On Authority in the Study of Writing

Abstract

If the author is dead, as Roland Barthes contends, then what about authority? It, too, has passed from our midst, if we are to believe Hannah Arendt. In the end, it seems that both author and authority suffered the same fate. Succumbing to modernity unraveled, theories of authorship and authority supposedly ceased to explain the production and reception of written discourse. Language itselfand not the human agents and agency of its performance-thus emerged as the central concern of English studies. This turn of events continues to pose a perplexing question for those of us who study and teach writing. How are we to account for the theoretical erasure of the authority that constitutes the writers-the authors-we face everyday in our composition classrooms? One answer to this question, an answer that motivates this essay, suggests that authority may not be dead after all, and even if it is, it hardly matters. Contemporary myths of authority are so prevalent that authority remains for many a simple matter of common sense. Indeed, in the literature of composition studies, mention of authority is so frequent as to demand an assessment of its status, of how it functions for those who talk and write about acts of composing. So alive or dead, functional or not, the concept of authority is very much with us. Or perhaps we should speak of concepts of concepts that we might array from the most contingent to the most determined. Composition studies now struggles with two fairly distinct views of authority, yet the term is trusted as stable and uniform by a range of authors who otherwise appear to hold differing assumptions about the nature of language and the world. While both views assume that authority attends the negotiation of power within the context of communities, they diverge in assumptions about how communities function and, consequently, how authority is to be defined and engaged (see Harris). In one view, community evolves from consensus and authority compels assimilation. That is, individuals gain discursive authority by

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