Give me sloppy any day

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> 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?"

What you call a radical revision designed to avoid, I would call
Foucault's Creative principle. Like the Objective perspective it is
clearly present and defined in the essay. In fact, these are what the
essay is all about. It's all about deconstructing definitions of an what
an author is and giving primacy to the creative principle. 
It's not a matter of avoiding binaries. Foucault is after all (like
Nietzsche and  Freud), an Agonist. This is his method. So when you say
he *avoids* the binaries I think what you are talking about is the
Creative principle and how it functions with the Objective Perspective
in his thought and in the essay.  

For example, at the end of the essay he poses several questions and
these questions are designed 

(a)  to construct an Objective discourse

(b) to privilege the Creative principle

 I note that you chose the  verb "avoid" to describe Foucault's method.
What do you mean by avoid? How does he avoid the binaries? 

I don't think he avoids them at all. I think your use of the verb
"avoid" agrees with my reading of Foucault.  You are not suggesting some
dialectic because one doesn't simply avoid binaries with the dialectic
method. You don't seem to be suggesting that Foucault's argument is
logistic or constructive. Surely we can agree that Foucault's method
involves de-construction and not logistic argument.  In fact, he 
deconstructs not by some dialectic or by premise to conclusion
arguments,  but by placing ideas in opposition. That no dialectic or
logistic is involved is obvious, his essay after all, is not question
and answer or premise and conclusion, but a question and more questions; 

he begins by asking, 

what is an author? (ideas about what an author is, how an author
functions and so forth are deconstructed to give primacy to the creative
principle) 

he concludes with a series of questions about discourse and anonymity
(the objective perspective). 



 


I don't know where in the essay you find Foucault talking about such
binaries anyway. 
As I read Foucault, he is all about binaries in conflict. In other
words, as I've said before, like Nietzsche, Foucault is an Agonist. 


> 
> 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).

Right. 

> 
> The author, then, isn't a real person but a way of organising knowledge.
> Such organisation is a (discursive) social construct. 

Right. 

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).

Foucault's St.  Jerome. 


> 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).

Such readings are possible, even if they are manifestly fantastic and
absurd. 
I don't think it's simply a matter of living in one time and place where
for example this subjective reading of M-D  is not possible or in a time
and place where/when reading of M-D might be the only one possible. 

It's always possible to read M-D as a story about one's mother and her
black cat. In fact this is what people do all the time. One can read M-D
as being about one's mother and her  black cat, but how does one
introduce such a reading to the common discussion of the common text and
convince others that such a reading of the common text M-D is warranted
or has merit beyond its subjectivity and creativity? 

Take Irving Malin's essay "Foreshadowing the Text" for example. Malin is
co-editor of the first volume of essays published about M&D. Why is his
essay in the volume? What is its purpose? Why does it have merit? Why
include it? 

"I am Nobody." 
"Nobody has blinded me!" 

	- Homer