From Work to Text
Roland Barthes
It is a fact that over the last few years
a certain change has taken place (or is taking
place) in our conception of language and,
consequently, of the literary work which
owes at least its phenomenal existence to
this same language. The change is clearly
connected with the current development of
(amongst other disciplines) linguistics,
anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis
(the term 'connection' is used here in a
deliberately neutral way: one does not decide
a determination, be it multiple and dialectical).
What is new and which affects
the idea of the work comes not necessarily
from the internal recasting of each of these
disciplines, but rather from their encounter
in relation to an object which traditionally
is the province of none of them. It is indeed
as though the interdisciplinarity which is
today held up as a prime value in research
cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation
of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity
is not the calm of an easy security; it begins
effectively (as opposed to the mere expression
of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the
old disciplines breaks down -- perhaps even
violently, via the jolts of fashion -- in
the interests of a new object and a new language
neither of which has a place in the field
of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully
together, this unease in classification being
precisely the point from which it is possible
to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation
in which the idea of the work seems to be
gripped must not, however, be over-estimated:
it is more in the nature of an epistemological
slide than of a real break. The break, as
is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken
place in the last century with the appearance
of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there
has been no further break, so that in a way
it can be said that for the last hundred
years we have been living in repetition.
What History, our History,
allows us today is merely to slide, to vary,
to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian
science demands that the relativity of the
frames of reference be included in the object
studied, so the combined action of Marxism,
Freudianism and structuralism demands, in
literature, the relativization of the relations
of writer, reader and observer (critic).
Over against the traditional notion of the
work, for long -- and still -- conceived
of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there
is now the requirement of a new object, obtained
by the sliding or overturning of former categories.
That object is the Text. I know the word
is fashionable (I am myself often led to
use it) and therefore regarded by some with
suspicion, but that is exactly why I should
like to remind myself of the principal propositions
at the intersection of which I see the Text
as standing. The word 'proposition' is to
be understood more in a grammatical than
in a logical sense: the following are not
argumentations but enunciations, 'touches',
approaches that consent to remain metaphorical.
Here then are these propositions; they concern
method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation,
reading and pleasure.
1. The Text is not to be thought of as an
object that can be computed. It would be
futile to try to separate out materially
works from texts. In particular, the tendency
must be avoided to say that the work is classic,
the text avant-garde; it is not a question
of drawing up a crude honours list in the
name of modernity and declaring certain literary
productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue
of their chronological situation: there may
be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many
products of contemporary literature are in
no way texts. The difference is this: the
work is a fragment of substance, occupying
a part of the space of books (in a library
for example), the Text is a methodological
field. The opposition may recall (without
at all reproducing term for term) Lacan's
distinction between 'reality' and 'the real':
the one is displayed, the other demonstrated;
likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops,
in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text
is a process of demonstration, speaks according
to certain rules (or against certain rules);
the work can be held in the hand, the text
is held in language, only exists in the movement
of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for
the very reason that it knows itself as text);
the Text is not the decomposition of the
work, it is the work that is the imaginary
tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced
only in an activity of production. It follows
that the Text cannot stop (for example on
a library shelf); its constitutive movement
is that of cutting across (in particular,
it can cut across the work, several works).
2. In the same way, the Text does not stop
at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained
in a hierarchy, even in a simple division
of genres. What constitutes the Text is,
on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive
force in respect of the old classifications.
How do you classify a writer like Georges
Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist,
philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult
that the literary manuals generally prefer
to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote
texts, perhaps continuously one single text.
If the Text poses problems of classification
(which is furthermore one of its 'social
functions), this is because it always involves
a certain experience of limits (to take up
an expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet
used already to talk -- but in a very restricted
sense -- of limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's
Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through
to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that
which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation
(rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is
this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some
'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place
itself very exactly behind the limit of the
doxa (is not general opinion -- constitutive
of our democratic societies and powerfully
aided by mass communications -- defined by
its limits, the energy with which it excludes,
its censorship?). Taking the word literally,
it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.
