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

to disemburden the text and criticism of the text of any answerability to 'contents', of any
obligations to the aesthetics of representation. However, the further they progressed in the
direction of a non-representational theory and criticism, the more they came to find that their
researches put the validity, and even the efficacy of authorial exclusion under question. Thus, in
time, the Russian Formalists were to seek ways of reinscribing the author without default on their
commitment to the autonomy of literary language, a process which was continued by Bakhtin in
the latter stages of that movement. What the Formalists came to realise—as Barthes did
somewhat belatedly—is that the closure of representation neither necessitates the exclusion of
the author, nor can be achieved on its basis. The removal of the author opens a provisional space
wherein the methodology can be developed, but once the methodology has been established, it
must either return to take stock of that which it has excluded, make reparations, revisions, or
continue to neglect the question of the author at the cost of remaining regional, selective,
inadequate to the literary object.
The representational aesthetic has been under attack at least since the time of Mallarmé, and the
more radical critical schools to appear during this century, those of the Russian Formalists, the
Anglo-American New Critics, the structuralists and deconstructionists, have—to greater and
lesser degrees—rejected mimesis in favour of textual language in and for itself. Indeed, it would
not be the boldest stroke to suggest that we have entered a postrepresentational era: certainly, in
any case, no-one any longer takes seriously the ideal of pure realism. Correspondingly modernist
and postmodernist fiction has moved further and further from representationalist modes. 70 The
theoretical recognition of this development has not only proceeded on the high roads of
structuralism and poststructuralism, but is also to be found in the quieter work of conventional
aestheticians. John Hospers' Meaning and Truth in the Arts is as good a guide as any to the
inherent contradictions in the doctrine of representation.71 The decline of representation has
been signalled also in the reworkings to which Marxist critical theory has been subject in the last
quarter-century. Having moved beyond Lukács's reflection model, Marxist thought has come to
assert that language is not so much expressive as constitutive of social and cultural realities, a
position which maintains the text's interaction with its historical and infrastructural conditions
whilst avoiding the corollary obligation to discover the principles of that interaction in the
supposedly representational function of textual language. The later work of Michel Foucault is
also of the greatest significance in the quest for non-representational structures by which
textuality can be related to the social and ideological ground of its determination. With Jacques
Derrida and Paul de Man the denial of representation takes the form of a thoroughgoing
epistemological scepticism which relentlessly questions the basis and validity of imputing any
properties of presence or re-presentation to textuality. Barthes began his career by radically
redefining the Marxist relation to textuality, and the work of recent Marxist revisionists can be
retraced to Writing Degree Zero, as to the moment at which language rather than its objects was
introduced as the determining factor in a literary text's engagement with the social and historical
conditions of its emergence. Later in his career, Barthes's lifelong hostility to representation
began to ally itself cursorily with the conclusions reached by Derrida and de Man, yet the reasons
for Barthes's espousal of a language of pure differences could scarcely themselves be more
different. As we have seen, Barthes's concerns are far from epistemological; if anything, his
objection to representation is moralistic. That is to say, that what he spent a writing life
challenging is what we might call the ethics of representation, the ways in which a society
transforms culture into nature and thereby stamps its products with the seal of authenticity.
Accordingly, he works to expose the concealed mechanisms by which representational ethos
imposes itself, to dissipate vraisemblable, rather than to subject the philosophy of language
underpinning such an aesthetic to rigorous scrutiny. This is the burden, too, of texts which have
not concerned us here, Mythologies in particular. Advance pointing to your mask (larvatus
prodeo), this is all Barthes finally asks of any system, any work of art or literature, and it is for this
reason that his labours are finally more disentropic than iconoclastic.
In On Racine he had looked to criticism of the author, and had disputed its validity not on the
grounds that the author was dead or irrelevant to criticism, but in point of its dishonesty in
concealing the essentially subjective nature of such an activity. Author-centred criticism, he
concluded, was as admissible as any other form of criticism provided that it no longer contorted in
empty posturings of self-justification, so long as it became 'the mask of several living