"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.