"Perhaps it was all a mistake, a terrible act of misreading. Rather than a serious deconstruction of the author concept, perhaps Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author" was ironic, a close relative of Pop Art. After all, while "The Death of the Author" achieved its widest circulation in the U.S. in its 1977 version in
Image - Music - Text, it is perhaps lesser known that the essay had appeared previously in English in the Fall-Winter 1967 issue of the avant-garde magazine
Aspen: "each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards" and even a Super-8 film. Contributors included Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Hans Richter, Susan Sontag, and others. Barthes's essay -- translated by Richard Howard -- appeared in a double issue (the
Minimalism issue) which explored "conceptual art, minimalist art, and postmodern critical theory." 1967-68: a serious time shaken by violence and protest, yes, but also a time of great experimentation and humor and absurdity. The pleasure of death; jouissance that has been lost as career academics used Barthes's essay, stripping it out of its playful dimensions, its at once urgent and resigned manifesto-like quality (...)
"Stripped of aura, of mystery, of distance, we are known today as mapped elements in a database. Surveilled, recorded, and marked, we are becoming the function of our components -- our decoded genes, the number of hits (hourly, daily, monthly) on our websites, our on-line purchasing histories. It is perhaps ironic that it is in the very forms of authorship that post-humanist critics strove to erase that we find our best chance of theorizing -- and resisting -- our own disappearance. Donna Haraway's ironic prediction -- "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" -- has assumed the shape of everyday social reality. Is it any surprise that for every technological advancement that renders a more perfect, flawless reality -- whether it be classical Hollywood's invisible style, or new film stocks and lenses that offer a cleaner and sharper image, or the hyperrealism of high definition, or the clean, hiss-less ring of the digital code -- is it any surprise that these are always accompanied by countermeasures that preserve and introduce errors, mistakes, degradations of the pristine image? Whether it be Italian neorealism, or cinema verité, or experimental films by the likes of Stan Brakhage, or the rough, "amateur" look of the Dogma 95 films, or even the blurred, miniature movies of web cinema -- all these serve as an antidote to the very forms of perfection that we seek. The author is stronger than ever today because she reminds us of an identity memorable for its utter failures. And to be reminded of our failures is to be reminded that we are human.(...)"
Nicholas Rombes @
ctheory
The previously unknown species, the Yariguies brush finch, Atlapetes latinuchus yariguierum,