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Literary Review
Grappling with the text
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Two books on Roland Barthes, the man who is always departing from any single programme or ideology and for whom the pursuit of knowledge is part of a personal affirmation of values. A review by SHELLEY WALIA.
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STEVEN UNGAR'S method, in accordance with Barthes' own dismissal of "the final word" is to read the writings as "stations on a circuit that finds Barthes always departing from any single program, school or ideology". This strategy allows Ungar to correlate Barthes to changes and movements in literature and criticism, and also to mark out the ruptures and adjustments that place the writings of the final decade of Barthes' life at variance with his former practice.
For Barthes, teaching can become utterly personal because of the "intimacy it is capable of producing": "Teaching is not only very personal, it is also very physical. That teacher there, walking from the library to his office, dispensing smiles and warm greetings to fresh-faced students, is me. I talk a lot about souls but no soul have I ever seen that did not come in a body and when I teach somebody I teach some body". His book S/Z points to the pedagogical dimension of what had become his critical practice, namely, that a personal motivation needs to be recognised in the face of what is otherwise mistaken for an objective or indifferent project of critical understanding. When this freedom of exchange, or the efforts towards collective elaboration that mark his seminars (out of which is born his book The Pleasures of the Text) are understood beyond the institutional context, the pursuit of knowledge can be approached as part of a more personal affirmation of values. The conveyor of knowledge becomes the lover of knowledge; the seminar space becomes for Barthes the prime site of discovery around which any subsequent formulation of theory is but a trace. The classroom ceases at last to be a laboratory of empty theory and Barthes succeeds in converting the silence of his students to active participation.
It is clear from his critical practice that Barthes preferred to assault dominant interests of the ruling elite through his constantly demystifying intellectual engagement. For him neither style nor language could be a ground for commitment. Taking ecriture as a field of politics, he only saw racism, sexism, colonialism lurking behind the apparently natural and innocent day-to-day world. Nothing for him was natural, not even how we speak, or what we eat; our religion, education, or for that matter, the time we go to sleep are all part of a social constructor "mythologies" created by modern society. It is no more natural to make love in a certain manner, just as it is no more natural to eat Chinese food rather than caviar.
Such myths in bourgeois culture only serve to obscure the manufactured nature of that very culture, making the contingent and historical appear natural and eternal. Here Barthes is close to Marx, though mostly his concerns are focused on the trivial in everyday life such as striptease, wrestling, advertisements, soap, powders. He examines the grammar of fashion and demonstrates the different levels at which meanings are generated. Within the system of signs with which we are constantly confronted, everything signifies, and meanings become differential; nothing has an essence or a history. All is arbitrary, relational and coded and we are moved by something that does not exist.
These elements of Barthes' theory are simply and suggestively put across in Philip Thody and Ann Course's Introducing Barthes which explains to the lay reader the application of such notions to literature and popular culture, bringing out vigorously the tendency of each one of us to see language as a neutral means of communication thereby ignoring the significance of connotation. The book goes on to explain how Barthes rejects the notion of bourgeoisie clarity as absolutely rubbish, implying that the reader stands liberated from the authoritarian position of the author. His emphasis on death of the author is one way of breaking the hold of the ruling elite on the ways of thinking about economics, philosophy, politics and culture.
The inward rational principles of a text which rigidly become self-validating and fix meaning that is beyond scrutiny stand demolished before Barthes' idea of the "text of bliss" that leads the reader to a jouissance or a radically violent pleasure which comes only because it brings no contentment or a comfortable relation to language. Unsettling of the reader's historical, cultural and psychological assumptions bring about the "erotics" of reading which lie at the "seam" between the expected and the surprising. Bliss, as Barthes argues, can only come from a disruptive intensity and a "hedonism of difference", where the opposing forces are never repressed, but always allowed to exist. In such a text everything is in the process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Confirmatory, predictable and comfortable reading is nothing but passivity submitting only to the pleasure of responding to expectations and beliefs that bring in their wake mere bourgeois satisfaction. Bliss, on the other hand, is derived from the total rejection of the extra-systemic "metaphysics of presence", a transcendent centre or origin that fixes linguistic meaning. More than anything this lesson must be foremost in the mind of a student of literary criticism and cultural theory if education is to be a liberating and not a straitjacketing and claustrophobic experience.
Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire, Steven Ungar, Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, p.206, £22.50.
Introducing Barthes, Philip Thody and Ann Course, Cambridge: Icon, p.176, £8.99.
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