Authorial regimes of truth vary across cultures and eras

Evidence

Foucault’s historicizing of the author problem, consistent with his concept of the rise (and, by implication, displacements and breaks) of épistémès, is crucial, especially in light of what is for us an important statement, that the “modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each.” The rise, through suppression, of the ideological author at the expense of the individual author, as well as the ineluctable disappearance and death of the former in favor of an as yet unidentified newcomer, belies any claim for a perpetual, much less eternal, regime of truth, certainly not one in modernity that an Aeschylus or a Dante—or for that matter an Aristotle or a Protagoras—could have advocated. The historicizing for us is thus pregnant with significance in terms of how the death and rise of authors fit within a theory of paradigms. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 87

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Kuhn’s paradigm theory — the rise and fall of authors maps onto scientific paradigm shifts. — connects to: Universal authorship arrives long before universal literacy did — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34