A Response to Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author"

This is a response to a famous and influential essay, The Death of the Author, by the French cultural critic, Roland Barthes (see http://deathoftheauthor.com for a copy of the text of the essay). In it Barthes makes a number of interesting claims. Barthes is writing about written texts, but some have thought that his essay is also relevant to certain non-literary domains, such as visual art (Freeland, 2001).
First, Barthes’ main claims in The Death of the Author are:

• what is written in a text cannot be reduced to the authority of the author
• in writing a text it is not the author who acts but language itself
• the text is in the hands of a “scriptor” who produces several meanings; the scriptor has no history, biography or psychology; the scriptor does not pre-exist the text, as the author does, but comes into being when the text comes into being.
• the job of the critic is not to work out the (single) meaning of a text, but to disentangle the many possible meanings
• the reader provides the unity of the text; the reader is someone “who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”

With regard to the first claim (what is written in a text cannot be reduced to the authority of the author) this seems uncontroversially true. Barthes is mainly concerned in his essay with the meaning or meanings of a text, and this in turn must have at least something to do with various other factors, including, crucially, with the response of the reader. He opens his essay with a quotation from Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine”:
This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her  impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.

Barthes asks whether it is the hero of the story, Balzac the individual, Balzac the author, universal wisdom or romantic psychology that is speaking here. We are usually aware that when people talk about what the author means (perhaps by quoting something the author has said) and what we, the readers, take the meaning to be, the two may well differ. Thus it seems plausible to say that there is more than one meaning of the work in question than to say that only the meaning articulated by the author counts.

However, the second claim, namely that in writing it is not the author who acts but language itself which acts, seems highly implausible, even almost incomprehensible given, what we normally take the term “acts” or “to act” to mean. Somebody acts, or performs an action, when she does something intentionally. Moreover, we usually think that a person has a belief and a desire which both motivate and cause the action in question. So, for example, if I want some beer and believe that there is a bottle of beer in the fridge, then this motivates and causes me to open the fridge, take out the beer and drink it. Given this widely accepted view of what acting is, only people and some animals, insofar as they have beliefs and desires, can act. A text clearly cannot act, in this sense of acting. Barthes seems to be using the term “to act” in an idiosyncratic way, without telling us what he means by “acting”, as if only the meaning he, the author of the essay, wants to give the term counts, thereby contradicting what he says about the “death of the author”. For instance he may mean by acting “having an effect” – and of course a text can indeed have an effect or effects, but having an effect is not the same thing at all as acting. But then he is, as the author, simply stipulating the meaning, and this is at odds with what he says in the essay about how texts in general (and hence the terms they contain) come to have meaning.

His third claim is that there is something called a “scriptor” which has a role to play in what ever it is the text “does”. In an attempt to explain what a scriptor is Barthes introduces the philosophical term “performative”, which was coined by the Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin. What Austin meant by a “performative” is a kind of utterance. In uttering a particular form of words we do something else besides uttering. For instance, if I say that I promise to do something, in addition to uttering the words “I promise…” I am imposing on myself the obligation to do the thing in question. In making myself responsible for doing it, I may have to accept criticism or some kind of sanction if I fail to do whatever it is. (Other examples of performatives include “I name this ship…” and “I do” when uttered during the marriage ceremony). But the relevant point with regard to Barthes’ mysterious  “scriptor” is that only human beings can use performatives to do things. An abstract entity such as a scriptor cannot; indeed an abstract entity cannot do or perform anything at all. Indeed the whole notion of a “scriptor” seems totally redundant, as Barthes’ general point about the irrelevance of the author when it comes to meaning can be formulated in a perfectly understandable way without any mention of a “scriptor”.

When it comes to the critic (fourth claim: the job of the critic is not to work out the meaning of a text, but to disentangle the many possible meanings), if it is agreed that a text can have more than one meaning, then it seems quite plausible to say that at least part of the job of the critic is to disentangle these various meanings. The critic’s job usually involves other things as well, such as making judgments about the aesthetic qualities of the work in question, and giving reasons for these judgments, but as Barthes is primarily concerned in this essay with meaning, he does not mention other aspects of the critic’s job.

Barthes’ final claim (the reader provides the unity of the text; the reader is someone or something “who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”) is again difficult to comprehend. The reader is clearly not a person, because Barthes states that she has no history, biography or psychology. The reader is an abstraction, namely the one place where the multiple strands or components of a text come together. One possibility is that the reader refers to the sum of all the real or possible readers of a text, but Barthes does not say this. If we recall the sentence Barthes quotes from Balzac’s story he suggested various “voices” besides the voice of the author which might be “speaking”. Now it turns out that these voices all come together in the listener. The listener has, so to speak, replaced the author and becomes the crucial unifying force for the text. He concludes that “the birth of the reader is the death of the author”.

Thus Barthes seems in this essay to have abandoned one extreme view (only the author counts when it comes to the meaning of a text) and to have adopted another (only the listener counts when it comes to meaning). My suggestion is that both of these claims are wrong and that the meaning or meanings of a text is or are a combination of the meaning attributed by the author to the work and what the listeners or viewers take the meaning to be. This type of view is sometimes described by philosophers as “intersubjective”, i.e. accessible to at least two minds or subjectivities. When I refer here to the listeners I am referring not to an abstraction but to the real people who have experienced the work in question. Occasionally there may be a consensus of the writer and the public which results in one widely agreed meaning, but much more probably there will be more than one meaning – and on this point I agree with Barthes. This suggestion has the advantage of bringing meaning down from a realm of abstraction to show how the meaning of a work of art has essentially to do with how human beings understand it.

Finally, we might wonder what the status of Barthes’s claims in this essay is. He is suggesting, on the one hand, that what he is saying is true, and he seems to be clear about the meaning of his own text – despite the fact that he is simultaneously undermining his own position as the author of the essay and is strongly suggesting that all texts, including his own, have multiple meanings.


Bibliography
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Barthes, R. (1968, 1977) The Death of the Author, in: Image - Music – Text, trans. S. Heath, Now York: Hill and Wang. See: deathoftheauthor.com for the text.
Freeland, C., 2001, Art Theory  A Very Short Introduction: Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 109

Paul Crichton
London, 6. February, 2015