We're also covering What Is An Author? this evening. I used it briefly in a paper on Creative Commons, and am still very interested in the implications different notions of authorship pose to Intellectual Property. Here's what I have so far, which is a blend of Foucault's What Is An Author? and Barthes' Death of the Author:

[...] If we reveal ourselves on the web and draw readers through ethos and persona, haven’t we attempted a resurrection of the Author?

Not necessarily. Regardless of medium, and regardless of the extent to which we reveal ourselves, we’re still engaged in the act of writing. That act puts our existence squarely within language, which is Barthes’ point: “It is the language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality … to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (143). My readers know the words on the screen, not me. Anything they might know of me is “born simultaneously with the text” (Barthes 145). Thus the words live and breathe on their own, and exist within the space and time that the reader devotes to them.

The blogger, and the author, serves as a conduit that allows the words to be born – a function, as Foucault would have it. Like Barthes, he defines “author” as a concept devoid of persona:

Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence… To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s survival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death…” (102-105, emphasis mine)

Whether that death is metaphorical or physical is of little consequence – either way, the issue is the perpetuation of the work itself. (Or, as Lanham would call it, the potential of the text.) Viewed in this manner, the words belong to themselves, independent of their creator, just as knowledge belongs to itself. Any potential the text has belongs to the reader. Barthes writes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. … refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary…” (147). This directly coincides with our discussion of shared knowledge on the web.

Perhaps most important to the topic of Creative Commons is Foucault’s concept of the author as transdiscursive. He sees the author as not only the creator of his/her own work, but also as the producer of other works: “They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other text” (114). Authorship produces not only concrete original work, but also the possibility of additional derivative work.