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.

Some words on poetry analysis

Like I said in the last post, I had to explain recently the purpose of citations, reading response papers, things like that.  Here is my explanation of the basic reasons for analyzing poetry:

The analysis of poetry isn't something you learn in order to replace reading, or even to become a better reader. You don't need analysis to read a poem and enjoy it. But analysis is a tool that opens up a shortcut to the insights you typically get after you've read a poem a trillion times. When you know it by heart. When you've memorized it. And in that sense, it's extremely useful to know, and is almost required as a skill if you want to make any truly scholarly remarks about a piece of writing like a poem, because it is only based on that intimate knowledge that anything of that critical complexity can be genuinely thought valid. But it also heightens your appreciation of a poem in general, just like reading something over and over and knowing it inside and out does. So it provides the foundation for everything involved in talking in a sophisticated manner about poems, at the same time as it capitalizes on the strengths you already have as someone who is literate and knows how to read. It is a device that can turn literacy into critical thinking.

Some words on thesis statements, response papers, and citations

I was recently asked to define and explain a few basic elements of paper writing, and I liked what I had to say. I thought it might be productive if I put it up here. Expect some further tips and tricks in the future:

On thesis statements:
These are like the initial punch of a one-two combo: you need the thesis statement to open up things decisively to get to what you really want to get at, and the better you are at writing one, the better the eventual thing you want to write about will be. Their nature, of course, depends on what you're writing about, but they do several things generally. There are a trillion formulas for this, and everyone says they know the real way to do it. The point is to do what works for you and what will give you the result people can understand clearly. For me, the best definition of a thesis statement is just that it is the argument seen as the answer to a question, one that is brief and provocative. The thesis asks, What is the question I'm asking in what I want to say, and what is the answer I give? If you can show how what you want to say is opening up a problem, something openended, but also definite and precise and provocative, and then give some sense that there is an answer to this question, suddenly what you are going to write becomes clearer in like fifty different ways. You give some sense of the scope of your argument, the stakes, and its possible resonance. And you get right to the center of what you're trying to say and why you're saying it.

On (literary) response papers: 
Like mindfulness for reading, response papers do two things: they organize your reactions to a text and showing how they can inform the text for other people, and they connect your own reactions to the larger issues surrounding the text itself. You gather yourself together, and you link yourself to the general discussion. You do this by bringing the work itself into connection with your thinking, taking a passage that was a particularly poignant node in the text for you and actually looking at its linguistic makeup. You employ, during this, a certain simple attentiveness to language, and an attentiveness to your own feelings, and an articulateness about both. This can be extremely fun, and is also extremely useful: your response paper can usually serve as the raw material for an essay that you can write up later in the semester.

On citations:
Citations are often a pain, but they are also important. This isn't just because they "show evidence that you didn't plagiarize." It's because it puts your work into dialogue with other work. Becoming good at citing and knowing how to cite adds a whole different dimension to your paper: suddenly you're not all out on your own, just saying what comes into your head, but you're actually joining a conversation, showing how what you have in mind actually is the product of reading a lot and trying to figure out what the consensus is on an issue, and whether that consensus is good or whether the discussion needs to be changed. So it's not just that you need to show you got information from a source. It shows you got SPECIFIC information from a SPECIFIC source, and that your conclusions build on what is being said THERE, or challenge what is being said THERE. Learning how to cite well is learning how to discuss and argue well--and if you know this, it makes the fundamentals (all that formatting) really interesting and crucial. Good citations are really appreciated by your readers--you appreciate them, don't you? when you read a book?--and change the nature of your argument depending on how you do them. So doing them right is a worthwhile task.