CU-MA-English-SEM-III-Literary Theory-Second draft

c. The Birth of the Prison d. The Birth of the Clinic 10. What city was Foucault born in? a. Poitiers b. New York c. London d. Detroit Answers 1-b, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b, 5-d, 6-c, 7- c, 8-a, 9-c, 10-a 4.11 REFERENCES Reference’s book  Falzon, Christopher, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (eds.), 2013, A Companion to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118324905  Butler, Judith P., 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge.  Foucault M.. History of Madness. Translated by Khalfa J. NY: Routledge; 2009. ISBN 0-415-47726-3. Preface to the 1961 edition. p. xxvii–xxxix.  Sawicki, Jana, 1991, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, New York: Routledge  Taylor, Dianna (ed.), 2011, Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, Durham: Acumen.  Halperin, David M. (1990). One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-90097-3.  Byrne, Romana (2013). Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4411-0081-8 Website 101  https://www.britannica.com/art/Greek-literature  https://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Literature/ CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://www.edutry.com/Study-material/  https://www.ancient.eu/aristotle/  https://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Poetics  http://ignou.ac.in/  https://www.uoc.ac.in/  http://www.tmv.edu.in/ 102 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 5: MICHEL FOUCAULT: ‘WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?’ Structure 5.0 Learning Objectives 5.1 Introduction 5.2 What is an author? 5.3 The author function 5.4 Summary 5.6 Keywords 5.7 Learning Activity 5.8Unit End Questions 5.9 References 5.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Explain the Foucauldian thought.  Outline the concept of Author Function 5.1 INTRODUCTION To read Michel Foucault, is to feel the grounds of one’s belief systems shift underneath one’s feet. For Foucault, as for Roland Barthes (1916-1980), the notion of the author must come into question. Although Foucault was not a literary theorist, he, like Barthes, was a theorist of history, and “What is an Author?” echoed many of the thoughts of Barthes on the subject of authorship. Over a decade earlier, in Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes laid out how the “Author” came into being during a certain historical period and discussed how the term “author” was privileged due to the concept of what Foucault would call “individuation.” The notion of the author as a proper name produced “the author function” 103 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

that became characteristic of certain kinds of discourses, such as fiction, and not others, such as letter writing. The system that produced the author function is a system of ownership and, by the end of the 18th century, the author was placed at the centre of a system of property. Foucault was acting against Structuralism or a formal reading of a literary work and was opposed to the concept of expression, a holdover of Romantic thinking. Foucault understood writing to be “freed” from the need to “express” and was able to represent only itself. Writing was identified with its own unfolded exteriorly—an interplay of signs arranged to the nature of signifiers. As Foucault wrote, Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. Foucault defines the “author” in terms of what it was not: The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s sources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and re-composition of fiction. 5.2WHAT IS AN AUTHOR? In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need for an explanation. To this day, the 'author' remains an open question both with respect to its general function within discourse and in my own writings; that is, this question permits me to return to certain aspects of my own work which now appear ill-advised and misleading. In this regard, I wish to propose a necessary criticism and re-evaluation. 104 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

For instance, my objective in The Order of Things had been to analyse verbal clusters as discursive layers which fall outside the familiar categories of a book, a work, or an author. But while I considered 'natural history,' the 'analysis of wealth,' and 'political economy' in general terms, I neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works; it is perhaps due to this omission that I employed the names of authors throughout this book in a naive and often crude fashion. I spoke of Buffon, Cuvier, Ricardo, and others as well, but failed to realize that I had allowed their names to function ambiguously. This has proved an embarrassment to me in that my oversight has served to raise two pertinent objections. It was argued that I had not properly described Buffon or his work and that my handling of Marx was pitifully inadequate in terms of the totality of his thought.1 Although these objections were obviously justified, they ignored the task I had set myself: I had no intention of describing Buffon or Marx or of reproducing their statements or implicit meanings, but simply stated, I wanted to locate the rules that formed a certain number of concepts and theoretical relationships in their works. In addition, it was argued that I had created monstrous families by bringing together names as disparate as Buffon and Linnaeus or in placing Cuvier next to Darwin in defiance of the most readily observable family resemblances and natural ties. This objection also seems inappropriate since I had never tried to establish a genealogical table of exceptional individuals, nor was I concerned in forming an intellectual daguerreotype of the scholar or naturalist of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In fact, I had no intention of forming any family, whether holy or perverse. On the contrary, I wanted to determine—a much more modest task—the functional conditions of specific discursive practices. Then why did I use the names of authors in The Order of Things} Why not avoid their use altogether, or, short of that, why not define the manner in which they were used? These questions appear fully justified and I have tried to gauge their implications and consequences in a book that will appear shortly. These questions have determined my effort to situate comprehensive discursive units, such as 'natural history' or 'political economy,' and to establish the methods and instruments for delimiting, analysing, and describing these unities. Nevertheless, as a privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, and literature, or in the history of philosophy and science, the question of the author demands a more direct response. Even now, when we study the history of a concept, a literary genre, or a branch of philosophy, 105 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

these concerns assume a relatively weak and secondary position in relation to the solid and fundamental role of an author and his works. For the purposes of this paper, I will set aside a sociohistorical analysis of the author as an individual and the numerous questions that deserve attention in this context: how the author was individualized in a culture such as ours; the status we have given the author, for instance, when we began our research into authenticity and attribution; the systems of valorisation in which he was included; or the moment when the stories of heroes gave way to an author's biography; the conditions that fostered the formulation of the fundamental critical category of 'the man and his work.' For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it. Beckett supplies a direction: 'What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking. In an indifference such as this we must recognize one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing. It is not simply 'ethical' because it characterizes our way of speaking and writing, but because it stands as an immanent rule, endlessly adopted and yet never fully applied. As a principle, it dominates writing as an ongoing practice and slights our customary attention to the finished product. For the sake of illustration, we need only consider two of its major themes. First, the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression'; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority on the contrary, we recognize it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates. Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears. The second theme is even more familiar: it is the kinship between writing and death. This relationship inverts the age-old conception of Greek narrative or epic, which was designed to guarantee the immortality of a hero. The hero accepted an early death because 106 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

his life, consecrated and magnified by death, passed into immortality; and the narrative redeemed his acceptance of death. In a different sense, Arabic stories, and The Arabian Nights in particular, had as their motivation, their theme and pretext, this strategy for defeating death. Storytellers continued their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. This conception of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death has been transformed by our culture. Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obvious examples of this reversal. In addition, we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing. While all of this is familiar in philosophy, as in literary criticism, I am not certain that the consequences derived from the disappearance or death of the author have been fully explored or that the importance of this event has been appreciated. To be specific, it seems to me that the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change. Of these, I will examine two that seem particularly important. To begin with, the thesis concerning a work. It has been understood that the task of criticism is not to re-establish the ties between an author and his work or to reconstitute an author's thought and experience through his works and, further, that criticism should concern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms, which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Yet, what of a context that questions the concept of a work? What, in short, is the strange unit designated by the term, work? What is necessary to its composition, if a work is not something written by a person called an 'author'? Difficulties arise on all sides if we raise the question in this way. If an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or communicated to others? Is this not properly a work? What, for instance, were Sade's papers 107 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

before he was consecrated as an author? Little more, perhaps, than rolls of paper on which he endlessly unravelled his fantasies while in prison. Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work? This problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what 'everything' means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the drafts of his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a remainder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not? These practical considerations are endless once we consider how a work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual after his death. Plainly, we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author often suffers from the absence of this framework. Yet more questions arise. Can we say that The Arabian Nights, and Stromates of Clement of Alexandria, or the Lives of Diogenes Laertes constitute works? Such questions only begin to suggest the range of our difficulties, and, if some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate the equally problematic nature of the word 'work' and the unity it designates. Another thesis has detained us from taking full measure of the author's disappearance. It avoids confronting the specific event that makes it possible and, in subtle ways, continues to preserve the existence of the author. This is the notion of ecriture. Strictly speaking, it should allow us not only to circumvent references to an author, but to situate his recent absence. The conception of ecriture, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text, of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment. It appears, however, that this concept, as currently employed, has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. The extremely visible signs of the author's empirical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of religious and critical modes of characterization. In granting a 108 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

primordial status to writing, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin or a critical belief in its creative nature? To say that writing, in terms of the particular history it made possible, is subjected to forgetfulness and repression, is this not to reintroduce in transcendental terms the religious principle of hidden meanings (which require interpretation) and the critical assumption of implicit significations, silent purposes, and obscure contents (which give rise to commentary)? Finally, is not the conception of writing as absence a transposition into transcendental terms of the religious belief in a fixed and continuous tradition or the aesthetic principle that proclaims the survival of the work as a kind of enigmatic supplement of the author beyond his own death? This conception of ecriture sustains the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priori; the play of representations that formed a particular image of the author is extended within a grey neutrality. The disappearance of the author—since Mallarme, an event of our time—is held in check by the transcendental. Is it not necessary to draw a line between those who believe that we can continue to situate our present discontinuities within the historical and transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who are making a great effort to liberate themselves, once and for all, from this conceptual framework? It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should re-examine the empty space left by the author's disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance. In this context we can briefly consider the problems that arise in the use of an author's name. What is the name of an author? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I will attempt to indicate some of the difficulties related to these questions. The name of an author poses all the problems related to the category of the proper name. (Here, I am referring to the work of John Searle,16 among others.) Obviously not a pure and simple reference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) has other than indicative functions. It is more than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description. When we say 'Aristotle,' we are using a word that means one or a series of definite descriptions of the type: 'the author of the Analytics,' or 'the founder of ontology,' and so forth. Furthermore, a proper name has other functions than that 109 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of signification: when we discover that Rimbaud has not written La Chasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of the proper name or this author's name has been altered. The proper MICHEL FOUCAULT 303 name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and, granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions. Yet—and it is here that the specific difficulties attending an author's name appear—the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author's name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way; and these differences require clarification. To learn, for example, that Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, does not live in Paris, and is not a doctor does not invalidate the fact that the name, Pierre Dupont, continues to refer to the same person; there has been no modification of the designation that links the name to the person. With the name of an author, however, the problems are far more complex. The disclosure that Shakespeare was not born in the house that tourists now visit would not modify the functioning of the author's name, but, if it were proved that he had not written the sonnets that we attribute to him, this would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions. Moreover, if we establish that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon and that the same author was responsible for both the works of Shakespeare and those of Bacon, we would have introduced a third type of alteration which completely modifies the functioning of the author's name. Consequently, the name of an author is not precisely a proper name among others. Many other factors sustain this paradoxical singularity of the name of an author. It is altogether different to maintain that Pierre Dupont does not exist and that Homer or Hermes Trismegistes have never existed. While the first negation merely implies that there is no one by the name of Pierre Dupont, the second indicates that several individuals have been referred to by one name or that the real author possessed none of the traits traditionally associated with Homer or Hermes. Neither is it the same thing to say that Jacques Durand, not Pierre Dupont, is the real name of X and that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. We could also examine the function and meaning of such statements as 'Bourbaki is this or that person,' and 'Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, ConstantinConstantius, all of these are Kierkegaard.' 110 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

These differences indicate that an author's name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts. Neither Hermes not Hippocrates existed in the sense that we can say Balzac existed, but the fact that a number of texts were attached to a single name implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentication, or of common utilization were established among them. Finally, the author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author's name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates. We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts—separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. Consequently, we can say that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarly, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society. In dealing with the 'author' as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses. If we limit our remarks to only those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features. First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, 111 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture—undoubtedly in others as well—discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks long before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive MICHEL FOUCAULT 305 properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property. Secondly, the 'author-function'22 is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call 'literary' (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorised without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Texts, however, that we now call 'scientific' (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of 'Hippocrates said ...' or 'Pliny tells us that...' were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or pathological syndrome. 112 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

At the same time, however, 'literary' discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended on this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent on the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm other than the author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology and medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the 'reliability' of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory.) The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A 'philosopher' and a 'poet' are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. There are, nevertheless, transhistorical constants in the rules that govern the construction of an author. In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods for defining an author—or, rather, for determining the configuration of the author from existing texts—derive in large 113 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

part from those used in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desire to 'recover' the author from a work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author. In De VirisIllustribus, Saint Jerome maintains that homonymy is not proof of the common authorship of several works, since many individuals could have the same name or someone could have perversely appropriated another's name. The name, as an individual mark, is not sufficient as it relates to a textual tradition. How, then, can several texts be attributed to an individual author? What norms, related to the function of the author, will disclose the involvement of several authors? According to Saint Jerome, there are four criteria: the texts that must be eliminated from the list of works attributed to a single author are those inferior to the others (thus, the author is defined as a standard level of quality); those whose ideas conflict with the doctrine expressed in the others (here the author is defined as a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); those written in a different style and containing words and phrases not ordinarily found in the other works (the author is seen as a stylistic uniformity); and those referring to events or historical figures subsequent to the death of the author (the author is thus a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge). Although modern criticism does not appear to have these same suspicions concerning authentication, its strategies for defining the author present striking similarities. The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications (and this through an author's biography or by reference to his particular point of view, in the analysis of his social preferences and his position within a class or by delineating his fundamental objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be—at a particular level of an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire—a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a particular source of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth. Thus, even while Saint Jerome's four principles of authenticity might seem largely inadequate to modern critics, they, nevertheless, define the critical modalities now used to display the function of the author. 114 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

However, it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive material, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author. Well known to grammarians, these textual signs are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and the conjugation of verbs.24 But it is important to note that these elements have a different bearing on texts with an author and on those without one. In the latter, these 'shifters' refer to a real speaker and to an actual deictic situation, with certain exceptions such as the case of indirect speech in the first person. When discourse is linked to an author, however, the role of 'shifters' is more complex and variable. It is well known that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a 'second self'25 whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the 'author function' arises out of their scission—in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of 'quasi- discourse,' but, in fact, all discourse that supports this 'author-function' is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the 'I' who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this 'I' would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the 'I' is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the 'author-function' in such discourses operates so as to affect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos. Further elaboration would, of course, disclose other characteristics of the 'author- function,' but I have limited myself to the four that seemed the most obvious and important. They can be summarized in the following manner: the 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of 115 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy. I am aware that until now I have kept my subject within unjustifiable limits; I should also have spoken of the 'author-function' in painting, music, technical fields, and so forth. Admitting that my analysis is restricted to the domain of discourse, it seems that I have given the term 'author' an excessively narrow meaning. I have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. However, it is obvious that even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of much more than a book—of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate. For convenience, we could say that such authors occupy a 'trans discursive' position. Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers played this role, as did the first mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition. This type of author is surely as old as our civilization. But I believe that the nineteenth century in Europe produced a singular type of author who should not be confused with 'great' literary authors, or the MICHEL FOUCAULT 309 authors of canonical religious texts, and the founders of sciences. Somewhat arbitrarily, we might call them 'initiators of discursive practices.' The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirely from that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never more than the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital: they both established the endless possibility of discourse. Obviously, an easy objection can be made. The author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some 'importance' in the literary world, his influence can have significant ramifications. To take a very simple example, one could say that Ann Radcliffe did not simply write The Mysteries of Udolpho and a few other novels, but also made possible the appearance of Gothic Romances at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To this extent, her function as an author exceeds the limits of her work. However, 116 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

this objection can be answered by the fact that the possibilities disclosed by the initiators of discursive practices (using the examples of Marx and Freud, whom I believe to be the first and the most important) are significantly different from those suggested by novelists. The novels of Ann Radcliffe put into circulation a certain number of resemblances and analogies patterned on her work— various characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be integrated into other books. In short, to say that Ann Radcliffe created the Gothic Romance means that there are certain elements common to her works and to the nineteenth-century Gothic romance: the heroine ruined by her own innocence, the secret fortress that functions as a counter-city, the outlaw-hero who swears revenge on the world that has cursed him, etc. On the other hand, Marx and Freud, as 'initiators of discursive practices,' not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated. In saying that Freud founded psychoanalysis, we do not simply mean that the concept of libido or the techniques of dream analysis reappear in the writings of Karl Abraham or Melanie Klein, but that he made possible a certain number of differences with respect to his books, concepts, and hypotheses, which all arise out of psychoanalytic discourse. Is this not the case, however, with the founder of any new science or of any author who successfully transforms an existing science? After all, Galileo is indirectly responsible for the texts of those who mechanically applied the laws he formulated, in addition to having paved the way for the production of statements far different from his own. If Cuvier is the founder of biology and Saussure of linguistics, it is not because they were imitated or that an organic concept or a theory of the sign was uncritically integrated into new texts, but because Cuvier, to a certain extent, made possible a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own system and because Saussure made possible a generative grammar radically different from his own structural analysis. Superficially, then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any scientific endeavour, but I believe there is a fundamental difference. In a scientific program, the founding act is on an equal footing with its future transformations: it is merely one among the many modifications that it makes possible. This interdependence can take several forms. In the future development of a science, the 117 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

