Does Poststructuralism Have a Biography?

Conference: "The Renaissance of Roland Barthes, CUNY (2013)
Revised Draft
***

Does Poststructuralism have a Biography?
Rereading "The Death of the Author"

Does poststructuralism have a biography? In this paper I want to
suggest that it does. And I want to further suggest that it might be
possible to date the advent of this biography to Roland Barthes' most
famous essay "The Death of the Author" of 1967. I explicitly want to force
the suggestion of biography in this context, which means reading Barthes
apparently against himself. Note that Barthes' polemical attack on the
concept of the Author was also an attack on what he understood to be the
three pillars of literary humanism: "history, biography, psychology." A
certain reading of Barthes' later works could well yield the impression
that there was a turn towards the autobiographical and thus a turn in the
very direction of biography and psychology that he had so vehemently
denounced in the heady days of High Theory.
I will try to show through a reading of "The Death of the Author"
that this turn in a sense grows out of the biographical seeds buried deep
in the "The Death of the Author." I have chosen to focus on the closing
paragraphs. As we know, Barthes insists that the Author is a metaphysical
even "theological" myth—the self-willing, autotelic wordsmith who manifests
her intentions directly without remainder. Barthes will argue that this
"myth" incessantly dies into the reality that a text is a tissue of
"multiple, writings drawn from many cultures, and entering into mutual
relations of dialogue" (Barthes 1967, p. 148). Barthes declares that the
Author as conventionally understood falls to the floor in the face of the
fact that writing is never "authored" but is rather a matrix of citations—a
bricolage of recycled letters, words, and phrases.
But what is strange is that he then contends that "there is one place
where this multiplicity is focused, and that is the reader" (148). Barthes
appears to reconstruct a Subject all over again in the form of this
anonymous "reader." Barthes tries to save this paradox with rhetoric. He
calls the reader a "place" (later he will use the term "space"). The term
place here functions to rhetorically demarcate a non-personal placeholder
for this non-author and non-person called the reader. He writes:
The reader is a space on which all the quotations that make up a
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity
lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination
cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a
single field all the traces by which the text is constituted (148).

Barthes' impassioned effort here to grant the reader autonomy and
interpretive freedom is obscurely bound up in a description that is
weighted with the same metaphysical baggage as is the concept of the Author
he seeks to dismantle (or at least discredit). The problem is precisely
that a reader is always a "someone" and not just anyone – and it seems
manifestly obvious that a someone always has a history, a biography, and a
psychology. If not, then we are not talking about "someone" but about just
a "one" – an anonymous one called the "reader" or really more accurately
the Reader. His desire to depersonalize his account of the reader comes
close – if it doesn't already cross the line – into a metaphysics of the
Reader which, formally speaking, is barely distinguishable from the
metaphysics of the Author. Stanley Fish has drawn attention to this
paradox. In "Intention and Biography," Fish notes that it seems that with
"the advent of poststructuralism the self has been dissolved" and with it
"the notion of an intentional agent with a history and a biography" (Fish
1991, p.13). But, Fish continues,
in fact this is not at all the case, for...[even] if the individual
mind is merely the tablet on which the mind of Europe or the mind of
the pastoral or the mind of myth inscribes itself, then we have not done
away with intention and biography but merely relocated them. In
principle it does not matter whether the originating source is a
discrete human consciousness or the spirit of an age or a literary
tradition or a culture, or of language itself; to read something as the
product of any one of these "transcendental anonymities" [in Foucault's
words] is to endow that anonymity with an intention and a
biography (13).

This is precisely the paradox of the "The Death of the Author." Barthes'
urgency to hold open the space or place of the reader without foreclosing
it into the shape of yet another metaphysical subject catalyzes the essay's
polemical crescendo.
[I]t is derisory to condemn the new writing [and we should add the
new criticism] in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion
of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid attention to
the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are
now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant
antiphrastical recriminations of a good society in favor of the very
thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give
writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the Author (148).

