Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early — Crooked Timber

Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early — Crooked Timber

There’s a great anecdote about Roman Jakobson, the structuralist theorist of language, in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. For Jakobson, and for other early structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, language, cybernetic theories of information, and economists’ efforts to understand how the economy worked all went together : By aligning the refined conceptual systems of interwar Central Euro…