The history of ideas has had some bad press in cultural studies where too many critics produce a “parodic” version of literary history that takes the form of this imperative: everyone “back then” was benighted by ideology, everyone now is benighted by ideology, and so we must read cultural productions not for what they say but for what they do culturally, politically, socially. Fredric Jameson argued against this kind of historicizing in Postmodernism, pointing out that the critic exempts him or herself from ideological contamination (5).

Roland Barthes’s essay, “The Death of the Author,” has had precisely the opposite impact of its intent. Its intent was to prevent critics from achieving finality in their interpretations of a text by claiming to know the author’s intention:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ — victory to the critic. (Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang,1977], 147.)

Paradoxically, cultural studies is full of “victories” for critics, of moments when the critic triumphantly claims to know better than a writer what motivates that writer’s text, a cultural producer his or her production. That is, uncritically deployed, gender, sexual-preferance, heterosexism, racism, sexism, classism, the economy, politics — these are as much “hypostases” susceptible of standing in for “Author” as “society, history, psyche, liberty,” Barthes’s examples.

It is possible for someone who lived before me to know more about something than I do, and so I’m trying to extract those things here, but not in a way that is naively anti- or a-theoretical.