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.

Rallying its qualities

Should I keep a journal with a view to publication? Can I make the journal into a "work"? [...]  No, the journal's justification (as a work) can only be literary in the absolute, even if nostalgic, sense of the word. I discern here four motives.

The first is to present a text tinged with an individuality of writing, with a "style" (as we used to say), with an ideolect proper to the author (as we said more recently); let us call this motive: poetic. The second is to scatter like dust, from day to day, the traces of a period, mixing all dimensions and proportions, from important information to details of behavior [...]. Let us call this motive: historical. The third is to constitute the author as an object of desire: if an author interests me, I may want to know the intimacy, the small change of his times, his tastes, his moods, his scruples; I may even go so far as to prefer his person to his work [...] I can attempt to prove that "I am worth more than what I write" (in my books): the writing in my journal then appears as a plus-power (Nietzsche: Plus von Macht), which it is supposed will compensate for the inadequacies of public writing; let us call this motive: utopian, since it is true that we are never done with the image-repetoire. The fourth motive is to constitute the Journal as a workshop of sentences: not of "fine phrases," but of correct ones, exact language: constantly to refine the exactitude of the speech-act (and not of speech), according to an enthusiasm and an application, a fidelity of intention which greatly resembles passion: "yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things" (Proverbs 23:16). Let us call this motive: amorous (perhaps even idolatrous--I idolize the Sentence).

For all my sorry impressions, then, the desire to keep a journal is conceivable. I can admit that it is possible, in the actual context of the Journal, to shift from what at first seemed to me improper in literature to a form which in fact rallies its qualities: individuation, spoor, seduction, fetishism of language.
-Roland Barthes, "Deliberation," Tel Quel, 1979

Simile

Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which does not so much compare as narrate another story in miniature, and when they are not annoying for taking us away from the action, they vex our attempts to make sense of them, as they force even best interpretations to turn towards the awkwardness of allegory.

But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).

But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).

If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.

Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.

This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.

Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:

quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25

Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.

While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)

I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.

Demystifying literature: de Man and the singular

You all know I'm skeptical of de Man: I think that through equivocation on crucial issues he mislead theorists so much they are only now beginning to realize the extent of the damage. But this doesn't mean he wasn't also brilliant, or that his works aren't extremely useful. In other words de Man's power to mislead only came with a certain type of earned authority. It's just that his words require you to never let your guard down.

This is even more important to remember when these words are strung together in the witty remark, the teachable fragment, the slogan, the aphorism--I'm not sure what exactly to call these particular segments in de Man's corpus. These remarks--like "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," or "scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable," or "it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true" (all three taken only from "The Resistance to Theory")--remain influential even today: though it is important to keep in mind the limits of de Man's influence (as is only appropriate when such an uncritical notion as influence is used), which to this day has not been sufficiently mapped out, such phrases still guide our attempts to articulate what, at bottom, we're doing.

Such a delicate, yet dangerous string of words I want to look at right now:

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it.
-"Criticism and Crisis" (1967, updated in 1970), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 3-19, 18

As you can see, this is not only highly polemical, but is also conveniently short, pithy, repeatable. One can imagine many theorists picking it up and using it in all sorts of situations. But it would be a mistake to see it merely as a general statement just about anyone. Like most de Manian formulations, it is very precise. The task, then, is not to pull apart what is actually being said here from the sweeping, polemical force of the statement. Instead, it is to see that specificity alone gives such theoretical statements power. The trick of de Man's aphoristic formulation (and it is indeed a dirty one) is to let you think that theory must become less polemical as it gets more specific. Or (and this is oddly more likely), if it does allow you think otherwise, if it allows you to see polemic and precision's incompatability as superficial, it becomes your responsibility to assert this (which makes the trick even dirtier). But we'll try and get specific while also not taking over all the responsibility: we will remain critical of de Man insofar as he engages in a ruse that turns us all into his interpreters--or, better, his "demystifiers."

But, as we were saying, it isn't enough to see de Man's statement as just applying to anyone: we have to ask, first, who these "modern critics" that "demystify" actually are. Ironically, after all we just said, de Man isn't as specific as he should be about this: his answer is, the New Criticism and structuralism, or, rather, the New Critical tendency in American criticism (we can call it by its much misunderstood name: "practical criticism") as it is affected by structuralism coming from France. That's a lot of criticism, enough to seem like the most significant criticism in America and abroad (in other words, another trick involving sweeping generalizations). But it isn't enough to exhaust the totality of the field--not nearly enough, if we have the right view of things.

Why, then, this general practical criticism/structuralist poetics nexus, and not something else? Here de Man is most precise. Both, he says,

consist of showing that certain claims to authenticity attributed to literature are in fact expressions of a desire that, like all desires, falls prey to the duplicities of expression.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 12

This is what he calls "demystifying" literature. Let's be clear about what this process of demystification entails, according to de Man, for the above definition remains only a sliver of what he has to say about it. De Man goes on to say that the authenticity attributed to literature is in fact reducible to the notion--popular before the New Critics and before the advent of structural linguistics--that literary language was of a different nature than the system of language we normally use. (This, by the way, leads to the notion that the experience of this language is of a different order than everyday experience, or what I.A. Richards called, quite accurately, "the phantom aesthetic state:" the two notions imply each other and Richards, in the opening of his Principles of Literary Criticism, moved from this phantom state to this phantom literary language.) The process of demystification then would involve showing that a normal language system could serve as an adaquate basis for interpreting literature. One can see the task that the structuralist poeticians and practical critics, then, oddly have in common--and why de Man rightly groups them together: in the case of practical criticism, the task is to show that normal usage, or in fact everyday usage, provides us with enough meanings that we can outline possible interpretations of what the poem or prose work may be saying; in the case of structuralist poetics (which has a bit more complications I might get into below), the task is to outline how the system of signifiers that linguistics has studied can account for the work in question. Everyday language and the linguists' language both rid us of the need for any priveliged sort of literary language, which would be different in essence.

The larger meaning of de Man's statement becomes more and more obvious: both of these modes, in trying to undo the privilege accorded to literature, fall prey to its privilege. The implications are clear too: de Man is arguing for the restoration of a notion that literary language is different than the system of language we use everyday.

