The Rustle of Language

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OTHER BOOKS BY ROLAND BARTHES A Barthes Reader

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Camera Lucida Critical Essays

TheEiffel Towerand OtherMythologues of Semiology Elements TheEmpireof Signs The Fashion System

TheGrain of theVoice Image-Music-Text A Lover’s Discourse'

Mpythologes NewCriticalEssays. On Racine ThePleasureof theText ofForms TheResponsibility RolandBarthes Sade| Fourier| Loyola

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ROLAND BARTHE

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LIBJ HILLL. AND WANG

¢ NEW YORK

. Translation Lopyrlght

1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

dela langue . Originallypublishedin FrenchasLe bruissement

Copyright © 1984by Editions du Seuil All rights reserved Published simultaneously inCanada by Collins Publishers, Toronto Printed in the United Statesof America Designedby Jack Harrison

printing,1986 Second

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“To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” first published [in English] in The Lan-

edited by Controversy, ofMan: The Structuralist guagesof Criticismand theSciences Rustle Press.“The University Hopkins Johns the by 1970 Richard Macksey,© by 1975 © sansentraves, Versunepsthettque in of Language” first published U.G.E.“Rhetorical Analysis”first published in LittératureetSociété,© 1967 by L'Institut de sociologiede I'Université libre de Bruxelles. “The Division of Languages”first published in Une civilisationnouvelle?Hommagea Georges Friedmann,© 1973 by Gallimard. “Cayroland Erasure” first published in Les by Jean Cayrol, © 1964 by U.G.E.“Bloy” first published in Corpsétrangers frangaise,© 1974 by Gallimard. “What Becomesof the Tableaudela littérature in Eden,Eden, Eden by Pierre Guyotat, © 1970 by published first Signifier” Gallimard. “Outcomesof the Text” first published in Bataillein the 10/18 collection,© 1973 by U.G.E. “Reading Brillat-Savarin”first published in du goditby Brillat-Savarin,© 1975 by C. Hermann. “Prefaceto Physiologie Renaud Camus’sTricks,”© 1979 by Persona. “The Image” first published in Prétexte:Roland Barthes in the 10/18 collection, © 1978 by U.G.E.

Library of CongressCataloging-in-PublicationData ' ‘ Barthes, Roland. The rustle of language. Translation of: Le bruissementde la langue. 1. Philology—Addresses,essays,lectures. essays,lectures. 2. Discourse analysis—Addresses, essays,lectures.1. Title. 3. Seml()tlcs—Addreeses

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The number of texts(thenotionof countingwouldhaveamused him) writtenby Roland Barthessince1964(whenCriticalEssays appeared in France) is remarkable: 152 articles,55 prefacesand

contributionsto miscellanies,11 books. Throughout, as in the textsalreadypublishedin NewCriticalEssays andTheResponsibility of Forms(those in the latterdevotedto photography,cinema, painting, and music), R.B.’s work wasarticulatedaround writing

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and the sign. It can be specifiedon threelevels.The semiologist’s research, which hasorientedseveralgenerations:textsstillto be collected under the titleTheSemiological Adventure.At theother extreme, a number of writings which no longer interrogatetextsbut of everyday (accordingtothetitleR.B. gaveoneof them)incidents life; thesepageswill constituteanother—brief—book. Betweenthesetwotypesof textuality,TheRustleofLanguage: almostall the essaysin this collectiondeal with languageand with literary writing, or, better still, with the pleasure owed to

the text. It is easyenough to recognize,in the courseof these pages,the shiftsin conceptand procedure which over fifteen years lead to this term textand perhaps transcend it, with R.B.’s

~accessionto the method of the fragmentand to a project of joining writing ever more emphaticallyto thebody. Frangois Wahl

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~ Contents

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1 / FROM J

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SCIENCE

TO LITERATURE

From Scienceto Literature

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To Write: An Intransitive Verb? fi] Reflectionson a Manual

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Writing Reading 29 On Reading

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2 / FROM WORK TO TEXT The Death of the Author From Work to Text

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B - MythologyToday 65 [

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Research:The Young 69 The Rustleof Language 76.

AND STYLE g3/ LANGUAGES RhetoricalAnalysis 83 Styleand Its Image go Pax Culturalis 100 The War of Languages 106 T'heDivision of Languages 111

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4 / FROM HISTORY TO REALITY The Discourse of History 127 The RealityEffect 141 149

Writing the Event

THE LOVER OF SIGNS Revelation

157

pe———.

A MagnificentGift 159 162

Why I Love Benveniste Kristeva's Semeiotike 168

T'he Return of the Poetician

172

176

To Learn and to Teach

-' READINGSs

Cayrol and Erasure 131 Bloy 191

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Michelet,Today

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Michelet’'sModernity 208 Brecht

and Discourse:

A Contribution

to the

Studyof Discursivity 212 F.B.

223

I'he Baroque Side

233

What Becomesof the Signifier 236 Outcomesof the Text 238 ReadingBrillat-Savarin 250 An Idea of Research 271

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Longtemps, je mesuiscouché debonne heure. ..

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Preface to Renaud Camus’s Tricks

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One AlwaysFailsin Speakingof What One Loves

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ENVIRONS

1 OF THE

IMAGE

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers

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, M,,z‘éu)\

To the Seminar gg2 The Indictment Periodically Lodged ... Leaving the Movie Theater The Image Deliberation

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FROM SCIENCETO LITERATURE

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F “Man cannotspeakhis thoughtwithoutthinkinghis speech.”

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French university facultiespossessan officiallist of the social

and human scienceswhich constitute the object of a recognized

instruction, thereby necessarilylimiting the specialtyof the diplomas they confer: you can be a doctor of aesthetics,of psychology, of sociology—notof heraldry, of semantics,of victimology. Thereby the institution directly determinesthe nature of human knowledge,imposing its modes of division and of classification, just asa language,by its“obligatoryrubrics” (and not only by itsexclusions),compelsus to think in a certain way. In other words, what definesscience (the word will henceforth be used, in this text, to refer to all the social and human

sciences) 1s neither its content (which is often ill defined and labile) nor its method (which varies from one science to the

next: what do the scienceof historyand thatof experimental psychology have in common?), nor its morality (neither serious-

ness nor rigor 1s the property of science),nor its mode of communication

(science is printed in books, like everything else),

but only its status,1.e., its socialdetermination: the object of science 1s any material societydeems worthy of being transmitted. In a word, science 1s what is taught. Literature has all the secondary characteristics of science, i.e.,

allthe attributeswhichdo not defineit. Itscontentsareprecisely thoseof science:there is certainlynot a singlescientificmatter which has not at some moment been treated by universal literature:

the world of the work is a total world, in which all

(social,psychological,historical)knowledgetakesplace,so that for us literature has that grand cosmogonicunity which so

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From Science to Literature

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delightedthe ancientGreeks but which the compartmentalized state of our sciences denies us today. Further, like science,

literatureis methodical:it has its programs of research,which vary according to schoolsand periods (like those of science, moreover), its rulesof investigation,sometimeseven its experimental pretensions.Like science,literaturehas its morality, a certainway of extractingitsrules of procedure from the 1mage it assumesof its being, and consequentlyof submitting its enterprisesto a certainabsolutespirit. One last feature unites science and literature, but this feature

isalsothe one whichdividesthemmore certainlythan anyother

difference: both are discourses (which waswell expressedby the

idea of the ancient logos),but scienceand literature do not assume—donot profess—thelanguagewhich consttutesthem in the sameway. For science,languageis merelyan instrument, which it choosesto make astransparent,asneutral as possible, subjugatedto scientificmatters(operations,hypotheses,results), whichare saidto existoutsideit and to precedeit: on one side andfirstof all, the contentsof the scientificmessage,which are the verbal form everything; and on the other and afterwards, entrustedwith expressingthesecontents,which is nothing. It is no coincidence if, since the sixteenth century, the combined rise of empiricism, of rationalism, and of religious evidence (with

the Reformation),i.e., of the scientificspirit (in the very broad senseof the term), has been accompaniedby a regressionof the automy of language, henceforth relegated to the status of

“instrument” or of “fine style,”whereasin the Middle Ages shared almost human culture, as interpretedby the Septenium, equallythe secretsof languageand thoseof nature. at leastfor that literature For literature, on the contrary and from humanism—language whichhasissuedfrom classicism can no longer be the convenientinstrumentor the sumptuous decor of a social,emotional,or poetic“reality”which preexists it and whichit isresponsible,in a subsidiaryway,for expressing, provided it abidesby a few rules of style:no, languageis the beingof literature,its very world: all literatureis containedin

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From Scienceto Luterature "(r

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the act of writing, and no longer in that of “thinking,” of “painting,” of “recounting,”of “feeling.”Technically,according to Roman Jakobson’sdefinition, the “poetic”(i.e., the literary) designatesthat type of messagewhich takesfor objectits own form, and not its contents.Ethically,it is solelyby its passage through languagethatliteraturepursuesthe disturbanceof the essentialconceptsof our culture, “reality”chief among them. Politically,it is by professing(and illustrating)thatno language Is innocent, it is by employingwhatmightbe calledan “integral language” that literature is revolutionary. Literature thus is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility for language;

for though scienceneeds language,it is not, like literature, withinlanguage; scienceis taught, i.e., it makesitselfknown; literaturefulfillsmore than it transmitsitself(only itshistoryis taught). Sciencespeaksitself;literaturewritesitself; scienceis led by the voice, literature follows the hand; it is not the same

body, and hence the samedesire,which is behind the one and the other. Bearing essentiallyon a certainway of takinglanguage—in the former casedodged and in the latterassumed—theoppositionbetweenscienceand literatureis of particularimportance to structuralism.Of coursethis word, generallyimposedfrom outside, actually overlaps very diverse, sometimesdivergent, sometimeseven hostileenterprises,and no one can claim the privilege of speaking in its name; the author of theselines makes no such claim; he merely retains the most particular and

consequentlythe mostpertinentversionof contemporarystructuralism, meaning by that name a certainmode of analysisof culturalworks, insofar as thismode is inspiredby the methods of contemporary linguistics.Thus, itselfresultingfrom a linguistic model, structuralismfinds in literature, the work of language,an objectmuch more than affinitary:homogeneous to itself. This coincidencedoes not excludea certain embarrassment,

even a certain laceration,

depending

on whether

structuralismmeansto keepthe distanceof a sciencein relation to its object, or whether, on the contrary, it is willing to

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From Scienceto Literature

compromiseand to spoilthe analysisit wieldsin that infinitude of languageof which literatureis todaythe conduit—ina word, depending on whetherit seeksto be scienceor writing. As science,structuralism“findsitself,”one mightsay,on every levelof the literary work. First of all, on the level of contents, or more exactly,on the level of the form of contents, since structuralismseeksto establishthe “language”of the stories told, their articulations, their units, the logic which links some

toothers—inshort,the generalmythologyin whicheachliterary work participates.Next, on the levelof the forms of discourse: structuralism, by virtue of its method, pays special attention to

orders, arrangements;its essentialobjectis taxclassifications, onomy, or the distributivemodel inevitablyestablishedby any human work, institution, or book, for there is no culture without

classification;now discourse,or ensembleof words superior to the sentence, has its forms of organization;

it too is a classifica-

tion, and a signifyingone; on this point, literary structuralism hasa glamorousancestor,one whosehistoricalrole is in general underestimatedor discreditedfor ideologicalreasons:Rhetoric, grandioseeffortof an entirecultureto analyzeand classifythe forms of speech,to render the world of languageintelligible. Finally,on the levelof words: the sentencehasnot onlya literal or denotedmeaning; it is crammedwith supplementarysignifications: since it is at once a cultural reference, a rhetorical

model, a deliberateambiguityof the speech-act,and a simple unit of denotation, the “literary” word has the depth of a space,

and this spaceis the field of structuralanalysisitself, whose projectis much greaterthan that of the old stylistics,entirely basedas it wason an erroneous idea of “expressivity.”On all its levels—thatof the argument, that of discourse,that of the words—theliterarywork therebyoffersstructuralismthe image of a structureperfectlyhomological(present-dayinvestigations tend to prove this) to the structureof languageitself;derived from linguistics,structuralismencountersin literaturean object which is itself derived from language. Henceforth,

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it will be

understoodthat structuralismmay attemptto found a science

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IR From SciencetoLiterature

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of literature, or more exactlya linguisticsof discourse,whose objectis the“language”of literaryforms,apprehendedon many levels:a newproject,for hithertoliteraturehasbeenapproached “scientifically”only in a very marginal fashion—bythe history of works, or of authors,or of schools,or of texts(philology). New asit may be, thisprojectis nonethelessnot satisfactory— or at leastnot sufficient.It leavesuntouched the dilemma I mentioned at the beginning,one thatis allegoricallysuggested y the opposition between science and literature, insofar as

literatureassumesits own language—underthe name of writing and science avoids it, feigning to regard it as purely instrumental. In a word, structuralismwill never be anything but one more “science”(severalof theseareborn everycentury, some quite ephemeral),if it cannotmakeits centralenterprise the very subversionof scientificlanguage,i.e., cannot “write itself”: how can it fail to callinto questionthevery languageby which it knows language?Structuralism’slogicalextensioncan only be tojoin literatureno longer as“object”of analysisbut as activity of writing, to abolish the distinction, born of logic, which

and scienceinto a metamakesthe work into a language-object language,and therebyto risk the illusoryprivilegeattachedby scienceto the ownershipof a slavelanguage. It remainsthereforefor thestructuralistto transformhimself into a “writer,” not in order to professor to practice“style,”but in order to recognizethe crucial problemsof any speech-act, once it is no longer swathedin the kindly cloudof strictlyrealist illusionswhich make languagethe simplemedium of thought. This transformation—still

rather theoretical, it must be admit-

ted—requiresa certain number of clarifications—oracknowledgments.First of all, the relationsof subjectivityand objectivity—or, to put it another way, the subject’splacein his work— can no longer be conceivedas in the palmy days of positivist science.Objectivityand rigor, attributesof thescholarwhichwe still hear so much about, are essentiallypreparatory virtues, necessaryto the work’s moment,and assuch thereis no reason to mistrust them or to abandon them; but these virtues cannot

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B From Scienceto Literature

be transferredto discourse,exceptby a kind of hocus-pocus,a with its purely metonymicprocedurewhich identifiesprecaution discursive effect.Every speech-actsupposesits own subject, whetherthis subjectexpresseshimselfin an apparentlydirect fashion, by saying/, or indirect, by designatinghimself as he, or in no fashion at all, by resorting to impersonal turns of speech;what is in questionhere are purely grammaticalstratagems,simply varying how the subjectconstituteshimself in discourse,i.e., giveshimself, theatricallyor fantasmatically,to others; hencetheyall designateforms of the image-repertoire. Of theseforms, the most speciousis the privative form, precisely

theone usuallyemployedin scientificdiscourse,from which the scholarexcludeshimselfin a concern for objectivity;yet what is excludedis never anythingbut the “person” (psychological, emotional,biographical),not the subject;moreover, thissubject is filled, so to speak,with the very exclusionit so spectacularly imposesupon its person, so that objectivity,on the level of discourse—aninevitablelevel,we mustnot forget—isan imagerepertoirelikeanyother. In truth,onlyan integralformalization of scientific discourse (that of the human sciences, of course,

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for in thecaseof the other sciencesthishasalreadybeenlargely achieved)couldsparesciencetherisksof theimage-repertoire— unless,of course, it consentsto employ this image-repertoire withfull knowledge, a knowledgewhich can be achievedonly in writing:onlywritinghasoccasiontodispelthebadfaithattached to every language unaware of its own existence.

Again, only writing—andthis is a first approach to its definition—effectuates languagein itstotality.To resortto scientific discourseas to an instrumentof thoughtis to postulatethat a neutral stateof languageexists,from which would branch off, like so many gapsand ornaments,a certainnumber of special languages,suchasthe literarylanguageor the poeticlanguage; this neutral statewould be, it is assumed, the code of reference

for all the “eccentric”languageswhich would be only so many sub-codes; by identifying itself with this referential code, basis

of all normality, scientificdiscoursearrogatesto itselfthe very authority which writing must contest;the notion of “writing”

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From SciencetoLuterature

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impliesin effectthe idea thatlanguageis a vastsystemof which no singlecode is privileged—or,one may say,central—andof which the departmentsare in a relation of “fluctuatinghierarchy.” Scientificdiscoursebelievesit is a superiorcode; writing seeksto be a totalcode,includingitsown forcesof destruction. It follows that only writing can break the theologicalimage imposedby science,can rejectthe paternalterror spreadby the abusive“truth” of contentsand reasonings,canopen toresearch the completespaceof language,with itslogicalsubversions,the mixing of itscodes,with itsslippages,itsdialogues,itsparodies; only writing can set in opposition to the savant’s assurance—

insofar as he “expresses”his science—what Lautréamontcalled the writer’s“modesty.” Last, between science and writing, there is a third margin,

which sciencemust reconquer: thatof pleasure.In a civilization inured by monotheism to the idea of Transgression,where every value is the product of a punishment,this word has an unfortunateresonance:there is somethinglight, trivial, partial about it. Coleridgesaid: “A poem is thatspeciesof composition which is opposed to works by science,by purposing, for its immediateobject,pleasure,not truth”—anambiguousdeclaration, for if it assumesthe “erotic” nature of the poem (of literature),it continuesto assignit a specialandguardedcanton, distinctfrom themajor territoryof truth. “Pleasure,”however— an experience we admit this more readily nowadays—implies much wider,

more significant than the simple satisfaction of

“taste.”Now, the pleasureof languagehasnever beenseriously considered;

the old Rhetoric had, in its fashion, some idea of it

when it setup a specialgenreof discoursededicatedto spectacle and to admiration, the epidictic;but classicalart wrapped the pleasingwhich it claimedas itslaw (Racine: “The firstrule is to please . . .”) in all the constraintsof the “natural”; only the baroque,a literaryexperimentwhich hasnever beenmore than toleratedby our societies,atleastby Frenchsociety,dared some exploration of what might be called the Eros of language. Scientificdiscourseis remote from this; for if it acceptedthe notion, it would have to renounceall the privilegeswith which

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From Science to Literature

the socialinstitutionsurrounds it and agree to return to that “literarylife” Baudelairecalls,aproposof Poe,“thesoleelement can breathe.” in which certaindéclassés of structure,and of the purposes Mutationof consciousness, of scientificdiscourse—thatis what must be demanded today, preciselywheretheflourishing,constitutedhuman sciencesseem to leavelessand lessroom for a literaturecommonly accused of unrealityand inhumanity.But precisely:therole of literature activelyto the scientificinstitutionjust what it is to represent rejects,i.e., the sovereigntyof language. And structuralism should be in a good position to provoke

this scandal; for,

intenselyconsciousof the linguisticnature of human works, only structuralismtodaycanreopenthe problemof thelinguistic statusof science;havinglanguage—alllanguages—forobject,it has very quickly come to define itself as our culture’s metalanguage. This stage, however,

must be transcended,

for the

remains and their meta-language oppositionof language-objects ultimatelysubjectto the paternalmodel of a sciencewithout language.The taskfacingstructuraldiscourseis to make itself entirelyhomogeneoustoitsobject;thistaskcanbeaccomplished by only two methods,eachasradicalasthe other: either by an exhaustiveformalization,or elseby an integralwriting. In this secondhypothesis(which we are defendinghere), sciencewill become literature, insofar as literature subject,moreover, to a growing collapseof traditionalgenres(poem, narrative, criticism, essay)—isalready, has alwaysbeen, science; for what the

human sciencesare discoveringtoday,in whateverrealm: sociological,psychological,psychiatric,linguistic,etc.,literaturehas alwaysknown; the only differenceis thatliteraturehas not said what it knows,it has writtenit. Confronting this integraltruth of writing, the “human sciences,”belatedlyconstitutedin the wakeof bourgeoispositivism,appearasthe technicalalibisour society uses to maintain the fiction of a theologicaltruth, superbly—abusively—disengaged from language. -d

The TimesLiterarySupplement,1967

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1. Literatureand linguisticst'

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For centuries,Westernculture conceivedof literaturenot aswe do today, through a study of works, authors, and schools, but

through a veritabletheoryof language.This theoryhad a name, Rhetoric,and it triumphed in the West from Gorgias to the Renaissance,i.e., for over twothousandyears.Threatenedsince the sixteenthcentury by the advent of modern rationalism, rhetoric was altogetherruined when rationalism was trans-

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formed into positivism, at the end of the nineteenth. By then,

there was no longer any common zone of reflectionbetween literatureand language:literatureno longer regardeditselfas language,exceptin the work of a few precursorwriters,such as Mallarmé, and linguisticsclaimed only very limited rights over literature,thesebeing enclosedwithin a secondaryphilologicaldisciplineof uncertainstatus:stylistics. As we know, this situationis changing,and it seemsto me that it is in part to take cognizanceof this change that our colloquium has been assembled:literatureand languageare in the process of recognizing each other. The factors of this rapprochementare various and complex; I shallcite the most obvious:

on the one hand, the action of certain writers who

sinceMallarméhave undertakena radicalexplorationof writing and who have made their work a search for the total Book,

such as Proust and Joyce; on the other, the developmentof linguisticsitself, which henceforth includes within its scope or the order of effectslinked to the messageand not to poetics, its referent. Hence, there existstoday a new perspectiveof reflection—common,

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I insist, to literature and to linguistics, to

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From Science to Literature

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the creatorand the critic, whosetasks,hitherto absolutelyselfcontained, are beginning to communicate, perhaps even to converge, at least on the level of the writer, whose action can

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increasinglybe defined as a critique of language.It is in this perspectivethat I wantto indicateby a fewbrief observations, of a prospective and not conclusive nature, how the activity of

with thehelp of certain writingcan todaybe expressed[¢énoncée] “ I linguisticcategories.

