealous retard with ulterior motives and not just some average fedora wielder that was entertaining random ideas in the genuine pursuit of knowledge and truth.

bunch of nonsense

not him... but could it be there's actually nothing more to be discussed? Could it be that you're merely not informed enough about the debate to know all the arguments and counter-arguments that have been gone over? Could it be that most reasonable and knowledgeable participants found a consensus view a while ago? Basically, could it be that you have nothing original to offer - and that what you should be doing instead of arguing on this board is studying and slowly becoming less of a 'dumbfuck'?