Cognitive distancing between the author and the creative work: Dynamics of development of the methodology from Tristan Tzara to William Burroughs

Abstract

The idea of «death of the author» was laid out by Roland Barthes in the same sense of the 1967 essay. It proclaims the epoch of the reader, which replaces the epoch of the author’s monopoly to determine the content and nature of the work. It is the reader who now decrypts the voice of the text, according to its own cultural code, and determines the volume of its values. The proclamation of «the death of the author» was the logical conclusion of the long-term process of its desacralization, turning into an abyss of the cognitive dis­ tance between the author and the work, and the tendencies of introducing conscious contingent chaos to reflect the torn and alienated world. To track the dynamics of the cognitive distance between the author and the work, the development of the methodology of avant-garde art of the 1910–1950s and the accompanying leveling of author’s control over the final meaning and appearance of the work is considered. An analysis of the artistic and literary experiments of dadaists, in particular Tristan Tzara; techniques of «automatic writing» and «au­tomatic drawing» of surrealists; factor of spontaneity in the literature of the representatives of «beat genera­tion»; action painting of abstract expressionists; conceptual understanding and use of the «cut-ups» method by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.