Sunday, January 20, 2002		Books

Erotics of reading a text
Review by Shelley Walia

Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire by Steven Ungar. The University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Pages 206. £22.50.

IN the face of criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, Steven Ungar, in "The Professor of Desire", peels away with impeccable scholarship the various myths surrounding Barthes, the teacher and the mythographer.

Commencing in the late 1940s anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the cultural critic Roland Barthes, and other mid-century theorists and scholars kicked off French structuralism by harnessing linguistically stimulated formal methods to literature and allied phenomena. Structuralism endeavoured to examine the "structure" of a culture as a whole by "decoding", or reading between the lines, its interactive systems of signs. These systems included literary texts and genres as well as other cultural formations, such as food, advertising, fashion, and taboos on certain forms of behavior, the key concerns of Barthes’ writings. Western criticism that has always been cordial to any opposition to its principles has by now embarked on soaking up the insights of its finest contemporary contestant. Submitting itself to renovation yet again, it sets up to finally materialise as Weltliteratur: the wide-ranging but intertwined literatures of the world.

Barthes is associated with structuralism, the study of how our cultures intermingle, organise or signify meaning in their written texts; with semiotics, the study of symbols, representation and signs, and also with New Criticism, a literary movement in Europe and the USA which emphasised close reading of the text, excluding the biographical, cultural, or social approach. To put it another way, Barthes was influenced by Marxism and existentialism in the forties, structuralism in the fifties, semiology in the sixties and post-structuralism in the seventies.

Barthes’ writings for Combat, a staunchly leftist newspaper were finally compiled in the book, "Writing Degree Zero". After 1948, he began to teach at the universities in Bucharest, Romania and Alexandria, and from 1952 to 1959 he pursued lexicology and sociology at the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique in Paris. In 1962 Barthes was elected director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he taught semiotics, and in 1976 became the first faculty member to hold the chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France.

In 1963, his book "On Racine" met with an resounding uproar and criticism in the academic world, especially from Raymond Picard, the critic belonging to the Right; conventional scholars felt gradually more vulnerable to Barthes’ approach to reading a text that went against the celebration of Racine as the paragon of French dramatic art. Barthes blew up the French worship of their major playwright by showing how Racine ‘was reproducing a set of emotional patterns about which he could, with his conscious mind, know nothing at all’. Due to his straightforward language and writing style, Barthes was able to present the new theories and movements he championed to wider audiences.

Ungar’s method, in accordance with Barthes’ own dismissal of ‘the final word ‘ is to read the writings as ‘stations on a circuit that finds Barthes always departing from any single program, school or ideology’. This strategy allows Ungar to correlate Barthes to changes and movements in literature and criticism, and also to mark out the ruptures and adjustments that place the writings of the final decade of Barthes’ life at variance with his former practice.

Ungar attends to Barthes’ procedures as teacher and links them to Barthes’ running into such tutor figures as Gide, Proust, Nietzche, Lacan, and Socrates. The bond between language and teaching, teaching and power, fiction and desire, became major issues in Barthes’ later works. As he writes in an essay "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’: ‘Imagine that I am a teacher. I speak, endlessly, in front of and for someone who remains silent. I am the person who says I (the detours of ‘one’, ‘we’, or impersonal sentence make no difference), I am the person who, under cover of setting out a body of knowledge, puts out a discourse, never knowing how that discourse is being received and thus forever forbidden the reassurance of a definitive image - even if offensive-which would constitute ‘me’." For Barthes teaching can become utterly personal because of the ‘intimacy it is capable of producing’: "Teaching is not only very personal, it is also very physical. That teacher there, walking from the library to his office, dispensing smiles and warm greetings to fresh-faced students, is me. I talk a lot about souls but no soul have I ever seen that did not come in a body and when I teach somebody I teach some body". His book S/Z points to the pedagogical dimension of what had become his critical practice, namely, that a personal motivation needs to be recognized in the face of what is otherwise mistaken for an objective or indifferent project of critical understanding. When this freedom of exchange, or the efforts towards collective elaboration that mark his seminars ( out of which is born his book ‘The Pleasures of the Text’) are understood beyond the institutional context, the pursuit of knowledge can be approached as part of a more personal affirmation of values. The conveyor of knowledge becomes the lover of knowledge; the seminar space, becomes for Barthes the prime site of discovery around which any subsequent formulation of theory is but a trace. The classroom ceases at last to be a laboratory of empty theory and Barthes succeeds in converting the silence of his students to active participation.

It is clear from his critical practice that Barthes preferred to assault dominant interests of the ruling elite through his constantly demystifying intellectual engagement. For him neither style nor language could be a ground for commitment. Taking ecriture as a field of politics, he only saw racism, sexism, colonialism lurking behind the apparently natural and innocent day to day world. Nothing for him was natural, not even how we speak, or what we eat; our religion, education, or for that matter, the time we go to sleep are all part of a social construct or ‘mythologies’ created by modern society. It is no more natural to make love in a certain manner, just as it is no more natural to eat Chinese food rather than caviar.

Such myths in bourgeois culture only serve to obscure the manufactured nature of that very culture, making the contingent and historical appear natural and eternal. Here Barthes is close to Marx, though mostly his concerns are focused on the trivial in everyday life such as striptease, wrestling, advertisements, soap, powders. He examines the grammar of fashion and demonstrates the different levels at which meanings are generated. Within the system of signs with which we are constantly confronted, everything signifies, and meanings become differential; nothing has an essence or a history. All is arbitrary, relational and coded and we are moved by something that does not exist.

These elements of Barthes’ theory are simply and suggestively put across in Philip Thody and Ann Course’s Introducing Barthes which explains to the lay reader the application of such notions to literature and popular culture, bringing out vigorously the tendency of each one of us to see language as a neutral means of communication thereby ignoring the significance of connotation. The book goes on to explain how Barthes rejects the notion of bourgeoisie clarity as absolutely rubbish, implying that the reader stands liberated from the authoritarian position of the author. His emphasis on death of the author is one way of breaking the hold of the ruling elite on the ways of thinking about economics, philosophy, politics and culture.