Of all the drivel gobbed up by the humanities academia in the last century, surely the worst is the notion that "the author is dead". This discharge first appeared in watered-down form in the 1940s, as the belief that it is impossible, and wrong, for the reader of a text to determine the intentions of its author. The "intentional fallacy", as it was called, was the great bogeyman of the "New Criticism" and its acolytes, who liked to caricature the "old criticism" as literary biography with annotations. (A caricature that doesn't resemble any old criticism I've read, which admittedly was journalistic criticism and not the work of learned professors.) Perhaps their reforming zealotry was well-intentioned, but it led to a fetishism of the text and only the text, which was later taken to its absurd conclusion by the poststructuralist Roland Barthes (uncle of Fabian, the former Man Utd goalkeeper). In "Death of the Author", Barthes argued that the author was just a functionary stringing words together, and that the real artist was the reader -- a claim that is accepted almost without question by many academics today.
This claim is quite patently a load of bollocks. A work of art is the creation of an artist, who is an intentional being. It's impossible to create a work of art without intending to do so. Postmodern curators who refer to "unintentional art" are chasing shadows; the mere act of declaring something art is intentional. And there is no point in claiming that we cannot determine the intentions of an artist -- of course we can! We do this all the time!
One of the decisive moments in human evolution was when our ancestors developed the ability to form intentions, to conceive of goals and the actions required to bring them about, to conceive of the world not only as it is, but as it should be. Intentions became the driving force behind almost all human activity; they became such a key part of human behaviour that we began to see the whole world in terms of intentions. This intentional stance led to a number of errors and misapprehensions -- random events in nature became attributed to intentions of imaginary higher beings, whom we called gods -- but it is also the basis for much of our communication, and much of our existence in society.
To understand human communication, it is necessary to be able to divine the intentions of others. The meaning of an utterance is not just restricted to its semantics -- the combined dictionary meanings of its words. The pragmatics of the utterance are more important -- its meaning as uttered in a particular context, by a particular speaker, who has intentions, and knows his listeners have intentions, and knows they have suspicions about his intentions. We're rather good at determining intentions. In fact, we're incredibly good at it -- much better than machines, much better than any other animal.
Take, for example, the utterance "we have a new Booker Prize-winner". The speaker could simply be intending to inform his audience that there is a new Booker Prize-winner. Or, in a different context, it could be an ironic comment, intended to convey the speaker's low opinion of someone's literary abilities. Or, in a different context still, as the answer to the question "What time is it?", it could be intended to inform the questioner that he is already too late for the awards ceremony. In short, we cannot tell the whole meaning of an utterance unless we are aware of the intentions of its speaker and the context in which it is uttered.
Similarly, the "meaning" of a work of art -- an intentional act -- is inseparable from the context in which it was made and the intentions of its creators. This is not to claim that the author's intention is the meaning, nor is it to claim that only authorial intention and context are relevant. The one significant point made by the author-is-dead crowd, albeit an obvious and unoriginal one, is that other contexts contribute to the meaning of a work: the contexts of the reader, the performer, the audience. But none of these contexts invalidate the author's contribution, nor do they make authorial intention disappear.
Even ignoring the fact that we can determine the intentions of an artist, the New Critic will still insist that we shouldn't. But why not? The artist has intentions, and we can try to determine them. We are, as we've established, rather good at it; why deny us one of our best abilities? Reading a book without trying to determine the author's intentions is like looking at a picture with one eye, or sprinting with our arms tied together.
And then there is the claim that an author cannot be reconstructed from his writing. Of course he can! We do this all the time. We construct people from what they do and say. Our contruction might not be entirely accurate -- the authorial persona we derive from a text might not be the same person as the author -- but who is to decide on that? And in any case, so what? It doesn't mean that this persona should be immune from criticism.
Essentially, the New Criticism was an attempt to deny the "pragmatic" component of art. Wimsatt and Beardsley, who coined the term "intentional fallacy" in their essay of the same name, are quite explicit about this:
"Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrevelant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract than poetry."
According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, art is exempt from the standard rules of communication. A poem is a message stripped down to its semantics, with all context excluded. They provide no justification for this statement, beyond the false claim that we cannot determine authorial intention, and the repeated insinuation that authors have no idea of their intentions anyway:
Here is a confession of how poems were written which would do as a definition of poetry [...]. Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie verite.
This is a vision of the author as an unintentional being, to whom ideas come unbidden and fully-formed, a radio-receiver relaying messages from the undying soul, from the divine. Given the Southern Methodist background of the leading New Critics, one has to wonder whether they were purposefully leaving a gap for God to slip into. If God is the real author of a text, then the intentions of the author are of course not to be questioned; we should interpret his word and his word only. Looked at in this way, the similarity between the New Criticism and Bible literalism is neither superficial nor accidental.
To deny the "pragmatic" aspect of art is also to deny its social aspect. It's to ignore the other human being who created the work, and the social context in which it was created, and instead interpret the work in your own autistic shell. Thus, while the New Critics claimed to be looking for an "objective" interpretation of the work, they were really arguing for a fiercely and almost pathologically individualistic interpretation. The reader discovers the truth through the text alone, much as the Protestant discovers God through bible study and individual revelation.
This individualistic approach found favour with the radicals of the late 60s, who were about to take Stalin's dictum to an extreme and propose Socialism in One Person. Barthes, when repackaging the "Intentional Fallacy" as "Death of the Author", was careful to surround the idea with lots of "left" rhetoric; it was important to put some distance between himself and the conservative Christians of the New Criticism:
The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the "human person." It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the "person" of the author.
The above paragraph, which namechecks all the right pomo bogeymen, might appear to be a rant against the "prestige of the individual", but as later becomes clear, Barthes merely wants a change of emphasis. The reader should attach less prestige to the individual who wrote the text, and more to the individual who is reading it. The result is an act of self-liberation worthy, perhaps, of a daytime talk show:
...it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
It's interesting to look at what the "Death of the Author" has really achieved. Has it thrown off the yoke of "capitalist ideology"? Has it done anything to progress society? Has it overthrown the old elites and liberated the vast horde of readers? No; quite the contrary. When the author is dead, the reader is king, or rather, the individual, free-floating consumer is king. The quality of a work of art is therefore determined by the number of people who consume it; in other words, by market forces. Artists must cater their work to market realities, and a whole swathe of nominally "left" commentators cheer them on; those artists who pursue their singular, uncommercial vision are condemned as "elitist" or worse. The trend launched by the "Death of the Author" has been against self-expression in art, and in favour of pandering to the dollar and to the lowest common denominator. It's a perfect example of the dead end and hypocrisy of 60s radicalism. The author is dead, long live the free market!