founding act may appear as little more than a single instance of a more general phenomenon that has been discovered. It might be questioned, in retrospect, for being too intuitive or empirical and submitted to the rigors of new theoretical operations in order to situate it in a formal domain. Finally, it might be thought a hasty generalization whose validity should be restricted. In other words, the founding act of a science can always be rechannelled through the machinery of transformations it has instituted. On the other hand, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its ulterior transformations. To extend psychoanalytic practice, as initiated by Freud, is not to presume a formal generality that was not claimed at the outset; it is to explore a number of possible applications. To limit it is to isolate in the original texts a small set of propositions or statements that are recognized as having an inaugurative value and that mark other Freudian concepts or theories as derivative. Finally, there are no 'false' statements in the work of these initiators; those statements considered inessential or 'prehistoric,' in that they are associated with another discourse, are simply neglected in favour of the more pertinent aspects of the work. The initiation of a discursive practice, unlike the founding of a science, overshadows and is necessarily detached from its later developments and transformations. As a consequence, we define the theoretical validity of a statement with respect to the work of the initiator, whereas in the case of Galileo or Newton, it is based on the structural and intrinsic norms established in cosmology or physics. Stated schematically, the work of these initiators is not situated in relation to a science or in the space it defines; rather, it is science or discursive practice that relate to their works as the primary points of reference. In keeping with this distinction, we can understand why it is inevitable that practitioners of such discourses must 'return to the origin.' Here, as well, it is necessary to distinguish a 'return' from scientific 'rediscoveries' or 'reactivations.' 'Rediscoveries' are the effects of analogy or isomorphism with current forms of knowledge that allow the perception of forgotten or obscured figures. For instance, Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar28 'rediscovered' a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position. 'Reactivation' refers to something quite different: the insertion of discourse into totally new domains of generalization, practice, and transformations. The 118 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

history of mathematics abounds in examples of this phenomenon as the work of Michel Serres on mathematical anamnesis shows. The phrase, 'return to,' designates a movement with its proper specificity, which characterizes the initiation of discursive practices. If we return, it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that is not the result of accident or incomprehension.30 In effect, the act of initiation is such, in its essence, that it is inevitably subjected to its own distortions; that which displays this act and derives from it is, at the same time, the root of its divergences and travesties. This nonaccidental omission must be regulated by precise operations that can be situated, analysed, and reduced in a return to the act of initiation. The barrier imposed by omission was not added from the outside; it arises from the discursive practice in question, which gives it its law. Both the cause of the barrier and the means for its removal, this omission—also responsible for the obstacles that prevent returning to the act of initiation—can only be resolved by a return. In addition, it is always a return to a text in itself, specifically, to a primary and unadorned text with particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences. We return to those empty spaces that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false and misleading plenitude. In these rediscoveries of an essential lack, we find the oscillation of two characteristic responses: 'This point was made—you can't help seeing it if you know how to read'; or, inversely, 'No, that point is not made in any of the printed words in the text, but it is expressed through the words, in their relationships and in the distance that separates them.' It follows naturally that this return, which is a part of the discursive mechanism, constantly introduces modifications and that the return to a text is not a historical supplement that would come to fix itself upon the primary discursivity and redouble it in the form of an ornament which, after all, is not essential. Rather, it is an effective and necessary means of transforming discursive practice. A study of Galileo's works could alter our knowledge of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas, a re-examination of the books of Freud or Marx can transform our understanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism. A last feature of these returns is that they tend to reinforce the enigmatic link between an author and his works. A text has an inaugurative value precisely because it is the work of a particular author, and our returns are conditioned by this knowledge. The rediscovery of an unknown text by Newton or Cantor will not modify classical cosmology or group theory; at most, it will change our appreciation of their historical genesis. Bringing 119 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

to light, however, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, to the extent that we recognize it as a book by Freud, can transform not only our historical knowledge, but the field of psychoanalytic theory— if only through a shift of accent or of the centre of gravity. These returns, an important component of discursive practices, form a relationship between 'fundamental' and mediate authors, which is not identical to that which links an ordinary text to its immediate author. These remarks concerning the initiation of discursive practices have been extremely schematic, especially with regard to the opposition I have tried to trace between this initiation and the founding of sciences. The distinction between the two is not readily discernible; moreover, there is no proof that the two procedures are mutually exclusive. My only purpose in setting up this opposition, however, was to show that the 'author-function,' sufficiently complex at the level of a book or a series of texts that bear a definite signature, has other determining factors when analysed in terms of larger entities—groups of works or entire disciplines. Unfortunately, there is a decided absence of positive propositions in this essay, as it applies to analytic procedures or directions for future research, but I ought at least to give the reasons why I attach such importance to a continuation of this work. Developing a similar analysis could provide the basis for a typology of discourse. A typology of this sort cannot be adequately understood in relation to the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse, because there undoubtedly exist specific discursive properties or relationships that are irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic and to the laws that govern objects. These properties require investigation if we hope to distinguish the larger categories of discourse. The different forms of relationships (or nonrelationships) that an author can assume are evidently one of these discursive properties. This form of investigation might also permit the introduction of an historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps the time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture, of modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution, and appropriation. Partially at the expense of themes and concepts that an author places in his work, the 'author-function' could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships. 120 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Is it not possible to re-examine, as a legitimate extension of this kind of analysis, the privileges of the subject? Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse. The author—or what I have called the 'author-function'—is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this function is far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions: 'Who is the real author?' 'Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?' 'What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?' New questions will be heard: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse?' 'Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?' 'What placements are determined for possible subjects?' 'Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?' Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference: 'What matter who's speaking?' 5.3THE AUTHOR FUNCTION When Michel Foucault addresses the question of the author, his horizon is already that of the systems of ideological controls of modern society. In 1969, Foucault presented a lecture entitled “What is an Author?” echoing the postmodern considerations of Barthes’ “Death of the Author”, published two years before. Foucault’s lecture remains a landmark in his thought, a clear presentation of his reflection on the notion of author and of its relevance in 121 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

today’s society. In December 1970, he would give a lecture entitled “L’ordre du discours” at the Collège de France (later added as appendix to new editions of Archaeology of Knowledge), in which Foucault confirms the larger frame in which he understands ‘the author’, that of the control of discourse, which also includes the concepts of commentary and of disciplines. In the present essay, we shall simply attempt to present Foucault’s original arguments in his lecture “What is an Author?” Barthes’ understanding of the disappearance of a strong and unquestioned view of authorship is indeed the starting point of Foucault’s analysis. This disappearance is found through two themes. First, the liberation of writing from the dimension of expression (Foucault 1991:102). An author does not simply attempt to express something, but rather builds a game (jeu) of language, proper to its text, which he will perpetually attempt to break and transgress. Second, “the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics” (102) through its relation to death. In Flaubert, Proust or Kafka, the very event of the written describes the progressive withdrawal of the author, leaving only his paradoxical absence as presence. As a reaction to this disappearance, Foucault continues, it has been argued by some that certain notions have replaced that of the “author” to determine discourse: the work (l’œuvre) and writing (écriture). (The latter may be a hint at Jacques Derrida, previously a student of Foucault, who wrote a critique of his work in 1963-1964: “Cogito and the History of Madness”.) In both cases, the new notion pretends to be a replacement of the concept of “author” while actually dissimulating its reinforced presence. It is in this context that Foucault attempts a more comprehensive analysis: one that focuses on “the space left empty by the author’s disappearance” (105) and what it entails. What is an Author? An author’s name, first, is a proper name (105). But this proper name is not just indicative of a particular person, it is also “equivalent of a description” (105): the name “Aristotle” does not only denote a particular individual but describes the relevance of a work in the wider recognition of that name. One cannot deal with Shakespeare’s name like with that of Pierre Dupont (the French version of John Doe): saying that Shakespeare is the name of the author of (Bacon’s) Organon, or further, saying “Shakespeare did not exist” are statements that carry tremendous implications in our cultural understanding of an author. An author’s name “performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts …” (107). The very existence of the label of “author” allows for author’s writings to be 122 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

considered as more than “ordinary everyday speech” (107), more than someone’s letter to a friend or than an anonymous message on a wall (108): as something which is valued and seen as having a certain status. For Foucault, the label of the “author” is given to certain discourses accepted by the dominant ideology (or ideologies): “there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author function,” while others are deprived of it” (107). Foucault offers a thick(er) description of his understanding of the author function, under four characteristics, which we can attempt to summarize as: (1) institutional authorship, (2) historical variations, (3) external attribution and (4) multiple individualities. 1. The author function is first to be observed in a judicial, penal and institutional context. Before the author, there was the act of discourse. It is when this act could become as such transgressive, illicit, that the notion of author became a convenient way to control and condemn these subversive acts. 2. The author is also a notion that concerns various agents and groups across time and societies, and not always the same. Literary works were accepted for a long time in virtue of their anonymity, while Middle Ages sciences were only validated if having the signature of a recognized authority. The 17th-18th centuries witnessed a reversal: one’s name became almost trivial in the plethora of scientific experiments, while anonymity became intolerable in the literary world (109). 3. The author function is also not attributed by a writer to himself but by a set of complex and external operations. Christian tradition praised texts in function of the saintliness of their author. 4. In addition, calling a particular historical individual an author faced the problem of the variations of quality in his work. To remedy it, Saint Jerome, for instance, found reasonable to reject parts of an author’s writing so that he would retain (a) a constant level of value, (b) a certain theoretical coherence, (c) a stylistic unity and (d) a historical consistency (111). Foucault argues that these criteria have survived and are still there today, even in our modern criticism. Nonetheless, this attempt at unification is always a lost cause, as any work contains contradictory and multiple accounts of the voice of the one who is writing it: “the author function… does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects-positions that can be occupied by 123 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

