Bar S B R H S Barthes the Late(r) Barthes Constituting Fragmenting Subjects Author(s): Alec McHoul and David Wills Reviewed

work(s): Source: boundary 2, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1985 - Winter, 1986), pp. 261-278 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303524 . Accessed: 13/10/2012 20:44
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bar THE

b rh s

barthes

L AT E (R) BARTHES fragmenting subjects*

constituting

Alec McHoul
&

David Wills
1. Non-problematization of the subject in necrology/literary history It is a remarkablestrategy of literaryhistory that its discourse acts as a kind of policing of the dead. The concepts "author" and "oeuvre"are major agents in this. It becomes all the more remarkable when that policing is performed in relation to a set of texts some of which have themselves been concerned to problematize matters such *Acompanionto this piece, "Mouths Off", appearedin the Australian literary vol. magazineMeanjin, 43, nol 4, 1984,pp.582-83. 261

as the authorial subject and which have been arguably careful to avoid a text-by-text unity. In her introduction to the Barthes Reader,'Sontag manages just that-to stitch a common thread through the manifold texts which happen to have appeared over the signature "Roland Barthes."The principle of classification known as "the oeuvre" thus recuperates the Barthes texts for literaryhistory,precisely because they now are "the Barthes texts"; no more and no less. One topic that will dog these notes is "Did Roland Barthes go soft?", i.e., are some of the last texts (Lover's Discourse and Camera Lucida in particular)moments of literaryindulgence in which the projects of formalist semiology and deconstructionism are negated? Sontag cuts across all such possible discontinuities-for her, Barthes always was soft, the author of genius, the man of feeling and letters. The tactic is obviously one of creating a unity and, more, a unity formed around a centre, the personal author-subject. Formalism and deconstructionism, it seems, can finally be put to one side now that the body of Barthes, in which the conscious author-subject presumably resided, has been consigned. In more senses than one: there has been a failure to look more than one way. or all his contributions to the would-be science of signs and structures, Barthes's endeavour was the quintessentially literary one: the writer's organizing under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind. ("WI," viii) p. With the authorial mind firmly in place, the problem of the institutional and discursive relations between texts ("doctrinalauspices"?) can be put to one side. What matters in the end is a uniquely creative subject who existed and worked independently of discursive possibilities in order to produce a unique corpus. By these tactics, Barthes becomes a literature; literaturemarshalledoutside theory whose subject (its topic) is that very creative subject--"his own mind." Barthes's voice became steadily more intimate, his subjects more inward. An affirmation of his own idiosyncracy ... is the main theme of Roland Barthes. ("WI," xxxiv) p. This is after all the expected product when a great figure dies-some assertions about his mind, his life and times, some attempt to produce generalities about his work. And all because of an accident-the encounter of a body with a van. Why should we be interested in that? Instead we might attempt to produce a readingwhich cuts across such traditional belletristic practices; a reading which does not form things up this way. To start: it would have to reject the unity of the oeuvre-giving up the attempt to find changes, developments and perhaps even discontinuities in a set of texts simply because they are the texts signed by a particular author-subject. A topic like "discon262

tinuity in the texts of Barthes" would itself be a literarytopic concerning unity. Perhaps instead, it would be productive to look at the way in which certain textual practices (e.g., those of formalism or deconstructionism) are risked, put into hazard, by being brought up against adjacent practices, say, belletrism, representationism, aestheticism and bourgeois liberal literaryindulgence. Then we might say "incidentally, that occurs in some of the texts signed by Roland Barthes." In that case, we would not be in the business of repeating the old battles between science and art,formalism and expressionism, or analysis and appreciation.Instead we would be asking:what are these discursive forces and (by the way) do they produce some of the Barthes texts and in what measure? It is a paradox that once the author is dead enough to become the subject of a brief text called an obituary, he is more than ever recuperated as the source and origin of a volume of texts which that obituary would seek to neatly close. His work suddenly has attributed to it, with a vengeance, the coherence such readings assumed it to have all along. By the same token, the body of texts which bear his signature automatically appear within a different frame once that signature can no longer be repeated. Since the Death of the Author,the name of a text of Barthes,2it becomes difficult to operate outside of that paradox. To prevent the closure attempted by necrologies, the texts have to be somehow reanimated, but it remains difficult to reanimate the anonymous. The name has to be invoked either way.That is to say that within the terms of reference of the necrology, rereading implies some form of reanimation. A redeployment of the texts needs to be effected which escapes those terms of reference. Sontag's introductionto the Barthes Reader is probablyno more than Picard'sNouvelle surprising than Thody's "conservativeestimate,"3 critique ou nouvelle imposture,4 than any number of readings of Barthes's texts that one might like to resist. Short of truth there will only ever be (mis)-readings to compare. And since the death of the author it may well be that there are only ever necrologies in the business of writing on writing. On the other hand, it seems that necrologies, of the type which must by definition refer to the author as human subject, even if dead, in order to constitute themselves, create another paradoxwhich is their own de(con)struction. They may claim to refer to a subject which exists outside of the textual, but their very readings of that subject, of his life and times, of his kindness and humanity,are automatically textualized.They can hardlyclaim to have closed the text aroundthe author now dead when they are in the process of opening those texts to the contexts of biography,history, and so on. Rescuing the human subject only seems to protect him from textualization. In actual fact any reference to him once he is absent, is either reference to anecdote, hearsay and apocrypha, or to a text. A case in point. A necrologist, J. Gerald Kennedy,writes in the 263

Georgia Review that Barthes said in his seminar program in 1978-79, that he was writing a novel.5The present writing subject maintains that he was also at the seminar and that he distinctly heard Barthes say that he was not writing and could not write a novel. But it is there in print in the Georgia Review. It can't be doubted that it is either true or false. It can presumably be verified by references to other sets of notes (Kennedy cites his own as reference), or by listening to a recording of the seminar. Perhaps he coughed as he spoke. Any reference has to be to a remaining sign, to some sort of text. For even if he did say he was writing a novel, he also said other things. Here is the r6sum6 from a set of notes: the course is announced the previous year as being concerned with how one might go about writing a novel if one were to do so; the first lecture compares the idea with the "fantasy" he had announced as his project in LeGon,6a week later he speaks of the weakness of an organ which prevents him from writing a novel, like someone with short fingers not being able to play the piano (it is memory which he says he lacks); a week later still in introducing his studies of haiku he says he will continue as if he were going to write a novel but also refers to his commitment to the fragment and the difficulty of transition to the continuous. So, as soon as reading (be it simply listening, transcribing) is involved, it is clear that he did deliver some fiction. Besides, as long as one waits for the unpublished novel to appear,one will overlook the obvious "caractereromanesque" of Camera Lucida.It is as easy to read biography and necrology as contributing to the death of the author as to his revival.

2. The question of context in writing on texts

"Context" is itself by no means unproblematic; no less so than "author" and "oeuvre" as Derrida makes perfectly clear when he rewrites "context" as "the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of [the sign's] inscription."'7 What could be argued is that (a)some such collectivity is never absent; there is no contextlessness while (b) no particlularsuch collectivity is ever the single organizer of all possible inscriptive moments; there is no necessary contextfulness (such as "the mode of production,""the Weltanschauung,"etc). Further,context is always just that: the text(s) that go(es) with another text or texts. In this sense, we could begin to draw up some relations between the texts of Barthes (noting that this collection is itself purely heuristic); relations which display those texts' differential contextfulness. Clearly there are markeddistinctions between, say, Elements of Semiology and Lover's Discourse in this respect. In the former, the con-texts of Saussure and the formalist project are the main organizing collectivity while in the latter the literary subject of writing, the aesthetic "I"with its history of self-reflexion organizes a good deal of the text. To that extent we can distinguish between a textual production which would speak of textual production and a textual production which shows itself by indulging in the joy or pleasure of 264

literature/text/writing.What separates these contexts is their relation to power. In the former, the power of discourse is transcended/transgressed by an attempt to produce a meta-discourse. Power is denied without reflexion on the power that is denied: one simply goes ahead and forms a metadiscourse without concern for the impossible metapowerfulness that is assumed in such a project.On the other hand, the avowedly "literary"texts deliberately speak on behalf of "entry into a place that we can strictly term outside the bounds of power,"8 thereby constituting for themselves an "enormous, almost unjust, privilege" ("IL," p.458). There are two problems here. In the first case (formalism)there is the implicit assumption of transcending the level of the discursive altogether so as to produce a theory divorced from practice. Formalism, that is, runs the risk of naive theoreticism. In the second case (belles lettres) transcendence is well understood as an unattainable object. But its absence is not taken as a logical and material impossibility. Rather, belletrism seeks to appropriate transcendence, to steal that denied and illicit object for "the interrogationof [its] own pleasure"("IL," p. 458). Formalism is almost naively transcendent: it begins with the assumption of itself as the discourse of discourses. Belletrism is quite openly hedonistic-its transgression/transcendence is done openly, albeit by fiat. To that extent it displays its own impossibly free world: The forces of freedom which are literaturedepend not on the writer's civil person, nor on his political commitment-for he is, after all, only a man among others-nor do they even depend on the doctrinal content of his work, but rather on the labor of displacement he brings to bear on language. ("IL," 462) p. Formalism/belletrism is but a single division among others in that politically bizarreunit "the texts of Barthes"-but it is an importantdivision politically. For it asks the question "how does the text stand as a political practice, i.e., in relation to power?" Let it be stressed again: these discourses which we may call formalist "metalanguage" and literary "will" do not monolithically inhabit single texts; nor do they alone produce any given text. S/Z, for all its analytic precision, indulges in the pleasures of "Sarrasine," while the Lover'sDiscourse offers also a partial taxonomy of the discursive strategies open (or closed) to the lover. The point is to give a political relief map of (e.g.) the texts of Barthes-and to open up the possibility of making strategic readerly routes through them. A single choice that faces us, at a particularcrossroads (trivial as it may be) is this: should the reading/text privilege itself by standing above, outside its "object discourse" (e.g., the discourse of fashion in Elements) and so invoke an impossibly magisterial space of commentary (science?)? I.e., should it seek to be the text which over-rules, in orderto describe, the rules of discursive production?Or:should it grasp transgression at the level of discursive practice itself and run the risk

