Pleasure-work: flashes from a few Barthesian Texts.

Prologue [delete]:

Although I haven’t read Barthes for quite some time, I’ve thought of him often these past months. This time reading a few Barthes selections, it became clear that I am not ready for Derrida Season to be over. Neither did I hasten to throw Barthes in some camp of manicured lawns and houses smelling of pine called “basically structuralists”, as I have been tempted in the past. Nevertheless, I have figured, and still do figure somewhat, that this is almost fascinating; it is the expressions of a person pushing, but whose jungle isn’t so fierce. Or maybe it is possible to love this and its that my ideal jungle is too fierce. Still, I am slowly learning that the best theoretical framework is one that is constantly borrowing. But alas, perhaps pathetically so, for me there are few things more pleasurable than pages of incomprehensible Jacques read in a frenzy at 2am. Now that's a Text. My Derrida [who most likely has nothing to do with the man that he thought he was, at any moment in his life] never accepts that he has gone far enough. Text, human, dream, or things divine will burst in a fabulous or horrific blaze of glory or pain. That is always preferable to if I were a woman.

Barthes is placed under the Cultural Studies and the Deconstruction and Poststructuralism categories in the Norton [The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch et al. ed., 2001] alternative index. Apart from the reassuring certainty that they are categories, classification mechanisms, or organizational tools, it is difficult to know what any one of them actually means (and the entire system, for that matter). If we asked Barthes (definitely if we asked Barbara Johnson, who also falls under this heading), he would probably tell us not only that these categories and the texts that appear in each are determined by what they are not, i.e. Barthes is Structuralism because he is not Marxism, but also, at least in the case of the texts, that they are determined by their difference: the way in which a text is different from itself. The author of the introduction notes that it was Jonathan Culler who said that Barthes was famous for contradictory reasons: scientific in that he sought a “universal grammar of narrative” in “Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative” (1966), or his treatment of Saussure's notion of semiology in works like Elements of Semiology (1965), but also that he was somewhat of a hedonist and dialogged with avant guard authors, Brecht and Sollers (while at the same time, writing about the most traditional of French authors, Racine, Balzac, Proust). Similarly, while Barthes placed into question the category of author, he himself participated in the making of Roland Barthes, the author, with the publication of self-titled book in a series. [1457] At the same time, however, what “From Work to Text” presents to us, really, is a controlled, structured pleasure, the pleasure of the work being one of consumption, while the pleasure of the text is actually “jouissance”; further, we might consider that Barthes is not so much “questioning the importance of the author,” but simply relativizing him, which, consequently, might correspond to putting him in a more specific place.

In Mythologies (1957), Barthes carries out a semiology [study of symbols and signs] of mass culture and everyday life. He attempts to show how mass culture is saturated with ideological propositions “myths” presented as if they were natural and self-evident. In this way, his writing represents a precursor to cultural studies. He is critical of “the covert functions of what goes without saying” (1458).

In his attempts to read Saussure’s synchronic linguistic analysis to larger cultural structures, Barthes engaged in dialog with a Racine scholar Raymond Picard. Barthes suggested that we might focus on Racine’s textual world, as opposed to its biographical or historical world. He suggested that “traditional critics" recourse to the values of clarity, nobility, and humanity, which they treat as neutral and self-evident, actually exert a coercive, censoring force on other interpretive possibilities” (1458). An important concept to understand from Saussure (one of them), is the idea that the sign is comprised of a signifier (a word for example) and a signified (associated concept). To this basic framework, in Mythologies, Barthes integrates, among other complications, the concept of myth, which essentially constitutes a secondary signification (in a modified Saussurian sense.

But it is “From Work to Text”, an essay in which he proposes theories of text and of work, that I found most engaging; here the text becomes structured (but nevertheless, structured) like play. The text is a process, the work is a project. The reader can activate either the closure of the signified (the coherence of meaning) or the play of the signifier (the dissemination and disruption of meanings). The text deserves no vital “respect”, it can be manhandled. The work is “consumed”, the text, “produced.”

From Mythologies

“Soap-powders and Detergents.”

At the beginning of this essay, Barthes suggests that the psycho-analysis of purifying fluids and soap powders is different: “The relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are different in each case.” (1461). Liquids mutilate the dirt, while powders liberate the object from its dirt; as opposed to war, the powders maintain public order. Pressing, rolling vs. beating. Further on, he notes, however, that within the category of powders, it is necessary to distinguish between advertisements based on psychology and those based on psycho-analysis.

1) Despite what looks like an illustration of this distinction between psycho-analysis and psychology, what distinguishes these terms? How does Barthes define them, or, on the other hand, why does he neglect to define them?

The examples to which I am referring are the following: 1) Persil Whiteness and its presentation of two objects, one whiter than the other and its play on the consumer’s vanity, and 2) Omo’s indication of the effect of the product, but also its involving the consumer in a kind of direct experience with the substance, making him “the accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a result; matter here is endowed with value-bearing states” and the subsequent discussion of the value-bearing states. [The difference seems to reside in the notion that Psycho-analysis involves a literal acting out (on the part of the consumer, a performance on the part of the consumer) of the company’s appropriation of language, in this case, a religious vocabulary.]

2) In Barthes development of the distinction between mutilation and liberation and his subsequent discussion of linen as “deep”, his idea of very visual concept of foam, and considering his ideas about Text presented in “From Work to Text”, is he acting out the “euphoria” that these advertisements seek to create? Does he allow himself to be taken in, or carried off by depth, by foam?

Yes, he creates his own euphoria, because his is Text. Barthes both re-appropriates the language appropriated by the soap companies and demonstrates how the company was capable and successful in their appropriation in the first place (by acting out the euphoria that they sought to inspire in the consumer).

3) What can we gather about Barthes’ conception of myth from this essay?

His definition of myth emphasizes the hidden ideological content of things such as soap powder and liquid chemicals. It is the job of the semiologist to uncover the hidden meanings in products and texts . Myth for Barthes is basically any depoliticized speech, speech taken as natural (and not that of a certain history and politics), also might say unstudied speech. “What matters is the art of having disguised the abrasive function of the detergent under the delicious image of a substance at once deep and airy which can given the molecular order of the material without damaging it.” (1462).

“The Brain of Einstein.”

Using Einstein’s brain as an example, Barthes extends his theory of myth, underscoring again the power of the euphoria which myths have the capacity to create. Einstein is signified by his brain, “which is like an object for anthologies, a true museum exhibit” (1462).

4) Is the mythology of Einstein’s brain wholly glamorous? Why can or can’t it be?

“The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages” (1463). At the same time, “Paradoxically, the more the genius of the man was materialized under the guise of his brain, the more the product of his inventiveness came to acquire a magical dimension, and give a new incarnation to the old esoteric image of a science entirely contained in a few letters (1463). [Why is this paradox a necessary condition for the creation of myth? Why, for example, is it essential that in the end, he is not able to verify “the equation in which the secret of the world was enclosed?”]

Must we simplify Einstein's talent in order to be able to mythify it? If it were really incomprehensible to us, could it serve a as a hope? Is it thus necessarily to read his genius as somewhat mechanical in order to have it serve successfully as myth?

“Photography and Electoral Appeal.”

This essay develops a theory of a photograph as an “anti-intellectual weapon” in which occurs “an ellipsis of language”, an observation that brings to the forefront the importance of language, the word, to Barthes. Photographs are used to sell values to an undiscriminating public, one, again, that does not read critically. Images, like those used by candidates running for political office, have the capability to distort in that they cannot speak to us about their historical contexts; instead, what they represent are births, deaths, without history. Of the election photographs, Barthes writes: “what we are asked to read is the familiar”. The thoughtful gaze of the subject, produced by means of a most careful placement and other conventions, forgets history and context, while erasing political contractions, replacing them, maybe in a metonymic way, with a thoughtful gaze, “nobly fixed on the hidden interests of Order” (1465).

5) In this essay, Barthes appears to “read” the election photographs as though they were texts. For this, in Barthes' view, they fail on many accounts (ignoring context, some contradictions, while producing and subsequently harmonizing others). Can we structure, or poststructure, a photograph in the same way we might a text? Why can't we read a text? Is there a proper order in which we interpret images?

“From Work to Text.”

