Page 33 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

to forge new meanings. This creativity takes place ‘inside the whale’ of postmodern
consumer capitalism where the binary divisions of inside–outside and
authentic–manufactured collapse. Style is on the surface, culture is industry,
10 subcultures are mainstream, high culture is a subculture, the avant-garde is
commercial pop art, fashion is retro. However, the deconstruction of authenticity
at the level of theory does not prevent participants in youth subcultures from laying
claim to it. Indeed, empirical research suggests that claims to authenticity remain
at the heart of contemporary youth subcultures and club cultures.
Links Anti-essentialism, author, essentialism, postmodernism, style, subculture

Author Both the high cultural tradition and common sense understand an author to
be an individual who is the creative originator of a text and whose intentions
constitute a work’s authentic meanings and significance. This account of an author
is solidly located within the humanist tradition wherein meaning is understood to
be the product of unique and unified persons who possess an inner core that is the
source of significance and creativity.
However, this view has been challenged, from a number of theoretical directions,
by questioning the proposition that individuals are the most appropriate level at
which to explore the generation of meaning. Thus the tradition of hermeneutics
disputes the idea that an ‘author’ has any special insight into the meanings of a text
since meaning is required to be actualized by readers who may do so in ways that
deviate from authorial intention. For hermeneutic theory, understanding and
meaning are realized in the ‘hermeneutic circle’ that is constituted by the interplay
between texts and readers.
Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, writers associated with poststructuralism, have
also challenged the centrality of authorship. Indeed, Barthes famously announced
the ‘death of the author’ arguing that a text does not consist of a single meaning
(the ‘message’ of the Author–God), rather, it is better grasped as a multi-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings blend and clash. In other words, textual
meaning is unstable and cannot be confined to single words, sentences or particular
texts. Meaning has no single originatory source but rather is the outcome of
relationships between texts, that is, intertextuality. This is an idea that finds further
elaboration in the work of Derrida and in particular through his notion of
‘différance’. In a parallel argument, Foucault suggests that the proper name ‘author’
is not to be identified with a ‘real and external individual’ but rather is a sign that
marks an ‘author–function’ in the context of discourses of individualism and artistic
creativity. Thus the ‘author’ is understood to be a sign of a particular ‘regime of the
self’ and its processes of subject formation.
To hold subjects and texts to be the products of social and cultural processes that
lie outside of the individual does not mean that either persons or works of art are
not original. Originality does not have to mean that subjects or texts are their own
spontaneous source but rather that they demonstrate specific and unique
arrangements of the cultural resources from which they are formed. Subjects all
have unique patterns of family relations, of friends, of work and of access to