#white male privilege | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kimyoonmiauthor · 2 months

Text

Death of the Author by Ronald Barthes (1967)

Full disclosure, I've never really liked this essay. That said, I do like Barthes' other arguments. But I always found this one lacking, not in its central thesis that readers also matter, but I find that the lines of evidence are really poor. People worship this argument far too much without examination of why it has no citations and no one seems to be willing to question the argument in full from other viewpoints of things like, does it make philosophical sense?

But then people often use this essay as a crutch to say they don't need authorcism, and in fact go towards 100% readercism and then skip out on other critical theories. This isn't exactly what it argues, but I also feel like it doesn't argue the points it wants to make well. And truly, if I handed something like this in as an undergrad to my English classes, I'd be marked down hard. I think we need the same level of scrutiny towards the so-called masters as we do towards students and don't make excuses for "Because he's well-liked". This wasn't a new idea like he suggests. Authorcism goes further back than he suggests–but because people don't want to challenge these notions (and apparently don't read all the way through Poetics?) they think he's brilliant?

Dude gave no citations. Seriously. All his assertions are on weak ground.

Man, sometimes I think being born a white straight male means never being questioned when you make wild assertions and no one will ever fact check you ever. Well, I'm fact checking this thing, and it's not coming up the way he wants.

Original file: (translated, 1977)

No one wants to say this is racist or challenge the whole, "In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or realtor whose 'performance' the mastery of the narrative code–may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'."

The core idea that the "author" is a modern figure is disputed by Aristotle, when Aristotle goes on and on and on about how much of a effing genius Sophocles was. I mean that Homer dude, that Homer dude wasn't good for anything and is a distant second to Sophocles. (Why do I remember this? Because I read the whole of Poetics and *cough* Aristotle waxes on poetic about Sophocles and barely mentions anyone else.)

No one wants to challenge how this basis and core of his thesis is coming off racist?

It's reading as those "primitive" people in that effing functionalist snobbery where some civilizations are "more advanced" than others storytellers aren't lauded. Ummm... OK, prove it, buddy. Your anthropology is faulty.

Often shaman, the keepers of the stories of the tribe/organization are lauded in their communities as important. If this was NOT true, the British Empire wouldn't have specifically gone after and tried to KILL those people. If he's arguing that the author was less important in those stories, that those people said, which is an interpretation, because he's not directly saying it, then the problem with that is there is a difference between losing the author, and what we'd call resonance of the words. And then you have a whole semantics question here on how much do stories outlive their authors, and how much there is over attribution issues to people that should not be lauded.

And then that's a whole other question than authorcism v. readercism. Because even those stories without the original author who might have shifted over time, still have other ways to read the text. Those are historicism, cultural relativism, race theory, etc. All of which, BTW, did exist by the time Barthes was writing. To pin his hopes on readercism, and say something this effing racist, that copyright does not matter to tribes, without textual evidence, when Kung! do respect copyright ideas, at the very least, is trying to kill the author, but also bury everything else in literary discourse, which was an issue I had with Percy Lubbock, to be fair, because I thought his way of thinking was far too reductive.

There's no citation?

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single·person, the author 'confiding' in us.

I disagree, it's an overstatement at this point in time. Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, did do some of this, but he also looked at other things to explain the text. And there was Percy Lubbock who introduced Readercism (not the coinage, but the concept) in 1921. (yes, 1921, eat it, it sounds like plagiarism....). The absolutist idea that it was always sought through the author before this point isn't true. 'cause I effing did my reading.

Percy Lubbock said it was ultimately up to the reader to know the context, etc. Earlier critics have also suggested things like partnership between audience and creators. This would be writers such as Bertolt Brecht, who was around by the time Barthes was writing and gets half-hearted cited, no less. TT I did a ton of reading. There was a ton of effort in the early 19th century to give more context to plays like Antigone. Even that jerk, Freytag tried to give context to Aristotle, though wrongly. He uses (wrong) Historcism in order to illuminate Aristotle.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it)

What? As I outlined, I don't see that. He's making assertions without citation. And then people aren't challenging it. Why? I would be 100% be required to give citations for either assertion.

In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme~s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).

Stéphane Mallarmé was born 1842. No citation of the essay. TT Again, I'd be required to cite the effing essay. No one wants to challenge this? Intertextual evidence is missing. For a guy who says the reader is most important, he isn't doing a lot to prove it in his own work.

