Death of the Author

An auteur is someone who creates a body of work, usually writing, which is what the word author is derived from. In the lecture we went to about this subject, we went over what it meant to be an auteur, how it related to not just writing, but filmmaking and having a style as well. This message was brought home for us by looking through Roland Barthes 'Death of the Author'. We looked at several excerpts from the book and talked about how cynical he was about the credit of authorship and how too much emphasis was placed upon the author, rather than the reader. Some of the ideas we went over were fairly confusing, as my mindset was not prepared for this type of in depth conversation. The general idea I got from what I heard and understood was that Barthes said that the author was that he believed the reader was more of an integral part in how the book is perceived. He believed that it wasn't the author that brought meaning to the written work, but that it was "language which speaks, not the author" (Barthes. R, 1968, pg. 143). The author is merely there to refacilitate already created works and recycle them into something that is new. In animation this can be related to how many things nowadays are recreations of already made works, and its up to the audience whether or not to accept these new works into the already known body of information.

He also believed that the modern author was a product of a modernised capitalist society, wherein the ideas of the author are held in higher praise than the readers. Where an individual cares more about the money involved rather than the actual creation of the text. In popular culture, this can be seen in Hollywood with people making movies and films with the sole reason of producing a profit out of it.

In another text, a man by the name of Landow, said "hypertext... infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting that portion to the reader"(Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 90). This predicts that through the act of reading a work, the power structure between author and reader changes in favour of the reader. In that text it talks about how hypertext can help the reader acquire more information and ideas through the act of reading and writing along with it. In the case of animation, I can see how the idea of response is very important within our modern society, seeing the many critics and movie reviewers of todays age. They tend to provide a deeper meaning to the animation by giving context a regular viewer might not have noticed. A deeper meaning which, even the creator of the animation might not have meant to create by any actual sense.

I can see how many of these peoples ideas an predictions about the modern age can be construed in todays society as both correct and false. Later in Landow's text, he quotes another man while refuting that Digital writing, because it consists of electronic signals, puts one willy-nilly on a network where everything is constantly published. Privacy becomes an increasingly fragile notion. Word processing manifests a world in which the public itself and its publicity have become omnivorous; to make public has therefore a different meaning than ever before” (ElechicLunguuge, 215).

The key phrase here, of course,is “in a sense,"…. The answer must be in some bizarrely inefficient dystopic future sense-”future” because to- day few people writing with word processors participate very frequently in ... information networks that already exist, … the billions and billions of words we would write would all have equal ability to clutter the major resource that such networks will be. " (Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 94-95). We can see that in todays internet culture there is a huge amount of information that can tend to clutter our perceptions of what the overarching point would be. There is so much information going around that privacy HAS become more and more fragile. There have been countless leaks of information from various celebrities to other bodies, even the CIA. Today there is more and more information being put through more and more filters and interpreted in many different ways. In some ways this is very good but in others it does in fact risk privacy and general well being. It also does a very good job at making the reaction to stigma and various works much more important than the actual work itself.

In closing, I would say that these two people had very interesting ideas considering most of them had no idea about what kind of landscape we have ourselves in today. I can see many of their points would be correct in terms of the animation industry and many creative industries, as well as how their ideas might be incorrect in terms of general pop culture and the ideas of the masses.

Barthes, R. (1968) "Death of the Author" in Image Music Text, (1977), London, Fontana Press


Landow, G.P. (1992) "Re-configuring the Author" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.