Interactivity
tends to evoke mostly images of the digital media. In literature,
digital interactivity is commonly associated with hypertext
and more recently with cybertext. George Landow traces the origins
of this term to Theodor Nelson who used it in the 1960s to refer
to non-sequential writing on a computer. Hypertext gives the
reader choices to branch out among chunks of text linked by
multiple pathways.[1] Espen Aarseth looks
beyond hypertexts to cybertexts which he defines as involving
calculations in their production.[2] Such
explorations of other possible ways to generate literature open
the question of the very nature of literature as a collection
of fixed texts. Literature is moving from its origins in oral
traditions to a future that we can hardly envision from current
experiments in the new media. As for the
arts, the objective nature of museums is turning fuzzy. The
art work is becoming harder to contain. Fixed objects are increasingly
perceived as fossilized traces of broader ensembles, organic,
in process.[3]
More generally,
Sherry Turkle observes that we are starting to move toward a
culture of simulation.[4] This is possible,
she points out, because people are increasingly comfortable
with substituting representations of reality for the real. How
simulation is able to deal flexibly and creatively with the
always problematic notion of reality, is perhaps one of the
most important epistemological advances of our times.
Yet
such developments overflowing traditional boundaries actually
recall creative features which have atrophied over time, or
have been neglected and now resurface in new guises. The sense
of interactivity which dominates the digital media stretches
as far back as we care to look into the roots of human creation.
The most deliberately interactive books span the ages, from
the I Ching to Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch. In many ways
these books are beyond what computer driven texts achieve these
days.[5] In an entirely different cultural
world, interactivity surfaces right from the start of the Popol
Vuh, the ancient Maya book of creation, when a narratorial voice
speaks of the text as a seeing instrument which can help the
viewer understand clearly all there is. The notion of interactivity
appears in Aristotle's notion of tragic catharsis and the pleasures
of imitation described in the Poetics. I recounted in The Festive
Play of Fernando Arrabal how theatre developed in ancient Greece
as a festive medium using mainly episodic forms. This was a
highly interactive mode of creation. It served as vehicle to
interconnect performance, audience, and a pre-existing festive
background. But this began to change as theatre detached itself
from its active web of links. Aristotle rejected the
episodic form in favor of the more sophisticated plot-structures
which had started to emerge.[6] The constraints
of plots have in fact reduced the interactivity of theatre and
literature. Such well-made frames tend to tame the imagination
and narrow the field of expectations. However, they can enhance
a game-like virtuosity through a mastery of specific rules,
so that both authors and audiences can rely on artificial yet
objectified expectations as marks of excellence.[7]
Antonin Artaud used the medium of theatre in an intransitive
mode, as incantation, to make what he envisioned as its double
reveal itself. Political and philosophical
literary texts use the medium in a more transitive way to communicate
messages which could effect change. In the arts, André
Malraux conceived museums without walls. He wished to see art
works move beyond the boundaries of museum walls, and have art
history establish dialogues across space and time. Malraux noted
how Picasso was interested in the process of creation rather
than in the final products. He quoted Picasso saying: "it's
always painting that wins in the end."[8]
Picasso was satisfied by the certainty that, like, cave painters,
he had captured something with his creations. Whatever it was,
he could not tell. The object captured is not important. Framing
only brings the work to an end. The process of interaction is
essential for artists. It is now beginning to count for the
museum as well.
The
exploration of interactivity brings us back to the roots of
literary and dramatic creation. It takes us beyond more classic
issues such as Eco's question of whether texts are to be used
or interpreted.[9] Interpretation becomes
one of the many uses of texts, rather than being an alternative.
Richard Rorty has already noted that a work of literature is
neither a mirror of nature nor a fixed object, thus recalling
many other uses of literature including its potential for simulation
and modeling which are essentially interactive features. The
issues which return when exploring interactivity, not surprisingly,
are concerned with the play set in motion through the medium.
As it turns out, these are pragmatic issues.