Instead, Barthes gets lauded by later writers by interpreting what the author meant when the author didn't say it?

It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem." --Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Note" to Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pg. 301.

Isn't this against what he's arguing for? He didn't leave it on the page. He didn't say any of this. Barthes left no evidence. Reader with no context wins?

To be fair, here, I've seen Barthes other work and he does know how to do citations, but Johnson is flat out trying to explain the author for him and I don't like that. If you're arguing for readercism, then the author's intentions shouldn't need to be explained.

By putting it behind a veil of "Well, he did no citations, so we need to interpret what he meant" when he doesn't leave it on the page, that's authorcism, ironically. Makes me cranky when white men get away with doing no citations to prove their thesis.

Barthes cites Valery is Paul Valéry b. 1871, also no citation. I'd get lambasted if I did this. Ah, white male privilege.

No intertextual evidence for his assertion here, either. While I don't love Lubbock 100% and I thought he oversimplified, at least he put *effing citations* on the page to prove his assertions.

Where are the citations? He doesn't need them? Why?

Proust gave modern writing its epic.

There's no proof for this assertion. I don't think it's true either. Epic of Gigamesh. It was translated in 1875, not by Proust. Barthes knew about it. He's not giving the context well in the text either.

There's no citation for his assertions of Proust either. He makes opinions, but where is the textual evidence?

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with·Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage)

He cites Brecht, not the particular work?? But also Brecht argued for partnership between audience and author a bit at least?

Urrrgghhhh I HATE writers like this. Have I not gone over how much I dislike people who do assertions without citation and then get lauded?

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as" the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically " on a single line' divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.

Barthes, citation? No citation?

You asserted it was a "New idea" that the author reigned supreme. Prove it. Show the work that says that. Because Aristotle, nope. Aristotle worshiped the living pants off of Sophocles.

Look, Lubbock did a better job supporting his assertions in this area. He actually cited living works and did intertextual evidence. I agreed that his assertions are reductive like Virginia Woolf, but at least the man cited Tolstoy. He didn't make wild assertions about Tolstoy and then hoped that someone would get the references, and then cite no works.

In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now.

Modern from when? What time period? If you're trying to argue anyone before Stéphane Mallarmé existed, again, effing Poetics. Not to effing mention the whole of Aelius Donatus's entire treaties on how plays should go was based on a single author: Terence. In what time period are you talking about? Author worship goes way back in time. Effing reading about Aelius Donatus loving the hell out of Terence's play with r*** made me cranky for a week. He found it sooo funny. And I was struggling with the Latin too.

The fact is (or, it·follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say)

which ones, Barthes, which ones? Give me an effing citation. 'cause I can't see that the "depiction" reigned supreme over the "author" through Aristotle literally ranking Sophocles as better than Homer. Aristotle kept going on and on about it. Plus you just cited Brecht earlier, who hates Aristotle's ass. So, make it mesh together. Which parts of the "Classics" are you citing, and which parts of Brecht are you taking from? Brecht HATES Aristotle, and most of the time when people talk of Classics, they are talking about Greek plays. You need to delineate which parts you are taking and which you leave behind.

rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered - something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets.

No citation again. I'm cranky. No citation or quotes for all these pages. For an author whose supposedly arguing for "readercism" and "simplicity" by leaving it on the page, as the critic earlier, Johnson, is saying, he's not doing either, honestly.

Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

Honestly, there is more burying of citations.

He's saying in the fanciest of words to make it sound like he's smarter than he is, that "You aren't dumb 'cause you don't understand the author." If he's arguing for simplicity and leaving on the page, he's not practicing the same himself. So I don't know if the earlier argument by Johnson works in his favor at all.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none' of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.

I have issues with this from a philosophical PoV.

The question of originality, is certainly something that rose with industrialization, but that's more of an individualism, rather than an authorcism, I would argue–given how much that Aristotle, Aelius Donatus and others around the world tried very hard to preserve authorship. An argument of lost authorship overtime is a totally different affair, and one I've been dealing with as people over attribute, and I find that quotes are wrongly attributed because people don't remember the author or are too lazy to look up the texts they are talking about (I'm staring at you Barthes).

Individualism, is well, well argued to have risen with industrialization. Off the top of my head, though not in Barthes' time, you have Lucy Worsley, who in A Very British Romance argued that individualism in Romance is a very modern notion (argued, first episode within the first few minutes). Not to mention a lot of social sciences, in general, argue for this type of individualism, and then that argument, in general, leading to the arguments for why industrialization often leads to loneliness. To be contextually fair to Barthes, he didn't have the bit about loneliness yet, since that's a more recent sort of studying, but the scholarship on individualism as a part of industrialization should have been emerging in his time period, IIRC. This might have spurred this essay, but the notion that historicism and other ways of examining the text along with the author did not exist is a farce, at best.

One could argue the Butterfly effect, which is Henri Poincaré, prior to Barthes' existence of his essay, would disprove the idea of originality, but we're getting neck deep into physics and philosophy here. I am a nerd and interdisciplinary, so...

Say huip is a new thingy. It weighs 200 lbs. It does a bunch of new stuff–very theoretical. It doesn't matter. Someone newly buys this object that can do new stuff. It is a result of culture. Yes? Interwoven culture, as Barthes describes.

Bob has bought this huip thingy, and drops it down some stairs and finds that it rolls, not doing the original intended function. This is his particular life experience with huip. He thinks that 200lbs being able to bounce down stairs is awesome. I mean, dude, it defies all physics and is able to go down and turn on stair landings.

Bob posts this information somewhere, puts it into text, and then his interpretation, is by writing it, it is fun.

Sally, say, does the same thing, but kills a cat.

The first ripple is that it has killed a cat. Oh no, Sally's interpretation of huip is that the cat is dead and she's getting sued.

Isn't Sally's interpretation of huip and this thing it can do, but wasn't designed for novel as Bob's interpretation? If they both post about it, they are authors of a new experience.

If the manufacturers of huip say, but Huip isn't supposed to do that and do a total recall of the product and start doing things like making it so it can't roll, or weigh that amount, then the experience of the object changes. A new novel experience happens.

So the philosophical question is "What is then new?" in this scenario. If Barthes says "nothing" then it becomes an issue. Because humans aren't the same over time. And if you say that the author, Bob of the huip meme, didn't have a novel experience, dude, it is 200 lbs of menace and he discovered something new.

The fact that Sally interpreted it and then it ran over the cat and killed it... who is liable in that scenario? Bob, who didn't follow the instructions and accidentally found out and memed out what huip can do, the manufacturer, or Sally or all three?

Something clearly new happened.

BTW, I randomly pressed letters to come up with said object, huip.

If the experience is always anterior and not original, then how come witnesses never agree on anything? I don't think Barthes thought this part through completely. It's missing some key French Philosophers.

His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them.

Writers go outside and do things like experience seeing a new animal. Saying that a writer only mixes previous writing and cultural functions... meh, I'm not quite sure about this.

If his total argument is culture shapes the writer, and the writer has no free will, and the writer is merely mixing other writers, thus there is nothing new, this is more like an argument for determinism over free will, which runs into philosophical problems as I illustrated with Bob up there. Bob had a novel experience he wrote about. It wasn't the intention of the manufacturer, but gravity is not manufactured by culture. Stairs are manufactured by culture. Did an accident with gravity and a manufacturing error shape Bob into writing and memeing what he did with the huip? Or was it really Sir Issac Newton whom Bob never bothered to read, but loosely heard about once in Science Class for a test and he can't bother to remember the numbers for gravity.

Writers have experiences outside of books. The filter might be culture, but the filter doesn't always shape everyone's opinion exactly the same. Perspective, worldviews, and experiences do, and that's what's novel.

Barthes further argues that because the author has a dictionary, they are caught in culture. Urrggg. I made up huip on the spot. You still have no idea what the primary function of the object is. I'm sure someone is trying to make up one in their head. Or I typed that up and someone is making it up. But I don't particularly need to know much in order to make up that context. I need stairs, some name, and a mythical object I banged my keyboard for. Gravity is a natural force I personally experience. Especially when I was struggling to put an air conditioner in my window, heard a cat and then wondered what would happen if said air conditioner landed on the cat and then posted about it on Nanowrimo in 2008-ish.

Barthes might argue that I got it from literature somewhere. But the filter of words had nothing to do with the initial experience. I didn't have to put it into words. No one else was there.

Where did I get 200 lbs? Uhhh... random number.

