The text is reproduced according to the edition: Kosikov G.K. Roland Barthes - semiologist, literary critic // Bart R. Selected Works. Semiotics. Poetics. / Compilation, total. ed., enter. article by G.K. Kosikov. - M.: Progress, 1989. S. 3–45.

© G.K. Kosikov, 1989, 1994
© OCR: G.K. Kosikov, 2002

R. Barthes - along with Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault - is considered one of the largest representatives of modern French structuralism, and such a reputation is fair, if only structuralism is understood broadly enough. That is why it should be borne in mind that in addition to the "structuralist" stage, oriented towards the corresponding direction in linguistics (60s), in Barth's work there was not only a long and fruitful "pre-structuralist" (50s), but and the brilliant "post-structuralist" (70s) period. It should also be remembered that the vicissitudes of Barth's thirty-year "semiological adventure" in some way turned out to be external to him: through all these vicissitudes, Bart managed to carry several fundamental ideas, which he only deepened, varied and persistently played out in the key of one or another " isms". What are these ideas? In answering this question, let us first trace the main milestones of Barth's scientific biography.

Barthes was born November 12, 1915 in Cherbourg; a few years after the death of his father, a naval officer, in the war, he moved with his mother to Paris, where he received a classical liberal arts education - first at the lyceums of Montaigne and Louis the Great, and then at the Sorbonne. In his youth, two characteristic features of Bart's spiritual appearance were determined - left-wing political views (in his lyceum years, Bart was one of the founders of the Republican Anti-Fascist Defense group) and interest in the theater (at the Sorbonne, he actively participated in the student "Antique Theater").

The proposed teaching career was interrupted by illness - a tuberculous process in the lungs, discovered in the early 30s. Declared unfit for military service, Bart spent six years - from 1941 to 1947 - in various sanatoriums. It was at this time that the process of his active intellectual formation took place - a process during which Marxism, on the one hand, and French existentialism (Sartre, Camus), which was gaining strength, on the other, had a significant influence on him.

In 1948-1950. Barth taught abroad - in Bucharest and Alexandria, where he met the 33-year-old linguist A.-Zh. Greimas, who was probably one of the first to draw Barth's attention to the methodological possibilities of linguistics as a humanities.

However, having an interest in linguistic theory, Barthes still chooses a career as a literary publicist: in 1947-1950, with the support of the well-known critic Maurice Nadeau, he publishes a series of literary and methodological articles in the Combat newspaper, where he tries, in his own words, to , "to Marxize existentialism" in order to identify and describe the third (along with "language" as a universally binding norm and the individual "style" of the writer) "dimension" of the artistic form - "writing" (note that it was thanks to Barthes that this expression acquired in the modern French literary criticism status of the term). An essay compiled from these articles and published as a separate edition in 1953, Barthes called it: "Zero degree of writing" 1. Then followed the book "Michelet" (1954) - a kind of substantial psychoanalysis of the texts of the famous French historian, comparable by research principles with works by Gaston Bachelard.

Fluctuating between linguistics (in 1952, Barth received a scholarship to write a dissertation on "social lexicology") and literature, Barth, nevertheless, until the end of the 50s. acts mainly as a journalist who sympathizes with Marxism and analyzes current literary production from these positions) - "new novel", "theater of the absurd", etc., and dramaturgy and the stage attract Bart's special attention: he publishes a lot in the magazine "People's Theater", supports the creative program of Jean Vilard, and since 1954, after the Paris tour of the "Berliner Ensemble", becomes an active propagandist of the stage theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht, whose ideas would influence him throughout his life: the meaning of Brecht - Barthes wrote seventeen years later - consists in combining "Marxist reason with semantic thought"; therefore Brecht "continues to be relevant to me to this day. He was a Marxist who thought about the effects of the sign: a rare case" 2.

Indeed, it is not the academic problematics of semiology itself that should be considered the real impetus that caused Barth's decisive turn to semiology, but Brecht's technique of "alienation": it was this technique that exposed, "revealed" the semiotic codes underlying human social behavior, and prompted Barth to turn to to the problem of the sign and its functioning in culture, and only then with the need to become interested in the analytical apparatus of modern semiology: Barthes' acquaintance with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics dates back to the summer of 1955.

So, Brechtian social analysis, passed through the prism of Saussure's semiology, is the task that Barthes sets himself in the mid-1950s, at the moment when he finally realized that any cultural phenomena - from ordinary ideological thinking to art and philosophy - are inevitably fixed in signs, they are sign mechanisms, whose implicit purpose and work can and should be explicated and rationally explained. Barthes takes a corresponding step: in the same year, 1955, at the request of the historian Lucien Fevre and the sociologist Georges Friedman, he enters the National Center for Scientific Research, where he takes up work on the "psychosociology of clothing." This is a large study, the idea of ​​which was constantly enriched in the course of Barth's acquaintance with the works of P. G. Bogatyrev, N. S. Trubetskoy, R. O. Jacobson, L. Elmslev, E. Benveniste, A. Martinet, Kl. Lévi-Strauss et al., eventually turned into a book on the "sociosemiotics of fashion", completed in 1964 and published in 1967 under the title "Mode System"; this is one of the pinnacles of the "structural-semiotic" period in Barth's work.

In the meantime, in 1954-1957, Barthes continues to work energetically in the literary critical field and seeks to apply his semiotic knowledge to literary material, in addition, he directly addresses the analysis of the sign functioning of everyday social life; this is how "Mythologies" (1957) are born - a series of exposing sketches of the mystified consciousness of the "average Frenchman", equipped with a theoretical and semiological afterword "Myth Today". Surgically accurate, mercilessly caustic "mythologies" brought Bart - in the broad environment of the humanitarian intelligentsia - the glory of a brilliant "ethnographer of modern petty-bourgeois France"; the work "Myth Today", where the author, who has not yet fully mastered the terminological apparatus of modern semiology, nevertheless deeply revealed the connotative mechanisms of ideological myths, attracted attention to him in linguo-semiological circles.

Along with the "Zero degree of writing", "Mythologies" can be considered in Barth's scientific biography as an exemplary work of the "pre-structuralist" period - precisely pre-structuralist, because the ideological sign is considered in the "Mythologies" only in its "vertical" dimension (the relationship between connoting and connoting members ), that is, outside of any paradigmatic or syntagmatic connections: it is a sign outside the system.

Barth's transition (at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s) to structuralism is not least associated with overcoming this methodological weakness. First, an in-depth reading of Saussure, Trubetskoy, Hjelmslev, Levi-Strauss, and others allowed Barthes to understand the significance of the paradigmatic principle for the analysis of sign systems; secondly, acquaintance with the works of V. Ya. Propp and representatives of the Russian formal school contributed to the emergence of "syntagmatic thinking" in him. Barth's turn to conscious structuralism is vividly marked by two of his program articles: "The Imagination of a Sign" (1962) and "Structuralism as Activity" (1963).

In the early 60s. Barth's professional position is changing (and strengthening): in 1960 he became one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Mass Communications 3, since 1962 he has led the seminar "Sociology of Signs, Symbols and Images" at the Practical School of Higher Knowledge.

In addition to a large number of articles 4 published by Barth in the 60s, the structuralist period of his "semiological career" was marked by the appearance (along with the book "The System of Fashion") of a large essay - "Fundamentals of Semiology" (1965) 5, where the intention Barthes, who was implicitly present already in the Mythologies, is to give a new status to semiology as a science by including in it the whole variety of connotative semiotics. This "semiology of meaning", which demanded the study of not only signs-signals, but also signs-signs (in the terminology of L. Prieto) and thereby openly opposed itself to the functionalist "semiology of communication" 6, produced, according to A.-J. Greimas 7, the impression of a real shock and caused a heated controversy. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of Barth's approach, which unlocked entire areas of culture for semiology that were previously inaccessible to it, turned out to be so obvious that Barth's semiological studies immediately received citizenship rights and gave rise to a number of interesting developments in the same direction. Defending the principle that semiology should be a "science of meanings" - of any meanings (and not just denotative ones, intentionally created for the purposes of communication), Barthes emphasized that a person, in the process of socio-ideological activity, endows the entire objective world with such meanings and that, consequently, semiology must become the science of society insofar as it is concerned with the practice of signification, in other words, the science of ideologies.

