The Autobiography of mastery The other day a week would welcome at this conference by noting that it reminded the author unjustly forgotten. E 'habit of the media take care of something only if it somehow makes the news. Rowing is in the news (and then called: Mode of the moment: Roland Barthes), the scandal hit the headlines, the recent publication of a work, but in the absence of better news may be the revelation that someone or something has been overlooked - and in this case, the "scoop" of the newspaper is to remember what else have dropped into oblivion. But Roland Barthes
can really be called an unjustly forgotten author? If we were to visit today libraries in New York we would realize that there are shelves devoted exclusively to his works, in the course of continuous translation, is published by the rhythm rather intense new monographs on Barthes, France, Italy and immediate rebound, continue to appear, unpublished barthiani ; Barthes is mentioned, commemorated regret.
If anything we might say that what happened could not happen: that life was a controversial (and still remember all the controversy of Professor Picard dichiaratogli and ostracism from the Sorbonne) and in death has become an unquestioned character. Of which no one should complain, since becoming undisputed is the aspiration of everyone in a spirit of honesty and passion, putting to write a page. And finally, still life, Barthes had enjoyed the supreme celebration of the satirical pamphlet. The thing had very sorry, and I was amazed, because if someone writes an entire pamphlet parodying the language of a page, even the language of his followers, this means that the parody has reached a state of great listening. But we all know, Barthes, tender and painful sensitivity.
That someone is amused at the things he did with shadowy conviction hurt him. Such was the man, but this man can say anything but has been forgotten. But
Seeking to understand the sense in which the reporter has heard Barthes as "overshadowed" and deployment dividing thinkers into two categories. Mind you, the distinction is convenient, and especially does not want to establish hierarchies and oppositions between black and white. I just want to outline two ways, both useful and acceptable to be teachers. There is the teacher who works offering his life and his work as a model and is the teacher who spends his life building models, theoretical or experimental, to be applied.
Barthes undoubtedly belonged to the first type of masters. He never proposed plans to write other pieces of amorous discourse, but even in his most purely "academic" (and think of S / Z) has offered models of analysis - in the sense that it is not enough to split a text I read in an author to say what Barthes was able to say that Balzac. Take also the idea of \u200b\u200bcode proairetico, take it in the hands of a student without imagination, and tell him to go and apply, say, a Peau de chagrin : not much will come of it.
belong to the second category authors such as Chomsky or Greimas: they propose analytical models that deliver to their disciples, and formulate them precisely because they are applicable beyond the individual genius of those who apply them (though of course there may be bad Chomskyans greimasiani and bad, as there are poor students who can not work with the multiplication table). You can be
Hegelians and can not be if not metaphorically, Kierkegaard. The masters of the second category require that someone in their wake, proceed to apply their assumptions, and perhaps correct them to improve them, to falsify them.
Masters in the first category pose embarrassed their followers, challenging them to a constant and impossible "imitatio magistri," which addresses precisely because it produces something different from the work of the master.
Working with masters of the second type means testing their models locally, correct in infinitesimal details, and you run the risk at every step, to be recognized as heretics. Not so happens with the masters of the first type has always heretics, and you may not be. I said
I did not want to establish hierarchies, and I repeat it. There are bad teachers of the second type, which impose their models dogmatically, and do not allow students to discuss them. There are bad teachers of the first kind, which puts on a show of visionary ecstasy and educate their followers to worship the ineffable.
E 'characteristic of teachers of the first type have a communicative practice that is identified with the artistic practice. Barthes often made us understand that knowledge comes through the practice of writing. It does not come from abstract diagrams that you then try applications. Barthes tried at least once, thinking to abstract diagrams, and it happened with system of Fashion, but we know that he had do so, almost on a bet, but not for academic needs (and what gave him so much trouble that the finished work, he declined to use it as a university degree). This will also chair
artistic works of the so-called theoretical Barthes. It seems to me that yesterday, in an interview, François Wahl deny that there are moments in the work of Barthes and scans. I would agree with him: if there were, were external and accidental.
