June Reading: "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes

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81

Yes. Subjectivity. Thoughts and feelings are vital in writing and reading. As you say, there is a need for an awareness, not only of the presenting idea but of the potential for understanding and misunderstanding self and others.

Barthes, Section 3:

: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” not a “person,” end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language “work,” that is, to exhaust it.

What or who is it that makes language ‘work’?

‘I’ as a pronoun can represent a person. It works as part of language. But it is not a person, real or fictional. It is not the man or author. By itself, it is not enough to make language work.

Popeye sings:
“I yam what I yam, and I yam what I yam that I yam / And I got a lotta muscle, and I only gots one eye / And I’ll never hurt nobodys, and I’ll never tell a lie”

‘I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam’ works as a humorous and philosophical statement. Acceptance without pretence.

Then, there is:
“I think, therefore I am” — Descartes. In other words, cogito, ergo sum or je pense, donc je suis.

It expresses the idea that the act of thinking confirms the thinker.

There are stories behind both.

Where would the world of literature be without the music or metaphor of language?

Mental images are communicated to others using all the senses, sound, syntax and semantics.

Barthes may well be attempting to deny the importance of the author, perhaps to burst an authoritarian bubble in French literature.

However, this reductive argument is not persuasive in its denial of the person.

Language functions in interactions by the telling of stories, by expressing emotions and abstract concepts. It is a human tool.

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Perhaps there is another way of looking at it.

Enactivism is the view that life evolved in synergy with its environment through a continual interaction between the two. The natural consequence is that we can only cognise what is cognisable. For example, we see the colour red because it corresponds with something in the world.

People generally follow the ideas and beliefs of the community that they grow up in. For example, about 91% of people in Mexico are Christians (Wikipedia - Religion in Mexico), about 99% of people in Iraq are Muslims (Wikipedia - Religion in Iraq) and about 95% of people in Thailand are Buddhists (Wikipedia - Buddhism in Thailand). It is common that the thoughts and language of a person generally derive from the community that they happen to live in.

From Barthes’s point of view, the thoughts and language of an individual are taken from the pre-existing thoughts and language of the community within which they live.

Without denying that people are individuals who may write and read, that people take their ideas and language from the community they happen to live in is not reducing such people to mindless automatons but rather seeing them as valuable members of a community.

As Descartes might have said, “I think as a part of my community, therefore I am a part of my community”, where the act of thinking as part of a community confirms the thinker as being part of that community.

Being a part of a community is not a denial of that person’s individuality, but rather in Barthes’s terms, a restoration of the status of the reader against the tyranny of the author, and the birth of the proletariat against the death of the bourgeoisie (Mythologies 1957 and The Death of the Author 1967).

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The more I read this essay, the more it closes me down. It is not so much ‘mysterious’ as dramatically absurd.

Section 4, first sentence:

The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real “alienation:’ the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself).

Epic. Barthes seeks to dethrone an image of a mythic Author. This so-called father-figure ( like God) now ‘absenting’ himself from his own text (child) or literature ( his milieu).

Barthes writing so does not make it so. It is circular.

Barthes. The stage director:

Go away, dear Author, “Allez-Vous en!”.
The Author slinks away. Literature is transformed.
Thank God! “Dieu merci!”
We can now write and read text so that the Author absents himself.

A new ‘hero’ is born in a different way, at a different time:

The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book…the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing,

Barthes presents the existence of an Author as a belief in a religious entity. I’m surprise he didn’t capitalise ‘him’ or ‘his’.

It may well be metaphorical but I doubt readers pick up poetry or prose with the idea of attributing divinity or authoritarianism to a writer.

Who is it that believes in the concept of an ‘Author-God’ now dead?

Barthes changes the word author (writer) to Author, then to ‘scriptor’. Why?

First, the ‘scriptor’ is born with the text. How convenient and how unlikely. No background. As if by magic, a new actor appears ‘not supplied with a being’. Detached from his writing. No origin? The traditional author apparently obliterated.

Barthes is presenting a narrow and normative view. How a writer should conceive of himself. Writing is the destruction of every voice. Really? Well, perhaps those of females or other minorities - but that is changing. And the destruction lies in the lack of writing.

his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.