Barthes' effort to maintain a critical image of the reader as a pure
space—as a mere placeholder—begins to breakdown with that "we" that twice
marks the above passage. Who is this "we" who are no longer going to be
fooled? If we are generous for the moment and grant that this signifier is
not a cover for Barthes himself, surely it is someone like him, someone who
is no longer going to be fooled by the myth of the Author. What is being
constructed in the open space of this "we" is a biography of sorts –what I
want to call a biography of poststructuralism. It is the life of this "we"
that has grown up to take the place of the reader, at least the academic
reader, for the last forty years or so.
We academic readers, I suspect, are all part of this "we" and we have
come to enact the phrase that we too will no longer be fooled in one way or
another. That is to say, we have come t – or at least many of our teachers
– have come to identify themselves with that "we" that appears in the
closing paragraph of "The Death of the Author." This 'we," we know has a
certain history that can be traced and whose movement can be traced as it
is for example in François Cusset's sociological study of the migration of
so-called French Theory from France to North America in the 1970s and 80s.
This "we" has then a biography whose "life-text" begins in the late sixties
French literary, critical, and philosophical milieus. And it has a
psychology in the sense that it has a kind of worldview about how things
stand, or should stand, with respect to questions of the type: What is an
author? What is a text? What is a language? But insofar as language is what
Wittgenstein calls a "form of life," then it is hard to imagine without
categories like history, biography, and psychology. But to return to the
"life-text" at issue, this "we", we might say, is granted by Barthes a kind
of agency, biography and even intention since it is figured as possessing
the power, the drive, and the intent to sack the citadel of Classic
criticism and liberate the reader from the theological thrall of the
Author.
What is one to make then of this paradox then that the death of the
author is haunted by the very thing it wants so desperately to dispel if
not destroy? Is biography inescapable as Fish argues? Poststructuralism has
its doubts.
Rosalind Krauss for one is prepared to stem what she sees as the
rising tide of "biographical scholarship" which she sees as having
"mutated" out of trauma studies. In her essay "Who Comes After the
Subject," she critiques trauma studies for smuggling the subject back in if
only in the form of a subject that testifies to a "shattering and
decentring" (Krauss 2007, p. 32) She lays into trauma scholars for using
terms that sound like those favored by deconstruction
(shattering/decentring) but are in fact, she thinks, proffered as cover for
the reconstruction of the critical respectability of biography from the
shattered and decentred remains of the traumatized. She is dismayed with
what she evidently sees as the return of the biographical after it had
seemed that with Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and co. that "post-
structuralism had consolidated its moves against the biographical,
empirical person of the author" (32).
Yet this dreaded return of the Author may be less the work of trauma
conspirators, than a critical boomerang-like trajectory which the "subject"
of auto/biography seems always to follow. Like the "whirligig" in Paul de
Man's essay "Autobiography as De-Facement," the desire to destroy the
Author always seems to spin us right back onto questions that remobilize it
if only negatively. We know that language defaces the writer in that it
effectively robs her of the uniqueness of her being by representing that
being in a system of signs that is shared and is antecedent to her
appearance on the scene of writing (she is defaced by it). But we also know
that the only reason this loss of face is interesting to us or is a problem
for "we" theorists is because language and life are linked in ways that
make it very difficult to disentangle by critical mantras alone like
pronouncing the Author dead by fiat. Indeed the only reason to make such a
pronouncement is because one thinks that it is meaningful for literary
studies, which is to say meaningful for readers or again people like
Barthes or "we" assembled here today. However we slice it questions of
history, biography, psychology, if not intentionality, seem to impinge on
our conception of text (big T or little). The problem of the Author doesn't
go away so much as it is displaced into more comfortable but still
transcendental structures. The poststructural critique of the author has
had the perhaps unfortunate effect, as Foucault aptly noted in "What is an
Author," of merely "transpos[ing] the empirical characteristics of the
author into a transcendental anonymity" (Foucault 1969, p. 120).
What then might be said is that far from dismissing the author,
poststructuralism has been in fact tied, and deeply so, to a particular
image of the author. That is, if there is an author at the heart of
poststructuralism—that figure around which the movement has mobilized its
critique—it may be an author of its own making. Seán Burke for one is
convinced that this author has either never existed or at least had long
since vanished until, that is, Barthes came along and revived it. Burke
points out that the so-called New Criticism had already vastly undermined
the Author. He writes,
it is not easy to see how the theologizing of the author can be
affirmed as a characteristic of twentieth-century literary-critical
discourse. Certainly it would be difficult to characterize Anglo-American
criticism in this fashion. For a tradition suffused with notions such as
the intentional fallacy, the unreliable narrator, the implied author
(Burke 1998, p. 25).
Burke concludes that when viewed from the perspective of mid-twentieth
century Anglo-American criticism, "Barthes' essay might well seem aimed at
a target that had long since retreated out of range" (25). The Author, as a
metaphysical specimen, may have already died early in the twentieth century
only to be revived and killed again in a move that authorized the
poststructural critique of the Author. The biography of this Author of
poststructuralism might then be a phantom or "function" (pace Foucault)
that catalyzed a critical scorched earth policy of sorts that aspired to
wipe clean the territory of writing from that opiate of the literary
establishment—what Barthes calls the "Author-God."
There is to be sure a kind of chauvinistic heroism that haunts the
tone of "The Death of the Author." Cheryl Walker draws attention to this
aspect of the text in her remarkable essay "Persona Criticism and the Death
of the Author." Walker sees Barthes' essay as falling prey to a masculine
metaphysics, operating albeit under the cover of the "neutral" heading of
"textuality." Walker sees both the way the Author is defined and sentenced
to death by Barthes as two sides of a patriarchal fantasy bent on
theoretical totalization. Walker writes:
One of the useful insights of feminist criticism is that much
totalizing theory is designed to obscure difference. In the past twenty
years, women have been resisting the tendency of many masculinist
theorists to assume that the male can speak for [all authors] without
finding out if what is claimed works equally well for both sexes (Walker
1991, p. 111).
Through her study of female writers (particularly of the nineteenth
century), Walker has come to see authorship as not simply a theological
sham, but as a strategy by which female writers re-imagined their
identities and their social belonging. Walker asks that we consider what
she calls "persona criticism" as a third way between hard-line textualism
and the old biographical criticism. Walker sees authorial discourse as
having the capacity to construct literary personae that re-figures a
writer's personal and public image. Writers, Walker argues, have long
recognized that the Author, like a mask, is constructed and precisely
because of this it affords the possibility of re-constructing one's own
(literary) self. But she does not from this position cry out for a return
to biographical criticism in the traditional sense. She writes:
I prefer a critical practice that both expands and limits the role of
the author, in my case by finding in the text an author-persona but
relating this functionary to psychological, historical, and literary
intersections quite beyond the scope of any scriptor's intentions either
conscious or unconscious (114).
I would contend (following Walker) that the "we" that appears in the
closing lines of "The Death of the Author" is an example of an author-
persona. It is not a "we" that can be reduced to a simple codeword for
Barthes. It is a literary, psychological, and historical persona that
signifies the "we" that makes up poststructuralist criticism. Barthes could
not have foreseen the full effect that his little essay would have. He may
have hoped, but could never have known, how central it would be to the
establishment of the poststructuralist critical cannon. The "we" of "The
Death of the Author" was a latent persona that only emerged in the
aftermath of a literary-critical history that was quite beyond Barthes'
intentional scope at the time he penned those impassioned lines.
The question remains: what did "The Death of the Author" accomplish?
It is a polemic, a manifesto, a charter of sorts, which destroyed and at
the same time gave birth to the Author-God in a move both critical and
literary. For we know that criticism for Barthes was firstly "literary"
criticism before anything else. It was an aspirational gesture that sought
to find our found for criticism a transcendence over the seemingly servile
domain of second-order commentary. It announced the birth of a new
generation of critics: it authorized a generational attitude. In its own
way it authored what might be called the biography of poststructuralism.
References
Barthes, R 1977 (1967) "The Death of the Author" in Image, Music, Text,
trans. Stephen Heath. Farrah, Strauss, and Giroux, New York.
Burke, S 1998 The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh.
Fish, S 1991 "Intention and Biography" in Contesting the Subject: Essays in
the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism,
ed W Epstein, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette.
Foucault M 1980 (1969) "What is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Krauss, R 2007 "Who Comes After the Subject?" in The Life and the Work: Art
and Biography, ed C Salas, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Walker, C 1991 "Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author" in
Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Practice of Biography and
Biographical Criticism, ed. W Epstein, Purdue University Press, West
Lafayette.