What is
an interactive work? Without shutting the door on an open concept,
we can say that interactivity points to active interrelations
between players and mediums. The interactions can be of many
types. The forms of interactivity tend to be as diverse as the
artists who make them possible. What the rise of new digital
media has done is to widened the focus of interest beyond the
object created, to the participation in a process of playing
out multitude of interactions. Interactivity in its most general
form is a mode of creation, a way of being, a perspective. The
basic characteristics of such a perspective can be grouped tentatively
into four areas. An interactive approach favors the use of multiple
points of view which can coexist even if they appear mutually
exclusive; it celebrates the creative value of play; it is a
catalyst for emergence; and it tends to be ultimately pragmatic.
Like a statue
on a pedestal or a frozen oracle, the object of creation has
been defined classically as something to contemplate. From an
interactive perspective, this leaves most of the creation out
of the picture. A first quality of an interactive perspective
is that is opens multiple points of view through the blurring
of boundaries of realities and objects once conveniently fixed.
This shifts the emphasis away from the object and tilts it more
toward the subject who perceives. Viewers interact with objects
in a way that celebrates subjectivity and diversity. Multiple
views of a common phenomenon can coexist even if they are mutually
exclusive. Objects themselves can remain fuzzy and metamorphic.
The genial French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided
a striking illustration of both classical and interactive views
in the sciences. Poincaré used to say that when truth
is reached, what remains to be done is to sit back and contemplate
it. Truth, when perceived in detached, static terms, becomes
a precious object which can only be admired from a distance.
The world turns into a museum. Look but don't touch.
Poincaré,
however, had other more complex and contradictory views. The
man who would sit back to contemplate, also thought it was impossible
to find truth in things in themselves. Truth hovered only in
relations among things. He saw in the emergence of non-Euclidean
geometries a clear indication of the ephemeral and arbitrary
nature of theories: what mattered was not an ontology but convenience
of use. He thought that failed theories left a valuable trace
even as they vanished, and that trace had the scent of truth.[10]
A
second characteristic of an interactive perspective is that
it favors open approaches which stimulate play. Unfortunately,
the creative function of play at the adult level tends to be
underestimated. In cultural studies, Johan Huizinga's Homo ludens
sparked an interest in play. It was published in 1938 when Herman
Hesse was already at work in his novel The Glass Bead Game.
Both writers situated play as a free activity deliberately outside
of ordinary life. Huizinga saw play as an activity originating
in the mind, distinct from all other forms of thought as a "second,
poetic world alongside the world of nature." In this realm
of illusion, the mind is able to break down what Huizinga presupposed
was "the absolute determinism of the cosmos."[11]
In a similar fashion, Hesse separated Castalia, the domain of
the abstract, intellectual & artistic glass bead game, from
the domain of sensuous, down-to-earth wordly life. But such
view left out the interactive side of play. The ending of The
Glass Bead Game highlights such conflict. It is precisely the
dilemma that Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht faces toward the end
of his career. He has reached the limits of the game and begins
to find it an empty exercise, all too perfect and formulaic.
The world, thought imperfect and chaotic from a Castalian point
of view, begins to appear vaster and richer, full of change,
history, struggles, and new beginnings. Knecht fears that the
isolation of the Castalian game-culture might be its own doom
because it has lost the capacity for further growth and change.
Castalia has reduced interactivity to a minimum. The only variations
allowed are brilliant new moves within the strict rules of the
world-like Glass Bead Game. But these moves escape the ongoing
changes which take place in the outside world. Knecht foresees
that unless Castalia interacts with the world, it will come
to an end. Such is the end of all systems that try to remain
close, and exhaust their possibilities.
Huizinga's separation of play from "ordinary
life" cuts along somewhat similar lines as Hesse's but
is more problematic. Whereas Hesse saw that life was the realm
of change, Huizinga considered life fixed in its basic order.
Chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine bridged this gap and
introduced the question of play directly into what Huizinga
had imagined was an absolutely deterministic cosmos. Prigogine's
work in the area of complex systems explores a world that might
function with both laws and play at the same time. In The End
of Certainty, Prigogine pointed out that scientific laws formulated
in traditional ways, describe an "idealized, stable world
that is quite different from the unstable, evolving world in
which we live."[12] He envisioned science
hovering between "the two alienating images of a deterministic
world and an arbitrary world of pure chance."[13]
Perhaps
Jean Piaget offered the most functional definition of play.
He presented play as a type of adaptive action understood in
contrast to imitation. Adaptation to situations involves a combination
of imitation and play. These two activities are the extremes
in the spectrum of adaptive behavior ranging from accommodation
to assimilation, respectively. When imitating, we accommodate
to the outside model. But in play we undo the world, so to speak,
and assimilate it to our preferences. Adaptation is reached
through a balancing of these processes.[14]
A way to look at the spread of adaptive attitudes ranging from
imitation to play is to gauge them in terms
of interactivity: imitation minimizes interactivity, but interactivity
increases the more play there is.
Marshall
McLuhan used a temperature metaphor to distinguish between what
we consider are interactive features. He distinguished between
hot and cold media. He wrote that hot media
leave little to be filled or completed by the audience. Hot
media are low in participation, and cool media are high in participation
or completion by the audience.[15] In this
sense, the new interactive media is mostly cool.
Sherry Turkle
prefers the metaphor of solidity to that of temperature. Cool
media for her is soft.[16] It allows for
flexible, nonhierarchical interactivity. It embodies the notion
of a decentered self. It facilitates bricolage
and simulation. Along similar lines, Ian Hacking proposes that
hard sciences tend to be indifferent because participation is
excluded. Natural laws are supposed to be what they are independently
of the observers. But social sciences, far softer, are interactive
because there is change introduced by the very process of structuring
the sciences.[17] In other words, observations
affect what is observed.
Many have already started to question the validity of the metaphorical
division of the sciences into a range from hard to soft, noting
that there is interaction and lack of objectivity even in physics,
in the area of quantum mechanics, for example. The possibility
of interactive emergence extends then to all areas of human
research and creation. Much depends on how a medium is used
rather than on the properties of the medium or on the discipline.
As works like the I Ching or Hopscotch show, hot medium can
be used in cool ways. Or, to put it differently, a hard science
like physics has plenty of soft spots.
A third
and perhaps the most unique feature of an interactive view is
that it allows us to consider emergent phenomena without downgrading
them by reductions. An emergent phenomenon cannot be predicted.
Nor can it be entirely explained away a posteriori. Emergent
phenomena are above all those which cannot be predicted by the
behavior of its constituent parts. They
happen as if on their own. Here we see the crucial role of interactivity.
Only through the play or jiggling of interactivity is the stage
set for emergent surprises. Marvin Minsky ranks intelligence
as one of such surprises. In The Society of Mind he investigated
how a mind could possibly emerge from an ensemble of mindless
little parts. In writing the book, Minsky tried to simulate
the process of emergence of possible solutions to the question
of how a mind comes into being, by writing collections of short
pieces and letting the parts conjure themselves into solutions.[18]
Emergent phenomena can be seen as successful
yet unpredictable mutations. John Holland has even suggested
that life itself may well be an emergent phenomena.[19]
Concerning
the digital media, Jim Gasperini has noted the emergence of
an interactive aesthetic in the structural ambiguity which permeates
decentered computer environments and the internet.[20]
He thinks this sense of interactivity is still in its infancy,
especially in the area of interactive games.
But the development of more user-friendly interfaces and the
way the internet has broken down barriers so that every page
is literally next to every other one in the world, are interactive
breakthroughs which begin to show the extraordinary richness
of the digital media. Eric Drexler suggested that a breakthrough
in the order of the Gutenberg revolution has taken place with
the advent of digital hypertext. The introduction of movable
print made producing texts much easier. Now hypertext and its
spread to the internet, make searching for information incredibly
fast and effective.[21]
The investigation of emergent phenomena is trully a new frontier
of both the sciences and the arts. The two domains of human
creation seem to join hands in this realm of exploration. Science
has traditionally dealt with repetitive phenomena, whereas the
arts have favored special events charming by their inspiring
uniqueness. In the realm of emergence we begin to look into
events which are neither regular nor unique. They are suprises
which can be managed to happen but never coherced into predictable
repetitions. What I suggest is that an interactive perspective
helps us map more effectively this new frontier opening between
chaos and total order.
