Postmodern Approaches to Literature 2: From Work to Text

Rodrigo Oliveira: From Work to Text # 4 (2008)

Collage on Fabriano paper, acrylic resin, 146 x 210 cm

artfacts.net

S/Z is an important publication within Barthes's overall body of work. It marks a transitional stage between his structuralist and poststructuralist phases as Barthes the semiologist gives way to Barthes the hedonist. Indeed, Barthes himself will eventually protest that S/Z should not be thought of as a structural analysis, but as a textual analysis - i.e. one which is founded upon a theory of the Text born out of an encounter between structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.

Initially developed by Julia Kristeva, the theory of the Text was embraced by Barthes who set out his thinking on the notion in a short essay entitled 'From Work to Text' which opens with the following claim: "It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work ..."

This change is due to the encounter between different disciplines in relation to an object - language - which is suddenly seen as crucial to their practice; including disciplines, such as politics, which, as Barthes points out, have not traditionally had any special interest in language: interdisciplinarity is born here. But, importantly, it is not accomplished "by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge". On the contrary, it requires the effective breaking down of traditional boundaries between genres if it is to be more than the "mere expression of a pious wish" for polite cooperation and intellectual unity.

As former divisions begin to dissolve and disciplines promiscuously consort, the classical idea of what constitutes a work begins to mutate and we are faced with a new object "obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories" - the Text. This term, the sudden and widespread fashionability of which even Barthes seems a little embarrassed by, stands at the intersection of several key propositions concerning "method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure".

Barthes conveniently summarizes each proposition in turn:

1. "The Text is not to be thought of as an object ... It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts".

Essentially, the Text is a methodological field and/or a signifying practice; it can be demonstrated, but it can’t be displayed. Thus whilst the work can be held in the hand, the text is only ever held in language and exists in the movement of discourse that cuts across the work (or, indeed, across several works at once). In other words, "the Text is experienced only in an activity of production".

2. “In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”

The Text is always that which takes writing to the limits (of rationality, readability, etc.). For Barthes, this makes it paradoxical in the literal sense that it is contrary to common sense and received opinion (doxa).

3. "The work closes on a signified. ... The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified ... its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning’ ... but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action."

The signifier invites us to participate in a game that never ends; the symbolic game of language.

4. "The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings ... it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)."

This is why it can be undone, or why we can find ‘holes’ (aporia) in the fabric of the Text (in its internal structures, narratives, arguments, theories etc.) no matter how carefully and cleverly (no matter how tightly) it has been woven together. It is in its plurality that the Text offends and disturbs all those monomaniacs who look for One Truth, One Way, One God. For such people the Text is a form of Evil which declares its name to be Legion (Mark 5: 9) and the only good book is a work in which there is a single point of origin and authority: the Author. They have no time for the pagan or demonic plurality of the Text. But for those readers who read in a writerly fashion and who find their pleasure in the Text, the words of Nietzsche come back to them: Love of One is a form of barbarism and man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

5. "The work is caught up in a process of filiation."

Simply, Barthes means here that the work - unlike the Text - looks for its parental origin and owner: its Author. It likes to discover its roots and its genealogical determination. The Text, on the other hand, is an orphan and happily deracinated. Barthes writes:

"Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' ... the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic ..."

This idea of the text as a network of alliances and connections rather than as a single living organism is interesting and deserves further commentary ...

Anticipating Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, Barthes is suggesting that the Text-as-network can assume a wide - perhaps infinite - number of forms due to the fact that it can join together any one point with any other and has neither beginning nor end, but only a middle from which it expands and overspills. In contrast to an organism that has a nervous system and a brain acting as an hierarchical centre of communication and coordination, the Text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any "tripartite division between a field of reality (the world), a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)" [ATP].

This idea of Text-as-network has, perhaps not surprisingly, been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it - particularly within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Theodore Nelson in 1965 to refer to a radical new way of organizing information (i.e. non-sequentially), may not be Barthes’s, but as Mireille Ribière points out:

"Some hypertext specialists consider that Barthes’s definition of the 'writerly' text in S/Z ... precisely matched that of computer hypertext. They, therefore, see hypertext as the electronic embodiment of Barthes’s 'ideal' text and they see Barthes’s writings as offering a framework in which to discuss hypertext."

6. "The work is normally the object of consumption ... The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability') decants the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish ... the distance between writing and reading ..."

We noted earlier Barthes’s notion of reading in a writerly manner and this is simply a furthering of this idea, now coupled closely to the notion of play; a word which can be understood to refer to the Text itself which is ready to play like a machine with a play button and to the reader who can play the Text in the same fashion they might play a game or a musical instrument. The Text therefore requires a reader who will agree to an active collaboration and not be content simply to gobble down works of literature much as they do fast-food and other goods within so-called consumer culture. Barthes concludes:

"The reduction of reading to consumption is clearly responsible for the 'boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going."

