Page 29 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

AUTHOR/SHIP

it is invoked to ascribe not just meaning but value – aesthetic or moral
as well as monetary – to works and authors identified by literary
criticism (and marketing managers) as ‘significant’. Once an author’s
name has been established, then potentially any writing under that
name counts as authored – even down to shopping lists, if any were to
turn up that had been penned by, say, Shakespeare. Such are the ironies
of ‘significance’.
Authorship is, then, a social system imposed on the domain of
writing; it is not the act or trade of writing. It is a system for producing
hierarchies within that domain. Authors are the product of a social
division of labour, and authorship is an ideological notion which
functions to privilege not only certain kinds of writing and writers,
but also, more importantly, certain ways of thinking about the
meaning of texts.
The ideology of authorship locates the source of literary quality not
in aspects of writing itself – the exploitation of genre, convention,
rhetoric, intertextuality and so on – but in the bodies of writers.
Creativity, inspiration, experience, the ability to ‘express’ thought,
emotion and truth, these personal attributes are supposed to emanate
from a free-floating individual consciousness which is assumed to the
source of meaning, with writing merely a transparent medium through
which the great thoughts can flow to the reader’s equally free-floating
consciousness.
The ideology of authorship leads, for example, to the fruitless
search for ‘what Shakespeare really meant’ – an impossible quest which
leads inexorably to the imposition of authoritarian meanings on a
given work by a critic who seeks to establish one reading as the only or
true reading. In other words, any appeal to ‘the author’s intentions’ is
coercive – it seeks to impose ideological closure on a text, to minimise
its polysemic potential. It is also dishonest, imputing to the author
meanings that are necessarily the creation of the critic. ‘Intentionalist’
criticism is reduced to second-guessing an author who is conveniently
absent, often dead, so that it is impossible to verify what his or her
intentions were.
Moreover, an author’s intentions do not account for the meaning of
a text. Even if the author can be interrogated, as, for example, in an
interview, what results from this process is not a direct account of his
or her intentions, but merely another text. Authors always work within
the domain of writing, which is an autonomous domain with its own
history, modes of production, genres, conventions and established
practices. Writers are to a large extent at the mercy of the discursive
resources available to them, and creativity comes not from abstract

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