"Death Of The Author" is a poisonous mind virus and the idea that an author has as much authority over the meaning of their work as the reader/audience is inherently opposed to the idea of art itself.
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
damn i guess we'll never know what homer was all about then. bummer.
This doesn't support the idea that interpretation/observation is transformative.
You cannot change what the author intended.
That's a strawman and not my argument.
Cope and seethe. No good author says anything about what they intend their work to mean.
Art is a created thing. The audience does not create, they observe. Observation is a process of logic and not a transformative act.
lmao no.
Not a refutation
based. If you want to create create your own art. The best audience only learns.
True. They believe they've already stated it in their work.
Correct.
>The curtains walked away
>It'll be curtains for you!
there is nothing new or interesting to say on this topic
it's a debate that was already boring 100 years ago
>We can have our own interpretations which can be equally valid
No we cannot. These interpretations may be supported by our subjective feelings on
>the events of the work
but they are not necessarily relevant to what the author intended when creating it.
They are essentially our insights into the inherent meaning of the work, they are not constructions of new meaning, though many would deceive themselves in such a manner.
This. At the very best you can say
>the author betrays his true feelings in passage X
or
>he revealed his misunderstanding when he wrote Y
But the intent is always clear if you know the cultural context of the work, and a little bit about the author himself.
The nice thing about DotA is that if you have a modicum of intelligence and imagination, you seem like a brilliant critic. DotA has ruined the ability of the masses to comprehend art on their own.
>inherently opposed to the idea of art itself
Art is the estrangement of consciousness in material. Intention has literally no place in the objective form of the artwork. There are messages, expressive moments, and a structuring of content that can all be experienced as an 'author effect', but that's an effect produced by the text -- if the text didn't function to produce it, we wouldn't perceive it. Because it's a function of the text, those strands of meaning are all on the same plane as other strands, and there's no ghostly figure telling you which to view as just ironic citations from culture, characters, or convention and which are to be taken as the genuine hidden presence of the author: in art you necessarily give yourself up to that in-the-thick-of-it-ness of being part of culture. If the author's original intention could have been expressed purely and directly then it wouldn't need to be set down it art, with all the grappling with objective material that making art involves. Through that grappling, the artist, without needing to be consciously be aware of it, creates a constellation of material that expands and redirects his intention into something that goes beyond him. Why ignore the way the text actually works in favour of focusing on just one of its effects, is Barthes's question.
Schizophasia is a sign of an underlying issue. Seek professional help.
Cope
art is hedonism, especially in a bourgeois atheist society
good post
>Art is the estrangement of consciousness in material. Intention has literally no place in the objective form of the artwork.
Could you elaborate on / explicate this further?
>Because it's a function of the text, those strands of meaning are all on the same plane as other strands, and there's no ghostly figure telling you which to view as just ironic citations from culture, characters, or convention and which are to be taken as the genuine hidden presence of the author: in art you necessarily give yourself up to that in-the-thick-of-it-ness of being part of culture.
"Function of the text" gives me the impression of a uniform passivity and a dualism that is not true to at least my own experience. It makes it sound to me like there's a sharp division between a text and the context in which it is experienced and interpreted which often includes as salient knowledge of its author and that author's circumstances (sometimes including with specific details surrounding the construction of the text in question). As art is a species of intentional human behaviour, the prevalence of the question of "what does X mean by Y?" over "what does Y mean?" seems to me both fairly natural and at least partially justified from the point of view of communication and interaction in general.
>Through that grappling, the artist, without needing to be consciously be aware of it, creates a constellation of material that expands and redirects his intention into something that goes beyond him.
This seems to me to be perfectly sound (see here
).
>Why ignore the way the text actually works in favour of focusing on just one of its effects, is Barthes's question.