3. The Text can be approached, experienced,
in reaction to the sign. The work closes
on a signified. There are two modes of signification
which can be attributed to this signified:
either it is claimed to be evident and the
work is then the object of a literal science,
of philology, or else it is considered to
be secret, ultimate, something to be sought
out, and the work then falls under the scope
of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation (Marxist,
psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short,
the work itself functions as a general sign
and it is normal that it should represent
an institutional category of the civilization
of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practises
the infinite deferment of the signified,
is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier
and the signifier must not be conceived of
as 'the first stage of meaning', its material
vestibule, but, in complete opposition to
this, as its deferred action. Similarly,
the infinity of the signifier refers not
to some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable
signified) but to that of a playing; the
generation of the perpetual signifier (after
the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in the
field of the text (better, of which the text
is the field) is realized not according to
an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic
course of deepening investigation, but, rather,
according to a serial movement of disconnections,
overlappings, variations. The logic regulating
the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what
the work means') but metonymic; the activity
of associations, contiguities, carryings-over
coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy
(lacking it, man would die); the work in
the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic
(its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt);
the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived,
perceived and received in its integrally
symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text
restored to language; like language, it is
structured but off-centred, without closure
(note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion
of the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at
structuralism, that the epistemological privilege
currently accorded to language stems precisely
from the discovery there of a paradoxical
idea of structure: a system with neither
close nor centre).
4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply
to say that it .has several meanings, but
that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning:
an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable)
plural. The Text is not a co-existence of
meanings but a passage, an overcrossing;
thus it answers not to an interpretation,
even a liberal one, but to an explosion,
a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends,
that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents
but on what might be called the stereographic
plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically,
the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The
reader of the Text may be compared to someone
at a loose end (someone slackened off from
any imaginary); this passably empty subject
strolls -- it is what happened to the author
of these lines, then it was that he had a
vivid idea of the Text -- on the side of
a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued
is there to bear witness to a certain feeling
of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple,
irreducible, coming from a disconnected,
heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives:
lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender
explosions of noises, scant cries of birds,
children's voices from over on the other
side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants
near or far away. All these incidents are
half identifiable: they come from codes which
are known but their combination is unique,
founds the stroll in a difference repeatable
only as difference. So the Text: it can be
it only in its difference (which does not
mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive
(this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive
science of texts -- no 'grammar' of the text)
and nevertheless woven entirely with citations,
references, echoes, cultural languages (what
language is not?), antecedent or contemporary,
which cut across it through and through in
a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which
every text is held, it itself being the text-between
of another text, is not to be confused with
some origin of the text: to try to find the
'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is
to fall in with the myth of filiation; the
citations which go to make up a text are
anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read:
they are quotations without inverted commas.
The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic
philosophy (we know that there are opposing
examples of these); for such a philosophy,
plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore,
the text could well take as its motto the
words of the man possessed by demons (Mark
5: 9): 'My name is Legion: for we are many.'
The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes
text to work can bring with it fundamental
changes in reading, and precisely in areas
where monologism appears to be the Law: certain
of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally
recuperated by theological monism (historical
or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves
to a diffraction of meanings (finally, that
is to say, to a materialist reading), while
the Marxist interpretation of works, so far
resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize
itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however,
the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).
5. The work is caught up in a process of
filiation. Are postulated: a determination
of the work by the world (by race, then by
History), a consecution of works amongst
themselves, and a conformity of the work
to the author. The author is reputed the
father and the owner of his work: literary
science therefore teaches respect for the
manuscript and the author's declared intentions,
while society asserts the legality of the
relation of author to work (the 'droit d'auteur'
or 'copyright', in fact of recent date since
it was only really legalized at the time
of the French Revolution). As for the Text,
it reads without the inscription of the Father.
Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates
from that of the work: the latter refers
to the image of an organism which grows by
vital expansion, by 'development' (a word
which is significantly ambiguous, at once
biological and rhetorical); the metaphor
of the Text is that of the network; if the
Text extends itself, it is as a result of
a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover,
close to current biological conceptions of
the living being). Hence no vital 'respect'
is due to the Text: it can be broken (which
is just what the Middle Ages did with two
nevertheless authoritative texts -- Holy
Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read
without the guarantee of its father, the
restitution of the inter-text paradoxically
abolishing any legacy. It is not that the
Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in
his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'.
If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the
novel like one of his characters, figured
in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal,
aletheological, his inscription is ludic.