Isabella Pezzini A year ago and I wrote for "Communications" an essay in which we tried to show how Barthes semiologist existed before Elements of semiology , And certainly since the days of Mythologies . But if it is true that Barthes semiology was from the beginning, even when he wrote of the "proposed" by the academic tone for nothing, it is also true that Barthes was stretched even when those creative writing booklets for use by its students, then, and only by accident, we have great movement known as university books.
Let me go back to some personal memories.
When the Elements of semiology appeared on "Communications 4", Barthes had no intention to publish them later in separate volume. He considered them a notebook, a folder of notes for the use of his seminars. However existed in Italy since the magazine Marcatrè "which had the advantage of being large, can endure very long essays, Barthes, and I asked permission to translate the site's elements. He agreed because it was just to publish them as working materials. He entrusted the translation of Andrea Bonomi. As he was ready to go to press, died Vittorini, and friends dell'Einaudi I got a call saying that one of the last wishes of the deceased was right to publish the elements in volume, for the series "New University". At the request acted blackmail, for sentimental reasons, both Barthes on me: I gave in the translation Bonomi, Barthes and agreed in volume edition.
The volume has been as successful as we know, and only after the Italian episode Barthes decided to republish the text in French. With a few changes (I once asked to translate the material for a booklet Bompiani) happened with the old rhetoric .
Because there was even then in Barthes this fear to expose themselves as a theorist and crafts? I would say that, of deception, at the beginning he did not feel these texts as an exercise of true writing. Deceiving, I say, because the theoretical effect that they have had will affect writing, persuasive and subtle strategy. Fake hand, they were. Barthes made us believe that expose us flatly Saussure, reversed the relationship between Saussure and semiotics, and linguistics. We believe it was to borrow the concept of connotation (so important in his critical practice) from Hjelmselv, and it was not true: if you go to re-read the Prolegomena hjelmsleviani you will notice that in that context the concept of connotation was more limited and moderate (or conservative). Hjelmslev Barthes had offered not a notion "strong" as connotative semiotic semiotics whose expression plane is an underlying semiotics, but rather a notion "weak" of what this cannot semiotics. Hjelmslev gives the examples of connotation, for example on the fact that a decision can characterize the source Regional. There is no concept of "strong" and then manipulated by Barthes, where through the reading of the connotations it appears possible to read traces of the ideology and the way in which a company does move in a highly persuasive signs most seemingly innocuous. Barthes pretended to repeat, but in fact consisted of subtle strategies and writing, while writing, its authors, he is transformed in his hands.
This explains why Barthes then it seemed to deny their theoretical exercises and launched by a decision in writing explicit works, giving us the impression that he has abandoned his interest semiological (again disregarded the interests of its writer). In reality he has always remained faithful to his vocation, which was not to build a usable system semiological but always tell us at every turn that around us there is semiological, or you live in semiosis.
This is evident even in the most seemingly didactic readings of the myths of today, in some analysis of images where it seems that Barthes tries to explain to us what that picture meant. But its lesson is never intended for what the image meant, but the fact that in any case "it said" It 's rare that Barthes (who talked a lot of codes) arrivals to stiffen his readings in a final encoding . His lesson semiological, what made him so controversial, was right in pointing the finger at any event, the universe and feel that it would mean something. This angered both the Anglo-Saxon philosophers of language training, for example, who accused him of applying to the culinary arts categories of the language and read as a language that was not produced linguistically. We discuss certain transpositions barthiane linguistic categories from other systems of signs, but we must realize that what he wanted to do was to warn that in any case there is significant also in the culinary and that somehow you need to search, even if the ways and tools can be reformulated. The
semiologist, we repeat, is the one that when out and about in the street, where people see the facts and events, sees, smells signification. The have pinned on the idea that there is always around us, of meaning, rather than on the task of translating dizionariale for tourists sociological signifiers multiple meanings are clear and fixed once and for all, this was the ' Barthes's legacy.
only way we can understand his Japanese adventure. Finally he stood in front of a civilization that did not know any code: here he played his ability to understand and to say that there was significant, even when they did not understand that.
