The Phil-Phunction

Today’s episode, “The O.J. Simpson Book Battle,” discussed the circumstances and controversies involved in the recently published book If I Did It. The show featured the work’s ghostwriter and the Goldman family as guests. Most peculiarly, it presented Dr. Phil in a novel role, that of the literary critic, as he promised to give the audience his “reading” of the book. When Pablo Fenjves explained that the book was proposed, agreed to, and created in the context of a “hypothetical confession,” Dr. Phil seemed unable to comprehend such an abstract idea and even noted: “hypothetical and confession, I don’t see how those two words go together.” In the realm of critical theory, however, there are, in fact, many ways of interpreting this. One of the more interesting pieces to discuss such issues is Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” In this piece, Foucault makes a great many comments that help to elucidate problems in today’s Dr. Phil. It is suggested that “today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression,” that “the work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be it’s author’s murder” and that “we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance.” In fact, Foucault focuses not on the author, but rather the author-function. The author-function is more than the realization of the act of writing—even a famous writer’s signed checks, grocery lists, and tic-tac-toe games are generally not authored. Instead “the author-function is…characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” The authorship doesn’t simply describe who wrote something, but how, when, and under what circumstances. As Foucault writes, “literary anonymity is not tolerable,” perhaps—as this episode shows—because readers and their societal discourses need someone to punish. Nonetheless, the author-function is a construction and the specifics are “only a projection…of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.” If it is so mind-blowingly incredible that a hypothetical statement could also be a confessional one, it is only because we (not he) find it so impossible and because we are actually operating within a self-structured discourse which aims at separating the two concepts both hermetically and hermeneutically. Such a perspective is only as interpretively necessary as we make it; in fact, one could easily turn around and say that the idea of a hypothetical confession is at the root of all fiction. If it was conclusively discovered that Shakespeare was a murderer (like so many of his most realistically written characters in works of stunning detail) would that in any way affect his work? Objectively, it doesn’t, only when viewed through the author-function does it matter in the least whether any writer is a real murderer or simply imagines. Foucault also points out that the author-function demands a “certain unity of writing—all differences have to be resolved.” Dr. Phil and the gang are clearly fulfilling that end of the function, but it also glazes over a more serious issue. After all, while it might have been from interviews, it was not actually O.J. Simpson who wrote the book. No, it was Fenjves. The discourses are not in a position to evaluate Fenjves, however, either as a murderer or an author. Therefore, he is pushed aside radically, left to talk about what is not in the book, explaining his interactions with the true author. In this sense it seems that what Dr. Phil really can’t comprehend is that “all discourses endowed with the author-function do possess this plurality of self.” The “I” that is talking in one sentence is never the same exact “I” that is in the next, nor does the pronoun mean the same thing as the viewer jumps through passages, between chapters, or across books or genres. In this way, there is little connection between the speaker, the writer, and the author. In short, Dr. Phil’s show provides an answer to Foucault’s final question that is very different from the one given by the author himself. The question is: “what difference does it make who is speaking?” Foucault leaves it up to the reader, whereas Phil is not shy about letting his audience know that it matters a great deal, especially when he’s the one speaking.