But before we outline what this really means, I would like to return to de Man's quote above regarding demystification. For while demystification involves a certain notion of literary language, it also proceeds in a certain manner which the quote makes clear: armed with her notion that the privelige accorded to literature can be accounted for by everyday language or the structure of language, the demystifying critic shows that the privelige is merely the expression of a desire. This shall remain even more important for us, for it means that demystification involves, prior to the critic's having any very clear notion about the proper sphere of literary language, a certain operation, a method, a "strategy" as de Man indeed calls it (13). Demystification is first and foremost the process of asserting that what is there can be the expression of something the critic, but not you, can see: a desire that is not fully apparent, that is duplicitous, and that needs the critic in order to make its full manifestation. Literature for the demystifier would then lack its "priveliged" or "authentic" status for another reason: literature could not be something impenetrable to the critic's process of making the work fully manifest, and in this respect could not be of a different nature than the critic's language. This, I claim, is the deeper reason behind de Man's notion that demystification involves dissolving literary language into everyday language: it is what in other essays he calls the critic's belief in the phenomenality of literature, the notion that it is something that can be made manifest and, moreover, can, eventually, be made fully manifest. One can also see that it involves a certain notion of the literary object requiring a consciousness that can judge it: in this respect the belief in the phenomenality of the literary work is also a belief in its fundamentally aesthetic nature--the work is there to produce judgments (Kant, of course, gave this view its most concentrated expression). We can also emphasize that it is aestheticism in a different, more perjorative sense: the critic, in this view, is the only one who can complete the artwork by mastering its duplicities, which makes her of the same nature as the artist, and their criticism, in turn, something participating in the art.

But, back to the point: if demystification involves asserting that there is more to the work, in the sense that there is something about it which is not as it seems and can eventually be made clear, when modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are demystified by it means that they are only making more explicit their inability to see that literature may perhaps not be something that manifests itself.

Now, there are two ways to justify this particular assertion. De Man's way, in the essay in question, is by stressing the fictionality of literature. What he says prior to his little aphorism makes this clear enough:

It [fiction] is demystified from the start.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 18

That is, demystifying a literary text makes nothing in it manifest. This is not because criticism is powerless when confronted by it, but rather because the text's nature qua fictional is to disturb manifestation itself. This is a point not stressed enough--we overlook it constantly in talking about characters, say--but it perhaps lays too much stress on fictionality: de Man could be challenged by bringing up testimony, for example (Derrida, for one, does not evade this: his reading of Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" in the slim but profound Demeure precisely investigates the possible weave between these two).

I will take the other route and justify the notion that literature does not manifest itself by talking more about what the demystifier supposes literature actually does. The easiest case would be a practical critic, who tries ultimately to establish a meaning for the text. Jonathan Culler shows why this is questionable. Instead, a better case for now would be the structuralist poetician. I'll take Roland Barthes, with his powerful notion of codes in S/Z.

The five codes Barthes considers are extremely useful. They aren't ultimately very rigorous tools to use, but they are so handy and so intuitive: Barthes constructs them in such a way that to an experienced critic they fit like a glove--only allowing actual reflection on the manipulation ultimately produced. In short, in the codes Barthes makes explicit something the critic has for a long, long time engaged in, but never reflected on at such length (this is why they are not to be unreflectively used like any old tools, as Kaja Silverman does in The Subject of Semiotics). This is pointing out the saturation of the text with a certain type of non-literal language which is, unless we want to stretch the word, nevertheless not figurative. He opens up a domain in which a certain understanding of the message is brought about which nevertheless does not have to deal with meaning (that is, literal or figurative, strictly speaking). The code remains the way that parts of the text (and remember this remains pertinent only for a classic text, which is not stressed enough) try to be received in a certain way: as such it is like innuendo, except with the final meaning subtracted, as it were, or made unncessary to grasp.

The cultural codes are, in particular, the most intuitive to the critic (they are also the most boring of the codes: the proairetic and hermeneutic are much more interesting and indeed useful). One understands, in other words, a character has a certain status by the mention of what he wears. Or one understands a fragment of a sentence about abstruse academics, say, not because of the meaning but because of the cultural doxa, which states that academics have no connection to the real world.

The critic then goes through the text and points out these codes: it is what we do especially when watching TV, say, and noting how a certain type of character is stereotypically treated. What is one doing in such an instance? What de Man would say is, precisely, that one is trying to manifest something in the work. Even though the code isn't dealing with meaning, it is nevertheless there to bring something to the fore. It is, in fact doing something even more than that: it is allowing a secure transit between the work, on the one hand, and culture on the other. By pointing out doxa in literature or other, similar artforms, what we are doing is supposing an almost immediate link between the forces which construct the code and the code itself as we find it in a particular message. In pointing it out, we believe we are directly in connection with those societal forces, on some level, and transform them in the act. Why? Because we suppose that the message is not already demystified--to use the quote above--or in other words we overlook the fact that there there may be nothing to manifest in the message except the cultural forces which produce it.

To be clearer, manifestation may not be necessary because the literary work is singular. That means it does not express or represent those cultural and societal forces, but merely is a product of them--indeed, uniquely, irreducibly so (the reduction, in other words, would be to representation). Or, to put it another way, manifestation may not be necessary because the link between a the coded literature and culture is never immediate: it is always and only a set of productive relays which may indeed make manifestation possible, but never necessary for the work to be both extant and also (this is the tough part) able to be criticized.

With this made clear, we now understand how de Man proposes to restore the difference between literary language and ordinary language: it is not by giving literary language an essence, but rather by subtracting it. Literary language is singular, irreducible. And this does not mean the literary work is thereby shut off in any way from ordinary language, culture, or society, but is indeed precisely produced by them--since the connection is not presumed to be simply, unproblematically, indeed naively immediate. It is, in other words, produced in a way that cannot be reduced to the production of something destined to be manifest, and therefore demystified. I'll stop here, but it now should be somewhat clearer why modern critics are being demystified by such a singular literature in demystifying it.

