“From Work to Text” in Roland Barthes’ Image-Music-Text (
For Tuesday’s discussion.
English 752
Joe Petrulionis
We know from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: an Introduction that Roland Barthes described the end of structuralism and the beginning of post-structuralism as a “movement from work to text” (Eagleton 120). In this essay by almost the same name, Barthes draws distinctions between a “work” and a process of participating in literate exchanges that he terms “text.” Structuralists and earlier theorists allegedly focused on works, while post-structuralists played with “textuality.” Examples of works are books, poems and critical essays. The “stuff” of works is in their printing, words and pages, and they reside on bookshelves. Works can be owned, dropped and stolen. And a reader’s goal was (back during the days of structuralism) to decipher a work’s meaning. Text, conversely, is a nebulous process by which people participate in the production of language/thought/meaning. By the end of Barthes’ essay, Text is equated with Jouissance, and even provides a just and democratic space for a “social utopia.” Can this dichotomy between a work and text be understood as a refined explanation of Barthes’ earlier distinction between “writerly works” and “readerly works?” Is it an application of the signifier/signified pattern of language to written works? Is this distinction an attempt to change the focus of Literary Studies away from written works, and back to a focus on the process of language and epistemology?
Barthes himself likened this new focus to the physical relativism of Einstein as a structure both built upon and improving Newtonian Mechanics. Eagleton describes this movement toward textual analysis as a response to events surrounding the student riots of Paris in 1968, implying that by herding the discourse back toward safer linguistic topics and away from overtly revolutionary political goals, Barthes’ shift to “text” from “work” was covertly revolutionary: “Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least was likely to beat you over the head for doing so” (Eagleton, 123). To be revolutionary, something must have been threatening to the structuralists. What was at stake? What was threatening in this focus on text?