Oh, Barthes, What Has Become of Me?

I was recently sitting about, doing some hand-work, and thinking about various notions of the self. I though about the idea of a (possibly eternal) spirit or soul which is a sort of carrier for what we call the self, which somehow houses the individual. Then I moved on to a little consideration of the self as a collection of memories, more of a result  of a functioning brain than anything spiritual or constant. Then it struck me: "Why, that sounds like Barthes!"

Barthes writes that the reader "is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" (877). There is no constant reader, no self, only a collection of the symbols in the work. While Foucault holds that the author is "reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence" (905), in Barthes' argument, the reader is nothing but a singular absence until the text is imposed on him. Sort of like the idea that a mind is just a mind until memories begin to gather in it, and it is the memories that create the person.

The idea that there is no constant self, or that the individual is not really individual, often results in discomfort. However, as Campbell points out, "the concept of the individual... did not emerge fully in the  West until late in the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century" (2). In fact, the first use of the word was in reference to G-D as the "high and individual Trinity" (Campbell, 2). We now use in reference to ourselves a word that was first used to describe G-D. That's presumption, right there. I myself have no profound attachment to the idea of the individual, but I am partial to environments where everyone is treated as an individual. This is probably because, as Campbell says, "agency manifests itself  in the practices of individuals"(5), so when one is considered an individual, one acquires agency. Individuality is indeed a very nice thing to have.