As a mechanism

Sarrasine interrupts La Zambinella’s confession that she is a castrato:

“I can give you no hope,” she said. “Cease to speak thus to me, for they would make fool of you. It is impossible for me to shut the door of the theatre to you; but if you love me, or if you are wise, you will come there no more. Listen, monsieur…” she said in a low voice.
“Oh, be still!” said the impassioned artist. “Obstacles make my love more ardent.”
-Balzac, Sarrasine

Barthes comments:

If we have a realistic view of character, if we believe that Sarrasine has a life off the page, we will look for motives for this interruption (enthusiasm, unconscious denial of the truth, etc.). If we have a realistic view of discourse, if we consider the story being told as a mechanism which must function until the end [my italics], we will say that since the law of narrative decrees that it continue, it was necessary that the word castrato not be spoken.
-S/Z, LXXVI

We have all felt this at some point. Characters act improbably because of narrative requirements. But rather than cynically turn our gaze to the writer, and just say that this problem stems from the requirements of composition, the structuralist allows the literary system to absorb the problem, folding the contradiction back into its text—the “common sentence.” Thus Barthes goes on to say say that these two views “support each other:”

A common sentence is produced which unexpectedly contains elements of various languages [my italics]: Sarrasine is impassioned because the discourse must not end; the discourse can continue because Sarrasine, impassioned, talks without listening… From a critical point of view, therefore, it is as wrong to suppress the as it is to take him off the page in order to turn him into a psychological character (endowed with possible motives): the character and the discourse are each other’s accomplices.
-S/Z, LXXVI

But is particularly structuralist is that this text is still an effect of discourse (this, by the way, is what distinguishes Derrida's text from Barthes). In other words, critical analysis is always on the side of discourse:

Such is discourse: if it creates characters, it is not to make them play among themselves before us but to play with them, to obtain from them a complicity which assures the uninterrupted exchange of the codes: the characters are types of discourse and, conversely, the discourse is a character like the others.
-S/Z, LXXVI

Discourse wins, despite the reciprocity. Otherwise characters would play among themselves, in an imaginary literary world. The mechanism keeps working, and as it absorbs contradictions it also absorbs the “realistic view of character.” And rightly so, though this announces a limit to structuralism of sorts: we can’t look at character as some sort of motivated, coherent subject. Why? Because this completely fails to grasp the literary system as literary—that is, fictional. Furthermore, it does not allow us to distinguish basic functions: for example, there is a distinct difference between the improbable act of a character due to the needs of the story, and an improbable act of a character that actively delays the unfolding of a story. The first is what is under discussion here, as we consider the literary system “which must function until the end.” The second forms a subset of the first: it is precisely an effect of this functioning, which Barthes rightly calls a unit of the hermeneutic code. (It is notable that “end” in Barthes statement then does not mean merely a temporal end: it is—in accordance with structuralist notions of finitude—a spatial limit. Schlovsky, for example, cannot distinguish between the two.)

Thus, character is a tying together of various strands of the text, even if viewing them as personalities is somewhat legitimate. Because the looking at the text qua text can absorb this psychologistic view, however, as far as structuralism is concerned, there is no question who is ultimately the authority: the psychologistic view has no comparable ability to explain the textual phenomena except by evading the matter and cynically going to the author or denying fictionality. Barthes can sum up the structuralist view of character quite simply as follows:

When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created. Thus, the character is a product of combination: the combination is relatively stable (denoted by the recurrence of the semes) and more or less complex (involving more or less congruent, more or less contradictory figures); this complexity determines the character’s “personality,” which is just as much a combination as the odor of a dish or the bouquet of a wine. The proper name... referring in fact to a body… draws the semic configuration into an evolving (biographical) tense.
-S/Z, XXVIII

The Barthesian activity, part 2

Who other than Barthes would have said the following about the novelistic?

…the novelistic is neither the false nor the sentimental; it is merely the circulatory space of subtle, flexible desires; within the very artifice of a “sociality” whose opacity is miraculously reduced, it is the web of amorous relations (“To the Seminar,” an excellent text).

That is, who would have said “‘sociality’ whose opacity is miraculously reduced?” This is a way of conveying that what Lukács calls the “world of convention” (Theory of the Novel) in the novel is porous, indeed “circulatory,” “flexible.” But this is inverted unexpectedly and shown in terms of its thickness, its opacity, which is accordingly “reduced.” Barthes can not only effortlessly accomplish such an inversion: he can make it stick (like the referent, like the “real”) by getting it right, by saying the consistent thing, what accords, what would seemingly succeed or follow. This is what I was getting at in talking about activity and its tendency to frustrate the paradigmatic (to “outplay” it, as Barthes says in The Neutral), by tending to be more dynamic, more syntagmatic: activity is la succession réglée d'un certain nombre d'opérations. To put it bluntly, Barthes’s use of metaphor here (and nearly everywhere else) tends to be more metonymic than we might expect (though it is not reducible to this second, opposing, paradigmatic or metaphorical term). One can wonder, however (and Barthes himself wondered this), just how long this succession can go on.

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.

Barthes, the syntagmatic

The syntagm presents itself in the form of a 'chain' (the flow of speech, for example). Now as we have seen [earlier in the Elements], meaning can arise only from an articulation, that is, from a simultaneous division fo the signifying layer,and the signified mass: language is, as it were, that which divides reality [...]. Any syntagm therefore gives rise to an analytic problem: for it is at the same time continuous and yet cannot be the vehicle of a meaning unless it is articulated. How can we divide the syntagm? This problem arises again with every system of signs: in the articulated language, there have been innumerable discussions on the nature [...] of the word, and for certain semiological systems, we can here foresee important difficulties. [That is, the problem is not just in linguistics--it also has pertinence for semiology.] True, there are rudimentary systems of strongly discontinuous signs, such as those of the Highway Code, which, for reasons of saftey, must be radically different from each other in order to be immediately perceived; but the iconic syntagms, which are founded on a more or less analogical representation of a real scene, are infinitely more difficult to divide, and this is probably the reason for which these systems are almost always duplicated by articulated speech (such as the caption of a photograph) which endows them with the discontinuous aspect which they do not have.
-Elements of Semiology, III.2.2

For some reason this is a clearer explanation to me of why photographs need captions than all the others I hear (regarding that famous thesis people attribute to Barthes, citing his essays on photography). Barthes then says the following about the syntagm--a very concise and provocative formulation:

In spite of these difficulties, the division of the syntagm is a fundamental operation, since it must yield the paradigmatic units of the system: it is in fact the very definition of the syntagm, to be made of a substance which must be carved up.

