What is a Blogger?

Excerpt from above video:

Foucault says all the things that we attribute to authors (or other bloggers ;) are actually things that we project onto them that are actually about our relationship to the texts themselves. So, for example, when I pick up a novel and I'm reading it, that novel activates my imagination, my creative capacities, and so it puts me in a mode of Engagement that is fundamentally creative, and that's just about my relationship to the text. But then, I take that feature of my relationship to text creativity, and then I sort of psychically projected onto the author of the text itself, and I say, "Oh well, the author must have been very creative," simply because that is the way in which I experience the text. So there is a projection happening. 

In all Acts, or naming and talking about authors, another way in which this projection happens, it's not just with creativity like with psychological traits that we project to authors that are actually about texts, it also happens when it comes to the unity of texts and the unity of the figure of the author. And the reason here is, as follows: when I read a bunch of texts that have the same signature, like all of Heidegger's works, or all of Edward's novels, or, whatever all the poems by Lord Byron.

Unity
I as the reader try to find some theme that will try to connect them all in some way. I try to unify them just because I see that they have the same name on them. And so the unification is is a mental operation that the reader carries out. And then that Unity is projected onto the author, and we say the person who wrote all of these must have been one one person with a with a kind of unitary identity. And so this kind of projection, for Foucault, is what the author function is. It is US projecting things about our relationship to text on to this amorphous kind of illusory Mirage, like feet, or a figure that we call the author. 

The fourth and final feature of the author function is that the author function contains, according to google, many subjectivities, or rather, he says, a variety of Egos. And what he means by that is that when you encounter Egos, a text, and it's written by an author, and you have a relationship to it, there are actually not one, but many different egos that are at work in the creation of that authorial function. 

So on the one hand, there is the ego understood as the writer, literally the person who put in time and effort into the creation of the text, but then you have a second order ego which is the narrator, in the word. This is especially true in literature, right where you open a book and it's told from a certain narrative standpoint, but the narrator is not the same as the author and we would make a fundamental literary mistake um if we were to assume that writers are their narrators all the time. Sometimes they could be, but they need not. 

Now, so you have the writer, you have um the second ego which is the narrator, and then sometimes you even have a third level of ego that is sometimes encapsulated in things like the introduction, the preface, the conclusion, where suddenly there is a new eye talking about the book, which is the eye of the writer writing retrospectively from the standpoint of the conclusion of the book, or writing projectively, from the standpoint of the beginning of the book. And again, that's not quite the writer, and that's not quite the narrator, it's some other eye, some other ego, that speaks also through the work. 

And this variety of egos, again the writer, the narrator, and then all these other weird egos that sometimes creep their wage writing. All of this is not just true of literature, according to Google every kind of writing is subject to this plurality of egos that actually decentralizes or it upsets our understanding of the author as one as a Unity that doesn't change over time. 

Foucault brings his analysis of the author function to a conclusion by adding yet more layers of complexity to our understanding of this function, and he says, "Look, I've already told you that it's not a proper name. And I've already told you that it has these four defining features which are: that it's tied to objects of appropriation in law and economics, that it's subjected to rules that can change over time, that it is rooted in an exercise of psychological projection, and that it always involves a variety of egos that don't sit super comfortably with one another, there is not all, we cannot expect Harmony between the multiple eyes that exist in writing. He says that's always true of all authors. But we still should consider that there are different kinds of authors. Most of his analysis is of what he refers to as: authors of particular texts, like people who wrote an article, a poem, a book, a manuscript, whatever you want. 

But Foucault says there are also people, other types of authors, who author things that are different than just text. For example there are people who are the authors of theories, in the same way that for instance we might talk about Copernicus being the author of the theory of heliocentrism. So too we can talk about somebody like Einstein, as the author of the theory of relativity. Where what they are contributing is certainly writing, because they wrote about their theories, but they are authoring some larger thing than just a text, which can be a theory, a hypothesis, a way of viewing the world. So that would be a different kind of author than just the author of texts. 

But then, there is this third category. And this is what Foucault calls "trans discursive" authors, and this is a kind of tricky category but essentially, a trans discursive author is somebody who authors an entire school of thought that itself is not limited to a particular domain or discourse. That's why they're called trans discursive. So they create a world view that can actually affect many different disciplines, many different fields or domains of discourse. And the examples that he gives are: Freud, who authored psychoanalysis and then psychoanalysis has an application in clinical Psychiatry, it has an application in literature, it has an application in the visual arts, it can change things up in philosophy. Another example would be somebody like Marx, who's Corpus, whose ideas go beyond just attacks and beyond just the theory. Again, it is that trans discursive formation that can move across areas, areas of intellectual production. And so Foucault says, "Let's just keep that in mind as a way of remembering how complicated this thing is that we call an author."