Who is the author?

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD
(FROM IMAGE, MUSIC, TEXT, 1977)

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose 'performance' - the mastery of the narrative code -may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person'. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme's theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer's interiority seemed to him pure superstition. Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel - but, in fact, how old is he and who is he? - wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou - in his anecdotal, historical reality - is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codes-itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only 'played off'), contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by show ing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or - which is the same thing -the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered-something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes'. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained'- victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined, along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no 'person', says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Another-very precise- example will help to make this clear: recent research (J.-P. Vernant) has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the 'tragic'); there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him-this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Foucault’s "What Is an Author?" was originally delivered as a lecture in 1969, two years after the first English publication of Barthes’ famous essay "Death of the Author, 1967)". Although never explicitly stated, it’s quite obvious Foucault is directly responding to and criticizing Barthes’ thesis as evidenced by the following statement early in the essay: “A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance.”
Both Barthes and Foucault agree the "Author” is an unnatural, historical phenomenon that has unfortunately obtained mythological, heroic status. And both aim to contradict and complicate this status. However, their methods are drastically different.
If "Death of the Author" actively attempts to kill the Author from the position of full-frontal attack, then "What is an Author?" casually submits to the inevitability of this death and opts instead to further problematize the foundational definitions underlying author and text.
“[I]t is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself,” Foucault writes. “The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.”
Here, Foucault poses a series of ontological questions regarding a text. Questions like, Where does one draw a line in an author's oeuvre? What constitutes a work? Should everything an author writes, including notes, scribbles and shopping lists, be considered part of a work?
He then goes on to question and complicate the author in a similar vein. “'First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author's name. What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents.”
After positing the classificatory problems associated with an author’s proper name, Foucault introduces the concept of the “author function” and describes its primary characteristics:
1. The "author function" is connected to the legal system. The law insists on holding individuals accountable for subversive or transgressive communications, hence the need for an “author.”
2. The "author function" varies according to field and discipline. Anonymity in scientific discourses, for example, is more acceptable than in literary discourses where an author is always demanded in order to situation meaning within the text.
3. The "author function" is carried out through "complex operations" and "is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer".
4. An "author" doesn't necessarily connote a specific individual; several narrators, selves and subjects confuse and complicate the designation between author and individual.
Foucault then makes a distinction of an "author function" and how it relates to an individual work versus an entire discourse. Authors who operate in the latter category are what he calls "founders of discursivity" and operate in the unique position of the "transdiscursive". These are authors like Freud and Marx who "...are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts."
By the end of "What is an Author?" it becomes clear that Foucault is interested in exhaustively complicating the notion of what it means to be an author through the articulation of “author” alongside its many historical and discursive formations rather than, like Barthes, singling out a generic “Author” to attack.

THE DESIGNER AS AUTHOR

Spring 1996

Essay
What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?
Authorship has become a popular term in graphic design circles, especially in those at the edges of the profession: the design academies and the murky territory between design and art. The word has an important ring to it, with seductive connotations of origination and agency. But the question of how designers become authors is a difficult one. and exactly who qualifies and what authored design might look like depends on how you define the term and determine admission into the pantheon.

Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages. But theories of authorship also serve as legitimising strategies, and authorial aspirations may end up reinforcing certain conservative notions of design production and subjectivity - ideas that run counter to recent critical attempts to overthrow the perception of design as based on individual brilliance. The implications of such a re-definition deserve careful scrutiny. What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?

The meaning of the word ‘author’ has shifted significantly through history and has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last 40 years. The earliest definitions are not associated with writing per se, but rather denote ‘the person who originates or gives existence to anything’. Other usages have authoritarian - even patriarchal - connotations: ‘the father of all life’, ‘any inventor, constructor or founder’, ‘one who begets’ and ‘a director, commander, or ruler’. More recently, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s seminal essay ‘The Intention Fallacy’ (1946) was one of the first to drive a wedge between the author and the text with its claim that a reader could never really ‘know’ the author through his or her writing.(1) The so-called ‘death of the Author’, proposed most succinctly by Roland Barthes in a 1968 essay of that name, is closely linked to the birth of critical theory, especially theory based in reader response and interpretation rather than intentionality.(2) Michel Foucault used the rhetorical question ‘What is an Author?’ in 1969 as the title of an influential essay which, in response to Barthes, outlines the basic characteristics and functions of the author and the problems associated with conventional ideas of authorship and origination.(3)

Foucault demonstrated that over the centuries the relationship between the author and the text has changed. The earliest sacred texts are authorless, their origins lost in history. In fact, the ancient, anonymous origin of such texts serves as a kind of authentication. On the other hand, scientific texts, at least until after the Renaissance, demanded an author’s name as validation. By the eighteenth century, however, Foucault asserts, the situation had reversed: literature was authored and science had become the product of anonymous objectivity. Once authors began to be punished for their writing - that is, when a text could be transgressive - the link between the author and the text was firmly established. Text became a kind of private property, owned by the author, and a critical theory developed which reinforced that relationship, searching for keys to the text in the life and intention of its writer. With the rise of scientific method, on the other hand, scientific texts and mathematical proofs were no longer seen as authored texts but as discovered truths. The scientist revealed an extant phenomenon, a fact anyone faced with the same conditions would have uncovered. Therefore the scientist and mathematician could be the first to discover a paradigm, and lend their name to it, but could never claim authorship over it.

Post-structuralist readings tend to criticise the prestige attributed to the figure of the author. The focus shifts from the author’s intention to the internal workings of the writing: not what it means but how it means. Barthes ends his essay supposing ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.(4) Foucault imagines a time when we might ask, ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’(5) The notion that a text is a line of words that releases a single meaning, the central message of and author / god, is overthrown.

Post-modernism turned on a ‘fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion’ of the subject, noted Frederic Jameson.(6) The notion of a decentred text - a text which is skewed from the direct line of communication between sender and receiver, severed from the authority of its origin, and exists as a free floating element in a field of possible significations - has figured heavily in recent constructions of a design based in reading and readers. But Katherine McCoy’s prescient image of designers moving beyond problem-solving and by ‘authoring additional content and a self-conscious critique of the message … adopting roles associated with art and literature’ has as often as not been misconstrued .(7) Rather than working to incorporate theory into their methods of production, many so-called ‘deconstructivist’ designers literally illustrated Barthes’ image of a reader-based text - ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture’ - by scattering fragments of quotations across the surface of their ‘authored’ posters and book covers.(8) The dark implications of Barthes’ theory, note Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, were fashioned into ‘a romantic theory of self expression’.(9)

Perhaps after years as faceless facilitators, designers were ready to speak out. Some may have been eager to discard the internal affairs of formalism - to borrow a metaphor used by Paul de Man - and branch out into the foreign affairs of external politics and content.(10) By the 1970s Design had begun to discard the scientific approach that had held sway for decades, exemplified by the rationalist ideology that preached strict adherence to an eternal grid.

Muller-Brockmann’s evocation of the ‘aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking’ is the clearest and most cited example of this approach.(11) Muller-Brockmann and a slew of fellow researchers such as Kepes, Dondis and Arnheim worked to uncover a pre-existing order and form in the way a scientist reveals ‘truth’. But what is most peculiar and revealing in Muller Brockmann’s writing is his reliance on tropes of submission: the designers submits to the will of the system, forgoes personality, withholds interpretation.

On the surface, at least, it would seem that designers were moving away from authorless, scientific texts - in which inviolable visual principles arrived at through extensive visual research were revealed - towards a position in which the designer could claim some level of ownership over the message (and this at a time when literary theory was moving away from that very position). But some of the institutional features of design practice are at odds with zealous attempts at self-expression. The idea of a decentred message does not necessarily sit well in a professional relationship in which the client is paying the designer to convey specific information or emotions. In addition, most design is done in a collaborative setting, either within a client relationship or in the context of a studio that utilises the talents of numerous creative people, with the result that the origin of any particular idea is uncertain. The ever-present pressure of technology and electronic communication only muddies the water further.

Is there an auteur in the house?
t is perhaps not surprising that Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ was written in Paris in 1968, the year students joined workers on the barricades in a general strike and the western world flirted with real social revolution. The call for the overthrow of authority in the form of the author in favour of the reader - ie the masses - had a real resonance in 1968. But to lose power you must have already worn a mantle, which is perhaps why designers had a problem in trying to overthrow a power which they never possessed.