Where did I get the runs over cat–from the original experience of worrying about the air conditioner falling from the window.

Where did I get magically rolls down stairs? I had an experience with a friend of mine that liked to roll down stairs. It was a novel experience for me. She liked to bounce around corners. (Hello, Libbie). If writing is purely words, culture, not nature, experience, worldview, opinion, Barthes has an issue with the treaties here.

My novel experience with the air conditioner and feeling like a weakling and hearing a cat though cat is not a controllable object in my framework, lead me to post about air conditioner falling from my apartment window into a roof, killing a cat, and typing it into Nanowrimo's boards.

Is Barthes saying the entire incident is mediated purely by words? That's a lot of coincidences, don'tcha think?

Gravity isn't a cultural experience and not everyone thinks in words either. In order to write you have to use words, certainly, but the initial experience still is not necessarily mediated by words or culture as he'd expect.

Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the·very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Untrue. Aristotle spends a HUGE amount of time on it. HUGE. !@#$. (We need the play to have negative reinforcement on the reader in a morality PoV–he spends a lot of his treaties on this. How do you achieve this as author. About how the audience should feel. How plays are inferior if they don't achieve this. About how Homer was a poor writer for not doing it correctly and the impact being wrong.) Aelius Donatus even talks about it. (We Latins this. We Latins that. What does the audience think. What's the difference between 'us' Latins and the Greeks? Should we account for the differences?)

His idea is that in the past authors were never worshiped, until the "modern era" and copyright didn't matter. (Untrue, Aristotle). And that the reader has forever been ignored in literary criticism before him. (Brecht, Aristotle, Aelius Donatus?)

We should ignore the author because the reader is the ultimate decider–honestly Percy Lubbock did a better job arguing this in 1921 with less convoluted language.

That everything is mediated by culture for the author and previous texts. (Didn't read Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss? Levi-Strauss, BTW, was French and published before him) And that copyright didn't exist in those all oral tradition tribes. TT Kung! Anyone?

Because you see, according to him, writers don't experience or mediate it through their own lives. Only through texts.

I think the better argument for readercism would follow like this:

Readers have their own experiences and worldviews. This will not be universal or resonate reader to reader because inherently no two people will agree on anything. Despite that there is a sort of cultural agreement to tame what seems like chaos. Writing comes into this chaos and tries to pull meaning from it.

The writer and reader's experience will not close to always match, so the impact of the writing is not going to be the same no matter what you will do. The best you can do is mediate your experiences, whether it's with culture, nature or your personal experiences through writing which is interpreted by others.

As Lubbock said, the text doesn't come alive until a reader reads the text.

To me, Barthes' argument is far, far more poor than Lubbock's argument for the same. At least Lubbock's argument for the same wasn't effing blatantly racist. (I give more leeway to Lubbock in 1921, before the 1960's than Barthes in 1965 who is also French and has clearly access to Levi-Strauss and even talks about ethnographies) It's based on assumptions, the majority of which aren't backed up. Plus he has more to work with if what he says is true. D- argument. He doesn't argue for what to replace it with, doesn't talk about the other critical theories at all. Urgghh. He's done better. But I know, I'm not supposed to question the greats when people worship them. But it irks me that he gives one citation, maybe, and then we blindly believe everything else he wrote. Why? I want some critical thinking here.

For the record, I hated Derrida too. His major flaw for me, BTW, was that he said everything is mediated through words, which is not true. Functionalists suck. Structuralists suck less, but are still effing prone to racism.

Sometimes I wonder if academics purposefully like to teach convoluted texts like this without citations, rather than a cautionary tale, of what will happen, but because it sounds smart and convoluted and because they don't check the assertions as true or not and plus there is a bonus points for the level of racism they can force their students to read, but they gloss over it and say ignore it. I mean, you absolutely need to read Emmanuel Kant, even if you can't with his hatred of women and you're supposed to ignore that part because there are no substitutes in the world that might have said the same things he said better. Urrgghh. Do you purposefully choose the most uptight racist white men to teach and tell that they are lauded? Lubbock made a far, far better argument. Lack of citations and blind worship because of lack of citations+white maleness makes me cranky.

#critical theory #story theory #roland barthes #writing #death of the author #where are the citations #white male privilege #white male privilege says you don't have to cite anything and still get believed? Bullshit #Evidence is poor

5 notes · View notes