The essay begins by posing the question of the “breaking up” of the old disciplines. Barthes mentions the relativization of History, aided by the advent of disciplines like Freudianism and Marxism, and the relativization of the relations of the reader, writer and observer (critic), but his star performer, perhaps in quite a literal sense, is the Text. Text is opposed to work. The former is a “methodological field,” while the work is “a fragment of substance.” He likens this opposition to Lacan’s distinction between “reality” and “the real.” (1471). (The work being reality, something displayed, the text demonstrated, as process). The text never stops, it is text and knows itself to be text because it is in constant motion and “is experienced in an activity of production”: … “the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production.”

A few big ideas:

• Text as opposed to work (see above). Text here essentially refers to a performance of a text.
  

• Text does not fit within a simple division of genres, it cannot be contained in a hierarchy. What defines Text is its difference [from itself] and its subversive force with regards to genres and classifications.

"Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this [the idea of text] a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa [received opinion] (is not general opinion--constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications--defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical."

6) What exactly is the paradox here? The text goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation, but what does it mean to “place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa”?

• “The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified (sign is divided into signified—the meaning conveyed and the signifier—symbol or sound that conveys that meaning), the work closes on a meaning, while the text practices the infinite deferment of the signified. The text, on the other hand is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as ‘the first stage of meaning,’ its material vestibule, but in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action. Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the unnamable signified) but to that of playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in the field of the text (better, of which the text is the field) is realized not according to an organic process of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations." (1472)

• The text is plural, irreducible. “So the Text: it can be it only in its difference.” (1473).

• While the work is caught up in a process of filiation, ideas of respect, no “vital ‘respect’ is due to the Text; it can be broken…It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest…[the Author] becomes, as if were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary)…” (1474).

• Push for a decreased distance between reading and writing. Again invokes the word “playing”. The discusses “post-serial” music, in which sometimes an interpreted shapes a deliberately “open work”. In this way, the Text asks for collaboration with the reader.

• Barthes suggests that Texts are pleasurable and achieve a type of social utopia in that, unlike some works (it appears to cite the texts of Proust, Flaubert, Balzac), provide a pleasure (or better yet, achieve jouissance) that is not one of consumption (1475). Proust cannot be “re-written”. The text is bound to jouissance while the work, to pleasure.

6) This is a hopeful concept. Text is forever, endless, never-ending, defined as process. We might ask, however: how does this process begin? Does it use Work as a springboard and then come alive? If the text is metonymic, what is its relationship (is it antagonistic, for example) to its whole?

Or is it something more on the lines of this: a text, in that it is a “methodological field” represents possible readings, what might be, all that we may see (but that, on the other hand, all that is already in the text).

7) Is it necessary to renounce ideas of origin and, perhaps in the same token, authors, such that we might allow for endless readings?

What kind of myth is Barthes’ idea of Text? Is there euphoria, a utopia, in the idea Text?

Reflections on my Derrida Season: a story with a pluperfect beginning and a fairytale finish.

It was reading an article by David Wills called “Post / Card / Match / Book / "Envois" / Derrida” (SubStance, Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43. (1984), pp. 19-38) that I found Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (John’s Hopkins UP, 1981). This book is very useful, with articles, among others, about S/Z, frames of reference (purloined letter, Poe, Lacan, and Derrida) and some of the making of various versions of the concept of difference. With even a quick perusal of books like Johnson’s and articles like Wills’ it becomes clear, as if it were not already painfully clear enough, that I am no philosopher. I have nevertheless come to a few conclusions about determined pieces of thought from “The Time before First” (Dissemination), Positions, “Scribble (Writing Power)”, the Post Card, The Truth in Painting, and Grammatology. My next project will be an attempt to understand something about Glas, which I have been saving as a special and extra unmasterable treat.

So I turn to intertextuality and difference, motivated mostly, apart from by the quandary expressed above (i.e. not a philosopher), by if Derrida would think I cite him cheaply. When I put quotes down here and there sometimes I feel as though I were engaging in a most disgusting and violent act of textual borrowing. I could answer my own concern by stating that it is not text I am borrowing, but inspiration, energy to disrupt my own, hopefully only initial, reading. The problem is that I do it seriously, I mean very earnestly to create questions and not simply to cite words of theory. What I am about to cite hits upon a few of my objections with some of what I read as deconstructionist thought (which in reality, is most likely not Derridean thought at all, and thankfully (or maybe not so thankfully), we are permitted, even encouraged, endless re-readings):

