Page 30 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

AUTHOR/SHIP

‘genius’ but from an ability to exploit these resources. Once written, a
text takes on a life of its own, and what it means depends on the
conditions of its circulation and the uses to which it is put in different
places and times. Its meanings are always plural, and always exceed
what the writer thought was going on, intentionally or otherwise.
However, so established has the concept of authorship become that
it has achieved a kind of hegemony. It seems to represent a
pathological desire for an ultimate origin, a god who will finally limit
the infinite potentiality of meaning.
The desire for a singular origin for meaning has proved strong
enough to infiltrate areas of culture hitherto regarded as too lowbrow
to warrant authors, especially cinema, where the ‘auteur’ approach
seeks to account for certain films by conferring author-status on their
director. Naturally, auteur directors are credited with ‘significance’,
which may be traced across a number of films, and their ‘genius’ is seen
as an individual ‘vision’.
However, the source of meaning in cinema is notoriously hard to
pin down, which is to say that there is no single source, even at the
point of production, let alone once a film is released into the cultural
sphere at large. Auteur theory fixes upon just one person to represent
the creative input of the whole cast and crew – often hundreds of
people working on and off for months or even years, all of whom may
change with the director’s next project. In the history of cinema it has
never been clear who, of all these people, should be treated authorially
– the screenwriter has never enjoyed this status, but it has been
conferred not only on directors but also on stars and, more recently,
even on producers.
It seems in cinema, as in literature itself, that authorship is more a
way of organising marketing strategies and conferring value on
intellectual property than a way of accounting for meaning.
The general reader or viewer approaches authors not as persons at
all but textually; either solely by engagement with a text, or
additionally by knowledge gained intertextually about the author.
The author is ‘implied’ in the writing itself. Hence, for readers,
authors are not persons but an ensemble of rhetorical and narrative
ploys, dedicated to hooking and drawing them into the writing.
Throughout any discursive text or fictional story there are devices
which ‘guide’ the reader as to its preferred reading and direction. Such
devices may also be more intrusive or coercive – an authorial
introduction telling readers how to read what follows, or a cover blurb
which seeks to sell the writing on the basis of the author’s name,
institutional clout or biographical credibility.

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