The Death of the Author - Reflecting On Roland Barthes' Short Essay

“Words are not wind.” So Michel Foucault once conjured an image of the power of words, these packets of air that carry not just wind but the force of thought, the performance of ideals. Suspiration is not just the heavy sigh but a transubstantiation of element into sign; air formed into thought, like the Word made flesh. Indeed, the notions of speech, of the author, have always had a religious aspect to them for as long as memory has held in the West. Not even God existed without speech, but in the beginning was the Word, God’s Word that was with Him, that was also Him, in the strange paradox that is the Christian dogmatic reflections on a God who is one but also three; singularity but also a community of speech, where the incarnate Christ is the writing of God’s exhalation, carried by the Spirit. While some like Hans Georg Gadamer can make much of this theological resonance to explore the dynamics of the fusion of horizons (Truth and Method), or like Derrida, find in the slippage of meaning a differance whose deferral references the not-God, the GOD, that is, like the apophatic gesture of negative theology (though Derrida denies the similarity) always beyond the closure of fixated meaning. Roland Barthes in his famous essay “The Death of the Author” does something equal yet opposite—he explores the theological underpinnings of writing in order to kill the Writer and see what happens. To kill the A/author is to turn “literature” into “writing,”; “by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’” he says, that is, to assign “an ultimate meaning to the text (and to the world as text),” is an act of liberation. It “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” (“Death of the Author,” 147). However, as we will show, Barthes presentation is full of paradoxes that ultimately undermine the liberation he sees in the death of the author. These paradoxes cause Barthes in addition to reach conclusions opposed to the author’s death being in service of the reader. Ultimately, without an A/author controlling meaning, even to some extent, the secret that all readers are in turn authors, as they must communicate what they have read, deconstructs all attempts at meaning.

            Barthes’ Position: The Death of the Author Empowers the Reader

            Though it represents but a moment in an already short essay, this passage referencing God as the archetypal author, an archetype that is killed in an act of liberation, is filled with meaning. But this is not a meaning based on origin, for in killing the author, in releasing the text, the origin is void and “the text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” that is, “the reader,” the one who is now “the space on which all quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (148). Immediately, a paradox arises that must be dealt with, lest the entire project collapse: the author might be dead, so that we are no longer to receive our direction from the intentions of that ghostly visage that peers at us behind the veil of inks and white spaces; yet here that death, imagined or real, is still the prescription from an author. A ghost telling us there are no more ghost stories. Curiously, though the death of the author is an anti-positivist gesture (a move away from that “capitalist positivism” that regales the author with power, 143) like positivism Barthes runs into a performative contradiction at the origin of his project. Positivism’s flaw was that the criterion of verifiability—that everything be either analytic or empirically demonstrable—was neither of these things. So too, Barthes’ dead author is all but dead, indeed very much alive and quite bossy, instructing us to treat authors as dead and so capable of no contracts or fees or legislation over a text frozen into the singular form of an author’s desire. What are we to make of this? Rupert Sheldrake once lampooned the flaw of scientism as “give me one free miracle, and I will explain the rest.” The free miracle is, of course, the existence of everything, the answer to the perennial “from whence the world?” being, thus far, unanswerable short of God or some other brute facticity. So too, Gödel saw all theorums as being incomplete without reference outside of themselves; and Cantor, likewise, saw that even mathematics do not always march in lockstep with the dream of completion, where the set of all sets was itself incapable of containing itself as a set … and so on we tumble. Is the death of the author like this? One free miracle, the self-giving kenosis of the Author, the sacrifice of God upon the cross of the last text—is that what is necessary here to start such authorless projects on their way?

           

 But—surely—Barthes is aware of such a basic contradiction. So, surely, something else must be meant? Like God’s death for Nietzsche, the death of the author is the dissolution of that which never truly existed. There is no contradiction of the author Barthes denying authorship for others but in the same gesture ensuring his own authorial nature. Rather, he appears to want the death to be a symbol of a text deconstructing itself, disassembling itself. For the text is not a unity held together by the author (this was an illusion and remains an illusion) but is rather “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146); the text is “not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author God),” rather it is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). In this way the death of the Author is not a removal, it is not a dissolution at all for there was no original unity to dissolve. This was a fiction. The author was an addition, a forced addition, a forced limit, where “to give an Author to a text is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). What is created is a unity of text by the reader (146-147). Without an author and with the reader a new creativity—from within the text itself, which was always there but suppressed by the imposition of the hypothetic Author—is supposedly reborn anew. What is a created (or, what is revealed to have always been there) is “an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes” (146). This is the site of the reader.