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2 La:guage

This new conjunctionof literatureand linguistics,which I have just mentioned,might provisionallybe called,for lackof a better sinceit impliesthat writing is a systemof name, semio-criticism, signs. Now, semio-criticismcannotbe identifiedwith stylistics, isfarfrom exhausting evenin anewform, or in anycase,stylistics it. It involves a perspectiveof an altogetherdifferent scope, whoseobjectcannotbe constitutedby simpleaccidentsof form, and language.This butby thevery relationsbetweenthescriptor perspectivedoes not imply a lack of interestin language,but, on the contrary, a continual return to the “truths,” however

provisional,of linguisticanthropology.Certain of thesetruths stillhave a powerof provocation,in respectto a certaincurrent ideaof literatureand of language,and for thisreason,we must not fail to considerthem. 1. One of the teachings of contemporary linguistics is that

there1sno archaiclanguage,or that,atleast,thereis no relation betweena language’ssimplicityand its age: ancientlanguages can be as completeand ascomplexasthe recentones; there is no “progressive” history of languages. Hence, when we try to

recognizein modern writing certainfundamentalcategoriesof language,we makeno claimto reveala certainarchaismof the “psyche”;we are not sayingthat the writer harks back to the origin of language,but thatlanguageis for him the origin. 2. A second principle, especiallyimportant with regard to literature, is that languagecannot be consideredas a simple

To Write: An Intransitive Verb?

instrument—utilitarianor decorative—ofthought. Man does notexistprior tolanguage,eitherasa speciesor asan individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from

language,which he then elaboratesin order to “express”what is happening within him: it is language which teachesthe definition of man, not the contrary. 3. Moreover, from a methodologicalview, linguisticsaccustoms us to a new type of objectivity.The objectivityhitherto required in the human sciencesis an objectivityof the given, which must be acceptedtotally.Linguisticssuggests,on the one hand, that we distinguish levels of analysis and describe the distinctive elements of each of these levels, in short, that we establish the distinctness of the fact and not the fact itself; and

on the other, it asksus to recognizethat, unlike physicaland biological facts, cultural facts are twofold, that they refer to

somethingelse: as Benvenistehas observed,it is the discovery of language’s“duplicity”which givesSaussure’sreflectionall its value. 4. These fewpreliminariesarecontainedin afinalproposition which justifies all semio-criticalresearch.Culture increasingly appearsto us as a generalsystemof symbols,governedby the same operations: there is a unity of the symbolicfield, and culture, in all its aspects,is a language.Hence, it is possible todayto foreseethe constitutionof a unique scienceof culture, which will certainly be based on various disciplines,but all devoted to analyzing, at different levels of description, culture

aslanguage.Semio-criticismwill obviouslybe only a partof this science,which will alwaysremain a discourseon culture. This unity of the human symbolicfield authorizesus to elaboratea postulatewhich I shallcalla postulateof homology:thestructure of the sentence,objectof linguistics,can be recognizedhomologicallyin the structureof works: discourseis not only a sum of sentences, it is, itself, one great sentence. It is in terms of

this working hypothesisthat I would like to confront certain categoriesof languagewith the writer’ssituationin relationto his writing. I am not concealingthe factthatthis confrontation

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does not have a demonstrativeforce and that for the moment its value remains essentiallymetaphorical:but perhaps, too, in the order of objectswhich concernsus, metaphor has—more than we suppose—amethodologicalcx1stence and a heuristic

forcel

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Temporality As we know, there is a linguistictemporallty,equallydifferent from physicaltime and from what Benvenistecalls“chronicle” time,or the timeof calendarsand computations.This linguistic time receivesextremely various contours and expressionsin example,certainlanguageslike Chinook variouslanguages—for employ severalpasts,including a mythic one—butone thing seemscertain: the generatingcenterof linguistictime is always This leadsus to ask the presentof the speech-act[énonciation]. whetherthere is, homologousto linguistictime, a time specific to discourse.On this point, Benvenisteoffers an initial clarification:in manylanguages,specificallyIndo-European ones,the systemis twofold: (1) a first system,or systemof discourse proper, adaptedtothetemporalityof thespeaker,whosespeechactis alwaysthe point of origin; (2) a secondsystem,or system of history, of narrative, appropriateto the recountingof past events, without the speaker’sintervention and consequently deprived of present and future (except periphrastically),its

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specifictense the aorist (or its equivalents, like the French passé

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simple),preciselythe one tense missing from the systemof discourse. The existenceof this a-personalsystemdoes not contradictthe essentiallylogocentricnature of linguistictime we have just asserted:the second systemmerely lacks the characteristicsof the first: one is linked to the other by the oppositionmarked/ unmarked:consequently,they participatein the samefield of pertinence. The distinctionbetweenthe twosystemsis not at all the same as the one traditionallymade betweenobjectivediscourseand subjectivediscourse,for we cannot identifythe relation of the

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. To Write: An Intransitive Verb?

speakerand the referenton one hand with the relationof this same speaker and the speech-acton the other, and it is only this second relation which determinesthe temporalsystemof the discourse. These linguistic phenomena were difficult to perceive so long as literaturewas regarded as the docile and “transparent”expressionof eitherso-calledobjective(or chronicle) time, or of psychologicalsubjectivity,i.e., so long aslitera-

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ture was placed within a totalitarian ideology of the referent. Today,

however,

literature discovers in the unfolding

of dis-

coursewhat I callcertainfundamentalsubtleties:for example, what is told in the aorist does not appear immersed in the past,

in “what has takenplace,”but only in the non-personal,which 1s neither history nor sciencenor even the one of so-called anonymouswriting,for whatprevailsin thisoneistheindefinite, not the absenceof person: oneis marked; he, paradoxically,is not. At the other extremeof the experienceof discourse,the writer today, it seems to me, can no longer be content to express

his own presentaccordingto a lyricalproject:he mustlearn to distinguishthe speaker’spresent,which remainsgrounded in psychologicalplenitude,from the presentof thelocution,which I is asflexibleasthatlocutionand in whicheventand writingare absolutelycoincidental.Thus literature,at leastin its explora| ]ions. is taking the samepath aslinguisticswhen, with Gustave ( suillaume, it concerns itself with operative time, or the time of he speech-actitself. 4. Person

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This leadsto a secondgrammaticalcategory,quiteasimportant

I lirn linguisticsasin literature:thatof person.Firstof all,weare

eminded by the linguiststhat person(in the grammaticalsense of the term) seemsto be universal, linked to the very anthropology of language.Every language,as Benvenistehas shown, rganizesperson into two oppositions:a correlationof personlity, which sets person (I or you) in opposition to the nonperson (heor it), sign of whatis absent,of absenceitself;and,

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within this first great opposition, a correlation of subjectivity

setstwo personsin opposition, the I and the non-I (i.e., you). For our purposes,we must make three oppositions,following Benveniste’slead. First of all, the polarity of persons,a basic condition of language, is nonethelessvery special, for this polarityinvolvesneither equalitynor symmetry:egoalwayshas a positionof transcendencewith regard to you,I being interior to whatis statedand youremainingexteriorto it; and yet/ and you are reversible, / can always become you, and vice versa; this

is not the casefor the non-person (ke or i), which can never reverse itself into person or vice versa. Second, the linguistic /

can and mustbe definedin an entirelya-psychological fashion: I is nothing but “the personwho uttersthe presentinstanceof discoursecontainingthelinguisticinstanceI” (Benveniste).Last, the non-person never reflectsthe instanceof discourse,being situatedoutsideof it; we mustgiveitsfull weightto Benveniste’s recommendation that e or it is not to be represented as a more

or lessdiminished or distancedperson: ke or it is absolutely non-person, marked by the absenceof what specifically(i.e., linguistically)constitutesI and you. From thislinguisticexplanationwe shalldraw severalsuggestions for an analysisof literary discourse.First of all, we note that whatever the varied and often cunning forms (marks) person may takewhen we proceedfrom sentenceto discourse, justasin the caseof temporality,the work’sdiscourseis subject to a double system,that of person and that of non-person. What produces an illusion, here, is that our classical discourse (in the

broad sense)is a mixed one, which frequentlyalternates—at a rapid rate (for example, within the samesentence)—thepersonal

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speech-actand the a-personalone, by a complex interplay of pronouns and descriptiveverbs. This mixed systemof person and non-person produces an ambiguous consciousnesswhich managesto keep the personal quality of what is stated,yet periodicallybreakingoff the speaker’sparticipationin the statement. Second, if we return to the linguistic definition of the first

person (I is the one who saysI in the present instance of

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discourse),wemaybetterunderstandtheeffortof certainwriters today (I am thinking of Sollers’sDrame) when they try to distinguish, on the level of the narrative itself, psychological person from the author of the writing: contraryto the current illusion of autobiographiesand traditionalnovels,thesubjectof the speech-actcan never be the same as the one who acted yesterday:theI of thediscoursecanno longerbe thesitewhere a previously stored-upperson is innocentlyrestored.Absolute recourse to the instanceof discoursein order to determine person, which with Damourette and Pichon we might call nynegocentrism (consider the exemplary beginning of Robbe-Grillet’s

novel In theLabyrinth:“I am alone here now”)—thisrecourse, imperfectasitspracticemaystillbe,thusseemsaweaponagainst the generalbad faithof a discoursewhichmakesor wouldmake literaryform merelythe expressionof an interiorityconstituted previous to and outsideof language. Last,letus recallthisdetailof linguisticanalysis:in theprocess of communication,thecourseof theI is not homogenous:when I liberatethe signI, I refer to myselfinsofarasI am speaking, and here there is an actwhich is alwaysnew, even if repeated, an act whose “meaning” is alwaysunprecedented;but upon reachingits destination,this/ is receivedby my interlocutoras a stablesign, product of a completecode, whosecontentsare recurrent.

In other words, the I of the one who writes I is not

the same as the I which is read by you. This basic dissymmetry of language, explained by Jespersen and Jakobson by the notion

of shifteror an overlapping of code and message,is finally beginningto disturbliteratureby showingit thatintersubjectivity, or rather interlocution,cannotbe accomplishedsimplyby a pious wish about the meritsof “dialogue,”but only by a deep, patient and often circuitous descent into the labyrinth of meanm

There remains to be discussedone last grammaticalnotion which may illuminate the activityof writing at its very center,

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since it concerns the verb to writeitself. It would be interesting

toknowatwhatmomentthisverbbegantobeusedintransitively, the writer no longer being the one who writessomething,but thisshiftis certainlythe signof theone who writes—absolutely: an important change in mentality.But does it really involve intransivity?No writer,of whateverperiod, canbe unawarethat he always writes something; we might even say that it is paradoxicallyat the moment when to writeseemsto become intransitive that its object, under the name bookor text,assumes

a specialimportance.Hence, it is not, at leastprimarily, on the side of intransivity that we must look for the definition of the

modern verb towrite.Another linguisticnotion may give us the key: that of diathesisor, as the grammar booksput it, “voice” (active,passive,middle). Diathesisdesignatesthe way in which the subjectof the verb is affectedby the action; this is obvious for the passive;and yetlinguiststellus that,in Indo-European at least, the diatheticalopposition is not betweenactive and passivebut betweenactiveand middle. Accordingto the classic example given by Meillet and Benveniste,the verb to sacrifice (ritually) 1sactiveif the priestsacrificesthe victim in my place and for me, and it is middle voice if, taking the knife from the

priest’shands, I makethe sacrificefor my own sake;in the case of the active voice, the action is performed

outside the subject,

for althoughthe priestmakesthe sacrifice,he is not affectedby it; in the caseof the middle voice, on the contrary, by acting, the subject affectshimself, he alwaysremains inside the action,

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even if that actioninvolvesan object.Hence, the middle voice does not exclude transitivity.Thus defined, the middle voice correspondsexactlyto the modern stateof the verb towrite:to writeis todaytomakeoneselfthecenterof theactionof speech, it is to effectwriting by affectingoneself,to make action and affectioncoincide,to leavethescriptorinsidethewriting—notas a psychological subject(theIndo-European priestcould perfectly well be overflowingwith subjectivitywhile activelysacrificing for his client),but asagentof the action.We can even takethe diatheticanalysisof the verb towritea littlefurther. We know

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that in French certain verbs have an activemeaning in their simple form (aller—to go, arriver—to arrive, rentrer—to return,

sortir—to leave) but take the passive auxiliary (étre—tobe) in

forming the perfecttense(jesuisallé,je suisarrivé);in order to explain thisbifurcationpeculiarto the middle voice,Guillaume distinguishesbetweenwhat he callsa dirimentperfect(with the auxiliaryavoir—tohave), which supposesan interruptionof the action due to the speaker’sinitiative (je marche,je m’arrétede marcher, j'ai marché—I1 walk, I stopwalking,I havewalked),and an wntegrant perfect(with the auxiliaryétre—tobe), peculiarto the verbs which designate a semantic whole, which cannot be

deliveredby thesubject’ssimpleinitiative(jesuissorti,il estmort— I have left, he has died—donot refer to a dirimentinterruption of leaving or dying). To writeis traditionallyan activeverb, whosepastis diriment;but in our literaturethe verb is changing status (if not form): to writeis becoming a middle verb with an

integrantpast, preciselyinsofar as to writeis becomingan indivisiblesemanticwhole; so thatthe true past,the “right” pastof one saysje suis this new verb is notjai écritbutje suisécrit—as né, il est mort, etc., expressions in which, despite the verb étre,

there is no notion of the passive,sincewithoutforcingmatters we cannot transformje suis écrit—lam written—intoon m’a haswrittenme. écrit—someone Thus,

in the middle voice of to write, the distance between

We could even scriptorand languagediminishesasymptotically. saythatit is thewritingsof subjectivity,suchasromanticwriting, whichare active,for in themtheagentis not interiorbutanterior to the processof writing: here the one who writesdoes not write for himself, but as if by proxy, for an exterior and antecedentperson (evenif both bear the samename), while, in themodern verbof middlevoicefowrite,thesubjectisconstituted as immediatelycontemporarywith the writing, being effected and affectedby it: this is the exemplarycaseof the Proustian narrator, who existsonly by writing, despitethe referenceto a pseudo-memory.

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6. The instance of discourse

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These observationssuggestthatthe centralproblem of modern writing exactlycoincideswith what we might call the problematicsof the verb in linguistics:just astemporality,person,and diathesisdefine the positionalfield of the subject,so modern literatureis trying, by various experiments,to establisha new positionfor the agentof writing in writingitself.The meaning or the goalof thiseffortis to substitutetheinstanceof discourse for the instance of reality (or of the referent), that mythic alibi which has dominated—still dominates—the idea of literature. The field of the writer is only writing itself, not as pure “form,”

conceivedby an aestheticof art for art’ssake,but much more radicallyasthe only possiblespaceof theonewhowrites. It seemsto me necessaryto remind thosewho accusesuch investigationsof solipsism, formalism, or scientismthat by returning to the fundamentalcategoriesof language,such as person, tense,and voice, we placeourselvesat the heart of a problematicsof interlocution,for such categoriesare precisely the ones where we may examine the relations of I and of what is deprived of the mark of I. Inasmuch as person, tense, and

voice (so properly named) imply these remarkablelinguistic beingsknown asshifters,they compelus to conceivelanguage and discourse no longer in terms of an instrumental and consequentlyreified nomenclature,but as the very exerciseof discourse:

for example, the pronoun,

which is doubtless the

most dizzying of the shifters,belongsstructurally(I insist) to discourse; this is, one might say, its scandal, and it is on this scandal that we must work today, in linguistics and in literature;

weare tryingto sound the depthsof the “pactof speech”which unites the writer and the other, so that each moment of discourse

is both absolutelynew and absolutelyunderstood.We can even, witha certaintemerity,givethisresearcha historicaldimension. We know that the medievalSeptenium, in its grandioseclassificationof theuniverse,prescribedtwo greatsitesof exploration:

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on the one hand the secretsof nature (quadrivium),on the other

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2 / A To Write: An Intransitive Verb?

the secretsof discourse (trivium: grammatica,rhetorica,dialectica);

this opposition was lost betweenthe end of the Middle Ages and our own time, language being considered only as an instrumentin the serviceof either reasonor the heart. Today, however, somethingof that ancientoppositionis reviving: to the exploration of the cosmoscorresponds, once again, the exploration of language,conductedby linguistics,psychoanalysis,and literature.For literatureitselfis a science—nolonger of the “human heart,” but of human discourse; its investigation,

however, is no longer addressedto the secondaryforms and figures which constituted the object of rhetoric, but to the

fundamental categoriesof language:just as, in our Western culture, grammarwasborn only long afterrhetoric,so it is only after having made itswayfor centuriesthrough lebeaulittéraire thatliteraturecan raisethe fundamentalproblemsof language without which it would not exist. ColloquiumatJohns HopkinsUniversity,1966

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I should like to offer somesimple, even simplisticobservations suggestedby a recent reading or rereading of a manual of Frenchliteraryhistory.While rereadingor readingthismanual, which closelyresemblesthose I remember from the lycée,I asked

myselfthisquestion:Can literaturebe anythingelsefor us than a childhood memory?I mean, whatis it thatcontinues,what is it thatpersists,whatis it thatspeaksof literatureafterthe lycée? If we were to make an objectiveinventory, we would answer thatwhat abides (from literature) in adult, current life is: certain

crosswordpuzzles,sometelevisedquiz shows,the postersof the centenaries of some writer’s birth, some writer’s death, a few

paperbacktitles,somecriticalallusionsin the newspaperwe're for something readingfor altogetherdifferentreasons—looking altogetherdifferent from theseallusionsto literature. All of which has a lot to do, I believe, with the fact that we French

have alwaysbeen accustomedto identify literature with the history of literature.The history of literatureis an essentially academicobjectwhich in factexistsonly becauseit is taught;so that the titleof our conference,“The Teaching of Literature,” 1sfor me almosttautological.Literatureiswhatistaught,period. It is an objectof teaching.It is generallyagreedthatat leastin Franceno major synthesis—say of the Hegeliantype—hasbeen produced on the history of our literature. If this French literatureis a childhood memory—andthatis how I am taking it—I should like to see—thiswill be the objectof a very limited and quitebanalinventory—whatelementsthismemory consists of. First of all, this memory consistsof certain objectswhich recur, whichcontinuallyrepeatthemselves,and whichwe might

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Reflections on a Manual almost call monemes of the meta-literarylanguage or the language of literary history; these objectsare of course the authors, the schools, the movements, the genres, and the centuries. And then, around these objects, there is a certain—

actuallyvery limited—numberof featuresor predicateswhich find a placeand combinewith eachother. If we were to read the manualsof literaryhistory,we should have no difficultyin determining the paradigmatics,the elementarystructure of thesefeatures,whichappearstobe thatof couplesin opposition with an occasional mixed term; this is an extremely simple structure: for instance, there is the archetypal paradigm of our

whole literature, romanticism-classicism (though French romanticism, on the international

scale, seems a relatively poor thing),

occasionallyamplifiedinto romanticism-realism-symbolism (for the nineteenth century). As you know, the law of combinative operations permits, with very few elements,the immediate production of an apparentproliferation:by applyingcertainof thesefeaturesto certainof the objectsI have mentioned,we produce certain individualities,or certainliterary individuals. [his ishow themanualsalwayspresentthecenturiesthemselves: in a paradigmaticfashion.Actually,it'sodd howa centurycomes to have a kind of individual existence,but it is preciselyour childhood memorieswhich accustomus to make the centuries into individuals of a sort. The four great centuriesof our literatureare stronglyindividuated by our literaryhistory: the sixteenth is overflowing life; the seventeenthis unity; the eighteenthis movement;and the nineteenthis complexity. Other featuresare added which again can very nicelybe set in opposition, paradigmatized.Here is a random samplingof these oppositions, these predicateswhich are fastenedonto literary objects:there is “exuberant”opposed to “restrained™; there is “loftyart” or “deliberateobscurity”opposedto “expan- b overlaps siveness”;“rhetoricalcoldness”to “sensibility”—which the familiar romanticparadigm of coldand warm—oragainthe opposition between“sources”and “originality,”between“labor” and “inspiration.” What we have here are the rudimentsof a

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littlerosterof thismythologyof our literaryhistory, one which would begin by establishingthosemythic paradigmsof which

French textbooks have always been so fond, perhaps because

this was a good method of memorizationor perhaps, on the contrary, becausea mental structure that functions by contraries

hasa high ideologicalyield (we need an ideologicalanalysisto tellus). It is thissameoppositionthatweencounter,for instance, betweenCondéand Turenne,the greatarchetypesof two French temperaments:if you put them together in a single writer (Jakobsonhas taughtthat the poeticact consistsin extending

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a paradigm into a syntagm), you produce an author who reconciles, for example, “formal art and extreme sensibility” or

who manifests“a wittynature concealinga tragicsense”(such as Villon). What I am sayinghere is simplythe sketchof what we might imagineas a kind of littlegrammarof our literature, a grammar which would produce stereotypedindividuations: authors, movements, schools.

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Second element of this memory: French literary history consistsof dismissalswe need to explore. There 1s—aswe know,

ashas alreadybeen said—awholeotherhistorywhich would be preciselythe historyof suchdismissals.What are these“censorships”?First of all, the socialclasses;the socialstructurewhich underliesthis literatureis rarely found in manualsof literary history, we must turn to more emancipated,

more highly de-

velopedcriticalworks in order to find it; when we read these manuals, references to classstructure may sometimes exist, but

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only in passingand as aestheticoppositions.Actually,whatthe manual setsin opposition are classatmospheres, not realities; when the aristocratic“spirit” is opposed to the bourgeoisand folk spirit, at leastfor previouscenturies,it is the distinctionof a refined tastewhich is opposed to good humor and realism. We also find, even in recent textbooks, sentences of this sort:

“A plebeian,Diderot lackstactand delicacy;he commitsfaults of tastewhich affectthe sentimentsthemselveswith a certain vulgarity . . .” Thus, class exists, but as an aesthetic or ethical

atmosphere;on thelevelof theinstrumentsof knowledge,these

Reflections on a Manual manualsbetray the flagrantabsenceof any economicsor sociologyof our literature.The second“censorship”wouldobviously be that of sexuality, but I shall not discuss it here, because it

overlaps the much more generalcensorshipwhich our entire societybrings to bear upon sex. A third “censorship”—formy part, I regard it as a censorship—wouldbe that of the very concept of literature, which is never defined as a concept, literaturein thesemanualsbeing an objectwhich is self-understood and never interrogated in order to define, if not its being,

atleastitssocial,symbolic,or anthropologicalfunctions;whereas in fact we might reverse this omission and say—in any case, I

personallyshould be glad to say—thatthe historyof literature ought to be conceived as a history of the idea of literature, and that such a history does not seem to exist, for the moment.

Finally,a fourth “censorship,”and not theleastimportant,bears on “languages,” asalways.A language is a much more important

objectof censorship,perhaps,thanalltherest.By whichI mean a manifestcensorship,the kind thesemanualsbring to bear on statesof languageremote from the classicalnorm. This is a well-knownphenomenon:thereisavastcensorshipofpreciosity, which notablyin the seventeenthcenturyis describedasa sort of classicalinferno: every Frenchperson,through the teaching of our schoolsystem,hasthe samejudgmentand thesameview of preciosityas Boileau, Moliere, or La Bruyere. This one-way indictment is repeatedfor centuries—andthis despitewhat a real history of literature would readily make clear, i.e., the

enormous and persistentsuccessof preciositythroughout the seventeenthcentury,sinceeven in 1663a voluminouscollection of poésiesgalantesby the Comtessede Suze went into fifteen printings. Hence, there is a point to clarify here—apoint of French, censorship.There is alsothe caseof sixteenth-century what is called Middle French, which is rejected from our

language, on the pretext that it consists of ridiculous novelties,

[talianisms,jargon, baroqueaudacities,etc.,withouteverraising the question of what it is we have lost today in the great traumatismof classicalpurity. We have lostnot only meansof

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expression,as theyare called,but mentalstructuresaswell, for languageis a mentalstructure.Here again,thereis perhapsan indictmentto be brought, one which should obviously begin whichin my opinion witha condemnationof “classico-centrism,” still marks our whole literature, specificallyin regard to language.Once again,wemustincludetheseproblemsof language in the problemsof literature;we mustraisethe greatquestions: When does a languagebegin? What does to beginmean for a language?When doesa genrebegin?What doesit mean when we are told of the first French novel, for instance? It is evident

thatthereis always,behind the classicalidea of the language,a politicalidea: the language’svery being, i.e., its perfectionand even its name, is linked to a culminationof power: the Latin classicis Latin or Roman power; the Frenchclassicis monarchic power. This is why it must be said that, in our teaching, we

cultivate,or wepromote,whatI shouldcallthepaternallanguage and not the mother tongue—particularlysince, let me say in passing,we do not know whatspokenFrench is; we know what writtenFrench is becausethere are grammarsof good usage; but no one knowswhatspokenFrenchis; and in order to know, we should have to begin by escapingour classico-centrism. Third element of this childhood memory: this memory is centered,and itscenteris—asI havejust said—classicism. This classico-centrism seemsanachronisticto us; yetweare stillliving with it. Even now, we passdoctoralthesesin the SalleLouisLiard, at the Sorbonne, and we must inventory the portraits in

that hall; they are the divinities which preside over French knowledge in its entirety: Corneille,

Moliere,

Pascal, Bossuet,

Descartes,Racineunder the protection—thisis an admission— of Richelieu.This classico-centrism goesfar, then, sinceit always identifiesliterature—andthis even in the discussionsof the manuals—withthe king. Literatureis the monarchy,and invinciblythe academicimageof literatureis constructedaround the name of certainkings: Louis XIV, of course,but alsoFrangois [, St. Louis, so that, ultimately, we are presented with a kind of

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shiny image in which king and literature reflecteach other. There is also,in this centeredstructureof our literary history,

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a nationalidentification; thesemanualsof history perpetually advance what are called typicallyFrench values or typically French temperaments;we are told, for instance,thatJoinville is typically French; what is French—Generalde Gaulle has provided one definition—iswhat is “regular,normal,national.” This is obviouslytherangeof our literature’snormsand values. From the momentthatthishistoryof our literaturehasa center, it is obvious that it is constructed in relation to this center; what

comesafteror beforein the structureis presentedasharbinger or desertion. What is before classicismheralds classicism— Montaigne i1s a precursor of the classics; what comes after

classicismrevivesor betraysit. A lastremark: thechildhoodmemoryI invokeborrowsitspermanentstructuration,downthroughthesecenturies,from a grid which is no longer a rhetoricalgrid in our teaching,for thatwas abandonedaround themiddleof thenineteenthcentury(asGérard Genettehasshownin a splendidarticleon theproblem);itis now a psychologicalgrid. All academicjudgments reston the conceptionof form as the subject’s“expression.”Personalityis translatedinto style:this postulatenourishesalljudgmentsand all analysesconcerningauthors;whence,ultimately,thekeyvalue, the one most often invoked tojudge authors:sincerity.For instance,du Bellaywillbe praisedfor havingproducedcertainsincere and personalcries; Ronsard had a sincereand profound Catholic faith; Villon, a cry from the heart, etc. These remarks are simplistic, and I am uncertain as to their value in a discussion, but I should like to conclude them with a

lastobservation.To my sense,there is a profound and irreducible antinomy betweenliteratureas practiceand literatureas teaching.This antinomyis seriousbecauseit is attachedto what is perhaps the most serious problem we face today, the problem of the transmission

of knowledge;

this is doubtless, now, the

fundamentalproblem of alienation,for if the greatstructures of economic alienation have been more or lessrevealed, the structuresof the alienationof knowledgehave not; I believe thatin thisregard a politicalconceptualapparatusis not enough analysis. and thattheremustbe, precisely,one of psychoanalytic

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Hence,it is for thisthatwe mustwork, and thiswill have many subsequentrepercussionson literatureand on whatcanbe done with it in teaching, supposing that literature can subsistin teaching,thatit is compatiblewith teaching. Meanwhile, we can indicate certain points of provisional

correction;within a teachingsystemwhich retainsliteratureon its program, I seethree immediateones. The firstwould be to and to “do” literaryhistorybackwards: reverseclassico-centrism insteadof envisioningthe historyof literaturefrom a pseudothe center of geneticpoint of view, we should make ourselves this history, and if we really want to “do” literary history, organize this history startingfrom the great modern break; thus, pastliteraturewould be dealt with through present-day disciplines,and even in present-daylanguage:we should no longer seefirst-yearlycéestudentsobligedto study a sixteenth century whose languagethey scarcelyunderstand, on the pretext

that it comes beforethe seventeenthcentury, itself beset by religiousdisputesunrelatedto their presentsituation.Second principle: to substitutetextfor author, school,and movement. The text, in our schools,is treatedas an objectof explication, butan explicationof thetextis itselfalwaysattachedto a history of literature; the text must be treatednot as a sacredobject (objectof a philology),but essentiallyasa spaceof language,as the site of an infinite number of digressions,thereby tracing, from a certainnumber of texts,a certainnumber of codesof knowledgeinvestedin them. Finally,a third principle: at every opportunity and at every moment to develop the polysemic readingof the text,to recognizefinallythe rightsof polysemy, to constructa sort of polysemiccriticism,to open the text to symbolism.This would produce, I believe,a considerabledecompressionin the teachingof our literature—not,I repeat,as teachingis practiced—thatdependson the teachers—butas it seemsto me to be codifiedstill. Colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, 1969

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WritingReadir:g N Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stoppingas you read, not becauseyou weren’tinterested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli,

In a word, haven’tyou ever happenedtoreadwhile associations? lookingupfromyourbook? It is such reading, at once insolentin that it interruptsthe text,and smittenin thatit keepsreturning to it and feedingon it, which I tried to describe. In order to write it, in order for

my reading to becomein its turn the objectof a new reading (thatof the readersof S/Z),I obviouslyhad to try to systematize all those moments when one looksup. In other words, to interrogatemy own reading wasto try to grasptheform of all readings(form: solesiteof science),or again: to devisea theory of reading. I therefore took a short text (this was essentialto the detailed

scopeof the enterprise),Balzac’sSarrasine,a little-knowntale (but isn’t Balzacdefined preciselyas Inexhaustible,the author no one ever reads all of, except by some exegetic vocation?), and 1 kept stoppingas I read this text. Criticism ordinarily

functions(thisis not a reproach)eitherby microscope(patiently illuminating the work’s philological,autobiographical,or psychologicaldetails)or by telescope(scrutinizingthe greathistorical spacesurrounding the author). I denied myselfthesetwo instruments:I spokeneitherof Balzacnor of histime,I explored neither the psychologyof his charactersnor the thematicsof thetextnor thesociologyof theanecdote.Recallingthecamera’s first featsin decomposinga horse’s trot, I too attemptedto “flm” the reading of Sarrasinein slow motion: the result, I suspect,is neither quite an analysis(I have not tried to grasp

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of thisstrangetext)nor quite an image(I don’t think the secret [ have projectedmyselfinto my reading; or if I have, it is from an unconscious site which falls far short of “myself”). Then

whatis §/Z? Simplya text,thattextwhich we writein our head whenwelookup. Such a text, which we should be able to call by a single word,

text-as-reading,is little known becausefor centurieswe have been overly interestedin the author and insufficientlyin the reader; mostcriticaltheoriestry to explainwhy the author has written his work, according to which pulsions, which constraints,

which limits . . . This exorbitant privilege granted to the site

the work comesfrom (personor Story),thiscensorshipapplied to the siteit seeksand whereit is dispersed(reading)determine a very special(though an old) economy:the author is regarded as the eternal owner of his work, and the rest of us, his readers,

as simple usufructuaries.This economy obviously implies a themeof authority:the author, it is believed,has certainrights over the reader, he constrains him to a certain meaningof the work, and this meaning

is of course the right one, the real

meaning: whence a critical morality of the right meaning (and

of its defect,“misreading”):we try to establishwhattheauthor meant, and not at all what the reader understands.

Though certainauthorshave themselvesnotifiedus that we are free to read their textas we chooseand that they are not really interested in our choice (Valéry), we still find it hard to perceive how the logic of reading differs from the rules of

composition.These, inherited from rhetoric, are still taken as referring

to a deductive, i.e., rational model: as in the case of

the syllogism,it is a matter of compelling the reader to a meaning or an issue: composition channels; reading, on the contrary (that textwe write in ourselves when we read), disperses, disseminates; or at least, dealing with a story (like that of the

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sculptorSarrasine),we see clearlythat a certainconstraintof our progress (of “suspense”)constantlystruggleswithin us againstthe text'sexplosiveforce,itsdigressiveenergy: with the logicof reason(whichmakesthisstoryreadable)minglesa logic

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of the symbol.This latterlogicis not deductivebut associative: it associateswith the material text (with each of its sentences)

otherideas,otherimages,othersignifications.“The text,only the text,” we are told, but “only the text” does not exist: there is

immediately in this tale, this novel, this poem I am reading, a supplementof meaningfor which neitherdictionarynor grammar can account.It is thissupplementwhosespaceI wantedto explore in writing my reading of Balzac’sSarrasine. I have not reconstituteda reader(you or myself)but reading. [ mean thatevery readingderivesfrom trans-individualforms: the associationsengendered by the letter (but where is that letter?) are never, whatever we do, anarchic; they are always

caught up (sampled and inserted) by certain codes, certain languages, certain lists of stereotypes.The most subjective reading imaginable is never anything but a game played according to certain rules. Where do these rules come from? Certainly not from the author, who does nothing but apply them in his own way (this can be inspired, asin Balzac’scase); visibleapart from him, theserules come from an age-oldlogic of narrative, from a symbolicform which constitutesus even before we are born—in a word, from that vastcultural space through which our person (whetherauthor or reader) is only one passage.To open the text,to positthesystemofits reading, is thereforenot only to askand toshowthatit canbeinterpreted freely;it isespecially,and much more radically,togainacknowledgmentthatthereis no objectiveor subjectivetruthof reading, but only a ludic truth; again, “game” must not be understood

here as a distraction,but as a piece of work—from which, however, all labor has evaporated:to read is to make our body hastaughtusthatthisbodygreatlyexceeds work (psychoanalysis our memory and our consciousness)at the invitation of the text’ssigns, of all the languageswhich traverseit and form somethinglike the shimmeringdepth of the sentence. I can easilyimaginereadablenarrative (the one we can read without declaring it “unreadable”: who does not understand Balzac?).As one of those articulatedlay figuresthat painters

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use (or used to use) in order to “catch” the various postures of

the human body; reading, we too imprint on the texta certain posture, and it is for this reason that it is alive; but this posture,

which is our invention, is possibleonly becausethere is a governed relation among the elementsof the text, in short a proportion:1 have tried to analyzethat proportion, to describe the topologicaldispositionwhich givesthe readingof a classical text both its contour and its freedom

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Le Figaro littéraire,1970

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A On Reading

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[ should like, first of all, to thank the Writing Conferenceof Luchon for welcomingmehere. Manythingsuniteus, beginning with that shared questionwhich eachof us asksfrom his own position: What is reading?How doesoneread? Why doesone read?

One thing, however, separatesus, which I shallnot attemptto disguise: I have, for a long while, ceasedto engagein any pedagogicalpractice: school, lycée,and collegeare today unknown to me, and my own teaching practice—whichcounts for

a greatdeal in my life—atthe EcoledesHautesEtudes,is very marginal, very anomic, even within universityteaching.Now, since this is a congress,it seemsto me that eachof us should make his own voice heard—the voice of his practice; hence, 1

shall not compel myselfto join, to mimic, a pedagogicalcompetence which is not my own: I shall abide by a particular reading (as any reading is?)—thereading of the subjectI am, whom I believemyselfto be. I am, with regard to reading, in a greatdoctrinalconfusion: as for a doctrine of reading, I have none; on the other hand, a

doctrine of writing is graduallytaking shape. This confusion sometimes goes so far as to become a doubt: I do not even know

of reading; I do not know if reading if one must have a doctrine is not, constitutively,

a plural field of scattered practices, of

irreducibleeffects,and if, consequently,the readingof reading, meta-reading,is not itselfmerely a burst of ideas,of fears,of desires,of delights,of oppressionsaboutwhichweshould speak in fitsand starts,blowby blow, in the plural imageof the many and various workshopswhich constitutethiscongress. [ shallnot attemptto reducethisconfusion(moreover,I have no means of doing so), but only to situateit, to comprehend

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of which the notion of reading is evidentlythe object the excess in myself.Where to start?Well, perhapswith whathas permitted modern linguisticstogetunder way:with thenotion ofpertinence.

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1. Pertinence

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is—or at leastwas—inlinguisticsthe point of view Pertinence from which one chooses to consider, to question, to analyze an

ensembleas heteroclite,as disparateas language:it was only when he had made up his mind to regard languagefrom the point of view of meaning, and from that point of view alone,

.

thatSaussurestoppedfumbling,leftpanicbehind, and wasable to establisha new linguistics;it was by deciding to consider sounds alone within the pertinence of meaning alone that Trubetskoy and Jakobson launched the developmentof phonology; it was by consenting,at the expenseof many other possibleconsiderations,to see in hundreds of folk talesonly situations and stable, recurrent

roles—in short, forms—that

Propp founded the structuralanalysisof narrative. If, then, we could determine

a pertinence within which to

interrogatereading, we might hope to develop, gradually, a linguistics,a semiology,or simplyan analysisof reading—f{rom anagnosis:an anagnosology:why not? Unfortunately,readinghas not yet encounteredits Propp or its Saussure;that desired pertinence,image of the scholar’s alleviation,has not been found—atleastnot yet: the old pertinencesdo not suitreading, or at leastreadingoverflowsthem. 1. In the field of reading, there is no pertinenceof objects: the verb toread,apparentlymuch more transitivethan the verb tospeak,can be saturated,catalyzedby a thousandcomplements of objects:I read texts,images,cities,faces,gestures,scenes, etc.These objectsare so varied thatI cannotunify them within any substantialnor even formal category;I can find only one intentionalunity for them: the objectI read is founded by my to be read, issuingfrom intentionto read: it is simplylegendum, a phenomenology,not from a semiology.

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On Reading 2. In the field of reading—andthisis more serious—thereis not only no pertinence of levels,there is no possibilityof describing levelsof reading, becausethere is no possibilityof closing the list of these levels. Of course, there is an origin of

graphic reading: this is the apprenticeshipto letters,to written words; but, on the one hand, there are readings without apprenticeship(images)—atleastwithout technical,if not cultural apprenticeship—andon the other hand, once this techneé is acquired, we do not know where to halt the depth and the dispersionof reading:attheapprehensionof a meaning?Which meaning?Denoted?Connoted? These are artifacts,I shallcall them ethicalartifacts,sincedenotedmeaningtendsto passfor the simple, true meaning and to found a law (how many men have died for a meaning?), while connotation permits (this is its

moraladvantage)positing a law with multiple meaningsand therebyliberatingreading: but how far?To infinity: thereis no structural obligationtoclosemy reading: I canjust aswellextend the limits of the readableto infinity, decide that everything is finally readable (unreadable as this seems), but also, conversely,

I can decidethatin the depthsof every text,howeverreadable its conception, there is, there remains a certain measure of the

unreadable.Our knowinghowtoreadcanbedetermined,verified at its inaugural stage,but it very quicklybecomesa knowledge without basis, without rules, without degrees, and without end. This difficulty in finding a pertinence, from which to establish

a coherentanalysisof reading, we mustassumewe are responsible for simply becausewe lack genius. But we can also suppose

issomehowcongenitalto reading:something, thatnon-pertinence statutorily,comesto blur the analysisof the objectsand levels of reading, and thereby checkmatesnot only any search for a

pertinence in the analysisof reading, but even, perhaps, the very concept of pertinence (for the same thing seemsto be happening in the realm of linguisticsand narratology).This something I believe I can name (in a quite banal fashion, moreover): it is Desire. It is becauseeveryreadingis steepedin Desire (or Disgust)that anagnosologyis difficult,perhaps im-

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possible—inany case,that it is likely to be achievedjust where where we expectit: we do not expectit, or at leastnot exactly we expectit in the realm of structure; by—recent—tradition, and no doubt we are partly right: every reading occurswithin a structure (however multiple, however open), and not in the

allegedlyfree space of an alleged spontaneity: there is no “patural,” “wild” reading: reading does not overflowstructure; it is subjectto it: it needs structure,it respectsstructure; but readingpervertsstructure.Reading is the gestureof the body (for of courseone readswith one’sbody) which by one and the same movement posits and perverts its order: an interior

supplementof perversion. .

2. Repression

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[ am not inquiring, strictlyspeaking,about the avatarsof the desireto read; notably,I cannotanswerthis irritatingquestion: Why don’t Frenchmen today want to read? Why, it appears, do

fiftypercentof them not read? What we might consideris the trace of desire—or of non-desire—that there is within a reading,

supposingthatthe will-to-readhasalreadybeen assumed.And of reading. Two of which come to first of all, the repressions mind.

or interiorized The firstresultsfrom alltheconstraints—social by a thousandrelays—whichmakereadinga duty,in which the very actof reading is determinedby a law: the actof reading, or betterstill,the actof havingread,the almostritual traceof an initiation. Hence, I am not speakingof the “instrumental” readings necessaryto the acquisition of a specifickind of knowledge,of a technique,and accordingto which the gesture of reading vanishesbeneaththe act of learning: I am talking about “free” readings, which you “must” nonethelesshave performed: you“must”haveread(ThePrincessofCleves,Anti-Oedipus).Where doesthe law come from? From various instances, eachof which is institutedasa value,asideology:for the avantgardemilitant,you “must”havereadBataille,Artaud. For a long time, when reading was narrowly elitist,there were duties of

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On Reading ‘

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l — B universalreading; I supposethatthecollapseof humanistvalues has put an end to thesedutiesof reading: for them have been substitutedcertainprivateduties,linked to the“role”thesubject acknowledgeshe has in today’ssociety;the law of reading no longer comesfrom an eternityof culture, but from a bizarre, or at least enigmatic, instance located between History and

Fashion.What I mean is thatthereare group laws,micro-laws, from which one mustbe entitledto liberateoneself.Or again: freedomto read, whateveritsprice, is alsofreedomnot to read. Who knows if certain things are not transformed,

who knows

if certain important things do not happen (in work, in the historyof thehistoricalsubject)notonlyby theeffectof readings but also by the effectof reading’somissions(forgettings):by what we might call the unconstraintsof reading? Or again: in

reading, Desire cannot be detached,whateverthe costto our institutions,from itsown pulsionalnegativity. A second repression is perhaps that of the Library. No question,of course,of contestingthe institution,or of ignoring itsnecessarydevelopment;but a questionof acknowledgingthe traceof repressionin this fundamentaland inevitablefeature of the public (or simply: collective)Library: itsfacticity.Facticity in itselfis not a road to repression(Nature hasnothing particularly liberatingabout it); if the Library’s facticityproducesa failure in the Desire to read, it is for two reasons.

1. By status,whateverits dimension, the Library is infinite, insofar as it is always (however well-conceived it may be) both

short of and in excessof demand: tendentially,the book you want is never there, while another book is offeredto you: the Library is the spaceof substitutesfor desire; confronting the adventureof reading,it is reality,in thatit callsDesireto order: to derive pleasure,satisfaction,gratificationfrom a Library, the subjectmustrenouncetheeffusionof hisown image-repertoire; Oedipus I must not only he must have donehis Oedipus—that “do” at the age of four, but every day of my life that I desire. Here in the Library, it is the very profusion of books which is the law, castration.

=

2. The Library is a spaceone visits,but not thatone inhabits.

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We should have in our language, versatile as it is said to be, two

different words: one for the Library book, the other for the book-at-home(let us use hyphens, producing an autonomous syntagmwhose referentis a specificobject); one for the book “borrowed”—usuallythrough a bureaucraticor magistralmediation—theother for the book grasped,held, takenup as if it were alreadya fetish; one for the book-as-objectof a debt (it of a desire mustbe returned), the other for the book-as-object or an immediate (without mediation) demand. Domestic (and

not public) spacedeprives the book of any function of social,

cultural, institutional appearance. Of course the book-at-home 1s

not a pure fragment of desire: it is (generally) traversed by a

mediationwhichhas nothingparticularlycleanaboutit: money; we have had to buy it, which meansnot having bought others; but things being what they are, money is itselfa liberation— which the Institutionis not: in the Fourieristutopia, booksare worth virtually nothing, but they nonethelessexperiencethe mediation of a few pennies: they are covered by an Expense, whereupon Desirefunctions:somethingis released. 3. Desire

e

What is there of Desire in reading? Desire cannot be named,

not even (unlike Demand) expressed.Yet it is certainthatthere is an eroticismof reading (in reading, desire is there with its object, which is the definition of eroticism). Of this eroticism of

reading, there is perhapsno purer apologuethan thatepisode in Proust’snovelwherethe young Narrator shutshimselfup in the Combray bathroom in order to read, so as not to see his grandmothersufferwhen she hasbeen told, asajoke, thather husbandis going to drink cognac. . . ): “I wentup sobbingto the very top of the house, to the room next to the schoolroom, under the roof, a littleroom smellingof iris, and alsoperfumed by a wild currantbush sproutingbetweenthe stonesof the wall outsideand which thrusta floweringbranch through the open window. Intended for a more particularand vulgar use, this

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On Reading

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39

room, from which one had a view, during the day, all the way

longservedme asa refuge, to thedonjon of Roussainville-le-Pin, doubtlessbecauseit was the only place I was allowedto lock myselfin, for all thoseoccupationsof mine which required an inviolablesolitude:reading, reverie, tears,and pleasure.” Thus, a desiringreadingappears,markedwith two institutive features.By shutting himself up to read, by making reading into an absolutelyseparated,clandestinestatein whichthewhole world is abolished, the reader is identified with two other human

quite closeto each other—whosestatealso subjects—actually requires a violent separation: the amorous subjectand the mystic

subject;Theresa of Avila specifiedreading as a substitutefor mental prayer; and the amorous subject, as we know, is marked

by a retreat from reality, he releaseshimself from the outer isa subject world. This certainlyconfirmsthatthereader-subject entirely transposed into the register of the image-repertoire;

his whole economy of pleasure consistsin nursing his dual relation with the book (i.e., with the Image), by shutting himself up alone with it, fastened to it, like the child fastened to the

mother and the Lover poring over the belovedface. The irissmellingbathroom is the very closureof the Mirror, the siteof of subjectand Image—ofthe book. the paradisiaccoalescence The secondfeature from which a desiringreading is constituted—aswe are told explicitlyby the bathroom episode—is this: in reading, all the body’semotionsare present,mingled, coiled up: fascination, emptiness, pain, voluptuousness; reading

produces an overwhelmed body, but notparceledout (otherwise,

reading would not issuefrom the image-repertoire).Yet something more enigmaticis presentedfor us to read, to interpret in the Proustian episode: reading—thedelightof reading—has somerelationwith anality;one and thesamemetonymyconnects reading, excrement,and—aswe have seen—money. And now—withoutleavingthe reading room—thisquestion: Are there different pleasuresof reading? Is there a possible typology of these pleasures?It seemsto me that there are, in any case,at leastthree typesof pleasureof reading or, to be

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more specific,three waysby which the Image of reading can capture the reading subject.According to the first mode, the reader hasa fetishistrelationwith the textbeingread: he takes pleasure in the words, in certain words, in certain arrangements of words; in the texts, certain areas, certain isolates are formed and in their fascination the reader-subject is lost, ruined; this

would be a kind of metaphoricor poeticreading; to enjoy this pleasure,is there any need of an extendedlinguisticculture? This is not certain: even the very young child, at the stageof prattle, knows the eroticismof the word, an oral and aural practice available to pulsion. According to the second mode,

which isjust the contrary,the reader is drawn onward through the book’s length by a force alwaysmore or less disguised, belonging to the order of suspense:the book is gradually abolished,and it is in this impatient,impassionederosion that thedelectationlies;a matter,chiefly,of themetonymicpleasure of all narration,withoutforgettingthatknowledgeitselfcan be recounted,subjectedto a movementof suspense;and because this pleasure is visibly linked to the observationof what is unfolding

and to the revelation

of what is hidden,

we can

supposethere is some relation to the discoveryof the primal scene; I want to surprise, I am about to faint from expectation:

a pure image of delectation,in that it does not belong to the order of satisfaction; we should also question, conversely, the

blockages,the distastesof reading: Why don’t we go on with a book? Why cannot Bouvard, deciding to take up the Philosophy

of History, “finish Bossuet’scelebratedDiscours”?Is this Bouvard’s fault, or Bossuet’s? Are there universal mechanisms of

attraction?Is there an erotic logic of Narration? Here the structural analysisof narrative should raise the problem of Pleasure:it seemsto me that it now has the means to do so. Then thereisathird adventureof reading(I am callingadventure thewayin whichpleasurecomesto thereader): thatof Writing; readingis a conductorof the Desire to write (we are now sure that there is a delectationof writing, although it is still very enigmatic for us); not that we necessarily wanted to write like

PR

the author we enjoy reading; what we desireis only the desire the scriptorhas in writing, or again: we desire the desire the author had for the reader when he was writing, we desire the

love-mewhich is in all writing. This hasbeenvery clearlyput by the writer Roger Laporte: “A purereadingwhich doesnot call for anotherwriting1sincomprehensibletome . . . ReadingProust, Blanchot, Kafka, Artaud gave me no desire to write on these authors (not even, I might add, likethem), but to write.” In this perspective,

reading

is a veritable production:

no longer of

interior images,of projections,of hallucinations,but literallyof work:the (consumed)product is reversedinto production,into promise, into desire for production, and the chain of desires begins to unroll, each reading being worth the writing it engenders,to infinity. Is this pleasureof productionan elitist pleasure, reserved only to potentialwriters?In our society,a society of consumption and not of production, a societyof reading, seeing, and hearing, and not a societyof writing, looking, and listening,everythingis done to blockthe answer: lovers of writing are scattered,clandestine,crushedby a thousand—eveninternal—constraints. This is a problem of civilization:but, for me, my profound and constantconvictionis thatit willneverbe possibletoliberate reading if, in the sameimpulse, we do not liberatewriting.

4. Subject

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There has been a greatdeal of discussion,and long beforethe adventof StructuralAnalysis,of the differentpointsof viewan author can adopt to tella story—orsimplyto producea text.A wayof connectingthe reader to a theoryof Narration,or more broadly to a Poetics, would be to consider him as himself occupying a point of view (or severalin succession);in other words, to treat the reader as a character, to make him into one

of the characters(not even necessarilya privilegedone) of the fictionand/or the Text. Greek tragedyaffordsan example:the reader is that characterwho is on stage(even if clandestinely)

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and who hearswhat eachof the partnersof the dialoguedoes not hear; hishearingis double(and thereforevirtuallymultiple). In other words, the reader’sspecificsiteis the paragram,as it obsessed Saussure (did he not feel he was going mad, this

the reader?): a “true” scholar,from being solelyand completely reading, a reading which would assumeits afhirmation,would be a mad reading, not becauseit would invent improbable notbecauseitwouldbe“delirious,” meanings(misconstructions), but becauseit would perceivethe simultaneousmultiplicityof meanings,of points of view, of structures,a spaceextended outside the lawswhich proscribecontradiction(“Text” is the very postulation of such a space).

This imaginationof a total—i.e.,totallymultiple, paragrammatic—readermaybe usefulin thatit permitsus to glimpsethe Paradoxof the reader: it is commonlyadmittedthat to read is to decode:

letters, words,

meanings,

structures, and this is

incontestable;but by accumulatingdecodings(sincereading is by rightsinfinite),by removing the safetycatchof meaning,by putting reading into freewheeling (which is its structural voca-

tion), the reader is caughtup in a dialecticalreversal: finally, he does not decode, he overcodes; he does not decipher,

he

languages,he letshimselfbe infinitely produces,he accumulates and tirelesslytraversedby them: he is thattraversal. Now, this 1s the very situation of the human subject, at least

aspsychoanalytic epistemologytriestounderstandhim: a subject who i1sno longer the thinkingsubject of idealisticphilosophy,but rather devoid of all unity, lostin the double misreadingof his unconsciousand of his ideology, and remembering only a whirligig of languages.I mean by this that the reader is the completesubject,that the field of reading is that of absolute subjectivity(in the materialisticsensewhich this old idealistic word can now have): every reading proceedsfrom a subject, and it 1s separatedfrom this subjectonly by rare and tenuous mediations,the apprenticeshipof letters,a few rhetoricalprotocols,beyond which (very quickly)it is the subjectwho rediscovers himself in his own, individual

structure: either desiring,

oo 4 On Reading

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Or perverse, or paranoiac, or imaginary, or neurotic—and of

course in his historicalstructureaswell: alienatedby ideology, by the routinesof codes. This 1s to indicate that we cannot reasonablyhope for a Scienceof reading, a Semiologyof reading, unlesswe conceive thepossibility,someday,of—acontradictionin terms—aScience of the Inexhaustible,of infiniteDisplacement:readingisprecisely that energy, that action which will seize—inthistext, in this book—thevery thing “which refusesto be exhaustedby the categoriesof Poetics”;* reading, in short, is the permanent hemorrhage by which structure—patientlyand usefully describedby StructuralAnalysis—collapses, opens,is lost,thereby consonantwith any logicalsystemwhich wultimately nothing can close—leavingintactwhat we must call the movementof the subjectand of history: reading is the site where structureis made hysterical.

>

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Le Frangaisaujourd’hui, 1976

dessciences * Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaireencyclopédique

du langage (Paris, 1972), p. 107. ..-ll--h-

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toWrite Ez.ee@m. S

Flaubert’s last novel is missing a chapter on orthography. In it

wewouldfind Bouvard and Pécuchetorderingfrom Dumouchel a wholelittlelibrary of spellingmanuals,atfirstdelighted,then astoundedby the comminatoryand contradictorycharacterof therulesprescribed,finallyworkingeachotherup and endlessly arguing:Why thisparticularwrittenform?Why writeCaen,Paon, Lampe,Vent,Rang when the vowel sound is the same in each case? Why Quatre and Caille, since these two words have the

sameinitial consonant?Whereupon Pécuchetwould inevitably conclude,bowinghis head: “Spellingmightbe a hoax!” This hoax, as we know, is not an innocent one. Of course, for a historian of the language, these accidents of French orthog-

'

raphy are explicable:each one has its reason, analogical,etymological,or functional;but the sum of thesereasonsis unreasonable, and when this unreason is imposed, by means of education,upon an entire nation, it becomesculpable.It is not the arbitrary characterof our orthographywhich is shocking,

:

it is the fact that this arbitrariness is statutory. Since 1835, the

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officialorthography of the Academie Frangaisehas had the valueof law in the eyesof the State;from the very firstclasses of the young French citizen,“spellingmistakes”are punished: how many livesspoiledfor a few spellingerrors! The first effectof spellingis discriminatory;but it also has secondaryeffectsof a psychologicalorder. If orthographywere free—freeto be simplified or not, accordingto the subject’s desire—itmightconstitutea verypositivepracticeof expression; the writtenphysiognomyof the word mightacquirea properly poeticvalue, insofar as it emergedfrom the scriptor’sphantas-

Ny matics, and not from a uniform

and reductive law; just think

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of the kind of intoxication,of baroquejubilation whichexplodes in the orthographic “aberrations” of old manuscripts, of textsby children and the lettersof foreigners:might one not say that in such efflorescences as thesethe subjectseekshis freedom:

to trace, to dream,

to remember,

to understand?

Are there not occasions when we encounter particularly “happy” spelling mistakes—as if the scriptorwere obeying not academic law but a mysterious commandment that comes to him from his own history—perhapseven from his own body? Conversely, once spellingis made uniform, legalized,sanctioned by statemeans,in its very complicationand its irrationality, it is obsessionalneurosis which is instated:the spelling mistakebecomesTransgression.I havejust sentoff a letterof application for a job which can change my life. But have I remembered to put an s on that plural? Was I careful to put two p’s and just one [ in appeler?1 worry, I am in agony, like the vacationerwho can’trememberif he turned off the gasand the water back home, and if a fire or a flood will be the result.

And just as suchworry keepsour vacationerfrom enjoyinghis vacation, legalized spelling keeps the scriptorfrom enjoying writing, that euphoric gesturewhich permitsputting into the tracingof a word a littlemorethan its mere intention to communicate. Reform spelling?It has been tried severaltimes, it is tried periodically.But what is the use of remakinga code, even an improved one, if it isonceagainin order to imposeit, to legalize it, to make it a specificallyarbitrary instrument of selection? It

is not spelling which should be reformed, but the law which prescribesits minutiae. What can be asked is this: a certain “laxism” of the Institution. If I enjoy writing “correctly”,i.e., “in conformity,” I am quite free to do so, as I am to enjoy reading Racine or Gide today: statutoryspellingis not without its charm, it is not without perversity;but let “ignorances”and “blunders” be penalized no longer; let them cease to be perceived

as aberrations or debilities;let societyagree at last (or once

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again) to releasewriting from the stateapparatusto which it belongstoday; in short, let us stop excluding “for reasonsof spelling.”

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FROM WORK TO TEXT

The Death of the Author

I

In his taleSarrasine,Balzac,speakingof a castratodisguisedas a woman, writes this sentence: “She was Woman, with her sudden fears, her inexplicable whims, her instinctive fears, her

meaninglessbravado, her defiance,and her deliciousdelicacy of feeling.” Who speaksin this way?Is it the hero of the tale, who would prefer not to recognizethe castratohidden beneath the “woman”? Is it Balzacthe man, whosepersonalexperience hasprovided him with a philosophyof Woman?Is it Balzacthe author, professingcertain “literary”ideasabout femininity?Is it universalwisdom?Romanticpsychology?We canneverknow, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every

voice, every origin. Writing is thatneuter, thatcomposite,that where obliquityinto whichour subjectflees,theblack-and-white all identityis lost,beginning with the very identityof the body thatwrites. 'No doubt it has alwaysbeen so: once a factis recounted—for intransitivepurposes,and no longerto actdirectlyupon reality, i.e., exclusiveof any functionexceptthatexerciseof the symbol itself—thisgap appears, the voice losesits origin, the author entersinto his own death, writing begins. However, the affect of this phenomenon hasbeenvariable;in ethnographicsocieties, narrative is never assumedby a person but by a mediator, shaman, or reciter, whose “performance” (i.e., his masteryof

T D

the narrative

code) can be admired,

but never his “genius.”

The authoris a modern character,no doubt produced by our societyasit emergedfrom the Middle Ages,inflectedby English empiricism,

French rationalism,

and the personal faith of the

Reformation, therebydiscoveringthe prestigeof the individual, e

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B From Work to Text

50

or, as we say more nobly, of the “human person.” Hence, it is logicalthat in literary mattersit should be positivism,crown and conclusionof capitalistideology, which has granted the greatest importance to the author’s “person.” The author still

reignsin manualsof literaryhistory,in biographiesof writers, of litterateurs magazineinterviews,andin theveryconsciousness eagerto unite, by meansof privatejournals, their person and their work; theimageof literatureto be found in contemporary culture is tyrannicallycenteredon the author, his person, his history,his tastes,his passions;criticismstilllargelyconsistsin sayingthat Baudelaire’soeuvre is the failure of the man Baudelaire,

Van

Gogh’s is his madness, Tchaikovsky’s

his vice:

of theworkisstillsoughtin thepersonof itsproducer, explanation as if, through the more or lesstransparentallegoryof fiction, it wasalways,ultimately,the voiceof one and the sameperson, the author,whichwastransmittinghis “confidences.” . Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (the new

.

criticismhas quite often merelyconsolidatedit), we know that certain writers have already tried to subvert it. In France, Mallarmé, no doubt the first, sawand foresawin all its scope thenecessityto substitutelanguageitselffor thesubjecthitherto supposedto be itsowner; for Mallarmé,asfor us, it is language which speaks,not the author; to write is to reach, through a preliminaryimpersonality—which wecanatno momentidentify with the realisticnovelist’scastrating“objectivity”—thatpoint where not “I” but only languagefunctions, “performs”: Mallarmé’swholepoeticsconsistsin suppressingtheauthor in favor of writing (and therebyrestoring,as we shallsee,the reader’s place). Valéry, entangledin a psychologyof the ego, greatly edulcoratedMallarmean theory, but led by a preference for classicismto conform to the lessonsof Rhetoric, he continued to castthe Author into doubt and derision, emphasizedthe linguisticand “accidental”natureof his activity,and throughout his proseworks championedthe essentiallyverbalcondition of literature,as opposedto which any resortto the writer’sinteriority seemedto him pure superstition.Prousthimself, despite

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the apparently psychologicalcharacterof what is called his analyses,visibly undertook to blur by an extremesubtilization the relation of the writer and his characters:by making the narrator not the one who has seen or felt, or even the one who

writes,but the one who s goingtowrite(the young man of the novel—but, as a matter of fact, how old is he and who is he?>—

wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when writing finally becomespossible),Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal,insteadof putting his life into his novel, as is so often said, he made his life itself a work of which

his own book wasthe model, so that it is quiteclearto us that it 1s not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou,

but Montesquiou,

in his anecdotal, historicalreality, who i1sonly a secondary, derived fragmentof Charlus. FinallySurrealism,to keepto this prehistoryof modernity, could doubtlessnot attributea sovereign placeto language,sincelanguageis system,and whatthis movementsoughtwas, romantically,a directsubversionof the codes—an illusory subversion, moreover,

for a code cannot be

destroyed,only “flouted”; yet, by constantlystrivingto disappoint expectedmeanings(thiswasthe famoussurrealist“shock”), by urging the hand to write as fastas possiblewhat the head was unaware of (this wasautomaticwriting), by acceptingthe principle and the experimentof collectivewriting, Surrealism helped desacralizethe image of the Author. Last, outside literature itself (in fact, such distinctionsare becomingquite dated), linguistics furnishes the destruction of the Author with

a precious analyticinstrument, showingthat the speech-actin its entirety is an “empty” process,which functions perfectly without its being necessaryto “fill” it with the person of the interlocutors: linguistically,the author is nothing but the one who writes,just asI is nothingbut theone who saysI: language knows a “subject,” not a “person,” and this subject,empty outsideof the very speech-actwhichdefinesit, sufficesto “hold” { h I language,i.e., to exhaustit. l ‘

The

removal

of the Author

(with Brecht, we might speak

here of a veritable distancing,the Author diminishing like a

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figureat the far end of theliterarystage)is not only a historical factor an actof writing: it utterlytransformsthe modern text (or—whichis the samething—thetextis henceforthproduced and read so that the author absentshimself from it at every level). Time,

first of all, is no longer the same. The Author,

when we believein him, is alwaysconceivedas the pastof his own book: book and author are voluntarilyplacedon one and the sameline, distributedasa beforeand an after:the Author is supposed to feed the book, i.e., he lives before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he has the same relation of antecedence with his

work that a father sustains with his child. Quite the contrary,

the modern scriptoris born at thesametimeas his text; he is not furnished with a being which precedesor exceedshis writing, he is not the subjectof which his book would be the predicate; there is no time other than that of the speech-act,and every text is written eternallyhereand mow.This is because(or it follows that) writing can no longer designate an operation of

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From Work to Text

recording, of observation,of representation,of “painting” (as theClassicsusedto say),but insteadwhatthelinguists,following Oxfordian philosophy,call a performative,a rare verbal form (exclusivelyfound in the first person and in the present), in which the speech-acthasno other content(no other statement) than the actby which it is uttered: somethinglike the I declare of kingsor the I singof the earliestpoets;the modern scriptor, having buried

the Author,

can therefore

no longer believe,

accordingto the pathosof his predecessors,that his hand is slowerthan his passionand thatin consequence,making a law of necessity,he must emphasizethis delayand endlessly“elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached

from any voice,borne by a pure gestureof inscription(and not of expression),tracesa field withoutorigin—or at leastwith no origin but languageitself,i.e., the very thing which ceaselessly callsany origin into question.

.Wc know now that a text consistsnot of a line of words, 1elea51ngasmgle ‘theological”meaning (the “message of the

A“-

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TheDeathof theAuthor Author-God), but of a multi-dimensionalspacein which are married and contestedseveralwritings,noneof whichisoriginal: the text is a fabric of quotations,resultingfrom a thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard

and Pécuchet, those eternal

copyists,atoncesublimeand comical,whoseprofound absurdity preciselydesignatesthe truth of writing, the writer can only imitatean ever anterior, never original gesture;his solepower 1sto mingle writings,to countersomeby others,so asnever to himself,at leasthe knows rely on just one; if he seeksto express thatthe interior “thing” he claimsto “translate”isitselfno more than a ready-madelexicon,whosewords canbe explainedonly

e

through other words, and this ad infinitum: an adventure which

exemplarily befell young Thomas De Quincey, so versed in his

Greek thatin order to translatecertainabsolutelymodern ideas and imagesinto thisdeadlanguage,Baudelairetellsus, “he had a dictionary made for himself, one much more complex and extensivethan the kind produced by the vulgar patienceof purely literary themes”(LesParadisartificiels);succeedingthe Author, the scriptorno longer contains passions, moods, senti-

ments,impressions,but thatimmensedictionaryfrom whichhe drawsa writing which will be incessant:life merelyimitatesthe book, and this book itself is but a tissue ofsigns, endless imitation,

infinitelypostponed. .

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Once the Author is distanced,the claim to “decipher”a text becomesentirely futile. To assignan Author to a text is to imposea brake on it, to furnish it with a finalsignified,to close writing. This conceptionis quite suitedto criticism,which then undertakesthe importanttaskof discoveringthe Author (or his hypostases:society,history, the psyche,freedom) beneaththe work: once the Author

is found,

the text is “explained,”

the

critichas won; hence,it is hardly surprisingthathistoricallythe Author’s empire hasbeen theCritic’saswell,and alsothat(even new) criticismis todayunsettledatthe sametime asthe Author. In multiple writing, in effect,everythingis to be disentangled, but nothing

[VSO

deciphered, structure can be followed, “threaded”

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(as we sayof a run in a stocking)in all itsrcprises,all itsstages, 1 but there is no end to it, no bottom; the spaceof writing is to be traversed,not pierced; writing constantlyposits meaning, but alwaysin order to evaporateit: writing seeksa systematic exemptionof meaning.Thereby, literature(it would be better, from now on, to say writing),by refusingto assignto the text (and to the world-as-text) a “secret,” i.e., an ultimate meaning,

liberatesan activitywe may call countertheological,properly revolutionary,for to refuseto halt meaningis finallyto refuse God and his hypostases,reason,science,the law. m

‘

To return to Balzac’ssentence.No one (i.e., no “person”) says it: its source, its voice is not the true site of writing, it is reading.

Another very specificexamplewill help us here: recentinvestigations(J.-P. Vernant) have shed somelight on the constitutivelyambiguousnatureof Greektragedy,whosetexti1s“woven” of words with double meanings,words which each character understandsunilaterally (this perpetual misunderstandingis precisely what we call the “tragic”); there 1s, however, someone

who understandseachword in itsduplicity,and further understands,one maysay,theverydeafnessof thecharactersspeaking in his presence:this “someone”is preciselythe reader (or here the listener).Here we discernthe totalbeing of writing: a text consistsof multiplewritings,proceedingfrom severalcultures and enteringinto dialogue,into parody, into contestation;but there is a site where this multiplicity is collected, and this site is not the author, as has hitherto been claimed, but the reader:

the reader is the very spacein which are inscribed,withoutany of them being lost, all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination,

but this destinationcan no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds collectedinto one and the same field all of the tracesfrom which writing is constituted. That 1swhy it is absurdto hear the new writing condemnedin thenameof ahumanismwhichhypocriticallyclaimstochampion

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'y TheDeathof theAuthor the reader’srights.Classicalcriticismhasneverbeenconcerned with the reader;

for that criticism, there i1s no other man in

literaturethan the one who writes.We are no longerso willing to be the dupes of suchantiphrases,by which a societyproudly recriminates in favor of preciselywhat it discards,ignores, muffles,or destroys;we know that in order to restorewriting to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader

must be requitedby the deathof the Author.

I Manteia, 1968

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" From Work to Text

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A change has latelyoccurred, or is occurring, in our idea of languageand consequentlyof the (literary)work which owesto thatlanguageat leastits phenomenalexistence.This changeis obviouslylinked to the presentdevelopmentof (among other disciplines)linguistics,anthropology,Marxism, psychoanalysis (the word linkis usedhere in a deliberatelyneutralmanner: no determinationis being invoked, howevermultipleand dialectical). The transformation of the notion of the work does not

necessarilyderive from the internal renewalof each of these disciplines, but rather from their intersection at the level of an

object which traditionallyproceedsfrom none of them. We mightsay,asa matterof fact,thatinterdisciplinary activity,today so highly valued in research,cannotbe achievedby the simple confrontationof specializedbranchesof knowledge;the interdisciplinaryis not a comfortableaffair: it beginseffectively (and not by the simpleutteranceof a pioushope) when the solidarity of the old disciplinesbreaks down—perhapseven violently, throughtheshocksof fashion—totheadvantageof a newobject, a new language,neitherof which is preciselythisdiscomfortof classification which permitsdiagnosinga certainmutation.The mutation which seemsto be affectingthe notion of the work must not, however,be overestimated;it is part of an epistemological shift, more than of a real break of the kind which in fact

occurred in the lastcentury upon the appearanceof Marxism and Freudianism;

no new break has occurred

since, and we

mightsaythatfor the lasthundred yearswehavebeeninvolved in a repetition. What History, our History, allowsus today is merely to displace,to vary, to transcend,to repudiate.Just as Einsteinian sciencecompels us to include within the object S

4 Y From Work to Text

studiedthe relativityofreference points,so the combinedactionof » Marxism,

Freudianism, and structuralism compels us, in literature, to relativize the relations of scriptor, reader, and observer

(critic). Confronting the work—atraditionalnotion, long since, and still today, conceivedin what we might call a Newtonian fashion—therenow occurs the demand for a new object,obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories.This object is the Text. I know that this word is fashionable (I myself am

compelledto useit frequently),hencesuspectin somequarters; but this is precisely why I should like to review the main propositionsat whoseintersectionthe Text is located,as I see it; the word propositionmust here be understoodmore gramnot arguments, maticallythan logically:theseare speech-acts, “hints,” approacheswhich agreeto remain metaphorical.Here are thesepropositions:they concernmethod, genres,the sign, the plural, filiation,reading, pleasure.

e

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. The textmust not be understoodas a computableobject.

It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works

from texts.In particular,we must not permit ourselvesto say: the work is classical, the text is avant-garde; there is no question

of establishinga trophy in modernity’s name and declaring certain literary productions in and out by reason of their chronologicalsituation:there can be “Text” in a very old work, and many productsof contemporaryliteratureare not textsat all. The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance,it occupiesa portion of the spacesof books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodologicalfield. The opposition may recall(though not reproduce term for term) a distinctionproposedby Lacan: “reality”is shown[semontre],the “real” is proved [se démontre]; in the same way, the work is seen

(in bookstores,in card catalogues,on examinationsyllabuses), the text is demonstrated,is spoken accordingto certainrules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text

is held in language:it existsonly when caughtup in a discourse (or rather it is Text for the very reasonthat it knowsitselfto

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be so); the Text is not the decomposition

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From Work to Text of the work, it is the

work which is the Text's imaginary tail. Or again: theTexts only in an activity,in a production.It follows that the experienced

Text cannotstop(for example,ata libraryshelf); itsconstitutive moment is traversal (notably, it can traverse the work, several

works).

P

2. Similarly, the Text does not stop at (good) literature; it cannot be caught up in a hierarchy, or even in a simple distributionof genres.What constitutesit is on the contrary(or precisely) its force of subversion with regard to the old classifi-

cations.How toclassifyGeorgesBataille?Is thiswritera novelist, a poet, an essayist,an economist,a philosopher,a mystic?The answer1s so uncertainthat handbooksof literaturegenerally prefer to leave Batailleout; as a matter of fact, Bataille has written texts, or even, perhaps, always one and the same text.

If the Text raisesproblemsof classification(moreover, this is one of its “social”functions),it is becauseit alwaysimplies a certain experience of limits. Thibaudet used to speak (but in a

very restrictedsense)of limit-works(such as Chateaubriand’s Life ofRancé,a work which indeed seemsto us to be a “text”): the Text is what is situatedat the limit of the rules of the speech-act(rationality, readability, etc.). This notion is not rhetorical,we do not resortto it for “heroic”postures:the Text attemptsto locateitselfvery specificallybehindthe limit of the doxa (i1snot public opinion, constitutiveof our democratic societies,powerfully aided by mass communications—isnot public opinion definedby its limits, its energyof exclusion,its censorship?); takingtheword literally,we mightsaythatthe Text

isalwaysparadoxical. -

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‘3. The textis approachedand experiencedin relationto the sign. The work closesupon a signified.We can attributetwo modesof significationto thissignified:either it is claimedto be apparent, and the work is then the objectof a scienceof the letter,which is philology;or elsethissignifiedis saidto be secret

B

From Work to Text and final, and must be sought for, and then the work depends

upon a hermeneutics,an interpretation(Marxist,psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general

sign, and it is natural that it should representan institutional categoryof thecivilizationof theSign.The Text, on thecontrary, practicesthe infinite postponementof the signified,the Text is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier;the signifiermust not be imagined as “the first part of the meaning,” its material similarly, vestibule,but rather, on the contrary,asitsaftermath; the signifier’sinfinitudedoes not refer to some notion of the ineffable(of an unnamablesignified)but to a notionofplay; the engendering of the perpetual signifier (in the fashion of a perpetualcalendar)in the field of the Text is not achievedby some organic process of maturation, or a hermeneutic process

of “delving deeper,” but rather by a serialmovementof dislocations,overlappings,variations; the logic governingthe Text is not comprehensive(trying to definewhatthe work “means”) but metonymic; the activityof associations,contiguities,Crossreferencescoincideswith a liberationof symbolicenergy (if it failed him, man would die). The work (in the best of cases)is

symbolic(itssymbolicsruns short,i.e., stops);theText moderately natureone is radicallysymbolic: a workwhoseintegrallysymbolic isa text.The Text is thusrestored andreceives percetves, conceives, to language; like language, it is structuredbut decentered, withoutclosure (letus note, to answerthe scornfulsuspicionof “fashion” sometimeslodged againststructuralism,that the epistemologicalprivilege nowadaysgranted to languagederives preciselyfrom the factthatin it {language]we have discovered a paradoxicalidea of structure:a systemwithoutend or center). 4. The Text is plural. This does not mean only that it has severalmeaningsbutthatit fulfillsthevery pluralityof meaning: (and notjust acceptable)plurality.The Text 1snot an irreducible coexistenceof meaning,but passage,traversal;hence,it depends

T

not on an interpretation,

however liberal, but on an explosion,

on dissemination.The pluralityof theText depends,asa matter

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of fact, not on the ambiguityof its contents,but on what we might call the stereographicplurality of the signifierswhich weaveit (etymologically,the textis a fabric): the reader of the I'extmight be comparedto an idle subject(who hasrelaxedhis image-repertoire):this fairly empty subject strolls (this has happenedto the author of theselines,and it is for this reason that he has come to an intense awarenessof the Text) along a hillside at the bottom of which flows a wadi (I use the word to

attestto a certain alienation); what he perceivesis multiple, irreducible, issuing from heterogeneous, detached substances and levels: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, tenuous explosions of sound, tiny cries of birds, children’s voices from the other

sideof the valley,paths,gestures,garmentsof inhabitantsclose byor very far away;alltheseincidentsare halfidentifiable:they issue from known codes, but their combinativeoperation is unique, it grounds the stroll in a differencewhich cannot be repeated except as difference.This is what happens in the Text:

it can be Text only in its difference(which does not mean its individuality);

its reading is semelfactive (which renders

any

inductive-deductivescienceof textsillusory: no “grammar” of the text) and yet entirely woven of quotations, references, echoes: cultural languages(what language is not cultural?), antecedentor contemporary, which traverseit through and through, in a vaststereophony.The intertextualityin which any text is apprehended, since it is itselfthe intertextof another text,cannot be identifiedwith some originof the text: to seek out the “sources,”the “influences”of a work is to satisfythe mythof filiation;the quotationsa textismadeof areanonymous, irrecoverable,and yet alreadyread:they are quotationswithout quotation marks. The work disturbs no monistic philosophy (thereare antagonisticones,aswe know); for sucha philosophy, pluralityis Evil. Hence, confronting the work, the Text might indeed take for its motto the words of the man possessedby devils: “My name is legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9). The plural or demonic texturewhich setsthe Text in oppositionto the work may involve profound modificationsof reading, pre-

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01

ciselywhere monologismseemsto be the law: certain“texts”of Scripture, traditionally adopted by theological(historical or anagogical)monism, may lend themselvesto a diffractionof meanings (i.e., finally, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist

interpretation of the work, hitherto resolutelymonistic,may become more

materialist by pluralizing

itself (if, of course,

Marxist“institutions”permit this). 5. The work is caughtup in a processof filiation.What is of the world (of the race,then of postulatedare a determination of worksamongthemselves, History)over thework, a consecution of the work to its author. The author is and an appropriation reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; literary themanuscriptand theauthor’s sciencethusteachesustorespect declared intentions, and societypostulatesa legalityof the author’s relation to his work (this is the “author’s rights,” actually

a recent affair, not legalizedin France until the time of the Revolution).

The Text, on the other hand, is read without the

rhetorical);

the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if

Father’sinscription. The metaphor of the Text is here again detachedfrom the metaphor of the work; the latterrefers to the image of an organismwhich growsby vital expansion,by “development”(a significantlyambiguousword: biologicaland the Text expands,it is by the effectof a combinativeoperation,

of a systematics (an 1mage, MOreoVer, close to the views of

contemporary biology concerning the living being); no vital (moreover, “respect”isthereforedue totheText: it canbebroken this is what the Middle Agesdid with two nonethelessauthoritarian texts: Scripture and Aristotle); the Text can be read

without its father’s guarantee;the restorationof the intertext paradoxicallyabolishesinheritance. It is not that the Author cannot “return” in the Text, in his text, but he does so, one might say, as a guest; if he is a novelist, he inscribes himself there as one of his characters, drawn as a figure in the carpet;

his inscription is no longer privileged, paternal, alethic, but ludic: he becomes,one can say, a paper author; his life is no

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longer the origin of his fables,but a fableconcurrentwith his life; there is a reversionof the work upon life (and no longer the contrary); the work of Proustand Genetpermitsus to read their lives as a text: the word bio-graphyregains a strong, etymologicalmeaning; and therebythe sincerityof the speechact,a veritable“cross”ofliterary ethics,becomesa falseproblem: the I thatwritesthe text1snever anythingbut a paper 1.

i

6. The work is ordinarily theobjectof consumption;I intend no demagogueryby referring to what 1s called a consumer culture,butwemustrecognizethattodayit isthework’s“quality” (whichultimatelyimpliesan appreciationof “taste”) and not the actualoperationof readingwhichcanmakedifferencesbetween books: “cultivated”reading is not structurallydifferent from reading on trains.The Text (if only by its frequent“unreadability”) decantsthe work (if it permits it at all) from its consumptionand recuperatesit as play, task,production, practice. I'his means that the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at

leastto diminish) the distancebetweenwritingand reading, not by intensifyingthe reader’s projection into the work, but by linking the two together into one and the same signifying practice.The distancethat separatesreading from writing is historical.In the period of strongestsocialdivision (before the instaurationof democraticcultures),reading and writing were equallyclassprivileges:Rhetoric, the greatliterary code of that time, taughtwriting(evenif whatwasordinarily producedwere discourses,not texts);it is significantthatthe adventof democracyreversedthewatchword:the(secondary)schoolpridesitself on teachingreadingand no longer writing. In fact,reading,in the sense of consuming,is not playing with the text. “Playing”

must be taken here in all the polysemyof the term: the text itself “plays” (like a door that “plays” back and forth on its hinges; like a fishing rod in which there is some “play”); and the readerplaystwiceover: heplaysattheText (ludic meaning), he seeksa practicewhich reproducesit; but, sothatthis practice.

is not reduced to a passive, interior mimesis(the Text being

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preciselywhat resiststhisreduction), he playstheText; wemust not forget thatplayis alsoa musicalterm; the historyof music (as practice,not as “art”) is, moreover, quite parallelto thatof the Text; there was a time when, active amateurs being numer-

ous (at leastwithin a certain class),“to play” and “to listen” constituteda virtually undifferentiatedactivity;then two roles successively appeared:firstof all, thatof theinterpreter, to which the bourgeoispublic (though it could stillplaya littleitself:this is the entire history of the piano) delegatedits playing; then that of the (passive) amateur who listensto music without being

able to play it (the piano has effectivelybeen replacedby the record); we know thattodaypost-serialmusichasdisruptedthe role of the “interpreter,”

who is asked to be in a sense the co-

author of the scorewhichhe completesratherthan“expresses.” The Text is a littlelike a scoreof thisnew kind: it solicitsfrom the reader a practicalcollaboration.A greatnovationthis, for raisedthisquestion:he wanted thework?(Mallarmeé who executes theaudiencetoproducethebook.) Today only thecriticexecutes the work (pun intended). The reduction of reading to consumption is obviouslyresponsiblefor the “boredom”many feel in the presenceof the modern (“unreadable”)text, the avantgarde film or painting: to be bored meansone cannotproduce the text, play it, releaseit, makeit go. 7. This suggestsone final approach to the Text: that of pleasure. I do not know if a hedonist aestheticever existed (eudaemonist philosophies are certainly rare). Of course, a pleasure of the work (of certain works) exists; 1 can enjoy reading and rereading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, and even—why not?>—Alexandre Dumas; but this pleasure, however intense,

and even when it is releasedfrom any prejudice,remainspartly (unlessthere has been an exceptionalcriticaleffort)a pleasure of consumption: for, if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot rewrite them (that one cannot, today, write “like

that”); and thisrather depressingknowledgesufficesto separate me from the production of theseworks, at the very moment

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when their distancingfounds my modernity(to be modern—is thisnot reallyto know thatone cannotbegin again?).The Text is linked to delectation,i.e., to pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier,the Text participatesin itswayin a social utopia; before History (supposingthat Historydoes not choose barbarism),the Text fulfillsif not the transparencyof social relations,at leastthe transparencyof languagerelations: it is the spacein which no languageprevailsover any other, where the languagescirculate(retaining the circularmeaning of the word).

.

.

These few propositions do not necessarilyconstitute the articulationof a Theory of the Text. This is not merely the consequenceof thepresenter’sinadequacies(moreover,in many points he has merely recapitulatedwhat is being investigated and developedaround him). This is a consequenceof the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfiedwith a metalinguisticexposition: the destructionof meta-language,or at least(for it may be necessaryto resort to it provisionally) calling

it into question,is part of the theory itself: discourseon the Text should itself be only text, research, textual activity, since

the Text is that socialspacewhich leavesno language safe, outside,and no subjectof the speech-actin a situationofjudge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder: the theory of the Text can

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coincideonly with a practiceof writing. Revued’esthétique, 1971

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MythologyToday o

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Some fifteen years ago, a certain idea of contemporarymyth was proposed. This idea, which on its first appearancewas hardly developedatall(theword retainedan openlymetaphoric value), nonetheless included several theoretical articulations. 1.

Myth, close to what Durkheimian sociologycallsa “collective representation,”can be read in anonymousstatementsof the press,advertising,massconsumption;it is a socialdeterminate, a “reflection.”

2. This reflection, however, in accord with Marx’s

famousdictum, is inverted:myth consistsin turning cultureinto nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the ideological,

the historicalinto the “natural”: what is merely a product of classdivision and its moral, cultural, aestheticconsequencesis presented (stated)asa natural consequence; the quite contingent

grounds of the statementbecome,under the effectof mythic inversion,

Common

Sense, Right Reason, the Norm,

Public

Opinion, in a word, theEndoxa(thesecularfigureof theOrigin). 3. Contemporary myth is discontinuous:it is no longer stated in extended, constituted narratives, but only in “discourse”; at

a corpus of phrases(of stereotypes); most, it is a phraseology, myth disappears,but the mythicremains,all the more insidious.

4. As speech (this was, after all, the meaning

of muthos),

contemporarymyth issuesfrom a semiologywhich permitsthe “correction” of mythic inversion by decomposingthe message into two semanticsystems:a connotedsystemwhosesignifiedis ideological(and consequently“straight,”“non-inverted,”or, to be clearer, even by speakinga moral jargon, cynical),and a denoted system(the apparent literalnessof the image, of the object, of the sentence), whose function is to “naturalize”

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the

classproposition by giving it the guaranteeof the most“inno-

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From Work to Text

cent”of natures:thatof language(age-old,maternal,academic, etc.).

This washow myth today appeared,or at leastappeared to me. Has anythingchanged?Not French society,at leaston this level,for mythichistoryis on a differenttimescalefrom political history; nor the myths, nor even the analysis; there is still a

great deal of the mythicin our society: equally anonymous, slippery,fragmented,garrulous,availableboth to an ideological dismantling.No, whathaschanged criticismand to a semiological in the last fifteenyears is the scienceof reading,under whose scrutinymyth, like an animallong sincecapturedand observed, object. nonethelessbecomesa different A scienceof the signifier(even if it is stillbeing elaborated) hasin facttakenits placein the work of the period; its goal is not so much the analysisof the sign as its dislocation.With regard to myth, and though thisis stilla taskwhich remainsto be accomplished,the new semiology—orthe new mythology— can no longer (or will no longer be able to) separateso easily the signifierfrom the signified,theideologicalfrom the phraseological.Not that this distinctionis falseor ineffectual,but it has becomemythicitself:any studentcan denounce the bourgeoisor petit-bourgeoischaracterof a form (of life, of thought, of consumption);in otherwords,a mythologicalendoxahasbeen created:demystification(or demythification)has itselfbecome a discourse,a corpus of phrases,a catechisticstatement;confronting which a scienceof the signifiercan only be displaced and stop (provisionally)farther on: no longer at the (analytic) dissociationof the sign,but at itsvacillation:it is no longer the myths which must be unmasked (the endoxanow undertakes that),but the signitselfwhich mustbe perturbed: not to reveal the (latent) meaning of a statement, of a feature, of a narrative,

but to fissurethevery representationof meaning;not to change or to purify symbols,but to contestthe symbolicitself.What is happening to (mythological)semiology is a little like what happenedtopsychoanalysis: itbegan,necessarily, by establishing listsof symbols (a loosened tooth = the castratedsubject, etc.),

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Mythology Today but today, much more than interrogatingthis lexicon which, without being false,is no longer of much interest(exceptto amateursof the psychoanalyticvulgate),it examinesthe very dialecticsof the signifier;semiologybeganin the sameway by establishinga mythologicallexicon,but the taskfacingit today is rather of a syntacticalorder (which articulations,which displacements constitute the mythic fabric of a mass-consump-

tion society?);initially,we soughtthe destructionof the (ideological) signified; now we seek the destructionof the sign: “mythoclasm” is succeeded by a “semioclasm” that is much

broader and raised to a higher level. The historicalfield is therebyextended:it is no longerFrenchsociety,but far beyond it, historicallyand geographically,thewholeof Western(GrecoJudeo-Islamo-Christian) civilization, unified in one and the same

theology(essence,monotheism)and identifiedby the systemof meaning it practices,from Platoto France-Dimanche. The scienceof the signifiercontributesa secondcorrection (or a secondextension)to contemporarymythology.The world, taken obliquelyby language,is written,through and through; signs,constantlydeferringtheirfoundations,transformingtheir signifiedsinto new signifiers,quoting each other to infinity, nowhere come to a halt: writing is generalized.If society’s alienationstillcompelsus to demystifylanguages(and notably that of the myths), the means of this combat is not—is no longer—acriticaldecipherment,it is evaluation.Facedwith the world’swriting systems,thetangleof variousdiscourses(didactic, aesthetic,propagandistic, political, etc.), we must determine levelsof reification,degreesof phraseologicaldensity.Shallwe succeedin specifyinga notion which seemsto me essential:that

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Languages are more or less dense; of a language’s compactness?

an unshaksome—themost social,the most mythical—present able homogeneity (there is a power of meaning,there is a war of meanings):woven of habits,of repetitions,of stereotypes,of obligatory fragmentsand key words, each one constitutesan idiolect(a notion which twentyyearsagoI designatedaswriting); today,more than myths,it isidiolectswhichwe mustdistinguish,

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describe; mythologiesare succeededby a more formal, and thereby, I believe,more penetrating,idiolectology,whose operative conceptsare no longer sign, signifier, signified, and

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connotation, but citation, reference, stereotype. Thus, the dense

languages (such as mythic discourse) can be apprehended in

the cross fire of the trans-writingwhose still literary “text,” antidoteto myth, would occupythe pole, or rather the region— airy, light,open, spaced,decentered,noble,free—wherewriting deploysitselfagainstthe idiolect,i.e., at its limit, and combats it there. Myth in factmust be included in a generaltheory of the language of writing, of the signifier, and this theory, supported by the formulations of ethnology, psychoanalysis, semiology,and ideologicalanalysis,must extend its object to take in the sentence, or better still, to take in sentences (the plural

of the sentence);by which I mean that the mythic is present whereversentences areturned,wherestortes aretold(in everysense of theseexpressions):from interior monologueto conversation, from the newspaperarticle to the politicalspeech, from the novel (if there are any left) to the advertising image—all utterancesthatcan be included in the Lacanianconceptof the image-repertoire.

This is no more thana program,perhapsin factno more than a “desire.”Yet I believethat,evenif thenewsemiology—mainly concerned,recently,with the literarytext—isno longer applied to mythsof our timesincethe lasttextof Mythologies, in which I sketchedan initialsemioticapproachtosocialspeech,it is atleast consciousof itstask: no longer merely to reverse(or to correct)the

;

mythicmessage,puttingit right side up, with denotationat the bottomand connotationatthetop, natureon thesurfaceand class interestdeep down,but tochangethe objectitself,to engendera newobject,point of departurefor a newscience;to shift—making due allowance, of course, for differences in importance, and

accordingto Althusser’sscheme—fromFeuerbachto Marx, from the young Marx to the great Marx.

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Here is a special issue of Communications:it has not been devised

to explore a body of knowledgeor to illustratea theme; its unity, at leastits original unity, is not in its objectbut in the group of its authors: theseare all students,recentlycommitted to research;deliberatelycollectedhere is thefirstwork of young researcherssufficientlyfree to have determinedtheir research projectthemselvesand yet stillsubjectto an institution,thatof the third-cycledoctorate.What I shalldiscusshere is therefore mainly the research itself, or at least a certain research, research

stilllinked to the traditionalrealm of artsand letters.It is solely with that research that I shall be concerned. ~

On the thresholdof his work, the studentexperiencesa series of divisions. As a youngsubjecthe belongsto an economicclass defined by its unproductiveness:he is neither an owner nor a producer; he is outsideof exchange,and even, one might say, outsideof exploitation:socially,he is excludedfrom any nomsubject,he isbroughtintothe hierarchy ination. Asan intellectual of tasks,he is supposedto participatein a speculativeluxury he nonetheless cannot enjoy, for he has not yet mastered it, i.e.,

subject,he is the availabilityof communication.As a researching dedicated to the separation of discourses: on one side the discourse of scientificity(discourseof the Law), and on the other, the discourse of desire, or writing.

The task (of research) must be perceivedin desire. If this

perception does not occur, the work is morose, functional,

alienated,impelled solelyby the necessityof passingan examination, of obtaining a diploma, of insuring a career promotion.

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From Work to Text

For desire to be insinuatedinto my work, that work must be of me not by a collectivityseekingto guaranteemy demanded labor and to gain a return on the loans it grantsme, but by a living collectionof readersexpressingthe desire of the Other

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(and not the control of the Law). Now, in our society, in our

!

institutions,what is asked of the student, of the young researcher, of the intellectual worker, is never his desire; he 1is

not askedto write,he is askedto speak,to “report” (with a view to regular verifications). Here theintentionhasbeenthatthework of researchbefrom itsinceptionthe objectof a strongdemand, formulatedoutside the institution—ademand which can only be the demand for writing.Of course,only a fragmentof utopiacanbe represented in this issue,for we realizethatsocietyis not ready to concede this happinessbroadly, institutionally,to the student,and singularlyto the student“of letters”:thatit is not his competence or his future functionthatis needed,but his presentpassion.

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[t is perhaps time to dispose of a certain fiction: the one

maintainingthatresearchis reportedbut not written: here the researcheris essentiallya prospectorof raw materials,and it is on this levelthathis problemsare raised;once he has communicated his “results,” everything is solved; “formulation” is nothing more than a vaguefinal operation,rapidly performed accordingto a few techniquesof “expression”learned in secondary schooland whoseonly constraintis submissionto the code of the genre (“clarity,”suppressionof images,respectfor the lawsof argument). Yet it is unlikely that, even in the area of simpletasksof “expression,”thestudentof thesocialsciences 1sadequatelyprepared.And when the objectof researchis the Text (a word to whichwe shallreturn), the investigatoris faced with a dilemma—aformidableone: either to speakof the Text according to the conventionalcode of inauthentic writing or écrivance, 1.e., to remain prisonerof the “image-repertoire”of a scholar who seeks to be or, worse still, believes himself exterior

to the objectof his study and claims, in all innocence, in all

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Research:The Young

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assurance, to put his own language in a position of extraterri-

toriality;or elseto enterthe playof the signifier,the infinityof the speech-act,in short“to write” (whichdoesnot simplymean “to write well”), to extract the “ego” from its imaginary hull, from that scientific code which protects but also deceives, in a

word to cast the subject acrossthe blank page, not to “express”

it (nothingtodo with“subjectivity”)buttodisperseit: tooverflow the regular discourseof research.It is obviouslythis overflow, however slight, which we are allowing, in this issue of Commu-

nications,to come on stage:an overflowvariable accordingto the authors: we have not sought to reward any one kind of writing; the important thing is that at one levelor another of his work (knowledge, method, speech-act)the researcherdecides

not to be imposed upon by the Law of scientificdiscourse(the discourseof scienceis not necessarilyscience:by contestingthe scholar’sdiscourse,writing in no way doesawaywith the rules of scientific work). :‘

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Research is done in order to be published, though it is rarely

published,especiallyin itsearlyphases,whicharenot necessarily less important than its conclusion: the successof a piece of textual research—doesnot abide in its research—especially “result,” a fallaciousnotion, but in the reflexivenature of its speech-act;atevery momentof itstrajectory,a pieceof research can turn languageback upon itselfand therebyovercomethe scholar’s bad faith: in a word, displace author and reader. However, aswe know, the work of studentsis rarely published: the third-cyclethesisis in facta represseddiscourse.By pub-" lishing fragmentsof initial research,we hope to combatthat repressionand to releasenot only the author of the articlebut the magazinereader) his reader, for the reader(and specifically is also caught up in the division of specializedlanguages. Researchmust no longer be that parsimonioustaskperformed either in the researcher’s“consciousness”(a painful, autistic form of monologue) or in the impoverishedoscillationwhich makes the “director” of a research project its only reader.

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From Work to Text

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Researchmustjoin the anonymouscirculationof language,the dispersionof the Text. y .. .l

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These studiesare researchin thattheyseekto renewreading (the readingof older texts).To renewreading: not to substitute new scientificrulesfor the old constraintsof interpretation,but rather to imaginethatafreereadingmight become,finally,the norm of “literarystudies.”The freedomin questionis of course not just any freedom (freedom is in contradictionwith “just any”): the claim of an innocentfreedom revivesa memorized, stereotyped culture (the spontaneous is the immediatefield of

thealreadysaid,the déja-dit):thiswould inevitablybe thereturn of the signified. The freedom “staged”in this issue is the freedom of the signifier: the return of words, of word games and puns, of proper names, of citations,of etymologies,of reflexivitiesof discourse,of typographies,of combinativeoperations, of rejectionsof languages.This freedom mustbe a virtuosity:the kind which ultimatelypermits us to read within the support text, however ancient,the motto of all writing: it

circulates. Q

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Interdisciplinary studies,of which we hear so much, do not merelyconfront alreadyconstituteddisciplines(none of which,

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as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do

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interdisciplinarywork, it is not enough to take a “subject”(a theme) and to arrange two or three sciencesaround it. Interdisciplinarystudyconsistsin creatinga newobject,whichbelongs to no one. The Text is, I believe,one suchobject. ‘ ' The

semiotic studies undertaken

in France the last fifteen

yearshave in factstresseda new notion which must gradually be substitutedfor the notion of the work: thisis the Text. The Text—which cannot be allotted to the traditional realm of “Literature”—wastheoreticallyfounded by a certainnumber of initiatorywritings:first of all, the Text wastheory. The studies (one should like to be able to say, the testimonies) collectedhere

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Research:The Young

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correspond to that moment when theory must be fragmented for the sake of particularinvestigations.What is put forward here is the passagefrom theory to research:all thesearticles deal with a particular, contingenttext belongingto historical culture, but all are also the product of that preliminary

or of the methodsof analysiswhich have preparedit.

theory

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With regard to “letters,” reflection on research leads to the Text (or, at least, let us admit today, research is free to lead to

it): hence the Text, equallywith research,is the objectof this _ issue. The Text: let us make no mistakeabouteither this singular or this capitalletter;when we saytheText,it is not in order to divinize it, to makeit the deityof a newmystique,but to denote a mass, a fleld requiring a partitive and not a numerative expression: all that can be said of a work is thatthere is Text in it. In other words, by passingfrom textto theText, we must change numeration: on the one side, the Text is not a comput-

able object, it is a methodologicalfield in which are pursued, accordingto a movementmore “Einsteinian”than “Newtonian,” the statement and the speech-act, the matter commented on [the commenté]and the matter commenting [the commentant];on the other side, there is no necessitythat the Text be exclusively

modern: there can be Text in ancientworks; and it is precisely the presenceof thisunquantifiablegermthatmakesit necessary to disturb, to transcendthe old divisionsof Literary History;

one of the immediate,

obvious

tasks of new research is to

of writing,to explorewhat Text there proceed to such accounts

can be in Diderot,

in Chateaubriand,

in Flaubert, in Gide: this

is what many of the authors gatheredhere are doing; asone of them says, speaking implicitly in the name of severalof his comrades: “Perhaps our work merely consistsin identifying fragmentsof writing caughtup in a discoursestill guaranteed by the Father.” No betterdefinitionof what,in previouswork, is Literature,

and what is Text. In other words: how can this

pastwork stillbe read?These young researchersmustbe credited

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From Work to Text

with raising their activity to the level of a critical task: the presentevaluationof a pastculture. d > All these studies form a collectivegesture: it is the very territory of the Text which is graduallybeing drawn, colored in. Let us follow briefly, from articleto article, the collective hand which, far from writing the definitionof the Text (there is no such thing: the Text is not a concept), describes (de-scribes)

(

the practiceof writing. First of all, this, which is necessaryin order to understand and to acceptthe range of articlescollectedhere: the Text frustratesany culturaltypology:to show the limitless character of a work 1s to make it a text; even if reflection on the Text

begins with literature (i.e., with an object constitutedby the institution),the Text does not necessarilystopthere; wherever an activity of signifying is stagedaccording to the rules of combination,transformation,and displacement,there is Text: in writtenproductions,of course,but alsoin the playof images, of signs,of objects:in films,in comicstrips,in ritual objects. Then this: as deployment of the signifier, the Text often dramaticallyargueswiththe signifiedwhichtendsto recrudesce within it: if it succumbs to this recrudescence, if the signified

triumphs, the text ceasesto be Text, the stereotypewithin it becomes“truth” insteadof being the ludic objectof a second combinativeoperation. Hence,it is logicalthatthe Text engage its operator in whatwe may calla drama of writing (which we shall see analyzedhere apropos of Flaubert), or its reader in preliminarycriticalevaluation. However, the main and so to speak massive approach that

can be made to the Text consistsin exploring all its manifest signifiers: structureswhich the linguisticsof discourse can articulate:phonic configurations(puns, proper names), typographic arrangements,polysemies,enjambments,blanks, collages,associations, everythingwhichcallsintoquestionthebook’s substance,willbe recognizedhere, proposedby variousauthors, from Flaubertto Claude Simon.

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Research:The Young Last, the Text is above all (or after all) that long operation through which an author (a discoursing author) discovers (or

makesthe reader discover)the irreparability of his speechand managesto substituteit speaks for I speak.To know the imagerepertoire of expressionis to empty it out, since the imagerepertoire is lack of knowledge:severalstudies,here, attempt to evaluatethe image-repertoireof writing (apropos of Chateaubriand,

of Gide, of Michel Leiris) or the image-repertoire

of the researcherhimself (aproposof a researchon cinematographic suspense). It must not be supposedthat thesevarious “prospects”help encirclethe Text; rather, it is to expandthe Text thatthe entire issue functions. Hence, we must resisttrying to organize, to program thesestudies,whose writing remainsvery diverse (I have been reluctantto acknowledgethe necessityof “introducfor therebyI risk appearing ing” this issueof Communications, to give it a unity in which the contributorsmay not recognize themselves,and lending eachof them a voicewhich is perhaps not entirely his own: any presentation,by its intention of synthesis,is a kind of concessionto discourse).Ideally,throughout theissue,independentof whatprecedesandof whatfollows, the researchof theseyoung scholarsshouldappearboth asthe (even if they are revelationof certainstructuresof speech-acts analyzedin the simple languageof a report) and the critique (the auto-critique)of any speech-act:moreover it isjust when research manages to link its object to its discourseand to dispossessour knowledgeby the light it castson objectsnot so much unknown as unexpected—itis atjust this moment that research becomes a true interlocution, a task in behalf of others,

in a word: a socialproduction.

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1972 Communications,

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The Rustleof Language

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Speechis irreversible; that is its fatality.What has been said cannot be unsaid, exceptby adding to it: to correct, here, is, oddly

enough, to continue. In speaking,I can never erase,annul; all [ can do is say“I am erasing,annulling, correcting,”in short, speaksome more. This very singularannulation-by-additionI shallcall“stammering.”Stammeringis a messagespoiledtwice

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over: it 1s difficult to understand,

but with an effort it can be

understood all the same; it is really neither in languagenor outsideit: it 1sa noiseof languagecomparableto the knocksby which a motor lets it be known that it is not working properly;

suchis preciselythe meaningof the misfire,the auditorysignof a failure which appearsin the functioningof the object.Stammering (of the motor or of the subject) is, in short, a fear: I am

afraid the motor is going to stop. E m - The deathof the machine: it can be distressingto man, if he describes it like that of a beast (see Zola’s novel). In short,

howeverunsympatheticthe machinemay be (becauseit consti-

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tutes, in the figure of the robot, the most serious of threats: the

lossofthebody),it stillcontainsthepossibilityof a euphorictheme: its goodfunctioning;we dread the machine when it works by iself, we delight in it when it works well. Now, just as the dysfunctionsof language are in a sense summarized in an auditory sign, stammering,similarly the good functioning of the machlineis displayedin a musicalbeing: the rustle.’

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The rustleis the noise of what is working well. From which followsthis paradox: the rustledenotesa limit-noise,an impossible noise, the noise of what, functioning to perfection, has no

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noise; to rustleis to makeaudiblethevery evaporationof noise: the tenuous,

the blurred,

the tremulous

are received as the

signsof an auditory annulation. Thus, it is happy machineswhich rustle. When the erotic machine, so often imagined and describedby Sade,an “intellectual”agglomerateof bodieswhoseamoroussitesarecarefully adjusted to each other—whenthis machine startsup, by the convulsivemovementsof the participants,it tremblesand rustles:in short,i works,and it workswell.Elsewhere,whentoday’s Japanesesurrender themselvesen masse,in huge halls,to the slot-machinegame calledpachinko, thesehalls are filled with the enormous rustleof the littleballs,and this rustlesignifies thatsomething,collectively,is working: the pleasure(enigmatic for other reasons)of playing,of moving the body with exactitude. For the rustle (we see this from the Sadean example and

from theJapaneseexample)implies acommunityof bodies:in the sounds of the pleasure which is “working,” no voice is raised,

guides,or swerves,no voiceis constituted;the rustleis thevery sound of plural delectation—pluralbut never massive(the mass,

quite the contrary, hasa singlevoice,and terriblyloud). languagerustle?Speechremains,itseems, And language—can condemned to stammering;writing, to silenceand to the distinction of signs: in any case, there alwaysremains foomuch meaningfor languageto fulfill a delectationappropriateto its substance.But whatis impossibleis not inconceivable:therustle of language forms a utopia. Which utopia? That of a music of

meaning; in its utopic state,languagewould be enlarged, I to thepoint of forminga vastauditory should even saydenatured fabric in which the semanticapparatuswould be made unreal; the phonic, metric, vocalsignifierwould be deployedin all its sumptuosity,without a sign ever becomingdetachedfrom it (ever naturalizingthis pure layer of delectation),but also—and this is what is difficult—withoutmeaning being brutally dismissed, dogmatically

foreclosed, in short castrated. Rustling,

entrusted to the signifier by an unprecedented movement

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unknownto our rationaldiscourses,languagewould not thereby abandon a horizon of meaning: meaning, undivided, impenetrable, unnamable,

would however be posited in the distance

like a mirage, making the vocal exerciseinto a double landscape,

furnishedwith a “background”;but insteadof the musicof the phonemesbeing the“background”of our messages(ashappens in our poetry), meaningwould now be the vanishing point of delectation. And just as, when attributed to the machine,

the

rustleis only the noiseof an absenceof noise,in the sameway, shiftedto language,it would be thatmeaning which revealsan exemptionof meaningor—thesamething—thatnon-meaning which producesin the distancea meaninghenceforthliberated from all the aggressionsof which the sign, formed in the “sad and fiercehistoryof men,” is the Pandora’sbox. This is a utopia, no doubt about it; but utopia is often what of theavant-garde.Sothereexistshere guidestheinvestigations and there, at moments, what we might call certain experiments

in rustling: like certain productionsof post-serialmusic (it is quite significant that this music grants an extreme importance

to the voice: it is the voice it works with, seekingto denature the meaning in it, but not the auditory volume), certain radio-

phonic researches;and like the latesttextsby Pierre Guyotator

Ofgpetialess

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Moreover, we ourselves can undertake this research around the rustle, and in life, in the adventures of life; in what life

affordsus in an utterlyimpromptu manner. The other evening, watchingAntonioni’sfilm on China, I suddenlyexperienced,at theend of a sequence,the rustleof language:in a villagestreet, some children, leaning against a wall, reading aloud, each one

a differentbook to himselfbut all together;that—thatrustled in the right way, like a machine that works well; the meaning wasdoubly impenetrableto me, by my not knowing Chinese and by the blurring of these simultaneous readings; but I was

hearing, in a kind of hallucinatedperception(so intenselywas it receiving all the subtletyof the scene), I was hearing the

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music, the breath, the tension, the application,in short something like a goal. Is that all it takes—justspeakall at the same time in order

to make language rustle, in the rare fashion,

stampedwith delectation,that I have been trying to describe? No, of course not; the auditory scene requires an erotics (in the broadest sense of the term), the élan, or the discovery, or the

simple accompaniment of an emotion: precisely what was con-

tributedby the countenancesof the Chinesechildren. I imagine myselftoday somethinglike the ancientGreek as Hegeldescribeshim: he interrogated,Hegelsays,passionately, uninterruptedly,the rustleof branches,of springs,of winds,in short, the shudder

of Nature,

in order to perceive in it the

designof an intelligence.And I—it is the shudderof meaning [ interrogate,listeningto the rustleof language,thatlanguage which for me, modern man, is my Nature. .

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sansentraves(U.G.E.), 1975 Versune esthétique

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. Rhetoricalzz\nalysis ®

Literature presents itself to us as an institutionand as a work.As

an institution,it collectsall usagesand allpracticeswhichgovern the circuit of the thing written in a given society:the writer’s socialstatusand ideology, modes of circulation,conditionsof consumption,

sanctions of criticism. As a work, it is essentially

constitutedby a verbal,writtenmessageof a certaintype. It is the work-as-objectthat I wish to deal with, suggestingthat we concern ourselveswith a still little-exploredfield (though the word is very old), thatof rhetoric. The literary work includeselementswhich are not specialto literature;

I shall cite at least one of these, because the devel-

opment of masscommunicationspermitsits incontestablerecognition todayin films,in comicstrips,and perhapsin thenews item [the fait-divers], i.e., elsewhere than in the novel: this is

narrative, story,argument,whatSouriau hascalled,aproposof There existsa diegeticform common to different film, diegesis. arts,a form we are beginningto analyzetodayaccordingto new methods inspired by Propp. However, confrontingthe element of fabulationit shareswith other creations,literaturepossesses one element which defines it specifically:its language; this specificelementthe Russianformalistschoolhasalreadysought to isolate and to treat under the name of Literaturnost, “literar-

iness”; Jakobson calls it poetics;poeticsis the analysiswhich permits answeringthis question: What is it thatmakesa verbal messagea work of art? It is this specificelementwhich, for my part, I shallcall rhetoric,so asto avoid any restrictionof poetics to poetryand in order to mark our concernwith a generallevel of language common to all genres, prose and verse alike. My

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questionis whether a confrontationof societyand rhetoric is possible,and under whatconditions. For centuries—fromantiquity to the nineteenth century— rhetoric has receiveda definition which is at once functional and technical: it is an art, i.e., a set of constraints which permit

either persuasion or, subsequently,expressiveness.This declared goal evidentlymakes rhetoric into a socialinstitution, and, paradoxically,the link which unitesthe forms of language to societiesis much more immediatethanthestrictlyideological relation; in ancientGreece,rhetoric is born very specificallyin the property trialswhich followedthe exactionsof the Tyrants in fifth-centurySicily;in bourgeoissociety,the art of speaking accordingto certainrules is both a signof socialpower and an instrumentof that power; it is not insignificantthat the class which concludessecondarystudiesof the young bourgeois in Franceis calledthe classede rhétorique. However, it is not this immediate (and, indeed, quickly exhausted)relation that we shall linger over, for, as we know, if social need engenders

certain functons, these functions, once they are setin operation,

or, as we say, once they are determined, acquirean unforeseen autonomy and acquire new significations.For the functional definition of rhetoric, I shall therefore substitute an immanent,

structuraldefinition,or to be stillmore specific,an informational definition. We know thatevery message(and the literarywork is one of them) includes at least one level of expression, or level of signifiers, and one level of content, or level of signifieds; the

juncton of thesetwo levelsforms the sign (or group of signs). However, a messageconstitutedaccording to this elementary order can, by an operation of separation or amplification, becomethe simpleexpressivelevelof a secondmessage,which is of the extensivevariety;in short,the signof the firstmessage becomesthe signifierof thesecond.We are thenin the presence of twosemioticsystemsimbricatedwithin eachother in a regular fashion.Hjelmslevhascalledthesecondsystemthusconstituted connotative semiotics (in oppositionto the meta-language, in which

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the sign of the firstmessagebecomesthe signifiedand not the signifier of the secondmessage).Now, as language,literature is, from all evidence, a connotative semiotics; in a literary text,

a first systemof signification,which is language(French, for instance),servesasa simplesignifierin a secondmessage,whose signified is different from the signifiedsof the language;if 1 (Bring forward delaconversation read: Faitesavancerlescommodités message the comforts of conversation),I perceivea denotated which is the order

to move the armchairs closer, but I also

messagewhosesignifiedhereis“preciosity.” perceivea connotated In informational

terms, we shall therefore define literature as

a double system,denoted-connoted;in this double system,the manifestand specificlevel,which is thatof the signifiersof the secondsystem,will constituteRhetoric; the rhetoricalsignifiers will be the connotators. Defined in informationalterms, the literarymessagecan and exploration,withoutwhichwe mustbe subjectedto a systematic can never confront it with the Historywhich producesit, since the historical being of this messageis not only what it saysbut

alsothe way in which it is fabricated.Of course,the linguistics of connotation—whichwe cannotconfusewiththeold stylistics, for the latter,studying meansof expression,remained on the levelof speech[parole],while the former, studyingcodes,takes its place on the level of the language [langue]—isnot yet constituted;but certain indicationsof contemporarylinguists permitus to proposeatleasttwodirectionstorhetoricalanalysis. The first has been sketchedby Jakobson, who distinguishes six factorsin every message:a sender,a receiver,a contextor referent,

a contact, a code, and finally the message itself; to

eachof thesefactorscorrespondsa functionof language;every

discourse mixes most of these functions, but it receives its mark from the dominance of one function or another over the rest;

for instance,if the emphasisis put on the person emittingthe

message, the expressive or emotive function dominates; if it is

put on the receiver,it is the connotative(exhortativeor supplicative)function which prevails;if it isthe referentwhich receives

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the emphasis, the discourse is denotative (as is the case here);

if it is the contact(betweensender and receiver), the phatic functionrefersto all the signsintended to maintaincommunicationbetweenthe interlocutors;the meta-linguisticfunction, or function of elucidation,

.

accentuates recourse to the code;

last,when it is the messageitself,itsconfiguration,the palpable

aspect of its signs which are emphasized, the discourse is poetic,

)

in the broad sense of the term: this is obviously the case of

literature;we cansaythatliterature(work or text)is specifically a messagewhich putsthe emphasison itself.This definitionno doubt permits a betterunderstandingof how it comesabout that the communicativefunction does not exhaustthe literary work, but that the latter, resisting purely functional definitions,

always presents itself in a certain fashion as a tautology, since

intra-mundanefunctionsremainultimatelysubject themessage’s to its structural function.

However,

the coherence and decla-

rationof thepoeticfunctionmayvarywithHistory;and further, synchronically,thissamefunctionmay be “devoured” by other functions,aphenomenonwhichin a sensediminishesthework’s coefficientof literaryspecificity.Jakobson’sdefinitiontherefore involvesa sociologicalperspective,sinceit permitsus to evaluate both theprocessof literarylanguageand itssituationin relation

J

to non-literary languages.

Another explorationof the literary messageis possible,this time of a distributionaltype. We know thata whole portion of linguisticsis concernedtodaywith definingwords lessby their meaningthan by the syntagmaticassociations in which theycan take their place; roughly speaking, words associateamong themselvesaccording to a certain scaleof probability: dog is readily associatedwith barkbut rarely with mew,though syntacticallythere is nothing that forbids the associationof a verb and a subject;thissyntagmatic “filling”of thesignis occasionally calledcatalysis. Now, catalysishasa closerelationwith the special nature of literary language; within certain limits, which are - preciselythose to be studied, the more aberrantthe catalysis, the more patentliteraturebecomes.Of course, if we abide by .

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theliteralunits,literatureisnot atallincompatiblewitha normal catalysis;in theskys blueas an orange,no literalassociationis deviant;

but if we refer to a higher level of units, which is

preciselythat of connotators,we recognizethe catalyticdisturbancewithoutdifficulty,for it is statistically aberrantto associate bluenesswith an orange.The literarymessagecanthereforebe defined as a divergence of associationof signs (Guiraud); operationally,for instance,confrontingthe normativetasksof automatictranslation,literaturemightbe definedasthe sum of the insoluble casespresentedto the machine. We can say in of another fashion that literature is essentiallya costlysystem information.However, if literatureis uniformly luxurious, there are several luxury economies, which can vary with periods and societies; in our classical literature of the anti-précieuxgeneration,

syntagmaticassociationsremain within normal marginson the levelof denotation,and it is explicitlythe rhetoricallevelwhich supportsthe high costof the information; on the contrary,in surrealist poetry (to take two extremes),the associationsare aberrant and the information costlyon the level of the elemen-

tary units themselves.We can reasonablyhope, here again,that the distributionaldefinition of the literary messagewill cause certain links to appear betweeneach societyand the economy of information it assignsto literature. Thus, the very form of the literary messageis in a certain relationwith Historyand with society,but thisrelationis special and doesnot necessarilycoincidewith the historyand sociology of contents. The connotators form the elements of a code, and

the validityof thiscodecan be more or lesslasting;the classical code (in the broad sense) has lasted for centuries in the West,

sinceit is the samerhetoricwhich animatesan orationby Cicero or a sermon by Bossuet;but it is likelythatthiscodeunderwent a profound mutation in the second half of the nineteenth century,even if, to thisvery day, certaintraditionalwritingsare subjectto it. This mutation is doubtlessrelatedto the crisisof bourgeois consciousness;the problem, however,is not to know if the one analogically reflects the other, but if, confronting

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certainorder of phenomena, historydoes not somehowintervene to modify the rhythm of their diachrony; as a matterof fact,as soon as we deal with forms (and this is obviously the casewith the rhetoricalcode), the processesof changeare more on the order of translationthan of evolution:thereis successive exhaustionof the possiblemutations,and historyis calledupon to modify the rhythm of these mutations, not these forms themselves;thereis perhapsa certainendogenousdevelopment of the structureof the literary message,analogousto the one which governschangesof fashion. There is another way of appreciatingthe relation between rhetoricand society:by evaluatingthe degreeof “frankness”of the rhetoricalcode. It is certainthatthe literarymessageof the classicalperiod deliberatelyparaded its connotation,sincethe (whence by apprenticeship a codetransmissible figuresconstituted the numerous

treatises of the period),

and since it was not

possibleto form a recognizedmessageexceptby drawing on this code. Today, as we know, this rhetoric has exploded; but preciselyby studying its debris, its substitutes,or its lacunae, we

can doubtlessaccount for the multiplicity of writings and in our recognize,for eachof them, the significationit possesses society.We mightthusapproachquitepreciselythe problemof and the others,whosesocial the division betweengoodliterature importance is considerable,especiallyin a mass society.But here, too, we must not look for an analogicalrelationbetween a group of usages and its rhetoric; our task is rather to reconstitutea general systemof sub-codes,each of which is definedin a certainstateof societybyitsdifferences,itsdistances, and its identitieswith regard to its neighbors: elite literature and mass culture, avant-garde and tradition, constitute, formally,

different codes simultaneouslyplaced, accordingto MerleauPonty, in a “modulationof coexistence”;it is this setof simultaneouscodes,whosepluralityhasbeenrecognizedbyJakobson, which should be studied; and since a code is itself merely a certainwayof distributinga closedcollectionof signs,rhetorical analysisshould derive not from sociologystrictlyspeaking,but

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ratherfrom thatsocio-logic,or sociologyof formsofclassification alreadypostulatedby Durkheim and Mauss. Such are, summarily and abstractlypresented,the general perspectivesof rhetoricalanalysis.It is an analysiswhoseproject is not new, but to which recent developmentsof structural linguisticsand of informationtheoryaffordrenewedpossibilities of exploration;but, aboveall, it requiresof us a methodological analysisthatis perhapsnew: for the formalnatureof theobject it seeksto study (the literarymessage)obligesus to describein an immanent and exhaustive fashion the rhetorical code (or codes) before setting this code (or these codes) in relation with

the societyand the historywhich produceand consumethem. Goldmann colloquium,

1966

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Style

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and Its Image

I should like to begin with a personal consideration:for some twentyyears, my investigationshave been concernedwith literary language,withoutmy beingaltogethercomfortablein the role eitherof criticor of linguist.I shouldlike to takeadvantage of this ambiguoussituationin order to deal with an impure notion, one whichis atoncea metaphoricform and a theoretical concept.This notion is an image.I do not believe,as a matter of fact,thatscientificwork can proceedwithouta certainimage of itsobject(aswe know, nothingis more resolutelymetaphoric than the languageof mathematiciansor geographers);nor do I believethattheintellectualimage,heir of ancientPythagorean cosmogonies, at once spatial, musical, and abstract, can be

‘

divestedof a theoreticalvalue which preservesit from contingency without exaggeratedlydeflectingit toward abstraction. Hence, it is an image which I seek to question, or, more specifically,a vision:How do we seestyle?What is the imageof style which troubles me, what is the one I desire?

Simplifyinggreatly(the privilege of vision), it seemsto me that style(in the current senseof the word) has alwaysbeen part of a binary system,or, if you prefer, of a mythological paradigm of two terms; theseterms have, of course, changed namesand even content,accordingto periodsand schools.Let us considertwoof theseoppositions. The first,theoldest(it is stillwith us, atleastquite frequently in the teaching of literature), is that of Content and Form; it derives, we know, from one of the first classifications of classical

Rhetoric, the opposition betweenRes and Verba: on Res (or demonstrativematerialsof discourse)dependsInventio,or researchinto whatone can sayabouta subject(quaestio); on Verba 9o

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Style and Its I'mage

depends Elocutio(or transformationof thesematerialsinto a verbal form); this Elocutiois, roughly, our “style.”The relation of Form and Contentis phenomenological:Form is reputedto be the appearanceor garmentof Content,which is its truth or body; the metaphorsattachedto Form (to style)are therefore of a decorative order: figures, colors,nuances;or again, this relation of Form and Content is experiencedas expressiveor alethic: the writer (or the commentator)mustestablisha proper relation betweencontent (truth) and form (appearance), between message (as content) and its medium(style); between these two concentric terms (the one being insidethe other) is assumed a

reciprocal guarantee.This guaranteegivesrise to a historical problem: can Form disguiseContent,or must it be subservient to it (so that there can no longer be a “coded” Form)? It is this

argumentwhich setsin opposition,down throughthecenturies, Aristotelian (later Jesuit) rhetoric and Platonic (later Pascalian)

rhetoric. This vision subsists,despite terminologicalchange, when we considerthe textasthesuperpositionof a signifiedand a signifier, the signified then being inevitably experienced (I am

speaking here of a more or lessassumedvision) as a secret hidden behind the signifier. The second, much more recent opposition, of a more scien-

tific aspectand largely tributary to the Saussurianparadigm Langue | Parole (or Code| Message),is that of Norm and Deviance.

Styleis then seen as the exception(though coded) to a rule; it is the (individual, yet institutional)aberration of a current usage,sometimesperceivedasverbal (if we definethe norm by the spoken language),sometimesas prosaic (if we set Poetry in opposition to “something else”). Just as the opposition Form| Content implies a phenomenological vision, so the Norm| Devianceopposition implies an ultimatelymoral vision (under cover of a logic of endoxa):there is a reduction of the

systematicto the sociological(the code is what is statistically guaranteedby the greatestnumber of users)and of the socio-

logical to the normal, where social nature begins; literature, the

space of style, and becauseit is specificallythis space, then

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92 assumes a shamanic function,

which Lévi-Strauss has well de-

scribedin his Introductionto theWorkof MarcelMauss: it is the

site of (verbal) anomaly, as society establishes, recognizes, and

assumesit by honoring its writers, in the same way that the ethnic group establishesthe supernaturaiin the person of the witch doctor (the way an abscess marks the limits of a disease),

in order torecuperateit in aprocessof collectivecommunication. I should like to startfrom thesetwo visions, lessto attack ‘ them than to complicatethem. .a Let us take first the opposition

of Content and Form,

of

Signifiedand Signifier.No doubtitincludesacertain,irreducible portion of truth. Structuralanalysisof narrativein its achievementsand its promisesis wholly basedon the conviction(and the practicalproof) that we can transform a giventext into a more schematicversion, whosemeta-languageis no longer the integral languageof the original text, without changing the narrativeidentityof thistext: in order to enumeratefunctions, to reconstitutesequences,or to distributeagents—inshort, to bring to light a narrative grammar which is no longer the grammar of the vernacularof the text—wemust peel off the stylistic(or, more generally, elocutionary, “expressive”)film from anotherlayer of secondary(narrative)meaning, to which the stylisticfeatureshave no pertinence: they can be varied without affectingthe structure.That Balzac should say of a disturbing old man that he “kept upon his bluish lips a fixed

and paralyzedsmile, as implacableand jeering as the smile of a death’s-head,”has exactlythe samenarrative (or, more pre-

4 .o

cisely, semantic) function as if we were to transform the phrase

and say that the old man had something funereal and fantastic

about him (this semeis irreducible, since it is functionally necessaryto the sequence of the story).

The error, however—andit is here thatwe must modify our vision of Content and Form—wouldbe to stop “peeling oft” style prematurely; what this (possible,as we have just said) peeling off revealsis not a content, a signified, but another

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another signifer, or if we prefer a more neutral term,

another level, whichis neverthelast(for the textis alwaysarticulatedaround codeswhich it does not exhaust);signifiedsare forms, as we have known since Hjelmslev and even more clearly

from the recent hypothesesof certain psychoanalysts, anthropologists,philosophers.Recently,analyzinga taleby Balzac,I attemptedto bring to light—withoutreferenceto style,with which I wasnot concerned,and remainingwithintheboundaries of the signified—aninterplayof five differentcodes:actional, hermeneutic,

semic, cultural, and symbolic; the “citations” which

the author (or more exactly the performer of the text) extracts

from thesecodesarejuxtaposed,mixed, superimposedwithin one and thesameexpressiveunit (a singlesentence,for example, or, more generally,a “lexia,”or unit of reading),so asto form a braid, a fabric, or even (etymologically)a text.Here is an example: the sculptorSarrasineis in love with a prima donna whom he does not know to be a castrato; he abducts her, and

the apparentsoprano defendsherself:“The Italianwomanwas armed with a dagger. ‘If you comecloser,”she said, ‘I shallbe forcedto plunge thisweaponinto your heart.”” Is there,behind the statement, a signified? Not at all; the sentence is the “braid”

of several codes: a linguistic code (the French language),a rhetorical code (antonomasia,interpolationof an inquit,apostrophe), an actionalcode (the armed defenseof the victimis a unit in the sequenceRape), a hermeneuticcode (the castrato concealshis sex by feigning to defend his virtue as awoman), and a symboliccode (the knife is a symbolof castration). Hence we can no longer seethe textas the binary structure of a content and a form; the text is not double, but multiple;

in the text,there are only forms, or, more precisely,the textin its totalityis only a multiplicityof forms—without(a) content. We cansaymetaphoricallythattheliterarytextisa stereography: neither melodic nor harmonic, it is resolutely contrapuntal; it mingles voices in a volume, not in a line, not even a double one. Doubtless, among these voices (these codes, these systems, these

forms), some are more especiallyattachedto verbal substance,

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verbalplay(linguistics,rhetoric),butthisisahistoricaldistinction, usefulonly for theliteratureof theSignified(whichisin general the only literaturethat we have studied); for we need merely think of a few modern texts to see that as the (narrative, logical,

symbolic,psychological)signifiedrecedesstill further, it is not possibleto setin opposition(even with the greatestsensitivity to nuance) systemsof Form and systemsof Content: styleis a historical(and not universal)concept,whichhaspertinenceonly for certain

historic works.

Does it have, within

this older

literature, a definite function? I believe it does. The stylistic system, which is one system among others, has a function of naturalization,

or of familiarization,

or of domestication:

the

units of the codesof contentare in effectsubjectedto a rough pigeonholing(actionsare separated,characterialand symbolic notationsare disseminated,the march of truth is fragmented, retarded);

language,

in the elementary

aspects of sentence,

period, paragraph, superimposesupon this semanticdiscontinuity establishedon the level of discoursethe appearanceof continuity; for however discontinuouslanguageitselfmay be, its structureis so fixed in the experienceof each man that he recognizesit asa veritablenature:do we not speakof the “flux

{I

of speech”? What is more familiar, more obvious, more natural,

than a sentenceread? Style“overspreads”the semanticarticulationsof content;by metonymicmeans,it naturalizesthe story told, declares it innocent.

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Now let us turn to the secondopposition, thatof Norm and Deviance,whichis in effecttheoppositionof Codeand Message, sincestyle(or literaryeffect)is experiencedhere asan aberrant messagewhich “surprises” the code. Here too, we must refine our vision of the oppositionrather than destroyit. The featuresof styleare undeniablydrawn from a code, or at leastfrom a systematic space(this distinctionseemsnecessary if we wantto respectthe possibilityof a multi-code,or even the existenceof a signifierwhosespaceis governedand yetinfinite,

o S

1.e., an unsaturatable paradigm):

)

style is a distance, a difference;

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StyleandIts Image but in relation to what?The referenceis mostoften, implicitly or explicitly,to thespoken(“current,”“normal”) language.This propositionseemstomeboth excessive andinsufficient:excessive becausestylisticcodesof referenceor differenceare numerous, and the spoken language is alwaysonly one of thesecodes (which, moreover, there is no reasonto privilegeastheprinceps language,the incarnationof thefundamentalcode,theabsolute reference); insufficientbecausethe oppositionof spoken and written is never exploitedin all its depth. A word on this last point.

.

We know that the object of linguistics, what determines at once its task and its limits, is the sentence(however difficult to define):

beyond the sentence, there is no linguistics, for here

discoursebegins, and the combinativerules of sentencesare different from those of monemes;but, short of this, there is no

linguisticseither, for then we can expectto find only shapeless, incomplete,

“unworthy”

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syntagms; only the sentence, we feel,

guaranteesorganization, structure, unity. Now, the interior language(the languageof thought) is essentiallya sub-sentence language; of course, it can include complete sentences, but the

code of the genre does not require this for the successand advantageof the communication: we constantlytalk without finishingour sentences.Listentoa conversation:notehowmany sentencesthereare whosestructureisincompleteor ambiguous, how many clausesare subordinatedwithno main clauseor with no clear antecedent, how many subjects lack predicates, how

many adversativeslack correlatives,etc.To the point where it even“incomplete” isabusivetocontinuespeakingof “sentences,” or “defective”ones;betterto speak,more neutrally,of syntagms whose“congregation”remainsto be described.But if we open a book, there will not be one sentencewhich is not ended,by an overdetermination of operators—structural,rhythmic, and punctuational. Whence, by rights, two autonomouslinguistics:a linguistics of the syntagmand a linguisticsof the sentence,a linguisticsof the spoken and a linguisticsof the written. By carrying this

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distinction to its conclusions,we shall only be following the recommendationsof philosophy, which today assignsspeech and writing different ontologies; it is, philosophy says, by a paradoxicalabuse that linguisticsdeals only with the written (languagein sentences),while claimingthat the canonicalform of language is speech, in respect to which writing is only “transcription.” We lack, obviously,a grammar of the spoken language(but is this grammar possible:is it not the very notion of grammar whichwould be eliminatedby thisdivision of communication?), insofar as we have only a grammar of the sentence.This lack determinesa newdistributionoflanguages: thereare languages of the sentenceand all the other kinds. The first are marked by a constrainingcharacter,an obligatoryrubric: thecompletion of thesentence.Styleisobviouslyone of thesewrittenlanguages, and its generic feature (which attachesit to the genre of the writtenbut does not yet distinguishit from its neighbors)is its requirement to completeits sentences:by its finitude, by its “neatness,” the sentence declares itself written, en route to its

literarystate:the sentenceis already,in itself,a stylisticobject: the absenceof smudging,by which it fulfillsitself,is in a sense the first criterion of style;we see this clearlyin two properly and contour:bothare effectsof neatness, stylisticvalues:simplicity one litotic, the other rhetorical:

if this sentence of Claudel’s

(“The night is so calm it seemssalted”)is both simple and “contoured,” it is because it completes the sentence in its

necessaryand sufficientplenitude.This canbe relatedto several historicalphenomena: firstof all, a certaingnomic inheritance of the writtenlanguage(divinatorymaxims,religiousformulas, whosetypicallysententialclosureassurespolysemy);then, the humanistmyth of the living sentence,effluviumof an organic model, at once closedand generative(a myth discussedin the treatiseOn theSublime);last,the attempts—thoughas yet ineffectual,so closelyis literature,even subversiveliterature,linked to the sentence—toexplode the limits of the sentence(Mallarmé’sCoupde dés,hyper-proliferationof the Proustian sen-

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tence,destructionof the typographicsentencein modem pc )-

etry).

The sentence,in its closureand its “neatness,”seems to me then, the fundamental

determination

of writing. From which

many written codesare possible(though not yet alwaysidentified):

learned,

academic,

administrative,

Jjournalistic writing,

each describable in terms of its clientele, its lexicon, and its

syntacticalprotocols(inversions, figures,clausulae,all features marking the identityof a collectivewritingby their presenceor their absence).Among all these kinds of writing, and even before speaking of style in the individual sense in which we

ordinarily understand this word, there is literarylanguage,a truly collectivewriting whose systematicfeaturesshould be itemized (and not only its historicalfeatures,as hasbeen done hitherto): What is it, for instance,whichis permittedin a literary text but not in an academic article? Inversions,

order of com-

plements,syntacticallicense,archaisms,figures,lexicon?What we must grasp first is not the idiolectof an author but of an institution (literature).

This is not all. Literary writing must be locatednot only in relationto itsclosestneighborsbut alsoin relationto itsmodels. I mean by modelsnot sources,in the philologicalsenseof the word (let us note in passingthat the problem of sourceshas been raised almost exclusively on the level of the content), but

syntagmaticpatterns,typicalfragmentsof sentences,formulas, if you like, whose origin is not identifiable but which make up

part of the collectivememory of literature. To writeis to let them (in the sense thesemodels come to one and to transform this word has acquiredin linguistics). I shall point out, in this regard, three phenomena, taken virtually at random from a recent experiment. The first is personaltestimony: having worked for sometime on a taleby Balzac, I often catchmyself spontaneouslycarrying over into the circumstancesof daily life fragmentsof sentences,formulations spontaneouslytaken from the Balzaciantext; it is not the memorial (banal) character of the phenomenon which

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interestsme here, but the evidencethat 1 am writingdaily life (it is true, in my head) through theseformulas inherited from an anterior writing; or again, more precisely,life is the very thing which comes alreadyconstitutedas a literary writing: writing is a pastwriting. The secondphenomenon is an nascent exampleof externaltransformation:when Balzacwrites: “I was plunged into one of thoseprofound reverieswhich overcome everyone, even the frivolous, in the midst of the most tumultuous

festivities,”the sentence,if we exceptits personalmark (“7 was plunged”),is merely the transformationof a proverb: Amadst profoundreveries;in other words,theliterary festivities, tumultuous speech-actrefers,by transformation,to another syntacticstructure: thefirstcontentof the sentenceis anotherform (here, the gnomic form), and style is establishedin the effort of transfor-

mationapplied not to ideasbut to forms; it remains,of course, to identify the chief stereotypes(such as the proverb) from which literary languageis invented and generated.The third phenomenon is an exampleof internal transformation(which theauthorgeneratesfrom hisown formula): atacertainmoment of his stayat Balbec,the Proustiannarrator triesto engagethe young elevatorboy of the Grand Hétel in conversation,but the boy doesnot answerhim, Proustsays,“whetherfrom astonishment at my words, attention to his work, concern for etiquette,

hardnessof hearing, respectfor the place, fear of danger, mentaltorpor, or orders of the director”; the repetitionof the same syntacticalformula (a noun and its complement) is obviously a game, a “turn,” and style then consists in (1) trans-

forming a potentialsubordinateclauseinto a nominal syntagm (because he did nothearwellbecomeshis hardness of hearing);(2) repeating as often as possiblethis transformationalformula through differentcontents. From thesethree random and virtuallyimpromptu remarks, I should merely like to draw a working hypothesis:that we considerstylisticfeaturesastransformations, derived either from collectiveformulas (of unrecoverableorigin, literary or preliterary) or, by metaphoricinterplay, from idiolectalforms; in

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both cases, what should govern the stylistic task is the search

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for models,for patterns:sententialstructures,syntagmatic clichés, divisions and clausulae of sentences; and what should animate

this task is the conviction that styleis essentiallya citational procedure,

a body

of formulas,

a memory

(almost in the

cyberneticsenseof the word), an inheritancebasedon culture and not on expressivity.This permitssituatingthetransformation to which I allude (and consequentlythe transformationalstylistics I can desire): it certainlyhas some affinitywith transformational grammar, but it differs from it on one fundamental point (where linguistics,inevitablyimplying a certainvisionof language, once again becomes ideological): stylistic “models”

cannotbe identifiedwith“deepstructures,”withuniversalforms derived from a psychologicallogic; thesemodelsare only the depositariesof culture (even if they seemvery old); they are repetitions,not foundations;citations,not expressions;stereotypes, not archetypes.

To return to that vision of styleto which I alluded at the beginning: in my opinion, it must consisttodayin seeingstyle within the plurality of the text: a plurality of semanticlevels (codes), whose “braiding” forms the text, and a plurality of citationsdepositedin thatcodewe are calling“style”and which I should prefer to call, at leastas a firstobjectof study,literary language.The problem of stylecan only be treatedin relation to what I shall call the layeredquality of discourse; and, to continue

the alimentary

metaphor,

I shall sum up these few

remarks by sayingthat, if hitherto we have seenthe text as a fruit with its pit (an apricot, for instance),the fleshbeing the form and the pit the content,it would be betterto seeit as an onion, a superimposedconstructionof skins(of layers,oflevels, of systems) whose volume contains, finally, no heart, no core,

no secret,no irreducibleprinciple, nothingbut the very infinity of its envelopes which envelop nothing other than the totality of its surfaces. -

Bellagiocolloquium,1969

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Pax

Culturalis

To saythat there is a bourgeoisculture is wrong, becauseit is our entireculturewhichisbourgeois(and tosaythatour culture is bourgeois is a tiresome truism, one which is mouthed in all

our universities).To saythatcultureis in oppositionto nature is dubious, because we are not sure where the limits of each

are: Where is nature in man? If one is to describehimself as man, thatman must have a language,i.e., culture itself.In the biological?Today we recognizein the living organismthe same structuresasin the speakingsubject:life itselfis constructedas a language.In short, everythingis culture, from garment to book, from food to image,and cultureis everywhere,from end to end of the social scale.This culture, certainly, is a very paradoxicalobject:withoutcontours,withoutoppositionalterm, withoutremainder.

Letusevenadd, perhaps:withoutincident—oratleastwithout schism, subject to a tireless repetition.

Here, on television, an

American spy serial: cocktails on a yacht, and the characters

indulgingin a kind of worldlybanter(flirtations,double meanings, worldly interests); but thishas alreadybeenseenor said: not

only in thousandsof popular novelsand films, but in earlier works belonging to what might pass for anotherculture, in Balzac,for instance:one might supposethat the Princessde Cadignan has simply changed places,that she has left the Faubourg Saint-Germainfor theyachtof a Greek shipowner.Thus, culture is not only what returns, it is also and especiallywhat remainsin place,like an imperishablecorpse: it is a bizarre toy thatHistoryneverbreaks. A unique object, since it never setsitself in opposition to anything, an eternaldeet since it never breaks—inshort, a 100

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peaceableobject,in whosebosomeveryoneis gatheredwithout apparentconflict:then where is culture’sreflexivetask—where are its contradictions,where is its inadequacy? To answer,we must, despitethe epistemologicalparadox of the object,risk a definition, the vaguestimaginableof course: Of what?Of languages. culture is afield of dispersion. In our culture, in the Pax culturalisto which we are subject,

there is an inveteratewar of languages:our languagesexclude eachother; in a societydivided (by socialclass,money,academic origin), languageitselfdivides. What portion of languagescan [, as an intellectual, share with a salesman in the Nouvelles

Galeries? Doubtless,if we are both French, the languageof but thisisan infinitesimalshare:wecanexchange communication; pieces of information

and truisms; but the rest, i.e., the enor-

mous volume, the entire play of language?Since there is no subjectoutsidelanguage,sincelanguageis what constitutesthe subjectthrough and through, the separationof languagesis a permanent grief; and this grief, if it doesnot occuronly when we leave our “milieu” (where everyone speaksthe same language),is not only the materialcontactof others,coming from othercircles,otherprofessions,whichlaceratesus—itisprecisely that “culture” which, in good democracy,we are all supposed to share: it is preciselywhen, under the effectof apparently technical

determinations,

culture

seems unified

(an illusion

rather stupidly reproduced by the expression“massculture”) that the division of cultural languages is excruciated. Spend an

evening at your televisionset(to keep to the commonestforms effortsof generalbanaliof culture); you will receive—despite zation undertaken by the producers—severaldifferent languages;it is impossiblethatall of theselanguageswill respond not only to your desire (I use this word in its strongestsense) but even to your intellection: there is always, in culture, a share

of languagewhich the Other (henceI myself)does not understand; my neighbor is bored by this Brahms concerto, and I regard this variety sketch as vulgar and that soap opera as idiotic: boredom, vulgarity, stupidityare various namesfor the

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secessionof languages.The resultis thatthissecessionnot only separatesmen from each other, but each man, each individual

is in himself lacerated;each day in myself,there accumulate, without communicating, several isolated languages: 1 am frag-

mented,severed,scattered(whichin other circumstancespasses for the very definitionof “madness”).And, even if I manageto speak the same language all day long, how many different languagesI am compelledto receive!That of my colleagues,of my postman,of my students,of the sportscommentatoron the radio, of the classicalauthor I read in the evening: it is a linguist’sillusion to consider on equal statusthe language spoken

and the languageheard, asif theywerethe same;here we must return to the fundamentaldistinctionproposed by Jakobson between active grammar and passive grammar: the first is monotonous, the second is heteroclite—that1s the truth of cultural language; in a divided society, even if it manages to

unify its language, each man struggles against the explosionof

listeming: under coverof thattotalcultureinstitutionallyoffered to him, the schizophrenic division of the subject is imposed

upon him every day; cultureis in a sensethe pathologicalfield par excellence, in which 1s inscribed the alienationof contem-

porary man. Thus, it seems,what is soughtby each socialclassis not the possession of culture—either to obtain or to preserve it—for

culture is there,everywhereand for everyone; instead,it is the unity of language, the coincidence of speech and listening. How

then, today,in our Westernsociety,divided in itslanguagesand unifiedin itsculture,howdo thesocialclasses,theonesMarxism and sociologyhave taught us to recognize—howdo they look

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toward the language of the Other? What is the (alas, very disappointing) interlocutoryplay in which, historically, they are

involved? The bourgeoisiein principle possessesall of culture, but it has been a long time (I am speakingfor France) since it has possessedany cultural voice of its own. Sincewhen? Since its intellectuals,itswritershave dissociatedthemselvesfrom it; the

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Dreyfus Affair seems to have been, in our country, the instituting shock of this dissociation; this was, moreover, the moment when

+

appeared:the intellectualis the“clerk”who the word intellectual seeksto break with the good conscienceof his class—ifnot his classof origin (thata writer is “workingclass”changesnothing about the problem), at leasthis classof consumption. Here, today, nothing is invented: the bourgeois (owner, boss, executive,

administrator)no longeraccedesto thelanguageof intellectual, literary, artisticresearch,becausethis languagecontestshim; he resignsin favor of massculture; his children no longer read Proust, listen to Chopin, but maybe Boris Vian, pop music.

However, the intellectualwho threatenshim is no longertriumphant for that; try ashe will to posithimselfasa representative, as a procurator for the proletariat,asan oblatefor the socialist cause, his critique of bourgeoisculture can use only the old language of the bourgeoisie, which is transmittedto him by itself becomesa university teaching: the idea of contestation bourgeoisidea; thepublicof intellectualwritersmayhaveshifted (though it is certainlynot the proletariatwhich readsthem), but not the language; of course, the intelligentsiaseeksto invent nothing new languages,but these languagesremain enclosed: has changedin socialinterlocution. The proletariat(the producers)has no cultureof itsown; n so-calleddeveloped countries,its languageis thatof the petite bourgeoisie, because this is the language offered it by mass communications(popular press,radio, television):massculture is petit-bourgeois. Of the three typical classes,it is the inter-

becausethisisthecenturyof itshistorical mediateclass—perhaps promotion, which today is seeking to elaborate an original culture,

one that would

be its own: it is incontestable that

important work is being done on the level of so-calledmass culture (i.e., petit-bourgeoisculture}—whichis why it would be ridiculous to hold aloof from it. But bywhatmeansis suchwork being done? By the alreadyknownmeansof bourgeoisculture: it is by taking and degrading the models (the patterns) of bourgeois language (its narratives, its types of reasoning, its

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psychologicalvalues) that petit-bourgeoisculture createsand implantsitself.The idea of degradation may seem“moral,” the product of a bourgeois which regrets the excellenceof past culture; I am givingit, quitethecontrary,an objective,structural content: there is degradationbecausethere is no invention; modelsarerepeated on thespot,banalized, becausepetit-bourgeois culture (censoredby the state)excludeseven the contestation the intellectualcan contributeto bourgeoisculture: it is immobility, submissionto stereotypes(conversionof messagesinto stereotypes)which definessuch degradation.One can say that In petit-bourgeois culture, in massculture, it is bourgeois culture

whichreturnsto thestageof History,butasafarce(Marx’simage will be recalled).

A game of hunt-the-slipperthereby seems to govern the culturalwar: the languagesare indeed separated,like partners in the game,sittingbesideeachother; but whatis passedfrom hand to hand is alwaysthe sameobject,the sameculture: tragic immobilityof culture, dramaticseparationof languages—such is the double alienationof our society.Can we trust socialism to undo this contradiction,at once to “fluidify,” to pluralize culture, and to put an end to the war of meanings, to the exclusionof languages?Certainly; what hope elsewhere?Yet we mustnot blind ourselvesto the threatof a newenemy which lies in wait for all modern societies. Indeed, it seems that a new

historical entity has appeared, has establisheditself, and is

developing pathologically, complicating (without outdating)

Marxist analysis:this new figure is the state(here, moreover, wasthe enigmaticpoint of Marxistscience):the stateapparatus 1s tougher than revolutions—andso-calledmassculture is the direct expressionof thisstatepresence:in France,for example, the state now seeks to dissociate itself from the university,

to

turn its interest elsewhere,to concede the institution to the communistsand the protesters,for it realizesthat it is not here thata conqueringculturewill be created;but for nothing in the world will it releaseits hold of televisionor radio; by possessing thesemeansof culture,it governsrealculture,and, by governing SN

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it, makes it into us own: a culture within which must gather

together the intellectually“resigning” class(the bourgeoisie), the promotional class(the petite-bourgeoisie),and the silent class(the proletariat).Thus, we understandwhy ontheotherside, even 1f the problem of the stateis far from being settled,the People’sRepublicof China hasnamedtheradicaltransformation of society1t has undertakena “culturalrevolution.”

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The TimesLiterarySupplement,1971

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While out walkingone day in my region, which is southwestern France, a peaceable terrain of retired minor officials, I had occasion to read, within a few hundred yards, on the doors of

three villas, three different signs: ViciousDog, DangerousDog, Waichdog.This region, evidently, has a very lively sense of property. But that is not of such interestas this: thesethree expressionsconstituteone and the samemessage:Do NotEnter (or you will be bitten). In other words, linguistics,which is concernedonly with messages,could say nothing about them but what is very simple, very banal; it would by no means exhaustthe meaningof theseexpressions,for thismeaningis in theirdifference: ViciousDogis aggressive;Dangerous Dogis philanthropic; Watchdog is apparentlyobjective.In still other words, throughone and thesamemessage,weread threechoices,three commitments,three mentalities,or again, three image-repertoires,three alibisof ownership; by the languageof his sign— by whatI shouldcallhis discourse, sincethe languageis the same in the three cases—the villa’sowner is shelteredand reassured behind a certain representation, even a certain system of own-

ership: here fierce (the dog, i.e., the owner, of course, is vicious),

here protective(the dog is dangerous,the villa is armed), here finally legitimate(a dog is guarding the property, a statutory right). Thus, on thelevelof the simplestmessage(DoNotEnter), language(discourse)explodes,fragments,diverges: there is a divisionof languages,for which no simple scienceof communicationcan account;society,with itssocio-economicand neurotic structures, intervenes, constructing language like a battleground.

Of course, it is the possibilityof savmg one and the same

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thing in several ways, it is synonymy, which permits language

to divide itself up; and synonymy is a statutory,structural, “«