The Barthesian activity

How many people would have written “the structuralist activity,” as Roland Barthes did? That structuralism is an activity, as “la succession réglée d'un certain nombre d'opérations,” rather than a methodology, a school, or a vocabulary (the alternatives that famous essay entertains), or something else altogether, is by no means obvious. But it is typical of Barthes, who sees things in the light of their capability to become, like écrire itself (“To Write, an Intransitive Verb?”), less merely active, or simply opposed to passivity, even as they become more intransitive, richer, more forceful. It also frustrates those who would like to see activity described in the more definite (more active, yet less neutral) terms of practice.

For prior to having any particular object in mind, before narrative, before photographs, before myths, Barthes concerns himself with activities, and insofar as he does so what matters less is who performs them or what their effects are. The important thing is not to get the real object, but to get at its activity—which means adding intellect to the object, if I can use an intelligent phrase with which Barthes describes structuralism itself (and I think I can, not because Barthes himself is a structuralist, but because he himself shares in the structuralist activity: of fabricating a functionally analogous world, reflecting and creating all at once—which is by no means a great description of structuralism).

The consequence of this, which should be noted by those privileging practice, is that practice thereby becomes rare (“the rarest text,” in “To the Seminar”), recovers its difference. At the same time, an activity without a real object, without actors or effects, with rare (here, not rarefied, but also seldom) forays into practice, has to be questionable for us: it is, at the very least, vague, and no doubt leads another camp to savor the Barthesian activity precisely in that aspect which allows it to pose as, to play as practice.

But we find already that this skepticism, as well as this enthusiasm, is a bit misplaced: both miss what is crucial, namely what we can call, with Peter Brooks, the “fluid and dynamic” aspect of the activity. It comes from the neutrality we talked about earlier, and how this neutrality, this undoing of activity needs to be described as a “regulated succession:” it is that activity, considered as a succession, as sequence, as closer to syntagm than paradigm (even though it attempts to remain irreducible to either), which makes up the Barthesian activity.

I'll elaborate upon this in another, more thorough post on S/Z.