Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

premised that the concept of the author derives from the culture of the book and that the collapse
of the latter necessarily vitiates the former. Such arguments again have a Janus-faced quality.
Rather like the dubitable trajectory which McLuhan followed in seeing a secondary orality in the
technologies of radio and television, digital votaries find affinities in the pre-technological world of
primary orality. Interactivity is seen to restore the immediacy and copresence of the speech
situation: a dialogic or polyphonic anti-authoritarianism is promised in the 'scripted speech' which
contemporary technology facilitates. At the same time, the model of unitary authorship is
challenged by a collaborative model which seeks distant antecedents in the accretional
construction of 'Homeric' epic, the open text of the Medieval period, or the work of the
confabulatores nocturni of The Thousand and One Nights. Pretechnological necessity is thereby
associated with a virtuously democratic futurology. The unifying functions of book and author are
rethought as imprisoning and monologic impositions on a discursive sphere which is properly
without closure or respite. From a pastoralised world in which 'the text is handed over to the
reader in a state of perfection', digital technology constructs a realm where 'in the near future it
will be difficult—even impossible—to say who is the author of a text'. Just as 'the closed and
protected text will be a thing of the past', so too 'the boundary between reader and author should
largely disappear'. 7 As Michael Heim writes in Electronic Language: 'digital writing turns the
private solitude of reflective reading and writing into a public network where the personal symbolic
framework needed for original authorship is threatened by linkage with the total textuality of
human expressions'.8
In considering these claims, nothing could be further from the point than to declare oneself for or
against technology. Its progress will not be delayed or indeed expedited by any 'ought': both the
first word of prophecy and the last word of reaction are equally out of place. One can, however,
call into question a representation which purports to speak from elsewhere. Reflections on the
technology lag behind the technology itself, but the argument insists that we inhabit an ideal
vantage point which has yet to be realised. How, for example, are we to take the constructions of
multiple authorship and the idea of the reader as coauthor within this postlapsarian culture? In
what kind of world will the reconfiguration of the canonical text be a compelling act—whether in
aesthetic or political terms? If interactivity allows the reader to become the co-author of, say,
Paradise Lost, are we to expect that this 'new' text—reconfigured and replete with readerly
interpolations—will be a document of widespread cultural interest? The utopian nature of this
vision need hardly be stressed. One need not be an unreconstructed advocate of objective
aesthetic value to perceive that while I may become free to interact with and co-compose Bach's
Mass in B Minor, I would also expect to be the sole auditor of my act of co-composition. A
seemingly less contentious construal would take the claims of interactivity to mean that 'the active
reader necessarily collaborates with the author in producing a text by the choices he or she
makes'. If this is the case, however, then the number of texts produced by readers are
innumerable, just as Scotus Erigena once said that scriptural meanings are without limit. There
may well be as many Bibles as its readers, but there are not innumerable versions of The Bible in
circulation. As Borges's 'Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote' wryly demonstrates, the ne varietur
form of the book does not inhibit rewritings by the reader; the same form of words can constitute
different texts in different times. 9 For us, the Iliad and the Odyssey are objects of aesthetic
pleasure and historical speculation; to the presocratic Greek they constituted guides to practical
action. The words of the Tempest have not changed substantially but they compose today a text
different to the one experienced by an inhabitant of Elizabethan England. However, a multitude of
readings implies a stable entity on which such readings take place (and here much confusion
would be avoided if advocates of the digital revolution attended to Roman Ingarden's argument
that the literary work of art must be distinguished from its concretisations, its mundane
reproductions and the multiple acts of readerly consciousness that it promotes10): a tiny
proportion of those readings enter public consciousness and less still endure as acts of reading
which have an ongoing influence of the interpretation of the primary text. Any achieved act of
criticism reconfigures the text by proposing a singular channel and set of links to other texts. It is
quite possible that extraordinary documents of creative criticism will one day be produced using
digital technology just as extraordinary readers are once or twice produced in a generation in the
forms of an Oscar Wilde, a William Empson. What is certain, however, is that the new technology
will not produce an ultrademocratic world in which a significant proportion of linked-up readers