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of stepping across the fine line into bourgeois subjectivism (phenomenology?)? On the other hand, as the metaphor of trivia (three roads) implies ("IL," 467), is there a thirdway,another possible relation between p. theory and practice? Politically, this is the space that the question of context opens up.

There is a repeated explicitation in Barthes's texts of an ambiguous project. Various texts, as well as various pieces of text, might read as one or the other sides of that ambiguity, and hence Elements of Semiology might contrast with Camera Lucida and the Lover's Discourse with Mythologies. This ambiguity is explicited in Camera Lucida in terms of an alternation between two languages, "one expressive, the other critical."9 But more interesting perhaps is the extent to which this ambiguity or this alternation becomes implicated in the play of programmatization and strategy. Foraccording to the logic, perhaps the syntax, of some of Barthes's texts, and in particular after Legon, that alternation becomes translated into a generative process of the repeated erection and abandonment of the system, of a series of systems. This would seem to both invite and avoid a teleological positioning of his texts on the one hand, and a bourgeois valorization of private and individual privilege on the other. First of all this strategy refers to semiology: though it is also true that very early on I associated my investigations with the birth and development of semiotics, it is true as well that I have scarcely any claim as its representative, so inclined was I to shift its definition (almost as soon as it was formed).... ("IL," 457) p. The semiology of which the latter text is the inauguration, the official and artificial beginning, will be described as apophatic ("IL," 473), p. involving saying one thing and doing another. This matches well with the programmeof post-structuralism in s6manalyse based on Marxistdialectics, Dergeneral, witness Krist6va's rida's deconstruction or, for that matter, Deleuze's devenir minoritaire.10 The first of these is a semiotics whose dynamic ensures that it automatically involves a critique of its own premises: Semiology is thus a type of thinking wherein science sees itself (is conscious) of the fact that it is a theory. Whenever it is produced, semiology thinks its object, its apparatus, and their relation, hence thinks itself, and becomes in this bending back upon itself the theory of the science that it is. Which means that 266

semiology is each time a re-evaluation of its object and/or its models, a critique of those models ... and of itself.1 Then there is Derrida'sdouble programmeinvolvingthe reversals of existing dualisms and the development of alternative conceptual practices. The two phases must not be seen as chronological, and although the first implies an interminable analysis, without the second only an inverted hierarchy would be installed. Therefore one must proceed with a double gesture, in terms of a unity which is at one and the same time systematic and as it were of itself divided, a doubleof reversal... on the other hand ... markthe division between the inversion which brings down what governed the hierarchy,and the irruptiveemergence of a "new" concept.... If this division, this double face or double phasing, can only be inscribed within a twinpronged form of writing... it can no longer be delineated except in a textual field that I shall call grouped: at the outside it is impossible to put it into focus (to bring it to a head); a unilinear text, a punctual position, an operation signed by a single author, these are by definition incapable of practising such a spacing.2 The scandal proposed by Barthes is his relating of such a programme to a state of the subject, so that he goes on to say in Camera Lucida that he will make a heuristic principle out of his protestation of individuality or singularity, out of the realization that "the only sure thing ... in me" is a "desperate resistance to any reductive system" (CL,p.8). But,once again, this turns out to be the practice par excellence as it locates the site of a moment which activates the programbut robs that site and that moment of any priorityas origin by problematizing them with respect to the objectively verifiable. That is to say that one could not conceive of a system for verifying whether Barthes was really split or vacillating between two languages, nor whether he was essentially resistant to reductive systems; nor could one establish, outside of that vacillation and that resistance, according to what movement those two ideas interrelated. Barthes would simply be the lure of such a diff6rance.Nor could that resistance to any reductivesystem establish itself as the essential Barthesian subject position, for it involves its own contradiction to the extent that this only sure thing is a resistance to sure things.
layered writing ... on the one hand go through a phase

3. Subject position in "Lover'sDiscourse"

The subject is very explicitly framed in Lover's Discourse. 267

The title, when translated, gives priorityto the loverand anteriority to the fragments. So be it, no privilege is claimed for the original, but it does read "Fragments d'un discours amoureux," with the fragments as the first word, and the displacement of the lover into the adjectival form. Fragments of the discourse of love. There are three prefaces: 1. A justification of the text in terms of an intellectual neglect for the discourse in question23 The affirmationwhich becomes the subject of the text acts in favour of a deprivatization of that discourse. (Gregariousness is often discommended in Barthes, e.g., Legon, but here it is valorized for its role in a process of demystification.) This preface ignores therefore the indulgence which the/a body of the text would seek to defend. 2. The metalanguage (?) "How this book is constructed" (Fragments, pp. 7-12;LD,pp. 3-9) whose first paragraphrenounces the metalinguistic in favourof the intractable/untreatable."The simulation of the lover's discourse has therefore been substituted for its description, and the fundamental person of this discourse, namely the I, has been reinstated in order to put into play an enunciation ratherthan an analysis" (Fragments, p. 7, our translation). Once the I becomes an instanciation of parole, discourse (running hither and thither, figure and gesture), or at least this lover's discourse, is more like writing on the body than on the subject, readings of a text of (physical) anxiety rather than a taxonomy of private emotions. 3. The foreword: "So it is a lover who speaks and who (LD,p. 9), given a page of its own in the French (Fragments, p. 13). says": The organization of the figures themselves involves express systems of distanciation, and the second preface includes reference to Brechtian technique (LD,p. 5) with respect to the short paragraph which follows the title of each, said to be its argument, its direct speech (our term). It also mentions systems of arbitrariness in the ordering of the fragments. The coherence of each figure is broken by means of its syntagmatic divisions-numbering of sections without any logical senamely quence; and also by means of its paradigmaticself-referentiality, the identification of intertexts,whether friends, authors, or books, those references being only unsystematically reinforced by footnotes. In this regard, it seems the English takes the further liberty of omitting the tabula gratulatoria (Fragments, pp. 279-81)at the end of the text which lists, in sections numbered one to four, the names of friends referred to by initials in the text; the Goethe text; other written texts; and finally music and films. A final d6coupage operates in the index at the very end (Fragments,pp.284-287)which gives the alphabetical title of each figure, the word or phrase which appears at the top of the page for each new figure, and the number of sections within each figure to which are now given for the first time individualtitles or headings. This table is severely edited and becomes the Contents page of the English translation. Are Barthes's interruptions of the coherence of the text suffi-

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cient to counter a constitution of an inviolable human subject within the text? Do they reinforce that operation? On the other hand, isn't that subject, by virtue of being in love, subject in the text to both systematic and random fragmentation? One reads of a subject which resists that fragmentation (cf. references to writing in the figures entitled "Drame" and "Ecrire"; fear of abandoning love to the risks of textualization) the but which cannot avoid being implicated in it. This subject, in uttering, in writing the love he says cannot be written, is being more than ever confronted with "the waste (le gdchis) of language" (Fragments, p. 115, our translation).

"I want to change systems" (LD,p. 60): two readings of this at least can be made; either the "I"would move from one extant system to another, or it would undertake a transformation of extant systems: which? The question specifies two possible subject positions: the bourgeois "I" and the revolutionary "I".A good deal of the Lover's Discourse can be read as a recuperation of the former.Again, Sontag's praise for Barthes's hedonism serves to condemn him: To assume that society is ruled by monolithic ideologies and repressive mystifications is necessary to Barthes's advocacy of egoism, post-revolutionary but nevertheless antinomian: his notion that the unremittingly personal is a subversive act. This is the classic extension of the aesthete attitude, in which it becomes a politics: a politics of radical individuality. Pleasure is largely identified with unauthorized pleasure, and the right of individualassertion with the sanctity of the asocial self. In the late writings, the theme of protest against power takes the form of an increasingly private definition of experience (as fetishized involvement) and the ludic definition of thought. ("WI," xxxi) p. This is not merely bourgeois but fascist-and it is no exculpation here to simply assert that "language ... is quite simply fascist" ("IL," 461), p. for that is to give up struggle. It assumes too that the being of language is pre-knowable. The Lover'sDiscourse, as Sontag puts it, is a post-revolutionary discourse; it pretends that the revolution has already elapsed which, for the bourgeoisie, it indeed has. But more: there is the pretence that revolution is personal revolution ("Iwant to change systems"), that by changing the subject position everything changes-for me. The category of the asocial self is itself a bizarreone strategically speaking for it denies collective action (except presumably by accumulation). What is invoked here is the bourgeois ethic of freedom: I want to be free, I will be free, because I simply am free to be free. What such a

