Facebook and Focault

“An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author” (Focualt 108).

I read this as someone in the digital age, a part of the Facebook generation, and I have to laugh at how well the words mesh with our own morphed ideas of those same words now mean. “Text,” “post,” and “wall” all now denote a digital sort of discourse where the writer and author are very much alive (despite what Barthes claims about the print text). I bring my ideas to Focault—and he’s dead. But what if this was his status update or a tweet? What if he posted an anonymous comment on a Yahoo story? Is he still dead if the dialogue is actively going on?

But the digital age does nothing to revive Barthes dead author, right? Authorship remains artificial. Right now I am writing this blogpost because I am enrolled in a grad class where we have to do two posts per week or else... I type it out in Word first and it usually catches most of my typos. I copy/paste it into Blogger and Google takes care of the formatting for me. After I hit “post” and the blog goes to my main page (or “wall”) am I only the writer here? Can I not take all the credit because I have all of these forces acting on me, shaping my discourse? Is my choice between Blogger and WordPress a form of authorship or do those spaces write me? (And, I should note here, that we begin to see the re-emergence of an interest in the body and embodied rhetorics.)

             Most significant is what Barthes calls the “total existence of writing”—the idea that “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestations” (148). My blog is a response to a number of texts read each week and (hopefully) synthesized. I look at my peers’ blogs, the class blog rules, and author my next response. I take all of these thoughts and put them through the series of interfaces (or do the interfaces act like Burke’s terministic screens? I’m not sure.). When I take this into account it seems like I was barely alive to begin with and each time I post a little part of me dies. Writing just seals the deal.

            So we have all these forces acting on and shaping and reshaping text. Barthes goes on to remind us that the reader is also coming to the text with his/her own context. The author is done. The text is written. Now it’s the reader’s turn to contribute to the text. And this is where the breakdown is for me: it seems that the idea of author/writer and reader, where a text resides for Barthes is largely based in time. Barthes states that “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after” (145).  But the before and after is blurred in Cixous when she writes “as a woman, towards women” (1524). It is not just audience idenitifcation here; this is a movement in time that bridges the past and present. How is the author dead when she writes as if speaking directly to us?

            I’ll venture a guess and say that a large part of this has to do with the capitalist nature of the 20^th century—that we tend to view living and dead in terms of production. The dead is a final product, the thing produced from manual labor that becomes an artifact. Life is the process by which an artifact (fossil?) is found.

            This brings me back to digital writing—a Google doc, an instagram, or a iPhone location update. What happens to our idea of the dead author when the book in the material sense is erased? Is authorship really bound up in the material? Is the idea of the dead author dead because of digital context or does this digitized text cause an outer-body experience?