Foucault’s Discovery of Critical Theorists as a Remedy for Barthes’s Limitation

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

What’s Good about Destruction?

With both temporally and culturally diverse references, Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author carries out an encompassing attack on the concept of “Author.” His argument is quite simple. The production and criticism of the text have hitherto focused on the Author as the Father of His works; thus, if we acknowledge His ontological opacity and focus on “the reader” as plain agent “without history, biography, [and] psychology,” (148) it would all work out. The former half of the argument, his rage against “God and his hypostases-reason, science, law,” (147) is understandable if we consider the temporal context of the text — the revolution era in France, 1968 — even though he might not want to be analyzed as “the Author” of it. However, the latter half, divinizing the reader as an empty and liberating warrior against the authority, needs a thorough re-examination.

According to Barthes, it seems all the good things come from the subversion of the “Ancient Regime” and accepting any kind of discourse. Of course, you never know the outcome of something until you try it. However, it should be noted that the naive destruction of existing authority and structure doesn’t always lead culture in the direction of enrichment. Here I want to refer to two cases of anarchy after the destruction: science and visual art. A philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend wanted to abolish authority. His attempt to consider myth, magic, and dream as equally valid possibilities as the Newton’s or Galileo’s, saying “Anything goes,” makes science stop there, accumulate nothing, and go back to the autocratic authority. For visual art, things went to the other catastrophic end: After pop art and postmodernism, the art scene just played with the fragmented signifiers (such as Warhol’s) and was eventually engulfed by capitalism.

A Typology of Discourse: Attempt to Re-construct

Therefore, in order not for the ‘empty’ reader to be engulfed by the myth again, the reader should not remain in naive emptiness. The liberated writer and reader have to show the potential to accumulate discourses and protect themselves from the attack of arrogant ideologies. In this respect, Foucault properly discovers the possibility of an ever‑self‑changing discourse as the solution to the anticipated anarchy. Initiated by Marx and Freud, Marxism and psychoanalysis evolved differently from other traditions, such as novels and science. Unlike them, a “discursive practice” relinquishes the self‑maintenance of fundamental assumptions “to its subsequent transformations.” (219) Even though Marxism has evolved to something different from its original form as time goes by, we can still call it Marxism, because it is not a stiff system but a tradition. This flexibility may guarantee these discourses’ longevity, liberty, and any (new kind of) “productivity.”

Indeed, there are various traditions with these “flexibilities” other than Marxism and psychoanalysis. Since we cannot assess the moral superiority or intellectual richness of any one of these —these flexible traditions cannot be assessed by fixed criteria—, we can do, and only do, the classification of these discourses. It is not meaningless at all; with the proper classification, anyone can access the state-of-the-art discourse on the particular subject and truly effectively contribute to the diversity and fecundity. This “typology of discourse (220)” project of Foucault, which I praise for its achievement in both theory and practice, stimulates our imagination to envisage a changed world. For instance, how would the library evolve? Will it reform its bibliography of the field-author-A-B-C system? If so, how?