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

Foucault's visionary lyricism disrupts his coolly formalist analyses or, in another context, that he is
the prisoner of his own archaeological categories.
Nowhere is this inconsistency more keenly registered than in The Order of Things, where, on the
one hand, we might wish that Foucault had dedicated more energy to describing the conditions of
knowledge within the modern episteme than to preparing the stage for its disappearance, and on
the other that he had relaxed his epistemic structures to allow for obvious noetic appurtenances,
an aetiology of concepts from one era to another, phylogenetic analyses, and so on. Certainly, in
any case, little would have been lost by accepting a general principle of reciprocal interplay
between what determines authors and what authors determine, even if this relationship were to
be weighted heavily in favour of deep-lying rules of discursive emergence.
Of course, there are many reasons why Foucault should have encountered insurmountable
difficulties in this text. The Order of Things is, after all, among the most ambitious histories
attempted since Hegel, and is all the more ambitious in that it attempts to tell the story of four
centuries without recourse to the idea of history itself, to the extent that history implies teleology,
aetiology and influence, notions which not only provide the ground principles of historicity in
general, but which also greatly facilitate the imposition of some form of narrative upon the
proliferation of discourses. And we cannot but feel that had Foucault separated his epistemic
researches from his attack upon the subject, perhaps even in the form of two discrete texts, that
both theses would have gained in consistency from this distance. Foucault's subsequent work
goes a certain way toward unpackaging these themes, though on the question of authorship his
revision—like The Order of Things itself—both contradicts and reconfirms archaeological
anonymity.
What (And Who) Is An Author?
As might be expected, The Order of Things became the subject of fierce controversy. Yet
Foucault, generally so passionate in defence of his labours, tended to agree with many of his
detractor's judgements. In the 'Foreword to the English Edition' of The Order of Things he isolated
three problems to which his text had no satisfactory answers: the problems of change, causality
and the authorial subject. Of these problems, it was the latter which seemed to have troubled
Foucault most, and he returned to the author-question at length in a paper entitled 'What is an
Author?'. 42 In the preamble to this monograph, Foucault explained the necessity for a
reevaluation of his approach in The Order of Things:
In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need for an explanation. To this day,
the 'author' remains an open question both with respect to its general function within discourse
and in my own writings; that is, this question permits me to return to certain aspects of my work
which now appear ill-advised and misleading. In this regard, I wish to propose a necessary
criticism and re-evaluation.
For instance, my objective in The Order of Things had been to analyse verbal clusters as
discursive layers which fall outside the familiar categories of a book, a work, or an author. But
while I considered 'natural history', the 'analysis of wealth', and 'political economy' in general
terms, I neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works; it is perhaps due to this omission
that I employed the names of authors throughout this book in a naive and often crude fashion. I
spoke of Buffon, Cuvier, Ricardo, and others as well, but failed to realise that I had allowed their
names to function ambiguously. 43
Yet, from the list of examples Foucault forwards, it is clear that 'What is an Author?' is not
destined to be an entirely open and candid critical reevaluation of The Order of Things. If, in fact,
the names Buffon, Cuvier and Ricardo do function ambiguously in this text they scarcely do so
with a breath of the mystery which surrounds that of Nietzsche. Indeed, 'What is an Author?'
repeats many of the ambiguities that it seeks to dispel. As in The Order of Things, a spirit of
hostility to the author is to encase a meta-authorial description. The essay proper opens with a
line from Beckett, 'What does it matter who is speaking?', a line which tolls at the close as the
indifferent answer to its own question, as Foucault hopefully envisions a society in which the
author-function will have disappeared.44 Indeed were we only to read the beginning and end of
the main text, we should be forgiven for assuming 'What is an Author?' to be a no less
intransigently anti-authorial tract than Barthes's 'The Death of the Author'. Yet having made a
number of preliminary and schematic observations on the author function, Foucault introduces
the centre-piece of his discussion: