A Glance at the Impact of Derrida's Deconstruction on Criticism of the Death of the Author

The mysterious nature of mirrors has always been and attractive for artists to choose as their subject matter for the creation of the artwork. This is not just due to their reflective quality of their surroundings but also because of their capability to change such reflections. Today, mirrors and knowledge about them are being used beyond their reflecting feature more than any time before. Mirrors have coexisted mysteriously with the art and have found their special meanings in different cultures in the same way that art has enveloped other sciences, like psychology, politics, and technology. The complexity of mirrors and their ability to reflect things in a unique way is contrary to their simplicity. Therefore, their impression on their audiences varies from person to another. In other words, this method of “deconstructive reflection” (as Derrida has named it), can be explained as: the hidden meanings of signifiers that are constantly suspending and floating; the subject finds its meaning only through its division, multiplication, and expansion in space and floating in time. Using mirrors in the field of interactive arts can represent the relationship between the artist and his inner and outside world. The involvement of mirrors in artworks can be a way of representing the audience by the artist, in a way that the presence of the artist/author is unavoidable in some of the new artworks. This form of indirect interaction within the symbols, signs, and/or archetypes in the art work can create a multi-layered relationship with the audience. Moreover, such interaction between the audience and artwork makes the role of artist even more effective and also creates a new form of perception and understanding for the audience. In this essay, attempt has been made to study and analyze the roles and functions of mirrors in the new interactive arts. Therefore, the author has proposed a method to examine the potentials of the poststructuralist ideas, such as Roland Barthes and Derrida’s, and if they are employable on Post-modern art. Furthermore, the paper seeks to respond to the literary idea of “The Death of the Author” and if we can perceive new meanings from artworks through this Barthesian debate. To this purpose, the research studies the roles of mirrors in the post-structuralist framework and Barthes’ theory of “The Death of the Author”. Hence, on one hand, this essay challenges this Bathesian theory in the interpretation of contemporary artworks, and on the other, analyzes mirror’s functions through Derrida’s post-structuralist theory. Finally, this essay concludes new responses to the author’s transformational role in the relationship with the audience and artwork. Through this relationship, the paper presumes that not only the author is not dead or absent in the art work-audience relationship but also exists in a more effective way through his indirect interaction with his audience. Interactive arts, including those that involve functional mirrors, are appropriate candidates for this research elaborating upon the thoughts and ideas of post-modern theorists like Barthes and Derrida. The data required to conduct this research has been gathered through the desk study of library resources taking descriptive-comparative method. The statistical population includes six examples of interactive arts created during the past decades. The works selected are sufficient to support the paper’s hypothesis and also extend it to the aforementioned theories.