Such a position, sharply at odds with the principles of linguistic academism, 9 had an ideological basis. Setting - throughout his life - as his goal a total criticism of bourgeois ideology, bourgeois culture (and culture, as you know, does not exist outside the symbolic, linguistic embodiment), Barthes saw two possible ways to fight the dominant ideological languages. The first is those that have become widespread already in the 50s. attempts to create "counter-languages" and "counter-cultures". However, it has long since become clear that such "anti-languages" relate to the languages ​​they deny only as a negative to a positive, that is, in fact, they do not reject them at all, but assert from the contrary. Barthes, on the other hand, clearly realizing the illusory nature of the creation of "antisemiology", turned to semiology itself - but turned not for the sake of its "internal" problems, but then to use its possibilities for the destruction of the dominant ideological languages, carriers of "false consciousness". With this approach, "destruction" is not to anathematize such languages, but to turn them inside out, to show how they are "made". Barthes literally suffered through the Marxist idea that the struggle against false consciousness is possible only on the paths of its "explanation", since to "explain" a phenomenon means precisely to "remove" it, to take away the power of ideological influence. "Unscrew in order to debunk" - this could be Barthes' slogan, to reveal (by mobilizing all the analytical tools of modern semiology for this) the "sociological"10 mechanisms of modern types of ideological "writing", to show their historical determinism and thereby discredit - such is his "super task" in the 60s.

This impressive attempt to turn semiology from a descriptive science into a "critical" science explains, among other things, the authority that Barthes acquired among the liberal and left intelligentsia, in particular, his direct influence on the theory and literary practice of the left intellectual and artistic avant-garde at the head of with the group "Tel Kel" (Philip Sollers, Julia Kristeva and others).

First of all, Barthes used the provisions of connotative semiotics to analyze the literary "form", which (this was shown back in "Degree Zero") should be understood as one of the types of social "writing", saturated with cultural values ​​and intentions, as if in addition to author's content, which it "expresses", and therefore has its own power of semantic impact. Disclosing - by means of semiology - the socio-cultural "responsibility of form" - Barthes's serious contribution to theoretical literary criticism, especially in the conditions of domination in France in the 50s and 60s. positivist literary-critical methodology.

Overcoming the positivist horizons in literary criticism is Barth's second most important task in the period under review. In the book "On Racine" (1963), written in 1959-1960, Barthes opposed the reductionist methodology of positivism, which reduces the "work-product" to the "cause" that gave rise to it, the idea of ​​a "work-sign", moreover, of such a sign that presupposes not supposedly uniquely objective, "timeless" decoding on the part of the decoder, but an infinite number of historically variable readings on the part of the interpreter. Giving one of the possible readings of Racine, Barthes at the same time methodologically legitimized the existence of all those trends in post-war French literary criticism (existentialism, thematic, sociological criticism, structural poetics, etc.), which, based on the data of modern humanities, opposed the mechanical " causality" and the empiricism of positivist literary-critical studies (journalists, with their penchant for labeling, have united all these areas under the name "new criticism", which has become common). Like the "Fundamentals of Semiology", which stirred up the linguistic environment, the collection "On Racine" generated a real storm in the literary criticism environment, causing, in particular, fierce attacks from the positivist "university criticism" (R. Picard and others). Barthes responded with the polemical essay "Criticism and Truth" (1966), which became a kind of manifesto and banner for all "new criticism"; Roland Barthes was henceforth recognized as its inspirer and head.

Attention should be paid to the well-known duality of Barth's methodological principles in the 1960s. On the one hand, by his own admission, this period passed under the clear sign of a "dream (euphoric) about scientificity" 11, which, Barthes believed, was the only thing capable of putting an end to "elegant chatter" about literature - chatter, commonly called "literary criticism." At the same time, "the art of science", belief in its effectiveness never developed in Bart into naive scientism various taxonomies, etc., does not forget for a moment that this is still a game - albeit a serious one). The reason lies in the sober understanding that the humanities, with all their growing power, are in principle incapable of exhausting the abyss of culture: "... I am trying," Barthes said in 1967, to try out each of them, but I do not strive to complete them with a purely scientific clause, since literary science in no case and in no way can have the last word on literature "12. to him no less than flat scientistic rationalism. Bart chooses a completely different path, which by the beginning of the 70s. will open the third - perhaps the most original - "post-structuralist" period in his work.

Barthes was inwardly prepared for a long time to embark on this path: the stimulus was the problems of the most connotative semiology; The impetus was the work of J. Lacan and M. Foucault, acquaintance with the dialogical concept of M. M. Bakhtin13, the influence of the Italian literary critic and linguist Umberto Eco, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as well as the student of Barthes himself, Y. Kristeva14.

