Tissues of Culture

Roland Barthes, in his text “The Death of the Author,” explains that we have the idea of the author due to our capitalist ideology and positivism (belief in one truth). Barthes is a cultural materialist. Cultural materialism is concerned with how we work within a power that limits us, and how we affect it. For example, the power imposed on us can be seen as capitalist hegemony. We are surrounded by its power and we can move and have freedom within it. Cultural materialism is concerned about how we work in this system. So the author is used as a type of power imposed on us over the text. Barthes is interested in how we work to interpret within this limiting power the idea of the author has over us. He explains that the author is, linguistically, “never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’…” The I is not a person, his physical self, but instead is a combination of all the ideologies power has imposed on us. Therefore when the author writes, it is not his own ideas being shared, but instead cultural ideology. The “text is a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Barthes explains that the authors ideas are not truly his own. He is merely writing his thoughts down from a “ready-formed dictionary” that has already been created for us.

Culture Cat explains in her blog http://culturecat.net/node/575:
Barthes argues that texts consist of "multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation." The field of composition has moved from the understandingof authorship as a solitary act resulting in a product owned by an individual to an understanding of authorship as a weaving together of other texts the writer has read and voices he or she has heard in conversation.

This explanation is related to Barthes when he says that the text is just a tissue of quotations and signs drawn from culture. The meaning of the work is always looked for in the idea of the author, a single voice of a person, in the text. This is not what we should be concerned with, Barthes says. The single voice of a person does not exist in the text. It is what is underlying in our culture, the ideology of power such as capitalism.