Erotics of the Text
1984. A revision of this essay is in progress.
Abstract: In her famous essay, "Against Interpretation," Susan Sontag sought an "erotics of art" that pays attention to what art does that philosophy, psychology, history, or theology do not. Such erotics would distinguish art as a complex of feeling or virtual experience from its other functions as statement. Roland Barthes' critical practice probably movatives Sontag's call to attend more closely to art's sensual qualities, as he, following in turn Bachelard's example, chose to analyze form rather than meaning and sought in the Structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss a language of form suitable to describe aesthetic ardor. Concerning himself with art's surfaces, Barthes describes art as a product of desire that in turn stimulates it.
Now Barthes makes for treacherous reading. The recursive turn of his thought, as suggested above, is only part of it. He praises logical inconsistency and blatant self-contradiction, which defeats any attempt to pin down just what it is he means. This he justifies in the name of pursuing fresh ways of responding to a work of art. In S/Z Barthes seeks to free the reader from the ennui of a classic work, such as one of Balzac's short stories, long domesticated by exegesis and well embedded within the narrative of literary history. Let readers, instead, avail themselves of the "writerly" text, becoming conscious co-authors who look for meaning that bucks familiar understandings. Let them lend their attention to those features that signify sensation more than statement and thus evade paraphrase. Thus, in S/Z Barthes begins to create that language of form that Sontag sought. However, while Sontag sets herself "against interpretation," Barthes himself recognizes that interpretation is inevitable, should the reader engage the work of art at all. To look at a painting is to acknowledge the social and aesthetic codes by which we distinquish a painting from a billboard and appreciate it accordingly.
In reading for pleasure, as Barthes describes it in Plaiser du texte, the reader ceases to read as a critic, seeking those meanings which are personally significant, idiosyncratic, and imaginatively fecund. To illustrate his point, Barthes writes Plaisir du texte itself in a way that frustrates any thorough-going public, objective and definitive reading of the sort attempted here. Alongside pleasure ("plaisir,") Barthes observes another quality in the experience of reading, bliss ("jouissance"), a Dionysian rapture that can assail the cultural assumptions from which the reading started, dismantling even the comforting consistency of self-hood from which the reader started.
It is more probable than not that even professional critics, as persons, as readers, read for pleasure sometime, even if not always while on the clock, even if not ever on the clock, finding little enjoyment in Shakespeare or Racine but finding guilty delight in Stephen King or Georges Simeon's adventures of Inspector Maigret. But there has never been any good way to discuss pleasure, never mind bliss, even when talking about the horrible catharsis Aristole identifies within Oedipus Rex, when the king learns the truth behind the plague, the troubling prophecies, and previously unanswered questions of his identity. As poets have long known through experiencing their own genesis, the only proper written response to a poem, in its full sense, is not a literary analysis but another poem.
Working out of Ernest Cassier's neo-Kantian tradition instead of Barthes' grounding in Structuralism, Existentialism and Marxism, Susanne K. Langer has developed her own workable hypothesis that the arts signify the verbally ineffable through deploying the sensuous, non-signifying qualities of their form. Taking her cue from the case of instrumental music, Langer proposes that non-discursive form articulates emotional meaning apart from intelligible meaning. Music, design, and abstract art often do so instead of it. Sensuous form accomplishes this through its rhythms and contrasts, its tonalities and textures, its color and volume, its movement and pacing. Along with representational evocations of time and place, this form creates a virtual reality which its audience inhabits that constitutes a semblance of experience lived and felt. Since this effect does not depend on what signifiers signify so much as how they are together arranged and embodied in the medium of their presentation, Langer does not feel obligated to attempt Barthes' circumvention of meaning nor his pluralizing of it; significant form, as she sees it, dispells otherwise the tendency to reduce a literary text to its consensus paraphrase. The plurality of signifying form that Barthes identifies, however, does have importance, taken up below. The physical structure of a work, significant form, as opposed to its semiotic structure, signifying form, has an import that coexists alongside its intelligible content, should there be one, yet is irreducible to it. The significant form that conveys emotional meaning involves the entire Gestalt of the work, not a signifier-signified association someone could define in a dictionary.
Although Langer's assays in Feeling and Form to explain how specific arts express their non-discursive import do not always hold up, she represents an early attempt to theorize what Sontag had hoped that critics would do, attend to the sensuous qualities that make art art. And Langer actually accomplished this before Sontag voiced her concern that critical discourse was habitually ignoring them.
A danger exists of misconstruing Langer's understanding of significant form as a singular and authoritarian Platonic intellible. Keep in mind the plurality that Barthes has uncovered in opposition to such essentialism, a plurality inherent within any signifying structure. What goes here also goes for significant form. As Langer herself points out, the same form can possess multiple import. This observation also follows from Sontag's call to recuperate in our reception of art what the criticism of the 1960s, centered upon hermeneutics, had minimized.