'From Work to Text' by Roland Barthes

From Work to Text by Roland Barthes | Critical Summary                                                                        

Introduction: The Change in our Idea of Language

A change has lately occurred, or is occurring, in our idea of language and consequently of the (literary) work. This change is obviously linked to the present development of a host of other disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc.

The transformation of the Notion of the Work

The interdisciplinary activity, today so highly valued in research, begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down-perhaps even violently, through the shocks of fashion. The mutation which seems to be affecting the notion of the work, is part of an epistemological shift more than of a real break of the kind which in fact occurred in the last century upon the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism. Barthes’s main propositions of the differences between work and text are outlined - in terms of method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading, and pleasure.

1. Method: According to Barthes, ‘work’ can be handled. It is a concrete object - something that is definite and complete, “a fragment of a substance occupying a portion of the spaces of books,” whereas the text is the composition or the meaning the reader takes from the ‘work’ and hence, it is not a definite object. The difference between a work and a text is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. a distinction proposed by Lacan: ‘reality’ is shown, the ‘real’ is proved; in the same way, the work is seen (in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses), the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language. The Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production.

2. Genres: Similarly, the Text does not stop at (good) literature; it cannot be caught up in a hierarchy, or even in a simple distribution of genres. Hence, unlike the rigid classifications applied to the ‘work,’ the text cannot be pigeon-holed into a genre or placed in a hierarchical system. What constitutes it is on the contrary its force of subversion with regard to the old classifications. The text poses problems of classification. The text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of genres – all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts. Hence, there is no literary ‘originality’: all literature is ‘intertextual’ and paradoxical.

3. Signs: The text is ‘incomplete’ in that it is metonymic; its words or phrases may be exchanged for others with similar meanings or associations. Its meaning becomes interrupted since it encourages the reader to produce overlapping ideas and make associations. Its ambiguity causes it to become extremely symbolic and makes its signifiers arbitrary and undetermined. On the contrary, the ‘work’ is complete, in that it closes upon a signified. It has closure and can be interpreted literally and is explanatory and is a sign in itself.

4. Plurality: The Text is plural. This does not mean only that it has several meanings but that it fulfills the very plurality of meaning: an irreducible (and not just acceptable) plurality. The Text is not coexistence of meaning, but passage, traversal; hence, it depends not on an interpretation, however liberal, but on an explosion, on dissemination. The plurality of the Text depends, as a matter of fact, not on the ambiguity of its contents, but on what we might call the stereographic plurality of the signifiers which weave it (etymologically, the text is a fabric).

5. Filiation: The work is caught up in a process of filiation. If writing is seen as a ‘work’ it is defined by a process of association or authorship. It becomes affiliated and identified with its author and the reader’s knowledge of the author and previous works may become the key to its understanding. The author is reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; literary science thus teaches us to respect the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, and society postulates a legality of the author’s relation to his work (this is the “author’s rights,”) The Text, on the other hand, is read without the Father’s inscription.

No vital “respect” is therefore due to the Text: it can be broken (moreover, this is what the Middle Ages did with two nonetheless authoritarian texts: Scripture and Aristotle); the Text can be read without its father’s guarantee; the restoration of the intertext paradoxically abolishes inheritance. It is not that the Author cannot ‘return’ in the Text, in his text, but he does so, one might say, as a guest; if he is a novelist, he inscribes himself there as one of his characters, drawn as a figure in the carpet; his inscription is no longer privileged, paternal, but ludic: he becomes, one can say, a paper author; The I that writes the text is never anything but a paper I.

6. Reading: The work is a commodity – the object of consumption; today it is the work’s “quality” (which ultimately implies an appreciation of “taste”) and not the actual operation of reading which can make differences between books: “cultivated” reading is not structurally different from reading on trains. The Text (if only by its frequent “unreadability”) decants the work (if it permits it at all) from its consumption and recuperates it as play, task, production, practice. This means that the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or diminish) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the reader’s projection into the work, but by linking the two together into one and the same signifying practice.

The reduction of reading to consumption is obviously responsible for the "boredom" many feel in the presence of the modern (“unreadable”) text, the avantgarde film or painting: to be bored means one cannot produce the text, play it, release it, make it go.

7. Pleasure: This suggests one final approach to the Text: that of pleasure. I do not know if a hedonist aesthetic ever existed. Of course, a pleasure of the work (of certain works) exists; I can enjoy reading and rereading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, and even-why not? - Alexandre Dumas; but this pleasure, however intense, remains partly a pleasure of consumption: for, if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot rewrite them (that one cannot, today, write ‘like that’); and this rather depressing knowledge suffices to separate me from the production of these works! The Text is linked to jouissance or delectation, i.e., to pleasure without separation. It is not an object of consumption making it not reliant on the author and reader can write and re-write it.

Conclusion

Barthes concludes this seminal article by emphasising that a text creates social utopia in its own ways. In addition, only a practice of writing, which is a process of production, can bring the text alive, and harmonize with the Theory of Text. Thereby, he upholds the ‘text’ by declaring it as an ultimate literary concept, as against the more popular notion of ‘work’.

1971