Spring 1991
Volume 17, Number 3

Excerpt from
Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise Authorship
by David Saunders and Ian Hunter

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1. Introduction

Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shares with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable. At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the 'formation of the subject'. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach.

2. Person, Individual, Subject

There are two main strategies for conceiving of the birth of the author in terms of the formation of the subject. They derive from forms of analysis known somewhat misleadingly as historicism and poststructuralism. Historicist versions of the emergence of modern forms of authorship are still perhaps more familiar than post-structuralist ones. They were certainly first into the field with their account of the early eighteenth century as the epochal moment, when a host of historical determinations--Protestantism, printing and the book trade, philosophical realism, the decline of patronage and the rise of a literary profession, _copyright law--coalesced to produce the prototype of the modern expressive author. Ian Watt's treatment of Daniel Defoe is a well-known case in point.1

But what is important is the manner in which historicist accounts structure this coalescence of the various factors. Dividing the historical field neatly into the material and the intellectual, and tracing a zigzag path between real determinants (such as the entrepreneurial author's economic interest in long books) and ideal outcomes (the moral interest in detailed, hence lengthy, descriptions of daily life), Watt's account of the rise of the modern author assumes the familiar form of a dialectic between the movement of history and the growth of consciousness.2 By the path it negotiates between the real and the ideal, historicism assumes that it has exhausted history. Thus in situating the birth of the author as the exemplary moment in which the determination of consciousness is reconciled with the consciousness of determination, historicist accounts purport to unify the patchwork of historical phenomena--including Protestantism, print literacy, the book trade, and copyright law--into a necessary moment in the formation of the subject of history. This subject is itself then conveniently identified with a figure--that of the expressive author-- to which all earlier forms of authorship were pointing, whether they knew it or not.

It might be thought that the more recent ascendancy of poststructuralist forms of literary criticism has altered everything, by identifying authorial consciousness as nothing more than a temporary and delusory fixing of the play of signification, a momentary eddy in the shifting materiality of discourse or writing. There is a sense, however, in which the figure of the subject remains central to post-structuralist accounts of the expressive author. Only in the most anachronistic of senses--where the subject is identified with Descartes's self-reflexive cogito--can poststructuralism regard itself as antisubjective. As Michel Foucault has shown in The Order of Things, since at least the time of Immanuel Kant the domain of the subject has been determined not by the self-reflexivity and transparency of its representations but precisely by their 'otherness' and opacity. The subject of the modern human sciences is not one whose being is identical with self-consciousness. Rather, it is a Janus-like entity said to be brought into being by nonconscious forcesÑhistory, language, labour. As a result its task or fate is the winning of consciousness from an unconscious which, as its condition of possibility, it can never leave behind.3 In this sense post-structuralist accounts of authorship are no less subjectcentered than historicist ones. They differ principally in replacing history with discourse as the dialectical medium responsible for the birth of the author, and in emphasizing a permanent debt of consciousness to the unconscious rather than the eventual wiping of the slate promised by G. W. F. Hegel.

[...]

Arranged around the necessary illusion of the expressive author, the varied historical determinants and forms of authorship are again, as in historicist accounts, forced into a limited set of roles for a single philosophical drama: the play between the dissolution of consciousness in a variety of unconscious forces and its restoration as their reflexive effect. Under these circumstances 'writing' plays out its leading role in the poststructuralist drama--decentering consciousness, destroying representation, dissolving genres--regardless of whether it is circulating as a manuscript to a cultivated coterie or as a printed book to a reading public, whether used as a guide to conscience or a goad to desire. We are neither surprised nor enlightened when post-structuralist studies claim to discover in early modern authorship precisely those effects--the staging and eclipse of authorial consciousness--which have been theoretically and programmatically attributed to writing in general.4

