This week’s texts have talked an awful lot about tyranny and constraint. Specifically, the perceived tyranny and constraint of language. This perceived tyranny, as Barthes and Saussure tell us, is not quite accurate. Language itself is not tyrannical. It is our belief in its absolute nature that enslaves us to it. Language has become Law – and as a political tool of power, it has been quite useful (where this conversation seems to go makes me think of Foucault and the juridico-discursive concept of power: power as language). Saussure and Barthes both emphasize that this perception of language as an absolute system is not quite true, as ultimately it is based upon what the former terms the “arbitrary” nature of language. For his part, Barthes focuses on the idea of the text (i.e language) being open to interpretation once the author has uttered/written the words: “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (“The Death of the Author,” 147). He specifies that the text ought to be multi-dimensional. Interestingly, he terms the “modern” text the text that resists the “theological” activity of “deciphering” an “ultimate meaning” (147). Having read this chapter, I assume that Barthes has read Eco. I believe it was in The Open Work that the latter postulates (very convincingly) that in the Medieval era, the text, that is to say the Bible was intended to have an ultimate meaning: the meaning dictated by the Church. Denoting an absolute truth and the ability to decipher that Truth was the (literary) paradigm of the time. As Barthes underlines, it is the paradigm of the modern text to subvert this theological activity, to reject absolute truth, to open up the text to its multiple interpretations. To reject the theological activity writes Barthes, is to refuse “God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (147).
What does this mean for me? I struggle with this question when it comes time for me to write this blog entry. Jon also questioned the pertinence and application of theory when it comes to the act of reading. Having read excerpts from Barthes and Saussure this week, will my approach to reading a text, my interpretation of a text change? One could likewise ask if it was Barthes who read Eco or Eco who read Barthes and as such who influenced who? Just as critics influence one another (metacriticism?), reading such critics is bound to have an impact on my reading process. As Bill mentioned in his post, reading Marx does change your perception of “The Little Cask.” Similarly, I remember reading Jameson for the first time and being so surprised by his perception of cultural phenomena as viewed under the lens of “late capitalism.” Why, this is my reality that he is speaking about, I proclaimed to myself! It is so easy to view these theorists as products of their time, their texts synchronic entities in someway less pertinent to my contemporary reality; however, if one makes a concerted effort to examine how one reads, it becomes obvious that reading is a comparative process. Whether the intertext is there or not (by that I mean intended), I am always relating my understanding of the text to other texts or to other mediums and experiences. An example of this, this thought just made be think of the Russian Formalists’ definition of literature as a series of (relatable) experiences. Consequently, this made me think of Barthes and Eco and the idea of the open work… and the idea of language as constraint, or power as discourse, leads me to Foucault…and ad infinitum (?)
I think that ad infinitum you raise is important. One of the things that struck me in my Saussure reading was his remark that language is stable because it is 1) arbitrary and 2) highly repeated (and I think there was a 3, but I have forgotten now...). Perhaps it is that repetition factor that closes the interpretations of texts (I need to go read Eco's book, rather than simply skimming it.): we don't interpret one text except through the interpretation of many texts, and those repeated interpretation set up a system that locks down the set of possible interpretations.
ReplyDeleteBut are interpretations arbitrary? To a degree, in the sense that one system is just a given way to see the world.
At any rate, Saussure is right to focus on that contradictory position of language: both mutable and non-mutable. And, to go all Lacanian for a moment, it is non-mutable because it is mutable.(?)
Something like Hofstadter's 3 ball remark (in reply to Jon in my resonance post): the same thing can have contradictory levels. Althusser talks about superstructure: does he deal with the fact that levels may be -- must be? -- contradictory?
So I think there is a tyranny in language-like structures. It is the tyranny of the force of repetition. That is what Saussure seems to be getting at. In fact, I see that in the stairwells at the end of class in Buchanan D: two lines form in the packed crowd, one going up and one going down. The individual has no choice; it is almost impossible not to get in one of those lines. So structure forms spontaneously from simple repetition (and here we step off into chaos theory).