Facing the Death of the Author.

Culture Professional’s Identity Work and the Fantasies of Control

Nico Carpentier

Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO) 

Barthes’ Image Music Text contains the seminal essay The Death of the Author, which pointed to the convergence between the producers and receivers of discourses at the level of interpretation. The death of the Author was a metaphor, not be taken literally, implying that there was no privileged vantage point that fixed the interpretation of a text. But now the Author is dying for a second time, as we witness a convergence between the producers and receivers of discourses at the level of the production process. The old Author is no longer solely in control of the production process, as the “produser” (e.g., Bruns, 2007) has again overcome the rigid separations between both categories.

 

But the Author is more resistant than it seems. S/he found shelter in a series of organizations and institutions, protected by their professional structures and organizational cultures that provide networks of support and resources. The Author is also resistant at the cultural-discursive level, as the contemporary subject positions related to the Author (or the many culture professionals), turn out to be more rigid than expected (and desired). In other words, culture professionals’ identities remain embedded within hegemonic discourses on management, autonomy and expertise.

 

Nevertheless, the transformations related to the digital era have put pressure on these professional identities, requiring them to perform additional identity work. This concept – originally used at a more individual level (see Snow & Anderson, 1987) but later applied to collective identities and subject positions (see e.g. Reger, Myers & Einwohner, 2008) – captures the discursive efforts that people have undertake in order to (re)construct and maintain their identities. In the case of culture professionals this identity work implies the development of coping strategies to deal with -amongst other issues- the increase of audience, visitor, reader, and spectator power to interpret and produce cultural products.

 

These coping strategies often deal with applying antagonistic identity strategies, whereas these audience members, visitors, readers, and spectators are defined as others. In some cases, as exemplified by Keen’s (2007) The Cult of the Amateur they become seen as a threat to (expert) tastes, knowledges and truths. Through dichotomising articulatory processes like these, ordinary people / amateurs are constructed as a homogeneous mass, detached from the cultural and political, and trapped in their authenticity. In other cases, more benevolent (but not necessarily less problematic) discourses are used to construct a difference between the cultural professional and the societal groups they aim to serve. Here we can for instance mention the strategy of respectful detachment, where the otherness is acknowledged, the other is respected but no attempt for communication or interaction is initiated. Another strategy is market reductionism, where the relations with the other are exclusively seen as an economic transfer.

 

It will be argued that these strategies are still very much based on the fantasy of power, trying to isolate areas of management, autonomy and expertise in a world which is more and more characterized by resistance to management, interdependence and the situatedness of knowledge. The contemporary context of postmodernity (or late / liquid modernity) unavoidably increases the levels of hybridity and liquidity in the social, which in turn are countered by coping strategies based on fantasies of control, harmony and stability.

 

From a perspective of cultural democratisation, this paper will engage in a search for a more balanced approach between cultural professional and audience identities, trying to formulate the conditions of possibility for more hybrid or liquid identificatory positionings. This plea for an increase of societal power balances has a clear utopian dimension. Situations of full participation, as described by Pateman (1970), are utopian nonplaces (or, better, "never-to-be-places") which will always remain unattainable and empty but which simultaneously remain to play a key role as ultimate anchoring points and horizons for our analyses. Despite the impossibility to fully realize these situations in the social praxis, their fantasmatic realization serves as breeding ground for democratic renewal in the field of (digital) culture.