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continue to expect of Barthes what we have traditionally expected of
criticism, an authoritative discours.e that clarifies or subverts the text or
that provides it with a context for an understanding of its social or
moral bearings. Barthes's criticism leads neither to understanding in
the traditional sense nor to the generation or support of creativity in
the inherited imaginative forms. Barthes is not obliged to satisfy
traditional expectations. I admire his keen problematic sense of the
critical enterprise. Yet he constitutes a threat to that en terprise when in
deauthorizing the text he authorizes the critic only to destroy the
dialectic between the mind of the critic and the mind of the text. The
effect is a double loss of authority. In characteristically disarming
fashion, Barthes admits as much in an essay "The Death of the
Author," " ... historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of
the Critic . . . criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the
Author." It is the self-indulgent reader who emerges at the expense of
the author and the critic.
Barthes's pacificism, his horror of the intimidation of languages,
makes him want to avoid what the dialectician would consider the
fruitful conflict between languages, each claiming authority. More–
over, the terms that incarnate difference are empty at the center, so that
what is ultimately "real" is the difference and what sustains the
difference is the nonencounter, the space between. Barthes 's admiration
for Japanese manners is precisely in the nontransgressive and hence
nondialectical relation of one to the other, each gesture concealing or
expressing an emptiness at the center which must be respected and
protected. In contrast, occidental manners proceed from an aggressive
conviction of the authoritative fullness of one's being.
What Barthes gives us in splendid fashion is "the empire of signs"
(the title, incidentally, of his book on Japan): the aristocratic space of
the verbal virtuoso. A socia-historical perspective on Barthes might
link his work with that of the
philosophes
of the eighteenth century,
who cultivated a reality-free abstractness as a compensation for their
lack of actual social and political power. In the case of the
phi losophes,
as Tocqueville has shown in masterly fashion, abstraction took the
form of generalizations about the nature of man and society. Despite
Barthes's "demystification" of the transparency of these generaliza–
tions, he shares with these aristocrats of the intellect an aversion to the
constraints of concrete realities. Encouraged by the verbal bias of
French culture (in contrast, for example, to the experiential bias of
American culture), Barthes is able to sustain this aversion through an
extraordinary belief in the transcendent power of language.