Prior to a hermeneutics and a history

Literature, instead of being taught only as a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history.
-Paul de Man, "The Return to Philology"

The power of this formulation comes right from the "prior to," and the fact that both "hermeneutics and history" are thereby conceived as something that "rhetoric and poetics" can actually (perhaps) do without. De Man makes us think not only of undoing the humanist function of the aesthetic object, which makes us "move so easily from literature to its apparent," but superficial, de Man would say, "prolongations in the spheres of self-knowledge, religion, and of politics"--in short that makes us fall prey to ideology in de Man's sense of the term (that which lets us think reference can be grasped precisely by referential means, in short that can allow us to turn literature into a grammar which can then be hermeneutically or historically decoded). He begins to show us that rhetoric, say, is not beholden to its hermeneutical basis except as a possible auxiliary function of its own (perhaps sovereign) operation. In other words, he begins to show us that rhetorical and poetic analysis can be "an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning [the analysis] produce[s]" (i.e. it can be what he calls a philology, which is what he is defining in this quote right here: and thus we can now understand his extremely equivocal phrasing--the return to rhetoric [to study that proceeds by anti-hermeneutic means] is a return to philology [to the generation of results, of ends that are anti-hermeneutic]). This is not only powerful but radical--and should serve as some check on my dismissals of de Man in my last post. But this way of putting it also comes with increasing dangers--with a vagueness in its radicality.

How? Let's return to the ideological function that I just outlined. For de Man, we move much too quickly between literature to "apparent prolongations in the spheres of self-knowledge, of religion, and of politics" because we precisely make literature into what, through a decoding, just is a set of statements about these three (or more) spheres. This, in his eyes, is precisely the aesthetic ideology: the function of the aesthetic object is to deproblematize precisely this move from what the object is doing to its effects in these spheres (which are the spheres of humanism). Conceiving the work as aesthetic means only to conceive it itself as a prolongation of these spheres (and thus as humanist). You can see even more visibly de Man's desire to expose this as ideology, and oppose it systematically with rhetorical analysis, in his outlining of a literature course (Literature Z) in a fascinating memo from 1975: courses as they have traditionally been taught see

...literature as a succession of periods and movements that can be articulated as an historical narrative. With regard to individual works, the conception is essentiall paraphrastic and thematic, the assumption being that literature can be reduced to a set of statements which, taken together, lead to a better understanding of human existence. Literary studies then become, on the one hand, a branch of the history of culture and, on the other hand, a branch of existential and anthropological philosophy in its individual as well as its more collective aspects.
-"Proposal for Literature Z"

For de Man this is extremely debatable, however nice it is. For what is clear is that all this relies upon a process of exposing the prolongations that are supposedly already there: i.e. a hermeneutics and historical analysis. We find the meaning that is already there. De Man simply asks us to think about whether we can be sure meaning is there or not--and this is enough to begin to dispel the ideology: "the anthropological function of literature cannot be examined with any rigor before its epistemological or verbal status has been understood," he continues, which means that we have to think about what the thing is that we so quickly conceive of as a prolongation of our self-knowledge. Is it really such a thing that we can interpret unproblematically? That we can decode? Hermeneutics and history work in tandem with and ideology of aesthetics to shut down this avenue of inquiry. In this respect what they do is--as he says--actually veil the literariness of literature and prevent its reading.

These last phrases--which are more than polemical (I'd say they are equivocal, nominalist, and dangerous)--are taken from his other most concentrated engagement with these questions, "The Resistance to Theory." This is where the more precise language about reference that I use above is brought in (it is also present in Allegories of Reading): in short it is not only literariness that gets seen as a prolongation of effects of humanist self-knowledge, etc. but the workings of language itself (thus the grammar, the meaning that it is turned into is a humanist grammar, a grammar of these spheres). But let's stay with the danger (and witness de Man outlining these more precise effects of grammar etc.) in that essay:

To stress the by no means self-evident necessity of reading implies at least two things. First of all, it implies that literature is not a transparent message in which it can be taken for granted that the distinction between the message and the means of communication is clearly established. Second, and more problematically, it implies that the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived. The extension of grammar to include para-figural dimensions is in fact the most remarkable and debatable strategy of contemporary semiology, especially in the study of syntagmatic and narrative structures. The codification of contextual elements well beyond the syntactical limits of the sentence [see Barthes S/Z and my last post] leads to the systematic study of metaphrastic dimensions and has considerably refined and expanded the knowledge of textual codes. It is equally clear, however, that this extension is always strategically directed towards the replacement of rhetorical figures by grammatical codes. The tendency to replace a rhetorical by grammatical terminology [...] is part of an explicit program, a program that is entirely admirable in its intent since it tends towards the mastering and clarification of meaning. The replacement of a hermeneutic by a semiotic model, of interpretation by decoding, would represent, in view of the baffling historical instability of textual meanings (including, of course, those of canonical texts) a considerable progress. Much of the hesitation associated with "reading" could thus be dispelled.
The argument can be made, however, that no grammatical decoding, however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text...
-"The Resistance to Theory"

You see, this last move is what is crucial: de Man then expands what remains his question--whether literature is something that can be decoded--into a conclusion. Literature is, indeed, something that cannot be decoded. Look again at all the limits being set up: "no grammatical decoding, however refined, could claim to reach..."; "a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived." How can he be sure of this? In the same process what he does is actually define terms like "reading" to apply only to modes of analysis that conclude, like he does, that there just are spheres that can't be reached by grammar. This is how, in the above, he is able to dismiss semiology, which, as Barthes was so good at doing, precisely is trying to responsibly (clearly) get at the aspects of meaning that lie beyond what can be easily decoded. In S/Z codes don't, as de Man here puts it, strictly decode: they arrange themselves into a structure which we are, at the end of the day, quite unsure what to do with. And this to me seems quite resistant to a hermeneutic model, and can't just be dismissed as grammar by another means--as de Man does above.

