Writerly texts and the poet-critic

The genius of that famous distinction Barthes makes in S/Z (which I am now finally getting around to), between the readerly and writerly text is that it challenges the old transit that existed and still (*shudder*) exists between the writer and the critic, famously typified in the poet-critics of Modernism.
Obviously this type or figure is too often assumed to be stable (and also to only belong to Modernism) and indeed thoroughly reflect the practices of Eliot and Pound, for example, when there are many differences between what we mean by the poet-critic and the activity of these poet-critics (and my colleague Evan is doing a lot to investigate this whole area--I should mention the mere fact that I.A. Richards went to Eliot for advice on whether he should continue teaching at Cambridge as a critic or go abroad, teaching high-school students and embarking upon the project of promulgating Basic English, and the fact that Eliot said Richards should go for the latter, is enough to demolish a lot of what we assume about Eliot as poet-critic). I refer to this figure however because (whether he exists or not) he still serves as a sort of weird model for a lot of critical activity going on even today. In short, the role of a lot of criticism is to try and hide--and yet preserve (that is, displace in the Freudian sense)--the desire to write in the manner of the authors we read. It isn't so much a primary-secondary text problem (critics don't want to be secondary) as what Barthes says it really is: a problem of production (the powerful force of a writer, the force behind writing) being mistaken for consumption.
The writerly text is a text that, when read, makes the reading act productive: it actually writes the text that it is reading--that is, loosely speaking, constitutes it. It is a lot similar to what I was calling the work of constitution and displacement that close reading should be doing--and I will write more about this soon, to elucidate more what I was talking about (and also the ways that my conception of this rewriting and constituting is, ultimately, very different than Barthes', though it shares a lot of his emphasis: I'd risk saying that, in the end, you can't call S/Z a close reading, if we interpret this in my privileged sense of the term). Reading produces the text, then. It is not responding to something that is already there: reading is creating precisely that which one reads.
Now, as it stands, this is precisely the illusion that the critic, desiring to be a poet-critic, worships. He thinks that the act of interpretation is one of production tout court, and therefore can flout philological rigor, disciplinary rules, etc., because it is shares in a certain power that those who can discern it in authors' texts can also wield. One sees that this is really a reactive stance, in the Nietzschian sense (and Nietzsche is all over S/Z): it is really a freedom that works out of frustration, carving a little imaginary nook for itself out of the prison that is the world. But what Barthes recognizes is that this desire to produce, to write, means nothing unless it is contrasted with consumption of texts, with the consumption-text, which is what he calls the readerly text. The readerly text is one that is already constituted before the act of reading: it is a totality which one can approach and then throw away when one is done with it.
The point is that the introduction of consumption makes one rethink what one means by production--and in a way that shows that the desire to be a poet-critic (now, that is--I'm not talking about Eliot et. al.) is not a desire to produce but to consume. In fact, it is the desire to consume in such a way that it passes itself off as production: one could rightly say that the only thing it produces is the notion that it, as an act of consumption, is production (this is obviously a Nietzschian logic which Barthes is following whereby something's lie is always more creative, and more "true," than its truth-claim: this is how Nietzsche can--and to recognize this is of the utmost importance for anyone studying Nietzsche--actually like Kant and Christianity at times, as odd as that sounds). The point though is that the poet-critic-desire desires not really to write in the manner of the poet or author, but actually wants to be consumed like they are: he interprets the power of their writing to be precisely a power over consumption, over creating a totality (that people can enjoy and then throw away). One sees that this is a capitalist configuration through and through: not only in the large sense, but down in the nitty gritty aspects of what labor is conceived as (and this would be the sort of French Nietzsche-Marx Marxism of Barthes, a particularly interesting strand that runs from Bataille and Klossowski through Blanchot to Deleuze).
What then gets revealed is that the writerly text is not just a text that makes the reading act productive in any old sense of this word: it is an act that makes the productive act escape all reappropriation into consumption. "Creation" in the sentence above ("it is creating precisely that which one reads") becomes construing, dispersing, relaying, since this is creation in a Nietzschian sense: it does not at all become a matter of creation in an aesthetic sort of manner (copying the author's ability to produce a vague type of pleasure and beauty which never needs to be specified or determined, it is so "pure"). So if the reading of the writerly text (or the writing of the writerly text, for they are the same thing) is faithful to itself, it will in this way--and only in this way--write in the manner of the poet or author himself.
Here, finally, is Barthes explaining this distinction, on the second page of the amazing book:

What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness--he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text.
-S/Z, 4.

So in the end what Barthes accomplishes is not the dissolution of the desire of the critic to be a poet-critic, but a refinement of what being a poet-critic, a writerly reader, means. In short, he formalizes it, and shows that it cannot remain just a vague desire motivating one's critical work: if one is serious about this desire, one has to be willing to leap into it such that its productive act cannot be reappropriated by its sort of reactive, frustrated side (and this means making it all the more rigorous--not reckless--in whatever institutional habits it has to go against, so that in the end it should also refine and transform the institution, rather than engage in anti-institutional nihilism). So if literary criticism is hounded by the ugly desire to be like the authors it reads--this doesn't have to be as disgusting as it sounds, or as it (*shiver*) actually still is. One can refine this impulse, or rather force it to finally take itself seriously. Perhaps the Yale School knew this: I'm thinking of some remarks of Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, as well as J. Hillis Miller. But overall the failures of theory are very obviously coextensive with letting this active desire become reactive (and, especially, nihilist as regards the institution)--as so many crappy theory articles can prove.
(A final note: though the bad transit between the critic and the author via the poet-critic is accomplished by this sense of production as consumption, this bad idea of production is also fostered by the idea of the author-in-isolation and reading-in-isolation. If one thinks of this situation of production differently, another attack against this bad transit is possible: this will be the matter of my dissertation, I think, so you can hear much more about this in posts to come!)