#foucault.michel

[aamjp]

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”

Deals with “the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it” (205)

What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list; is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? (207)

Cf. Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author:

it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality. (208)

we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers. (209)

Proposes the ‘author function’ to fill(?) this space.

the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. 

[...] 

As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there area certain number of discourses endowed with the "author function" while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has an editor – but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society. (211)

The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it. [...] Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator's account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. [...] In fact, however, all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self (215)

Analysis of this kind would also “reexamine the privileges [and agency] of the subject” (22)

one must return to this question, not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies. [...] How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. (220-1)

the author is not an indefinite source of significations that 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 recomposition of fiction. (221)

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? (222)

Thought a lot about Scwhabsky’s Object or Project.

[aamjp]

Michel Foucault, ‘Photogenic Painting’

The circulation of images:

“Pop art and hyper-realism have re-taught us the love of images. And not through a return to figuration, not through a rediscovery of the object with its real density, but by plugging it into the unending circulation of images. [... It] is a way of painting their images and highflying them as images within paintings.

[...]

“Pop artists and hyper-realists paint images. They do not integrate the images to their technique of painting; they stretch them out in a great wash of images. Their painting marks a stage in this unending process. [... What] they produce when their work is done is not a painting made from a photograph, not a photograph made up into a painting, but an image seized in the middle of its trajectory from photograph to painting. [... The] new painting carries itself lightly in the midst of the movement of images which it itself makes happen.” (5)

“[Through Fromanger’s painting, the event within the photo] slips through his hands, is sheaved, achieves its infinite speed, instantly joins and multiples points and time, generates a people of gestures and looks, outlines a thousand possible paths between them” (7)

There’s a continual exchange happening between viewer and the image. Is this in a Barthes-ian sense?

“[Fromanger looks] for the event that is taking place and that continually takes place in the picture because of the picture”. (6)

“[Fromager’s interventions] give rise [...] to an unlimited series of new passages. To create by the short circuiting of photo and colour, not the falsified identity of the old photo-painting, but a locus from which myriad images can gush forth”. (6-7)

Through the combination of text (in the the title) and a series of paintings based on the same image:

“Images, which the spectator does not see, come from the depths of space and, from some obscure source, mange to spring from one unique photo to diverge into different paintings, each of which in turn could lead to a new series, a new dispersal of events. [...] The profoundness of photography from which painting tears unknown secrets? No; but the opening up of photography by a painting which, through itself, calls and transmits unlimited images.” (8)

Foucault, Michel. 1989 (1975). ‘Photogenic Painting’, translated by Pierre A. Walker. Critical Texts, 6 (3): 1-12.

A better translation:

“Pop artists and hyperrealists paint images. They do not however incorporate images through their painting technique, but extend technique itself into the great sea of images, where their paintings act as a relay in this endless circulation. [… What] they have produced when their work is at an end is not a painting based on a photograph, nor a photograph made up to look like a painting, but an image caught in its trajectory from photograph to painting. [… The] new painting takes its place enthusiastically in the circulation of images which it does its own part to drive on.” — Photogenic Painting: Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gerard Fromanger (Black Dog: London, 1999), p. 91.