User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/from work to text

From Work to Text > Roland Barthes

[Rptd. in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979), 73-81.]

All notes here (except 1-2 remarks) are simply from the text itself. I could never reformulate better than it is already done.

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Signifier / Signified

The signifier has no meaning in itself, it is simply a sign, a way to 'signify' something. A word is simply an agglomeration of letters, which do not have meaning in themselves.

The signified refers to the concept that takes form in one's mind. It is the actual idea referred to, the meaning that we derive from the signifier. Everyone has different signified concepts as they are formed subjectively in our minds, although these can be trained with habit.

• Interdisciplinary activity, valued today as an important aspect of research, cannot be accomplished by simple confrontations between various specialized branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is not a peaceful operation: it begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down--a process made more violent, perhaps, by the jolts of fashion--to the benefit of a new object and a new language, neither of which is in the domain of those branches of knowledge that one calmly sought to confront.

• 1) The Text must not be thought of as a defined object. (While the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only as discourse)

• 2) Similarly, the Text does not come to a stop with (good) literature; it cannot be apprehended as part of a hierarchy or even a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force with regard to old classifications

• 3) Whereas the Text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign, the work closes itself on a signified.

• 4) The Text is plural. This does not mean just that is has several meanings, but rather that it achieves plurality of meaning, an irreducible plurality. The Text is not coexistence of meanings but passage, traversal; thus it answers not to an interpretation, liberal though it may be, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The Text's plurality does not depend on the ambiguity of its contents, but rather on what could be called the stereographic plurality of the signifiers that weave it (etymologically the text is a cloth; textus, from which text derives, means "woven")

• 5) The work is caught up in a process of filiation. [...] The Text, on the other hand, is read without the father's signature.

• 6) The work is ordinarily an object of consumption. [...] the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least to lessen) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the reader's projection into the work, but by linking the two together in a single signifying process [pratique signifiante] (collapse of the reader/author!)

• In fact, reading in the sense of consuming is not playing with the text. Here "playing" must be understood in all its polysemy. The text itself plays (like a door on its hinges, like a device in which there is some "play"); and the reader himself plays twice over: playing the Text as one plays a game, he searches for a practice that will re-produce the Text; but, to keep that practice from being reduced to a passive, inner mimesis (the Text being precisely what resists such a reduction), he also plays the Text in the musical sense of the term.

- (Great analogy here to understand the collapse of the author/reader again. When one practices a musical instrument, he 'plays' the music, but is also listening. Listening could be compared to reading a text (in opposition to consuming) and the playing comes as the author and 'player' come together in sound.)

• 7) This suggests one final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know if a hedonistic aesthetic ever existed, but there certainly exists a pleasure associated with the work (at least with certain works). I can enjoy reading and rereading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, and even--why not?--Alexandre Dumas; but this pleasure, as keen as it may be and even if disengaged from all prejudice, remains partly (unless there has been an exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption.