Author Must Fall: The Relationships Between the Death of the Author and Rhodes Must Fall

This response will be addressing the connection between Barthes’ and Foucalt’s ideas regarding the “Death of the Author”. Additionally, it will examine the relationship between their ideas and how it pertains to our case study: Rhodes Must Fall.

"A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance" (Foucault 905).

Barthes agreed with this notion; that the author holds too much power. He believed that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. Where the two would likely disagree is to what extent must the author disappear or die. Barthes would argue that the author must disappear completely, while Foucault believes that a certain amount of historical context is necessary for understanding the work fully. Containing a work entirely within a vacuum couldn’t prove to be problematic. This concept is where the Rhode Must Fall case study is concerned.

The Case Study

"... the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationships with the author, not to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships" (Foucault 905).

It’s plausible that the protestors were applying Barthes’ and Foucault’s argument when they had insisted the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue from the Univerity of Cape Town. As explained in the quote provided above, they analyzed the statue in its intrinsic form and the play of its internal relationships. Its internal relationships being those with white supremacy, the oppression of minority groups, and what they want their university to represent as the progress. They determined a course of action by analyzing what the work symbolizes, rather than reconstructing it to fit their beliefs and ideologies today.

This can be achieved if we examine the author of the situation to be the scholars and society of Cape Town in the 1930’s, with their work being the statue of Rhodes. By removing the relationship between the work and the authors they began observing the work independently. They held Cecil Rhodes’ contributions to the Univerty of Cape Town to a lower level of importance to what the problematic subtext that the memorialization of such a figure means today. Thus, coming to their conclusion that having such a statue displayed represents white supremacy, oppression, and institutional racism. By removing the authors of the 1930’s they inserted their own personal beliefs about the historical context of the situation.

They begged the question: Why do we need to commemorate this man today?