The concept of the death of the author and the problem of post-creativity in the digital age

Philosophy of creativity in the becoming of the culture’s language

Abstract

The paper analyzes Roland Barthes’ concept described in the article The Death of the Author (1968). It is shown that two different interpretations of the concept can be distinguished in this text: 1) the author dies with the appearance of the reader; 2) the author dies with the demise of the bourgeois era. The paper attempts to combine them into a single concept basing on the analysis of the notion «depersonalization», which appears to be among the fundamental ones for Barthes. It is concluded that by the impersonal subject of writing, the French intellectual most likely understood not an individual, but human in general or humanity as a whole. The process of depersonalization is carried out through language. The language, according to Barthes, is a set of ready-made words, phrases that the writer draws for his needs, taking them out of the storerooms as from a huge box. As a result, the author turns from the creator of ideas, what he appeared to be since Modern times, into a simple scriptwriter. The language performs the same depersonalization procedure with the reader. In the digital society, the problem of depersonalization of the author is revived in a new guise, as a result of which the concept proposed by Barthes acquires second life. With the use of modern generative technologies, the work of live artists is imitated, sometimes without their consent. A special case is the situation with deceased artists whose digital images can be artificially recreated by modern technologies and used in new works. Examples cited in the paper include cases from modern musical art, the GPT neural network as well as Russian cinema.