‘What is an author?’: critical reflections on authors and authority in critical security studies – introduction

Abstract

This special issue starts from some simple questions, questions that are periodically raised throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences, including in Critical Security Studies (CSS) and critical International Relations (IR). Yet they are important enough to be repeatedly re-posed at key moments. What is an author? What role does the ‘author’ figure perform in contemporary CSS? How do claims made alongside or against an author undergird or undercut the authority of research, arguments, claims and statements in the field? What does it do to a field that sought to challenge, disrupt and overturn authority claims when its own reliance on foundational authors and their gendered, racialised assumptions is called into question? Michel Foucault famously claimed that in Western culture, the author serves as an ‘ideological figure’ insofar as it is via reference to ‘the author’ that the proliferation of meanings inherent to an author’s work, inherent to language, stops (Foucault 1984, 118–119). The cultural function of the author is to provide coherence, to individualise and to neutralise contradictions and slippages within and between texts. This is evident, for example, when we debate what is most representative of an author’s work and what is not, or what ‘turns’ an author’s work may have taken, such as a ‘political’, ‘aesthetic’ or ‘ethical turn’. It is also evident in what is presupposed in our citational practices when we invoke an author’s ‘authority’ and, in turn, signify our own and/or others belonging to a particular intellectual community or ‘school’. While such insights speak to the importance of questioning authors and authority, they also point to the acute problems that can arise when, as a result of this work, one or more of the canonical figures of an intellectual community is reread against the grain of contemporary sensibilities, if not the ethical commitments of that community. This has been well evidenced by contemporary controversies in CSS – including those resulting from accusations of sexual misconduct against Foucault and those of racism against the Copenhagen School, the latter of which have been interpreted by some as an assault on the authors and intellectual authority of that School. Both controversies have reinvigorated debates about whose voices have been privileged and whose have been marginalised not only in CSS but in the production of knowledge more generally – in short, in the authorship of our world. Foucault, of course, variously resisted the imposition of these and other ordering practices – tirelessly illustrating the imbrication of truth claims and knowledge with power, whilst provoking controversy with his conduct and ideas. This is beautifully illustrated by Erzsebet Strausz’s contribution to this special issue, as it explores the inconsistency and slipperiness of Foucault as an author. And perhaps this resistance to ordering practices also provides Foucault’s most vital contribution to CSS. Alongside post-structuralist, critical constructivist and feminist thinkers, Foucault’s work helped to lay the groundwork for a broader dissident movement in IR and Security Studies – one less beholden to established theoretical traditions and the so-called ‘grand’ narratives of security and emancipation. With the emergence of CSS, the questions of ‘Security for