What does Foucault mean by "the author-function" in his essay "What Is an Author"?

Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” might be seen as an example of (post)structuralism, if not of the post-human. Foucault is not interested in the author as a person. That view of the author as a person would be, generally speaking, the view of pre-critical humanism, in which the author is credited as being “real” and as being in complete control of the text that the author produces. (Most readers today, despite Foucault, continue to view the author as in this pre-critical humanist way. They care about the life of the author, for example, and believe that the author is the ultimate authority when it comes to determining meaning in a given literary work.)

Instead of seeing the author simply as a person who writes, Foucault sees authorship as a function of the writing itself. Foucault identifies multiple functions of the author:

1. Author as a legal construction, connected to questions of heresy, slander, and libel. Today, we might focus on the importance of the author to copyright laws and charges of plagiarism.

2. Author as a literary construction, connected to questions of literary merit. A poem bearing my name, for example, simply won’t receive the same attention as a poem bearing Wordsworth’s name, even if my poem is better. Wordsworth’s poems have literary merit and mine don’t.

3. Author as a unifying construction, allowing seemingly very different texts to be unified under a single concept and allowing new texts to be evaluated against old texts for consistency of quality. Naming Homer as the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, allows us to overlook the obvious differences between those two works and to read them as closely related texts that express deeply held values of the ancient Greeks. Simply put, this function shows our belief that authors are internally consistent: they write about the same themes over and over, for example, and they’re either always good or always bad at what they do.

I’ve always tried to read this essay alongside the New Critical statements on the intentional fallacy and Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.”

Foucault spends about the first half of "What Is an Author?" explaining (or really, working up to) his own explanation of what the function of an author is. He begins by explaining that an author is separate from what he writes, even though he created it. We should be analyzing texts on their own merit, he asserts, and not constantly paying attention to the text's relationship with who wrote it--which makes us wonder why the author is even useful at all, beyond that old idea of bringing himself immortality through the written word.

So, toward the middle of the piece, Foucault argues that the author's function is to stand as a symbol, or a persona, so that we can gather up all of the works of that author and think of them as one cohesive body of texts.

The author plays a "classificatory function," as Foucault explains, so that we can assign a meaningful category to a group of texts (for example, all the plays and poems written by Shakespeare). This is useful because we need a way to meaningfully compare one author's body of work with another author's. It's also useful because we can "receive" an author's works in "a certain mode" and give it "a certain status" in our culture.

To put that another way, Foucault wants us to think of authors as a tool for organizing and directing our thinking and judgments about individual pieces of text and about groups of texts. The author (or rather, the author's name) gives us a method for categorizing and comparing groups of written texts.

Foucault spends the rest of the essay describing the implications and problems that arise from this designation of the author's function as a means of classifying texts.

What does Michel Foucault define as an author?

Michel Foucault, an influential French philosopher of the last half of the 20th century whose work dealt primarily with the relationship between knowledge and power, opens his essay, "What is an Author?" with a quote from Samuel Beckett which at once, asserts and summarizes it's point: "What matters who's speaking?"

Appearing during the now-venerable era of the "death of the author," it posits the role of the author as an "author-function". This status originally arises from the legal codification of books and speeches as property, "only when the author became subject to punishment" due to the nature of the text. As Foucault describes this first author-function, the author's name stands for a specific manner of discourse and the manner in which it is regulated in the culture in which it circulates.

The second feature of the author-function is that it is not universal in all discourse. He offers as examples the folk tales and epics which circulated widely despite anonymous authorship.

The third aspect of the author-function is that it isn't formed spontaneously through the attribution of a discourse to a known individual. Rather, it results from a collective effort to construct the entity we call the "author" when we speak of an "original individual's 'profundity' or 'creative power'...."

The fourth quality is that it doesn't apply to any person, except insofar as it generates a series of subjective positions that any individual could come to occupy.

There is one final type of author, who Foucault places in a separate category unlike other canonical names, designating them as "initiators of discursive practices". He cites Marx and Freud as the first two such "initiators" and describes as their distinctive contribution, that their works created the possibility and the rules of formation for other texts, establishing the potential for endless discourse.

In conclusion, Foucault envisions a culture in which discourses "...would unfold in pervasive anonymity." And the only relevant question would be, "What matters who's speaking?"

What are the functions of authors, according to Foucault?

In Michel Foucault’s mind, one of the primary functions of the author is to serve as organizing principle for a variety of texts. In “What Is an Author?,” Foucault argues that an author “serves as a means of classification.” For Foucault, the function of the author is not related to their physical, singular person: it’s connected to the works that they’ve created and that bear their name.

To make his point, Foucault brings in William Shakespeare. According to Foucault, Shakespeare’s author function would not change dramatically if it was proved that Shakespeare wasn’t born in the home that tourists visit because they think it was his birthplace. However, if it was demonstrated that the sonnets attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by somebody else, that would seriously alter Shakespeare’s function as an author.

If you review “What Is an Author?,” you might have noticed that Foucault compares the author to God. At one point, Foucault declares, “the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death.” Like a god, the human qualities and personal attributes of the author are immaterial. They've "disappeared." It doesn’t matter where Shakespeare was born, since Shakespeare, like all authors, is judged like a god. They’re judged by what they created. If what they created changes, that’s what changes them.