You shouldn't necessarily. The enlargement of context allows for more and greater understanding(s). An artist's work and their biography illuminate each other and there are likely times One could also argue that unqualifiedly de-emphasizing the intentional in art opens the door to a disregard for the intentional in communication more broadly (and by extension truth), which seems to have only dubious advantages but several serious and obvious disadvantages. Not saying that that's what Barthes (whom I haven't read) is doing but it resonates with a certain current of French intellectual culture that gets accused of that.
That's not what Barthes meant
Without someone to read the words in a book, all you have are ink particles mixed with wood pulp particles. Everything is meaningless without a reader, and that is the point of the essay. It is illogical to only consider the author's intentions in a book, because the experience people get while reading a book can sometimes differ wildly from the author's intentions.
I read Dune recently and the whole book is about a desert planet with Arabic inhabitants that has been colonized & ruled over by a foreign power; said desert having the most important natural resource in the universe.
Reading that book, any reader that is not a complete idiot will understand the "spice = oil" analogy. It's so clear and will colour your entire experience reading the book; being virtually impossible to ignore. Except that I'm talking about Dune (1965), and in 1965 the US was the largest oil producer in the world, followed by the USSR and Venezuela. So the entire reference to the belief that Arab countries control the oil of the world and can hold everyone else hostage to that power a la 1973 falls flat on its face, if we go by just what the author intended. That's illogical, because my experience of reading the book is my experience reading the book, not the author's experience. Why should I change my experience and interpretations of the themes to comport with what the author intended when the meaning of books can evolve or change over time?
All that being said, English teachers like to abuse this idea because they are lazy fricks who do not understand actual symbolism. They just like plogging through a book to find surface level crap like "blue shades mean he feels blue" or "the lion is the symbol of England so Narnia is about the established Church of England and the need for Anglicans to convert the natives of conquered lands" despite that being a pretty big stretch. They then immediately violate the whole point of the essay and establish their interpretation as a dictat, force you to memorize it, regurgitate it on a test, and hide behind the "death of the author" like they didn't just effectively replace the author with themselves and make me wish they died instead.
>Without someone to read the words in a book, all you have are ink particles mixed with wood pulp particles. Everything is meaningless without a reader
I feel that this gives the impression of far more activity on the part of the reader in the generation of meaning than I feel is due (and correspondingly far less than is due on the part of the author). The reader is not creating a meaning from nothing, they're (fallibly) interpreting a meaning within the constraints of both their narrower understanding of what the text is and their own broader linguistic and cultural context. Even with a case of language that cannot be understood by the reader at all, you have, even then, the inference that you are most likely dealing with an instance of intended communication colouring how you approach the object in front of you.
>That's illogical, because my experience of reading the book is my experience reading the book, not the author's experience. Why should I change my experience and interpretations of the themes to comport with what the author intended when the meaning of books can evolve or change over time?
Art shouldn't just be about "the" meaning. There is a place for the looser and more creative, analogical, etc. in the interpretation of literature, but I don't think the best way to go about securing that place is by denying that there's a place for the more narrowly-circumscribed and explicitly intentional-communicative aspect of language. The fecundity and vitality of the kind of analogy you've found between Dune and your own cultural context is itself a justification for its existence and propagation and to intrude with "that's bullshit because the author meant X" is missing the point.
the book is merely the author's discourse with the publick
People keep citing JK Rowling as a reason to accept "Death Of The Author" but the opposite point could be made with schizo theories made by others.
Honestly the dishonest way that DotA is written makes the image in OP both an argument for and against it. I don't the merits of it as other ideas could do analytical lens can do the same thing only better. DotA has never protected anyone from censorship or persecution despite its liberating language.
Unless an author is anonymous like the Evangelists or Homer their biographies and other works are monumental to understanding their writing style and motivations. It’s important for scholarship nerds basically.
If I ever feel down I just think of the (probably moronic) van driver who mowed this pseud down.
He looks like an even more insufferable and israeli David Mitchell.
then how do I find out what the correct interpretation is?
>"Death Of The Author" is a poisonous mind virus
At first, I read it as "The Death of Arthur" and wondered why do have such animosity towards Thomas Malory ...