Give me sloppy any day

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance writes: "Foucault is another example of the objective POV or
perspective".

I think, rather, that his radical revision of subjectivity was designed to
avoid any such binary opposition as that between the objective and
subjective. I suggest that this is the aim of "What is an Author?"

Foucault: "Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he
wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work?"

Hence, author-ness has to be assigned.

And then: "What is the name of an author? How does it function?"

And even: "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 characterising their mode of existence."

All quotations from "What is an Author?" (in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice).

The author, then, isn't a real person but a way of organising knowledge.
Such organisation is a (discursive) social construct. Does this mean
consciously-motivated human beings acting together or separately?

Is it possible for knowledge to be produced and organised without any kind
of human intervention? That is to say, does the production and organisation
that establishes knowledge take place independently of conscious human
activity? One of the points made by Barthes in "The Death of the Author" is
that the concept of author is a means to limiting what we can say when
interpreting a text (eg a novel by Pynchon is not a novel by Mark Twain).
This takes us down a road we've already travelled - towards a distinction
between 'closed' and 'open' readings (or 'writerly' and 'readerly' texts)
and the extent to which Moby Dick is about black cats and mothers. I think
Foucault (and Barthes) would argue that, if MD is not about black cats and
mothers, that's only because such a reading isn't possible; for the sake of
argument, we might agree that, in another time and place, such a reading mig
ht be the only one that makes sense (although don't ask me to explain how).

Interestingly enough, I suppose, this latest subjective/objective thread
began when the p-list briefly went awol and a few scattered souls found
themselves shivering in a virtual lifeboat. Some gave themselves, and each
other, parts to play. I waited for someone to say they wished to be
Hitchcock ...