Barthes and Art History - Assignment Example

Barthes and Art History The thought of Roland Barthes has been undeniably influential on the field of art history Though his background, and much of his early work, was in semiotics, Barthes mature work approached much more closely to deconstruction (or so one must suppose, since Derrida steadfastly refused to say what deconstruction actually was). "The Death of the Author," originally published in 1973, is one marker of the shift of emphasis in his work and is the key text that will be here used as a guide to his ideas. In that work Barthes deals with the position of the author, but his references to van Gough and Tchaikovsky as authors clearly reveal that he is thinking of any creative work, not merely literature. The focus of this paper will be to closely read Barthes essay and determine what sort of art historical investigation his ideas could support. While it is evident that many art historians, and indeed artists, have draw on Barthes in their work, it is his own ideas that will be interrogated here. Like most intellectuals of his generation, the initial phases of Barthes education were in the Classics, the intensive study of Greek and Roman literature in the original languages. It is no surprise, then (for all that meta-critics like Iversen miss it), that "The Death of the Author" is a close conversation with Platos Phaedrus. The fact that Barthes nowhere acknowledge his use of Plato is, as will be seen, perhaps in keeping with the spirit of his philosophy. "The Death of the Author" begins with the quotation of a passage from Balzacs Sarrasine no doubt chose for its improbability and impenetrabulity, the description of a castrato and transvestite the narrator loves and believes to be a woman. Barthes asks of the passage: Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.2 What Barthes wants is more information from the text than it gives, and since it appears that the text is all he has, he despairs of ever discovering answers. From a reasonable point of view, it does not seem that he is making his best effort, since given the incredible amount of documentation that is available about a nineteenth century figure like Balzac, beginning with the complete text of the story in which the passage occurs, the rest of his literary output, then going on to memoirs by or about him, letters, and any other available documents. In fact, it would seem that more nearly than an unanswered question, Barthes has a book ahead of him to research in answer to his own question. But what Barthes really means is that he cannot simply say, Balzac, what did you mean here? Text, what are you saying here? and expect a ready answer. He is not the first to point out this difficulty with texts. Platos Socrates stated long ago: You know, Phaedrus, thats the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painters products stand before us as through they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.3 The reason that Barthes can have "No doubt it has always been that way,"4 is because he had the Phaedrus in mind as he wrote. Yet he turns in an entirely other direction. Barthes points out that in ethnographic (a circumlocution startling in its awkwardness, drawing attention to rather than concealing his desire to say primitive) societies there is no author, only a mediator between tradition and audience. Barth places the author as a product of modernity: Reformation and Revolution. But of course this theory is undercut by the very meaning that Barthes refuses to place within his text. If Socrates or Plato, or anyone in antiquity makes the same complaint about authorship that Barthes does, namely that you cannot interrogate his written work, then the author in Barthes terms clearly existed in antiquity. And if the author existed in classical antiquity, he most likely existed in other traditional cultures as well (or she one must hasten to add, not wishing to snub as a non-existent author either Sappho or Murasaki). But for Barthes, the author must be the ornament of "capitalist ideology," so he must come into existence with capitalism and not before. So here is another dead author Barthes is speaking with, Marx, whose authority must supersede Platos among the phantoms. But Barthes is far from done with Plato. He slyly introduces him into the text again, under the name of Surrealism. This movement Barthes, tells us, "contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist ‘jolt’), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together."5 But all this is a description of the Phaedrus, where the status of the author is built up through a text created by the cooperation of Socrates, Phaedrus and Lysias present only in his death covered over by his text (of which the report Plato gives us is merely a report), where the inspiration to speak comes to the unwilling and unknowing Socrates poured into his ear from the great poets as much as from the buzzing music of the cicadas, and in which myths are spun-out only to be revealed as jokes. Barthes goes forward with Plato again. Plato believed that knowledge, and especially art, comes from memory.6 When the memory is not conscious it is an inspiration, which he jokingly says comes from some god, or the muses, or the cicadas.7 Barthes interrogates this obfuscation and comes to the same conclusion as Harold Bloom,8 that inspiration is the voice of tradition and that artistic creation is the reception and transformation of tradition. For Barthes, the author is a bearer and worker in "language", and that language is clearly the received language of tradition: "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...