In short the risk, the danger, is in this: de Man conceives rhetoric, and the reading of rhetoric as only operating in those spheres that a hermeneutics or a history, which see the text as a grammar, cannot penetrate. But this definition is only a negative one. As soon as this "cannot" becomes positive, what he is doing is actually acting as if he is sure about the content of this rhetorical sphere, of this indeterminacy--and it is on this basis that he can dismiss something like semiology. For if "a text leaves a residue of indetermination" how can de Man be so sure that this indetermination "has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived?" Frankly, there is no way to make this sentence make sense. We just cannot be sure that the indetermination will not be resolved precisely by grammatical means if the indetrmination is indeed indeterminate (this is where Derrida and de Man part ways, in my book).

But the point then is that de Man outlines a principle of resistance to hermeneutics that has, really, no basis. He outlines how the aesthetic ideology is complicit with hermenetutics, but then gives you an alternative that only consists in asserting that hermeneutics "misses the literariness of the literary"--which I think means nothing. It means nothing not because this literariness is beyond or anti-hermeneutics--i.e. because the project of finding a mode of analysis that is not hermeneutic is bunk (I think it remains, still, perhaps the greatest task we have to undertake). It means nothing because de Man is still too sure of what the this literariness looks like: in short, because it is merely defined negatively as the anti-hermeneutic, as rhetoric.

So what we get is a powerful formulation, which envisions a space for us beyond a hermeneutics and a history. But it gives us nothing to work off of except our own hatred for hermeneutics and history. This is what is dangerous about de Man. It seems, in my view, much better to go the route of semiology that he precisely outlines here--the grammatization of the rhetorical. For I do think that while de Man is very sensitive to the problems of making the rhetorical grammatical, he himself also ends up doing the same thing in being so confident about what the rhetorical consists of (it is precisely what cannot, cannot, no no no, ever, be reduced to grammar--and this extends into his allegorical readings, though to prove that takes another post). And at the same time, this hatred manifests itself through the equivocation of terms like "reading" and "literariness," which suddenly are terms that function only negatively and in order to castigate other critics: you must not miss the literariness, you are missing it, you are not reading, no no no--I on the other hand do understand it, I read, etc. In short, he gives us something extremely valuable, but he also--by the way he puts it--trains a lot of critics to be only good at shutting down other readings without any reasons for doing so. And this is extremely dangerous.

But I don't want to end just by condemning de Man. I just think his target is wrong: the grammatization of rhetoric is not the threat. The threat is in not seeing the necessity of rhetorical reading in the first place as an alternative to hermeneutics--in being subject to the aesthetic ideology, in his words. Insofar as he makes this clear to us--and he does I think in saying that literature should be taught "as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history"--what he is doing is crucial.

(A postscript: what I find dangerous is quite clear--he provides a critical vocabulary that allows others to take it up for, basically, evil ends--and I'm not the first to say this about de Man. But perhaps this position can be countered. Perhaps what de Man is doing in "training a lot of critics to be only good at shutting down other readings" is precisely a less responsible, but somewhat excusable version of something I have argued elsewhere. Actually echoing de Man [in "The Return to Philology" but also elsewhere], I say that theory displaces the evaluative function one found in literary criticism or in the humanities education prior to [and as a concern throughout] the New Criticism and the institution [beginning] of our profession. If we take this notion up, we might see de Man teaching us how to shut down readings in order to teach us to be theoretical in one specific sense--to articulate evaluations in terms that are theoretical and concerned more with the possibilities of their own utterance. I still say this is a very, very dubious way of going about this--at what point do we stop and just say that behind the theory is really just a power-grab? But at another level we can't just say de Man was completely ignorant of the fact that each one of his terms actually was formed to produce the capability of this bad use. I think, in the end, that both things are true: he was quite aware he was disseminating things that could be used maliciously, perhaps more easily than they could be used correctly, but that he also believed perversely that this would change the face of literature, in the long run, for the better--that is, even if it came at any cost...)

Rhetoric as a second linguistics

From the point of view of linguistics, there is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in the sentence: "The sentence," writes Martinet, "is the smallest segment that is perfectly and wholly representative of discourse." Hence there can be no question of linguistics setting itself an object superior to the sentence, since beyond the sentence are only more sentences--having described the flower, the botanist is not to get involved in describing the bouquet.

And yet it is evident that discourse itself (as a set of sentences) is organized and that, through its organization, it can be seen as the message of another language, one operating at a higher level than the language of the linguists. Discourse has its units, its rules, its "grammar:" beyond the sentence, and though consisting solely of sentences, it must naturally form the object of a second linguistics. For a long time indeed, such a linguistics of discourse bore a glorious name, that of Rhetoric. As a result of a complex historical movement, however, in which Rhetoric went over to belles-lettres and the latter was divorced from the study of language, it has recently become necessary to take up the problem afresh.
-"Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," in Image-Music-Text, 82-3

This--an essay one can't reread enough--I think says more perspicuously and less equivocally what Paul de Man tried to get at, though perhaps de Man had his own way of recognizing other functions of this second linguistics which escape Barthes. Nevertheleless, is this not what de Man perhaps should have said when talking about rhetoric (and rhetorical tropes)? Wouldn't that (and the analytical tools necessary to put it in this way) have been more helpful? It's a crazy question, I know, but in studying these rhetorical structures, and in fact calling for a resurgence in rhetorical attention as well as instruction (which de Man did), putting it the right way is the most crucial thing. For instance, de Man would never make that nod to "transitions" between the sentence and what lies beyond it that for Barthes here "goes without saying:" de Man would emphasize how this "beyond" is a nearly absolute gap. And that seems to me to imply a whole different way of going about analyzing rhetoric--one which is much more likely to be irresponsible. (Derrida, for his part, would show that the beyond is absolute only as a form of being nearly-absolute, as a form of absoluteness which we are always unsure is absolute, which brings him actually closer to Barthes than de Man, I think: the failure of the gap to be absolute precisely means that we have a responsibility to find, locate, theorize, play with the "transitions.")

"L'accent compte:" Displacing the text, continued

I forgot to mention the crucial experience that really, for me, forms the essence of close reading and underlies my willingness to characterize it as a displacement of the text, as I remarked a few days ago. Or, perhaps to put it in a better way, there is a singular function that close reading can set to work which is of the utmost value and brings about what I call the displacement or the delay in communication that actually constitutes the text.
This function is one of allowing an ever so slight, but extremely crucial shift in the tone of a sentence (say), such that this sentence can be read in more than one way. The easiest and most simple example I can give is sarcasm:

That's a really nice job you did there.

There are basically two widely different meanings here depending on whether I read the sentence as sarcastic or not. And it isn't so much that these meanings inhere in the sentence itself (in the language and in linguistic convention), although its phrasing contains their possibilities. It is really that reading actuates these possibilities and actually constitutes the sentence depending on how it proceeds: if I read it as sarcastic, the word "job" loses some of its ability to signify an actual job, and becomes more idiomatic, less referential, and (appropriately) wider in scope (it can weirdly refer to more things, in losing its referentiality). The word "there" changes in a similar way. You can see then--despite this being a poor example--the work of tone. I.A. Richards defines tone usefully as the way that one communicates a sentence to another: it is for him "the speaker's [or writer's] attitude towards his audience," as he says in Practical Criticism. Notice that this is very far from something line intention: it is closer to the sort of general directedness of the sentence itself, such that one would rather speak of the intention of the sentence.
The point though, is that the function of close reading is to show that there is never merely one intention to our sentence. Or, since the work of reading actually brings out more of these intentions as it proceeds to consider or discuss the sentence, we can say that the function of close reading is actually to make possible the multiple tones with which something might be understood. It both shows that there are multiple intentions, multiple ways something can be said, but it also makes possible, by accessing tone or the possibilities of tone (which perhaps would not then be reducible to the tonal possibilities inherent in the language itself) the existence of these different ways beside each other, ranged out as it were before us. The work of close reading would then be to fold them back into the sentence as more and more of these ways are proffered in discussion. This would be the work of delay and displacement which actually--in resisting totalizing the text--actually constitutes it, which I talked about before.
This all sounds complex, but it's actually what is going on in any good close reading of a text--or at least this is my claim. It is a function that has produced many great readings over the years.
De Man in particular saw this, I think, but he made a very big mistake in his formulation of it. For indeed, one could describe more rigorously and more broadly this tonal function that I am describing in de Man's incisive terms as language's capability for irony (it's no mistake we started with sarcasm): it is basically the introduction of a sentence's difference from itself in terms of meaning (it would be a difference, then, that itself is irreducible to meaning). But de Man thought that there could be an assured process by which the proliferation of irony could be directed or somewhat contained: he therefore made this irony, this tonal function, also coextensive with the role of figurative language (which operated allegorically), such that the shifts in tone that we are talking about here would be seen as the work of the specifically figurative work of language itself. While this isn't inaccurate, characterizing it as figurative restores the intentions here that reading brings out back into language itself--or at least I think it had this effect for those who approached literature in a de Manian way: they would not see what they were doing as the work of reading but rather as a work of language. And this makes a big difference, because it really does presuppose an assured amount of this proliferation. You start talking about (or citing theories of) figuration, and are concerned less with opening up more irony or more intentions of the sentence and negotiating the process of folding them back into where they came--i.e. delaying the formation of a totalizing meaning or anything like the same meaning that would thereby (just by virtue of being the same) account for all these differences. (It should be obvious that implied in all this is a critique of de Man's conception of allegory.)
Someone who knew this even better was Derrida: this is why he will call his reading, occasionally, a double reading (or writing), a reading with redoubled effort. Reading a sentence of Derrida, which can usually be read at least in two ways--not just with the puns (this is precisely a totalizing reading, which sees theses in what he says) but more significantly with two hugely different tones--will bring out more the experience that I hint at above with my example. Regardless, the point is that the real function of close reading is a work that proceeds when you read something more than one way--and try to account for this in reading it further (in, that is, another way, never totally the same). In other words, it is trying to account for what Derrida himself notes in a very revealing sentence from Of Grammatology (52; 34 in English): "L'accent compte," the tone counts.
I should note, as a footnote--but an important one--that it is significant that, though we employed it in our example, we don't have to use the sentence in saying that this is the function of reading. In short, it doesn't matter whether it is on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, or the chapter, even of the work or set of works that this operation can proceed: close reading, then, because it would find its essence in this experience which I describe here and not in any notion of establishing a total textual object, would not necessarily be "close" in the way that we think of it. It would rather be an effect of a type of communication which is reading, and could have this effect on multiple levels, so long as experienced this odd tonal shift, or multiple intention, that we are talking about here. This would need elaboration, but I'm actually pretty confident that this is the case if we based close reading rigorously on this function here.
Also, I should note that if this ironic or tonal function is the center of closer reading, then something like S/Z would not be a close reading. That work proceeds by multiplying connotations. Occasionally they produce this function. But most of the time they range themselves alongside the work and do not allow you to hear the sentence differently. So while it pays very very intense attention to the text, this would preclude it from being a close reading.

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!)

Close reading: displacing the text

There are two ways to conceive of close reading. First, you become a textualist. This involves presupposing that people have no proper understanding of what they are reading until they read it again, closely. The work of close reading is then one that confronts the ignorant with the text--the text itself. Deploying the text in this way, making the reader confront it, is then what allows them to properly read. This construes the text, then, as a constituted thing, as something gathered together, however much one would like to assert that it is composed of differences or differentials. And it advantageously makes this thing equivalent to a proper understanding: upon perceiving this thing, you will have understood. This is advantageous because then you can say (perhaps even verify) that a reader had not read the text. All you have to do is make her say to you what she has read: if it does not correspond to (or at least come close to) what is now called the text, you either know or do not know whether she understood it.
Many people take I.A. Richards to be referring to this mode when he talks about the goal of reading closely being communication: something is communicated when it is understood properly and ignorance is overcome. But then there is the second way, which seems often to be more like what he means. This way presupposes that people already have an understanding of the text. The work of close reading then is not to confront someone with the object that is the text, since they already have a conception of that text. The work of close reading is, rather, to bring out that conception and actually constitute a text together with another person (or a class). A reader will say what she reads, and then this will be something that will alter the text that the rest of the class has established. In other words, she will say that a word means something to her, and this specification of meaning will alter the way the word has already been read. The word will then be taken back into the working model of the text that the class is constituting, either confirming it or forcing it to change or be displaced. So the text is not a constituted thing, but is something that is the result or effect of this work of constitution. This text then can be open to more or less displacement, depending on how much the work of constitution goes on. In the end, though, you are left with a text, and it will be equivalent to the success of a communciation or the readers' understanding. This process is also open to the textualism of the first mode of close reading we outlined. But if anything it tries to take it into account: the work of close reading is actually the work of displacing any particular constituted text, never letting it wholly confront you as a thing. This also opens up the text to research, which can help with the work of constitution along the way: in short, the work of reading is more of a detour than a work of confrontation, perception, squinting closer and closer until the thing itself is seen. For Richards, it takes over the work of the old philology, which was to construe a text and establish an authoritative version: it does this work, but with the understanding rather than material books, which again tend to make this work fall into textualism. In this sense, it also should be mentioned that the model for text for Richards was advertisements and signs, not books. Seeing a massive consumer culture up ahead (and to an extent already thoroughly established for his generation), he divined that reading would be more and more of a part of how we get around in the world, of how we relate to others--and less a thing that proceeded alone and with an old book in one's hands. The capacity or ability to displace the text together in conversation, rather than silently intuit its proper version--almost to the extent that you and others would effectively be rewriting it together (Barthes in S/Z very much stresses writing as reading in this way)--this was what he often wanted to cultivate.

Barthes, reversed

My reading of Barthes in my post on structuralism (and post-structuralism) was, I'll maintain, right in the direction it wished to go, but absolutely wrong (that is, going in the exact opposite direction) in how I put it. I said:

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident... is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural.

What I should have said is that this detaching takes place not through a moving away from semiotics and towards structure, but the more rigorous development of structure through semiotics--to the point where the older semiotic model (that only gives us the sign), reaches its limit and breaks, forcing us to found and find at this limit "another semiotics." This is what Barthes says in "The Structural Analysis of Narratives:" the detaching of structure from semiotics calls for a recognition of when and where the limit of a particular semiotic analysis must pause, and where it becomes necessary "to shift to another semiotics," to constitute another code, another langue or language (Image--Music--Text, 115-6).

But what this means is that we have to reconceptualize semiotics constantly: it is not the fixed thing that is taught in America as only the analysis of the sign  in its signifying act (or the failure of this signification to occur). Semoitics is not rigid, it is in fact extremely "flexible," as Barthes says earlier (109, it is in a revealing context, in contrast to psychological analysis). But it is not flexible in the sense that it can be applied as the same thing to all sorts of fields of data: this is precisely how America views semiotics, from what I gather. Rather, each time a new field or language is constituted, it must work at establishing the limits at which its functioning might break down. There, at that point, it must again seek another language, analyze a different code. This means that the sign constantly traverses itself as it gets imbricated with a metalanguage. Structuralism picks up this traversing, this cutting across a constituted semiotics, and develops it, transforms it into something other. This is the way we must revisit structuralism: not by fleeing its cooperation or coexistence with semiotics as I stupidly put it, but by developing our sense (so concretely grasped by Barthes) of the flexibility of semiotics and the ability of it to respect the need and the possibilities for new fields for analysis--developing our sense of all this, I say, as structuralism.

The post of structuralism

A genius colleague of mine (Sand Avidar-Walzer) has been talking with me about several aspects of the structuralism/post-structuralism distinction. His thesis, to which I most definitely subscribe, is that post-structuralism should not be conceived as a homogenous discourse opposed to structuralism (as a similarly homogenous discourse), but that post-structuralism is the precise deployment of structural tendencies and devices in a particular way.

If we take his thesis and run with it (and the running with it here is entirely my own--Sand's position with respect to the following is much more subtle and moves along different lines), what is produced is an uncannily accurate resituation of the current American reading of "Structure, Sign, and Play," considered to be the seminal text of post-structuralism, or at least that text which marks most clearly a break between the two ways of thinking, provoking the addition of "post-" to structuralism. This new reading understands extremely well the precise thrust of structuralist thinking that Derrida is trying to bring to the fore in the essay.

This, as I tried to bring out in another (unfinished) post, is essentially that the hypothesis of the bricoleur is not a mere patching-up of structuralism that Lévi-Strauss effectuates in order to cover the supposed flaws in structuralism, but the specifying of an operation that much of our thinking continuously engages in, insofar as it employs a particular conceptual apparatus that is not its own (or proper to it), that is other (composed of others' discourses), and requires the extensive organization of that apparatus. In other words, the provisionality characteristic of the use of another discourse--"I'm just using this concept now, this organization of data, these signifiers, to get at the real, underlying phenomenon; they are essentially inessential to my task, because they're not my own, or are not designed for my hermeneutical endeavor"--is a part of bricolage not because discourse needs to be provisional, not because structuralism as discourse is hypocritical with respect to its discursive

 provisionality (positing and referring to a center where it claims to empty out the center, to use the overused terms of that essay).

I once read that the character of MacGyver is a perfect example of the bricoleur: he uses what he finds around him to get out of sticky situations. On this reading, the use of the various pieces or fragments of equipment around MacGyver treats these pieces only as provisional things inessential to the real task: to create a device that will get one out of the room before it explodes, etc. But one must understand the existence of these provisional tools or fragments not as provisional in the sense that they are not owning up, somehow, to their own real nature as a totally provisional tool, as devices that exactly and only fit the task at hand, so that one can immediately just get out, without worrying about using the tools at all. In other words, one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional or completely inessential to the task. It should be obvious that MacGyver isn't somehow a guru primarily because he doesn't find some dedicated device that will immediately release him from the trouble he is in. However, this is in effect how one faults the bricoleur all across America in introductory classes in theory. In other words, this is the reading operative as the current situation stands. And we can see that this is a reading that reads structuralism already from the perspective of a post-structuralism. This can be seen in the absurd structure of our sentence above ("one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional"), which is almost unintelligible, yet duplicates this reading exactly in that it assumes provisionality is something both to be sought by a discourse that breaks with the center or origin (which would include post-structuralism), and is something not adequately formulated by structuralism. This reading, it is obvious, cannot conceive provisionality as the product of something other than provisionality (and one should note that this inconceivability is the essence of the humor in the "MacGruber" parodies of Will Forte currently on Saturday Night Live).

