I am trying to write about Roland Barthes. Yet, when I think and try to extract from his text I am confronted by an onslaught. I cannot think about authorship, or readership in any single context. Here is Saussure on linguistic value, here is Lefebvre on the social text, Here I am thinking about authorship in a world going to bed with text as its main mode of communication, here I am fascinated by the pages and pages of dialogue written everyday in text messages, and here is the memoir breaking my idea of authorship in half.
I resort to Wikipedia. I do this for two reasons. Firstly, it will give me the information I think I want to have, information I can trust alongside other people: memoir sales have— secondly, because it allows me to be completely self-reliant in obtaining this information. I do not need to see other people, I do not need to interact: I am the tool used in getting information, I utilize/operate the tool, and I am the beneficiary of the tool. This online resource is a part/product of the culture I live in, as am I. I am because of Wikipedia and Wikipedia is because of me. The point is because of Wikipedia I am the most important part of my life, not only this—as was of course peoples ideas of the world they inhabited in the past—I now have the common mans ability to manifest my desire to be the center of my own life.
“[W]riting is the destruction of every voice, every origin.” So as I sit and write this, am I destroying myself? You cannot see me, so in your readership you actively disembody me, but you have the new-age ability to write over, and about my text, directly influencing me and simultaneously destroying yourself. Is the blog the result of a communal desire to self-actualize and self-annihilate; to actualize the thought that you have valuable things to say and to annihilate the spot-light of personal responsibility i.e. a legacy: we can walk away at any time. Where does it start and stop?
There is no longer a reader. There is only a system of writers espousing their own voices in place of others’. I do not read, I only comment. Everything is available to me, and it all has the space for me to affect it. Yes, i have valuable and insightful things to say, not because i truly believe that I do, but because i have the opportunity to do so.
"In multiple writing, in effect, everything is to be disentangled, but nothing deciphered, structure can be followed, "threaded" (as we say of a run in a stocking) in all its reprises, all its stages, but there is no end to it, no bottom; the space of writing is to be traversed, not pierced; writing constantly posits meaning, but always in order to evaporate it: writing seeks a systematic exemption of meaning...to refuse to halt meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law."
There is no choice—our meanings are tied by both self and sentiment, they are given and taken by ourselves and this results in a never ending parallax of more and more view points realized in blog format. There is no bottom, there are only more writers gathering to thread, and evaporate meaning by projecting themselves onto every text.Where we have the ability to traverse more and more written landscapes, the tools we use to do it sacrifice content for distance/expanse. Our meaning is one of subjectivity because of multiplicity--we have the freedom to explore but we must do it alone.
This is an evocative, thoroughly thoughtful post, Mark. I have a lot of ideas in response to this, but I want to let it float and see what others have to say, first. I only say one thing, here: In your last sentence, don't you in fact mean that we have the freedom to explore but we must do it *together*? What would a solitary user of the Internet look like? Can we envision such an explorer in a way that isn't strongly apocalyptic? Far better, I think, to consider a differantial plane on which the explorers are reading and writing in such a way that communication is staggering in its sheer dissemination, yet all the more pressing in terms of the specific—and perhaps *slower*—acts of meaning that are actually being developed.
ReplyDeleteI thought about this. I have to agree with you about the number of 'acts of meaning' but their nature, to me, is less impressive. I think i mean personal connection. I am old enough to remember not having a computer in my house, and then not having the internet for a while. I'm projecting when i say the expansion of the internet and our continuing and deepening use separates us in a way that enables us to maintain our social 'identities' but allows us to create them ourselves outside of a physical social context, which to me is the more important regardless of what resources i lose.
ReplyDeleteReading back, I feel like I'm using the internet to 'mean' more than it necessarily has to. For whatever reason, it has suddenly become as deep and as cumbersome as...only i will never be able to stop commenting, or stop trying to 'disentangle' in an effort to let others 'decipher.'
ReplyDeleteMark Yakich has a quote somewhere--"what makes a passenger not also a pilot?"
I think I see what you are getting at, Mark. Upon rereading the end of your post:
ReplyDelete"There is no bottom, there are only more writers gathering to thread, and evaporate meaning by projecting themselves onto every text. Where we have the ability to traverse more and more written landscapes, the tools we use to do it sacrifice content for distance/expanse. Our meaning is one of subjectivity because of multiplicity--we have the freedom to explore but we must do it alone."
—I take your point that the more presence that we 'thread' on the internet, the more 'absence' we unravel. Now this is if we accept that me typing right now is a kind of absence, outside or beyond what you call a "physical social context." (I could be 'doing stuff' and talking to people instead of punching little plastic keys.) But if I start paying attention to my fingers on the keyboard, and my breathing (which hardly stops), and the way I am trying to write words that will make their way over and into your brain...then I start to see this strange machine in front of me as physical, as social, and myself as never quite (ever) alone. Does that make sense?
I don't think you are using the 'internet' to mean more than it has to; in fact, I think this is precisely the kind of tapestry to 'feel out' in terms of the implications and effects of Barthes's 'death of the author'. Critical theory has to be, maybe not 'applicable' in any easy sense, but seen to puncture the fabric of everyday life, punch holes in it...if only then to see that the holes were there all along, and maybe even that all there are are holes as far as the eye can see, in every direction.
“[W]riting is the destruction of every voice, every origin.” So as I sit and write this, am I destroying myself?
ReplyDeleteDon’t worry, Mark. You aren’t destroying yourself by writing this. If anything, expansion of the self occurs. As you stated, this blog may possibly serve as a means for self-actualization, and I believe that it does. However, I believe that this self-actualization only truly occurs when writers are able to channel their own experiences into a unique text, a text that recognizes that it is not the final authority, open for interpretation. Of course readers will be able to discover underlying motives, inspirations, histories, and emotions, but all of these ideas culminate into a unique creation that can be infinitely engaged; they engage in you.
We should also recognize the fact that, as mentioned in class by Kerry, readers interpret a text according to their own experiences. Regardless of if we like or dislike, agree or disagree, understand or don’t understand a text, we nonetheless mold ourselves to the work, however abstract. Interpretations endless. Possibilities infinite. It’s almost as if the writing and reader are in conversation, a conversation that moves along endlessly, text and reader trying to arrive at an understanding that will never be reached.
Getting back to the point (I think), I don’t believe writing destructs origins or voices, but in fact creates an origin, creates a voice. The origin allows one to become engaged in this conversation through reading and writing, while the voice both inspires and challenges us to engage in this intricate network. We view the author as affected by stories writing a story among other stories: a constellation of conversations, ever expanding, isolation of the author appearing impossible. And while this may sound like the death of the author, the death of Mark, we come to the realization that the author is the story. The story will continue whether Mark realizes it or not. Mark will continue. Mark is the story.
Michael, I think what you are calling an "origin" is what I (and perhaps Barthes) would call a 'hole': an empty space where meaning can take place...if only temporarily, fleetingly—and paradoxically all the more *meaningfully*. You are right, Mark doesn't 'die' in a literal sense; what he does on a blog post such as this one is open up this space where 'he' (the person) ceases to 'be' in a concrete way, and instead, his words spread into this "tissue of quotations" that we each expand a little more. To rigorously adopt Barthes's theory, here, when he says (as Mark cites) "the space of writing is to be traversed, not pierced; writing constantly posits meaning, but always in order to evaporate it"—this is why we might hesitate before calling what we are doing "interpretation"—that sounds a little too much like 'piercing' the space of writing. What would it mean to traverse this space of writing without piercing it? (Maybe Barthes should have called this essay "The Dulling of the Author"!) It is hard to let meaning always "evaporate" behind (and before) us, and I can hear Calvin wanting to resist and refuse this adamantly, but when we wish for " a conversation that moves along endlessly" (as you say), isn't this evaporation effect fundamentally what we have to allow for? The point would then become: how seriously can we take evaporative meanings? Well, if we've been taking them seriously all along, that should give us—to quote Derrida now—'hope'.
ReplyDeleteQuestioning meaning: That which envolopes the new? Not meaning directly, but finding something meaningful 'evaporates' a notion previously held by a 'reader.' 'I have found God, now the self-centered atheist no longer exists' or 'The culture i live in can be read, I can longer find meaning in enjoying a twinkie, i have to study its packaging and cultural dissemination.' Pehaps in this way, this life of 'reading' or actively sorting through culture--on a surface level of immediate self-interest--brings us closer to our own death. In some societies the community is more important than the individual ego, so by trying to come closer to my community, am i, in part, destroying my ego/the self that i understand/the imagination writing this? Can i make that correlation?
ReplyDelete"In some societies the community is more important than the individual ego, so by trying to come closer to my community, am i, in part, destroying my ego/the self that i understand/the imagination writing this? Can i make that correlation?"—yes, Mark, I think this is on the right (which I almost misspelled as "write"!) path. Whenever we read (or write, which is Barthes's point), we participate (knowingly or not) in something more vast and dispersed than ourselves. And this 'participation' is a kind of 'death' of the as-if solitary ego, isn't it? And this 'death' is not a threatening thing at all, but in fact a different—maybe even more dynamic—kind of *life*. Is this what you are getting at?
ReplyDeleteIt’s true, our texts are in constant conversation with one another! Mark's original post held a sentiment that there is something detrimental about the way the internet has changed the role of the reader, to whom, "Everything is available" to be perpetually decontextualized. This process has always happened when a reader consumes a work of literature, the internet only acts as a literal virtual space where readers can widely distribute their opinions. To shed some positive light upon this young communicative system, which seems to give anyone the right to be “right,” I encourage the class to view the internet and blogging community as a manifestation of Derrida’s theory, a place where people can view and relate the constantly shifting meanings of a text, and in doing so, contribute to the inevitable change that looms whenever a work is published.
ReplyDeleteBarthes says “a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning… the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture” (123). He gives the perceptions of the reader as much presence as those of the author; the text then is only as present as its past influences and the future influences it has upon its readers.
If I can twist Dr. Schaberg’s reference to critical theory and to apply it to texts as a Derridian “fabric,” those “holes” that a reader’s blog may seem to put into a text are in actuality just a few of the many holes which already existed in the text, and the holes that will be put into the text in perpetuum.
Yes, even without the blog as an open forum which lays all of our writings before us, and which allows us to freely, discreetly, unabashedly comment on the work of our peers, writing has always disembodied the writer. The joy I feel in writing is that it becomes created before my eyes, and is most times more articulate than what I could say aloud. Poets and writers have often gone insane because the worlds they were able to create on paper, were impossible to re-create in their lives. Artists, writers, musicians, athletes, everyone becomes a different person when they are producing, as opposed to when they are simply Being. There is a process involved in the destruction of the writer which at times is necessary to creation. If a prior self wasn't destroyed, one's work might not be able to come to fruition. We have to be reasonably reasonable in order to live in society, and art is anything but.
ReplyDelete