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. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely."9 "We know now" and Plato knew then: it is no different. Indeed the first author that one can consider calling such, Homer, was already improvising in performance with a few thousand lines and half lines of traditional verse he had memorized, but which had been composed by his teachers and his teachers teachers and so on.10 His art was not in creating new language, but already in recombining remembered language in new ways. What Barthes accomplishes here is to knock down a straw-man, perhaps a very well-respected one, but never-the-less a straw-man, a false argument that each author creates a new thing de novo. It may indeed dominate a great deal of scholarly discourse about artistic genius, and stand behind his remarks on Baudelaire, van Gogh, and Tchaikovsky as inspired by their pathologies, but its hardly a serious argument against the character and importance of tradition. Bathes proceeds then on a very strange path. The strawman of the author as creator was set up by the critic. In reality its effect is to illustrate the critic. The critic alone is the hero of the tale because he can discover and decipher the meaning of the author. But it isn’t like that at all, Barthes assures the reader. The meaning of the text is created by neither the author nor the critic, but by the reader. What is the difference between the critic and the reader? The critic deciphers; the reader disentangles. The critic looks for what is underneath the text, the reader rips the text apart and follows each thread back to its source,11 just as Theseus finds his way out of the labyrinth by winding up Ariadnes thread Barthes does not add. Barthes should be careful. The reader might founder under the impression that disentangling and deciphering are metaphors for the same act of finding meaning in reading, that pulling apart the threads of a garment might lead to its inside, that is, to its underside. But really, who is the reader that pulls apart a text to find its origins, the reader who is not a critic, or the reader who is a critic? In the end Barthes parts company with Plato. In the Phaedrus, Socrates solution to the problem of being unable to interrogate texts, is to relegate texts to a second class, to act merely as reminders of true knowledge and learning. These categories and activities he insists can only be carried on through dialectic between student and teacher.12 Barthes will not have this, he sticks to his texts, but finds, as she thinks, some other way out of the maze of difficulty. He turns for help to the eminent French Classicist Jean-Paul Vernant. Vernant points out that the tragedy in Oedipus Rex is created when Oedipus condemns the murderer of Laius to exile, without knowing that he himself is the murderer of Laius, and without knowing so much else. Oedipus is unperturbed, even happy with his speech of condemnation, since he thinks it helps Thebes and helps himself. But it is the audience that feels fear and pity since they know who Oedipus is and what he has done. The men in the audience were the ones who created the tragedy. Barthes takes this as the key that unlocks all puzzles. The reader, not the author is the one who creates all meaning in a text: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."13 But is the reader the one who does this, the one who creates meaning? If it would be impossible to find a reader who completely lacks, "history, biography, psychology," as Barthes requires,14 it would be possible to find one who does not know who the murderer of Laius was. When such a reader hears the actor playing Oedipus speak Sophocles words, he will not experience fear and pity, he will think the same as Oedipus thinks, that the king is doing his best to save his city. So where has the tragic meaning gone if it does not exist in that case? Could it be that the tragic meaning still exists in the absence of its creation by the reader? Could it be that the reader needs his own past, his own knowledge of tradition, to understand the fear and pity the author is trying to convey through the same language of tradition, that the garment that is being disentangled was once woven together and the warp and woof of that weaving determines how it is to be unwoven? Could it be that the creation of meaning is a collaborative act between author and reader? In that case, the author is not quite dead, but lives in shaping the interpretive response of the reader. If the disentangling thread led nowhere, had no pattern, then the garment could not have held together in the first place. It seems that three things are necessary to give meaning to texts, to create art: the artist, the audience, and the language (tradition) they communicate in. Barthes felt that traditional criticism erred in not considering the reader as a necessary part (although it seems clear he is oversimplifying in that feeling). But Barthes sins at least as much in disregarding the author. Barthes replace his straw-man Author-God with an equally unworkable all powerful Reader-God. Just as he claims, Barthes sacrifices the author to gives birth to the reader as the source of creativity. But this is entirely paradoxical. If the author is dead because he contributes nothing