Text and Power
Anyway, I was thinking that language can be thought of as an exchange of power the same way that social relationships can. In a text, the meaning of any given word depends entirely on the context. Each word affects how the others are processed by the reader, and though their power over each other varies (in relation to things like where they are on the page, punctuation, etc.), none mean the same as part of a text as they would individually. But then, the act of reading itself is an exchange of power, too, because the words wouldn’t have significance without being internalized by a reader, who in turn would not have the impetus to consider the content of the text without the text on the page.
And it’s also an exchange of power between the author and the audience; one selecting the words and determining their order, the other assigning a meaning unique to the individual. Both possess power, arguably equal power, and it is only this interplay that allows a book to be an experience. So the act of analyzing a text is a microcosm of power relations – from words, to sentences, to the author, to the audience.
This relates to that whole idea of the “death of the author” – the concept, formulated by French theorist Roland Barthes, that justifying an interpretation of a text by attributing it to authorial intent is inherently fallacious. The meaning of a text “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.”
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Tags: Foucault
February 13th, 2013 at 3:01 pm
Hi Anonymous,
For this post, at least, it is appropriate for you to not sign your name!
You might be interested to know that Foucault also had an influential essay on the question of the author, “What is an Author?” that was published (I think) 2 years after Barthes. Together they challenged ideas about authorial intentionality as what a text means. One thing that will consider these ideas further is to use the term discourse where you say language. A discourse is a disciplined form of language–so if think about literature or history or medicine you will be able to see that each one has a certain set of questions that it asks, principles that it values, rules of addressing its domain, etc. When we think of it in this light, we can see how discourse constructs authors, historians, and physicians. It goes further when we see how institutions of religion, education and professional training provide credentials to establish who can “speak” officially within a given profession.
February 14th, 2013 at 3:25 pm
Ack, sorry, totally forgot my name! I had never heard of that essay – I will check it out!
February 14th, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Something you mentioned in terms of Foucault’s definitions resonated with me. Perhaps it’s due to a will- to- knowledge on my part (or a less positive trait, impatience), but Foucault’s sense of literary evasiveness rendered the reading of his text less pleasurable for me than I might have hoped. I found that whenever he introduced a concept or a term that he coined, he found the need to explain first what it was not, rather than what it was, thereby teaching through the use of tautologies. Although I do find Foucault’s insights interesting, I personally prefer a more straight- forward text which clearly delineates the author’s philosophy, rather than introducing ideas only to dismiss them in quick succession.