Our dissatisfaction with these twin versions of the birth of the author is tied to a specific series of identifications. Both versions identify what we might call the public person of the author with the writer as an individual, and they identify the latter with the subject whose Janus-like features we have outlined. It is possible to show what is at stake in this series of identifications by provisionally establishing a parallel series of differentiations, drawing in part on a usage made available by Marcel Mauss. Following this usage, the notion of person refers to those instituted ensembles of rights, duties, statuses, capabilities, and virtues which organise the deportment of and the relationships between the members of particular societies. Persons differ from individuals (as biological and psychological human beings) in depending for their delineation and distribution on definite forms of cultural technique and social organisation. The distribution of specific kinds of legal attributes--rights, standing, capacities--to individuals by legal systems is a case in point. Finally we can say that the notion of subject differs from that of person and individual in referring to a historically specific manner in which individuals can come to possess the attributes of personhood ascribed to them. This manner is one in which the public attributes of the person are internalised and identified with an inner entity (conscience, consciousness) rather than with a public institution (the totem, legal proceddure, religious ritual).5 According to Mauss this individualisation and internalisation of personhood does not represent a fundamental breakthrough or discovery; it is the result of the distribution of specific cultural techniques for constructing, monitoring, and controlling a self-- the 'techniques of conscience' first inculcated on a wide scale by the Puritan sects and churches.6 Adapting Mauss's typology to the discusslon of authorshlp we can distinguish the attributes of the authorial persona--as an ensemble of instituted virtues, rights, liabilities, capacities--from the individual who writes. We can also provisionally identify the notion of the authorial subject with a particular (individual, inward) manner in which individuals have come to possess these attributes.

With these differentiations in mind we propose the following thesis: the delineation and attribution of authorial personality is governed not by the logic of subject formation but by the historical emergence of particular cultural techniques and social institutions. The conditions under which the individual who writes may come to possess particular kinds of authorial personality--for example, the legal personalities of the obscene libeller (or pornographer) and the copyright holder or, indeed, the ethical and aesthetic personality of the expressive author are historically circumstantial. And these circumstances are not, we argue, those in which the determinants of consciousness are syntheslsed and subsumed within an exemplary moment, whether this moment is imagined to be the emergence of historical self-consciousness or its eclipsingg in discourse. To the contrary, the delineation of such personalities, together with the manner and degree of their possession by the writer, obeys no single logic. It is in fact the variable outcome of interactions between a limited number of cultural, legal, technological, economic, and ethical institutions. The 'personalities' made available by these institutions--the rights and liabilities, the statuses, the ethical and aesthetic capacities in which individuals might serve--do not converge in the authorial subject; they are neither the determinants of a consciousness which synthesizes them nor the props supporting its illusory staging by discourse. Rather, they are positive forms of social being distributed unevenly across individuals and institutions in a variety of ways and according to a variety of cultural, legal, technological, economic, and ethical imperatives. The expressive author represents a particular configuration of this shifting distribution.

For this reason we have chosen as the emblem of our investigation not an exemplary authorial subject--in all the glory of its becommg or dissolving--but an inglorious literate milieu: the 'literatory' of Edmund Curll. The Grub-streetJournal of 26 October 1732 carried a caricature of Curll at work in his print shop, or literatory. Lifting newly printed sheets to dry on overhead racks, he is depicted in a monster suit. The outfit is no doubt appropriate for the 'unspeakable Curll', as Ralph Straus represents him in the homonymous biography. For us, however, Curll's monstrosity lies less in the quirks of the biographical individual than in the melange of personal statuses and functions, capabilities, and liabilities that a Curll acquired as denizen of the literatory. In our terms Curll was an individual of several persons. That he should have been by turns pamphleteer, journalist, printer, publisher, publicist, pornographer, literary agent, bookseller, and pirate tells something of the organisation of the literate milieu which he inhabited.

In the new divisions of literary labour and status made possible by the technology of print, in the new types of moral and economic activity arising from the book trade, and in the new forms of legal regulation that began to organise this milieu, it was no simple matter to delineate the person of the expressive author in contrast to that of the artisanal book producer, to differentiate the economic interests of writers from those of publishers, or to determine the relation between a writer's legal personality (as copyright holder or as responsible for obscene libel) and his or her ethical or aesthetic personality (as creator or moral authority). Moreover, when these distinctions and relations began to be instituted, it was not as a sign of the emergence of the authorial subject or its illusion; it was as a set of makeshift solutions to problems arising from new circumstances and from the unforeseen interactions of legal, economic, technological, and ethical institutions. The literatory, in short, is an emblem not of the necessity of the expressive author but of his or her monstrous contingency.

[...]

It makes little difference whether the attributes of the writer's authorial personality are whistled into existence in order to mediate history and consciousness or are already contained in nuce in discourse. As long as such attributes are held to be precisely those required by history or discourse to manifest itself as subjectivity, we cannot begin to ask how individuals come to subject themselves to these attributes. We cannot begin to ask the paramount ethical question: What must individuals do--what ethical practices must they master, in what department of existence, to what ethical ends--in order actually to constitute themselves as subjects of a particular range of personal attributes?

In asking this question we detach ourselves from the quasiphilosophical conception of the subject underlying both historicist and post-structuralist accounts of authorship the better to see that the subjectform is not something promised by history or required by language; it is something brought into being and maintained as a definite mode of conduct by certain ethical institutions peculiar to the history of the West. The subject is a manner in which individuals possess the attributes of particular kinds of personhood. This is the lesson of Mauss's historical anthropology of personhood, Weber's historical anthropology of ethical 'life-orders', and Foucault's last philological inquiries into late antique ethical practices. That individuals should ever have conceived themselves as objects of ethical attention; that they should have come to relate their attributes and conduct to a principle of inner monitoring and control, the self; that they should have come to conduct their persons by forming themselves as the subjects of (and as subject to) these personsÑthese facts are referred by all three authors to the history of specific ethical institutions and practices.

[...]

6. Conclusion

The history of early modern authorship cannot be written as if the various 'personalities' associated with it converged in the writer as subject. In constructing liability for obscene publication, the common law system altered the threshold between sin and crime and established a mechanism for attributing criminal responsibility quite independent of the hermeneutic attribution of aesthetic or ethical responsibility for the work. Similarly, in working its way towards the copyright system, the legal apparatus was not attempting to recognise the presence of the writer's subjectivity in the work; it was regulating a novel sphere of cultural, economic, and technical activity by delineating and circumscribing the right to trade in mechanical duplicates of the work. Finally, we have suggested that the intense inwardness of certain forms of early modern writing cannot be ascribed to the writer's subjectivity as such. It must be attributed to the role of these forms of literacy in an ethical practice through whose mastery writers could compose themselves as subjects of a certain conduct of life.

Described in these terms, the distinctive ethical person formed by this practice is seen as being in its own way just as delicately technical and historically contingent as the legal personalities of the obscene libeller or the copyright owner. As such, the ethical person cannot be the deep foundation or the general anchorage of these two legal personalities. It does not so much underlie them, as contingently coexist and overlap with them, as they do with one another.

Without pretending to exhaustiveness, let us say that each of these three areas represents a line of historical development through which writers could come to possess specific attributes of personhood in definite but limited ways--as legal rights and liabilities, ethical inwardness, aesthetic standing. These three lines do not meet in the figure of the subject, where they might be grasped by the consciousness they give rise to, or where they perpetually recede into the unconscious depths of discourse or history. Rather they emerge as a contingent and unpredictable series of crosscutting intersections between the technological, economic, and cultural forces unleashed by the 'literatory', the legal forms created to regulate these forces, and the literate techniques of the Protestant ethos which were disseminated and transformed by them. If we are to historicise early modern authorship we must learn to trace these lines of intersection between universes--legal, ethical, technological, economic--in which the subject of literary theory is not master.

1. See lan Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley,1957), chaps. 1-3.

2. Consider, for example, the following typically dialectical and teleological formulation:

It would seem, then, that Defoe's importance in the history of the novel is directly connected with the way his narrative structure embodied the struggle between Puritanism and the tendency to secularisation which was rooted in material progress. At the same time it is also apparent that the secular and economic viewpoint is the dominant partner, and that it is this which explains why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is usually considered to be the first key figure in the rise of the novel. [Watt, The Rise of Novel, p. 83]

3. For further discussion see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (london, 1970), pp. 332-35.

4. See, for example, Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983).

5. The rise and decline of casuistical moral reasoning provides a neat example of this shift in the modality and location of (ethical) personhood. H.-D. Kittsteiner shows that the formal and 'external' casuistical reconciliation of the exigencies of daily life with the moral absolutes of Christianity was an accepted part of both Protestant and Catholic religious life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Once larger sections of the population had undergone this training, the need for formal casuistry and casuists abated; but this was only because individuals had acquired the art themselves and henceforward identified this previously public construction of ethical personality with an inner conscience. See Kittsteiner "Kant and Casuistry", in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 185-213.

6. See Marcel Mauss, "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self", in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-25

7. Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (London, 1927). On the biographer's reconstruction of the charges against Curll, his trial and sentencing for 'obscene libel', see chap. 6. For mentions of the 'literatory', see pp. 140, 144.