00169--Why does Roland Barthes hold that Author is a construct?

Barthes begins his essay, “Death of the Author” quoting a sentence from the French writer Balzac “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.”  Balzac is describing a Castrato [a male singer castrated at a very early age in order to preserve his sweet voice] disguised as a woman.  Barthes raises the following questions:

1)      Who is speaking thus?

2)     Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman?

3)    Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?

4)    Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity?

5)    Is it universal wisdom?

6)    Is it Romantic psychology?

Barthes himself makes the statement, “We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”   According to Barthes the author is a product of the western society which emerged from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, and French rationalism. 

The Author is a capitalist ideology which supports a master-theory.  It is something like considering the dramatist the complete authority.  Today we know that it is the audience which is the most important part of the success of the play.  The traditional concept is that the image of literature is centered on ‘the author’, his person, his life, his tastes and passions.  Often we try to explain some passages attributing their connection with a similar incident in the author’s life. 

Roland Barthes is against seeking the explanation of a work in the man or the woman who produced it.  Being a staunch follower of Saussure he liked to explain a text on the structural method.  He also agrees with the view that meaning is relational one.  The author is just an angel whose task is to combine words and phrases.  It is the reader who has to decide what the story is.  The Marxian philosophy also contributed to the destruction of the authors’s superiority.

00160--post-structuralism

                                                        
Post-structuralism is a school of thought that emerged partly from within French STRUCTURALISM in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical DECONSTRUCTION practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including that of the human 'subject'), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity—such claims being denounced as 'totalitarian'. They set out to dissolve the fixed BINARY OPPOSITIONS of structuralist thought, including that between language and METALANGUAGE—and thus between literature and criticism. Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality or 'free play' of meanings, stressing the INDETERMINACY of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism's delayed influence upon literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted. For a fuller account, consult Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism .

00144--What post- structuralist critics do?

1)        They read the text against itself' so as to expose what might be thought of as the 'textual subconscious', where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning.

2)        They fix upon the surface features of the words - similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, a 'dead' (or dying) metaphor and bring there to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning.

3)        They seek to show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity.

4)        They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that it becomes impossible to sustain a 'univocal' reading and the language explodes into 'multiplicities of meaning'.

5)        They look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence by the text.  These discontinuities  are sometimes called 'fault-lines', a geological metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give evidence of previous activity and movement.

00143--Structuralism and Post- structuralism-some practical differences

      The structuralist seeks                                  The post- structuralist seeks

            Parallels/Echoes                                           Contradictions/paradoxes

            Balances                                                        Shifts/Breaks in:  Tone

                                                                                                            Viewpoint

                                                                                                            Time

                                                                                                            Person

                                                                                                            attitude

            Reflections/Repetitions                              Conflicts                   

            Symmetry                                                      Absences/Omissions

            Contrasts                                                       Linguistic quirks

            Patterns                                                          Aporia

            Effect:  To show textual unity and               Effect:To show textual disunity

            Coherence

00142--Post-structuralism [The Death of the Author/Roland Barthes/Jacques Derrida/Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]

            Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960.  The two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  Barthes's work around this time began to shift in character and move from a structuralist phast to a post-structuralist phase.  The essay 'The Death of the Author' by Barthes shows his change of phase from structuralism to post- structuralism.  In that essay he announces the death of the author, which is a rhetorical way of assisting the independence of the literary and its immunity to the possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended, or 'crafted' into the work.  Instead the essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by intention or context.  Rather the text is free by its very nature of all restraints.

            The early phase of post- structuralism seems to license and revel in the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority.  Later there is an inevitable shift from his textual permissiveness to the more disciplined and austere textual republicanism.  According to Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is not a hedonistic abandonment of all restraint, but a disciplined identification and dismantling of the sources of textual power.

            The second key figure in the development of post- structuralism in the late 1960s is the philosopher Jocques Derrida.  Indeed, the starting point of post- structuralism may be, taken as his 1966 lecture, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'.  In this paper Derrida sees in modern times a particular intellectual 'event' which constitutes a radical break from part ways of though, loosely associating this break with the philosophy of Nietzche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of Freud the event concerns the (decentring) of our intellectual universe.

            Prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all things was taken for granted: thus 'man', as the Renaissance Slogan had it, was the measure of all other things in the universe:  White Western norms of  dress,  behaviour, architecture, intellectual out look, and so on, provided a firm centre against which deviations, aberrations, variations could be detected and identified as 'Other' and marginal.  In the twentieth century, however, these centres were destroyed or eroded; sometimes this was caused by historical events - such as the way the First World War destroyed the illusion of steady material progress, or the way the Holocaust destroyed the notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilisation; sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries - such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central absolutes, and sometimes, finally, it was caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions - such as the way modernism in the arts in the first thirty years of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world in art.

