In Roland Barthes’ 1977 essay, “The death of the author,”[1] Barthes celebrates the intended outcome of deconstructing single meaning as a necessary step toward empowering the reader. The design is ultimately to produce the death of the Author (who Barthes identifies as God) and the meaning that the Author intends and communicates. The means to accomplish this is through changing the way communication is understood, and particularly by discarding single meaning in favor of a multi-dimensional, reader-centric permissive perspective.
Barthes asserts that,
“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), ‘created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes’.”[2]
Rather than having the ability through written communication for exact precision in conveyed meanings, the writer, using words and combinations of words is limited in what can be communicated, because of the clash of meanings associated with those words in other contexts. The writer mixes writings, and invokes an (almost) infinite regress of meanings. Because we know there is no “Author” who communicates with precision, writers (scriptors) who follow are not bound by the same laws and principles of communication as God would have otherwise put in place.
Barthes continues,
“Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.”[3]
The text resulting from this word-salad of multi-dimensional meaning takes on a life of its own and is ultimately a “tissue of signs,” offering nothing concrete, but rather a resounding reverberation of ideas into winding corridors that continually reshape the “signs” beyond any writer’s intended meaning. Thus, it is central to the thesis that what Barthes “knows” – that a text is not a message from God (the Author) – be established, because, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. 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.”[4]
How is this accomplished? The Author, and the Critic are present if the text must (or can be) explained, but if criticism are undermined, so then are the Critic and the Author. “Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important, task. of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author.”[5]
In the multi-dimensional understanding of writing and its understanding, the meta-narrative is irrelevant. “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced…” In this perspective writing is experienced, but not understood in precise terms. Thus, “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying’ out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to 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. [emphasis mine]”[6] By refusing to recognize the force of communication as the fixing and discerning of meaning, one refuses God and that which He is supposed to have designed and provided (reason, science, law). Thus society is reshaped entirely through hermeneutic means, and hermeneutic multi-dimensionality becomes the central weapon for liberation from the Author, thus Barthes concludes with a battle cry that, “…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.[emphasis mine]”[7]
The weight of hermeneutics is far more than simply that of a discipline for understanding communication. It can be (and has been) weaponized against the Author, and those who are unsuspecting, who adopt multi-dimensionality as sophisticated and desirable for offering opportunity to inject themselves into the narrative, do so perhaps ignorant of the final intended outcome – the demise and dismissal of the author. It is ironic that prose crafted through supposedly multi-dimensional communication tools can convey the exact meaning of this pursuit, and celebrate it as already being successful.
[1] Roland Barthes, “The death of the author” in Image-Music-Text (Fontana, 1977), 146-147.
[2] Barthes, 146-147.
[3] Barthes, 147.
[4] Barthes, 147.
[5] Barthes, 147.
[6] Barthes, 147.
[7] Barthes, 147.
