The Pleasure of the Text
Roland Barthes; translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang, 1975.
From Susan Sontag’s blurb on the back cover:
“Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. (...) There is no rude or prophetic claims, no pleadings with the reader, and no efforts not to be understood. This is seduction as play, never violation. (...) For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.”
From Richard Howard’s ‘A Note on the Text’ I am reminded not only of the multiplicity of meanings contained within words -text- in a single language, but of what happens to the meaning as it, the word or text (or image) is translated across languages how the shifts in context add to the possible meanings. (see page 19 for more on this from Barthes) Or as Barthes described:
“Thus the Biblical myth is reversed, the confusion of tongues is no longer a punishment, the subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel.” (3-4)
The inability of the writer to know who/where the reader is; this unpredictability is bliss…”there can still be a game.” (4)
The text as a source of desire; a seducer of reader and writer the text must prove this desire through its seduction.
Barthes description as the point of pleasure as where two edges meet…”the place where the death of language is glimpsed.” (6)
“(...) what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.” (7)
Connecting to Coplans’ criticism of Serial Imagery:
“If I agree to judge a text according to pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad. (...) the text (the same is true of the singing voice) can wring from me only this judgement, in no way adjectival: that’s it! And further still: that’s it for me! This “for me” is neither subjective nor existential, but Nietzschean (“...What is it for me?...”).” (13)
“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” (17)
Drifting… “Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole,...” (18) the ‘intractable bliss’ and the Serial collide?
Pleasure and bliss...the same, but different…
“...criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss: (...) This text is outside pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you cannot speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, (...).” (21-22)
Connecting to Winnicott and the first transitional zone of play -mother and child- where identity begins to be formed:
“No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure (Lacan, apropos of Sade). For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not the language, it is the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body (...): in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language, and opinion will strenuously object, since it opposes “disfiguring nature”.” (37)
Connecting to thoughts on gesture (via O’Doherty’s definition):
“There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it: every old language becomes old once it is repeated. (...) the New is bliss.” (40-41)
“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions - these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.” (41-42)
“In short, the word can be erotic on two opposing conditions, both excessive: if it is extravagantly repeated, or on the contrary, if it is unexpected, succulent in its newness (...)’” (42)
Connecting to thoughts of hierarchy and finitude re: Serial Imagery:
“The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions. Whence its completion: how can a hierarchy remain open? The Sentence is complete: it is even precisely that language which is complete. Practice, here, is very different from theory. Theory (Chomsky) says that the sentence is potentially infinite (infinitely catalyzable), but practice always obliges the sentence to end. (...) it is the power of completion which defines sentence mastery and marks, (...) The professor is someone who finishes his sentences. The politician (...) imagine(s) an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized! And the writer? (... after words of Valery) A writer is (...) someone who thinks sentences: A Sentence-Thinker (i.e., not altogether a thinker and not altogether a sentence-parser).” (50-51)
Not….not…
“Unless for some perverts the sentence is a body.” (51)
“A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity. This fiction is no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual -but not personal.” (62)