The act of inscription has no expression. What kind of literature is this? Stand-alone barrenness. Isolated and meaningless. A staged voiceless ‘performative’.

As readers, we need to keep in mind who wrote the text and how it might be significant. How the meaning is produced and processed.

Readers are part of its generation by listening to the voice and giving voice to our experience. The author is kept alive.

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And, of course, that does not follow!

Being or feeling part of a community involves more than just being there. It includes incomers or ‘outsiders’ being accepted in every sense. In being able to live in a tolerant environment.

Intolerance or fear of death, is why some writers hide their real names or use ambiguity.

There is always another way. Some don’t take it, or can’t see it. They avoid the ideas of others, even within their community.

This is the ideology of Barthes. Individuality, as an author or reader, is as likely to be killed in either kind of community.

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Yes, and if you look up transitive, you get three meanings ( 1: the grammatical one, 2: the formal logic one [if A:B and B:C then A:C, or something], and 3: “characterised by transition”.)

If we invoke Merriam Webster, I’d say Barthes uses meaning number 3 for “intransitive ends”. He’s not talking about grammar. That’s the end of it for me, if we only discuss this text.

I’ll say this wasn’t well put by me. With uses, I mean that the “transitive” in “transitive verb” and the “transtive” in “transitive ends” are not each a token of the same verb-meaning.

“Transtive verb” relates to “characterized by having or containing a direct object” (MW).

“Transtive ends” relates to " of, relating to, or characterized by transition" (MW).

If Barthes has a super meaning in mind, I’ll have dig deep and think this through: what could he be talking about? If I don’t succeed long enough, I’ll eventually give up.

I’ll be dropping this topic unless there’s a particular answer you’d like to a particular question. The word “intransitive” only occurs once in this text, after all, and it’s not the grammatical meaning.

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I’m not sure how to describe language in terms of the where and when myself, so it’s absolutely fine to drop the topic. It’s a side-issue, anyway.

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Presumably one such way would be to suggest that Barthes would be likely to propose relaxing conventional obligations to avoid plagiarism?

A scriptor is as entitled as any author to copyright; just less inclined to claim jurisdiction on the correct way to read and interpret? And less inclined to be centre-stage in whatever interpretations?

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It seems to me that being accepted in every sense is one of the consequences of Barthes’s theory.

For Barthes, there is no separation or distinction between the individual readers who are intrinsic, constituent and integral parts of the whole, and the Reader who exists in a conceptual space that makes up the community.

As a tree is not distinct from a forest, but is part of the whole, without the part there would be no whole. Each part is by its very nature accepted without question as being part of the whole in every sense.

For Barthes, being part of a whole community requires of logical necessity being accepted in every sense.

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It is true that Merriam Webster includes transition as a possible meaning of “transitive”.

However, Barthes in his essay only uses the word “intransitive”.

In Merriam Webster, “intransitive” only has a grammatical meaning.

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People are not trees, a forest is not an abstract concept. A living tree is not part of a concept of Forest.

A person, author or reader, is distinct from an abstract collective imagined by another person.

Barthes. Section 6:

…the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.

If Barthes was being consistent, he would have capitalised the word ‘reader’ to indicate his abstract concept of impersonality.

The ‘small’ author, reader and person - they are individuals with context.

Yes, the meanings of a text are multiple and diverse. How can one argue against this? Barthes has built more than one ‘strawman’ to set fire to.

Not every person (part) is naturally accepted without question into the ‘whole’ of a ‘community’.
An abstract Author or Reader is not part of a living literature of breathing and sensing souls. Abstraction is part of Barthes’ classical criticism.

Barthes continues:

The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes.

So, basically, this is Barthes critique of traditional literary criticism. This is what he terms the powerful ‘Author’s empire’.

Nevertheless, he talks in Section 4 of the ‘Author’ in personal terms — ‘when we believe in him’.

The ‘Author’ is ‘buried’ by the modern writer (scriptor). Barthes says that to write is no longer about observation or ‘painting a picture’ but that it is a linguistic ‘performative’ (exclusively given to the first person, present).

Writing is reduced to an ‘utterance’ with no other content than the ‘act by which it is uttered’.

This is a separation or division of views in the history of literature. Barthes had a profound influence. Of that, there is no doubt. His ideas have sparked debates in literary theory and criticism.

Where do you find this in the text?

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Suppose I am a scriptor (or an LLM).

I use material pre-existing within my community and make new combinations.

I read that in politics, a red flag is predominantly a symbol of left-wing ideologies (Wikipedia - Red Flag (politics)).

I also read that “Roses Are Red” is a love poem and children’s rhyme (Wikipedia - Roses are red)

I make the connection that i) left-wing ideologies are associated with the colour red and ii) associated with the colour red is love

I can then make the new combination and write “left-wing ideology is love”

This is not plagiarism, as “left-wing ideology” and “love” are commonly known concepts.

I am entitled to copyright, as this is a new idea that is not commonly known.

The text is now “left-wing ideology is love”.

As a scriptor, I know that each reader will most probably find different meanings within each word. “Love” to a 7 year old South African girl going to school in Clanwilliam will have a different meaning to a 60 year Icelandic fisherman living in Gardhur.

Therefore, I know that as a scriptor, in practice, I have little claim on how my text is interpreted, and therefore less inclined to impose myself on how my text is, in fact, interpreted.

As a scriptor, I accept that my text stands alone independent of myself as author.

As a scriptor, I am content that the meaning of my text becomes the set of all possible interpretations within the conceptual space of my community, or in Barthes’s terms, the Reader.

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Section 6.

In the last two sections of the essay Barthes ramps up the rhetoric to produce what he hopes will be a rousing call to arms. Whether this is successful or justified, rather than ridiculous, is something I’ll look at when I come to evaluate the essay later. In section 6, Barthes does two things:

  1. Argues against decipherment, i.e., the uncovering of secret, ultimate meanings, and argues instead for disentanglement.
  2. Connects the rejection of decipherment with a kind of liberation movement, namely the overthrow of the reign of Author and Critic, which will mean a kind of liberation, not only for writing and reading but more widely: a liberation from God, reason, science, and law.

I’ll put it polemically, to get in tune with Barthes. The work of literature is not a mystery to be solved by tracing it back to the author’s psychology, motivations, intentions, or personal background and traumas, or other such gossip in the guise of profound revelation. The text is not a sign pointing somewhere else more interesting, that the author for some reason does not wish to mention. Insofar as we can get meaning from the text, it is in the language itself. Insofar as something matters to the text, it will be legible in it. The text is itself infinitely interesting. The language is not just a tool to carry something private and non-linguistic from one mind to another. The very idea that language is primarily instrumental to ends outside itself is anathema to the scriptor. We can ask the zealous acolytes of the Author: Why must the Author overshadow the text itself? Why must language play second fiddle to some other, originating greatness? Why should anyone still take seriously the idea that to properly approach literature we must subordinate and denigrate language?

Getting down off that high horse, I can think of a response, but I won’t say any more right now, since I’m postponing my evaluation till later. (In a nutshell, where I am right now is I agree that interpretation as decipherment is wrongheaded, but I don’t think a rejection of this paradigm depends on a rejection of the writer’s subjectivity).

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; …

What does it mean to reject one metaphor, namely piercing the space of writing, or lifting up the text to find what’s beneath it, or uncovering the secret—in favour of another, namely disentangling the multiplicity, following the thread, and ranging over the space of writing?

I’ve struggled to put this into words myself, because I think this has always been my way of appreciating literature (which tempts me to think it’s the natural or default way of reading, though I hesitate to commit to that claim). I have always disliked the idea that what you find in a novel must point somewhere else, must stand for something, or—even worse—must function as a delivery mechanism for a message. I think the kind of writing I like reflects that: Nabokov, Borges, Pynchon, John Barth, Samuel R. Delany—authors who revel in language, the multiplicity of meaning, and the instability of a story’s source.

In the past, without knowing anything about Barthes, I’ve attempted to get the idea across by saying that meaning is all on the surface, in the open, and shared. But I like Barthes’ metaphors better, because they get away from any superficiality or aestheticism suggested by “surface”; disentanglement, in contrast, acknowledges the complexity of a text, that its meanings are not always simple and obvious.

