Derivative Iterations of the Author-God or Those Damnable Bebe's Kids

During Tuesday’s class session, I poorly referenced Dr. Stacy Wolf’s wonderful article (1), wherein she addresses some of the challenges of teaching post-modern concepts to a thoroughly post-modern group of students. Here is an excerpt from that piece:

More importantly for this essay, as I later figured out, Savran’s motivation for writing “Toward a Historiography of the Popular” and his imagined adversarial reader completely baffled my students. More precisely, it was entirely illegible as an argument at all. The essay didn’t speak to them because their cultural hierarchies are different than Savran’s or mine. They don’t live in a world in which high art is better than pop culture. They have grown up being thoroughly postmodern, moving easily among media in a culture that privileges what John Seabrook calls the “nobrow”: the mind-bogglingly active shifting of cultural categories of value and worth, both commercially and intellectually. Later in the semester, they were furious to learn that musical theatre critics and scholars love Stephen Sondheim and hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. They dutifully researched the debates—and found them interesting—but disagreed thoroughly. They analyzed Phantom of the Opera with as much respect and seriousness as Sunday in the Park with George.
While I might have considered it my duty as a professor to provide their entrée into the categorizations of high art, to acculturate them to value the intellectual capital that the university provides and values, I decided rather to build on their tastes and to draw on their preferences as a basis for inquiry. Their refusal of the cultural hierarchies I (and my colleagues) have naturalized and take for granted allowed my students and me to think about pleasure, to talk about affect, and to use our visceral engagement with musicals as a crucial part of our analysis. (Wolf, p. 52).

I begin with Wolf’s reflection because I believe that our class is structured in much the same way. That is to say, Dr. Graban has attuned her ear to our interests, expectations and proclivities in an attempt to make the classroom experience one where there is a mutual exchange of ideas. What I take Barthes to be doing in this current reading is heralding or showing forth (epideictic) the dynamic process of exchange which inaugurates what ethnographers (which Barthes briefly alludes to on page 142) and performative scholars would deem: becoming coeval. It is that breaking down of the partition that separates; blurring the boundaries; challenging binaries.

By killing off the Author through an enunciation that is a simultaneous denunciation (much the same way as Fielding did Mrs. Moore’s death in Forrester’s Passage to India), Barthes is saying something that is destabilizing to the outdated-edifice-of-academia. He wasn’t the first to say it and maybe not even the best; after all, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish gets at the same kind of issue. What issue? The issue of the expert. Barthes writes, “there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic…” (p. 147). We can understand this as a kind of syllogism, which we might expect it to run something like: 1) The reign of the Author is the reign of the Critic. 2) The Authors’ reign is over; therefore 3) the Critics’ reign is over. Importantly, the killing of the Authors doesn’t kill the critics (with a little c); it causes them to proliferate.

Critics are like Khalid Muhammad’s Bebe’s kids: They don’t die, they multiply. The practical implication for this is that scopic regimens must give way to multiplicity and points-of-views (or so says Dr. Fleckenstein). You can see it happening in academia right before our very eyes. The days of this one prized expert—tenured gatekeeper of knowledge and, therefore, power—are done. Some don’t realize it yet, but Barthes saw it coming (in his field) and declared Author-death. In my estimation, this is the same thing as declaring the death of the Expert or the Romantic notion of the one true Scholar.

For Barthes, there was something undemocratic and too Author-itarian about the state of affairs. He writes: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author…when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. (p. 147). Hence we end up with schools and a system of thought dedicated to the Tao of the victorious Critic. The problem with this, of course, is that it devolves into intellectual incest. A system of thought is still a system and, like all systems, needs some degree of chaos (difference) in order to flourish. Barthes decries intellectual monism, when he writes: “by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law. (p. 147). Barthes’ point here is similar to McChesney’s, when he pointed out: Democracy’s treatment of bad ideas or poor speech is not to stop people from thinking or speaking. Quite the opposite! Democracy encourages more ideas and more speech, so that there is a veritable smorgasbord of options. The gift of plurality is that the un-thinking thoughts are swept away by a torrent of insight. However, it appears as though my interpretation of liberating the anti-theological is where “I chose the path less traveled by” and was asked to take my contention to the blog. I will turn to that point as a way of closing.

What I learned from this reading is that there are no Authors. According to Barthes, everything we say emerges out of this dense tissue of interconnectedness. Again, he’s applying (what sounds like) system’s theory to literary criticism, which makes sense to me. All systems give way to entropy or heat-death, if you like. Similarly, Barthes saw entropy taking over this capitalistic enterprise that produced the Author, which is another way of saying the Authorized Version. In keeping with the spirit of his article, when he refers to the refusal of positivism, empiricism and ethnocentrism, he is engaging in the anti-theological activity. The theological activity is to capitulate. That’s why when someone doesn’t capitulate to dominant theology, s/he is deemed a heretic and burned at the steak. No, the theological impulse, for Barthes, is to inculcate into docility. But, in class it was said that theology is a place where many ideas are exchanged; this is clearly not the kind of theology activity that Barthes is referring to in this article. He is binding together these chords of Author-God, monism (I know he doesn’t use this particular word), point-of-view and everything that reeks of single-mindedness in a way that is enthymematic of the theological enterprise. Again, the anti-theological activity is the one most revolutionary, most liberating. It looks in the face of the Author(ity) and says, “You’re done. You’re dead.”

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(1) Wolf, Stacy Ellen. "In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts [A Manifesto]." Theatre Topics 17.1 (2007): 51-60. Print.