In his essay, “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault treats authorship as though it were some kind of fiction.  It is, he says, a “function of discourse”  (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 124).  Discourse in our culture, he says, is “an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous” (Ibid.) .  In other words, authors do not create their works; instead their works are ultimately the result of a discursive practice in which they participate by virtue of living in a certain place and time.  Other discursive practices produce other types of “author-function.”  I wonder how the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic artists understood their relationship to their work?

The Art of Decoding