to think that man is only a recent invention...a new wrinkle in our
knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has
discovered a new form...In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of
western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its
rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more
stirring under our feet.^56Individuals, artists, authors–these are all incomplete and unstable historical
formations, arising in and through likewise incomplete and unstable histor-
ical social configurations. None of them is fully original, fully coherently
expressive, or self-authorizing. As Barthes claims in announcing the death of
the author,
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single“theological”
meaning (the“message”of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is
a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture...[T]he
writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His
only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a
way as never to rest on any one of them.^57Or, in Foucault’s formulation,“the subject...must be stripped of its creative
role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse.”^58 In
short, there is no there there: no creative subject to serve as a fount of
original work, but only a historically constituted point of assignation of
overlapping, mongrelized streams of discourse and image within complex
currents of planless, self-evolving social life.
Perhaps worse yet, as the ideas of the modern individual and the creative
artist were historically constructed, women were excluded from any share in
genius. On the basis of a detailed survey of conceptions of genius from the
Greek world through the Renaissance, Romanticism, and the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, Christine Battersby has established that the standard
image of genius was that of a“feminine”male. The prevailing rhetoric
(^56) Ibid., pp. xiii, xiv.
(^57) Roland Barthes,“The Death of the Author”(1968), reprinted inPhilosophy of Art, ed. Neill
and Ridley, pp. 386–90 at p. 388.
(^58) Foucault,“What is an Author?,”inCritical Theory Since 1965, ed. Adams and Searle,
pp. 138–48 at p. 148A.
Originality and imagination 131