269

discourse cannot tackle is extant unfreedoms, for they are dissolved by fiat priorto this speech, as the very condition of this speech. What is effaced is a long list of conditions of possibility: power, unfreedom, society, history ... in order that a bourgeois subject may speak. The only speech that can emerge under such conditions can be obscentity: The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, "a situation experienced by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him";the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau. Is it not indecent to compare the situation of a love-sick subject to that of an inmate of Dachau? Can one of the most unimaginable insults of History be compared with a trivial,childish, sophisticated, obscure incident occurring to a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his own Image-repertoire?(LD,pp. 48-49) The question is not rhetorical. Barthes answers it. Positively! And that must separate such a discourse irremediablyfrom a liberatorypolitics. In the place of a liberatory-collective problematic, there emerges an already liberated subject. And that is precisely the point: there is no theory of the subject here as such, no formal problematization (unlike in, say, SIZ).There is simply the affirmation of a subject-a parading of a subject. Inthe Lover'sDiscourse, there is talk of an "innercompulsion" (LD, pp. 80-81), a language, a demon of discourse, that which animates. But the lover is always the one to which discourse does something. That one exists separately from discourse and is then affected by it. At least this is the subject's self-understanding-and it might be another question where Barthes is in all of this. There is a radical shift between S/Z and Lover's Discourse in which effect (subject as discursive effect) is replaced by affect (the preexistent seat of emotions). And that affect eliminates all historical and discursive specificity. "Love" (sic) constitutes "a long chain of equivalences" (LD,p. 131)linking all lovers throughout time, space and language. The differential productions of amorous discourse in particular conjunctures (e.g., the medieval, the 19th century romantic, the technological) are effaced in this move. The discourse of love, more importantly,recuperates bourgeois realism: "the hero is real (because he is created out of an absolute projective substance in which every amorous subject collects himself)" (LD,p. 219).Hence there can be an escape from "the death of classification" (LD,p. 221), a point outside semantic systems which is no more and no less than the real itself. A subject which can so operate becomes a paradigm case of literary realism. we can say that literature, whatever the school in whose name it declares itself, is absolutely,

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categorically realist: it is reality, i.e., the very spark of the real. ("IL," 463) p. This is not a point for the emergence of critique,for Barthes, but a point of celebration.

4. Punctum and subject position in "Camera Lucida"

The last paragraph of Part I of Camera Lucida multiplies the ambiguities-subjectivity being imperfect in the search for universal truth, he will descend further into himself (CL, p. 60)-until in the last line he announces the necessity of a palinode: he will have to recant. Recant on what? In practice this recanting will explain itself in terms of a search for the lost essence of his dead mother in a particular photograph, and in terms of understanding that essence, that truth, to be equivalent to one discovered through a more disinterested approach, a discovery which was in fact published in Communications in 1964 as "Rhetorique de I'image," in the same volume as "Elbments de s6miologie."14 So who is kidding whom? Would the real Roland Barthes pause from recanting and stand up? He already did. He can be positively identified in his photograph(s). Those, for instance he himself published in Roland Barthes.5 So what, one can ask, is the punctum of any photograph of Barthes? A question which is tantamountafter Ronald Barthes and after the photographs textualized therein, to asking what the point is of any text by/of Barthes. That point will be reserved. For the moment one can say that the punctum of the later texts by Barthes, that which strikes the reader, is their palinody, the way in which the subject is coextensively (like the photograph and its referent)written in and written out. The punctum as elaborated in Camera Lucida has to be the ultimate form of that dynamic, addressed as it is to a privileged system of reference. As described in Part I of that text, the punctum poses a problem in terms of its possible comparison with a simplistic and subjective model of reading. Firstly,the punctum is said to stand out from the studium, to strike a viewer who has not however sought its effect (CL, pp. 26-27). But later, in the discussion of Hine's "Idiot Children," the emergence of the punctum is said to depend on an active defence mechanism on the part of the viewer (CL,p. 51). Finally, it is given the structure of the supplement-'what I add-and what, of course is already in the image"(CL,p. 55). This ambiguity is developed in Part II as the punctum comes more explicitly to participate in the presence/absence structure of the photograph, adding to, pointing out in, that structure, the play of death--"By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence" (CL, p. 96). Hence, even in, especially in, this privileged system of reference that is photography(analogue ratherthan arbitrary relationship of signifier and signified), what stands out more than 271

