Barthesian Discourse: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

When Philippe Sollers set out in May 1980, shortly after Roland Barthes' death, to write a succinct preface to the new, abridged edition of the seminal collective work of Tel Quel known as Theorie d'ensemble (originally published in 1968), (1) it was appropriate that he should try to summarize some of the major aims of the volume's contributors. In his words, the book's essence "port[ait] sur un reve: unifier la reflexion et declencher a partir de la une subversion generalisee."(7) Born of a no doubt utopian critical dream of unifying the many contemporary varieties of structuralism in vogue at the time, and closely connected to the infamous "evenements de mai 68," Theorie d'ensemble does indeed read (still) like a compendium of the major provocative ideas of that era. Even in an abridged format, the volume unfolds like a series of usually deliberate attempts to subvert various institutional powers and instances within the literary arena. As it happens, Sollers ends his preface by giving hommage to a towering figure whose essay appears second only to one by Michel Foucault in both the new and old editions of the collection. Clearly, he wished thereby to place this entire methodological and theoretical crucible (creuset), as he calls it, sous le signe de quelqu'un dont la complicite a tellement compte dans ces jours de mutation aventureuse, quelqu'un qui vient de nous quitter mais dont le style d'intervention, par son ampleur, sa justesse, sa mesure, nous aidait et nous aidera encore a aller plus loin: Roland Barthes. (7) Taking Sollers' assessment seriously, I should like to suggest that Barthes's work as a whole must be read as an on-going quest for a "subversion generale." In doing so, I am hardly going out on a weak limb inasmuch as in countless other studies practically every other critic who has ever written on Barthes documents similar, subversive stylistic proclivities. In her recent book Sens et non-sens de la revolte, (2) Julia Kristeva, for instance, rereads the early writings of Barthes (beginning with Le Degre zero de l'ecriture and Mythologies) with an eye towards this very tendency, which she effectively extends to the rest of the Barthesian corpus. Emphasizing the ever-present semi ological project that underlies all of Barthes' texts--which she first defines, after Saussure, not as a simple "formalisation, mais une recherche des lois dialectiques de la signifiance"--Kristeva immediately goes on to insist that Barthes' real goal was "une desubstantification de l'idealite signifiante. C'est dire que la portee de ces textes est d'abord negative." (436) In other words, from at least two of his closest acquaintances, Sollers and Kristeva, we get the distinct impression that Barthes was a rebel with seemingly countless causes. Unwilling to accept set categories and structures, Barthes was a writer whose subjectivity: defini[e] dans le topos de sa communication avec l'autre, commence par nier cette communication pour pouvoir formuler un autre dispositif. Negatif du premier langage dit "naturel", ce nouveau "langage" est par consequent non plus communicatif, mais, dironsnous, transformatif, quand il n'est pas mortel aussi bien pour le "je" que pour l'"autre." (436) It would appear, then, that Barthes was concerned primarily with breaking or transforming our reading and writing habits, with forcing us not to look backwards, as it were, at what texts (in the widest acceptation of that term) have always been said to express, but to look ahead instead to what else they might be saying. Literary language, in particular, was significant to Barthes not because it reminds us of things we already know, but because of what it can tell us now and in the future about other impulses, forces, and significations, which are discreetly at work within what he calls ecriture. Thus, with regard to his specific study of mythologies, for example, Kristeva points out that: A l'oppose d'un structuralisme qui cherchait dans le mythe les "structures permanentes de l'esprit humain" [an allusion to the kind of early structuralist project of, say, a Levi-Strauss], c'est la surdetermination sociale et historique que Barthes vise a travers le phenomene discursif. …