>Some leftoid French moron writes about how we need to abolish authorial intent for no reason whatsoever
>All of liberal academia proceeds to suck his wiener for the next half a century
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>Some leftoid French retard writes about how we need to abolish authorial intent for no reason whatsoever
Ironically this is the idea of process philosophy, there is no such thing as intent, no subject-object relation, just a continuous expression from then universal will
So same as Schopenhauerian Will?
Possibly, although that would put him in line with Hegel
mixing Hegel with Schopenhauer is just Von Hartmann
What Barthes suggests sounds more like what Heidegger described in Being and Time about the text revealing what the reader has in mind and has learned about that they can relate it to rather than whatever the author could have originally had in mind. Barthes never denied that authors exist, but what he instead suggested is that all we know about an author's thoughts at the specific point in time in which they wrote a text is limited to what they put down on paper, and that the image or line of interpretation derived therefrom must be built by the reader on their own. The way "the author" is envisioned by the reader is molded through the sum of each fragment they read from that author, and everything else they believe to be relevant to it that offers insight on the world around the author.
>Barthes never denied that authors exist, but what he instead suggested is that all we know about an author's thoughts at the specific point in time in which they wrote a text is limited to what they put down on paper, and that the image or line of interpretation derived therefrom must be built by the reader on their own.
That sounds nice; but at the same breath, he against relevancy of the authorial intent.
>he against relevancy of the authorial intent.
Not against, just acknowledges how it is ultimately irrelevant since it can never be known. All Barthes did was codify the standard practices of the past 50 yearss.
>Not against, just acknowledges how it is ultimately irrelevant since it can never be known.
You are just saying the same thing but removing his accountability.
There is no accountability to remove, literally all he did was codify what was going on in the field at the time. Might as well blame the weather man for the rain.
>Have a hunch it's a 60s work (peak French psuedposer period)
>Look it up
>1967
Never fails
I know this thread is more about expressing how you feel about a particular academic stereotype, rather than the actual ideas, but the idea that digging up the buried authorial intent isn't the ultimate goal of analysis isn't just some whim of Barthes's. It was part of a more general transformation in the humanities. The Death of the Author was 1967; this is Adorno writing in 1963:
>According to that axiom [of traditional interpretation], knowledge of literary works would consist in the reconstruction of what the author intended. But the firm foundation philology imagines it possesses has proved unstable. Where it has not taken objective form , the subjective intention cannot be recovered ... Most important, the artistic process, which that axiom regards as the royal road to the heart of the matter, as though the spell of Dilthey's method still secretly held, is by no means exhausted in the subjective intention, as the axiom implicitly assumes. Intention is one moment in it; intention is transformed into a work only in exhaustive interaction with other moments: the subject matter, the immanent law of the work, and -- especially in Holderlin -- the objective linguistic form. Part of what estranges refined taste from art is that it credits the artist with everything, while artists' experience teaches them how little what is most their own belongs to them, how much they are under the compulsion of the work itself. The more completely the artist's intention is taken up into what he makes and disappears in it without a trace, the more successful the work is.
>Part of what estranges refined taste from art is that it credits the artist with everything, while artists' experience teaches them how little what is most their own belongs to them, how much they are under the compulsion of the work itself.
this is 100% on the money. "intent" is fetishized by consumers that have no personal experience of the creative process.
>this is 100% on the money. "intent" is fetishized by consumers that have no personal experience of the creative process.
Unless it is written by an AI, intent is the reason why a story exists.
True, but the problem is that you can't accurately get the authorial intent. Not only can the authorial intent change over time during the creation of the text, but it can change afterwards as well. The author relaying their intent at the time of writing a work might look back on the work with different eyes than they had at the time of making it. They might not even understand the work either, as it's totally possible to create a work that you yourself do not understand. This is even worse with composite texts, like the Bible, where there are not only multiple authors but multiple editors and redacters. Whose authorial intent takes primacy?
Not only can you not trust the author to adequately relay the authorial intent, but you cannot trust others to relay it either. You see this a lot today in fan communities where huge amounts of what people consider a work to be about are just gibberish that people came up with that isn't in the text. The point of Death Of The Author is that you can only trust a text to relay itself to you, who is the person that you are at the time of reading it.
>you can only trust a text to relay itself to you, who is the person that you are at the time of reading it.
Precisely and the text itself changes with time.
A 17 year old reading Anna Karenina for the first time is gonna have a different read than a 60 year old reading for the first time.
And when that 17 year old reads it again when he is 60 he is gonna read it differently.
Iuri Lotman really expands on that.
>True, but the problem is that you can't accurately get the authorial intent.
So? History is full of inaccuracies yet that isn't a reason to start believing in unicorns, dragons, and gods.
