What is an author?

Foucault. What to do with Foucault? You can't live with him; you can't live without him. I first read "What is an Author" about 5 years back, and I didn't find it memorable. I think I was getting Foucault through the teeth those days. Foucault was Law, and so I wanted to diminish his hold on me, claiming he knew nothing. Although I did think he knew something.

Rereading "What is an Author" I find that my mind is ignited with insight. I don't agree with the zero-sum positions that F often urges - such as the dissolution of the subject or the complete negation of nature through the elevation of discourse, discipline, and discursively created subjectivity - however, I do think that discourse legitimates modes of being and thinking and to that end I value F very highly. What I will not do is idolize him.

Here is a passage that struck me while I was rereading this afternoon:

"Discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act – an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illict, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership." (Rabinow 108)

This reminded me: I was reading Greenblatt's bio of Shakespeare, Will and the World this summer, and I was struck by the violence of the theological battles in Renaissance/Reformation England. Greenblatt claimed that Shakespeare was secular because it was the only way he could survive (I'm not sure I agree). He came from a house of Catholic sympathizers while Elizabeth I was busy killing Jesuits (who were trying to overthrow her rule). Greenblatt describes the arrest of Edmund Campion SJ in his chapter, "The Great Fear". Pope Gregory xiii proclaimed that the assassination of Elizabeth I would not be a mortal sin (99)and Campion, amongst others took him seriously. By 1585 it was treason to be a Catholic priest in Britain (100). Greenblatt remarks "Saints, Shakespeare understood all his life, were dangerous people" (110). While he was free Campion claimed that he could defeat any Protestant that wanted to debate him on theological matters. After he was arrested, two Protestant theologians were brought before him and challenged him to a debate. They were Alexander Nowell, the dean of St. Paul's, and William Day, the dean of Windsor. Greenblatt narrates:

"The theologians, seated at a table piled with books and notes, were celebrated debaters. At another table two other distinguished but hardly neutral figures, William Chalk, the preacher of Gray's Inn, and William Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, were poised to act as notaries. The prisoner would get his debate, but the government would set the stage and the rules.
Campion objected that he had had not time to prepare, had not notes and no books, and that he had been subjected to "hellish torture". ...Campion accepted - as he had no choice but to accept - the grossly unfair terms of the debate. He then proceeded, by what appears to be near-universal consensus, to annihilate his opponents." (115)

In the weeks that followed the Crown staged three more debates with fresh scholars, at which point, (with a little help from torture) the Crown declared victory. They then hanged Campion, then quartered him and boiled the pieces of him in a vat (all public of course):

"One of the bystanders, a Protestant named Henry Walpole, was close to the place where the hangman was throwing the pieces of Campion's body into a vat of boiling water. A drop of the water mixed with blood splashed out upon his clothes, and Walpole felt at once, he said, that he had to convert to Catholicism. He left for the Continent, became a Jesuit, and was sent back to England, where he too was arrested and executed as a traitor. Such are the works of saints and martyrs." (115-6).

In this context, Foucault's claims make sense (well maybe not in this context but in a context that remembered this context well - perhaps during the Enlightenment). I'm also reminded of John Berger's claim that painter began to sign their work during the renaissance (Ways of Seeing). It would be interesting to compare the persecution of authors with painters. Is written truth much more troublesome than visual? Perhaps the iconoclast controversies previously dealt with this topic.