anything else is the idea that the event of the text, the advent of the sign, implies absolute rupture. All representation participates henceforth in the spectral. Hence the punctum of a good numberof texts signed "Barthes", which can be read as a palinodizing subject, reads also as the death of that subject, and comes finally to participate in the same structure as the point of any text of/by Barthes, the point of any text after Barthes, the point of any text after the death of the author,namely the point that he is dead. The idea that a subject or at least a signature written "Barthes" is the punctum of the texts which bear that name, is in developed by Derrida16 his contribution to a necrology along with the idea that in Camera Lucida this enunciation operates so that a certain form of (his) death becomes the point of the text. For whereas in other texts it has been Barthes's habit-changing with fashion, like a suit of clothes1L-to play off against each other concepts which are in appearance diamterically opposed, in this last text that operation is, as it were, photographed; its realization becomes co-extensive with its referent, its explicitation co-existensive with its practice. That practice becomes glaringly,embarrassinglyobvious, and at the same time leaves documentary evidence of the moribundity of metalanguage. As soon as it [the punctum] can no longer simply be opposed to the studium although it remains distinguished from it, as soon as one can no more delineate here between two places, two contents, or two things, then this punctum cannot be entirely reduced to a concept.... This concept of a phantom is as difficult to grasp... as a phantom of a concept.... This concept of a photograph photographs [Ce concept de la photographie photographie...] all conceptual oppositions, it uncovers there a haunting link which perhaps constitutes every "logical" chain.28

What would be a simple expression of the bourgeois theory of art? Undoubtedly it would be realist. The art object would exist outside and beyond either its production or its consumption, precisely as object. Its position in the "stream of life" would be as an object given quite freely to subjective interpretation. That is, codes of production and consumption would be suspended or effaced entirely and the "viewing process" would consist in a unique subjectivity working over the reified object, thus producing an "interpretation,"a "what I alone can becomes see." In Camera Lucida this object/subject photographlpunctum: Last thing about the punctum:whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nontheless already there. To 272

Lewis Hine's retarded children, I add nothing with regard to the degenerescence of the profile:the code expresses this before I do, takes my place, does not allow me to speak; what I add-and what, of course is already in the image-is the collar, the bandage29 (CL, p. 55) The art-object is, as it were, withdrawn(albeit consciously here) from the codes of its possibility as product and consumable and replaced into an ideal space of viewing where the "I"can create a free variation, noticing what it will(s): The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah:"Technique","Reality","Reportage", etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the "Art", detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.(CL, p. 55) Outside of the code(s), in this free space, there remains a continual supplement to the power and conditions of possibility of photography, a more that is never pre-knowable, that only arises in the phenomenological conjuncture of reified image and free-ranging consciousness. It is no mere coincidence, then, that the following fragments are comparableThis is why,as soon as I reached an age which allowed me to emerge fromthe tutelage of my teachers, I abandoned the study of letters altogether, and resolving to study no other science than that which I could find within myself or else in the great book of the world,
I
. . .20

... I persisted; another louder voice urged me to dismiss such sociological commentary;looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be a primitive,without culture. So I went on, not daring to reduce the world's countless photographs, any more than to extend several of mine into Photography: in short, I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, "scientifically" alone and disarmed. (CL, p. 7) Camera Lucida is indeed a Cartesian project, an attempt to efface all learning, all "naturalinterpretations."21 Thereby a space is cleared between ego and the real in order for ego to attain to true ("direct") knowledge of its object, to see it outside any available means of seeing. Precisely this is eliminated in the Cartesian/bourgeois theory of art:meditation. And in its place is put meditation-the play of affective consciousness. This is the strategy that a liberatory discourse needs to supplant, a strategy which always works because it has it both 273

ways-subjectivism and realism.Whathas to be seen is that this is a false dichotomy; producedby bourgeoisaesthetics preciselyin one and orderfor it to be able to delimitthe entiredomainof "art" to claim both outposts as its own: The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was was one already when I asserted thatthe Photograph an image withouta code-even if, obviously,certain codes do inflectour readingof it-the realistsdo not but take the photograph a "copy" reality, for an for of a emanation past reality: magic,notan art.(CL, 88) of p. A subtle realism,then: one that adds a realistversionof historyto a but realistversionof art,therebyextendingit empirically leavingit just as theoreticallyand strategicallyfrozen as before.(It is easy to be in remindedof LukAcs this respect.) subtle that reading Whywoulda text wish to makeanalytically of artwhichalreadydominatesby virtueof its entireinfusioninto the -rather than, say, a scientificstream of life? Only an aristocratic distaste for common sense could be at workhere. 5. The risk of writing literature is To"writeliterature" to repeatthe discourses of the literary whichhavetheirown quitespecific conditionsof possibilityas technihas ques and institutions. Davies notes that the term "literature" the severalcrises of meaninghistorically,22 most criticalbeundergone ing that whichcan be dated to the 1860sand 70s. He cites the following OEDentry: as productions a whole;the bodyof writings Literary or or ina particular country period, the world produced in general.Now also in a more restrictedsense, applied to writingwhich has claim to considerationon the groundof beautyof formor emotionaleffect.23 new restrictedsense has now become a dominantone This relatively withthe emergenceof the bourgeoisconception and is co-terminous of art and the individual. To"writeliterature" underthese presentconditions,to suris, to render a discourse of formaland emotionaleffectivity,i.e.,affectivity. It is to excise the political(no matterhow much the politicalmay to be its topic):and particularly excise the politics of literature. underthese conditions is preciselyto Forto "writeliterature" the clause "underthese conditions"and to assume that the forget a always was and will be irremediably matterof formaland literary emotive beauty. To "write literature" therefore,to indulge. "Inis, 274

