Author - text = Reader

An author is commonly referred to as the main focal point of a particular text. If a person were asked the question what is an author, they would presumably reply with the description of one who is autonomous, one who is the center of attention, a transmitter of cultural values or ideas who constructs these value in a literal way, etcetera. An author takes a reality and regurgitates it onto a page, so to speak. This would be considered a more liberal humanist approach to this question. Foucault, however, asks for a different answer to whom an author really is. In his essay “What is an Author?” Foucault questions who an author is by taking a given and deconstructing the center ultimately creating a problem. Elaborating on the idea given to us by Roland Barthes in “Death of an Author” that the death of the author brings about the birth of the reader, Foucault asks what the author did in the first place to initiate his/her demise.
Throughout history, Foucault explains that the author was not always autonomous and central within a text. He discusses “author-function,” where an author is “a function of discourse.” In ancient times, Foucault states that “(stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their authenticity.”(1264Foucault). Later on around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the opposite idea was taken within literary discourse. A text of fiction, poetry, drama, and others were required to label with the name author and the date and place in which a text was produced. In order for a text to be valued and accredited, authorship information had to be presented. In the realm of mathematics and science, for example, it was not necessary to label mathematical/scientific discoveries with an author during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, these texts were “accepted on their own merits ad positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification,” (1264Foucault). Only a theorem, an equation, a law, etcetera were labeled to acknowledge the inventor. Conversely in the Middle Ages, the name of the author was thought to have been the source of truthfulness with the indication of an author.
I would like, if I may, to take a bold leap into the depths of the Panopticon theory of Foucault. Panoptic essentially means “all-seeing.” Foucault discusses the idea of the panoptical prison where the guards centered in the middle of the room and the prisoners surrounding them in a circular formation. One could argue that it is quite similar to the idea of authorship. The author could very well be located within the center, like that of the guards. The author is in a space where he or she has the ability to see all of the prisoners from the middle. The prisoners very well may be the readers looking towards the center at the author (or guard). If these prisoners overthrow the guards, engage in a sort of revolt against the center, they then will be liberated. The same goes for authorship. If the author is removed from the center, then the readers will have the freedom to interpret a text, without any influence or control over their views. With the multiplicity of readers, the multiplicity of texts will come to light. The readers come “I” instead the author. Perhaps this is the message Foucault is trying to proclaim in his essay.
While reading Foucault Blog, (http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/facebook-is-the-new-panopticon/) Jeremy argues that Facebook is the new panopticon of the millennia. Zuckerman, creator of this online friendship networking site, says that he created it to promote pleasure for the common good. Foucault, in the 1970s, said that the panopitcon is ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’ The prison mate ‘is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.’ Jeremy goes on to say that members of Facebook are both guards and prisoners: guards in which they have access to the viewing of peoples’ profiles and prisoners for imprisoning themselves into Facebook, a possible metaphor for a prison cell. Jeremy says, “We relinquish ourselves to others, but have the luxury of indulging in everyone else’s surrender of secrecy.” Whether this is the case or not, it is an interesting concept and certainly relates to the idea of the author and the reader.