He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his
life is no longer the origin of his fictions
but a fiction contributing to his work; there
is a reversion of the work on to the life
(and no longer the contrary); it is the work
of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives
to be read as a text. The word 'bio-graphy'
re-acquires a strong, etymological sense,
at the same time as the sincerity of the
enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borne
by literary morality -- becomes a false problem:
the I which writes the text, it too, is never
more than a paper-I.
6. The work is normally the object of a consumption;
no demagogy is intended here in referring
to the so-called consumer culture but it
has to be recognized that today it is the
'quality' of the work (which supposes finally
an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation
of" reading itself which can differentiate
between books: structurally, there is no
difference between 'cultured reading and
casual reading in trains. The Text (if only
by its frequent 'unreadability) decants the
work (the work permitting) from its consumption
and gathers it up as play, activity, production,
practice. This means that the Text requires
that one try to abolish (or at the very least
to diminish) the distance between writing
and reading, in no way by intensifying the
projection of the reader into the work but
by joining them in a single signifying practice.
The distance separating reading from writing
is historical. In the times of the greatest
social division (before the setting up of
democratic cultures), reading and writing
were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric,
the great literary code of those times, taught
one to write (even if what was then normally
produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly,
the coming of democracy reversed the word
of command: what the (secondary) School prides
itself on is teaching to read (well) and
no longer to write (consciousness of the
deficiency is becoming fashionable again
today: the teacher is called upon to teach
pupils to express themselves', which is a
little like replacing a form of repression
by a misconception). In fact, reading, in
the sense of consuming, is far from playing
with the text. 'Playing' must be understood
here in all its polysemy: the text itself
plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play')
and the reader plays twice over, playing
the Text as one plays a game, looking for
a practice which re-produces it, but, in
order that that practice not be reduced to
a passive, inner mimesis (the Text is precisely
that which resists such a reduction), also
playing the Text in the musical sense of
the term. The history of music (as a practice,
not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that
of the Text fairly closely: there was a period
when practising amateurs were numerous (at
least within the confines of a certain class)
and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely
differentiated activity; then two roles appeared
in succession, first that of the performer,
the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public
(though still itself able to play a little
-- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated
its playing, then that of the (passive) amateur,
who listens to music without being able to
play (the gramophone record takes the place
of the piano). We know that today post-serial
music has radically altered the role of the
'interpreter', who is called on to be in
some sort the co-author of the score, completing
it rather than giving it 'expression'. The
Text is very much a score of this new kind:
it asks of the reader a practical collaboration.
Which is an important change, for who executes
the work? (Mallarmé posed the question, wanting
the audience to produce the book). Nowadays
only the critic executes the work (accepting
the play on words). The reduction of reading
to a consumption is clearly responsible for
the Boredom' experienced by many in the face
of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde
film or painting: to be bored means that
one cannot produce the text, open it out,
set it going.
7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final
approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I
do not know whether there has ever been a
hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies
are themselves rare). Certainly there exists
a pleasure of the work (of certain works);
I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust,
Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre
Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen
and even when free from all prejudice, remains
in part (unless by some exceptional critical
effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if
I can read these authors, I also know that
I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible
today to write 'like that') and this knowledge,
depressing enough, suffices to cut me off
from the production of these works, in the
very moment their remoteness establishes
my modernity (is not to be modern to know
clearly what cannot be started over again?)
As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance,
that is to a pleasure without separation.
Order of the signifier, the Text participates
in its own way in a social utopia; before
History (supposing the latter does not opt
for barbarism), the Text achieves, if not
the transparence of social relations, that
at least of language relations: the Text
is that space where no language has a hold
over any other, where languages circulate
(keeping the circular sense of the term).
These few propositions, inevitably, do not
constitute the articulations of a Theory
of the Text and this is not simply the result
of the failings of the person here presenting
them (who in many respects has anyway done
no more than pick up what is being developed
round about him). It stems from the fact
that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied
by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction
of meta-language, or at least (since it may
be necessary provisionally to resort to meta-language)
its calling into doubt, is part of the theory
itself: the discourse on the Text should
itself be nothing other than text, research,
textual activity, since the Text is that
social space which leaves no language safe,
outside, nor any subject of the enunciation
in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor,
decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide
only with a practice of writing.
1971
Translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Heath
Evans Experientialism 