dulgence" works here in both senses: in the sense of excessive gratification and in the sense of an exemption from strictures or a magically granted freedom. So we might ask: does Barthes "write literature"in, for example, Camera Lucidaand Lover'sDiscourse? CertainlySontag would unequivocally recuperate Barthes for the domain of literature.What is in play here is something like the extension of the "literaryideology,"the mistaken assumption that the literaryis not the effect of a training in certain technical and institutional practices, not the reproduction of a set of apparatuses for reading, but ratherthe emotional surrender to the "work"(ha!) which induces a response in those privileged souls who are simply pre-disposed to "the beautiful." only they were literally (If pre-disposed.) To ask whether or not Barthes "writes literature" is to ask whether or not the Barthes texts have been read in that latter way and whether or not that is or is becoming the dominant mode of "reading Barthes." And that is a matter in turn of a struggle between distinct readings. What it is better to say is that Barthes risks writingliteraturei.e., that there is a deliberate casting of the die, a demand made by the texts that they be permitted to be recuperated by literaryideology. That risk is continually run and, to display it as risk, the possibility of the non-literary (e.g., the possibility of formalism and analysis) must be continually run up against. It too must be "present"-the point is a wellknown Saussurian one after all. The two discourses--inviting two readings-must be set in play with or against one another. Thus, in Lover'sDiscourse, the lover's indulgent fantasies are classified into a structuraltaxonomy of amorous discourse. In CameraLucida,the unfettered ego ranges from photographto photographalmost wilfullydisplacing the possible codes of reading as it goes. The formal codes are not so much absent from the texts (i.e.,unmentioned);they are placed there in order to be abnegated. But they are present-so that one reading of Camera would produce it as a text where the struggle for the literary (or indeed against the literary)is seen in process. And that is the nature of the risk-the hazard of being swallowed up in the leviathan of "literature." There can therefore be no final verdict. What is (to count as) literarydepends very much on what is constituted as literary:today a It typographical error,tomorrow a work of art.24 has nothing to do with "what is in the text itself." The very concept of "in the text itself" is one produced by literaryideology. Another possibility is cancellationthe literaryand the analytic efface one another; rather in the way that the various accolades surrounding Roland Barthes cancel each other out: "Semiologist and structualist"/"championof the Noveau Roman"; "critic of bourgeois myths"/"moralist and hedonist"; "the one who startles and outrages"/"the would-be scientist."25Looking both ways would then itself lead to another kind of absence.

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A numberof Barthes'stexts treat the problematicof textual of Palinode apophasis,recantand studies intermsof the matter writing. havealready been mentionedas figuresof that relationing as erasure, ship. They can be compared with Genette's palimpsest,26 just as Barthes'sdiscussion of rhetoriccan be comparedwith the idea that withits objectwhich as evokesa relation criticism, writing uponwriting, In is analogousto thatbetweenthe literal the figurative. the essays and of is of the fifties, writingas a problematic the literary discussed in In a termsof the nouveau writing roman.7 S/Zthereis attempted readerly said to call forthanothersuch text. a of As soon as Writing DegreeZero, critique bourgeoisideology of and a rewriting literary historygo handin hand.Theterm"writing" comes then as (6criture), it compareswitha termsuch as "literature," of and to involvea reassessment both of the parameters the literary conBarthes's most important of the status of criticalanalysis.Perhaps to tribution that reassessment, certainlythat to which he gave much of attention,is the revalorization the essay, reducedin latertexts to the that lecture" (1982) the fragment Again,it is inthe "Inaugural fragment. of as is recommended a strategy,in spite of the ambiguity the operation it sets in play: I must admit I have producedonly essays, an am("IL," biguousgenreinwhichanalysisvies withwriting. p. 457) is Fragmentation proposedinthe finalpageof thataddressas a counterand tactic to the ruses of discursivepowerformations, suggests the as recognitionof rupture constitutiveof languageand writingwhich informsthe grammatological project:
And I am increasingly convinced ... that the funof a readerly text. In Pleasure of the Text,the texte de jouissance is

of damental operation this looseningmethodis, if one writes, fragmentation.... ("IL," 476.) p.

