Sunday, July 2, 2006
Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
B arthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-148.
Barthes advances several important (now "given") theoretical maneuvers in defining writing as "performative," in destabilizing the role of intentionality in reading, and in involving the reader as an equal (if unknowable) participant in the text's performance. Skeptics will counter that Barthes comes on too strong, that he means that the author gives up all control to the reader. But this is simply a theoretical project meant to relax and thereby introduce a degree of play in the taken-by-some-to-be-exactable relationship between authorship and the (meaningful) life of a text in its multiple, unpredictable performances. I take Barthes to be urging us to regard the reader as a legitimate participant in textuality and meaning, thereby opening a space for interpretation to contend with meaning rendered absolute or rigidified by the nod of the author (as an increasingly celebrated figure).
"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hiterto said, the author" (148). This changes the presumed controls, introducing the aliveness of a text and its terms as involving trajectories that we cannot always easily anticipate or constrain, though this doesn't necessarily mean that as writers, we shouldn't try, within reason, to do so or to make what we do readable.
"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile" (147). If the project of classical literary criticism was to stake out a superior (that is, intention-matching) reading, Barthes instead argues for something more democratic, participatory and reader-centered. This also matches with Barthes antithesis; he "refus[es] to assign a 'secret,' ultimate meaning, to the text" (147).
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" (146). A variation of intertextuality and a theory of writing as a tissue-like aggregation of various, contending fibers.
"For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs' and not 'me'" (143).
"Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing" (142). ^Consider this alongside Ong's notion of distance and also Barthes' mention of "distancing" (145).
"Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it" (145).
Posted by dmueller at Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology
B anks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.
"The questions remain, hauntingly: Is it possible to make this nation a just one for Black people? Is it worth the struggle? Can technologies really be used to serve liberatory ends, or is that hope just another pipe dream calling us upon our awakening to resist! resist! resist! the shiny boxes we're all sold and the promise they once held?" (xi). This books questions immix technology (primarily defined here in the instrumental sense, as an apparatus or material component with central issues of justice and access for African Americans. It keeps fresh issues of the bi-directional look running throughout African American struggle, the Racial Ravine (43) and the Digital Divide (as an aspect of the Ravine), the possibility of uplift and empowerment through technologies (Black Planet as site for collectivity, African American design principles for technologies and spaces of use, and the rhetorical techne of Martin King and Malcolm X as technologies in themselves).
Banks gives us seven chapters:
I. Introduction: Looking for Unity in the Midst of Madness: Access as the ONE in African American Rhetoric and Technology Studies
"The overall argument I make is this: rather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies overdetermine or have minimal effects on a society's development, or whether people (especially those who have been systematically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected through its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries" [rel: bricoleur] (2). Also: move beyond individual exemplars (2), refusal of "postmodern hype" (3), "post-everything navel-gazers" (4), "unities are not absolute" (5). Here, Banks pushes away from certain theoretical orientations while later preferring a set of three axes: practice, theory and pedagogy. ^"theory"?
"There are many reasons for centralizing access in this way, but it comes down to this: more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advances its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations" (10). ^Connect this to writing and agency, as with Baron's account of writing as a technology with dependencies on instruments and treatments of those instruments that might be improvised or tactical rather than orthodox.
II. Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment
This chapter reads technology issues alongside the ebonics debate. Banks
surveys articles on access in computers and writing from Selfe (15), Moran (15),
Porter (16). Grabill (20), Romano (20), and Blair (20).
"All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1996), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, receive, and used" (23).
III. Martin, Malcolm, and a Black Digital Ethos
IV. Taking Black Technology Use Seriously: African American Discursive
Traditions in the Digital Underground
V. Rewriting Racist Code: The Black Jeremiad as Countertechnology in Critical
Race Theory
VI. Through This Hell into Freedom: Black Architects, Slave Quilters and an
African American Rhetoric of Design
VII. A Digital Jeremiad in Search of Higher Ground: Transforming Technologies,
Transforming a Nation
- Related sources
- Heidegger, M. (1986). The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper.
- Mitchell, W. J. (1995). City of Bits. Campbridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: U. of Chicago.
Bursts of Memory
T hinking back on Fourths of July. I remember where I was on Fourths better than any other day of the year (for years afterward, that is). Fourths are distinctly eventful. The older I get, the less I like the celebrations though. Anti-patriotic? Nah. Celebratorily ambivalent when it comes to fireworks on the Fourth. Bombs bursting in air, cinders raining down, the dulled out masses of cricked necks turned skyward, a hypnotic oohing and aahing to exploding light. It's not the holiday; it's the cliched fireworks shows. I just can't get into them (beyond wow, that was something). But I probably sound like a crank. I keep going to them, anxiously watching for the bigger blast than last year and the extension of the show just when you thought it was over. Past Fourths: I've starred them all on this quikmap:
Flashes, memories of 4th of July and place:
Late 1970's: My grandparents' drive-way on Drummond Island. Safe-works, all sparklers and snakes. Grand finale: something tank-shaped that spun and popped. The flowing goo of writhing carbon snakes: wow, that was something. I was into the sparklers, too. Two at a time to keep it dangerous.
1984: Independence, Mo. My brother and I were staying in the duplex where my aunt and uncle lived. Only they were gone to Denver, so our grandmother was watching us. The entire complex of apartments was crawling with kids, the grounds ascramble with bottle rocket battles. Only we weren't allowed out past dark. Too risky. Grandma was a worrier. I think I remember that we tried her nerved by staying out past the first edge of evening. And then paid dearly for it. Still, my aunt and uncle brought back giant jawbreakers from their short trip to Colorado.
A year later? Or two. This time with another aunt. We left Lansing, Mich. and traveled through the night toward Kansas City. I was eleven or twelve. I watched out the car window (a Chevette, I think) for all of the fireworks shows between Lansing and Indianapolis. And then I fell asleep. I was supposed to stay awake, help her stay awake (changing radio stations, chattering on about how scenic south-central Illinois was). When I woke up on the Fifth, we were just leaving St. Louis. The I-70 corridor was a fireworks paradise with bright yellow tents parked at every exit for 270 miles.
1996: Saginaw Bay, Mich. I'd just taken my first job after undergrad, moved from KC to Saginaw, and was handling claims for damaged property following a wall of tornados from Frankenmuth to Bay City. A small cooler of beer, a cookout. Good friends who I don't keep in touch with any longer.
Posted by dmueller at