Barthes and the problem about the “Author”

Is hard to put in just one piece of “text” (to use Barthes´s concept) three different texts that are quiet interesting by separate. So, I will try to put in a kind of “union” a short reflection about Roland Barthes`s texts. I think that “The death of the author” and “From work to text” are two argument of the same idea: there is no relation or link between text and author. The main focus of Barthes is on the reader. According to his own words: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. Is precisely that idea the one that leads the distinction between “work” and “text”. The first have a filiation to his creator, the author, who, according to Barthes, points a determination on the “piece of work”. Barthes (if we follow his rules I can´t use the word “author”) thinks that the text can be read without the “guarantee of his father”. For him,  the “author” of a text is just one more character (for example in a novel), and there is no relation between “him” and the text.

One of the main arguments of Barthes to say this is the quality of “multiple” that a text has. As he says at “The death of author”: “We know 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”. This idea means, in other words, that there would be no creation in something related to language. Everything was previously “said”. So, would art or “creation” mean just a “new way” to put things together?

What Barthes does in his book Mythologies is an interesting exercise of analyzing different kind of texts. I would like to refer to the part of Einstein´s brain as an interesting case. As the author says (roll in your tomb), there is huge “myth” around Einstein´s brain (when he died, his brain was stolen by someone from the hospital and cut in slice to be studied). His brain become a kinf of “icon” of intelligence. The interesting part, more than the “case”, is what Barthes does “reading this phenomenon as a text”. He says that after Einstein`s dead people thought that the secret of the universe closed to them, the only one who was able to reveal the “truth” about the universe has gone. In this example we can notice that appears one of the main characteristic of the text, there is no author. Is “just there”, reality as a text to read.

Finally, I would like to say that I disagree about the maun issue of Barthes. I do think that there is a link between text and author. But is not a relation in terms of “the last meaning” of a text, is a relation in terms of space-time. If we “kill” the author we are destroying the relation of a discourse with it’s context, and I think that knowing what is “out” of a text (what leads to the interesting discussion about “in” or “out” of a text” and the problem of a “border” in a text) we can open the debate about it. I don’t think that linking text and author we are forced to look for “the real interpretation” of a text. Barthes says that the author means a “limit” to the text, I think that “the author” opens a wide range of possibilities of interpretations instead of close them.

Saussure

Saussure`s text is probably one of the most important text in the western tradition of the 20^th Century. Is also, a foundational text. Even when the text was well known after a few decades of his original publication, is doubtless the starting point of most of the scholar reflection about language across the past century. His proposal is very precise: There is something call “the sign” that has two different parts, but, both of them constitute it. The first one is called “signified” and the other “signifier”. The first one, refers to the “sound image” of what we usually call “a word”, and the other one, to the concept that it refers to.

I liked the idea he exposed about “Two classes illustrated by Comparisons”. There, he exposed about two ways of approaching to the study of a language, synchrony and diachrony. Is interesting because, at the end, he is not choosing one of them, just exposing that there are this two ways of deal with the study of language. Anyway, he recognizes that to language is always a matter of “state” or “moment”. That’s why he uses the comparison of language and chess. This means that language is always “contextual”. There is no option to attribute to the language some kind of “eternal meaning”. Language is a system that changes constantly. So, we can make the study of language in a “certain moment” or state, or try to figure out the transformation that have been experimenting in time. In his own words: “synchrony and diachrony designates respectively a language-state and an evolutionary phase” (p. 64).

I think we can link this idea to Bakhtin`s proposal. Both agree in the constantly moving of the language and it’s internal and external transformation. Also, we can find a relation between Saussure’s idea of opposition and Bakhtn`s idea of dialogue inside the language. In both cases, there is a interaction of the element that compose the system. We can read the ideas of “arbitrary” and “opposition” in Saussure’s text, as a dialogue inside the system. There is always this dialogue and interaction among the different part of the systems, is precisely that dialogue that turns language into a constantly moving object of study.