            In the resulting universe there are no absolute or fixed points, so that the universe we live in is 'decentred' or inherently relativistic.  Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is 'free play' (or play' as the title of the essay has it).  In the lecture Derrida embraces this decentred universe of free plays as liberating, just as Barthes in "The Death of the Author" celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom.  The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to credit but we must enedeavour not to be among 'those who....turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself' (Newto p.154).  This powerful often apocalyptic tone of post structuralist writing.

            If we have the courage, the implication is, we will enter this new Nietzcheque universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is no longer any authoritative centre to which to appeal for validation of our interpretations.

00141--Distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism

a)        Origins

"        Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics.  Linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge.  It believes that if we observe accurately, collect data systematically, and make logical deductions then we can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world.  Structuralism inherits this confidently scientific outlook:  it too believes in method, system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.

 "       By contrast, post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy.  Philosophy is a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things.  This point of view is encapsulated in Nietzsche's famous remark 'there are no facts, only interpretations:  Philosophy is, so to speak, sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions.  Its procedures often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted.  Post structuralism inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it.  It regards any confidence in scientific method as naive, and even derives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know anything for certain (fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entils.

2)        Ione and style

"        Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation:  it aims for a detached, 'scientific coolness' of tone.  Given its derivation from linguistic science, this is what we would expect.  An essay like Roland Barthes's 1966 pice 'Introduction to the structural Analysis of Narrative' is typical of this tone and treatment, with its discrete steps in an orderly exposition, complete with diagrams.  The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific writing.

"        Post-structrualist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive.  Often the tone is urgent and euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well contain puns and allysions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word - play of some kind.

3)        Attitude to Language

"        Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we so not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium.  All the same, all the same, it decides to live with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with.  After all language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair.

"        By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist and believe reality itself is textual.  Post-structuralism develops the idea that any knowledge is attainable through language.   

4)        Project (the fundamental aims)

"        Structuralism, firstly, questions our way of structuring and categorising reality, and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things.

"        Post-structuralism is much more fundamental:  It distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the 'dissolved' or 'constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces - that is, not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textualities'.

00125--Give and account of Derrida's notion of 'the sign'.

            Derrida brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not random markings, but signs.  A sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark-with-meaning.  To account for significance, Derrida turns to a highly specialized and elaborate use of Saussure's notion that the identity either of the sound or of the signification of a sign does not consist in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational) attribute-that is, its "difference" or differentiality, from other sounds and other significations within a particular linguistic system.  This notion of difference is readily available to Derrida, because inspection of the printed pages shows that some marks and sets of mark repeat each other, but that others differ from each other.  In Derrida's theory 'difference' itself supplements the static element of a text and it can be taken as to mean 'negativity'.  'Difference puts into motion the incessant play of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page.

            Derrida calls what is distinctive in the signification of a sign "trace".  This means what "appears" or "disappears".

00109--How do Saussure's views become radical?

            A movement or theory is radical when it is capable of favouring fundamental or extreme change in scientific, social or cultural spheres.  Structuralists argue that the entities that constitute the world we perceive (human beings, meanings, social positions, texts, rituals....) are not the works of God or the mysteries of nature.  It is an effect of the principles that structure us.  The world without structures is meaningless.  It will then be a random and Chaotic continuum.  Structures order that continuum and organise it according to certain set of principles.  And thus we make sense of it.  In this way structures make this world meaningful and real.  Many of the proportions put forward by Saussurian linguistics was radical in substance and result.  The foundational argument about the arbitrariness of the sign is a radical concept because it proposes the autonomy of language in relation to reality.  The Saussurian model, with its emphasis on internal structures within a sign system, can be seen as supporting the notion that language does not 'reflect' reality but rather constructs it.  We can use the language 'to say what isn't the world, as well as what is.  And since we come to know the world through whatever language we have been born into the midst of, it is legitimate to argue that our language determines reality, rather than reality our language' some  later critics have criticised Saussure for 'neglecting entirely the things for which signs stand'.  They have lamented his model's detachment from social context.  Robert Stam argues that by 'bracketing the referent', the Saussurean model 'severs text from history'.  More over, it was the Saussurian concepts that led to the most radical assumptions of Deconstruction.