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C O N C E P T S
ceiving them instead in a new way, tempting though this idea might be.
It is as though the text is a new thing, previously ungUmpsed. What con
stitutes the text, for instance, is “its force o f subversion with regard to the
old classifications.” Text is “what is situated at the limit o f the rules o f the
speech-act [des règles de lenonciation], (rationality, readability, etc.).” *'^ It
is irreducibly plural, a practice or play o f the signifier generating the infi
nite deferral o f the signified; it is not consumed by the reader but solicits
collaboration on the part o f the reader and functions not as an object of
consumption yielding plaisir but as a practice o f disruptive and self-disrup-
xwc jouissance.
Text, then, introduces a new concept o f the literary object, but the
status o f the opposition between œuvre [work] and texte is not entirely clear.
Barthes’ claim is not that literary studies used to operate with one notion
o f its object, that o f the work, which now it has reason to contest, so that it
now thinks o f the objects o f its study as texts, with myriad consequences.
On the contrary, he wants to insist that there are indeed œuvres— writings
that we continue rightly to describe and analyze as such, which are beat
able, describable— and then there is texte. Although he speaks here and
there in the essay o f texts in the plural, he insists that texts are not count
able, computable, beatable, and he generally speaks o f le Texte, singular,
with a capital T and treats it as a mass noun rather than a count noun,
maintaining that there is “du Texte” [Text] to be located here and there in
œuvres. The “texte en soi,” pure text, is not something that can be found
or analyzed, so that we cannot say that writings on one list are oeuvres and
these others are texts. And he insists from the outset, knowing that this is
how we are inclined to interpret his essay, “We must not permit ourselves
to say: the work is classical, the text is avant-garde.” We mustn’t because
there can be “Text in a very old work, and many products o f contemporary
literature are not texts at all.” *^ But o f course this argument reinforces the
idea that the oeuvre is something like “normal literature” and that text is
something avant-garde, just so radical that it cannot be pinned down.
In an essay o f 1972 entitled “Research: The Young” [Jeunes cherch
eurs], Barthes writes, “ [L]et us make no mistake about either this singu
lar or this capital letter; when we say the Text, it is not in order to divinize
16. Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 58.
17. Ibid., 57.
it, to make it the deity o f a new mystique, but to denote a mass, a field,
requiring a partitive and not a numerative expression: all that can be said
o f a work is that there is Text in ir.” ^® But this usage certainly does make
Text an honorific concept, if not quite a God. And indeed, an objection
to Barthes’ formulations in “De l’œuvre au texte” is that while remaining
within a logic o f opposition, they work precisely to generate a mystique o f
the text: it is something so radical, disruptive, indeterminate, that it is not
even an object but a practice or process, at best identifiable in certain mo
ments. If you can show that there is “du Texte” in works of the past, you
have shown that they are radical, exciting, worthy o f attention.
Barthes describes accurately, I think, what was actually happening
in the field o f criticism: jeunes chercheurs, as he notes, saw it as their task
to “explore what Text there can be [repérer ce qu’il y peut avoir de Texte]
in Diderot, in Chateaubriand.” It is a matter o f finding “what, in previ
ous work, is Literature and what is Text.” *^ Barthes is always up front and
undefensive, to the point o f undermining his own concepts and projects
and those o f his students. His description does indeed evoke a lot o f work
done in this domain-that o f finding what one might call disruptive, in
determinate, or perhaps “postmodern” moments or elements in works o f
the past. M y objection is not at all to this sort o f critical writing itself, o f
which I have done my share, and which may, like any other sort o f critical
writing, be surprising or predictable, dubious or convincing. M y doubts
bear, rather, on the theoretical framework: is this a good way to theorize
this domain.^
There seem two eminently defensible possibilities here. The first
would distinguish between two different ideas o f literary and cultural ob
jects, that o f the work and that o f the text, two different M^ays of conceiv
ing them. People used to treat Madame Bovary as an oeuvre, product o f
an authorial intention, with a meaning that had to be sought, an aesthetic
unity to be valued, and so forth. Bur we now see that such things can and
perhaps should be treated as texts, which means: as products o f sign sys
tems and intertextuality, instances o f the indeterminate functioning o f lan
guage, products o f historical processes o f production and reception. Thus
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