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work

Barthes clearly sees his approach to literature as liberating, in that it refuses to place a limit on a text’s meaning. The latter is what happens when its meaning is assigned to an ultimate origin, centrally the Author but also other candidate origins such as “society, history, psyche, liberty.” When he says these are hypostases of the Author, it means that they function in the same way as the Author, that they are in effect the Author—as in the authoritative source of meaning—in disguise.

He mirrors this with what he calls God’s hypostases at the end of the paragraph. More than rhetoric, this is meant to suggest that the death of the Author is something like the death of God, that the change is as fundamental and has the same structure. The implication might be that the death of the Author is part of a much wider development in philosophy, namely the rejection of a metaphysics of origin.

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In context. From Section 2:

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

His ‘Probably’ refers to what? The question of voices and identity in literature?

From the final sentence in Section 1:

It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

What is the connection?

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Yes, exactly right, and that’s a nice distinction.

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I thought you might have appreciated the metaphor. As you wrote in page 81 “Where would the world of literature be without the music or metaphor of language?”

I agree. I try to use for myself “reader” when referring to the individual reader and “Reader” when referring to the set of all possible readers within a community.

I agree. As with “reader” and “Reader”, differentiating between “author” and “Author” may have been clearer. The “author” becomes the scriptor and the “Author” is the dictionary or set of all possible material within a community.

I did not write “Barthes wrote that being part of a whole community requires of logical necessity being accepted in every sense”.

I am sure that inference is acceptable, as long as it is based on reasoned analysis of evidence.

As the article “Reading as a Philosopher” by David W. Concepción notes

The more important question is, is it true that for Barthes, being part of a whole community requires of logical necessity being accepted in every sense?

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Not really a side-issue, is it?

Isn’t this Barthes’ main critique? He is against internalism or interiority in language? Subjective experience in authorship.
A simple search ‘where is language’ instigated a Copilot response beginning:

Language exists not in a single place but across the mind, social interactions, and cultural practices, manifesting in speech, writing, and other forms of communication.

In the text, there are 9 instances of the word ‘language’ as per pdf search. Most of them (7) are in Section 3.

However, language is everywhere, not just counted as a word in the text.

The philosophical debate re internalism v externalism seems ridiculous to me. It’s another case of either/or — when it can be both.

What interests me more is the practical use. As in:
Interiority vs. Visceral Reactions in Deep POV | Writers In The Storm

Interiority creates emotional depth because it reveals how the character privately experiences the moment. That emotional layer may come from fear, expectation, identity, insecurity, memory, hope, or private associations unique to the character.

Authors engage with their own minds, experience, knowledge — subjective and objective, to use language effectively. The writing can be strongly autobiographical.

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Yes, he writes “all writing is itself this special voice” followed by “Probably this has always been the case”

I agree that his meaning is unclear. It seems like saying “all swans are black but it is probable some aren’t”

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It was an analogy and it didn’t work.

Yes. So which part(s) of the text did you read and analyse to infer that:

Perhaps so. However, my question was directed so that I could find and discuss the point you were making.

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It was a side-issue in my exchange with @Dawnstorm, because that was about the false dichotomy between the system of language and the speakers and writers. I was able to agree with Dawnstorm’s point even if we disagreed about the nature of language.

It’s also a side-issue because internalism vs externalism of language is not really what the essay is concerned with. It’s about whether the author’s interiority has any authority with respect to their work’s meaning. So it’s a question about interpretive authority, not about the metaphysics of language. Barthes could argue along the same lines as he does in the essay while also believing that language is at least partly in the head.

That said, you’re probably right that he is more or less externalist, and you’re right that we could make a useful connection.

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First, if something is a part of a whole, then by definition and by logical necessity, that part must be accepted in every sense as being a part of the whole.

Second, is the reader a part of a community?

From section 6, the reader is the one place that collects and unites the multiplicity of meanings within a text. The reader is that part which gathers into a single field all the multiple paths of the whole.

From this I understand that the reader is an inseparable part of the whole in collecting and uniting the multiplicity of the whole. Without the reader, the multiplicity of the whole could neither be collected nor united, and in this sense, the reader must be an accepted part of the whole in every sense.

It follows that for Barthes the reader is an inseparable part of the whole. They are not “just being there” but also “accepted in every sense”.

As you said: