Rykalski, W.

(2011)

Barthes S/Z

The Voice of the Reader: the Entanglement of the Reader and the Text

From S/Z LXIV The Voice of the Reader

"What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy,
to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interest ...
writing is ... specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader
speaks."

The involvement of the reader in the text (their interpellation perhaps) is a

significant problem as this entanglement of us and the text tends to either render
the text a narcissistic field (a mirror in which we read only ourselves) or obscures
the discursive regimes that constructed the text by rendering them seemingly
subject (or submissive) to our reading. We must be alive to our discursive
entanglement with the text if we are to avoid both traps and build for ourselves an
understanding of the text.

S/Z (I Evaluation) p3

"... the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a
consumer, but a producer of the text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless
divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and
its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and reader. The
reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness - he is intransitive; he is, in short,
serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of
the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor
freedom to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum."
Barthes' focus on the active reader - the reader as producer (as 'writer') - points to
the role of the disciplinary institutions of capital in cultural life and nexus of forces
brought to bear on 'readers' to ensure the limitation of our 'construction of meaning'
to pre-determined channels.

S/Z p5 II Interpretation - Plural

"Here, we require a second operation, consequent upon the evaluation which has
separated the text, more delicate than that evaluation, based upon the
appreciation of a certain quantity - the more or less each text can mobilize. This
new operation is interpretation (in the Nietzschean sense of the word). To interpret
a text is not to give it (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the
contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it."
This insistence on the plural (on the '&' over and against the 'or') is the very
presence of society (of people, of us). Society (interaction, power) is plural, culture

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(both objects and concepts) is plural, discourse is plural & all because we are
plural. This insistence on the '&' is the mark of thinking about us and is to be found
emerging in all 'disciplines' after the spark of The Genealogy of Morals. We must
as a matter of urgency remove the 'or' from the field of analysis-interpretation.

"the gradual analysis"

The first necessity of all work of analysis (of the self, of the text, of the social,
cultural or discursive) is the rejection of programme. The pre-ordained schemas
that so much analysis proceeds from are just the long-winded projection of the self
with the intent of obscuring the ostensible object of study. "... the step-by-step
commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids
structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which
would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of
assembling it."
S/Z p13

S/Z 465
"... the (realistic) discourse adheres mythically to an expressive function: it
pretends to believe in the prior existence of a referent (a reality) that it must
register, copy, communicate ..."
This short phrase from S/Z contains everything that History ought to be worried
about but wilfully ignores.

S/Z LXXVI Character and Discourse

Barthes draws a distinction between two functions of the realistic. First, the
realistic view of character in which we (the reader) invest characters with more
than just a paper-being and treat them as people with a 'psychology' and a life
beyond the page. Second, the realistic view of discourse in which we acknowledge
the text and its narrative as technologies with specific modes of functioning,
specific systems of effects, and specific durations and courses.
However, Barthes is keen to point out that this distinction is not a dichotomy.
Whereas it may seem that the two readings (which we might relate to the
suspension or not of disbelief) are separate an opposed they are not.

"From a critical point of view, therefore, it is as wrong to suppress the character as

it is to take him off the page in order to turn him into a psychological character
(endowed with possible motives): the character and the discourse are each other's
accomplices: the discourse creates in the character its own accomplice ... Such is
discourse: if it creates characters, it is not to make them play among themselves
before us but to play with them ... [in] the uninterrupted exchange of codes: the
characters are types of discourse and, conversely, the discourse is a character like
the others." S/Z LXXVI Character and Discourse

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Characters are paper-beings and do not posses a 'psychology' but the do have a
significance and a function in the discourse that we must be alive too. We must
treat the characters of a text with a double-caution: we must not dismiss them as
merely textual and we must not elevate them out of the text. To do either is to fail
to consider what it is the characters are doing in our world, the world beyond the
text, what effect they have on us.

The Surface of Truth

We are trained into the acceptance of their being something behind, beyond or
below the surface of things. We are actively schooled in the belief that the truth is
'behind the curtain' not because this is the case but because it suits the form of our
culture (and thus the 
structures of power in our society) for us to believe this.
Barthes showed (in The Reality Effect and elsewhere - e.g. S/Z LIV
Behind, Beyond) that the realistic was an aspect of bourgeois ideology. That is to
say (following Benjamin) that the realistic is the expression in culture of bourgeois
domination of society through their control of its resources. It is not the only such
expression but its effect on what we take to be true is the most dramatic.

The Force of Meaning

Barthes was concerned with the role of power in narrative and meaning. In His
work there is an effort to force us to recognise the dependency of text on power in
the world.
"Thereby appears the nature of meaning: it is a force which attempts to subjugate
other forces, other meanings, other languages. The force of meaning depends on
its degree of systemization: the strongest 
meaning is the one whose systemization
includes a large number of elements, to the point where it appear to include
everything noteworthy in the world..." 
 S/Z LXV The "Scene"
This systemization of meaning (the epistem of Foucault?) is both the effect of and
a mode of action of the system of power (of relations of power) in society finding
their expression in culture in the text. From S/Z LVI The Tree:
"... for meaning is a force: to name is to subject, and the more generic the
nomination, the stronger the subjection."
Discourse is power (it is an action-upon-the-action-of-others) and that power can
be a violence. Discourse is the most projectional of all tools and thus is a weapon.
It has both edges: of destruction and construction.

Irony, Meaning, Capital (S/Z XXI).

Section (element? It is difficult to know what to call the longer passages of writing
amidst the 'starred text' of S/Z) XXI of S/Z is worthy of close attention (of re-
reading as Barthes called for):

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"Stated by the discourse itself, the ironic code is, in principle, an explicit quotation
of what someone has said; however, irony acts as a signpost, and thereby
destroys the multivalence we might expect from a quoted discourse. A multivalent
text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true
and false, if it fails to attribute quotations (even when seeking to discredit them) to
explicit authorities, if it flouts all respect for origin, paternity, propriety, if it destroys
the voice which could give the text its ("organic") unity, in short, if it coldly and
fraudulently abolishes quotation marks which must, as we say, in all honesty,
enclose a quotation and juridically distribute the ownership of the sentences to
their respective proprietors, like subdivisions of a field. For multivalence
(contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership. The wall of voices must be
passed through to reach the writing: this latter eschews any designation of
ownership and thus can never be ironic; or, at least, its irony is never certain (an
uncertainty which marks several great texts: Sade, Fourier, Flaubert). Employed in
behalf of a subject that puts its imaginary elements at the distance it pretends to
take with regard to the language of others, thereby making itself even more
securely a subject of the discourse, parody, or irony at work, is always classic
language. What could a parody be that did not advertise itself as such? This is the
problem facing modern writing: how breach the wall of utterance, the wall of origin,
the wall of ownership?"

The nature of the ironic is, first, to advertise itself as such - to proclaim 'I am irony'
- and thus to guide our reading of the text. Irony can, therefore, be seen as a
strategy for the control of meaning (an 'encoding' to adopt Hall's terminology).
Second, the nature of irony is to advertise (disseminate the marks/signs of
ownership) and thus replicate the social-conditions of capitalism within the text and
in the reading (irony is, therefore, the main product of Benjamin's Author as
Producer and we should not be surprised that late-capitalist-culture is saturated
with it). 
There is in this a warning about the role of inter- & hyper-textuality in the
texts of late-capitalist-society. They are not just the rhetorical forms of our cyber-
capitalist society but constructs of it that emerge from a society we do not have the
means to control. In effect they are imposed on us from above (the 'commanding-
heights' of capital) and our use of them is collaboration with capital as much as it
could ever be resistance (in Foucault or Meinhoff's senses).

The Poverty of the Code of Culture is the Impoverishment of the Commodity.

S/Z LXXXVII The Voice of Science
S/Z is typically remembered for its discussion of codes and voices of narrative but
these are merely means of trying to unravel the mechanism of production of the
text in & by society. Barthes offers us the codes of this text, of Sarrasine, and not
of all texts because the modes of production of culture are so messy, so massive,
so situated that it is not possible to enumerate them all. What is essential is to
acknowledge the system of production and the structuring of that system of

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cultural production by the action of power. Indeed, following Benjamin in The

Author as Producer, we can see Barthes' gradual unravelling of S/Z as an
examination of where the writer stands in their relations of production.

It is this focus on the system of production of the text by society (by an 'art world' in
Becker's sense) that pushes S/Z away from structuralism & into the post-
structuralist camp (but only to effect a greater engagement with the critique of
capital: post-structuralism, and it's monster child deconstruction, is not a retreat
into the text as some of the current crop of object-fetishist claim). The codes are
the functioning of society on the text and are not part of a system of universals of
human culture (although this remains the greatest lesson of structuralism and we
would be unwise to dismiss it). The hermeneutic & proairetic codes do seem to
posses a structural applicability, what narrative lacks plot, but the other codes of
the S in S/Z are more specifically situated and are only expressions of a more
general, more structural, idea. Even the two more universal codes are dependent
on the particular text concerned and must end with the narrative (cf S/Z LXXXVI).

The production of the text by codes is the point at issue not the universality or
otherwise of the codes in question. The text as culture is the product of society and
its networks of interactions and the codes of a text are just the particular
productive forces of society used in the construction of that text. As such the codes
are the functioning of society expressed in the text and it is from this that they
attain their seeming universality. The cultural code (the voice of science) is the
weft of intertextuality and cultural reference of the text & the essential point for
Barthes is the poverty of this thread of reference. Barthes shows that the extent of
other works necessary to engage with the cultural code of Sarrasine is minuscule:
"the School Manual". Here the cultural code "generally corresponds to the set of
seven or eight handbooks accessible to a diligent student in the classical
bourgeois educational system" and is not a genuine engagement with a much
wider set of cultural fields. The purpose of this limited and weak engagement with
the rest of bourgeois culture (note, not the whole of culture the School Manual is
mechanism of exclusion) apart from being "a basis for reasoning or to lend its
written authority to emotions" is to replicate the caste function of that very
education.

Kaster and Heather have shown the cultural poverty of Late Roman education and
the caste function of this self-imposed cultural limitation and Bourdieu
demonstrated the same thing for late/industrial society more generally in
Distinction. The culture of the dominant has to be accessible to the members of
that group no matter how dim they are or they will not be able to mobilise the
necessary cultural capital to acceptably retain their position in that dominant social
faction. Capitalist systems of education replicate capitalism and one aspect of that
replication is the development of replacement members of the bourgeoisie who
must be trained & coached into the necessary cultural capital. So one of the
means of production of the text is the very system of education it then becomes an
object of and because all works of bourgeois culture are produced from the same
system of education (to differing degrees of elaboration: cf this text before you)

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any text which adheres to these strict limits will also find a willing audience for it's
caste function and any text that does not will (following Howie Becker) have great
difficulty finding or will never find an audience.

This is why Barthes dismisses any "critique of the references" as having "never
been tenable except through trickery" for "how can one code [of references; ours
perhaps] be superior to another without abusively closing off the plurality of
codes?". This 'imperialism' of language is a force of exclusion but it is a force in
society not in the text. Indicating the framework of intertexts is merely pointing
towards the machine on which the text was woven and not towards the networks
of relations of power that caused this creation. In this sense intertextuality is the
incorporation of the commodity fetish into the text because it replaces the
relationship of person-with-person (the social relationship) with that of person-with-
commodity: the relationship of person-with-text-as-commodity. The explosion of
intertextuality into culture in the late 20th century is an expression of late-
capitalism as surely a the explosion of realism into culture in the 19th century was
the expression of high-capitalism (cf The Reality Effect).

S/Z LXXVII The Readerly II: Determined/ Determinant

"... the law of solidarity which governs the readerly: everything holds together,
everything must hold together as well as possible."
The texts of bourgeois culture cannot be incomplete or undetermined. To violate
this law is to acknowledge the pseudo-plenitude of the whole society not just of the
text or narrative system concerned
"The moral law, the law of value of the readerly, is to fill in the chains of causality
for thus each determinant must be, insofar as possible, determined, so that every
notation is intermediary, doubly oriented, caught up in an ultimate progression.."
This necessity of causal completeness, which leads to the narrativisation of
explanation and understanding, is not a function of narrative but of the use
narrative is put to by the dominant part of society in the authorised culture of that
society. The social space from which this need for causal completeness emerges
is the abode of the dominant part of society and the presence of this mode of
thought is a sign of the presence of the dominant social group. It is for this reason
that so much analysis of life in society ( e.g. in academe) rejects the discontinuous,
fragmentary, parataxic, and the anti-programmatic. Such approaches are an
affront to their dominion.
"This is the narrative fabric: seemingly subject to the discontinuity of messages,
each of which, when it comes into play, is received as a useless supplement
(whose very gratuitousness serves to authenticate the fiction by what we have
called the reality effect), but is in fact saturated with pseudo-logical links, relays,
doubly oriented terms: in short, it is calculation which effects the plenitude of this
literature: here dissemination is not the random scattering of meaning towards the
infinity of the language but a simple - temporary - suspension of affinitive, already
magnetized elements, before they ate summoned together to take their place,

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economically, in the same package."

It is both too simple and too complex to say that narrative is a commodity and thus
participates in the system of obfuscation of the commodity-fetish. Too simple
because, as discourse, narrative is entangled with the self and the psychological.
Too complex because, as an element of the system of social ordering &
domination, narrative is a more basic than the commodity.

cacography
From S/Z LVII The Lines of Destination:
"... readerly writing stages a certain "noise", it is the writing of noise, of impure
communication; but this noise is not confused, massive, unnameable; it is a clear
noise made up of connections, not superpositions: it is of a distinct "cacography"".

The staging of the polysemous by the text directs us to the anarchy (not chaos) of
meaning which is the true state of language and our relations with that anarchy.
How do we respond: with a logo-fascism that tidies, straightens, governs, & rules
language or by embracing the mess?

The Readerly: 'a certain bravery'.

"In other words, the discourse scrupulously keeps within a circle of solidarities, and
this circle, in which "everything holds together", is that of the readerly. As we might
expect, the readerly is controlled by the principle of non-contradiction, but by
multiplying solidarities, by stressing at every opportunity the compatible nature of
circumstances, by attaching narrated events together with a kind of logical "paste",
the discourse carries this principle to the point of obsession: it assumes the careful
and suspicious mien of an individual afraid of being caught in some flagrant
contradiction; it is always on the look-out and always, just in case, preparing it
defence against the enemy that may force it to acknowledge the scandal of some
illogicality, some disturbance of "common sense". The solidarity of notations thus
appears to be a kind of defensive weapon, it says in its way that meaning is a
force, that it is devised within an economy of forces." From Barthes S/Z LXVI The
Readerly I: "Everything Holds Together"
Barthes captures the point of the rhetorics of non-contradiction that discourses
adhere to quite clearly. In order for the discourse to succeed within the field of
social-interaction it is part of it must engage with power (Foucault's power: action-
upon-the-action-of-others) and it must be considered by its readers (its victims) to
be one of those things that can and does act in that way. In ordered to be treated
in the way it must appear within the magic-circle of the genres. The lesson for the
ordered discourses of the disciplines is equally clear. The quest for coherence in a
work, the desire for logic, the horror of self-contradiction, and the disciplinary
requirements of order in words & writing are not parts of the movement of the will
to knowledge but rather an expression of the will to power. Only if we give up on

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order, coherence and logic. Only if we embraces mess, contradiction, anarchy,

and paradox will we begin to move from power to knowledge.

The Right to the Anti-Euphemistic Reading

S/Z LIII Euphemism
Baarthes shows us that we have a right to read texts against their euphemisticality
and prefer our version to that seemingly of the text;
"... to subsitute an erotic story for the euphemistic version ... is based not on a
lexicon of symbols but on a systematic cohesion, a congruence of relationships. It
follows that the meaning of a text lies not in this or that interpretation but in the
diagrammatic totality of its readings, in their plural system."
Indeed there is more a duty than a right to reject the euphemistic because "the
privilege of literality" of the text "as told by the 
author" "has little meaning except
intimidation" and we ought to act against that bullying action.

Point of Exit
S/Z XCII The Three Points of Entry

"... it is fatal, the text [Sarrasine] says, to remove the dividing line, the paradigmatic
slash mark which permits meaning to function (the wall of the Antithesis), life to
reproduce, (the opposition of the sexes), property to be protected (rule of
contract)."

Critical (re-)reading of the text result in "an unrestrained metonymy" a metonymy

that collapses the very dividing line we were warned against. The result is that
"by abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this abolishes the power of legal
substitution on which meaning is based ... it is no longer possible to safeguard an
order of equivalence" and the force of meaning, which derives from the power
structures of society, can no longer hold.

The ethical question is whether to heed the warning and obey its injunction or
allow the unrestrained metonymy to dismiss the warning, erase the barriers and
abolish its power.
 

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