different classes of individuals” The author function does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects- positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals. – Michel Foucault On the margin – or rather, perhaps, at the root – of the notion of author, Foucault describes what he perceives as “founders of discursivity” (114). These, like Freud or Marx (Foucault gives only these two examples), are not just authors, not just initiators of new scientific disciplines, but the origins of “an endless possibility of discourse” (114). Unlike the initiators of a new literary genre, these ‘founders of discursivity’ have opened fields, which themselves allow for a certain fluctuation or divergence, even to the point of criticizing their own foundational thoughts. Unlike with revolutionary scientists like Galileo, Cuvier or Saussure, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations” (115), that is to say, the founder’s discourse can be reversed by latter writers within the limits of that discourse. Furthermore, “the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates” (116). These founders are not yet another view on scientific questions: they set the possibility of a new kind of discourse of science or knowledge in general. Foucault closes his lecture by contextualizing the objectives of his study. First, it is important for particular theoretical aims: the construction of a typology of discourse, the possibility of a historical analysis of discourse focusing on the modes of existence of these discourses (117), and a re-examination of the privileges of the subject through the conditions of it becoming as an author (118). Second, Foucault’s attempt is also to deal with “the “ideological” status of the author” (118). Through the author function, society organizes and controls discourse, at the expense, occasionally, of the particular author, but always, of certain groups and communities: “the author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (119). If the author is bound to disappear, as it is happily claimed, a new system of constraint “will have to be determined, or perhaps, experienced” (119). Such is the final call of Foucault: to motivate the single individual to partake in this experience, instead of leaving its destiny to the all-encompassing power of hegemonic institutions. 124 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

5.5 SUMMARY  Foucault’s \"What Is an Author?\" has a few numbers of notions that are envisioned to replace the advantaged position of the author essentially seem to preserve that honor and suppress the real meaning of his vanishing.”  Both Barthes and Foucault agree the \"Author” is an unusual, historical singularity that has unfortunately obtained fabled, heroic status. And both aim to challenge and confound this status. However, their methods are considerably different.  If \"Death of the Author\" actively efforts to kill the Author from the position of all-out attack, then \"What is an Author?\" nonchalantly submits to the inexorableness of this death and opts instead to further problematize the introductory definitions fundamental author and text.  It is not enough to announce that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself,” Foucault writes. “The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.”  Here, Foucault positions a series of ontological questions regarding a text. Questions like, where does one draw a line in an author's work? What establishes a work? Should everything a writer writes, including notes, scribbles and shopping lists, be measured part of a work?  He then goes on to interrogate and muddle the author in a similar attitude. “'First, we need to elucidate momentarily the problems arising from the use of the author's name. What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents.”  After positing the classificatory problems related with an author’s correct name, Foucault familiarizes the impression of the “author function” and defines its primary features:  The \"author function\" is associated to the legal structure. The law claims on holding persons answerable for dissident or transgressive communications, hence the essential for an “author.”  The \"author function\" diverges according to arena and discipline. Concealment in systematic dissertations, for example, is more satisfactory than in literary dissertations where an author is always required in order to state meaning within the text. 125 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 The \"author function\" is supported out through \"intricate operations\" and \"is not well-defined by the spur-of-the-moment acknowledgement of a dissertation to its producer\".  An \"author\" doesn't unavoidably mean a definite individual; several storytellers, selves and subjects complicate and obscure the title between author and individual.  Foucault then makes an otherness of an \"author function\" and in what way it narrates to a discrete work versus an entire dissertation. Authors who work in the latter class are what he calls \"creators of discursivity\" and function in the exceptional position of the \"trans discursive\". These are authors like Freud and Marx who \"...are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. 5.6 KEYWORDS  Yield per Hectare- Crop yield is a measurement of the amount of agricultural production harvested per unit of land area. 5.7 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Researchmore on the works of Michel Foucault. __________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ 5.8UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Explain Michel Foucault’s theory? 2. How does Michel Foucault define power? 3. What Is an Author? 4. What is function of term \"author\"? Long Questions 126 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

1. What does Foucault mean by \"the author-function\" in his essay \"What Is an Author”? 2. What is an author according to Foucault? 3. What are the fundamental beliefs of Michel Foucault and those that changed the thinking of philosophers of his time? 4. Why does Foucault believe that \"the question of the author\" needs to be discussed? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. When was this essay written? a. 1926 b. 1930 c. 1984 d. 1969 2. When did Foucault die? a. 1984 b. 1954 c. 1980 d. 1970 3. Foucault was not a literary theorist, he, like Barthes, was a theorist of _________. a. History b. English c. Sociology d. Political Science Answers 1-d, 2-a, 3-a 5.9 REFERENCES Reference’s book  Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow (1991): The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. (London: Penguin). 127 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/624849/mod_resource/content/ 1/a840_1_michel_foucault.pdf Textbook references  Mamoria, C.B. (2002). Personnel Management. Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House.  Dipak Kumar Bhattacharyya, Human Resource Management, Excel Books.  French, W.L. (1990), Human Resource Management, 4th ed., Houghton Miffin, Boston.  H.J. Bernardin, Human Resource Management, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2004. Website  http://www.slideshare.net/sreenath.s/evolution-of-hrm  www.articlesbase.com/training-articles/evolution-of-human-resource- management- 1294285.html  http://www.oppapers.com/subjects/different-kinds-of-approaches-to-hrm- page1.html 128 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 6: JACQUES DERRIDA. \"LETTER TO A JAPANESE FRIEND Structure 6.0 Learning Objectives 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Letter to a Japanese friend 6.3Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction 6.4 Summary 6.5Keywords 6.6Learning Activity 6.7Unit End Questions 6.8References 6.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Introduce and explain the Deconstructive approach  Summarize the lesson “A letter to a Japanese friend”  Answer the examination-oriented questions 6.1 INTRODUCTION Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but also political institutions. Although Derrida at times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word “deconstruction,” its popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in philosophy, in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural theory, and in political theory. Indeed, Derrida’s fame nearly reached the status of a media star, with hundreds of people filling auditoriums to hear him speak, with films and televisions programs devoted to him, with 129 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

countless books and articles devoted to his thinking. Beside critique, Derridean deconstruction consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides self- consciousness (the difference of the “of” in consciousness of oneself). But even more than the re-conception of difference, and perhaps more importantly, deconstruction attempts to render justice. Indeed, deconstruction is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible to achieve. 6.2 LETTER TO A JAPANESE FRIEND 10 July 1983 Dear Professor Izutsu, During our last meeting I promised you some schematic and preliminary thoughts on the word \"deconstruction\". We spoke about a feasible translation of the word prolegomena into Japanese, one which would at least try to prevent a negative determination of its significations or connotations, if possible. Therefore, the question would be what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. I underline these words \"possible\" and \"ought\". If the difficulties of translation can be anticipated (and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of so-called \"western\" metaphysics), one should not begin by naively believing that in French the word \"deconstruction\" corresponds to some clear and univocal signification. In \"my\" language there is already a serious [sombre] problem of translation between what here or there can be envisaged for the word, and the usage itself, the reserves of the word. It is very clear that even in French, things keep changing from one context to another. In the German, English, and especially American contexts, the same word is already attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values. Their analysis would be interesting and warrants a study of its own. When the word was chosen by me, or when it forced itself on me - I think it was in *Of Grammatology* - I thought it would be credited with such a crucial role in the discourse that interested me at that particular time. I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau. In this context each denoted an operation bearing on the structure or conventional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. However, in French \"destruction\" meant an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer to Nietzschean \"demolition\" than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I suggested. So, I ruled that out. I 130 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

wanted to see whether the word \"deconstruction\" (which came to me quite spontaneously) was good French or not. I discovered it in the Littré. The grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses [portees] were found associated with a \"mechanical\" sense [portee \"machinique\"]. This association appeared very fortunate, and luckily adapted to what I wanted at least to suggest. I referred some of the entries from the Littré. \"Deconstruction is a grammatical term which meant action of deconstructing. Disarranging the construction of words in a sentence.'Of deconstruction, common way of saying construction', Lemare, De la maniéred'apprendre les langues, ch.17, in *Cours de langue Latine*.Deconstruire: To disassemble the parts of a whole. To deconstruct a machine to transport it elsewhere.Grammatical term.To deconstruct verse, rendering it, by the suppression of meter, similar to prose. ('In the system of prenotional sentences, one also starts with translation and one of its advantages is never needing to deconstruct,' Lemare, ibid). Se deconstruire [to deconstruct itself] ... to lose its construction. 'Modern scholarship has shown us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its own state of perfection is deconstructed [s'estdeconstruite] and altered from within itself according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,' Villemain, *Preface du Dictionaire de l'Academie*.\" Translating all of this into Japanese is necessary but it postpones the problem as well. It goes without saying that if all the significations listed by the Littré interested me because of their affinity with what I \"meant\" [voulais-dire], they concerned, metaphorically, only models or regions of meaning and not the totality of what deconstruction aspires to at its most ambitious. This is not limited to a linguistico-grammatical model, let alone a mechanical model. These models are supposed to be submitted to a deconstructive questioning. It is true then that these \"models\" have been behind a number of misunderstandings about the concept and word of \"deconstruction\" because of the temptation to reduce it to these models. As the word was rarely used so it was even unknown in France. It had to be reconstructed in some way, and its utility had been set by the discussions that were then being attempted around and on the basis of *Of Grammatology* as well. I will now try to give some precision instead of some primitive meaning or etymology sheltered from or outside of any contextual strategy. A few more words on the subject of \"the context\". At that time structuralism was prevalent. \"Deconstruction\" seemed to be moving in the same direction as the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). Deconstruction was also a structuralist gesture or a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problem. But it was also an 131 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

antistructuralistgesture, and its popularity rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all forms of structures, linguistic, \"logocentric\", \"phonocentric\" - structuralism being governed by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also known as Saussurian - socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all from the beginning philosophical). Deconstruction motif has been associated with \"poststructuralism\" (a word unknown in France until its \"return\" from the States) in the United States. But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures, in a certain sense which was more historical than the structuralist movement it called into question, was not a negative activity. Rather than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an \"ensemble\" was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end. However, the negative appearance was and continues to be much more difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammar of the word (de-), although it can designate a genealogical restoration [remonter] rather than a demolition. The word has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discussion. It is difficult to effect it later because, in the work of deconstruction I had to multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the conventional philosophical concepts, while reaffirming the importance of returning to them, at least under erasure. Therefore, precipitately this is known as a type of negative theology (this was neither true nor false but I shall not enter into the debate here). At the same time deconstruction, in spite of appearances, is neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes that are subject to deconstruction. It is no more a critique, neither in a general sense nor in a Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is one of the essential \"themes\" or \"objects\" of deconstruction, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique. I would say the same thing about method as well. Deconstruction is neither a method nor can it be transformed into one, especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. The technical and methodological \"metaphor\" that seems necessarily attached to the very word deconstruction has been able to seduce or lead astray in some of the circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States). As a result, the debate has developed in these circles: Is it possible that deconstruction becomes a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it thus be allowed by academic institutions to be reappropriated and domesticated? It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some 132 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each deconstructive \"event\" remains singular or, in any case, as close as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must also be made clear that deconstruction is neither an act nor an operation. Not only because there would be something \"patient\" or \"passive\" about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity) but also because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc. Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It can be deconstructed. [Ça se deconstruit.] The \"it\" [ça] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction (the Littré says, \"to deconstruct itself [se deconstruire] ... to lose its construction\"). And the \"se\" of \"se deconstruire,\" which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma. I have realized, my dear Driend, that to make a word clearer so as to assist its translation, I am only increasing the difficulties: \"the impossible task of the translator\" (Benjamin). This too is meant by \"deconstructs\". If deconstruction takes place everywhere, it [ça] takes place where there is something (and is not therefore limited to meaning or to the text in the current and bookish sense of the word). We still have to give a thought to what is happening in our world, in modernity, at the time when deconstruction is becoming a motif, with its word, its privileged themes, its mobile strategy, and so on. Neither I have simple nor formalizable response to this question. In fact, all my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question. They are modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative interpretations. I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema, that we are in an \"epoch\" of being-in deconstruction, of a being-in-deconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same time in other \"epochs\". This thought of \"epochs\" and especially that of a gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its dispersions (Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing. In very simple words I would say that the difficulty of not only defining but also of translating the word \"deconstruction\" comes from the fact that all the predicates, defining concepts, lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are directly or indirectly deconstructed or deconstructible. And that goes for the word deconstruction as well as for every word. *Of Grammatology* questioned the unity \"word\" and all the privileges bestowed upon it, especially in its nominal form. It is therefore only a discussion or rather a writing that can compensate for 133 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the incapacity of the word to be equal to a \"thought\". All sentences of the type \"deconstruction is X\" or \"deconstruction is not X\" a priori miss the point, which means that they are at least false. As you are aware, one of the major issues in what I refer to as \"deconstruction\" in my texts is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P. Like all other words, the word \"deconstruction\", derives its value solely from its inscription in a sequence of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely referred as a \"context\". For me whatever I have tried and still try to write, the word has interest only within a particular context, where it replaces and lets itself be determined by such other words as \"ecriture\", \"trace\", \"differance\", \"supplement\", \"hymen\", \"pharmakon\", \"marge\", \"entame\", \"parergon\", etc. By definition, the list is endless, and I have cited only those names, which are inadequate and done solely for economic reasons. In fact, I should have cited the sentences and the interlinking of sentences which in their turn determine these names in some of my texts. What deconstruction is not? Of course, everything! What is deconstruction? Of course, nothing! Because of these reasons, I don’t think, that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is definitely not elegant [beau]. It has definitely been of service in a highly determined situation. This \"highly determined situation\" needs to be analysed and deconstructed in order to understand what has been imposed upon it in a sequence of potential substitutions, despite its essential imperfection. It is a daunting job and I am surely not going to do it here. One final word to conclude my letter, which is already too lengthy. I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text. As I have just said, \"deconstruction\" is a term that is essentially substituted in a series of substitution, then that can also be done from one language to another. Firstly, the probability of (the) \"deconstruction\" would be that another word (the same word and another) can be found in Japanese to mean the same thing (the same and another), to speak of deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a more beautiful word. When I speak of this writing of the other which will be more beautiful, I simply understand that translation and poem involve same risk. How to translate \"poem\"? a \"poem\"?... With my warmest regards, Jacques Derrida 134 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

6.3JACQUES DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCTION Deconstruction defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition by its very nature. Derrida first outlined the concept in his book Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the construction of meaning. From his early and later works, most notably the Letter to a Japanese Friend, in which he has tried to describe deconstruction to others, it is possible to provide a basic explanation of what deconstruction is commonly understood to mean. Three key characteristics that emerge from Derrida’s work that makes deconstruction possible are as follows: first, the inherent desire to have a centre, or focal point, to structure understanding (logocentrism); second, the reduction of meaning to set definitions that are committed to writing (nothing beyond the text); and, finally, how the reduction of meaning to writing captures opposition within that concept itself (différance). These three characteristics found the possibility of deconstruction as an on-going process of questioning the accepted basis of meaning. Initially, the concept arose in the context of language but it is equally applicable to the study of law. Derrida considered deconstruction to be a ‘problematisation of the foundation of law, morality and politics.’ For him it was both ‘foreseeable and desirable that studies of deconstructive style should culminate in the problematic of law and justice.’ Therefore, deconstruction is a means of interrogating the relationship between the two. Derrida starts with the argument that modern Western philosophy is characterized by and constructed around an intrinsic desire to place meaning at the centre of presence. In simple words, it means that philosophy is driven by an aspiration for the certainty associated with the existence of an absolute truth, or an objective meaning that makes sense of our place in the world. This desire has been termed as ‘logocentrism’ by Derrida. Its effect is the placing of one particular term or concept, such as justice, at the centre of all efforts at theorizing or interrogating meaning. The term becomes the centre around which meaning is constructed, the reference point that determines all subsequent knowledge. Derrida brings into notice how logocentrism assumes the existence of set and stable meanings that exist to be discovered. The translation into words of a concept or a way of thinking is the way in which this term—the logos—is made known in language. This is regarded as the ‘metaphysics of presence’—the way in which we make present the objects of our thought. The nature is represented by logos, which is distinct from the instituted form expressed in language or in text. Therefore, the idea of a rigid separation of the origin of meaning (the abstract idea of 135 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

justice, for example) and the institutionalization of that meaning in ‘writing’ (or law) is crucial. For Derrida, the possibility of deconstruction is opened by logocentrism and by the idea of the exteriority of meaning. He sees how the natural ‘origin’ of meaning and its ‘institution’ in writing cannot be so easily separated. Derrida proposes that nature is constructed only with reference to the institution, rather than nature (justice) and institution (law) existing independently of each other. So rather than law being a direct embodiment of justice, how we understand both justice and law is determined by the interplay between the two. This is a rejection of the rigid separation that makes the quest for certainty possible — of the very notion that justice exists as a prior objective standard to be discovered. By reading law as reflecting or embodying the natural origin of justice, what is ignored or concealed are all the other possible interpretations of justice that are not embodied or encapsulated in the law. In this way writing both defines as well as reflects nature. The idea of deconstruction is therefore concerned with countering the idea of a transcendental origin or natural referent. It disproves the idea that it is possible to transgress the institution in order to discover something beyond — the existence of an independent origin. The idea is famously explained in the phrase ‘There is nothing outside of the text’, which is often used to summarise Derrida’s work. For Derrida the origin does not exist independently of its institution, but exists only ‘through its functioning within a classification and therefore within a system of differences…’ In his own words, Derrida terms this phenomenon ‘différance’, and it is this idea that forms the basis of deconstruction. Différance refers to the fact that meaning can never be set as fixed or static, rather keeps evolving. It arises from the constant process of negotiation between competing concepts. Deconstruction requires interrogation of these competing interpretations that combine to produce meaning, rather than seeking the reality of a natural origin. The act of institution—or writing —itself captures this constant competition between the differing possible interpretations of meaning within the institution. As a result, the effect of the translation of thought into language is to inscribe différance into the structure of meaning. It embodies both the author’s desired meaning and the limitations placed on that meaning through the act of text interpretation. Meaning is defined equally by what is included in the institution and what is not. At a particular time, one concept will be dominant over the other, thus excluding the other. Although the idea of exclusion implies the absence of any presence of that which is excluded, in fact that which is instituted depends for its existence on what has been excluded. The two exist in a hierarchical relationship in which one will always be 136 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

dominant over the other. The dominant concept is the one that manages to legitimate itself as the reflection of the natural order thereby squeezing out competing interpretations that remain stuck as the excluded trace within the dominant meaning. Derrida explains that in Positions the first task of deconstruction is to overturn the hierarchy. This is important to highlight the ‘conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition’. It emphasizes the dominance of one way of thinking over others, and belies the idea of fixed meaning, overturning, and therefore exposing, the existence of the binary and destabilizing previously fixed categories of understanding. However, this is only the first stage. To remain in this phase, according to Derrida, is to remain within the oppositional structure, allowing the hierarchy to re-establish itself. Inquiry remains trapped ‘within the closed field of these oppositions’ if deconstruction is restricted to the simple inversion of binaries. It means that instead of making any significant change to structural conditions, dominant and subordinate positions are swapped, allowing the same conditions to persist. A second stage is important to move beyond this dynamic, and to break open the structure itself. The indeterminate element of deconstruction becomes visible in this second stage. The second phase wants us to move beyond the oppositions, to remain in search of new meanings, not only by repeating ideas but also by analyzing how ideas are framed, how arguments are made, rather than resting with the inversion of the binaries, and by extension accepting a different manifestation of fixed meaning. At the Villanova Roundtable, Derrida delineates this as searching for the ‘tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within [the] corpus’. We can prevent existing structures of dominance from reasserting themselves only through this element of endless analysis, criticism and deconstruction. Here deconstruction is concerned with the process of questioning itself rather than discovering ‘truth’ or distilling correct conclusions. It is a process characterized by unpredictability and indeterminacy. Due to this reason, Derrida explains that deconstruction is neither a ‘method’ nor it can be transformed into one.Deconstruction is an endless process of interrogation concerned with the structure of meaning itself and one cannot ‘apply’ it to test a hypothesis or to support an argument. Deconstruction is neither analysis nor critique for Derrida, as he explains in ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’. It is neither done with a particular aim nor is it a search for a ‘simple element’ or ‘indissoluble origin’. As a result, its value is not linked to any subsequent reconstruction. As discussed previously, it does not exist to take apart one structure to replace it with another; rather it exists simply to reveal the inner logic of that structure so that it could be understood in a better way. This has led to the charge that deconstruction is insufficiently concerned with questions of justice and ethics. Derrida is 137 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

clear, that deconstruction is neither primarily concerned with advocacy or activism, nor is it nihilistic or anarchic. It does not reject the need for law and institutions, but rather seeks to work within those structures to reveal new possibilities. It consists of dismantling not institutions themselves, but rather ‘structures within institutions that have become too rigid, or are dogmatic or which work as an obstacle to future research’.Deconstruction is therefore an affirmative force that opens up possibilities that have been suppressed by virtue of the dominance of one particular way of conceptualizing justice. Finally, deconstruction is something that happens, something that takes place everywhere, but it is not an act or an operation. Its potential exists within our structures of meaning and does not require deliberation or consciousness. It is interested in exploring and revealing the internal logic of ideas and meaning. It is concerned with opening up these structures and revealing the way in which our understanding of foundational concepts is constructed. This is internal to meaning itself and not dependent on external factors. What we understand from this is that the possibility of deconstruction exists within the structure of meaning itself, within the structure of difference, and is not something to be found and applied from the outside. It is mainly concerned with understanding ideas, not with their application. Deconstruction itself is indeterminate, its aim is not to provide answers. It does not seek to prove an objective truth or to support any one particular claim to justice over another. For this reason, In Force of Law Derrida concedes that deconstruction is ‘impossible’. The ‘happening’ of deconstruction is not going to lead to a determinate outcome. Deconstruction requires first and foremost the relentless pursuit of the impossible and will not reveal the one and only true meaning of justice that can be embodied in law. What is ‘happening’ is not the pursuit of an answer which marks the end of the inquiry, but rather the continuous questioning that holds our minds open to the idea that there may be alternative views and understandings of the meaning of justice. When seen in these terms, it is simply a way of reading, writing, thinking and acting and not a method. Rather than finding an endpoint or a firm conclusion, the means cannot be distinguished from the end. The ongoing process of questioning is the end in itself. It is about negotiating the impossible and the undecidable and remaining open to the possibility of justice. 6.4 SUMMARY  Deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. 138 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 What deconstruction is and is not, according to Jacques Derrida.  Deconstruction as a term is an extremely complex concept.  It cannot be narrowed down to just one or two ideas.  Due to such inherent complexity, it is immensely difficult to translate its meaning to another language. 6.5 KEWORDS  Prolegomena – a critical or discursive introduction to a book  Annihilation - the state of being completely destroyed 6.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Collect details on various works of Derrida. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 6.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Where was Jacques Derrida born? 2. Jacques Derrida got admission in EcoleNormaleSuperieur in which year? 3. In which year was Jacques Derrida awarded honorary doctorate? 4. Of Grammatology was published in which year? 5. Jacques Derrida wanted to translate few of the French words into which language? Long Questions 1. What has Derrida discussed in A Letter to a Japanese Friend? Answer in detail. 2. What do you mean by deconstruction? 3. Can ideas be fully communicated from one language to another? Explain. 4. Explain post-structuralism. 139 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. When was Jaques Derrida born? a. 1936 b. 1940 c. 1946 d. 1930 2. What was the name of the Japanese friend to whom Jacques Derrida wrote a Letter? a. Professor Althuser b. Professor Louis Izutsu c. Professor Etienne Borne d. Professor Andrew D. White 3. Deconstruction motif has been associated with what? a. Poststructuralism b. Grammatology c. Text d. None of these 4. Jacques Derrida was the founder of a. Logocentrism b. Deconstruction c. Text d. None of these 5. In of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida argues what about literature? a. No fixed, stable meaning is possible. b. Language must be studied in conjunction with history in order to create meaning. c. Literature is timeless, and thus meaning does not change. 140 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

d. None of these Answers 1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-b, 5-a 6.8 SUGGESTED READINGS Reference’s book  Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow (1991): The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. (London: Penguin).  https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/624849/mod_resource/content/ 1/a840_1_michel_foucault.pdf Textbook references  Mamoria, C.B. (2002). Personnel Management. Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House.  Dipak Kumar Bhattacharyya, Human Resource Management, Excel Books.  French, W.L. (1990), Human Resource Management, 4th ed., Houghton Miffin, Boston.  H.J. Bernardin, Human Resource Management, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2004. Website  http://www.slideshare.net/sreenath.s/evolution-of-hrm  www.articlesbase.com/training-articles/evolution-of-human-resource- management- 1294285.html  http://www.oppapers.com/subjects/different-kinds-of-approaches-to-hrm- page1.html 141 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 7: M. H. ABRAMS: “THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ANGEL” Structure 7.0 Learning Objectives 7.1 Introduction 7.2About the essay: The Deconstructive angel 7.3The Title of the Essay 7.4Topic Explanation 7.4.1 M.H. Abrams Defence of Pluralism: 7.4.2 The premises of the Traditional Historians which Abrams Supports 7.4.3 M.H. Abrams’ views on Linguistic Interpretation: 7.4.4 Linguistic Premises of Jacques Derrida: 7.4.5 Linguistic Premises of J. Hillis Miller: 7.4.6 J. Hillis Miller 7.5 Summary 7.6 Keywords 7.7 Learning Activity 7.8Unit End Questions 7.9 References 7.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  introduce the Deconstructive approach  Explain the theory of deconstruction 142 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 State the following concepts: (a) Post-structuralism (b) ecriture (c) Trace (d) Deconstruction (e) Canny and uncanny critic iv) To study ‘The Deconstructive Angel’ by M.H. Abrams 7.1 INTRODUCTION Meyer Howard Abrahams, an American Literary critic was known for his works on English Romanticism. He also edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Abrams was born on July 23, 1912, in New Jersey as the son of East European Jewish immigrants. He was the first in his family to go to college. He entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Abrams won a Henry Fellowship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his tutor was I. A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school and received a master's degree and a Ph.D. Abrams’s contribution, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, is ‘both a lucid exposition of the deconstructionist theory of discourse’, and ‘a trenchant attack on it from the standpoint of traditional humanist scholarship’ 7.2 ABOUT THE ESSAY: THE DECONSTRUCTIVEANGEL About the Essay: The essay The Deconstructive Angel was presented at a session of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1976 which was chaired by Sheldon Sacks. Wayne C. Booth and J. Hillis who were involved in a debate over Abram’s book ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ were also present at the session. The book is both a lucid exposition of the deconstructionist theory of discourse, and also an attack on it from the stand point of traditional humanist scholarship. The central argument is that, in their own discursive practice, the deconstructionists rely on the communicative power of language which they theoretically deny. Abrams compares between the humanist critics and the post- structuralists and points out the serious drawbacks of the later school. There is a clash between two big theoretical traditions: humanistic and aggressively experimental (i.e., linguistic). 7.3THE TITLE OF THE ESSAY The title of the essay refers to William Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Here, the angel plays double game with Blake. The Angel tells Blake about the hell. But as 143 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

soon the angel disappears, Blake finds himself on the bank of a beautiful river with moon in the sky. Blake then tells the angel that he could see it (the hell) because of the angel’s metaphysics. Abram calls J. Hillis Miller, the Angel of Deconstruction. Like the angel of Blake, Miller also plays a double game i.e., his behaviour is contradictory. He behaves like a deconstructionist when he is interpreting a text. But he speaks differently when he is on the platform. 7.4 TOPIC EXPLANATION  M.H. Abrams defines of pluralism.  The premises of the traditional Historians which Abram’s support.  Abrams views on Linguistic Interpretations  Linguistic premises of Jacques Derrida.  Linguistic premises of J. Hillis Miller.  J. Hillis Miller and the double role. Demogorgon. -If the Abysm Could vomit forth its secrets: -but a voice Is wanting ... - Shelley, Prometheus Unbound We have been instructed these days to be wary of words like \"origin,\" \"centre,\" and \"end,\" but I will venture to say that this session had its origin in the dialogue between Wayne Booth and myself which cantered on the rationale of the historical procedures in my book, Natural Supernaturalism. Hillis Miller had, in all innocence, written a review of that book; he was cited and answered by Booth, then re-cited and re-answered by me, and so was sucked into the vortex of our ex-change to make it now a dialogue of three. And given the demonstrated skill of our chairman in fomenting debates, who can predict how many others will be drawn into the vortex before it comes to an end? I shall take this occasion to explore the crucial issue that was raised by Hillis Miller in his challenging review. I agreed with Wayne Booth that pluralism-the bringing to bear on a subject of diverse points of view, with diverse results-is not only valid, but necessary to our understanding of literary and cultural history: in such pursuits the con-vergence of diverse points of view is the only way to achieve a vision in depth. I also said, however, that Miller's radical statement, in his review, of the principles of what he calls deconstructive interpretation goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history.1 The issue would hardly 1. \"Rationality and 144 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth,\" Critical Inquiry 2 (Spring 1976): 456-60. 425 This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 426 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel be worth pursuing on this public platform if it were only a question of the soundness of the historical claims in a single book. But Miller considered Natural Supernaturalism as an example \"in the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship, the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, Lovejoy, C. S. Lewis,\"2 and he made it clear that what is at stake is the validity of the premises and procedures of the entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences. And that is patently a matter important enough to warrant our discussion. Let me put as curtly as I can the essential, though usually implicit, premises that I share with traditional historians of Western culture, which Miller puts in question and undertakes to subvert: 1. The basic materials of history are written texts; and the authors who wrote these texts (with some off-centre exceptions) exploited the possibilities and norms of their inherited language to say something determinate, and assumed that competent readers, insofar as these shared their own linguistic skills, would be able to understand what they said. 2. The historian is indeed for the most part able to interpret not only what the passages that he cites might mean now, but also what their writers meant when they wrote them. Typically, the historian puts his interpretation in language which is partly his author's and partly his own; if it is sound, this interpretation approximates, closely enough for the purpose at hand, what the author meant. 3. The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the expectation that the expert reader's interpretation of a passage will approximate his own and so confirm the \"objectivity\" of his interpretation. The worldly-wise author expects that some of his interpretations will turn out to be mistaken, but such errors, if limited in scope, will not seriously affect the soundness of his overall history. If, however, the bulk of his interpretations are misreading’s, his book is not to be accounted a history but an historical fiction. Notice that I am speaking here of linguistic interpretation, not of what is confusingly called \"historical interpretation\"-that is, the categories, topics, and conceptual and explanatory patterns that the historian brings to his investigation of texts, which serve to shape the story within which passages of texts, with their linguistic meanings, serve as instances and evidence. The differences among these organizing categories, topics, and patterns effect the diversity in the stories that different historians tell, and which a pluralist theory finds acceptable. Undeniably, the linguistic meanings of the passages cited are in some degree responsive to differences in the perspective that a historian 2. \"Tradition and Difference,\" Diacritics 2 (Winter 1972): 6. This content 145 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 427 brings to bear on them; but the linguistic meanings are also in consider-able degree recalcitrant to alterations in perspective, and the historian's fidelity to these meanings, without his manipulating and twisting them to fit his preconceptions, serves as a prime criterion of the soundness of the story that he undertakes to tell. One other preliminary matter: I don't claim that my interpretation of the passages I cite exhausts everything that these passages mean. In his review, Hillis Miller says that \"a literary or philosophical text, for Abrams, has a single unequivocal meaning 'corresponding' to the various entities it 'represents' in a more or less straightforward mirroring.\" I don't know how I gave Miller the impression that my \"theory of language is implicitly mimetic,\" a \"straightforward mirror\" of the reality it reflects,3 except on the assumption he seems to share with Derrida, and which seems to me obviously mistaken, that all views of language which are not in the deconstructive mode are mimetic views. My view of language, as it happens, is by and large functional and pragmatic: language, whether spoken or written, is the use of a great variety of speech-acts to accomplish a great diversity of human purposes; only one of these many purposes is to assert something about a state of affairs; and such a linguistic assertion does not mirror, but serves to direct attention to selected aspects of that state of affairs. At any rate, I think it is quite true that many of the passages I cite are equivocal and multiplex in meaning. All I claim-all that 59 any traditional historian needs to claim-is that, whatever else the author also meant, he meant, at a sufficient approximation, at least this, and that the \"this\" that I specify is sufficient to the story I undertake to tell. Other historians, having chosen to tell a different story, may in their interpretation identify different aspects of the meanings conveyed by the same passage. That brings me to the crux of my disagreement with Hillis Miller. His central contention is not simply that I am sometimes, or always, wrong in my interpretation, but instead that I-like other traditional historians-can never be right in my interpretation. For Miller assents to Nietzsche's challenge of \"the concept of 'rightness' in interpretation,\" and to Nietzsche's assertion that \"the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations (Auslegungen): there is no 'correct' interpretation.\"4 Nietzsche's views of interpretation, as Miller says, are relevant to the recent deconstructive theorists, including Jacques Derrida and himself, who have \"reinterpreted Nietzsche\" or have written \"directly or indirectly under his aegis.\" He goes on to quote a number of statements from Nietzsche's The Will to Power to the effect, as Miller puts it, \"that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation. 3. Ibid., pp. 10-11. 4. Ibid., pp. 8, 12. This content 146 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 428 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel of meaning into a text which has no meaning 'in itself.' \" For example: \"Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has im-ported into them.\" \"In fact, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.\"5 On the face of it, such sweeping deconstructive claims might suggest those of Lewis Carroll's linguistic philosopher, who asserted that meaning is imported into a text by the interpreter's will to power: \"The question is,\" said Alice, \"whether you can make words mean so many different things.\" \"The question is,\" said Humpty Dumpty, \"which is to be master-that's all.\" But of course, I don't at all believe that such deconstructive claims are, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, simply dogmatic assertions. Instead, they are conclusions which are derived from particular linguistic premises. I want, in the time remaining, to present what I make out to be the elected linguistic premises, first of Jacques Derrida, then of Hillis Miller, in the confidence that if I misinterpret these theories, my errors will soon be challenged and corrected. Let me eliminate suspense by saying at the beginning that I don't think that their radically sceptical conclusions from these premises are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that their conclusions are right-in fact, they are infallibly right, and that's where the trouble lies. 1 It is often said that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all inquiries to a prior inquiry into language. This is true enough, but not specific enough, for it does not distinguish Derrida's work from what Richard Rorty calls \"the linguistic turn\"' which characterizes mod-ern Anglo-American philosophy and also a great part of Anglo- American literary criticism, including the \"New Criticism,\" of the last half-century. What is distinctive about Derrida is first that, like other 60 French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture the written or printed text; and second that he conceives a text in an extraordinarily limited fashion. Derrida's initial and decisive strategy is to disestablish the priority, in traditional views of language, of speech over writing. By priority I mean the use of oral discourse as the conceptual model from which to derive the semantic and other features of written language and of language in general. And Derrida's shift of elementary reference is to a 5. Ibid. 6. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn (Chicago and London, 1967). This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 429 written text which consists of what we find when we look at it-to \"un text a ecrit, noir sur blanc.\"7 In the dazzling play of Derrida's expositions, his ultimate recourse is to these black marks on white paper as the sole things that are actually present in reading, and so are not fictitious constructs, illusions, 147 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

phantasms; the visual features of these black-on-blanks he expands in multiple dimensions of elaborately figurative significance, only to contract them again, at telling moments, to their elemental status. e \"marks\" that are demarcated, and separated into groups, by \"blanks\"; there are also \"spaces,\" \"margins,\" and the \"repetitions\" and \"differences\" that we find when we compare individual marks and groups of marks. By his rhetorical mastery Derrida solicits us to follow him in his move to these new premises, and to allow ourselves to be locked into them. This move is from what he calls the closed \"logocentric\" model of all traditional or \"classical\" views of language (which, he maintains, is based on the illusion of a Platonic or Christian transcendent being or presence, serving as the origin and guarantor of meanings) to what I shall call his own graph centric model, in which the sole presences are marks-on-blanks. By this bold move Derrida puts out of play, before the game even begins, every source of norms, controls, or indicators which, in the ordinary use and experience of language, set a limit to what we can mean and what we can be understood to mean. Since the only givens are already-existing marks, \"d~ej' acrit,\" we are denied recourse to a speaking or writing subject, or ego, or cogito, or consciousness, and so to any possible agency for the intention of meaning something (\"vouloir dire\"); all such agencies are relegated to the status of fictions generated by language, readily dissolved by deconstructive analysis. By this move he leaves us no place for referring to how we learn to speak, understand, or read language, and how, by interaction with more competent users and by our own developing experience with language, we come to recognize and correct our mistakes in speaking or understanding. The author is translated by Derrida (when he's not speaking in the momentary short-hand of traditional fictions) to a status as one more mark among other marks, placed at the head or the end of a text or set of texts, which are denominated as \"bodies of work identified according to the 'proper name' of 61 a signature.\"8 Even syntax, the organization of words into a significant sentence, is given no role in determining the meanings of component words, for according to the graphocentric model, when we look at a page we see no organization but only a \"chain\" of grouped marks, a sequence of individual signs. It is the notion of \"the sign\" that allows Derrida a limited opening- 7. Jacques Derrida, \"La Double seance,\" in La Dissimination (Paris, 1972), p. 203. 8. Derrida, \"La Mythologieblanche: la metaphoredans le textephilosophique,\" in Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 304. Translations throughout are my own. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 430 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel out of his premises. For he brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not random markings, but signs, and 148 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

that a sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark-with- meaning. But these meanings, when we look at a page, are not there, either as physical or mental presences. To account for significance, Der-rida turns to a highly specialized and elaborated use of Saussure's notion that the identity either of the sound or of the signification of a sign does not consist in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational) attribute-that is, its \"difference,\" or differentiability, from other sounds and other significations within a particular linguistic system.9 This notion of difference is readily available to Derrida, because inspection of the printed page shows that some marks and sets of marks repeat each other, but that others differ from each other. In Derrida's theory \"difference\"-not \"the difference between a and b and c...\" but simply \"difference\" in itself- supplements the static elements of a text with an essential operative term, and as such (somewhat in the fashion of the term \"negativity\" in the dialectic of Hegel) it performs prodigies. For \"difference\" puts into motion the incessant play (jeu) of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page. To account for what is distinctive in the signification of a sign, Derrida puts forward the term \"trace,\" which he says is not a presence, though it functions as a kind of” simulacrum\" of a signified presence. Any signification that difference has activated in a signifier in the past re-mains active as a \"trace\" in the present instance as it will in the future,1o and the \"sedimentation\" of traces which a signifier has accumulated constitutes the diversity in the play of its present significations. This trace is an elusive aspect of a text which is not, yet functions as though it were; it plays a role without being \"present\"; it \"appears/disappears\"; \"in presenting itself it effaces itself.\"\"11 Any attempt to define or interpret the significance of a sign or chain of signs consists in nothing more than the interpreter's putting in its place another sign or chain of signs, \"sign-substitutions,\" whose self-effacing traces merely defer laterally, from substitution to substitution, the fixed and present meaning (or the signified \"presence\") we vainly pursue. The promise that the trace seems to offer of a presence on which the play of signification can come to rest in a determinate reference is thus never realizable, but incessantly deferred, put off, delayed. Derrida coins what in French is the portmanteau term difftrance (spelled -ance, and fusing the notions of differing and deferring) to indicate the endless play of generated significances, in 9. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1959), pp. 117-21. 10. Derrida, \"La Differance,\" in Marges de la philosophie, pp. 12-14, 25. 11. Ibid., pp. 23-24. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 431 which the reference is 149 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

interminably postponed.12 The conclusion, as Derrida puts it, is that \"the central signified, the originating or transcendental signified\" is revealed to be \"never absolutely present outside a system of differences,\" and this \"absence of an ultimate signified extends the domain and play of signification to infinity.\"13 What Derrida's conclusion comes to is that no sign or chain of signs can have a determinate meaning. But it seems to me that Derrida reaches this conclusion by a process which, in its own way, is no less dependent on an origin, ground, and end, and which is no less remorselessly \"teleological,\" than the most rigorous of the metaphysical systems that he uses his conclusions to deconstruct. His origin and ground are his graphocentric premises, the closed chamber of texts for which he invites us to abandon our ordinary realm of experience in speaking, hearing, reading, and understanding language. And from such a beginning we move to a foregone conclusion. For Derrida's chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly non- presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void. For the mirage of traditional interpretation, which vainly under-takes to determine what an author meant, Derrida proposes the alternative that we deliver ourselves over to a free participation in the infinite free-play of signification opened out by the signs in a text. And on this cheerless prospect of language and the cultural enterprise in ruins Derrida bids us to try to gaze, not with a Rousseauistic nostalgia for a lost security as to meaning which we never in fact possessed, but instead with \"a Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without error [faute], without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active interpretation. .... And it plays without security. .... In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indeterminacy, to the seminal chanciness [adventure] of the trace.\"14 The graphocentric premises eventuate in what is patently a metaphysics, a world- view of the free and unceasing play of difftrance which (since we can only glimpse this world by striking free of language, which inescapably implicates the entire 12. In the traditional or \"classical\" theory of signs, as Derrida describes the view that he dismantles, the sign is taken to be \"a deferred presence ... the circulation of 63 signs defers the moment in which we will be able to encounter the thing itself, to get hold of it, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, have a present intuition of it\" (ibid., p. 9). See also \"Hors livre\" in La Dissemination, pp. 10-11. 13. Derrida, \"La Structure, le signe et lejeudans le discours des sciences humaines,\" in L'Ecritureet la diffirence (Paris, 1967), p. 411. 14. Ibid., p. 427. Derrida adds that this \"interpretation of interpretation,\" which \"affirms free-play.tries to pass 150 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)