Author! Author!

[This turned out even more long and boring than the last one! I will write about my trip to the hospital, and my adventure changing a bike tire with an anti-papist Hungarian, eventually]

About 30 minutes ago, I sprayed deodorant into my eyes. A whole series of missteps led to this, the first of which is the apparent unavailability of normal deodorant in this country. Also my shampoo had exploded in my bag, and it was very slippery. But as I was wincing in a public shower, I thought to myself, "Do all authors go through this? Behind every book, every article, is there some poor sap fruitlessly trying to wash deodorant out of his eyes?"

Of course, the answer is yes. It's kind of counter-intuitive though, at least to me. I never really thought about the authorship process of a book/dissertation in any serious way before this trip. I guess I still kind of imagined the author as a magical, wizard-like figure, from whose head chapters spring, fully-armed. This made me think about the whole "Death of the author" thing. "Death of the author" is one of those phrases, like "the end of history" or "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte", that is much more interesting for the hysteria it's created than for what it actually meant to begin with.

This is a tangent, but I am sick to death of the phrase "trendy post-modernists" or some version thereof. Almost all of those Heidegger articles contain something like that, and I really don't think the word "post-modernist" or even the word "theorist" really appears anymore without the addition of that word. The word "trend" means, "The general direction in which something tends to move." I challenge anyone to prove that academia is moving towards anything that might be called post-modernism. I have been in academia for ages and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about post-modernism, or the figures who apparently represent it (Derrida/Baudrillart/Lyotard/whatever). This includes classes in English, philosophy, and history (presumably the three most po-mo disciplines) at two northeastern universities that are presumably the target of all these attacks. Even at Columbia, which should be ground zero for this stuff, every student reads essentially the same "great books" curriculum that people read at finishing school 50 years ago. In graduate-level English classes, invocation of any theory was met with collective eye rolls. Am I missing something? Are students across the land forced to read de Man and told that there is no such thing as truth? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. And if it's not, everybody who wastes so much energy lampooning post-modernism needs to think of a different, and better, reason why nobody cares about the humanities.

(See this for instance: what is the point of this? Nobody talks like this in the universe. So what psychological need is it fulfilling? The same thing for those post-modernism sentence generators: what is BEHIND this animosity? The ideas themselves are irrelevant, something else is going on)

Anyway, so the "Death of the author" is one of those things, like "postmodernism," that is only really talked about by people who hate it. The critique of the idea (not the idea itself) has filtered into the general culture, too: I heard a non-academic the other day dismiss the thesis, apropos of nothing. My point with all of this is not to prop back up the death of the author thesis, or to add to the avalanche of critiques by saying in some facile way that "the author's intentions matter" or "context matters" or whatever. I mean: the debate about, "Is the location of meaning the author or the reader?" is stupid. Or at least seems to miss the point, because it misses everything that comes between the author and the reader, which seems way more important than the input of those two suckers.

So little of my time has been spent sending thoughts out of my brain and onto a page that it's changed the way I think about "writing" as an activity. It seems like the best way to think of an "author" is not as a "source of meaning" or even as a "function" of a text, but as himself an institution. The amount of resources necessary to write is enormous: Library cards, special access, visas, grants, university affiliations, police registration, and on and on. This is not just ancillary stuff, but is constitutive of the whole project. What the finished product "means" seems kind of beside the point. The function it serves—the FORM, which is always more important than the content—is structured by all of these institutions. It is a piece of a job application, and a necessary hurdle to the PhD, first and foremost. And isn't all writing kind of like this? I'm looking through the papers of all these interwar writers, and they never say, "I have serious meaning I wish to impart!" They say, "Oh man, I am out of money so I need to sell this article."

The author can't be dead, because someone is applying for grant money.

But I do, of course, have something I want to say. The pages will not be blank in the finished product. But why do I want to say it, and to whom? When I examine my motives, it is not really, "I want more people to know about this part of European history." What do I care? People can get on perfectly fine without knowing about my topic. If I really cared about that, wouldn't I post all of my writing online for free and spam the whole internet with the address? I'm writing this because it is necessary; it is part of my job description, the way joy buzzers are in the job description of clowns. It actually helps me to think of it in this way. It's easier to get up in the morning to complete a job you've been assigned than it is to serve the interests of civilization.