Sovereignty of the Dead: Authors, Editors, and the Aesthetic Text

Forty-four years ago a box carried within it a message concerning the death of the author. It also carried within it other works which demonstrate what art after the author looks like. One would have hoped that by this time the death of the author would have become part of the modus operandi of the arts of the present. Such though does not appear to be the case. Not only are some critics, like Jane Gallop and Sean Burke, challenging the notion that the author was ever dead—even for those who coined the "familiar" poststructuralist "slogan" (Gallop 1)¹—but contemporary critical, textual, and editorial practices seem more attuned to asserting the aesthetic sovereignty of dead authors than allowing "texts" or "writing" to speak on their own behalf. For me, critical and editorial acts that allow the "author" to impede the free circulation of texts and determine textual practices bind us to an aesthetic and critical past we allegedly were supposed to have overcome. Editors and critics today need to strive for textual practices that move beyond the reliance on "authors" and "authorship"—and instead learn to revel in the collaborative textual multitude afforded us by the age of digital multimedia. A resurrection of the author is simply not acceptable—even if the age of high theory which announced the death of the author is also itself dead.² Let's take the opportunity now to turn back to the message in the box—and work our way forward from it to the critical and editorial present.

Death in a Box

The box which delivered the message of the death of the author was the multimedia magazine, Aspen, founded in the early 1960s by Phyllis Johnson, an editor at magazines such as Women's Wear Daily and Advertising Age ("Aspen Magazine"). Described as "the first three-dimensional magazine," "each issue came in a customized box or folder filled with materials in a variety of formats" (Wikipedia entry), including "booklets, posters, postcards, flipbooks, vinyl recordings, and in one issue, a reel containing four Super-8 films" ("Aspen Magazine"). Johnson, who said that "Aspen should be a time capsule of a certain period, point of view, or person," and had different designers and editors for each of its ten issues, published the first issue in the winter of 1965—and its last issue in 1971 ("Aspen Magazine"). While the first two issues contained materials related to the ski resort town from which the magazine took its name, the third issue, edited by Andy Warhol and David Dalton, left the town behind and took up instead pop art. Warhol and Dalton's issue included, among other items, a vinyl recording of guitar feedback by John Cale of the Velvet Underground—and excerpts from fourteen papers presented at the Berkeley Conference on LSD.³

It is within the context of LSD papers and John Cale feedback that this multimedia magazine released in Issue 5/6 a provocation by Roland Barthes entitled "The Death of the Author."⁴ Though Barthes's article would also appear the following year in French in Manteia, a bound magazine also in its fifth issue, it is wonderfully appropriate that a piece which figuratively unbinds the author from the text and criticism would first appear in a literally unbound magazine—one which Johnson "wanted to get away from the bound magazine format, which is really quite restrictive" ("Aspen Magazine"). Edited by Brian O'Doherty, with art direction by David Dalton and Lynn Letterman, Aspen 5/6 was published Fall-Winter 1967 by Roaring Fork Press, NYC. In addition to Barthes's "Death of the Author" (translated from French by Richard Howard), two other essays were included in the box (George Kubler's "Style and Representation in Historical Time" and Susan Sontag's "The Aesthetics of Silence"). In addition, among the vinyl recordings found in the box were Samuel Beckett's "Text for Nothing #8" (1958) read by Jack MacGowan, "Excerpts from Nova Express" (1964) read by their author, William Burroughs, and an excerpt from Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, "Now the...