>The point of Death Of The Author is that you can only trust a text to relay itself to you, who is the person that you are at the time of reading it.
The idea of authorial intent grounds you to reality. The meaning of words do change and trying to interpret it using the modern definition of the word over the definition at the time it was written is ludicrous.
>new historicism
ya it's popular
>So? History is full of inaccuracies yet that isn't a reason to start believing in unicorns, dragons, and gods.
This is a non sequitor.
>The idea of authorial intent grounds you to reality.
That's the problem: You can't ever get at a 100% correct authorial intent. You can't, that's an objective fact. This is why we must go off of texts.
>The meaning of words do change and trying to interpret it using the modern definition of the word over the definition at the time it was written is ludicrous.
You can't stop people from doing this unless you make the text itself prevent this. That's the entire point of Death Of The Author: authorial intent means nothing, doesn't help at all, and can't be accessed. Only the text can.
>That's the problem: You can't ever get at a 100% correct authorial intent. You can't, that's an objective fact.
Who cares?
>You can't stop people from doing this unless you make the text itself prevent this.
That doesn't make them correct. You could have morons get their knowledge of medical science from Hollywood movie but that doesn't magically change reality.
>Who cares?
Clearly you.
>That doesn't make them correct. You could have morons get their knowledge of medical science from Hollywood movie but that doesn't magically change reality.
Right, so you have to ditch dumb shit like "authorial intent" and instead make sure that texts have things that matter in them.
This is the answer to the problem.
>Clearly you.
I don't. 100% isn't the minimum requirement.
>Right, so you have to ditch dumb shit like "authorial intent"
Why?
>and instead make sure that texts have things that matter in them.
Writing is shit because of this mentality.
>if you care so much about the author's intent to scour his life history for clues and red herrings why not respect that the author wrote it ambiguously intentionally?
I don't. I just don't think that making a moronic argument that it doesn't exist, doesn't matter, or isn't actually up to the author is a sensible conclusion to any amount of ambiguity.
>Writing is shit because of this mentality.
modern writing is shit because of an over-emphasis on the author and their identity
Modern writing is shit because moral busybodies can accuse writer of promoting a particular ideology based on said moral busybodies' moronic interpretation.
there is no creative process since the bourgeois revolution in England, since they turned art into an atheist commerce
Unlike in USSR where all art is state propaganda.
>I know this thread is more about expressing how you feel about a particular academic stereotype, rather than the actual ideas, but the idea that digging up the buried authorial intent isn't the ultimate goal of analysis isn't just some whim of Barthes's. It was part of a more general transformation in the humanities. The Death of the Author was 1967; this is Adorno writing in 1963:
Not OP but I read the Death of the Author and it is reasonable argument for a different conclusion. It is a painfully dishonest motte and bailey to disregard causality.
other than evading authoritarians that want to control information and who has access to it, this seems like a repeat of writing scripture or religious texts with no identifiable scribe. increasingly distancing human reality from the work is a really cheap way to produce an intriguing read rich with timeless nuance and subtlety within a period of constantly evolving linguistic and literary methods of communication. the depth and breadth of analysis is dependent on the death of the reader, not the death of the author. moreover, one could observe that marxist intention is not at all to help the working class and exploited blue collar workers, but provide a road map for how unethical capitalists and elitist social elites can both increase the distance and strength of the economic and political power that separates social classes.
>other than evading authoritarians that want to control information and who has access to it, this seems like a repeat of writing scripture or religious texts with no identifiable scribe.
It is clearly appealing to Rousseauian view of human nature by presenting the inaccuracies of oral history to be a feature.
>, the more successful the work is.
why
probably because when you can easily sense the author's intent it comes off as clumsy and takes you out of the experience moreover personal art is less likely to be universal. i don't care if you had a shitty relationship with your brother or your mom's suicide messed you up.
>less likely to be universal. i don't care if you had a shitty relationship with your brother or your mom's suicide messed you up.
Well, then noting is really universal beyond simple bodily human functions.
It's not that, I have to think, because I would say that we like non-universal things as escapism in the first place. I feel like this whole death of author thing had ideological reason behind it. Probably to shit on authority figures.
>we like non-universal things as escapism in the first place
i think adorno meant success as a work of art not commercial success, but who knows what the author-function known as "adorno" truly intended...
>I feel like this whole death of author thing had ideological reason behind it. Probably to shit on authority figures.
I for one always trust authority figures especially Scientists. That's why i'm getting my 5th booster this afternoon. Foucault was a chud.
It should be both though. You're always making the text your own, you can't avoid that, but ignoring the author (especially if it's historical or foreign) just means you impose the lowest common denominator sentiments and meaning uniformly on all texts. It's just feed for a narrow range of thoughts, ideas, and feelings already established, easy to understand and in common. These takes will also be learnt by others, thirdparty authority happens more readily when author bad, perhaps forever keeping it there. This is a disservice to the author if he's writing within the same culture and language as you. Because it takes a lot of work to push back the bounds or carefully step out. And simply refusing to engage when it's foreign and unshared.
i read that a while ago and always mix it up with foucault's "what is an author?" but just personally i think things can end up in the text unintentionally either from the author's subconscious or the general cultural climate of the time which if you asked them about they would be unaware of. i think this happens when an author says they don't like their major work or they think their best book is one of their irrelevant minor works. it shows they aren't even aware of what really makes their work significant.
All western culture is based upon combining the works of classical authors (who were pagans) and early Christians (crazy Middle Eastern death cultists) and saying that what really envisioned was something akin to a Victorian England.
how about if the author wants his intent to be clear he make it clear in his writing. if he wants it to be ambiguous then leave the text ambiguous. if you care so much about the author's intent to scour his life history for clues and red herrings why not respect that the author wrote it ambiguously intentionally?
Are the people on the side of author's intent middle school teachers who tell their students to read a biography on Harper Lee, read To Kill a Mockingbird and make an anylisis based on that?
Intent matters because you can understand what bullshit somebody is trying to peddle to the audience.
>Popular French literary theorist just writes an informal short essay, among many others
>Angloes take it as a program
ftfy
>is the author of Death of the Author
>eventually dies
you have to admit that Barthes was quite prescient
He was killed
Read Binet's Seventh Function of Language
If you want to be a contrarian and deny DotA then you have to accept that Dumbledore is gay and Hermione is black.
How do you say a story is badly written if authorial intent doesn't matter? Maybe you are using the wrong interpretation?
>How do you say a story is badly written if authorial intent doesn't matter?
How can you say a story is badly written unless you argue that authorial intent doesn't matter? Otherwise you have to accept the possibility of a story that is written terribly but conveys the proper authorial intent and is thus good.
Anyways, the answer: you just look at the quality of the text and assess whether it's good or not to standard forms and methodologies. This is why oral traditions develop very complex and technical systems of formula, rhythm, meter, wordplay, sound usage, etc.
>Maybe you are using the wrong interpretation?
Which, of course, is the answer: Death Of The Author makes it obvious that "interpretation" is a power that people have, and some people are better at it than others. Without Death Of The Author, we cannot say that one person's interpretation is shit and one person's is good because we cannot compare interpretations to some objective thing (the text), only to the shifting whims of whatever the author is saying that their intent was today (which differed from yesterday's, and will change again tomorrow). It is precisely because the Author is Dead that everyone isn't allowed to have their own niche opinion that is equally valid as everyone else's.
It sounds like you're not quite sure what you want and just want to argue because you have some vague idea that you're supposed to disagree with this concept.
>How can you say a story is badly written unless you argue that authorial intent doesn't matter?
You say that it is poorly executed.
>Otherwise you have to accept the possibility of a story that is written terribly but conveys the proper authorial intent and is thus good.
1) By that metric, Death of the Author makes clarity the ultimate measure of good writing thus ambiguity and subtly are inherently bad writing.
2) Authorial intent and how well a message is conveyed are two separate things.
3) Without the authorial intent, one can forever argue for a complex interpretation and claim that the other reader is simply too stupid to see it.
>Anyways, the answer: you just look at the quality of the text and assess whether it's good or not to standard forms and methodologies.
And I don't see how it is necessary or helpful to abandon authorial intent to do that.
>Which, of course, is the answer: Death Of The Author makes it obvious that "interpretation" is a power that people have, and some people are better at it than others.
>some people are better at it than others.
What is the goal of interpretation if it is not to decipher intent?
>Without Death Of The Author, we cannot say that one person's interpretation is shit and one person's is good because we cannot compare interpretations to some objective thing (the text), only to the shifting whims of whatever the author is saying that their intent was today (which differed from yesterday's, and will change again tomorrow).
That is metaphorical Motte in the Motte and Bailey fallacy. There are plenty of reasons why an author would lie. One is reason is to escape unjust persecution. Death of the Author has never benefited the oppressed except in the Marxist sense of freeing stories from their authors. Never once has tDotA have invoked to save someone from censorship or worse from authoritarian regimes.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
No, you actually have to ask what was her intent in saying this.
>The Death of the Author
>contains author's name
My intent is to get paid--period. Otherwise I suppose intent could be construed as a mode of seduction--how seduce whomsoever to want to read what I write while at the same time writing what's seduced me? Too little is made of this.
The reader only bothers about 'authorial intent' when it's put in front of his face. That's the lesson here, and it has thousands of applications, e.g. 'oedipus complex'....
It is a reflection of what you think would sell plus how much effort that you are willing to put.