Critique of Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault, in his "What is an Author?" provides us with slightly more useful theoretical tools. His analysis of the author-function is crystallised by Rochester's poetry and society's reception of it. The texts of Rochester's poems do not give the reader a fully developed author. Rather, they make sly references to society beyond the text and hint at the nature of the text, its author, its environment, and its readers. The relationship of an author to his/her texts is not static. It varies between different time periods and different societies. Foucault shows similar disdain to the author as Barthes did in his essay. He says:

We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.
The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction... The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

This disdain that Foucault shows for the idea of the author is unwarranted. Using the example of Rochester's poetry and how the name of its author has influenced its dissemination, one could agree with Foucault and say that the author "impedes the free circulation." Yet could we not also say that it is in the drastic temporal variation of publication and circulation that an exciting possibility of varying meanings within the text is created? Is it not the society's reaction to the poetry of Rochester that provides the critic and reader with a means to freely compose, decompose and recompose the text? Yes, we could limit the author's function to being just a system of classification. But we must also remember that this classification is dynamic and continually shifts between timeperiods. Instead of disdaining this (de)limitation of the author, let us rejoice in it. If we take the next theoretical step from Foucault's idea of the author, the author him/herself becomes a plural and fluid identity, a created and constructed discourse that interacts with society, the reader, as well as the texts attributed to him/her.