Roland Barthes (1915-80) famously proposed what he called 'the death of the author'. All who have studied literature to any degree will have not only read and studied certain pieces of writing, but will have found themselves having to give some consideration to their authors. Indeed, sometimes people even embark on reading the complete oeuvre of a particular author. Furthermore – particularly in a world obsessed by celebrity – authors may take centre stage while their work becomes the vehicle by which they obtain personal success. Barthes proposed eliminating the figure of the author from the study of literature and from other forms of critical thinking. It is not authors that should be studied but the texts alone.
There is a subtle effect that results from 'the death of the author' and that is 'the birth of the reader'. Or, perhaps that should be, re-birth; a renaissance of reading that now takes different forms. The reader is now the one who decides the meaning of a text. They may, of course, be guided by what the author gives them, but the reader is no longer confined. What the reader makes of the text is now a product of – and the responsibility of – the reader.
Barthes wrote (in Image, Music, Text, 1968) that 'a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash'. This is an interesting idea to consider in the context of biological science. Post-Darwin, God has come to be no longer accepted by the majority of biologists as being the architect of life - even if some still consider God to be its author. Physical biological objects are now texts which stand alone without their interpretations being coloured by theological agendas or interpretive nuances. Biological science has a certain purity the like of which Barthes recommended for literary and critical studies.
However, there is a difference between 'the death of the author' and 'the complete absence of an author'. God may, or may not, exist. What has changed post-Darwin is not the existence or otherwise of God, but whether He is allowed admittance when we try to explain biological objects. And that, He is not. (This, for all we know, is exactly how He might want it to be!)
If the author of books is dead, what then of the person who produces them? The French term, auteur should, Barthes suggests, be replaced by the term scripteur – literally 'someone who writes'. Biologically, that 'someone who writes' is not a person but certain natural processes – chief among them, is natural selection. For modern biology, the idea of the author (or architect of life) might be dead but the idea of the writer of life is not.
In the quotation above, Barthes notes that a text has no 'single … meaning [or] message … but [is] a multi-dimensional space' in which various things take place. This idea is also an interesting one to consider in the context of biological science. A body – the biological text I am trying to find ways of reading – might also be seen as a multi-dimensional space - or phase space. It is where many different interactions take place by way of creating and sustaining something that interacts with the world. It is the physical space where, somehow, personality emerges from or supervenes upon substance.