The figure of the author implied a totalitarian control over creative activity and seemed an essential ingredient of high art. If the relative level of genius - on the part of the author, painter, sculptor or composer - was the ultimate measure of artistic achievement, activities that lacked a clear central authority figure were devalued. The development of film theory during the period serves as an interesting example. In 1954 film critic and budding film director François Truffaut had first promulgated the ‘politique des auteurs’, a polemical strategy developed to reconfigure a critical theory of the cinema.(12) The problem was how to create a theory that imagined a film, necessarily the result of broad collaboration, as the work of a single artist, thus a work of art. The solution was to determine a set of criteria that allowed a critic to define certain directors as auteurs. In order to establish the film as a work of art, auteur theory held that the director - hitherto merely one third of the creative troika of director, writer and cinematographer - had ultimate control over the entire project.

Auteur theory - especially as espoused by the American critic Andrew Saris - speculated that directors must meet three criteria in order to pass into the sacred hall of auteurs.(13) Sarris proposed that the director must demonstrate technical expertise, have a stylistic signature that is visible over the course of several films and, through his or her choice of projects and cinematic treatment, show a consistency of vision and interior meaning. Since the film director had little control of the material he or she worked with - especially within the Hollywood studio system, where directors were assigned to projects - the signature way a range of scripts was treated was especially important.

The interesting thing about auteur theory is that film theorists, like designers, had to construct the notion of the author as a means of raising what was considered low entertainment to the plateau of fine art. The parallels between film direction and design practice are striking. Like the film director, the art director or designer is often distanced from his or her material and works collaboratively on it, directing the activity of a number of other creative people. In addition, over the course of a career both the film director and the designer work on a number of different projects with varying levels of creative potential. As a result, any inner meaning must come from aesthetic treatment as much as from content.

If we apply the criteria used to identify auteurs to graphic designers, we yield a body of work that may be elevated to auteur status. Technical proficiency could be claimed by any number of practitioners, but couple this with a signature style and the field narrows. The designers who fulfil these criteria will be familiar to any Eye reader; many of them have been featured in the magazine. (And, of course, selective republishing of certain work and exclusion of other construct a stylistically consistent oeuvre.) The list would probably include Fabian Baron, Tibor Kalman, David Carson, Neville Brody, Edward Fella, Anthon Beeke, Pierre Bernard, Gert Dunbar, Tadanoori Yokoo, Vaughn Oliver, Rick Valincenti, April Greiman, Jan van Toorn, Wolfgang Weingart and many others. But great technique and style alone do not an auteur make. If we add the requirement of interior meaning, how does this list fare? Are there designers who by special treatment and choice of projects approach the issue of deeper meaning in the way Bergman, Hitchcock or Welles does?

How do you compare a film poster with the film itself? The very scale of a cinematic project allows for a sweep of vision not possible in graphic design. Therefore graphic auteurs, almost by definition, would have to have produced large established bodies of work in which discernible patterns emerge. Who, then, are the graphic auteurs? Perhaps Bernard and Van Toorn, possibly Oliver, Beeke and Fella. There is a sense of getting a bigger idea, a deeper quality to their work, aided in the case of Bernard and van Toorn by their political affiliations and in Oliver by long association that produces a consistent genre of music, allowing for a range of experimentation. In these cases the graphic auteur both seeks projects he is commissioned to work on from a specific, recognisable critical perspective. Van Toorn will look at a brief for a corporate annual report from a socio-economic position, Bernard evokes a position of class struggle, capitalist brutality and social dysfunction and Oliver examines dark issues of decay, rapture and the human body. Jean Renoir observed that an artistic director spends his whole career remaking variations on the same film.

Great stylists such as Carson and Baron do not seem to qualify for admission to the auteur pantheon, at least according to Sarris’s criteria, as it is difficult to discern a message in their work that transcends the stylistic elegance of the typography in the case of Baron and the studied inelegance of that of Carson. (You have to ask yourself, ‘What is their work about?’) Valicenti and Brody try to inject inner meaning into their work - as in Valicenti’s self published Aids advertising and Brody’s attachment to the post-linguistic alphabet systems - but their output remains impervious to any such intrusion. A judgement such as this, however, brings us to the Achilles’ heel of auteur theory. In trying to describe interior meaning, Sarris resorts to ‘the intangible difference between one personality and another’.(14) That retreat to intangibility - the ‘I can’t say what it is but I know it when I see it’ aspect - is one of the reasons why the theory has long since fallen into disfavour in film criticism circles. It also never dealt adequately with the collaborative nature of cinema and the messy problems of movie-making. But while the theory is passé, its effect is still with us: the director to this day sits squarely at the centre of our perception of film structure. In the same way it could be that we have been applying a modified graphic auteur theory for years without being aware of it. After all, what is design theory if not a series of critical elevations and demotions as our attitudes about style, meaning and significance evolve?

Other models of authorship
Auteur theory maybe too limited a model for our current image of design authorship, but there are other ways to frame the issue based on different kinds of practice: the artist’s book, concrete poetry, political activism, publishing, illustration and so on. Could a theory of poetics be a functional model? Use is a major sticking point in trying to view designed work as poetic: traditionally the poem as artwork is a self-contained artefact, while design refers to some exterior function or overt intention.

This poetic / practical opposition is resolved in two examples of design production: the artist’s book and activist design. The artist’s book offers a form of design authorship from which function has been fully exorcised. The artist’s book, in general, is concrete, self-referential and allows for a range of visual experiments without the burden of fulfilling mundane commercial tasks. There is a long tradition of artists’ books through the historical avant-garde, the Situationists, Fluxus and experimental publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. Its exponents include an eclectic mix of designers and authors (Dieter Rot, Tom Phillips, Warren Lehrer, Tom Ockerse, Johanna Drucker) as well as visual artists (Robert Morris, Barbara Kruger, Mary Kelly, Jenny Holzer, Hans Haacke). Dieter Rot has produced a monumental and consistent body of books which explore in a self-reflexive way, the nature of books. Lehrer has focused on production processes, such as printing and binding, and aspects of dialogue and narrative. He has recently produced a new group of graphic portraits, distributed in the form of trade paperback, perhaps the most recent attempt at wide distribution.

Artists’ books - using words, images, structure and material to tell a story or invoke an emotion - may be the purest form of graphic authorship. But the odd thing about the genre is that many of the most skilled designers have avoided it and much of the work produced under the rubrik is of sub-standard graphic quality (not in terms of production values, which are often necessarily low, but in typography and composition). The singularity of the artist’s book, the low technical quality and the absence of a practical application may alienate the professional graphic designer.

If the difference between poetry and practical messages is that the latter are successful only when we correctly infer the intention., then activist design would be labelled as absolutely practical. But activist work - including the work of Gran Fury, Bureau, Woman’s Action Coalition, General Idea, Act-Up, Class Action and Guerilla Girls - is also self-motivated and self-authored with a clear political agenda. Proactive work has a voice and a message, but in its overt intentionality lacks the self-referentiality of the artist’s book Yet several problems cloud the issue of authored activism, not least the question of collaboration. Whose voice is speaking? Not an individual, but some kind of unified community. Is this work open for interpretation or is its point the brutal transmission of a specific message? The rise of activist authorship has complicated the whole idea of authorship as a kind of free self-expression.

Perhaps the graphic author is one that writes and publishes material about design - Joseph Muller-Brockmann or Rudy VanderLans, Paul Rand or Erik Spiekermann, William Morris or Neville Brody, Robin Kinross or Ellen Lupton. The entrepreneurial arm of authorship affords the possibility of a personal voice and wide distribution. Most split the activities into three discreet actions: editing, writing and designing. Even as their own clients, the design remains the vehicle of the written thought. (Kinross, for instance, works as a historian then changes hats and becomes a typographer.) Rudy VanderLans is perhaps the purest of the entrepreneurial authors, since in Emigre all three activities blend into a continuous whole. In Emigre the content is deeply embedded in the form – that is, the formal exploration is as much the content of the magazine as the writing. VanderLans expresses his message through the selection of the material (as an editor), the content of the writing (as a writer) and the form of the pages and typography (as a form-giver).