Two theses aimed at overcoming scientistic structuralism define the methodological face of Barthes in the 1970s. First, if structuralism considers its object as a finished product, as something cash-reified, immovable and subject to taxonomic description and modeling, then Barth's post-structuralism, on the contrary, involves shifting attention from the "semiology of structure" to the "semiology of structuring", from the analysis of static "sign" and its solid "meaning" on the analysis of the dynamic process of "meaning" and penetration into the boiling magma of "meanings" or even "pre-meanings", in short, the transition from "pheno-text" to "geno-text". Secondly, in contrast to scientism, which establishes a rigid distance between the metalanguage and the language-object, convinced that the metalanguage should be constructed, as it were, "above" culture, in some ahistorical space of objective absolute truth, Barthes insisted that the metalanguage of the humanities, itself being a product of culture, history, in principle, cannot overcome their attraction, moreover, it strives not only to move away from the language-object, but also to merge with it (see, in particular, the article "From Science to Literature", 1967). We emphasize once again: Barthes does not renounce science, but only soberly assesses its possibilities, as well as the threat lurking in it: "Scientific metalanguage is a form of alienation of language; it, therefore, needs to be overcome (which by no means means: in destruction) " fifteen.

Barthes' post-structuralist attitudes were most fully embodied in his exemplary book "S/Z" (1970), devoted to the analysis of Balzac's story "Sarrasin", where Barthes takes a radical step away from the notion of "many meanings" that can be read in the work depending on attitudes of the perceiver ("History or Literature?", "Criticism and Truth"), to the idea of ​​"multiple meanings" that forms the level of the work, which Barthes called the level of the Text. The methodological principles demonstrated in the book "S/Z" found expression in other works of Barth, in particular, in the articles "Where to start?" (1970) and "A Textual Analysis of a Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe" (1973).

In line with the problems of "production of meanings", "textual writing", "intertextuality" is also a vivid essay by Barthes "Pleasure from the text" (1973), which raises the question of the reader's perception of literature. The book "Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes" (1975), which followed soon after, is a well-thought-out mosaic of the main ideas and motifs scattered in numerous works of the author of the 50-70s.

The prestige and popularity of Barthes in the last decade of his life were extremely high - so high that in 1977 in the oldest educational institution in France, the College de France, a department of literary semiology was opened especially for Barthes. The "lecture" given by Barth upon taking office and published as a separate edition in 1978 sounded not only as a kind of summary of his thirty years of scientific activity, but also as a program indicating possible ways of developing modern semiology; Bart himself, however, did not have time to complete this program. His life was cut short suddenly and absurdly: on February 25, 1980, near the College de France, Barth was the victim of a road accident and a month later, on March 27, he died in the intensive care unit of the Pitier-Salpêtrière hospital. His death was perceived as the departure of one of the outstanding French humanists of the 20th century.

What are the main problems of Barth's "connotative semiology"? First of all, it is a problem of language.

Classical linguistics (from Saussure to modern French functionalists) tends to understand language as a "constant structure accessible to all members of society" 16. This view is based on the following postulates: 1) the signifier and the signified in the language are in relation to strict mutual predetermination; 2) as a result, linguistic signs are amenable to the same interpretation by all members of a given linguistic community, which ensures their "linguistic identity" due to the fact that 3) these signs themselves appear as a nomenclature of linguistic "means" suitable for expressing any thoughts, equally obediently and indifferently serving all groups and strata of society.

In a certain sense, all this is true: we really use the same national language (for example, Russian) as a neutral tool that allows us to convey the most diverse types of content.

However, it is worth taking a closer look at real speech practice - and the picture will become much more complicated, because each of us is by no means the first and far from the last to use words, phrases, syntactic constructions, even whole phrases and "genres of discourse" stored in the "language system" , which resembles not so much a "treasury" intended for our individual use, as a rental point: long before us, all these units and discursive complexes went through many uses, through many hands that left indelible marks, dents, cracks, stains, smells on them . These traces are nothing but the imprints of those semantic contexts in which the "nationwide word" visited before it came into our possession.

This means that, along with the more or less solid objective meaning that it possesses, every word is saturated with a multitude of fluid, changeable ideological meanings that it acquires in the context of its use. The real task of the speaker-writer is not at all to recognize and then correctly use this or that language unit (once learned, these units are used by us completely automatically in the future), but to discern the filling meanings and decide on the relation to them: we more or less passively realize the obligatory norms laid down in the language, but on the other hand we actively and intensely orientate ourselves among the social meanings with which its signs are populated.

