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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Tue Aug 5, 2003 12:48 am
Subject: Infinitely Recurring Past om_namah_shi...

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=68565

http://faculty.risd.edu/faculty/dkeefer/web/pms.htm

Consider Nietzsche: try as he might, he could not find a credible
refutation for the thought that popped into his head that everything
has recurred infinitely in the past and will recur infinitely in the
future. Nietzsche described this demoralizing position as his
greatest discovery. Humans have an uncanny ability to imaginatively
and intellectually abstract, depart, from real existence. When
someone believes what their imagination creates out of thin air, we
call them insane. When someone believes what their intellect creates
out of its own detached gyroscopic meanderings, we call it
philosophy. It is this intoxicating brush with insanity, more
popularly called, madness, that explains the cache of philosophy for
cultural criticism. They cannot or do not want to think their way out
of unbelievable views like Derrida's semiology or Barthes's death of
the author thesis.

The American philosopher, Richard Rorty thinks of philosophy as a
conversation of people good-naturedly considering alternative
vocabularies of being.

The German philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, perceptively
noted, "Philosophical problems occur when language goes on a
holiday."

http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibss5.html

Roland Barthes. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Ed.
and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977.

According to Barthes--no, I must not say "according to Barthes."
Moreover, I must not say "I"; or if I do, I must acknowledge that as
soon as I write the pronoun, it ceases to bear any relation to the
extra-textual human being who wrote it: "Writing is that . . .
space . . . where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing." There is only the text. Damn! Better
make the text the subject of the sentence. "The Death of the Author"
states that all writing--no, writing can state nothing about writing
or about anything else. The text is irrevocably cut off from that of
which it attempts to speak: "the book itself is only a tissue of
signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred." Rather,
writing is, as the linguists say, performative. "Call me Ishmael"
indistinguishable in function from "I now pronounce you man and
wife." And not only in function, but also in substance, because "the
text is . . . a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash." Originality being
impossible, all writings must bear essentially the same meaning. Not
that anybody can know that meaning: "writing ceaselessly posits
meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it." So there. Now put this one in
your pipe and smoke it: "In the multiplicity of writing, everything
is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered." One might wonder how to
disentangle without deciphering, since things cannot be separated
from each other without first being identified as different from each
other; but never mind. Far from demonstrating that the author is
dead, this essay stands as a monument to the monstrous arrogance of a
man whose authority derives solely from his talent for uttering
absolute rubbish in a tone of vatic infallibility. "The Death of the
Author" blows itself to pieces. I don't see how I can possibly be
expected to summarize it. (Steve Schroer.)

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0226.html

Death of the Author

Until recently, an author was an unproblematic concept; an author was
someone who wrote a book. Roland Barthes' landmark essay, "The Death
of Author," however, demonstrates that an author is not simply
a "person" but a socially and historically constituted subject.
Following Marx's crucial insight that it is history that makes man,
and not, as Hegel supposed, man that makes history, Barthes
emphasizes that an author does not exist prior to or outside of
language. In other words, it is writing that makes an author and not
vice versa. "[T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always
anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings [...] in
such a way as never to rest on any one of them" (146). Thus the
author cannot claim any absolute authority over his or her text
because, in some ways, he or she did not write it. This is not to say
that someone named Margaret Atwood did not spend many months toiling
away at book called Lady Oracle, rather that we must re-think what it
means when we say "Margaret Atwood" and "Lady Oracle." Barthes throws
the emphasis away from an all-knowing, unified, intending subject as
the site of production and on to language and, in so doing, hopes to
liberate writing from the despotism of what he calls the work, or
what we have called The Book:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to
furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...]

[However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to
the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an
anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary
since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his
hypostases--reason, science, law. (147)

It is tempting to see hypertext as realizing Barthes' utopian dreams
of a writing liberated from the Author. The ability for each reader
to add to, alter, or simply edit a hypertext opens possibilities of
collective authorship that breaks down the idea of writing as
originating from a single fixed source. Similarly, the ability to
plot out unique patterns of reading, to move through a text in an
aleatory, non-linear fashion, serves to highlight the importance of
the reader in the "writing" of a text--each reading, even if it does
not physically change the words--writes the text anew simply by re-
arranging it, by placing different emphases that might subtly inflect
its meanings.

However, the vision of hypertext as the New Jerusalem of the writerly
text neglects to consider the very real pleasures that come from
surrendering to the discursive seductions of a masterful author. As
Max Whitby notes in his article "Is Interactive Dead?," "[s]
torytelling and narrative lie at the heart of all successful
communication. Crude, explicit, button-pushing interaction breaks the
spell of engagement and makes it hard to present complex information
that unfolds in careful sequence" (41). The real allure of hypertext,
it may turn out, is not its alliance with the writerly text , but
with The Book, with its possibilities, through fixed links and
narrow path choices, of ever more ingenious ways of directing,
controlling and surprising the reader. The Author may be dead, but
his ghosts maybe even more eloquent.

http://www.drizzle.com/~tmercer/quotes/barthes_quote.html

From Death of the Author by Roland Barthes
The Reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity
lies not in it origin but in its destination.

http://puffin.creighton.edu/eselk/Aesthetics-WebSite-
p2000/Powerpoint_outlines/Interpretation_Barthes.htm

Barthes & the death of the Author

Roland Barthes (French, 1915-1980). "The Death of the Author."

When a character in a novel or play or film is speaking, who is
really speaking?

The character?

The author or director?

Barthes: We cannot know

Once an author has written something, there is a disconnect between
the author and the writing, "the voice loses its origin, the author
enters into his own death, writing begins" (249).

Art & literary critics still tend to interpret works by going back to
the author (e.g., Van Gogh)

Barthes' alternative: Language holds the meaning of the work. (How
can this be applied to painting?)

Since the text once written stands by itself, there is no one true
interpretation of a text.

"A text is not a line of words releasing [or holding] a
single `theological' meaning . . . but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash"
(251)

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text; it closes
the writing.

But "once the Author is removed, the claim to disciper atext becomes
quite futile" (251).

The text, once freed of the author, is ready by people of different
times & different cultures; they give the text multiple readings &
understand it in many different ways.

"There is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place
is the reader, not, as was hithero said, the author" (252).

http://www.playcreative.co.nz/posthuman/html/image_music_text.htm

Barthes examines the process of, and the nature and implications
of, 'text', 'author' and 'reader'. This illuminating essay shows that
the 'death of the author', or a re conceptualisation of the
relationship between author and reader, is a process that has
occurred through modern authorship and textural practices. Barthes,
in deconstructing these terms and their true interrelationships,
illuminates the 'hidden' importance and freedom that is the reader.

http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/gsi/tea/essays_02-03/s_combs.html

Writers into Readers

by Charles Scott Combs, Film Studies

Though I teach Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" as an
illustrious example of how criticism broadens our regard of fictional
works, the essay threatens to plunge class thought and discussion
into an abyss. Rather than liberating us from the confines of what
only an Author determines to be important in a work of literature,
the essay tends to bring out skepticism in my classes: "Does that
mean we can claim whatever we want?" or "Why do people write books
then?" The problem I face is the temptation students have to read
Barthes' criticism (and the majority of criticism in general) of god-
based meaning (conventionally attributed to the Author) as an overly-
simplified polytheism of reader pleasure.

More than anything after teaching Barthes, I have suspected that
students miss their authors, that Barthes threatens to undermine
their sense of the importance of individual artistry, and that more
than a few students in any class are writers themselves who are now
being told that they are, so to speak, dead. My goal, then, was to
make sense of their need to have their liberation movement as well as
their authorial design. Student reactions for some time proved to me
that criticism belongs in the hands of those who read, and that all
writers are readers themselves. But now I wanted to give them a sense
of how the Author and the Reader co-exist and need each other.

So this year, during the class preceding Barthes, I asked each of
them to write down anonymously what they believed to be their first
memory. I took each sheet of paper, full of someone's description of
a memory, and at home that night chose a specific phrase or sentence
from each offering, typing the phrase into a word document, one piece
of memory per line. Deliberating as a poet, I reordered the lines
into a new arrangement. I made 40 copies, and after the next class'
initial discussion of Barthes' essay (garnering the familiar
skepticism from students) I passed out the poem (enclosed with the
essay) and we read it aloud. I didn't even have to ask for their
feedback.

Nothing could have prepared me for what took place. The first student
reaction set the pace: "I understand exactly why you've done this."
Though already this comment had confirmed the significance of the
creative role of author, I pressed them all on this exaction. Over
the course of 30 minutes, the class read and reread the poem before
them, the one that each of them had contributed in creating, as each
of them was a mortal participant with personal memories. I asked
them: "So, who is the author of this poem?" In answering that
question, one student noted how the individual lines of the poem
flowed so well as a whole, even though each of them emerged from a
separate individual. Students began to analyze the poem as an
abstract creation before them, pointing out transitions they thought
particularly evocative and attributing them to me. Though able to
admire the work as an extension of my will, each student wanted his
or her fragment to participate in its overall design. Some students
who couldn't recognize their own memory fragment felt left out. I
told them that I would gladly relinquish my role as Author if they
thought it would liberate their role as Reader, but my relinquishment
mirrored their own as each student saw his or her own mortality
combined with someone else's. The substance of their memory had
become a poetic device of an Author who had not only spoken for them,
but had literally used their words.

In general, I suggest that group-based works of art are important
objects of analysis in classes where analysis is key, because they
transform writers into readers.

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