Ellen Lupton and her partner J. Abbott Miller have almost single-handedly constructed the new critical approach to graphic design, coupled with an exploratory practice. A project such as ‘The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste’, an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Centre, seems to approach a new level of graphic authorship. The message is expressed equally through graphic / visual devices and text. The design of the show evokes the issues that are its content; it is clearly self-reflexive. (The exhibition catalogue, by contrast, does not embody the same level of graphic authorship. Here Lupton seem to have slipped back into the more familiar, functionally separate roles of author and designer.) But much of their other work demands to be reckoned with, visually and verbally.

While Lupton and Miller‘’s work is primarily critical - a reading of exterior social and historical phenomena directed at a specific audience - the illustrated book, often overlooked by the design community, is almost entirely concerned with the generation of creative narrative. Books for children have been one of the most successful outlets, but author / illustrators such as Sue Coe, Art Spiegelmann, Charles Burns, Ben Katchor, Dave McCaulley, Chris van Allesburg, Edward Gorey and Maurice Sendak have also used the book in wholly inventive ways and produced serious work. Books such as Speigelmann’s Maus and Coe’s X and Porkopolis expand the form into new areas.

Other models that may indicate a level of graphic authorship include projects of such a scale that the designer is called on to make sense of a sea of material and construct narrative. Bruce Mau’s work with Rem Koolhaas on the gigantic S,M,L,XL, an architectural and typographic ‘novel’ (see Eye no.15 vol.4), and Irma Boom’s five-year commission from a powerful Dutch corporation to create a commemorative work of unspecified form, scale and content are two such projects. Here the designer - working like a film director on the unfolding cinematic structure of the work - assumes a primary position in the shaping of material.

The final category is that of designers who use the medium of professional graphic design to create self-referential statements and comparisons. Examples include April Greiman’s special issue of Design Quarterly, a full-scale image of her pixilated body with a personal text full of dreams and visions, and any number of intricate and enigmatic works by the likes of Tom Bonauro and Allen Hori (for instance, Hori’s graphic interpretation of a Beatrice Warde essay in a recent Mohawk paper promotion). Operating in a space between service-orientated projects and free expression, these works eschew the parameters of a client relationship while retaining the forms dictated by the needs of commerce: the book, poster, exhibition and so on. In the case of Hori’s visual essay, the client pays for a graphic work to embellish a corporate project and the designer lends his avant-garde credentials to the corporation.

Forward or backwards?
If the ways a designer can be an author are complex and confused, the way designers have used the term and the value ascribed to it are equally so. Any number of recent statements claim authorship as the panacea to the woes of the brow-beaten designer. A recent call for entries for a design exhibition entitled ‘Designer as Author: Voices and Visions’ sought to identify ‘graphic designers who are engaged in work that transcends the traditional service-oriented commercial production, and who pursue projects that are personal, social or investigative in nature’(15) The rejection of the role of the facilitator and call to ‘transcend’ traditional production imply that the authored design holds some higher, purer purpose. The amplification of the personal voice legitimises design as equal to more traditional privileged forms of authorship.

But if designers should aim for open readings and free textual interpretations - as a litany of contemporary theorists have convinced us - that desire is thwarted by oppositional theories of authorship. Foucault noted that the figure of the author is not a particularly liberating one: the author as origin, authority and ultimate owner of the text guards against free will of the reader. Transferring the authority of the text back over to the author contains and categorises the work, narrowing the possibilities for interpretation. The figure of the author reconfirms the traditional idea of the genius creator; the status of the creator frames the work and imbues it with mythical value.

While some claims for authorship may be simply an indication of a renewed sense of responsibility, at times they seem ploys to gain proper rights, attempts to exercise some kind of agency where there has traditionally been none. Ultimately the author equals authority. While the longing for graphic authorship may be the longing for legitimacy or power, is celebrating the design as central character necessarily a positive move? Isn’t that what has fuelled the last 50 years of design history? If we really want to go beyond the designer-as-hero model, we may have to imagine a time when we can ask, ‘what difference does it make who designed it?’

On the other hand work is created by someone. (All those calls for the death of the author are made by famous authors.) While the development and definition of artistic styles, and their identification and classification, are at the heart of an outmoded Modernist criticism, we must still work to engage these problems in new ways. It may be that the real challenge is to embrace the multiplicity of methods - artistic and commercial, individual and collaborative - that comprises design language. An examination of the designer-as-author could help us to rethink process, expand design methods and elaborate our historical frame to incorporate all forms of graphic discourse. But while theories of graphic authorship may change the way work is made, the primary concern of both the viewer and the critic is not who made it, but rather what it does and how it does it.