The presence of such - infinitely diverse - meanings just determines the stratification of a single national language into a multitude of so-called "sociolects". The pioneering role in the very formulation of the question of sociolects and in the study of them belongs, as is well known, to M. M. Bakhtin,17 who used the expression "social-ideological language." The approach of the early Barthes (the period of "Zero degree of writing" and "Mythologies") to linguistic phenomena is generally comparable to the ideas of Bakhtin, although, of course, there can be no talk of a direct influence.

Denoting a sociolect by the term "type of writing", Barthes analyzed it as a way of symbolic consolidation of sociocultural ideas. According to Barthes, "writing" is an ideological net, objectified in language, which this or that group, class, social institution, etc., places between the individual and reality, forcing him to think in certain categories, to notice and evaluate only those aspects of reality, which this grid recognizes as significant. All products of socio-linguistic practice, all sociolects developed by generations, classes, parties, literary movements, press organs, etc. during the existence of society, can be imagined as a huge warehouse of various types of "writing", from which the individual is forced to borrow his " language", and with it the whole system of value-semantic attitude to reality.

Bart differs from Bakhtin in two ways. First, if Bakhtin was primarily interested in the "dialogical" relationships between "social languages" as such, while he considered the individual only as an "embodied representative" of these languages, 18 Barthes emphasized the relationship between "writing" and the individual , and the alienating power of the socialized word is emphasized: in the seemingly innocent phenomenon of "writing" Barthes was able to discern a social mechanism, an institution that has the same coercive power as any other social institution. To overcome this force, it is necessary to understand the inner structure of the suppressive mechanism. Secondly, for this Barthes turned to the analytical means of modern semiotics, primarily to the connotative semiology of L. Hjelmslev, which contained the theoretical foundations for the practical "unscrewing" of the "writing" mechanism.

Elmslev defined connotative semiotics as such a semiotics, the plane of expression of which is itself semiotics 19. For example, the words that form a text written in Russian include the plane of expression (signifiers) and the plane of content (meanings), the combination of which leads to the appearance of a sign. The totality of the signs of a given system forms one or another type of semiotics; the objective meanings of such signs are called denotative or primary.

Let us dwell here on two methodological problems.

The first, posed by the French functionalists (L. Prieto, J. Mounin), boils down to the question: can Barth's "connotative semiology" be considered a semiology at all?

For functionalists, as you know, the main function of language is communicative. Communication is determined by the conscious intention of the addresser to tell something to the addressee and the equally conscious readiness of the latter to perceive this message, carried out with the help of signs-"signals", which are usually distinguished from signs-"indexes" 27: an index (for example, smoke, by which one can conclude about the beginning fire) is devoid of the communicative intention required for the signal. Both the signal and the index equally have a meaning, however, if the signal requires "decoding" that is unambiguous for everyone who owns a given language code, then the index, on the contrary, lends itself only to one or another "interpretation" associated with intuition, cultural outlook, etc. The concept of the perceiver, in other words, does not satisfy the classical semiotic postulate about the mutual predetermination of the signifier and the signified.

It is clear that most of Barth's connotative signs refer to index signs (the turkey with chestnuts on the Christmas table is shrouded in a whole cloud of connotative signifieds (bourgeois "standing", "smug conformity"), which, nevertheless, are not at all intended for open purposes. communication and therefore do not perform the most important (from the point of view of functionalism) linguistic function.Hence - the general conclusion made by J. Moonen: sign systems that perform tasks other than communicative should be excluded from the realm of genuine semiology; Barth's semiology is "incorrect" according to its very essence 28.

Meanwhile, in fact, Barthes's appeal to the latent signifieds of connotative systems was not an attempt to unjustly or prematurely expand the limits of semiology, but an attempt to qualitatively reorient it - to move from the study of sign systems that are directly recognized and consciously used by people, to sign systems that people are not aware of, although they are used, moreover, in many cases they are controlled. Such a transition to a semiotic study of the social unconscious is the most characteristic feature of modern structuralism.

