Sloppy Foucault: What matter who's speaking?

[Paul Nightingale]

'What is an Author?' dates from the 1960s; Foucault indicates at the outset
that he wishes to see the author as a discursive formation. How is meaning
assigned to writing?

To juxtapose 'objective' and 'subjective' is to subscribe to some kind of
rehashed positivism. The one only makes sense as an alternative to the
other; this is what I meant by a binary opposition. Either will only make
sense if you accept that the act of reading remains distinct from, and
independent of, that which is being read. This is why, when discussing
Pynchon, I have always tried to prioritise analysis over interpretation.

Any interpretive act insists on the omniscience of the interpreter-as-god.
The analysis of discursive formations has moved way beyond that by
prioritising the production of meaning, both within and between texts. How
and why, not simply what. To define the objective as being not-subjective,
or the subjective as being not-objective, has become meaningless.

Consider the following from an interview ('The Concern for Truth') conducted
at the end of Foucault's life in 1984 (in the excellent collection Foucault
Live, ed Sylvere Lotringer, 1989). The discussion concerns The History of
Sexuality.

"Problematization doesn't mean the representation of a pre-existent object,
nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It's the
set of discursive or nondiscursive practices that makes something enter into
the play of the true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought"
(pp456-7).

This is closely related to the work Foucault did from the mid-70s on
governmentality (including,of course, Discipline and Punish and The History
of Sexuality).  It encourages me to think his affinity to Nietzsche has been
over-stated at the expense of the territory shared by Foucault's
self-governing subject and a Marxian ideological subject.

Either way, "the true and the false" are exposed as constructs. To choose
something called the objective over the subjective is based on the
assumption that one can thereby seek, and find, greater truth or
authenticity.