to the understanding of the text, then the reader would have no text to interpret. He would be left in precisely the original position of the author, having to compose a new text out of language, and the dead work of the author would merely limit his efforts. The author, however, is able to compose a text which would exist and have meaning, even if the reader never laid eyes on it, or even if the reader is insufficiently versed in language to disentangle it, meaning alive and ready to be understood by a reader, even if the text is laying unpublished in a locked desk drawer. No one but the author could have created that meaning, it exits entirely independently of the reader. The reader on the other hand, is entirely at the mercy of the of the author. The meaning created by the reader is dependent on the primary signification of the authors text to establish a general framework of interpretation. But the readers own work of creativity is limited by the second-order meaning of the authors text, the bourgeois myths as a younger Barthes called them.15 The reader is limited to accepting the meaning of these second-order signs by embracing them and accepting precisely the meaning of the surface of the text, so he can read through them, disentangle them, and get to a true meaning at the source of the text (or would it be better after all to say, underneath the text?) that the author has tried to direct the reader away from. But that meaning too must have been known to the author or he could never have tried to conceal it. Indeed, this much was already clear to Plato, had Barthes simply chosen to interrogate that part of the Phaedrus: "anyone who intends to mislead another, without being misled himself, must discern precisely the degree of resemblance and dissimilarity between this and that."16 So in this way too, the reader is merely decoding a text to find a meaning encoded by the author. Unless a reader is simply having the meaning of the language created by the author called to mind by reading a text, he must be creating new meaning himself that he does not receive from the author. In that case he may as well be assigning an arbitrary meaning to the text that would be unrecognized by the author. But in that case the reader is no longer acting as a reader, but has become the author himself of a new work different from that of the original author. The situation invites a reductio ad absurdam. Consider the present text. If the reader of this text is creating its meaning though the disentanglement of language alone, if the author is dead and plays no part in that disentanglement, how can the reader evaluate the work of the author with sufficient fineness to assign a grade to the authors work? Is it not the readers work? Derisory as that idea might seem, it expresses in miniature much larger problems. It is hard work disentangling the densely woven meaning of a painting by Vermeer. But it may be harder work disentangling a full page ad in a prominent national magazine. Is the lesser or greater effort on the part of the reader to play a role in deciding which visual form is more important, more worth reading? Both are able to be read as commercial products since they were made to be sold in the marketplace, but if the reader distinguishes them on the basis of one have a final aesthetic purpose and the other a final purpose of continued commercial exploitation, the reader presumably finds this difference in their differing uses of artistic language. But suppose another reader sees it differently? In that case is the meaning of the language different for each reader? Are all readings equally legitimate? If they are not how could once decide between them, except by comparing to the meaning woven into the text by the artist? An art criticism based on Barthes would be a perilous one indeed.17 An application of his ideas (or of an over-simplified version of his ideas which is what one often gets in ideological criticism18) would silence the voice of the artist under that of the reader shouting about whatever meanings concerned him, quite irrespective of the meaning put into the art. Thus one would read about absurdities such as the construction of gender in Tokugawa period female automata or heterosexism in the shaft-graves of Mycenae. There would be no Plato, no Marx, no Barthes, even, but only Freud, as each critic and historian projected his own meaning onto a dead artist. If the artist is dead and has no voice in his work, whole new realms of interpretation could be discovered in novel classes of art objects: blank sheets of medieval parchment or monochrome mosaic floors of late antique Antioch. But the fact remains that the meaning of art is created by a discourse between the viewer and the artist. If the artist is not present in the flesh, the dialogue may proceed along different lines than if he were. But there will and must be a dialogue. With a dead artist there can be no dialogue. References Barthes, R, 1977, "The Death of the Author," Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans. New York, Hill and Wong, 142-48. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iversen, Margaret, 2002, "Barthes on Art," A Companion to Art Theory, Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 327-336. Lord, A. B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Plato, 1963. The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters. Bollingen Series 71. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Read More