Philosophers and scientists of modern times have known about the existence of the unconscious for a long time, at least since the time of Hegel. But it was in the 20th century Structuralism has made special efforts to show that the unconscious, being an area of ​​spontaneous, "irrational" experience, nevertheless represents a system of regular dependencies, obeys certain rules, in other words, is quite amenable to rational analysis. At the same time, it was discovered that the unconscious as a whole is structurally ordered in accordance with the same laws that govern natural languages ​​- the reason why it was natural language that became in the 20th century. a privileged field of methodological research and a model for other humanities - such as anthropology (Levi-Strauss), cultural studies (Foucault), psychology (Lacan). In the 60s. Structural linguistics for some time also became a model for Barth's semiology, but not a model in the sense that this semiology had to turn into an appendage of linguistics, that is, to describe, according to the recipes of functionalists and in addition to natural language, a certain number of non-linguistic (semiotically poor , but meeting the communicative criterion) codes, like the code of road signs, but in creating structural models of any type of "social practice" insofar as they are sign systems.

Barthes assigns a privileged role to language because, largely following E. Benveniste 29, he sees in it an "interpretant" of all other sign systems, from which it follows that semiology should become part of linguistics ("semiological inclusion", according to Benveniste): "although At first, semiology deals with non-linguistic material; sooner or later, it comes up against "genuine language" 30.

And at the same time: “this is not at all the language that serves as an object of study for linguists: it is a secondary language, the units of which are no longer monemes and phonemes, but larger language formations that refer to objects and episodes that begin to mean, as it were, under the language but never apart from it" 31, which means that semiology will have to dissolve into a discipline whose contours in the early 60s only yet were outlined - in "translinguistics".

In the "structuralist" period, society is depicted by Barthes as an organism that constantly secretes signs and structures reality with their help, while social practice, respectively, is a secondary system in relation to natural language, modeled after it and in turn modeling it. Barthes, in essence, seeks to create a semiotic hypostasis of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literary criticism, etc.

This is where the second problem is rooted - the problem of Barth's "betrayal" of orthodox structuralism, which can be understood if we return to Hjelmslev again and compare his teaching on metalanguage with Barth's views on the same problem.

To connotative semiotics, the plane of expression of which is represented by the plane of expression and the plane of content of denotative semiotics, Hjelmslev contrasted metasemiotics, in which semiotics is the plane of content. In other words, metasemiotics is a semiotics that "interprets" another semiotics; such, for example, is a scientific metalanguage that describes some kind of sign system, which in this case acts as a language-object.

In this regard, Hjelmslev's position, uncompromisingly opposing language-object (as a subject of analysis) to metalanguage (as a means of analysis), is a typical example of scientistic thinking, the main task of which is to turn the entire society, the entire human history, the whole world into material for the detached scientific dissection, while at the same time looking at man and mankind "from the point of view of eternity"; This extra-spatial and timeless point of view should be embodied in an absolute meta-language, a receptacle of "ultimate truth", elevating the scientist above the object of study: placing the mythologist outside of any mythology, the sociologist - outside of social relations, the historian - outside of history. Such a metalanguage (as we know, positivism and then neopositivism claimed its role in the 19th century) seeks to explain reality as best as possible, believing that it does not need any explanations.

Having succumbed for some time to this - indeed attractive to the analyst - scientist illusion, Barthes nevertheless managed to overcome it, as it were, from within scientism itself.

First of all, already from the beginning of the 60s, he emphasized that any language is capable of remaining a metalanguage of description only until it itself becomes an object language for another metalanguage; it was this fate that befell positivism, which in our century has become not only the object of controversy, but, most importantly, the subject of historical and cultural explanation and research. Replacing each other in history, metalanguages ​​are able to build on each other ad infinitum, for they are exactly the same products of culture as any other social phenomena; no scientist should imagine that he speaks in the name of substantial truth, for "every science, including, of course, semiology, bears its own death in the bud in the form of a language that will make it its object" 32.

At the same time, starting from the Mythologies, one can trace another logic of the fight against the scientistic illusion - the logic of displacement, the mixing of metalanguage and language-object, when, for example, having defined myth as a secondary (in relation to natural language) language, Barthes immediately calls its "metalanguage" and claims that it is such a "secondary language in which one speaks of the first" 33. He thereby deliberately identifies connotative semiotics, which is discourse in discourse, with metasemiotics, which is discourse about discourse. In fact, there is nothing unnatural in this paradoxical, from the point of view of glossematics, "connotative metalanguage", if only we assume that any language-object itself can play the role of a metalanguage and vice versa, if, therefore, we reject structuralist thinking in the categories of rigid "oppositions". " 34 and accept the thesis about the possibility of role reversibility of opposite "entities". Even the "subjectless" language of mathematics, which claims to be purely denotative and historically "a-topic", in fact presupposes a very definite - connotatively encrypted - subjective position: the very belief in the dispassionate objectivity and limitless possibilities of science, which is the "presupposition" of the scientistic ideology. In the same way, the language of the "mythologist" who "unscrews" myths is generated by a certain semantic topos - hostility and rejection of mythological consciousness as such, which by no means puts the researcher "above" the historical process, but, on the contrary, actively includes 35 in it.

