Barthes

Implied in authorship is a totalitarian controlling power over creative activity which makes sense in Barthes Parisian 1968 as the arts were joined by student activism in an attempt to overthrow a political idea

Is authorship a renewed sense of responsibility? The primary concern of graphic authorship is not who made it, but rather WHAT & HOW it achieves its purpose

In a Hollywood system where control lies with the capitalist driven structure of the studios, the treatment of it's script and other moving components becomes ever more important. The translation from written text to an onscreen production is a collaborative effort which comprises a multitude of skilled professionals who collaborate towards a common goal, managed by production staff. However in that hierarchal system whose vision is eventually realised?

1958 - as directors started to become auteurs.
Auteur theory as defined by Andrew Saris has 3 qualifying;

technical expertise
visible stylistic signature visible over multiple works
consistency of vision and interior

Are we moving towards a time when authorship is no longer important, flickr, tumblr, the ability to repost, reblog, retweet, reappropriate. Technical profiency in computer based skills sets are becoming more common, and can be applied loosely to many practitioners.
If we apply auteur theory to graphic designers, we can elevate our own work to auteur status.

What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?

The gaps between words are where meaning comes from. Space between letters. Space between a header and text body. Writing is fixed, cement.

"We think typography is black and white; typography's really white you know, it's not even black. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it."

Massimo Vignelli
(Helvetica)

LINKS TO A YOUTUBE DEFINITION AND EXPLANATION

"If he was willing to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass into immortality"

Michel Foucault as a post-structuralist theorist and philosopher considered the previous interpretation of the author as restrictive and debilitating in regards to the understanding and reading of a text. Keen to break the ties that the notion of the author can have on the understanding of a text. Being "the" author brings along with it, it's own set of imposed values, context, ideologies that may or may not be relevant or conducive to the understanding. If understanding is taken from how letters, words and media are arranged on a page then the role of the author changes from narrator to conductor. In doing so - creating new meanings of authorship. As the text will in most cases outlive the author, the author will impose his own identity into their work, therefore giving themselves immortality. This cannot be ignored.

"Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is
also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity ofhis absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing."

Let's put what we learn into a context

This is not a pipe
René Magritte
In the simplest terms "this is not a pipe". This is a painting of a pipe, however to the user it represents and is understood to be a pipe. Beautifully painted and clearly the work of a skilled master, Rene Magritte confronted the issue of communication through a visual language by challenging the preconceptions that the page/canvas can indeed not be a reflection of reality. Not being physical this 'pipe' can not be used, it can be understood however by the users inputting their own socio/political preconceptions into their discourse.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, postmodern challenged the notion of universality by asserting the endless diversity of indivduals and communities and the constantly changing meaning of visual forms."

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Typophoto

STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

http://www.rchoetzlein.com/theory/2009/timeline-of-20th-c-art-and-new-media/

Structuralist notions of the author began with the swiss linguist in the 20th century

French born Barthes was a structuralist thinker whose Death of the Author examined semiotics and the role of the author

Neurath brought with him a scientific approach to design, a methodology that later influenced the work of many.

Post-Structuralist semiotician accredited with the production of a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. His work was labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy

He is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s. He was one of those French intellectuals – like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur – whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition.

In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns.