“Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing,” (Barthes 141).
Wrong. Writing is that biased, composite, defined space, where our subject presents itself, the positive where all identity is found, starting with the very identity of the body writing. Right? What I am writing at this moment, as an author of a blog, is not neutral nor can it ever be viewed as neutral. Barthes may like to believe that The Author is dead and gone and in its place we have this idealistic neutrality where every text can be freed from the limits that Authors place upon it, but that is simply not the case. Authors cannot be removed from their work, even if they exist incorporeally or as anonymous or unnamed attachments. The fact of the matter is that words do not simply appear out of thin air, even if they float around like the colorful dots of We Feel Fine. Every one of those dots represents and author. Every word that is written has an origin and an agenda.
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child (Barthes 145).
If you believe in the existence of The Author, and I certainly do, then you may believe that the author is always present in the text and has some sway over it or some influence in its construction. Authors would not exist without text and text cannot exist without some kind of author. Someone has to write to codes, the epics, the novels, and the laundry lists. Someone has to take the pictures and upload them. These are not random acts, even if these authors want to create something random. Creation, or writing, is bound by its execution: we make decisions before we type something out, we calculate how we are going to randomly arrange those random lines of English Syllabi, and so on. The product may end up being something unexpected, but that does not automatically remove the author from the creation of the work.
I like how you push back on Barthes’ ideas. I wonder what difference it makes that Barthes uses Author with a capital A, rather than author. It suggests to me that he thinks it’s our concept of Authorship that is limiting, rather than the fact that there are actual authors, which he calls “modern scriptors.”
Also, his proclamations (and hyperbole) about the death of the Author should be seen in light of what Barthes really wants to talk about—which is the power of the reader. Barthes frames it as a zero-sum game: the reader can have no power unless the Author dies. But I think, as you suggest here, it’s more complicated than that.