The Hours

门外汉，现在处于别人的笔记我看不进去，我的估计别人也看不进去的状况

这是耶鲁的那门课，排版真是灾难（

Lecture Two - Intro Part II

After the question of skepticism follows the question of determinism
-- skepticism -- first whether we can know things as they really are
-- then from  Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we have the question of determinism -- that how we can trust the autonomy of consciousness if in fact there's a chance--a good chance, according to these writers--that it is in turn governed by, controlled by, hidden powers or forces. → Question of human agency - (Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices.) In the aftermath of Darwin in particular, our understanding of natural selection makes us begin to wonder in what sense we can consider ourselves, each of us, to be autonomous subjects.

1960s - questioning authority - questioning authors
Names of authors e.g. Proust - in a certain sense, the names of authors, the names of stars; but at the same time, plainly names that stand for something other than their mere name, names that stand for domains or fields of interesting discursivity.

(Jargon
- "discourse" or "textual field," "discursivity" instead of "literature"
- why - because of doubt about the generic integrity of various forms of discourse, a habit from a breakdown of the notion that certain forms of utterance can be understood as a delimited, structured field)

Questioning Author
- It's a question of how we know the author to be there, firstly, and secondly, whether or not in attempting to determine the meaning of a text, we should appeal to the authority of an author.
- If the author is a function, that function is something that appears, perhaps problematically appears, within the experience of the text, something that we infer from the way the text unfolds. So as a function and not as a subjective consciousness to which we appeal to grasp a meaning, the author still does exist.

Roland Barthes, The Death of The Author
- Barthes' supposition that the author isn't maybe even quite an author function because that function may be hard to identify in a discrete way among myriad other functions.

Foucault
- who does take for granted that a textual field is more firmly structured than Barthes supposes
- we no longer say, "How does the author exert autonomous will with respect to the subject matter being expressed?" We no longer appeal, in other words, to the authority of the author as the source of the meaning that we find in the text.
- "Instead, these questions will be raised: "How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?" In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute)…
- note: "The subject" here always means the subjectivity of the speaker, right, not the subject matter.

In defense of author
- Samuel Johnson -We want to rate human potential as high as we can, and it is for that reason in a completely different spirit, in the spirit of homage rather than cringing fear, that we appeal to the authority of an author.
- but to both Barthes and Foucault, the appeal to the author--as opposed to the submersion of the author in the functionality of the textual field--is a kind of delimitation or policing of the possibilities of meaning.

Barthes
- To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.Such a conception suits criticism [and criticism is a lot like policing, right--"criticism" means being a critic, criticizing] very well - when the Author has been found, the text is "explained"--a victory to the critic.

please note that the preoccupation with the misuse of the appeal to an author is very much of its historical moment. - 1969 - where author reminded people very much of authority -- then police

Then, How did Foucault mount an argument in which privileged authors--that is to say, figures whom one cites positively and without a sense of being policed, like Marx or Freud--can somehow or another stay in the picture?
-He invents a concept. He says, "They aren't authors. They're founders of discursivity,"
-distinguish between a founder of discursivity and an author who has had an important influence?
     - latter - Anne Radcliffe - who establishes certain tropes, topoi,and premises that govern the writing of gothic fiction for the next hundred years. but she isn't a person, Foucault claims, who introduces a discourse or sphere of debate within which ideas, without being attributable necessarily, can nevertheless be developed.
     - former - Marx or Freud - these are special inaugurations of debate, of developing thought, that do not necessarily kowtow to the originally figure. within the traditions that they established, it is very possible to understand them as instigating ways of thinking without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking authoritatively. That is the special category that Foucault wants to reserve for those privileged figures whom he calls founders of discursivity.