And this "something other," I am asserting, is exactly what causes provisionality. In the MacGyver example, this "something other" is precisely the fact that the tools he uses, in their otherness, in their just-found and yet not-appropriate essence, are set up as things external to him and his intentions, but which ultimately can be turned around to help him out. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is not his, because it is set up as against his use only at the most basic level of it being able to be turned around towards his use. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is conceived as neutral--as merely the site where two different intentions (McGyver's and the tool's proper use) are fought out. This is why MacGyver is a bricoleur: the tool can be turned around to his use because it is set up as against him, as not originally appropriate for him, and this makes the tool effectively--in the use itself--a "neutral" thing. We put "neutral" in quotes, because it is obvious that it isn't (and I should note that I'm not using this concept in the way Barthes formulates it). It has only the appearance of neutrality. Why? Because the tool was never sufficiently used against its ownmost, proper use, but only was used insofar as it was handy to get McGyver out of the situation. In this way new dimensions of the tool are opened up as uses (one understands how to use a hammer as a makeshift bazooka or something crazy like that), but the tool itself is not turned around completely to be used both as the tool that it is (a hammer) and the tool that it has become (bazooka), such that all hammers will thenceforth be possibly seen as bazookas and vice versa. To depart from the McGyver example (which has become more complicated perhaps than it was meant to be), think about how you think of a problem with the aid of a particular set of theoretical concepts: you pick up a thinker (Heidegger for example--let's say you are Derrida, or, to avoid confusion, another eminent thinker, like Sam Weber) and think in certain ways against him. The resulting reading of something (Sam Weber's essays on television, in Mass Mediauras for example) only uses Heidegger, you would say, provisionally: Heidegger is not essential to the thing you are trying to get at by way of the use of his outline of the stages of Seinsgeschichte or whatever (which Weber uses). Using Heidegger, therefore, does not make you (or Sam Weber, or Derrida) a Nazi--this would be absurd to say. Heidegger gets opened up to a new dimension of applicability: one understands a new way that the problematic Heidegger addresses in outlining stages of being history can be used. It is in this way that Heidegger himself uses thinkers like Kant, Descartes, Hegel, etc. to think about this very history of being (and to do so in a Nazi way--but one that is particular to this application of them): think of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which precisely thinks against Kant to show how being is making its appearance veiled within the discourse of Kant. The result is that the Kant, insofar as it was used, was effectively neutral: able to be turned around such that Kant was suddenly a thinker of being (amenable to Nazism), like Heidegger.

It is to against this neutrality that Derrida objects. And it is this objection that my reading here seeks to unlock from underneath the morass of comments on Derrida's essay that see the bricoleur as someone who wants to create a totally provisional discourse--when the bricoleur simply wants to think against someone or use a concept within a limited context until a more rigorous and valid concept can be found that can justify his primary aim better. For Kant, in Heidegger's reading, like Heidegger himself in Sam Weber's (or Derrida's) use of him, is not neutral. To repeat, this is because, in the first case, Kant has not been taken up as Kant. Kant has only been taken up as useful in the various places in which he addressed being and being-history. In the second, Heidegger has only been taken up by Weber in the places where he is not a Nazi. If Kant in the first case or Heidegger in the second were truly neutral, more of both of these thinkers would be able to be addressed. But because they are merely thought against (and Weber does more than merely this, but we're just using him as an example), they become places where provisionality gets performed or enacted rather than essentially constituted. The project of "Structure, Sign and Play" is to make this enactment more explicit. So this provisionality qua supposed neutrality is what is attacked in the post-structuralist attack of structuralism. The site of provisionality, then, is made again into the place where forces are taking place and need to be delineated or defined. It isn't--in the end--a simple point or place, or as simple as it looked to Lévi-Strauss (or McGyver).

So the project of post-structuralism, as I am suggesting, is to employ structures, even like a bricoleur, except render the sites on which they struggle to be used this way more responsibly as explicit and regulated, so they do not end up as wholly destructive loci in any discourse. It isn't to dispense with structures altogether (though Derrida might move closer to actually carrying out this project than others). "Structure, Sign, and Play" does not wish to transcend structuralism. It wishes to think with structures more rigorously, to account for the point at which their limited context (again, the goal is not that of a totally coherent provisional discourse, but one only coherent in certain conditions) in which they function becomes more permanently presupposed than it should--in short, where its limits get naturalized despite their resistance to this very naturalism as a tool. With Foucault, the goal is to make this realm of explicitness more and more supple, less rigid, and more determinable by analysis--that means particularly defining the limits in more complicated ways such that they can regulate the naturalizing tendency to a degree (this is largely Bourdieu's general task as well). With Lacan, the task is similar, yet it focuses more on the particular ways this regulation (or lack thereof) can be caused (this is what I get at in my recent post on Lacan, below).

Thus, the "post-" of post-structuralism is more fraught than we might think it would be. And, as we have seen, this is precisely because the notion of structure and its use as exemplified in the bricoleur is more complicated and more diversified than we are willing to admit. We might do well to display a quote of Foucault's as he turns towards his last, most amazing period--in short, that which we might call the most post-structuralist--and witness the ambiguity that the term structuralism has for him as he announces his the direction his teaching will take to the Collège de France:

And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this--if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them--structuralism...

-The Archaeology of Knowledge, "The Discourse on Language," 234.

If the notion of structure can, at this point (and several years after Derrida's essay) still apply somehow to what Foucault is doing; if it can do so such that Foucault could remain indifferent to the name itself; if only fools would assume that it were able to be transcended by virtue of the simple addition of a "post-," we would have to revisit the notion of structure as such and show precisely how it is amenable to post-structuralism as this field on which structures can appear and be made more rigorously analyzable. In other words, we have to revisit and relive the frame of mind in which Foucault can adopt this tone, this unbelievable nonchalance or ease with respect to structuralism, which would entail both a loosening up of the term itself and a loosening up of our current ways of understanding.

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident, if we take my friend's reading and run with it, is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural. The understanding of Barthes as a structuralist, and not passing him off as either merely a semiotician or a popularizer of Derrida (as is so often done in the American academy), would do much for an understanding of why structuralism is not reducible to semiotics and the other way around (semiotics may have unknown virtues apart from its structuralist use, too).