Another crucial issue which has arisen through poststructuralism is the (in)famous “death of the author.” The deconstructive emphasis on unintended meanings renders authorship and the author's individual responsibility for the meanings inherent in the written or read text highly problematic. If texts encoded their own terms of understanding and difference, then it did not make sense to study what the author had “intended,” as most twentieth-century literary criticism had quite literally intended to find out. Perhaps, in a structuralist mode, authorship could be seen as simply a “function” within a system of discourse, as Michel Foucault suggested:
The “author-function” is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.14
The author is here deprived of his/her role as originator and placed within a discursive field; the author is her/himself a subject of discourse, a proper name associated with a text, performing the function of authorship. Accordingly, Foucault concluded, “what matter who is speaking?” Critical readers should ask instead, “what are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it? … Who can fulfill the diverse functions of the subject?”15 Literary works and other texts thus take on historical significance as expressions of cultural systems rather than as the works of individual authors. Much as social historians might see goods and services as a product of economic systems instead of the work of the individual producers, so the post-structuralist reader sees texts as a product of discursive systems instead of individual genius. The author is not thereby neglected or considered unnecessary any more than is the worker, but the meanings embedded and contested within the text may range beyond his/her control, and appear as much through reading, as through writing.