The Author Who Knows Nothing : Socrates, Techne, and Barthes’ Scriptor

By Rodo @ 2025-06-01T09:49 (+1)

Preface

What does it mean to create meaning—through poetry, philosophy, or prose? This essay draws a line from Plato’s Ion to Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author, exploring how both texts challenge the idea of the writer or speaker as the true source of meaning. In Ion, Socrates famously denies the poet’s craft as techne, proposing instead that poetic speech is a form of possession. Centuries later, Barthes echoes this displacement of origin by declaring the “author” dead, and replacing him with the “scriptor”—a figure who assembles, rather than originates.

The text below argues that Socrates, as a literary creation of Plato, anticipates this move: he claims no knowledge, owns no authorship, and yet becomes a vessel through which philosophical meaning emerges, I hope this piece provokes some useful reflections.

Introduction

In Ion, one of Plato’s briefest and most enigmatic dialogues, Socrates confronts the rhapsode Ion with a disarming question: is his ability to interpret Homer grounded in systematic knowledge, or is it something else entirely? Ion insists he possesses expert insight into Homer’s poetry, claiming a unique attunement to its meaning. But Socrates, ever skeptical, responds, “You are not speaking about Homer with knowledge… you are possessed.”¹ With this diagnosis, he questions the traditional conception of poetic expertise—not as techne (a teachable craft grounded in rational understanding), but as a kind of divine inspiration that bypasses conscious mastery.

Centuries later, Roland Barthes would famously proclaim “the death of the Author,” challenging the modern illusion that meaning resides in the originating consciousness of a singular writer.² In its place, he introduces the scriptor—a figure who writes not to express a unified self but to rearrange and rearticulate a preexisting network of cultural codes. This essay argues that the contrast Socrates draws between techne and poetic possession parallels Barthes’ distinction between author and scriptor. And more provocatively: Socrates himself, as a literary construction voiced through Plato, may exemplify the very paradox he critiques—a figure who disavows authority, claims no knowledge, and channels meaning without owning it.

Craft and Possession: From Knowledge to Inspiration

At the heart of Ion lies a clear dichotomy between the rational discipline of techne and the irrational force of enthousiasmos—divine madness. Socrates undermines Ion’s claim to expertise by exposing its narrowness: if Ion truly possessed knowledge, he would be able to speak competently about all poets, not just Homer. Ion’s admission that he can only interpret one author suggests that his talent stems not from understanding, but from something more mysterious.

Socrates introduces the metaphor of a magnetic chain: the Muse inspires the poet, who then inspires the rhapsode, who in turn moves the audience. Each link transmits a divine current, yet none originates it. The poet, therefore, is not a source of meaning but a conduit. As Socrates puts it, “The gift you have of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but a divine power.”³ This view dethrones the poet as a knowing creator and reimagines him as a vessel through which something ineffable flows.

This relocation of creative agency is crucial. The poet, once regarded as a sage or seer, is reframed as someone who produces beauty without comprehension. For Plato, this is no mere aesthetic point—it’s an epistemological crisis. If poets lack understanding, why should their works guide us in matters of truth or ethics? The implication is clear: poetry, lacking rational foundation, must yield to philosophy—the techne of reflective inquiry.⁴

Barthes’ Scriptor: Writing Without a Source

In The Death of the Author, Barthes launches a parallel critique—not of poetry, but of authorship itself. The notion of the author as an expressive origin, whose intentions govern interpretation, is, for Barthes, a cultural fabrication designed to stabilize meaning. But language, he insists, “knows a ‘subject’ not as the person who speaks... but as that which is spoken.”⁵

Barthes replaces the sovereign author with the scriptor—a figure who assembles texts from already existing signs. The scriptor does not create ex nihilo, nor does he possess a private meaning to disclose. Rather, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”⁶ Meaning, then, arises not behind the text—in the psyche or biography of the writer—but within the act of reading.

Here, the poet in Ion appears curiously prescient—a kind of proto-scriptor. He lacks understanding, exercises no control, and yet speaks with force. His utterance is not authored in the traditional sense but dictated by forces beyond his grasp—the Muses, the gods, or what we might now call ideology or intertextuality. By denying the poet rational authority, Socrates unwittingly foreshadows Barthes’ rejection of intentionality and origin.

Socrates: Philosopher or Scriptor?

And yet Socrates’ own position is more complex. While he critiques the poet’s lack of techne, he does not simply assert his own mastery in its place. On the contrary, his famous motto—“I neither know nor think that I know”⁷—disqualifies him from claiming expertise. In the Apology, Socrates attributes his philosophical vocation not to reasoned conviction but to the promptings of a daimonion—a divine voice that offers no instruction, only interruption.⁸

Moreover, Socrates does not write; Plato does. He does not teach doctrine; he interrogates assumptions. He does not declare truths; he midwifes ideas from others. He is, in this sense, an author who refuses authorship, a thinker who dissolves authority rather than consolidates it. His method—the elenchus—could be described as a kind of techne, but one defined by paradox: a disciplined craft of unknowing.⁹

Socrates thus begins to resemble Barthes’ scriptor: not a fixed source of meaning, but a site of dialogical emergence. And the resemblance deepens when we remember that the Socrates we encounter is not a historical person speaking directly, but a character in Plato’s dramas—a figure constructed through another’s language. Just as Barthes seeks to dissolve the author to empower the reader, Plato creates a Socrates who effaces himself, only to become a generative node in a living tradition of philosophical interpretation.

Conclusion: The Death of the Knowing Origin

The dialogue between Plato’s Ion and Barthes’ The Death of the Author reveals a shared skepticism toward the idea of originary authority—whether poetic or authorial. In both cases, the supposed origin of meaning is displaced: the rhapsode and the modern writer are unseated not because they fail, but because they never fully possessed what tradition ascribed to them.

Yet in Socrates we find a unique figure—one who renounces knowledge, refuses authorship, and speaks only to elicit meaning in others. He stands not as a traditional philosopher dispensing wisdom, but as a scriptor avant la lettre: a presence through whom language passes, who facilitates rather than dictates interpretation. Far from an origin, Socrates becomes a relay—a paradoxical author who knows nothing, and in doing so, makes meaning possible.

Footnotes

1. Plato, Ion, trans. Paul Woodruff in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 533e.
2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–148.
3. Plato, Ion, 534d.
4. For a discussion of techne and knowledge in Plato, see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 94–101.
5. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145.
6. Ibid., 146.
7. Plato, Apology, 21d.
8. Ibid., 31c–d.
9. On Socratic irony and elenchus, see Gregory Vlastos, “The Socratic Elenchus,” in Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–37.