Given all the television shows, commercials, and infinite number of images that people are confronted with every day, their creators usually go by unnoticed, working behind the scenes. Their identities are known to a knowledgeable few, but for the most part, they remain anonymous. In place of sentences and paragraphs, aesthetic devices are used to portray mood and appeal to the senses of sight and sound. At its lowest point, mediums within media such as television, film, music, and computers can appeal to people's lack of attention. A lack of the ability to read will not hinder their enjoyment for any given sitcom or video game. Readers of new work through the use of appropriation, if the work is successful, will be able to disregard the original author's influence on the creation. The author will have become an inactive participant, whose roll will no longer extend itself into the piece's interpretation. The death of the author is the only thing that will yield a pure, untainted view of the piece. Some may say that this authorless creation lacks soul. Perhaps. On the other hand, when one views the credits at the end of some program, some film, it is clear that the creation is the collective work of many and could be said to possess a collective soul. Perhaps this notion of the collective soul has been present right back to the beginning of narrative in the western tradition. In place of speculations and fabrications about the narrator of Hesiod, for example, modern analysts are returning us to the way Hesiod the narrator, the Sender of the Way,5 would surely want to be understood--through his words. If we don't know who wrote the words, does it matter.
Often, though, if not to a significant extent, we come to be known through our body language. A study of body language reveals how much of our entire communication process relies on body language. I was often seen as a laid-back person. One of my students once said that he thought I was so laid back that I might as well have been parallel to the ground. I never felt I was super cool like, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, Jim Morrison in the Doors or Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. They were all cool and I was not in their league.