Theoretical pronouncements therefore do not stand here as instruments to be used in mastering literary structures. On the contrary, it is through contact with literature that theoretical tools are useful precisely to the extent that they thereby change and dissolve in the hands of the user. Theory is here often the straight man whose precarious rectitude and hidden risibility, passion, and pathos are precisely what literature has somehow already foreseen. For literature stages the modes of its own misreading, making visible the literary of the heart of theory and rendering the effects of its project of understanding unpredictable. The rhetorical subversion of theory by its own discourse does not, however, prevent it from generating effects; indeed, it is precisely the way theory misses its target that produces incalculable and interesting effects elsewhere (The Critical Difference xi-ii).

Thus, not only theory, but also literature, can be rewritten; both theory and literature beg us to be misread or to recognize them as misreadings. Re-reading. In it is the possibility that we can fix our wrongs, or at least, fill partially, our lack [my saying above: “energy to disrupt my own, hopefully only initial, reading”]. We can update the old [rework Arthurian legends], or bring genres used for centuries together in a new way [mixing of allegory, letters, poetry and songs] and rejoice, in that academic kind of way, in the manner in which theory, that ever witty straight man disappears in the hands of a witty user. This new bringing together, a revival and homage [reading the archive in an inventive way] permits us to see difference, not the differences that separate one text from another, but how a text is different from itself. If we read re-reading as a major component of what is often considered deconstructionist analysis, we might also read a fear of original. This begs the question: what is the motivation for rejecting the idea that there could be an original, a beginning, the idea of the text, the author? Is it that that idea would lead to nothing more than an end to our discussions?

In an analysis of several of Philippe Sollers’ texts, primarily Nombres and le Parc, Derrida writes the following (citing Le Parc) in the Time before First: “Any statements about the pre-beginning, about the fiction of the origin, about the indeterminacy of the seminal imperfect into which the pluperfect of some event without a date, of some immemorial birth, is inserted (‘something had begun…’) cannot themselves escape the rule they set forth. They recite themselves, leading you back for example to the native enclosure of the Park ‘…read the beginning of a sentence: “The exercise-book is open on the table,” make quite sure that it contains nothing that I wanted to give it (nothing that might be compared with the original project), that one word is not enough to save the rest, that this whole complacent, numbing succession of words must be destroyed; tear it up, tear it up, throw it away, make a clean sweep, recreate the space that will gradually extend and expand in every direction.’

Clearly the Sollers citation expresses an extreme anxiety for beginning. The first text, in the case of the Parc, is nothing more than a dull exercise book, a series of grammar drills whose answers, even the questions themselves, must be eradicated, such that we might forgo the complacent, numbing project of beginning. If there is no beginning and end, or, at least, there are no recognizable beginnings or ends, in the end, what happens is nothing:

“No event, then is being recounted; everything happens in the intertext; only one principle is observed: that ‘in the final analysis, what happens is nothing.’ There is always another book beginning to burn at the moment ‘he closes the book—blows out the candle with that breath of his which contained chance: and, crossing his arms, he lies down on the ashes of his ancestors.’

The duality between original text and quotation is thus swept away."

(“Time before First,” Dissemination. Cited from The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998; 134-5).

The dualities of [original and quotation] and [paraphrase and direct quotation] I will save for another post. I want to end these aimless reflections with something I learned from the Carte Postale. While we might decide that everything happens in the intertext, that the text gets going from a time of had done instead of did, that the text becomes in the passe-partout, and that Lacan is wrong in thinking that letters always arrive at their destinations, all of these ideas are simply decisions, readings that we might just as well re-read. Something important and rather obvious that I found on my second reading of Envois is that Derrida’s distance, in both physical and literary terms, from his female companion is a choice. It is by being apart that they can remain together, remain in communication, and that he can avoid her determination. I ask: when does not arriving become utterly boring? If it is rewriting, innovative reading of the archive that perpetuates the archive, when do we have nothing more than readings, readings, and more readings? Arrivals, even and perhaps particularly so, arrivals of polemic, “traditional” accounts can also fuel research and communication. There must be something in the space between (and I think maybe even big D would have to agree with this) reading for the message and re-reading ownerless texts. What we want to avoid, in any case, is saying nothing.