- Is it someone who creates something?
- Someone who writes books?
- Originator?
- Someone who gives existence to something?
- An individual who has their own opinions?
- Someone who has power to point out their idea?

In this essay I will be giving an overview of the birth of the reader as put forwards by Roland Barthes. Barthes suggested that the idea of author was dead and unimportant in reading a text. His ideas have caused a huge amount of controversy; even 40 years on his ideas are still being debated. Barthes theory gives power to the reader and many theorists such as Foucault have agreed with this. However, Rock suggested as designers have never been considered authors they may be unwilling to give up on the ideas and recognition associated with authorship. Rock also looks at ‘Auteur Theory’ to discuss whether a designer could be considered an author. Using a range of design work as examples, I will assess the strengths and weaknesses of Barthes essay ‘The Death of the Author and attempt to determine the relationship between designers and the idea of authorship. I will also give my own opinion in whether designers should be considered authors.

An author is a person who writes something and who is associated with power. In the past we have always thought that the job of writing is to communicate the ideas of its author. This means that when we read something we are looking for their intention. The word author is linked to authority; they are the ones who have the knowledge of the subject they are writing about therefore, they are the ones who have the power. We read their work to learn from them.

However, in his 1969 essay ‘The Death of The Author’ Ronald Barthes rejects this idea. He devalues the role of the author and gives the power to the reader. He says it does not matter what the authors’ intention is but it is the reader interpretation of the text that matters. Barthes proposes that once the author has written the text the text exists on its own so it’s the words and sentences that make up the text that really matter. Language and words have different meaning to different people. Barthes believes that this means each person understands a text in their own way. “Words…have double meanings… A text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other…”.

The author understands their text in one way but not in everywhere because he/she cannot imagine all the possible meanings it might have for other people. However, Barthes states “There is someone who understands each word in its duplicity…this someone is precisely the reader. So this way an author just becomes another reader. Once we have taken the power away from the author “the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless” the power is now in the hands of the reader.

Foucault agrees with Barthes to an extent, both of them agree that a text is read in its own right and we cannot understand it by looking at the author. Barthes and Foucault both undermine the importance of the author by saying that if we try and use the author as a code to explain the text we limit our understanding and interpretation. In Foucaults ‘What is an Author Essay’ he introduces the idea of author function in which he states the purpose of the author is to write the text once the text exists on its own the author as an individual becomes irrelevant. He then stated that the author is just a fictional character, as we read a book we speculate what the author might be like i.e. we create their character. This means that we should not give the author any power and we should not believe that they hold the meaning of the text. They both agree in taking the power away from the author, Barthes believes that the author id dead whereas Foucault believes that the author is irrelevant.

There are many strengths to Barthes ideas. In the famous Eye Article ‘A Designer as Author’ Michael Rock looks at the collaborative process of design. If design involves contribution from many different people, is authorship a relevant idea? “Most design is done in a collaborative setting, either within a client relationship or in the context of a studio that utilises the talents of numerous creative people, with the result that the origin of any particular idea is uncertain.” Meaning that if a group of people do all the work to create something who is the author? For example in making a comic you have an artist, graphic designer, writer, publisher and printer. All of them will consider themselves as the author. However, the reader will conflate them into one imagining a single author. This returns to Foucault’s idea as author as a character. “The aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only are projection.” Furthermore, techniques for design use computers they can be seen as doing our work for us. Making film sequences requires a graphic designer but the process is all computer based meaning that the graphic designer cannot get a sole credit for the work. As Michael Rock Says “The ever-present pressure of technology and electronic communication only muddies the water further.” “The aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only are projection”.

Typography is a really interesting example of authorship. If someone designs something that involves a typeface such as a leaflet, they design the layout. However, someone else has designed the font, so which one of them is the author? Another interesting example is templates .They are usually used by people who do not have design experience; templates are design made easy for people. They can be used for flyers, posters; even school children can use them. This complicates the issue of authorship hugely. If we can give the title of author to someone who knows nothing what so ever about design, does the word author mean anything other than the original creator as Foucault says.

Many designers belong to schools of design. Typography is a good example of this. Ellen Lupton is a typographer who follows the Bauhaus school. This means she follows Bauhaus principles such as “the limitation to characteristic, primary forms and colours, readily accessible to everyone”.
If someone is following a set of rules created by someone else, are they the author or does credit for the work go to the originator of those principles? The designer can be said to be interpreting those set of rules and making something slightly different but the issue of authorship is complicated.
Bauhaus have their own theories on the relationship between design and authorship. “The production of Bauhaus does not represent any kind of competition for either industry or crafts but rather provides them with impetus for their development. The Bauhaus does this by bringing creatively talented new people with ample practical experience into the actual course of production”. This means that Bauhaus is advising a middle ground between industry and art so a compromise between the idea of author and no author.
Another form of collaboration would be interactivity. This “refers to the possibility of an audience actively participating in the control of an artwork or representation”. An example of interactivity is graphic design for the internet. The concept of Facebook is entirely based on interaction. It encourages people to design their own pages, upload their own pictures and write statuses. We are the ones who control text and content on our page. This dilutes authorship and supports his idea that the reader is the creator. In his essay, ‘The Illusion of Interactivity’ Andy Cameron states “interactivity means the ability to intervene in a meaningful way within the representation itself, not to read it differently. Thus interactivity in music would mean the ability to change the sound, interactivity in painting to change colours, or make marks, interactivity in film the ability to change the way movie comes out and so on.”

In terms of the weaknesses of Barthes argument, Rock identifies a desire in designers to be seen as authors. Of Barthes argument he says “the call for the overthrow of authority in the form of the author in favour of the reader had real resonance in 1968. But to lose power you must have already worn a mantel, which is perhaps why designers had a problem in trying to overthrow a power which they never possessed.” He goes on to discuss the issue of auteur theory. An auteur literally means author, however, it has been invested with more power. An auteur is considered to have control over their genre. We view them as an artist at the top of their field. Critic Andrew Saris suggested that film directors needed to fulfil three criteria in order to be considered an auteur: 1) Technical Expertise 2) Have a stylistic signature 3) “Show a consistency of vision and interior meaning”, by which they mean an overall world view or consistent message. Michael Rock says, “The parallels between film direction and design practice are striking”, due to both industries relying on collaboration. In his essay ‘The Designer as Author’ he applies the auteur criteria to design and comes out with a list of designers he considers auteurs. One of them is typographer Wolfgang Weingart.

Rock considers Weingart to have both technical proficiency and stylistic signature however; it is harder to determine whether he has vision and interior meaning. Rock says, “graphic auteurs would have to have produced large established bodies of work in which discernible patterns emerged” for us to gage whether they have an interior meaning. As a designer I think that someone who creates something must be recognized because if they are not recognized they will stop producing. As a consumer we also need their work to be labelled as it helps us to distinguish what we want to read, view or watch. All creators work in a consumer market and their reputation as an author is what authenticates them. For example, J.K Rowling’s reputation is based on Harry Potter so now anything she writes will sell well. Her new novel is nothing to do with wizards or adventures but it is already selling brilliantly because people know her name. In its first six days her book ‘The Casual Vacancy’ sold 375,000 in the US alone.
We have seen how Barthes’ idea of killing of the author has provoked great debate. Foucault largely agreed that the power lay with the reader and it was their job to interpret the artistic work which gave it meaning. The issues of collaboration and interactivity dilute the power of the author. When many creatives work on a project together who do we call the author? If an artistic work is designed to encourage participation from its audience, the designer is giving away part of their authorship. These problems with authorship seem to support Barthes ideas. However, Michael Rock posits that design should be able to be considered high culture and the idea of authorship is a key to this. His essay is a response to designers wanting to be considered as authors. They believe they should be given credit for their work. As consumers, we also need to be able to follow the authors that we like. The authors name on a work helps us to discriminate between what we do and don’t want to look at. This returns to Michael Rocks survey of ‘Auteur Theory’. Consumers grow to love a certain author’s style.
In my opinion designers should be seen as authors. At the moment designers are considered functional workers but I think they should be given the same credit as creators of fine art. Each designer has their own unique process and creates a unique product. They deserve recognition for this.