There are no "purely" denotative languages, just as there are no "only" connotative languages; any language is a combination of the spoken and the implied, denotative and connotative levels, and the implied can, under certain conditions, be explicated, and the explicit can go into a connotative "subtext". Such is the dynamic reality of semiotic systems, although classical (static, taxonomic) structuralism (always dealing with reality that has already become, and not becoming) does not have the keys to this reality.

Barthes realized that if semiology really wants to become a "critical" science, it must first of all turn into a "critical", self-reflective discipline, must be aware of its own, not formulated, but silently implied premises, in order to overcome them, to find for itself not only a new object of study (connotative semiotics), but also to single out in this object a special subject that requires special analytical methods (such a subject will be "text" for Barthes), it must go beyond such categories of classical semiotics as "communication", "message ", etc., and shift attention from the finished "sign" to the process of its "generation", in other words, turn from the usual "semiology" into "semanalysis" (to use the term Yu. Kristeva), into "text analysis" ( according to Barth's terminology).

Now, in the light of all that has been said, we can proceed to consider Barth's literary concept, to trace the movement of his literary-theoretical views from "pre-structuralism" to "post-structuralism".

Barthes, in essence, was always interested in the only, but cardinal question: "What is literature?", and although, giving the answer, Barthes placed emphasis in different periods of his activity, the continuity of the problems is not difficult to trace.

In the 50s - the first half of the 60s. Barthes is mainly occupied with the problem of opposition between the author and the language given to him. Indeed, if we abandon the illusion that language is reduced only to its instrumental function, then serious questions will arise that every writer, who responsibly treats his own word, who knows what the “fear of writing” is, which is born from the realization of the hopelessness of an attempt, faces in practice. "to express the inexpressible" - to embody in a word the fullness and originality of one's experiences, thoughts, etc.: everyone who writes knows for himself how true Tyutchev's aphorism is ("Thought
spoken is a lie"), which tempted so many "to give up everything and never write again".

Indeed, it is immeasurably easier to express genuine sympathy to a friend who has lost a loved one, with the help of a lively gesture, look, intonation, than to do the same thing by writing him a "letter of condolence": having tried to verbally embody the most sincere, most spontaneous emotion, we are horrified let us make sure that completely conditional, “literary” phrases come out of our pen, but having tried to abandon literary eloquence, going through all possible variants of verbal expression for this, we will probably eventually come to the conclusion that our feeling is most adequate can be conveyed with the help of a single word that corresponds to it: "Condolences"; the only trouble is that such lapidarity will still not save us from "literature", because it will undoubtedly be perceived as one of the conditional "masks" - the mask of "cold politeness", worthy only of the style of an official telegram, and the "telegraphic style", as It is known that this is also a kind of "literature".

In any case, it turns out that, using language, we are doomed, as it were, to “act out” our own emotions on the language stage: in a certain sense, one can say that we do not use language, but language uses us, subordinating us to some mysterious, but powerful scenario. The “secret”, however, has long been revealed and lies in the fact that no immediacy through language is possible in principle because, by its very nature, language always plays a mediating role: it is generally incapable of “expressing” anything whatsoever (“expressing "pain or joy can only be an instinctive cry or, at worst, an interjection), he is only able to name, name. The specificity of the language nomination is that any individual object (thing, thought, emotion) is subsumed under general categories, and the latter are generally unable to capture and hold the "intimate", "unique", etc. Being named, any reality turns into a sign of this reality, into a conditional label under which all phenomena of this kind fit: the nomination does not "express", but, as it were, "depicts" its subject. Language, therefore, performs a dual function: on the one hand, among all semiotic systems, it is the most developed means of communication, contact with the "other"; only language gives the individual a full-fledged opportunity to objectify his subjectivity and inform his communication partners about it; on the other hand, language precedes the individual, lies before him; before and independently of the individual, he already organizes and classifies reality in a certain way and offers us ready-made forms into which all subjectivity is inevitably molded. Paradoxically, unable to endure loneliness and deciding to entrust our, perhaps, the most intimate "thoughts and feelings" to "others", we thereby give ourselves into the power of a system of linguistic "common places", "topoi" - starting with microtopoi of a phonetic or lexical order and ending with the so-called "discourse types". We become voluntary captives of these topoi, which in the literal sense of the word make every hope of a personality to break through to “one’s own” emotion, to “one’s own” subject, to “one’s own” expression 36 (“...expressiveness - this is a myth; in fact, expressiveness is just a conventional image of expressiveness").

