Although Michel Foucault’s essay on the question What is an author? was written half a century ago, it is still as vital, engaging, and thought-provoking as it was when it first appeared. It continues to inform scholarship across a wide range of disciplines: law, philosophy, literature and book history, history of science, and social studies of science. At last count, the English translation alone had 13,215 Google Scholar citations and the effect is not diminishing; What is an author? received more citations in 2020 than it did in 2010.

The object of this workshop, however, is not to celebrate the success of the essay but to intensify its generative potential, and to do so by situating it in relation to technological, political, and cultural developments that have unfolded since its publication. Conversations and disputes over the knowledge-power nexus, textual authority and modes of individuation are now very different from those that were taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is impossible today to pose the question What is an author? without having in mind theories and politics of race and gender that have emerged since that period (some inspired by Foucault’s work), or without noticing the turn in critical theory that provincializes Foucault's essentially European perspective. Similarly, it is obvious that the medial apparatuses within which something like an author function can take shape have changed quite considerably, producing diverse effects: new forms of authorial surveillance, anonymity and obfuscation; the emergence of social media and the platformed author; the shading of the author function into other modes of individuation such as branding; the development of digital publication and peer-to-peer dissemination; the emergence of authorial algorithms; the quantification of an author's work through metrics; and so on. 

Our object in inviting a sustained and multi-perspectival reflection on What is an author? is not to bring the text ‘up to date’ by expanding and adapting its argument. Nor do we expect our contributors necessarily to engage closely or exegetically with the text itself, though reflections of this kind are of course very welcome. The call is for reflections which take up and re-pose the question of authorship in the broad and generative terms that Foucault posed it. Which, in other words, identify an ‘effect’ whose conditions lie in the articulation of epistemes, techniques, practices or political configurations that are of broad cultural significance. So we anticipate figures of authorship that might be very different from those analyzed by Foucault, and which might emerge from very different domains, strata or ‘worlds’.

Speakers:

• Jimena Canales, Harvard University
• Martin Giraudeau, Sciences Po
• Frédéric Graber, CNRS-EHESS
• Matthew L. Jones, Princeton University
• Kara Keeling, USC Dornsife
• Vincent Lépinay, Sciences Po
• Celia Lury, University of Warwick
• Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, UCLA
• Thomas Scheffer, Goethe Universität Frankfurt
• Katrin Trüstedt, ZfL Berlin 

With the support of Columbia University Alliance Joint Projects Grants, Sciences Po Law School, Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO).