I found the Future of Textual Analysis discussions really interesting, and left class thinking about many of the ideas you presented today. I wanted to take some time here to share some of my thoughts on Tiara’s presentation, because I think it ties together nicely with some of the ideas we talked about when we studied time and temporality.

Tiara described memory as a bond that connects the past and the future. She talked about memory as a rhetorical construction that creates identity. I was particularly interested in the concept of public memory, because I think it builds on the idea of narrative time. In narrative time, real events are reordered in a way that serves a greater narrative, meaning that different events are woven together to make a certain point. Looking back on my paper on time, I’m surprised I didn’t mention memory, since it clearly plays a big role in our conceptions of time.

Listening to Tiara’s presentation, I found myself thinking of all the ways that memory ties to our different objects of study. I agree that memory definitely deserves a place in the future of textual analysis, and was grateful for what I thought was a useful way to expand upon the idea of narrative time.

Reading over our seminar agenda for Barthes’s “The Pleasure of the Text” that Kirt provided us, I noticed a question about a masculine writer, pointing us to the following passage on page 37:

“No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure. For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not 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’.”

I’d like to try to unpack this idea of a masculine writer. In fact, it’s interesting that Barthes uses the image of language as a mother figure, which I find more significant than the use of the masculine pronoun to denote the writer. The imagery of the mother tongue, like the oft-used “Mother Earth” imagery, implies connectedness, which I think makes sense. It’s certainly important to recognize that we are, generally as a human race and particularly as writers, connected through our common language. I think, like a child tests the limits of his mother’s discipline, it is important and also pleasurable, in Barthes sense, to test the limits of language. Through this testing writers learn the boundaries.

I disagree with Barthes use of this mother-son imagery primarily because it implies a naturalness of language. Our mother-child relationship is natural, even primal, and language, in my mind, is not. Language is so necessarily constructed and I think rhetoricians cannot make too light of this fact.

“Disfiguring language” for the sake of opinion can be frustrating because it is not natural, yes, but it is important to realize that our very conceptions of what is natural are also constructed. We cannot escape language’s guiding force in our world, but I do not think we should go so far as to naturalize language. Our ability to call attention to language’s arbitrariness is a key part of rhetoricians’ strength in pointing out the ways in which language constructs hierarchies and contributes to oppression, for example. Naturalizing language, in my mind, could lead to other dangerous naturalization.

I didn’t intend to post another book recommendation, but a book came up on my Facebook feed today, and I felt moved to mention it. Just last month, Jeremy Fernando published For The Pleasure of the Text … This book is written as “attempts to read,” and specifically to read and respond to Roland Barthes.

Fernando is, admittedly, a faddish writer. But I’ve read two of his books (Reading Blindly and The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death) and both were interesting, challenging, and quick reads, often more poetry and aphorism than theory, similar to The Pleasure of the Text itself. Fernando’s work is a bizarre mix of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, which he applies to soccer, prosthetic limbs, jui jitsu, terrorism, writing and reading, the other, death, game theory, and I’m sure many more eclectic topics. The combination of Derrida and Baudrillard leads him to focus on those points at which reading and writing become unintelligible and the power that lies in that unintelligibility. For example, he locates the suicide bomber’s power in her death which places her beyond interrogation, self-interest, and reason. This puts her closer to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation (the event that inaugurated the “Arab Spring” of 2010-2011) than to the terrorists of ISIL or Hamas.

I’m sure based on that description some of y’all have no interest in Fernando’s new book, and perhaps rightfully so. It takes an odd and in many ways unpalatable author to write an entire book on the beauty of the suicide bomber. But Fernando is brilliant – if faddish and quixotic – and I’m sure he brings Derrida and Barthes into conversation in a way almost no one else is capable of. Hopefully he’s able to answer the questions raised by Mehr – in class – and Nikki – on this blog.

At 110 pages (including an original piano score half-way through) it should be a quick read and it’s pretty cheap, so I’m planning on reading it over the break. (And if anyone else is interested, you can borrow it.)

I’ll conclude with a short passage from Fernando on writing, which seems appropriate to the topic of Barthes and which in some ways reminds me of both The Pleasure of the Text and Derrida. This is taken from his obituary of Jean Baudrillard:

“The beauty of writing lies—perhaps writing only lies—in the always unwritten, the un-writeable; the always imagined, yet outside the realm of the imaginable. This is both the strength of writing and forever its weakness—trying to capture but always failing in representation. The scribbles on a page, the blobs of ink that appear, speak—the phantom of the voice seems to constantly resurrect—of something; an event, an occurrence. But the event it speaks of is always already dead; the word speaks not of it, but of a transubstantiated event, the ghost of the event—there is necromancy at play.”

The idea of “readerly” and “writerly” texts has stuck with me despite class ending hours ago. Although I do not have a coherent and fully fleshed out idea of these concepts, I do have some ideas, problems, even provocations to offer. And in a form akin to Barthes’ style of jumping around from topic to topic nonetheless.

Perhaps one interesting implication for the distinction is in the classroom. How might a classroom become a readerly or writerly text? Is one of these setups better than the other? What does it mean to be a “writerly” classroom, where students “write” their own learning experiences? And what, if any, tensions could arise out of this type of classroom?

Barthes’ distinction between readerly and writerly seems, to me, to be a much more social attitude towards language than that of say, Derrida, who essentially seems to view us all as prisoners of linguistic play. After briefing talking about Barthes and Derrida in class, I’m starting to view them as having more differences than similarities in terms of their understandings of language.

The only other time I have encountered the term “jouissance” is in psychoanalysis, and particularly with Lacan. In fact, I learned about this in the same Literary Theory class where I first heard about Barthes. Barthes uses jouissance to talk about the “bliss” of a writerly text. For Lacan, jouissance is the experience of intense pleasure mixed with intense pain (physical, emotional, or both) that leaves a permanent imprint on the psyche (a classic example, of course, being childbirth). There seems to be a similarity between these two uses that could perhaps be productive. And, just to throw this out there as well, it is also (maybe) worth remembering that in French, jouissance has the distinct second meaning of the pleasure of the orgasm—which is fitting for the erotic nature of The Pleasure of the Text—and the French refer to an orgasm as “the little death,” so perhaps a connection between the pleasure/pain aspect of Lacan could also be used in Barthes.

Lastly, it seems that Barthes can be very vague about how one truly determines what is a readerly and a writerly text. Sure we know what those terms mean, but how do we recognize which is which? But, this might just precisely be what Barthes intends.

Since I won’t be in class tomorrow, I thought it important to get in my two cents about the Barthes book.

His project is more radical than I initially suspected. Texts can give us pleasure and bliss, sure. But when I typed in “The Pleasure of the Text” into Google to see what people were saying about it, I found a blogger review from 2011 that had some negative things to say about Barthes work:

“If we expect literary criticism to be pulled at the last moment from the dust bin of history, the writing of such criticism must be lucid and accessible to all readers. This does not mean lowering standards to a ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ critical analysis, but we cannot indulge obtusical writers (it’s my word, I own it!) like Barthes anymore. This essay is in the best tradition of ‘mental masturbation,’ as Woody Allen phrased it in one of his films, twisting this way and that and then doubling back on itself in a flagrant display of synaptic gymnastics. But who am I to argue with one of the great literary critics of history. For him, this kind of mental pleasuring of oneself might just get him to the blissful moment of a reading climax he most intensely desires. The rest of us will have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

Notice not just the dismissal but also the visceral reaction to the book. Barthes appears to represent a larger problem in literary criticism because he engages in “mental masturbation” that does little to make the text “lucid and accessible to all readers.” I share the democratic impulse of this blogger, but I’m not convinced that this is the best place for that critique. I take it that “mental masturbation” is purposefully ironic given the pleasure (sometimes erotic) focus of Barthes’ work. However, in critiquing it on this basis, the blogger has given away the game. I’ve always understood the charge of “mental masturbation” to be an attack on motives. The author, in other words, is abusing the trust of the reader by using the text for illegitimate purposes–to derive pleasure (sexual pleasure, if we grant Barthes his hyperbole). Barthes calls attention to our assumptions about the purposes of criticism, and we seem to have extricated the writer’s pleasure from criticism. Or at least, we’ve pushed it to the background. Whether or not we agree with Barthes, at least he raises the question: Is pleasure a legitimate reason to do criticism?

Whenever I attempt to “analyze” a text which has given me pleasure, it is not my “subjectivity” I encounter but my “individuality,” the given which makes my body separate from other bodies and appropriates its suffering or its pleasure: it is my body of bliss I encounter. And this body of bliss is also my historical subject; for it is at the conclusion of a very complex process of biographical, historical, sociological, neurotic elements (education, social class, childhood configuration, etc.) that I control the contradictory interplay of (cultural) pleasure and (noncultural) bliss, and that I write myself as a subject at present out of place, arriving too soon or too late (this too designating neither regret, fault, nor bad luck, but merely calling for a non-site): anachronic subject, adrift.

This section from Barthes (62-63) stuck out to me as a sharp articulation of where this semester has led me. What is my role as a critic, and how do I go about enjoying what I do? For Barthes, the process of analyzing a text, of critiquing it, means confronting my own positionality as a human critic. My biography, history, sociology, socialization, education, and enculturation all play in and around my act of criticism. Who I am shapes what I do as criticism.

It seems sometimes like criticism is more suffering than it is a pleasure. Usually around the end of the semester when many projects are due and there is not sufficient time to fully think through everything or give each assignment it’s due diligence, the act of criticism shifts more to suffering than pleasure. There is not always the time (particularly in grad school) to enjoy the pleasure of criticism–to allow the bliss of the text to overtake us. But in the end, the act of criticism is in my control. It is solely depending on what I say, what I see in the text or do not see in the text, and what I can persuade others is present, absent, or at work within the text. Take the time to enjoy the text, explore the relationship you have to it, and appreciate the uniqueness of that relationship.

The relationship between myself and the text allows for me to be adrift, which is never a bad thing.

This time last week I was writing my deconstruction essay at home, with my father in the room. He asked me about my paper and I begin to explain my text to him and how I’d analyzed it several ways, but this time I was using a deconstruction approach. Having to explain the process to another person whose work doesn’t resemble mine in any way was very helpful.

We run into this problem frequently, as grad students. We joke about trying to explain our field to people on airplanes or people we meet at parties. I joke that all I have to say to someone is that I study feminism and that’s usually enough not to make them want to ask me any more questions. However, if we have the time and a willing conversation partner, like a family member we might be seeing around this time of year, explaining our research to someone outside of our field can be helpful and rewarding. It’s like a “beginner’s guide” to textual analysis, or rhetoric, or feminism.

I’ve heard that you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to someone else, and I think that is true. Explaining your project to someone who doesn’t initially understand it forces you to decide the most basic and vital tenets of your project and figure out a way to frame them to someone who doesn’t speak a lingo that frequently includes names like Foucault, Derrida, and Ricoeur. It is easy to get caught up in the minutiae of a project and explaining the work to another person allows you to see the big picture.

Furthermore, I think these types of conversations force us to ask ourselves the “so what” question as we must explain the importance of our project. Therefore, although I often want to roll my eyes when a stranger or a family member asks me about my work, I will try to start seeing these interactions as chances to both connect with the other person and also clarify and therefore strengthen my own thinking about my work,

On page 59 of The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes: “The important thing is to equalize the field of pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical life and contemplative life.” I appreciate how mundane Barthes makes the text seem in that paragraph. He relates texts to gardens, dishes, or a voice. It’s one more object among daily life’s many objects. One more thing to interact with and enjoy. Sometimes, I worry that we lend “the text” special status; that, in all our fretting about how to choose the text and justify the text we choose, about how to let the text disclose its own essential means of persuasion and its inner dynamics, we fret away what makes texts worth studying: they are fragments of a material world, and as such, we can fairly assume they impact the world.

Not that we shouldn’t spend so much time precisely defining what textual criticism does and how it works. It’s important to fret. Precision and rigor are virtues. But aren’t virtues all about balance? There is a real danger that we lose ourselves in texts and in our rigorous approaches to them, and treat them like they are special objects whose pursuit is self-justifying.

This is more a reminder to myself than anything, after a semester of textuality. Texts are awash in a wide, wide world, and while we have learned a huge array of procedures and ideas for closely studying them, they are not in some ontological category of their own. Textual critics work in a practical life. Textual criticism’s value comes not from a privileged object, but from a rigorous approach well-suited to objects that often have distinct rhetorical power.

Grounded in the practical life, we can also approach criticism differently: not as a skill useful for scholarship, not as an element of a scholarly persona, but as a way of life. To me, that sounds like more fun.

In class we discussed how we might present deconstruction in a conference paper, knowing that not everyone in the field looks kindly on Derrida. It seems that many feel as though his ideas are incompatible with communication because he rejects the stability of language. However, many elements of deconstruction are present in other methods of analysis, so scholars use some of the concepts under different names. This is actually one of the solutions that we agreed upon for getting a deconstruction paper accepted by other academics– use Derrida’s theories, but hide them under another name.

This discussion, combined with the looming deadline for the “future of textual analysis” presentations, made me think about some of the politics in the field, particularly how methods and theorists seem to go in and out of fashion. Only being here for one semester, I’ve already heard that politics within the field play a role in what gets published in journals, accepted to major conferences, etc. Inevitably a method’s popularity will wax and wane, so how can we adopt scholarly identities that are our own yet can withstand the preferences of others? I will keep this question in mind as I begin to think about what I see in the future of textual analysis.

Shifting, slipping, sliding, and playing—all things deconstructionists say that language “does.” It almost sounds like a kid on a playground. And, perhaps some consider deconstruction to be taken as seriously as a child at play and not a scholar at work. Admittedly, I had a tough time with deconstruction at first and had a hard time understanding the value. But deconstruction surprised me and I found myself reversing my position.

I realized that when approaching a text I already often look for the gaps. These gaps help to understand what assumptions are inherently represented in and by the text as well as what is privileged. To me, these assumptions and binaries illuminate a deeper understanding of the author’s argument and the beliefs and values that are perpetuated or repeated in the text. But I want to be clear, I do not think it is a productive task to merely rip apart the text, but rather, I think deconstruction allows one to “read” the text even more nimbly.

To repeat the well-known metaphor, this perspective is another valuable tool for my toolbox. Maybe this tempered down version of deconstruction that I am thinking about is not in fact actually deconstruction. But I think a way to see the dominant readings and to see where the text undermines itself is useful—even if it is only used as a way to check one’s interpretation against the text or against other’s readings. Lastly, an understanding of deconstruction furthers one’s knowledge of how language operates. This mindfulness allows a writer to consider how to navigate the inevitable gaps that will arise out of the indeterminacy of language—which might just make the writing even better (if the writer does not become paralyzed by the potential unraveling of meaning that might be produced in her work).

Although I still have some issues with deconstruction, I am more comfortable with it in moderation as a way to act as an intervention against norms and as a way to read a text creatively.