What this makes me think of, is that all the photographs in the world, perhaps there is a finite limit to the possibilities even if that limit is immense...
Perhaps all photographs are discovered, as opposed to created... therefore we are not the creator, we are a discoverer, we are not responsible for making it, we are responsibile for discovering that particular configuration of visual imagery.
The Death of the Author
source???
1967 essay
or image-Music-Text (1977)
- Roland Barthes
Begins with an example story: Sarrasine, by Balzac
Describes a castrato male, disguised as a woman.
- The sentence describing him
"Who is speaking in this way?" ... "It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several discernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes." p2
"this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins."
"the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more of less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence." p2
"linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language "work," that is, to exhaust it." p3
"The author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book - that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now." p4
"We know that text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture." p4
"suceeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end of halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation." p5
"Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing." p5
"This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take its major task the discovery of the Author beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:" the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even "new criticism) should be overthrown along with the Author."
"we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its muth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed bu the death of the Author." p6
-translated by Richard Howard
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
The Death of the Author notes
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