Text/Textuality

As Tel Quel's "spiritual advisor," Roland Barthes (1915–1980) had enormous influence on the fate of the text. Although he often deferred to the theoretical rigor of others, he was unquestionably the text's most articulate and tenacious cultural ambassador. Like Kristeva he was keen to extrapolate the literary implications of the semiological text, and for this reason—not to mention the largely literary cast of the American reception of textuality—his studies S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text still define for many in the Anglophone world what the second text is. This reputation is by no means undeserved. It does, however, tend to obscure the permutations undergone by Barthes's text. In S/Z (a textual analysis of Balzac's Sarrazine [1830]), for example, Barthes deploys a straightforwardly etymological notion of the text by identifying five codes that, in his account of the story, are "woven together" in its narration. Although the strong suggestion made by the study is that this approach is warranted by its pedagogical value (and Barthes's skills here are legendary), it is clear that Barthes is reading the narrative in a deliberately textual manner. That is, he is constructing the means by which the story produces the possibility of its meanings, including, it should be added, the intensely queer motif of the sexual undecidability around which the narration winds and unwinds. This approach, also exemplified in numerous essays of the period, does at a certain point succumb to the affective charge it channels, resulting in the publication of The Pleasure of the Text (1973), where the figure of weaving, while not giving way entirely, recedes in importance. In its place appears a theme first programmatically identified in his groundbreaking essay from 1971, "From Work to Text": the theme of pleasure, later set off against its more strictly Lacanian double, jouissance.

As part of Barthes's professional trajectory from semiotics to semioclasm ("sign breaking" or the defiling of the sacred status of signs), this shift clearly registers the impact of Kristeva (and to a lesser extent, Derrida) on his writing. Indeed, in engaging the theme of pleasure Barthes openly weaves into his text the problem of the body and its drives. Although struck by Kristeva's semiotics, Barthes rechannels pleasure toward the practice of the reader, that is, the highly mediated encounter between the absent body of the writer and the present, indeed attentive, body of the critic/theorist. Drawing on Blanchot's neutered account of literary space, Barthes reframes this encounter in the distinctly queer mood of promiscuous anonymity, making the textual paradigm accommodate a distinctly sexual, indeed homo-textual, relationality.

This attention to the reader's body and its practices (what the body does when it reads) finds perhaps its highest expression in Barthes's critique of the literary object, the work. Not content to stress the existential aspect of one's practice, Barthes links such practice to the social reproduction of the literary institution, arguing that its organizing conceit, the concept of a commodity laden with values deposited there by a genius, in short the literary work, is not only an ideological confection of that institution, but one being deployed in a rear-guard action against challenges being mounted against it from within a heterogeneous field of writings. Here, the methodological field of the text serves both to frame the literary institution, to account for its reproductivity, while also establishing how one might read from the inside out, that is, with an eye toward grasping how reading is also always an engagement with its social and psychic conditions. In thus calling for a paradigm shift from the work to the text, Barthes is not only echoing Derrida's call for the end of the book in historical terms, but is situating the text itself as the context for a transformation of intellectual power in the West, one that in demythologizing some of its most cherished ideas, challenges the West's ability to define and thereby legitimate its cultural values. In this sense the text is not itself an idea.