authorship – GV Loewen

The Author: Persona Gratis

The Author: Persona Gratis (on the hyperbole of authority)

One would not imagine that any author, let alone one prolific and broadly based, would disclaim credit for his works, but I want to examine how the notion of ‘The Author’ has not only come about, but as well, how it has accrued to itself what I think is a too-bountiful accreditation and thus an over-generous genuflection. It is well known that publishers play on the names of best-selling authors, who, since the mid-nineteenth century, may not have written all of the titles upon which their name appears. Readers are attracted to a famous name, and anything published thereunder will sell, and far more so than that of an unknown figure. The name of an author is a autograph persona which is both free to the press – they get undue mileage from it if the author has himself sold well in the past – and presents a free pass even to the more discerning reader who has previously enjoyed books by this ‘same’ person. These two forms of gratis make the author’s name most welcome, for it eases the process at both ends of the productive-consumptive cycle for such products. The name of the author thus takes over the function of fetish for this kind of commodity, freeing the author herself to write, perhaps under another name, something else not as beholden to market interest. This third form of gratis is not as gratuitous as the first two, but it still acts as an hyperbole, extending the reach of the writer as an actual person, simply because this same person as author no longer struggles to make ends meet through her actual work.

It is always of interest when a singular concept iterates itself. The ‘author’ may be dead, in Barthes’ terms, in part due to the death of the idea of the work as Werke, and in part due to the death of God, the ultimate author, but this passing in fact has freed up the ‘writer’ – in terms yet wider than Derrida’s – to become an authority without relying upon authorship per se. One of Barthes’ motives arrives via a basic hermeneutics. Dorothy Smith, in her gracious dialogue with me many years ago, told me this: “When you publish a book, it is like writing a message and putting it in a bottle. You cast that bottle over the side and you have no idea where it will end up, or when. If it finds a beach at all you still can’t guarantee anyone will find it!” Certainly this is a wisdom, and indeed, the implication that one’s work will find itself rather shipwrecked on a reef or on the rocks remains a likely outcome, especially for philosophical books. This apt image speaks at first to the sense that the author loses control over ‘his’ work as soon as it is released, and for celebrity authors, perhaps sooner than this, when their avid editor and then marketer gets a hold of it. But historically speaking, if the book is read at all, the author in fact dies due to the function of the reader.

The reader brings her own life experience to the text, and interprets it thereby and therefrom. I have had a number of such experiences, mostly with fiction, since the interpretative latitude that fiction allows for is far wider than that of non-fiction. The interpretation of discourse is, however, a more profound movement in authorship, if not necessarily authority. Kant reading Hume is called to mind; certainly one of the most serious moments in modern readership and interpretation. Heidegger reading Husserl is another, the former taking apart his mentor’s work and moving from it. Far less profound, but somehow of perduring import nonetheless, are other like moments, such as Riefenstahl reading Mein Kampf andthen criticizing its author to his face about it. As with most such encounters with those he admired,Hitler laughed it off with the no doubt self-conscious equivalent of an ‘aw shucks, girl’. One is tempted to insert a Leonard McCoy line, such has ‘I’m an artist, Leni, not a politician’, but so it goes. As modern hermeneutics explains to us, the text is eventually the world itself, and so Hitler’s later brushing off with a grin and a chuckle his top fighter pilot’s sage advice regarding how to destroy the RAF ended up carrying a far more fateful weight to it.

The exegetical function of the reader broadens as readership did itself widen. However authoritarian and social class reproductive was the new bourgeois education from the 1820s onward, what it did produce was several generations of readers both apt and rapt, especially women, who ripped through a copious library of volumes, of pulp as well as of more precious paper. It is not a coincidence that the same decades saw figures like Schleiermacher and Schlegel break open the narrow scriptural definitions of hermeneutics and declare that its methods applied to all kinds of text. By the 1870s the ‘world as text’ sensibility, first associated with Dilthey, himself a profound student of textual revolution the early ‘post-Enlightenment’ period of the 1820s and 1830s – recall his first major work, the biography of Schleiermacher, widely hailed as a masterpiece and establishing Dilthey’s reputation as a major scholar even though its second volume was never completed – had captured the intellectual imagination as well as popular authorship, coming to its first nadir with Conrad and Wells. With some irony, given how hermeneutics freed itself from its lengthy roots in religious scholarship, the world as a text was in itself not a new idea. The medieval outlook had it that the ‘prose of the world’, to use Foucault’s expression, was literally written into the cosmos at large by the divine hand itself. The world was an autograph edition, not of itself, but indeed of the creation.

All authors, therefore, had their apical ancestor in God. The logoi of human writers was a species of the Logos, the text made in His own image kindred with the being itself. But not only authorship was at stake here. Authority was itself linked up to that divine, and so the author was able to accrue to himself a kind of meta-narrative: in the main, that authorial intent was understood to be the key to any rightful interpretation, and though Schleiermacher extended the scope of hermeneutics he did not deviate from this ancient sensibility. To read scripture, and later nature, was to understand the mind of God as an intentional structure. No one claimed that they could know the divine mind as a whole, of course, only what God deigned communicate to humanity. Still today, there are those who imagine that what the author thinks of their work is the standard by which all other interpretations must be judged. This is an error at a number of levels, not the least held within Smith’s image above. In fact, we know today the author to be simply another reader of the text, since the text has taken on a life of its own after publication, or, even after being written in the first place. For myself, I do not return to my philosophical works. They would require me to patiently study them again, for one, and the earlier ones are often too prosaic to provide any pleasure in their decipherment. I have enjoyed re-reading many of my fictional works, mostly to share them with others aloud, but even here, I find myself either not recalling how I wrote this or that part, or, more radically, that I myself even wrote them at all! This is more than the wiseacre writers guide’s ‘healthy distance’. I have changed in the interim, which is my much-wanted ‘intents’ must be taken with a grain of hermeneutic salt. I have changed, and my interpretation of ‘my’ work has thus also changed. Sometimes we hear a question, if the author is famous, along the lines of ‘would you have written this or that today, or in hindsight, what are your thoughts about…’. To attempt a response other than ‘that was who I was then’ or such-like, is to gainsay the life process and as well, perhaps avoid acknowledging the ultimate outcome of that selfsame process.

We as well sometimes hear of authors who tell us that they have ‘forgiven their younger selves’, but this is at best unnecessary and at worst a piece of personal sophistry. At the same time, authorial authority demands that I ‘stand by my works’, even though ideally any such work should be able to stand by itself. One can immediately understand how the historically inclined aura of the author casts a broad pall over both free interpretation as well as individuality, all the while allowing such persona to become both grander than they are as persons while at the same time losing their own textual freedom. From Barthes to Foucault and beyond ‘the author’ is a bad idea from the start. Derrida’s sense of it being ‘replaced’ or trans-substantiated into ‘the writer’ also did not hold up. For the writer too has both a pedigree and an aura – even the foppish but yet fashionable line, uttered in a Bohemian accent, that ‘I am a writer’, carries with it an indelibly clannish crest, declaiming a kind of cultural, but not at all necessarily cultured, elitism – and the former cannot provide nobility any more than can the latter become a halo. Perhaps the most an author should ever do, in responding to the effect of what he has written, is express an unfeigned caution about augmenting any interpretation through the use of authorial sources: ‘Yes, at one point I did write this book, and here’s what I like about it and here’s what I don’t’. One can consider this the author’s version of Richler’s deadpan, ‘I write books; some people like ‘em, some people don’t’. In this gruff but apt epigram lies the basic operation of both the writing process and the reception of the text itself, especially for fiction. Its very simplicity affords the listener all due freedom to work her own line. It is this hermeneutic space which in turn provides the very life of the work in question.

To counter the gratis of persona the concept of the author holds out to us, we must realize over against it the freedom to become the kind of reader the text does itself require: One, in its most understandable and necessary, a basic literacy, including that of one’s culture history, which I then bring to any text; Two, within the discourses, a growing and cumulative base of knowledge, know-how, and even experience that a more demanding text asks of its potential readership. Without any reliance on the author to ‘explain’ his works and, at the last, shedding the perfect safety also of the expert or specialist in this or that literary or philosophical genre, also often hyperbolic in both its presentation and its own vicarious persona – ‘did you know that Derrida was also a Joyce scholar?’ – the reader comes face to face with both her own limitations, but also her creditable self-improvements. The one is as valuable as the other, for in their face must I continue to become more literate and wise. The deeper meaning of the world as text is thus brought forth, through interpretation, as its ownmost and superlative historical gift: I am one person but to me is bequeathed the species entire.

G.V. Loewen is the ‘author’ of over 60 books and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Authorship and Authority

Authorship and Authority (Consider the Source)

‘Arguments from authority are worthless’, declares Carl Sagan, as he famously defined science near the end of the epic Cosmos (1981). This is surely an element of any research field, where there is not only always the next experiment and the next, but as well, the sense that our knowledge, however cumulative, is always both partial in the sense of being incomplete, as well as in that second, deeper sense of being biased. We are not only children of our own times and no other, we are also subject, as mortal beings, to the degradation of memory and the flight of fantasy. Beyond all of this local flavor, reality is, its ‘realismus’, itself subject to change given cosmic evolution. What once were constants have been shown to be relative and discursively, we cannot be certain that it is our own history that is at least a partial source of the enduring mysteries we encounter when we do inquire into the universe at large. The most obvious such link is that diverse antique civilizations and their moralities appeared to endure, almost timelessly, and thus in their worldviews, corresponding to their perduring quality as understood from the point of view of each short generation of mortal denizens, their ideas about the cosmos were also timeless. In a word, the politics of humanity spills historically into the human understanding of nature.

Sagan was himself an authority in both astronomy and physics, and he was a decent interpreter of history and culture as well. In spite of his credo, he too was a moralist, and in spite of the framework of his chief vocation which he correctly outlined in what remains the most watched documentary series of all time, he too mustered arguments ‘from authority’ from time to time, no less than in defining the merits of science as the ‘best tool’ humanity possessed. It is of more than passing interest that Max Weber, arguably the greatest authority and expert on society of all time cautioned us against relying upon expertise for any serious decision in or about that same society. What are we then to make of major figures who seem to bely, or even outright deny, their authority in matters we have already ceded to them? This is more than a question of modesty in the face of the vastness of cosmos and the daunting diversity of even our own species, parochial as it must be against the wider backdrop of indefinite infinity. To my mind, it seems more about the sense that when one does in fact dig into the human conversation, things quickly become more complex then one might have bargained for.

Which in turn begets the question of authorship as source. It is not so much that certain persons are not entitled to their opinions unbridled and unlimited, and thoughts remain yet free in at least the sense of being able to have one or the other pending one’s imagination and education. Rather, it is the recent ability for anyone to create his own venue, especially one digital, to broadcast such opinions far and wide and begin to construct his own authority out of that which is in fact mere authorship. Examples are, regrettably, far too abundant to enumerate, from misogynist bigots who happen to have Super Bowl rings, to anti-communist journalists who imagine they are experts in dialectical materialism, to Jewish comedians who are suddenly political scientists and experts in the history of the Levant. But by far the most dangerous authors who imagine they also have authority in some more profound sense are the many politicians who, because they wield power but that without non-legal authority, deliberately and diligently confuse serious discourse for mere politics. Here, names would be superfluous, because almost all politicians, whose very reason of being is to pander to any and all those who might vote for them – or, in anti-democratic conditions, support them either through their silence or their willingness to engage in precipitous conflicts upon their leader’s behalf – engage in the calculated conflation of authority and authorship. A fashionable favorite is that ‘parents know what is best for their children’, and apparently, everyone else’s as well. Teachers and mass media, the usual rivals to parental authority, have come more and more under fire, consistent with the parent-pandering craze – though with nothing else regarding the actual confluence of youth, anxiety, and hopelessness – and the ease of which targets can align against two fronts with which we are either generally suspicious – media sells things to us and little more – or have some resentment against – we all recall our poor teachers and perhaps too much so.

But teaching is, for one, a vocation, a trade, and a profession requiring training and expertise as well as the wisdom of experience, cliché as that sounds. Stating that ‘education should be returned to parents’ is much the same as saying that ‘gas-fitting should be returned to the parents’, or that ‘hydroelectric dam-building should be returned to the parents’, and so on. So far, I have yet to hear that my own vocation, philosophy, should be ‘once again’ a parental purview, but then such parents, who would certainly be incapable of even the slightest musings in that direction, would also likely baulk at the very idea. Not quite sincerely, however, as parenting, seen as a Gestalt of mentorship, guidance, resource allocation and even love, for goodness sakes, would certainly include much moralizing if never any real thinking of any note. Yet in spite of all of this faddish and hypocritical nonsense about ‘parent’s rights’, the wider question of expertise and authority remains. And when major authorities suggest that arguments from authority are either worthless – as they are in the experimental sciences – or to be taken with a grain of salt – as those emanating from the behavioral sciences – then, with some irony, we feel we must take such statements seriously.

I have chosen the two most important cautions that have appeared in discourse during the course of the twentieth century. Yet more well-known ones, such as Einstein’s ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ – Hawking reminded us decades later that he himself took ‘God’ to mean the same thing he understood Einstein to mean by it; the whole of cosmic forces as known to us and not as some inveterately anti-gambling moralizer – are statements of scientific position in the wider history of ideas. For Einstein, arguing against some of the more outlandish implications of the quantum theory at the time, this was simply his non-scientific way of refuting another such position, or at least, exhorting caution about it. But Hawking himself went further than this when he warned of extraterrestrial contact and the annihilation of the human species; this was an opinion uttered by a physicist who was anthropomorphizing alien morality; and as such one with absolutely no basis nor scientific evidence behind it. Hawking had made the mistake of playing on his bona fide authority in other areas; he was, in a word, borrowing status from himself.

When any discursive figure does this, no matter their contributions to other fields, they immediately fall from authority into mere authorship. Unfortunately, many of the rest of us do not at once make that vital distinction, or do not care to. Perhaps one is a Hawking ‘fan’, seeing the scientist in the same way as one holds any other kind of celebrity to heart. In this, we are being as dishonest as is the figure in question being disingenuous. How then to resist both the unguarded abrogance of the expert who is too-enamored of his own authority to remember its limits, often severe, as well as our own penchant for adulation which is born of, and borne on, the sense that this or that figure really is smart and thus anything he says must have some merit to it? One can begin to reverse this troubling trend by looking at oneself and those around us.

My father was a structural engineer and ended his career as the chief building inspector for the City of Victoria. He was a master carpenter and a decent renderer of still life and nautical scenes in oils and watercolors as well as an expert model-builder. He played golf and hockey until his mid-70s, winning his club championship at age 73 with a handicap of 10. He knew little of culture and nothing of thought, he had been propagandized during the war and as a veteran he remained so until his death. His surpassing weakness was that he rarely spoke of things he actually knew a great deal about, and yet would borrow from this tacit status – of which almost none were aware in any case – to issue declarations of the most ignorant sort upon almost any other subject. These were not stated as opinions but rather as if they had some factual basis, or, at the very least, the weight of ‘wisdom’ behind them. He was, as a parent, typically sound for the younger set, typically incompetent for those older. For his generational demographic, he was amazingly progressive and enlightened, as was my mother. As I have before japed, both my parents were philistines but they were not barbarians. My father was no discursive figure and never would be, but he nonetheless represents the commonplace error of mistaking one’s personal experience for actual knowledge. This almost-universal human error is grievous enough in itself – most of us find, as we live on, that our experience is itself often found wanting after all – but that this selfsame error is deliberately targeted by politicians as the best way to manipulate franchise is nothing less than a patent evil.

My father’s only son is a philosopher. But he is not a cognitive philosopher, or ‘philosopher of mind’, as this once wholly archaic designation has recently made a comeback, he is not an analytic philosopher of language, an epistemologist, an ancient scholar or a medievalist, he his not a philosopher of science nor a Marxist, nor is he by any stretch a logician. And so I do not, even within the genres of my own painstakingly studied vocation, assert any serious claims adhering to any of these departments and have never done so. The stuff I do know something about – phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, education and existentialism, religion – casts a broad enough net for any thinker to never want in topic or subject. Far beyond this, I do not spout off about gas-fitting, hydroelectricity, or even parenting for that matter – I have consulted as an ethicist for many families over the years and always explain to them that I am expert in human relations in the abstract and not a ‘parenting’ expert, whatever that last might mean – in order to maintain my serious game and nascent name within the wider conversation which is our shared species legacy. And though it may be the case that those lives deemed outside of circles meritorious are all the more likely, through ressentiment, to try to gain access to them through a combination of outright fraud and feigned ignorance as to their truer motives, it falls to the rest of us to exercise a more existential and ethical version of the caveat emptor in their face. Otherwise, we risk becoming as the politician alone, who, as a darling dapper doyenne of the system within which he must work, is compelled to become a huckster, a shyster, a conniver, a narcissist. Each of us has each of these and others within our breast, so this is not a matter of directing our disdain afar. Rather, it is more simply a matter of learning how to recognize the authorship-limitations of what we know today as who we are right now, and thence perhaps coming to a better understanding of the authority-limits of what we can know as a human being and thence as a species entire.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics, and health as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.