A
fourth broad characteristic of an interactive perspective is
that it favors pragmatic views. Richard Rorty captured the spirit
of pragmatism stating that it is the "refusal to believe
in the existence of Truth, in the sense of something not made
by human hands, something which has authority over human beings."[22]
Pragmatism is a self-organizing, bootstrap-like approach.
Rorty pointed
out that "the end of human activity is not to rest, but
rather richer and better human activity."[23]
He envisions solidarity as an expression of this human interactivity
directed toward the goal of enhancing our lot in the world in
an all inclusive rather than exclusive way. The method of working
in solidarity hinges on what Rorty calls a "new fuzziness"
in which "objectivity" gives way to "unforced
agreement." [24] The expression of
this creative solidarity is democracy: "a conception which
has no room for obedience to a nonhuman authority, and in which
nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has
any authority at all."[25] Following
John Dewey, what Rorty stresses is the notion of interactive
participation, of being an agent rather than a spectator.
From a pragmatic
point of view, objectivity is an illusion. What Rorty proposes
instead is to acquire habits of action to deal with the world.
Pragmatic interactions should not force preconceptions on others.
Agreements for action should come from reaching positions of
solidarity and working toward common purposes freely chosen.
In this sense, pragmatism favors a local flexibility. In the
absence of absolutes, what works, works--within a context which
by necessity must be local.
Rorty suggests
that the reward for pragmatists is Dewey's sense of democracy
with its utopian possibilities and sense of hope. He believes
that we can mitigate our finitude by self-creation rather than
by invoking untenable and ultimately confining truths. This
creative imagination begins with self-imagining: an inward interaction
which gives rise to processes and models to interact with the
world. The pragmatic high value of feed-back, a deep concern
with reflexivity, is perhaps the most critical navigating tool
of a mature interactive perspective.
Finally,
interactivity itself can be brought under focus. What does interactivity
have to offer in its approach that we did not already have?
I have suggested that it is best suited to deal with multiple
perspectives, it invites emergence, offers a broader sense of
play, and has a pragmatic outlook. In other words, an interactive
view celebrates a constructive flexibility well suited for navigating
in open, changing, or unknown environments. But such outlook
also exposes us to the risks of the new, to sudden conflicts,
disintegration, fragmentation, and other unpleasant surprises.
When science is more open to the whims of the imagination it
may be more vulnerable to ridicule. Literature may lose the
greatness of canonical values. The message in the new media
may turn out to be hollow, mindless. Creativity could be compromised.
Minsky already warned that total interactivity leads to chaos.
He argued in the appendix to The Society of Mind that insulators
are needed just as much as interactive links.
On the other hand, change is all around us. Borders have shifted
from autocratic theories to democracies of models. Politics
are evolving from dogmatisms to networks of pragmatic solidarities.
A drift in cultural plates is changing the artistic landscape.
And as new architectures metamorphose the imagination, science
also seems to overflow its banks an touch uncharted domains.
The internet is emerging as an example of total freedom to link,
without insulations or barriers to links, and yet we manage
to use it constructively. These reconfigurations are best explored
from an interactive perspective which moves us from teleology
to play.
Nevertheless,
an interactive perspective does not exclude other approaches.
Its tendency toward decentering and autonomy does not negate
hierarchical structures. This perspective is one more tool at
our disposal, another creative instrument to enhance our flexibility.
And in order to learn how to manage the initial anarchism of
total interactivity, we must put to good use all the tools we
have at hand. The development of new links is not enough. We
must also develop new ways to manage those links. The open development
of flexible management tools is one of the critical and challenging
aspects of our interactivity.
Finally,
couldn't we say that all creative works are always produced
by interactions? Yes, to varying degrees, unless, of course,
we think they originate from one-way divine inspiration, from
the whispers of muses.
Footnotes
[1]
George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1997), p. 3. return
[2]
Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 75. return
[3]
It is important to keep in mind Robert Markley's warning in
Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996) that the new media is not displacing
the old ones. Markley and the authors who contributed to the
book he edited, suggest that we must remain skeptical of the
notion that a new form can place itself above what has come
before. This verges on a totalitarian perspective. The denial
of other forms of expression or the claim to transcend them,
goes against the grain of interactivity, as I argue in this
essay. Virtual reality is essentially a new modeling medium
sprouting among the many others we already have. This, in itself
is plenty. return
[4]
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 20. return
[5]
Cortázar favored active readers rather than armchair
ones, as he put it. Hopscotch celebrates his notion of interaction
by inviting the reader in its table of instructions to follow
at least two paths through the text. Works which focus on plot
are the least interactive in this sense. The interactive nature
of Maya textuality is rather different. Readings are based on
spiritual links with the text. Readings vary depending on the
quality of such links, so to speak. The I Ching also contains
this type of interactive quality of reading, although here it
is enhanced with the throwing of sticks or coins to arrive at
one of sixty-four hexagrams. Espen Aarseth noted the hypertextual
nature of the I Ching and argued that it is the first expert
system based on the principles of binary computing (Landow 1994:
64-65) return
[6]
Luis O. Arata, The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal (Lexington:
UP of Kentucky, 1982), p. 1. The episodic form reappeared during
the revival of theatre in the Middle Ages, and has continued
to crop up since then in many playful guises. return
[7]
Such was the case with classical French tragedy made to follow
neo-Aristotelian rules of time, place, and action. Shakespeare,
fortunately, had enjoyed a much freer hand. return
[8]
André Malraux, Picasso's Mask (New York: Da Capo Press,
1994), p. 98. return
[9]
Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1992), p. 93. return
[10]
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, (New York: Dover,
1952), pp. xxvi, 50, and 143. return
[11]
Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp.
3-4. return
[12]
Ilyia Prigogine, The End of Certainty (New York: The Free Press,
1997), p. 26. return
[14]
Jean Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (New York: Random House,
1968), p. 8. return
[15]
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994), p. 23. return
[16]
This mirrors a solidity scale common in the sciences. Physics
is considered the hardest discipline. return
[17]
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard,
1999). return
[18]
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1986). return
[19]
John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading: Addison
Wesley, 1998). return
[20]
Jim Gasperini, "Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive
Aesthectic." In Robert Jacobson, ed. Information Design
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 301-316. return
[21]
Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (New York: Anchor Books, 1986).
Of course, Drexler wrote this book before the internet took
off as a hypermedium, but his observations carry over quite
well. return
[22]
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998), p. 27. return
[23]
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Realism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 39. return
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
· · ·
Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius" The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the "human person" Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author's "person" The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."
· · ·
Though the Author's empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, "performs," and not "oneself": Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme's theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost "chance" nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer's inferiority seemed to him pure superstition. It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel — but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he? — wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Surrealism lastly — to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity — surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be "played with"; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist "jolt"), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author. Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language "work," that is, to exhaust it.
· · ·
The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real "alienation:' the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the "pathos" of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly "elaborate" his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.
· · ·
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal "thing" he claims to "translate" is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, "he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes" (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
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Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:' the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even "new criticism") should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, "threaded" (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.
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Let us return to Balzac's sentence: no one (that is, no "person") utters it: its source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by "the tragic"); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader's rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
— translated by Richard Howard
Sarrasine Balzac English empiricism French rationalism the Reformation positivism Mallarme Valery Proust Charlus Montesquioi Surrealism jolt Brecht pathos Bouvard Pecuchet De Quincey Baudelaire Paradis Artificiels J. P. Vernant
The voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.
Since language is a system. For a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be “played with”.
Linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors.
There is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.
A text is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of cultures.
If the writer wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum.
Literature (it would be better to say writing) liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.
The true locus of writing is reading.
A text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.
The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