dangerous game, in which Barthes was walking on a razor's edge: of that language he did not know the rules, yet he knew that it says something in the way of making a package or cut fish. Where the Japanese semiosis is implicit, and the western non-existent, Barthes had a challenge, a methodology of suspicion. But just because what interested him was the mechanism of semiosis, not the encoding of its results, he was happy with the risk of contradiction. Working on a civilization that celebrated the Zen sense of rejection, silence, opacity, each page Barthes denounced and denied the significance, in a dialectic of bravery and modesty. The haiku does not make sense, and yet you spend three chapters to show the game creates the sense that it continuously around.
why, especially in recent writings, the significance of the preferential condition appeared to him that poetry, or literature in general (see Lesson ): literature is not required to set a direction, with the way you play. The metaphor recurs throughout his poetry reading in Japan, yet just as Barthes uses this metaphor shows us that there is poetry even in everyday gestures flatly. E 'in order to avoid filling the daily act of ultimate meaning, the work of interpretation as if it were a metaphor. He worked daily with the fear of semiosis on lock, and treated her gently, as it did who, out of respect for life in each of its forms, caressing a stray cat with light and love (and worship) that you petting a cat angora. Everything is full of meaning, he told us, and reveal a lot there, but do not show the whole film, and what I say I drop a shadow of suspicion, perhaps skeptical, because I do not want rigid code in what I'm displaying and interpreting that rise facades a ghost, the ghost of the referent.
I remember one day in Milan, in the early sixties, after a breakfast. We were and he take leave, as if to sum up the discussion we had done at the table, he said: "Et surtout, d'accord, Umberto, il faut tuer the réféfent. These were the years in which theories of language were still heavily referential, and anchored to the values \u200b\u200bof truth. The address of structuralist semiology was trying to work instead on the content, the illusion of truth, the production of ideology, the strategies of persuasion. The moment when the signifier is still in its supposed referent is the moment when language loses its thickness and does not rise more, and become "unnatural". Barthes fought against this, and saving the possibility of a continuous query language, he realized his way of being semiologist, even when it still seemed (or more) to semiotics. He wanted to leave the significant rise not because he believed, like others, that everything is signifying chain and there is no meaning, but precisely because he knew that everything has meaning.
And yet we must be careful not to read Barthes in the light of other theories of the text (such as deconstruction, the drift) appeared after Barthes. His idea of \u200b\u200b"jouissance" was not an anarchist, he was aiming, reading, according to elicit multiple, but not to celebrate the elusiveness, perpetual slippage of meaning.
There are two types of attitude towards the infinity of the text: one is that of St. Augustine, the other is what the Kabbalists.
Kabbalists knew that the letters of the Torah can be combined to infinity to produce new versions of the book, and then infinite interpretations. I do not see anything in this text Barthes' theory. Augustine knew that the sacred text was infinite (infinite sensuum sylva, "as St. Jerome had said), but that could always be subject to a rule of forgery, to rule out what the context is not allowed to read, for it was the energetic hermeneutical violence to which he was undergoing. You can not say when an interpretation is valid, or what is the best, but you can tell when the text rejects an interpretation is incompatible with its contextuality. And what Barthes Sarrasine law, divides it into lexias precisely because the "jouissance" must be controlled by their cross-reference, and the articulation and verification of governs lexias the dialectic of pleasure, the excitement of divination. Barthes and Augustine was not Kabbalist.
But it is clear: he taught us the adventure of a man in front of a text, it gave us schematic model to be applied, but a living example of how "enchanted" every day in front of the vitality, and mystery, semiosis in progress. In this sense we have to thank him and in this sense, despite what the newspapers say, I think it will be hard to forget his teaching and let die *.
* This intervention by Umberto Eco at the conference in Reggio Emilia on Roland Barthes on 13-14 April 1984 was collected in the volume of Roland Barthes' Mythologies , edited by Paolo Fabbri and Isabella Pezzini, publishing practices, Parma 1986, pp. 297-304, which is here thanks you for your courtesy.
Roland Barthes , myths of today (foreword by Umberto Eco ) , Einaudi
