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!)

Nancy, Derrida, Blanchot, Work

Thinking about Derrida's "The Pit and The Pyramid" (Margins of Philosophy) together with a remark of Jean Luc-Nancy's in "A Finite Thinking" (in his amazing book of the same name) elucidated a few things for me and also made them more intriguing.

One is always tempted--and this "one" includes Derrida himself--to explain "work" (tekhné, craft, labor, art) in Blanchot's sense, primarily as he talks about it in The Space of Literature. But for necessary reasons this must be resisted, if one is to think a "work" that functions, labors, proceeds--in short, works. Nancy succumbs to this temptation while maintaining a distance from Blanchot, while Derrida does not and yet tries to make this temptation permanently possible: that is the difference between the two thinkers, and Derrida sketches it out brilliantly throughout On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy in his constant references to Nancy's

 "exactitude" (this is how I would read those seemingly offhand remarks, that is).

Both think work that works, a work that purely functions without any respect for what it works on or what it produces by virtue of its work or--and this is the real key to thinking work that works--even without regard to its own functioning or operation. That is, both think a work that might always cease to function if it is to continue functioning purely: it must do so in order for it to be a work that operates without respect to its own functioning. Work without guarantee of the continued being of the work ("without reserve," as Derrida says): only this non-work in work would make work work (see my paper on Derrida and tekhné in The Gift of Death--where I precisely describe things in Nancy's way, due to the English translation--for a more coherent explanation of this).

Nancy explains this working or non-working of the technical in the following way, however:

The "reign of technology" disassembles and disorients the infinite sealing off of a Sense. In the same way, undoubtedly, as it disconcerts and displaces, endlessly, the completion of a "work," in such a way that technization could, in all rigor, be called "un-worked," or without work [dès-œuvrée].

-"A Finite Thinking," in A Finite Thinking, 26

The last term is Blanchot's. But notice how it turns our simple "non-work" into an "un-work," a

 failure of work to work that undoes what is working in its working. At the exact point (this is an example of the exactitude) at which there is work, there the work can just as equally as working it can be un-working itself.

This is crucial. For throughout the original text of "The Pit and the Pyramid," though the English translation by Alan Bass continually suggests this phrasing, Derrida will consistently avoid collapsing his explanation of the non-working of work into an un-working. In fact, he will never explain this non-working as non-working: if it is necessary for a machine or tekhné that works not work, this not-working is never simply the opposite or the undoing of work. It is not a negative of the term "work" at the heart of its operation. Notice how Derrida always moves between the words "travail," and "fonctionnerait," "marche," and, elsewhere in the text, "œuvre," so as to always attempt to equate one with the other and thereby disrupt their synonymous relationship--that is, so that one cannot name work a work that is un-work. Notice also that he starts precisely with Nancy's formulation "at the point at, at the moment in which," etc., only to move into this greater indecisiveness that is uniquely Derrida's own:

Or le calcul, la machine, l'écriture muette appartiennent au même syatème d'équivalence et leur travail pose le même problème: au moment où le sens se perd, où la pensée s'oppose son autre, où l'esprit [Hegelian Geist] s'absente de lui-même, le rendement de l'opération est-il sûr? ... et qui, en somme, en tant que négatif, mais sans apparaître comme tel, sans se présenter, c'est-à-dire sans travailler au servie du sens, réussirait? mais réussirait, donc, en pure perte?

Tout simplement une machine, peut-être, et qui fonctionnerait. Une machine définie sans son pur fonctionnement et non dans son utilité finale, son sens, son rendement, son travail... ce que Hegel, interprète relevant de toute l'historie de la philosophie, n'a jamais pu penser, c'est une machine qui fonctionnerait... L philosophie y verrait sans doute un non-fonctionnement, un non-travail, et elle manquerait par là ce qui pourtant, dans une telle machine, marche. Tout seul. Dehors.

-"Le puits et la pyramide," Marges de la philosophie, 126

I'll elaborate on this later, perhaps. It is enough to collect the three thinkers together for now.

Blanchot and memory

Here is a good quote from Blanchot that outlines how what Heidegger in Being and Time calls "historizing," and in other places calls "the destiny/destining of Being" in its movement of "enowning"--how this "epochality" (as Derrida calls it in order to indicate how all these concepts form a nexus, cf. Of Spirit, 12) ties in with memory, life, and death. That is, how it ties in with Hegel, for whom these topics (Errinerung, Lebenserfahrung/Erfahrung, der Tode/das Nichts, respectively), are absolutely crucial. If you are thinking these things and their imbrication, let me just suggest you look at this quote (I'll elaborate what I think this imbrication is as indicated by this paragraph later--I don't have time now unfortunately!):

A novelist writes in the most transparent kind of prose, he describes men we could have met ourselves and actions we could have performed; he says hs aim is to express the reality of a human world the way Flaubert did. In the end, though, his work really has only one subject. What is it? The horror of existence deprived of the world, the process through which whatever ceases to be continues to be, whatever is forgotten is alwas answerable to memory, whatever dies encounters only the impossibility of dying, whatever seeks to attain the beyond is always still here.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," from The Work of Fire, 333-4.

Derrida: Trace and Specter

Derrida in his last interview before his death explicitly equates the logic of two of his greatest concepts, the trace and the specter, the first used in his early writings, the second in his robust later work. Reading the latter into the former, one can understand it as a continuation of the thought of Heidegger on Hegel and the latter's concept of Geist. That is, if Geist is composed of the certain, deliberate death (negation) of un-Conceptual existence to be certainly, deliberately reborn in the Concept, understanding the trace as the spectral means understanding it as a different relationship of existence to death, to negativity. The spectral is the un-dead, the concrete anticipation of a death that is never certain to come precisely because it may have already passed the point at which it could be present. But as trace, it is clear from Derrida's early writings that it is also what Heidegger termed the sheltering in the withdrawing of being, the operation of Ereignis or enowning. That is, the relationship of existence to death is reconceived because what relates itself to death for Derrida (and Heidegger) is not existence, but this enowning movement of being, the movement of truth. In short, by combining these two concepts we are able to see that what Derrida was able to do was to exploit the French reworking of Hegelian negativity that was popular in the fifties (and earlier, in the work of Kojeve, Bataille, and Blanchot) with a concept that was not concerned with existence, and thus more concerned with being in the Heideggerian sense (the sense in which it was what was given by a movement of truth). In other words, he was able to bring French philosophy back to the sense of being that Heidegger was pursuing, out of its reified Sartreian form as existence. He was able to bring philosophy out of its concern with death and the present (existence) and towards a concern with death and the movement of presencing (which is chracteristic of enowning). The specter, then, is the figure that was concealed under the figure of the trace in Derrida's early writings.
As far as a critique of Hegel goes, and Heidegger's relationship to it as developed and exploited by Derrida, I can only outline that it would be a returning of Geist to its original signification in German, i.e. ghost. Derrida would show that the work of Heidegger is an exposure of the Hegelian tendency to suppress the spectral in its narration of the death that is constitutive of negativity as determinate--in other words, of the suppression of indeterminate negativity or abstract negativity. I'll outline all this in a clearer fashion sometime in the future--I just write now what is occuring to me. Here's the quote from Derrida that should show the links I've made here:

I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death. When it comes to translating such a notion, Benjamin emphasizes the distinction between uberleben on the one hand, surviving death, like a book that survives the death of its author, or a child the death of his or her parents, and, on the other hand, fortleben, living on, continuing to live. All the concepts that have helped me in my work, and notably that of the trace or of the spectral, were related to this "surviving" as a structural and rigorously originary dimension.
-Learning to Live Finally, 26.

Blanchot and Hegel's abstract negativity

In "Literature and the Right to Death," Maurice Blanchot invokes, like Bataille throughout his Inner Experience, the concept of pure nothing, (or, as a power, a becoming) abstract negativity, that Hegel defines early on in the Master-Slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit as well as in the beginning of the Science of Logic. The use for this is clear, and also aptly summarizes what I think Bataille thinks of it also, with respect to the work of literature. Blanchot says that "Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt," (301), in the sense that it, "by its very activity, denies the substance of what it represents" (310), and thus is "its own negation," (301). This is clear enough. Why? Because it is in this instance merely a contradiction, a determinate negation of itself, a negation that does not overcome our ability to determine the extent to which it is a negation, our ability to discern that it only contradicts itself.
This will become clearer when we contrast it to the abstract negativity that Blanchot outlines next as the real core of this contradiction in literature:

We should point out that as its own negation, literature has never signified the simple denunciation of art or the artist as mystification or deception. Yes, literature is unquestionably illegitimate, there is an underlying deceitfulness in it [because it claims importance and undermines it at the same time, as Blanchot said above]. But certain people have discovered something beyond this: literature is not only illegitimate, it is also null, and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity, it may constitute a marvelous force.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," 301.

Nullity here is something infinitely more than mere negation. It is its nothingness in the abstract, in a way that we cannot determine, "its own unreality," as Blanchot says, "realized" in the extreme. In other words, at the core of literature is something much more than a contradiction, in that it professes legitimacy and at the same time (i.e. as it is constructing its legitimacy--as Blanchot emphasizes, these are simultaneous processes) undermines that legitimacy. Instead, it questions its own legitimacy or constructs its own illegitimacy to such an extent that it is impossible to determine the extent to which this questioning goes: in questioning itself, it goes beyond itself into everything else. In other words, it is impossible to determine how much it is illegitimate, how much it calls itself into question--i.e., whether it is not calling more than itself (society, political regimes, existence, morality) into question with it.
This is Hegel's abstract negativity, or, isolated in the Science of Logic, pure nothing, at play. It escapes all dialectic except by determining itself--and if one rejects the way in which Hegel says it determines itself, then one is only left with its nullity, with its own self-questioning. That is, unless one thinks it in the realm of the Absolute, as something that already must be its own Concept, it will indeed pull everything into question.
In literature, indeed, there is often no speculation such that a dialectic may condition or determine this abstract negativity. Thus there is either denial, which many works of literature engage in, or the process of "opening up completely" to this abstract power, this nullity, this questioning that goes beyond itself, embodying it and allowing it to develop itself, questioning everything.
As a note, we should say that this does not mean that the work of literature is indefinite or vague at its heart. Quite the contrary. This is why it is important to note that the work constructs its illegitimacy within or as its legitimacy: precisely in its determinateness it opens itself up to this abstract negativity. Therefore, the calling-into-question is never just calling into question anything, but rather, in its power to question everything, can particularly question specific entities which it directs itself towards (the state, morality, etc.) in its (de)construction of its legitimacy. This is why Blanchot says that "it is not a question of abusing literature, but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it" (302): the work that accesses abstract negativity is not just any indefinite work of the pen--it is precisely the work that is trying to understand itself. Indeed, this is why it can question anything in the first place.

Postscript: After reading this essay over a few times, it seems that Blanchot might, most of the time, be invoking regular Hegelian negativity--i.e. determinate negativity--to explain writing as a work. In the interest of not distorting this invocation, we should not stretch it always into something abstract which it is not. But in the end, however, he really does have in mind and consider literarture as the abstract negativity pointed out by Bataille (whom he befriended about a decade before this essay was written and published): the type of negativity that he is using can only be abstract because it not only questions beyond itself in such a way as to lift the questioning work of literature out of the sphere of its immediate influence, but also calls the reality of everything into question. This is what Blanchot is saying in the following: "The influence authors exert is very great, it goes infinitely [my italics -MJ] far beyond their actions... His [the author's] negation is global It not only negates his situation... but bypasses time" (315). The "global" negation is the abstract negation: "global" and "abstract" mean the same thing here. Indeed, after this passage Blanchot clearly puts forth the general thesis regarding abstract negativity in general:

This negation negates nothing, in the end... the work in which it is realized is not a truly [read: determinate; true according to Hegel, who considers only determinate negation the operation of truthl] negative, destructive act of transformation, but rather the realization of the inability to negate anything [we might also call this "abstract," then], the refusal to take part in the world.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," 315.

Thus, the essay as a whole is attempting to lift the contradiction of determinate negation, the contradiction of bad faith that presents itself as the very form of literature into the sphere in which it operates or acts as itself, constituting itself as literature. All in all it is a rebuttal to Sartre and his ideas on a literature of action which precisely as action withdraws itself into the work of literature--i.e. into the work of constructing a call to action to a world distant from the work. The act for Sartre, Blanchot reveals, is therefore a non-act, a refusal to act (Blanchot criticizes Sartre in the same way, then, that Hegel criticized Kant): Blanchot puts this poignantly when he quips that this would be "making the wall into the world" (310)--"The Wall," ("Le mur"), of course being Sartre's famous short story. Blanchot is showing that the work is already within the world, already "disappears," in the world as he often puts it ("for failure is its essence, disappearance constitutes its realization", 308), and as such has a greater potential for negativity than can actually be determined through any artistic or, on the side of those who receive the literary work, social act. This power is the power of an abstract negativity: it is what, within the bad faith which we do not merely enter as a consequence of our actions (Sartre), but are born into, reside within, and begin any action out of, shatters this faith by developing and refining it to its utmost extent, the instant at which it becomes infinitely indeterminable (abstract). This is why Blanchot says "Literature is not nothing" (313). It is not nothing because it is a nullity, pure nothingness, nothing so simply and purely it is nothing excessively. It is so much nothing that it cannot be nothing. In this respect, it cannot be in any way either, not even as the other side of pure, abstract being in a process of becoming. It is a residue, a product of this determinate becoming, simultaneously being prior to it as well as what cannot be, "not light that has become the repose of noon but the terrible force that draws beings into the world and illuminates them" (326). In other words (that Blanchot essentially uses), it is a self-effacing trace. It should be clear from this last metaphor that most of this is made clear by Derrida in "From Restricted to General Economy" in Writing and Difference, and cannot be thought with respect to Blanchot without the rigor with which he clarifies the mission of Bataille and Hegel.