in literature the case Hence in the first place,the riskof writing of Barthes'stexts is the riskof ambiguitywhich arises as a resultof as a lackof cleardefinitionbetweendifferenttypes of writing; a result of of the contamination literature criticismwhich poses as writing by thus the riskof reading and which is other thanderivative parasitical; withoutits also beingreadas a noun as adjective "writing" a participial in appositionto "literature." is But the other risk of writingliterature withouta doubt that the impliedbythe active sense of that participle, fact of its being conleccerned with enunciationas Barthesdiscusses in the "Inaugural ture"and again in Lover's Discourse,which in turnimpliesthe playof a subject in that process. 276

tion exposes the place and energy of the subject, its lack even (which is not the same as its absence)... it assumes the task of giving utterance to a subject which is at the same time insistent and unidentifiable... 28 The question is whether that subject is seen in play as effect of discursive formations, or whether it is given a pre-ordainedform outside enunciation; and whether the choice of the literary text as privileged site for the exploration of that enunciative process is a poor choice, or one which on the contrary allows for greater problematization. That is the risk (l'enjeu), the gamble, the level of the stakes. Whether the matter remains, in Barthes's texts, in a state of play (en jeu), or betrays a bluff that hasn't paid off, that is the question. A good question and a good subject for a later Barthes paper. James Cook University NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself:On RolandBarthes"in A BarthesReader,ed. Susan Sontag (London:Cape, 1982), pp. vii-xxxvi(hereafter cited as "WI"). Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image-Music-Text, Stephen in ed. Heath (New York:Hill & Wang, 1977). Estimate(London: PhilipThody,RolandBarthes:A Conservative Macmillan, 1977). RaymondPicard,Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (Paris:Pauvert,1965). J. Gerald Kennedy,"Roland Barthes: Autobiography,and the End of Writing," Georgia Review 35 (1981). Roland Barthes, Legon:legon inauguralede la chaire de s6miologie litt6rairedu collbge de France, prononc6e le 7 janvier 1977 (Paris:Seuil, 1978) Jacques Derrida,"Signature Event Context,"Glyph 1 (1977),182. Roland Barthes, "InauguralLecture,Coll6ge de France,"in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Cape, 1982),p. 458 (hereaftercited in the text as "IL"). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,trans. Richard Howard(Hill & Wang, 1981),p. 8 (hereafter cited in the text as CL). Gille Deleuze &FdlixGuattari, MillePlateaux:Capitalismeet schizophr6nie(Paris: Minuit, 1980), pp. 284-380. Julia Krist6va,"LaS6miologie: science et/ou critique de la science." in Th6orie d'ensemble, ed. TelQuel (Collectif)(Paris:Seuil, 1968),pp. 85-86.Ourtranslation, her emphasis. Jacques Derrida,Positions (Paris:Minuit,1972), pp. 56-58. Our translation, his emphasis.

in writing it [knowledge] is an enunciation ... enuncia-

12

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Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 5 (hereafter cited in the text as Fragments). See also: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. RichardHoward(London:Cape, 1979),p. 1 (hereaftercited in the text as LD). Roland Barthes, "il6ments de s6miologie," Communications 4 (1964),91-135; and "Rh6toriquede I'image,"Communications 4 (1964),40-51. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. RichardHoward(New York: &Wang, Hill 1977). Jacques Derrida,"Les morts de Roland Barthes,"Po6tique 47 (1981),269-292. Derrida,"Les morts de Roland Barthes,"p. 273. Derrida"Les Morts de Roland Barthes,"p. 274. Our translation. The photo by Lewis Hine is to be found in Camera Lucinda, p. 50. Ren6 Descartes, Discourse on MethodlThe Meditations,trans. F E.Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 33. Paul Feyerabend,Against Method (London:New Left Books, 1975). Red Letters 7 (n.d.),4-15. Tony Davies, "Education, Ideology and Literature," Davies, "Education,"p. 5. Southern See lan Hunter,"TheConcept of Context and the Problemof Reading," Review 15 (1982),80-91. See Jonathon Culler,Roland Barthes (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1983), blurb. the G6raldGenette, Figures III(Paris: Seuil, 1969).See particularly paper"Raisons de la critique pure,"pp. 7-22. See Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London:Elek, 1972). Roland Barthes, Legon, p. 20. Our translation.

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