Durham, NC
Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.
Authored Comments
Or maybe a dissertation. Hmm.
I enjoyed this piece quite a bit. And I was delighted to see my beloved Foucault get a mention on opensource.com (a first, if I am not mistaken!).
In "What is an Author?" Foucault doesn't simply argue that authorship no longer matters (or that the author is dead, <em>pace</em> Barthes), though he does stress a non-necessary relationship between author "intent" and the "meaning" of a text. But here Foucault is less interested in the nature of "meaning" than he is in the concrete and discursive <em>effects</em> of what he calls the "author function"--not a person <em>per se</em> but a larger apparatus that exerts force on a "work." So while Foucault admits that authorship isn't a singular (or even primary) determinant of a text's meaning or utility, he <em>does</em> want to indicate that authorship (or the author function) works quite powerfully to hold works together (to keep them stable) and to <em>regulate</em> the ways they're encountered, utilized, dispersed, and so forth (to manage, maybe even aggressively, their "applications," to use your word, which is just great).
I think this is an important distinction for a few reasons.
First, saying "the author's intent doesn't matter" but stopping short of interrogating precisely how the author function plays a role in a particular situation doesn't provide us with a way of asking important questions about the ways creative material is in fact governed or controlled. When the Writer's Guild of America went on strike in 2007, issues of authorship, ownership, distribution, rights, and the future of collaborative production were at stake--even as the works in question were produced collectively (especially in the case of comedic works, as you note). So it's important to trace the ways "authorship" functions in relation to creative works, even if there <em>is</em> no permanent or necessary relationship between an author and a work (or set of works).
Second--and with regard to open source software this time--understanding the author function becomes critical for understanding how particular voices in various open source communities generate more impact--more force or more power to achieve things--than others. It's true: open source code has no "single author," and yet certain voices in particular open source communities gather momentum in ways that allow them to influence the direction of their respective projects. Foucault's author function provides one tool for tracking how this might happening without taking the naive stance that authorship <em>implies</em> control.
Thanks for a thought-provoking article, Kendra!