Hi, my name's Tom, welcome back to my
channel into another episode of What the
Theory?, my ongoing series in which I aim
to provide some accessible introductions
to key theories in cultural studies and
the wider humanities. Today, we're going
to be taking a look at Roland Barthes'
seminal 1967 essay The Death of the
Author and considering its
implications for how we read (whether
that involves actually reading or
watching, listening, playing etc) cultural
texts and how we interpret them. As
always, if you have any questions or
suggestions as we go along then please
do feel free to pop those below and, if
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notifications button. For now, however,
let's crack on with The Death of the
Author: What the Theory?
The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay
by the massively influential cultural
and literary theorist Roland Barthes. It is
incredibly short, just seven pages long
in the version reproduced in Barthes'
anthology Image Music Text yet, despite
this short length, it has gained quite
the reputation. A great deal of that
notoriety, I would argue, stems from that
very provocative title; where other theoretical
texts or treatises may tends towards
language which is either highly
technical or obscure, there's something
undoubtably appealing about the
pronouncement of the death of the author.
Nevertheless, beneath that murderous
title lies a far more measured piece of
writing and the use that we can find
from Roland Barthes' ideas here lie as
much in it theoretical incisiveness and
precision as in the strength of the
language. Today, then, as well as
introducing some of the key ideas from
Barthes' essay, I also want to try and look
beyond that title in order to draw out
some of the subtler elements of Barthes'
argument. In a similar mode, one of the
reasons The Death of the Author is so
often referred to in the present day is
because it marks a seminal moment in the
development of what we now call "Theory". It is often considered the moment where
literary scholars abandoned approaches
which we might group together as
"structuralism" and embraced "post-structuralism". As we go along today,
however, what I would like to do is slightly
refute this popular notion that The
Death of the Author represents some
massive, violent break from all previous
scholarship. Because, rather than some
kind of manifesto in the door moment, I
think we can more accurately frame it as
a sort of subtle bridge from one school
of thought to another. So, to frame
today's video not entirely unrelatedly in
Marxist terminology, today's video is
about viewing The Death of the Author as
reform rather than as revolution. But
first, some context. Of all the
theoretical approaches to analyzing
literature and culture flying around in
the 1960s (and there were a lot of
them), the most dominant ones can be
grouped together as what
refer to as structuralism. To summarise
very briefly and in very broad strokes,
structuralism seeks to consider how the
meaning that we derived from individual
cultural texts might be reliant upon
much wider cultural codes and ideas. The
notion of genre, for example, is a highly
structuralist one, it asks us to consider
how different cultural texts might be
grouped together and how they might draw
upon similar narrative ideas, tropes,
devices, character traits etc. A
structuralist analysis of a comedy, for
example, might seek to consider how the
meaning that we derive from that comedy
(including the laughter) might not only be
reliant upon elements within that text
itself but also upon our wider knowledge
of comedy as a form.
Roland Barthes himself had been a key
proponent of such approaches and his
book Mythologies is full of numerous
engaging and really insightful examples
of a structuralist approach to cultural
analysis. Where many previous schools of
thought had focused on the analysis of
cultural texts as individual,
self-contained objects then,
structuralism invited scholars to take a
step back and to consider the wider
cultural codes and meaningful systems of
which that cultural text was a part. And,
against this theoretical backdrop, Barthes
found himself asking whether, if the
meaning that we derive from any
individual cultural text is so reliant
upon wider cultural codes and sign
systems, we should really give that much
credit to any individual author at all.
So, in The Death of the Author, Barthes seeks to critique the significance that we so
often instinctively find ourselves
ascribing to an individual author of an
individual cultural text. And he does so
from multiple angles. However, to bring
out the subtleties of Barthes' argument, I really want to start today by
focusing on how he develops this notion
of the importance of cultural context.
Barthes writes 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'. He continues
that 'the authors only power is to mix
writings [...]. The inner "thing" he [sic] thinks to
"translate" is itself only a ready-formed
dictionary, its words only explainable
through other words'. Here, Barthes is
forwarding an argument that we might
have often heard: that no cultural text
can ever truly be original, that any
cultural text will draw upon narrative
devices, character traits, jokes etc from
pre-existing books, films, television
shows, performances. Yet, what Barthes is
using this idea to do is to suggest that
we might more accurately consider an
author, not as some kind of divine
creator of meaning from nothingness but,
instead, as a sort of collage-maker,
piecing together pre-existing ideas in a
unique and original way. Indeed, Barthes
argues that the celebration of the
author as some kind of divine creator is
in fact very specific to the modern "West"
and a result of the European Protestant
Reformation's privileging of the individual.
He points out that, in what he slightly
problematically refers to as
"ethnographic" societies, 'the
responsibility for a narrative is never
assumed by a person but by a mediator,
shaman or relator whose "performance"—the
mastery of the narrative code—may
possibly be admired but never his [sic] "genius"'.
In short, in such societies, someone might
be celebrated for their articulation of
a story but no one's ever particularly
interested in whether they created the
meanings present within that or not. If
we look to the Ancient Greeks, we can see
a very similar disinterest in authorship
as individual conception. Although each
epic poet or tragedian who retold the
story of Odysseus or Electra,
Achilles or Medea undoubtedly altered
the meaning of those narratives, the fact
that they were very clearly writing into
a tradition of pre-existing versions of
that same narrative meant that few would
have been interested in what, if anything,
they had created themselves. Certainly,
texts within our contemporary culture do
far more to hide their influences than
those of the Greeks and very much seek
to present themselves as original. Yet
Barthes argues that the process is still
very much the same; again, that the act of
authorship is more one of assembling
different influences rather than some
kind of magical process of creating
something from nothing. Barthes therefore
argues that we might more accurately
refer to the creator of a literary text
not as an author but as a "scriptor" who
'no longer bears within him [sic] passions,
humors, feelings, impressions but rather
this immense dictionary from which he
draws a writing that can know no halt: [...] the
book itself is only a tissue of signs'.
And it's important to note that, in doing
so, Barthes is not seeking to attack the
skill that the creation of a cultural
text undoubtably involves, he is simply
asking us to reconsider how we think of
that act. All this being said, the aspect
of The Death of the Author which often
receives the most attention is Barthes'
argument that, when analysing any given
cultural text, we should not be too
preoccupied with what the author's
intentions were. For, although the case
against what Wimsatt Jr. and Beardsley
had, in 1946, called the "intentional
fallacy", had been made numerous times, as
Barthes saw it, literature scholars were
still far too preoccupied with
uncovering an author's intentions in the
meaning of a text. He bemoans that 'the
explanation of a work is always sought
in the man or woman who produced it, as
if it were always in the end, through the
more or less transparent
allegory of the fiction, the voice of a
single
person, the author "confiding" in us'.
When taking such an approach, it is almost
considered that the text itself is
simply a flawed expression of a set of
meanings which the author themselves
holds on to. In this mode, then, the goal
of any analysis is almost to look
through the text to seek what meanings
it is that the author is still clasping.
Very often, this encouraged a
biographical approach, and Barthes foregrounds in particular the way in which analyses
of Van Gogh's work had been restricted
to solely considering how the Sunflowers
or Starry Night, for example, might be
some kind of expression of the artist's
psychosis. And this is clearly a limiting
way to look at things. Because succumbing
to such an approach relies upon two
assumptions: the first is that it is
possible to uncover what an artist's
intention with a cultural text was and,
the second, is that that meaning is the
objectively correct meaning of that text.
And, in The Death of the Author, Barthes
seeks to debunk both of these
assumptions. In the very opening of the
essay, Barthes draws upon an extract from
Balzac's Sarrasine in order to consider
whether we can truly know who is
speaking from a text and thus what the
author's intention ever was. To slightly
update Barthes' terms of reference, I want
to draw upon Martin McDonagh's 2017
film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing
Missouri. Throughout this film, Sam
Rockwell's character, Dixon, frequently
throws around racial epithets. But how
should we interpret these? Is such
language simply a character trait of
Dixon's? Is the writer himself using the
character to channel his own love of
throwing around such terms? Or is it part
of a broader attempt to explore racism
in contemporary America? In truth, Barthes
argues, we can never be truly certain. Of
course, the difference is that Balzac
had been dead for over a century at
Barthes' time of writing whereas Martin
McDonagh is very much alive. However, even
if we asked him what his intention with
the character of Dixon was, we could
never truly be sure that he was telling
the truth and, indeed, much of the
conversation surrounding JK Rowling's
frequent returns to her Harry Potter
series to, kind of, add intention there
has revolved around the fact that many
of the fans of her work seemed to think
that maybe she's not being entirely
genuine. Thus, while, contrary to popular
belief, Barthes does not suggest that trying
to work out what an author's intention
with the text was is never an
interesting pursuit, he does argue fairly
strongly that to arrive at a definitive
conclusion is near impossible. He does
not end on such a fatalistic note
however. Instead, he draws upon the
impossibility of deriving an author's
intention to suggest that maybe a
cultural text does not have an objective
meaning at all. For, just as the author
brings all those pre-existing texts
they've seen, all those cultural codes
and all those pre-existing influences to
the table when they create a text, so
does the reader bring a similar amount
of baggage to the table when they read
it. This means that the meaning that any
given reader will derive from a text
will be different to that of any other;
my reading will be different to yours.
Barthes writes that 'a text is made up 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
hitherto said, the author. The reader is
the space on which all the quotations
that make up a writing are inscribed'. In
this way, Barthes argues that the process of
signification, through which meaning is
communicated ,is only truly completed
when a text is read and, as such, that any given reader
will have a different reading of it and,
thus, that any text has multiple meanings.
Yet he does not see this as a downfall
or a defeat of literary analysis. Instead,
he sees it as a truly freeing  notion
in which the emphasis is shifted away
from the writing and creation of texts
and towards the experience of the reader.
To paraphrase Barthes' final sentence here,
the most important part of this essay is
not so much the death of the author but
instead the birth of the reader, for,
while many of the ideas within The Death
of the Author draw upon ideas and extend
ideas from structuralism, it is in
pronouncing the birth of the reader that
Barthes really lays the foundations for post-structuralism to begin. Thank you very
much for watching this video, I hope it
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watching once again and have a great
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