Finally, then, we come to the theme of pleasure, which I'll discuss in Part III of this post. It's clearly an important notion throughout Barthes’s writing, even if it is only in his later works where he developed it explicitly and at length as part of a new hedonistic aesthetics.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). All lines and passages quoted from Barthes are taken from this essay.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). 

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 3 (I) click here. To go to PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 1: The Death of the Author

Just as Nietzsche's tragic proclamation concerning the death of God opened a new horizon for thought, so too does the death of the Author announced by Roland Barthes allow an experimental and joyous movement to be made from work to text and for the emergence of a new type of reading pleasure: jouissance.

Traditionally, the Author is seen as a central and all-important figure; in his person resides the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth. The Word belongs to him and he is the Word. Thus, as the Author, he can claim authorship of and authority over a text and its meaning. Readers who wish to give an authentic reading are obliged to know his intention and never allow their own interpretations to stray too far from this. The Author is the father of the text and readers, like children, should be seen to be obediently reading - not heard voicing their own opinions (which would be impertinent), or exposing their behinds in an act of comic defiance (which would be rebellious).

But for Barthes, to tie reading and criticism to the figure of the Author is not only lazy in its convenience, it's slavish in its wilful and passive surrender to authority. To assign an Author to a text is not only to impose a limit on the latter, but on ourselves. Thus to call for (and to celebrate) the death of Author is, like deicide or the beheading of the king, an act of political resistance to tyranny (although the naive belief that we might fully liberate the text and ourselves from power is one that Foucault makes us rightly suspicious of).

This death - and the subsequent move from work to text - allows for the birth of the reader as the source of meaning and the subject of desire. This really rather simple but very beautiful and important idea remains, almost fifty years on, very seductive. For writing (and reading in a writerly manner) cannot commence until this death has taken place. Writing is thus a posthumous activity.

And posthumous writing is also postmodern in the sense that the Author is very much a modern figure, developing, as Barthes argues, out of English empiricism, French rationalism and the unique value afforded the bourgeois individual. Within modern culture, the Author takes on greater and greater importance until, finally, he assumes total control over his work and we are no longer allowed to listen to language, but only to the monotonous voice of the Author confiding in us about "his person, his life, his tastes, his passions".

For Barthes, it was the poet Mallarmé who was one of the first to understand "the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner" and to restore to writing its impersonality - which is to restore also the status (and the pleasure) of the reader. This process of calling into question and ridiculing the authority of the Author continued in the work of Valéry, Proust, and the Surrealists.

However, it was linguistics which provided those interested in disposing of the Author "with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors". Barthes continues:

"Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Acknowledging this, not only frees the reader and the text, but it also liberates the scriptor (Barthes's term for the writer who emerges after the death of the Author). The scriptor is not the father of the book, but a child of language; that is to say, he is not the past of his own work, but rather "born simultaneously with the text" in the immediacy of the present and is not "equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing".

Thus a postmodern approach to literature allows for a different understanding of time or temporality; one primarily concerned with the nowness of the moment and what Nietzsche designates as its eternal recurrence. And it means we have moved beyond the idea of literature as a form of representation. Instead, writing now designates a performative practice "in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered".

Emphasizing the material nature of writing as marks on a surface and the physical aspect of a hand that dances with a pen across a piece of paper, Barthes both echoes and anticipates Derrida. He writes:

"Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe ... that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently ... he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which calls into question all origins."

Barthes also echoes and anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva and her key concept of intertextuality, writing:

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

This notion of the text as intertext, obviously helps to further erode the old idea of literature as either representative of a non-linguistic reality, or expressive of the author's original ideas or unique being. The scriptor understands that he or she can only play with and within the field of language and "only imitate a gesture" that is pre-given and pre-rehearsed. They ought also to realise that they essentially work with a "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words".

Barthes concludes his crucial essay in a series of passages worth quoting at some length:

"Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. 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. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism ... is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by 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 since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted."

We see how Barthes disentangles a text and runs threads of meaning in his fetishistically detailed structural analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates how even what might appear to be a conventional readerly work written by a classical author can become a renewed source of perverse pleasure once it has been read in a writerly manner and transformed into a complex and ambiguous text.

I’ll say more about this movement from work to text (and the resulting pleasure of the text) in Part II of this post.


See: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. All lines and passages quoted are taken from this essay.
 
Note: this and the two following posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To go to PAL 2 click here. To go to PAL 3 (I) click here. To read PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'