The Problem: All Readers Are In Turn (Dead) Authors 

But is the death of the author truly feasible in the way Barthes represents it? Can the reader bear the burden Barthes asks in the way he asks it? Though it is not put quite in this way, the author, as a monolithic stamp that flattens out a text, is a tyranny born from out of an anxiety to be known—known in the manner of positivism in the west which Barthes seems to detest (143). He contrasts this to a pre-modern mediation, where the author, instead of asserting themselves in tyranny “enter into their own death” in the act of writing. In “ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ … may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (142). Where the modern “author” has the text “tyrannically centered” on themselves, as their work and their person are connected, there is a sense of the pre-modern, where the “death” of the author allows the recipients not to be controlled by an author but to bathe in the text like in a stream, “a field without origin, or at least, [that which] has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins” (146). There is the faintest hint of nostalgia, here, for a pre-Christian past before the Author. A longing, like Rousseau, but for a noble savage that has met neither author nor critic (147). The death of the author, the refusal to assign a secret to a text in the name of this author, is “anti-theological,” but also, it seems (given Barthes own examples) pre- theological. Dreams of a past lost because the Author has tried to control the “origin” of all texts. But this past cannot be regained. But a future can be attempted—a future that is given back to the reader who serves as the site of unity for the texts multiplicty (148). Thus in the death of the author, the controlled identity that was sought is given up for a new sort of purified encounter with language; not an encounter with the “essence” of language (or the author) which never existed, but the “flux” of the “field without origin” itself, the “futurity” of reading is unlocked. Instead of the death of the author being the death of the objective, Barthes in some sense is reaching for a new concept of the objective, or of reality, and how we go about encountering it. It is the reader through which the multiplicity of language is encountered in the text. These multiplicities are there, no longer the bearers of some secret intention of the “author.” Yet, though Barthes claims that the death of the author relieves texts of bearing a “secret” the truth is that on his view there can be nothing but secrets. For each reader, to communicate what they have read, becomes an author who dies, who dies, that is, before they can communicate (for authors do not, in Barthes’ notion, control or direct the text as we have just seen). They cannot serve as the site of unity.

By undoing the author, the plurivocity of the host of readers—who are legion—could supposedly be harnessed. But this is a grave paradox for Barthes: One speaks freely of the author and the reader as if their realities were ready to hand and easy to define. Barthes of course sees one dying, the author, but this death helps the other, the reader. The death of the author liberates the reader from tyranny. And yet what is a reader but one more author? The reader, in reading, is but the author of the text of yet another text, the one they have read and out of which they construct and identify the event of language encountered. To be sure, the reader is the site of convergence of a multitude of texts, cultural and otherwise, as Barthes says. But he seems to envision the reader as a sort of passive and spontaneous freedom that freely allows the plurivocal sites within the text to manifest in contrast to the singularity, the tyranny of an author. But readers are just authors by another name placed, momentarily, into the site of reception. Are they not then just another tyranny? One can not correct this and say: but we have a multitude of readers to compare one with another. For each reader to be able to produce an act of comparison must first become an author. And if an author dies as they write the text, the reader dies in communicating the text(s) they have received. For to receive a text is nothing else but to write a new text, to be an author. But then, instead of freedom, there is on this view nothing but a domino-effect of deaths where meaning, reality, truth, have no time to breath, to blink, to feel. They die along this chain as liberty after liberty, reception after reception, merely forms another text and so another death. Barthes couches his small essay in terms that speak (or does it speak?) of a beautiful liberation, that intends (or does it intend anything?) creativity, that gestures (or does it?) to the movement of the future in the figure of readers. But, there is nothing here but a chain of readers who die instantly unless they keep their secrets, like one who peered into the Holy of Holies but before they could speak of what they see, they become an author and so too bear the fate of those authors before them. They die and take their secrets with them. Language endures this, to be sure. So is Barthes ultimately saying that we are all but brief partakers of language (as once we thought we briefly partook of God?) Yet, if so, there is still no truth here. No freedom. Barthes may fight it (but can a dead man truly fight?) but we are left in the position of Nietzsche’s madman in The Joyful Science asking who wiped away the horizon? Barthes speaks of the future opened by the reader, but truly upon reflection there are no futures and, like the madman, we can only ask whence and where we have been flung? Creativities spawn, and die; worlds are created and wink out within the heart of readers who cannot speak lest they too die. Barthes may revel in speaking of an “anti-theological” gesture but it appears he has, perhaps, eliminated too much. The theological may have vengeance upon us yet. The authors may not be as healthy as they once were, but we ignore them to our own peril, and only to the extent that we are ready to ignore ourselves, and others. Is reading not, rather, a site of I/thou encounter? Is it not a dialogue? It is difficult to leave Barthes text with the feeling that though he speaks of freedom, this is a freedom from other people. Instead of rejoicing in pluralism, as the text seems to do on the surface, in fact this text manifests a deep fear of the other in the guise of author. To be sure, the “Author” as singularity is no more (if such an idea ever truly existed at large, and not just in certain extremes), but Barthes’ text eliminates more than this. For it seems to make every author, every reader, but the momentary site of a performance of language (146) where our “interior” is nothing else than a “ready-formed dictionary” (146). Freedom here becomes the elimination of the person, who is just the pulsing of language for a moment. For, since the reader is nothing other than an author, Barthes’ insistence that the reader is the “site of inscription” the “somone who holds together in a single field all traces by which the written text is constated,” (146) by its own rules and admissions dies as it becomes an author to speak what it held for a moment in itself but must now pass on. There is only language, and the small moments of diction we once called people through which it occasionally moves.