Revisiting and Trying to Understand Barthes

In this post, I wanted to back track a little. I've had trouble with Barthes concept of an "author cancelling himself out." I want to use this post tot try and explain his concept to myself.

Barthes was a structuralist. In structuralism, a text's meaning is found through the signs and conventions of the text's language. Bedford gives the example of the word tiger. A reader will read about a tiger and picture a tiger, but the text is merely a symbol for a tiger, calling on the reader's own knowledge of tigers (Bedford). Structuralists often find that readers organize these signs into binaries: madwoman vs. angel, hero vs. villain, white vs. black, etc.

Structuralism reminds me of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric. Aristotle said that a rhetor's job was merely to elucidate the "means of persuasion."  His job was to point to common knowledge pertinent to the case. An example of this may be, "murder is bad." This is commonly accepted and is pointed to in order to relate a particular case to that common knowledge.

Structuralists, similarly, thought the common signs and conventions were the foundations for a text's meaning. For example, Barthes says, “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them...life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred." (877) An author does not create original work because he is constantly referring back to already established signs. He does not invent the idea of a tiger but instead calls on the already accepted sign of a tiger. The text is constantly deferred because the common signs that founded the meaning of the text are always referring back to real life objects. The text can only defer; it can't make the objects real.

 Barthes refers to the modern "author" as a "scriptor" because he doesn't call on his life's history to write. He uses the "performative" form. Barthes explains that this is like a king saying "I declare." He is performing a declaration. The meaning of the word and the action itself are the same. He is both saying "declare" and performing a declaration. This confuses me because I don't see how modern works are performative. Perhaps, the kind of performative writing he is speaking of can be seen in the media better than in modern novels?

What does it mean, then, for an author to cancel himself out? It was written on the board in class that the kind of writing Barthes proposes "cancels or removes an archetype." Barthes’ writer defers himself. He mixes signs and symbols up in a way that cannot possibly be structured into a classic literary form. He borrows from all literary archetypes, but he does not allow the writing to rest on one of those archetypes. By doing this, by using the archetypes and mixing them together, he cancels them out. The modern scriptor's antecedent explicitly referred to his personal life in his works. The modern scriptor writes, mixing together all these conventional signs, but he himself does not organize those signs into an intentional form. For example, let's say an author wrote a dream poem and simply wrote down everything that happened in his dream in the order that it happened. He doesn't explain that it's a dream. Instead of trying to make sense of a narrative, the reader's job becomes deciphering the dream’s symbols. Why might these relate to each other? How do they relate in terms of language, in terms of how they sound together? The words he uses in his dream poem are derived from the signs and symbols he's learned from studying literature, but none of these take their usual forms; they don’t form into an archetype. The reader finds a way to connect the images because the writer is not providing any help to him. Through the act of writing, the author makes himself unnecessary. He writes without any intent of meaning and therefore it's up to the reader to place that meaning.

I think I might understand Barthes' concept better now, but I can't think of any examples of this kind of writing. Maybe Lady Gaga's lyrics?