Barthes, self-awareness, and irony

As I'm revisiting Mythologies lately I keep thinking back fondly on Writing Degree Zero, and just how brilliant and important a book that is.

It's also an interesting book from the perspective of our current, post-ironic moment of post-post-modernism or the New Sincerity or whatever you want to call it.

Barthes uses the analogy of the "degree zero"--I do indeed believe he used it as an analogy merely, as he would with various linguistic terms, not stretching them to apply literally scientifically but almost by metaphor extending their range and applicability instead--to talk about the type of writing that he is concerned with.  But I do think there was a tendency to interpret this, in the coming years, in certain, other ways.

The degree zero of writing I think for Barthes meant something more like writing that behaved as if it was aware of its status as writing.  As such, it was more like writing that was the parody of writing.  If it were to manifest itself at its purest, there was something campy about the writing that was writing degree zero.  It's like how spaghetti westerns are the purest type of westerns by also being some of the least original, the least authentic.  Or the Batman series, which is goofy but more perfect than any other kind of comic book adaptation.  All the elements are there, and there is a satisfaction, a YES that you utter privately to yourself when you read some writing of the type Barthes is talking about.

The Pleasure of the Text, despite being a great book, I think may have made this pleasure out to be a more serious thing than it was.  Because the pleasure you take in something campy isn't jouissance.  Barthes' use of that word was misleading and strange.  Only when he later got around to talking about writing and death did he seem to give us an accurate picture of the other face of the satisfaction he was originally talking about: it is something like nostalgia, something like mourning.  It isn't what he says it is in this work, which is that sort of bizarre ecstasy that so fascinated Lacan.

But it was an influential interpretation of the kind of reaction to the writing he was originally talked about. And it was of a piece with the times.  Self-awareness moving into parody around the time of that text seemed to become a much more serious, but also a much more superficial thing: the enjoyment wasn't in the nearness-to-parody anymore, but in something like the transformation of of the state of discourse, the change in the conversation, that that sort of writing--writing that was understood to be writing--produced.

In short, pleasure in self-awareness seemed to morph into a pleasure in irony, in the way that writing understood as such changed entirely the plane on which we as humans conversed and communicated.  No longer was any meaning to be taken literally.  Writing as writing was supposed to be the death of literalism.

We all know how well that turned out.  Literalism came back with a vengence, and the New Sincerity is in many ways a product of it.  But there is, I think, too, an acknowledgment that what most distinguishes irony as a vehicle is that it is safe: for all the crowing about how reckless and dangerous a figure it is, irony is most remarkable for the way that it seals off a domain of discourse from the rest of communicated speech, creates a group of people in the know, and forces others to be included in that group if they want to know the deeper meaning, the other meaning, both simultaneously behind and on the face of the text.

It can't be stressed enough how much this was an attempt, originally, to kill off literalism: in all the bashing of postmodernism that we do now, we forget just how bad literalism is, how bad the master-narratives that evolve out of it genuinely are, and how noble was the effort to try and do away with all that.

But it also can't be stressed enough how interpreting the degree zero of writing not just as a kind of self-awareness, but as a kind of special zone of meaning, makes writing into a very, very safe thing.  The pleasure in it that people had, I think, was a kind of pleasure in the sheer fact of its non-literalism. In many ways, it was a reactionary, even a resentful pleasure.

I have recently myself been at war with myself on this issue, as I try and figure out whether my writing is a little too self-aware, and whether it should become more self-aware to the level of being ironic.  Revisiting Writing Degree Zero, I found it quite liberating to see just how unironic was the sort of behavior of the text that Barthes was talking about.  Irony isn't bad, but self-awareness shouldn't be frowned upon just because it is associated with irony.  In many ways, the upshot was for me, was that writing that is self-aware in a way resists being taken ironically, and becomes more purely just a product, just writing.  Maybe, then, writing that moves beyond irony isn't a mere reaction against the excesses of postmodernism.  Nor does it thereby have to be sincere.

It may simply be really a return to an appreciation of writing as writing, in the sort of innocent pleasure in the corrupted text that knows it is what it is--writing--and that it can't do anything more about that.