The matter becomes even more complicated if we consider language not only in its denotative, but also in its connotative dimension, to which literature belongs. Every person deals with an already "specified" word,38 but the writer is forced to resort to such a word, the "speciality" of which is, as it were, legalized and codified by the social institution that is "literature": over the system of linguistic topoi, literature builds on the system of its own topics. - style, plot, composition, genre, etc.; it itself is nothing but a historically mobile collection of "common places" from which, like bricks, the writer is compelled to put together the building of his work. Of course, these "common places" are capable of filiations and transformations, are capable of entering into various contacts with each other, forming often unpredictable configurations, and yet any of these configurations, even the most original, first found by this author, is not only an individualized a set of ready-made elements, but also, most importantly, immediately turns into a kind of literary custom, striving to subjugate even its creator (not to mention his "followers" and "imitators") 39.

Precisely because "topoi" and "ususes" are given to the writer and, moreover, burdened with a multitude of "foreign" socio-historical meanings, Barthes - at first glance, in a paradoxical way - calls literature "the language of others" - a language from which the writer is not forces neither to hide nor to evade, for he voluntarily chose it as a means of "self-expression". Being the "language of others", literature simultaneously turns out to be both a point of intersection of various types of social "writing" and one of its types. Just as in everyday communication an individual only “depicts” his subjectivity on the language stage, so the writer is doomed to “act out” his worldview on the literary stage in scenery, costumes, plots and roles offered to him by a social institution called “literary letter." This “letter”, addressed to the writer by its alienating side, Barthes called the “enemy language”: “The enemy language is a language overloaded, cluttered with signs, worn out in many common stories, “through and through predictable”; it is a dead language, a dead letter sorted out once and for all, it is that excess of language that expels the narrator from his own "I" ...; in short, this hostile language is Literature itself, not only as a social institution, but also as a kind of internal coercion, like that one beforehand a given rhythm, to which in the end all the "stories" that happen to us obey, for to experience something ... means to immediately find a ready-made name for your own feeling" 40.

The problem for Barthes is to find a position that, far from forcing the writer to break with linguistic activity, with literature, that is, without dooming him to "silence", would nevertheless allow him to escape from the yoke of the "massifying" word.

In the early 1950s, dreaming of a "perfect Adamic world where language would be free from alienation," Barthes saw only a utopian way out of the situation, embodied in the dream of a "homogeneous" society in which the complete destruction of social barriers would lead to the destruction of the the concept of "writing", to a radical "universalization of language", when words will regain their original "freshness" and "finally become happy" 41.

Ten years later, Bart sees things differently; from now on, he sees the task not in constructing an unrealizable "linguistic utopia", but in real "mastery" of the language "here and now": language cannot be changed in its essence, nor destroyed, just as literature cannot be changed or destroyed ( the experience of the surrealists showed that, expelled through the door, literature always appears through the window); the only way of liberation is to "deceive", "outflank" the enemy language, namely, to voluntarily submit to its norms and rules, in order to put them at one's service all the more faithfully.

How to do it? It is necessary to show conscious, intentional "literariness" (a term borrowed by Barthes from the Russian formal school), that is, to fully get used to all the roles offered by literature, without exception, to fully master all its technique, all its possibilities (stylistic, genre, compositional etc.), in order to “play with literature” completely freely, in other words, to vary and combine any literary “topoi” and “uzus” in any way.

The measure of originality (one of the key concepts of Barth in the early 60s) of a writer is a measure of the freedom of such variation, "... originality lies at the very foundation of literature; only by obeying its laws, I gain the opportunity to communicate exactly what I intend to communicate; if in literature, as in everyday communication, I strive for the least "falseness", then I must become the most original, or, if you like, the least "immediate" 42.

Thus, "literariness", on the one hand, is opposed by Bart to "literature" as a way of overcoming literature from within, by its own means, and on the other hand, to the romantic myth of the "spontaneity" of the 43 creative act, as a result of which the work is allegedly created apart from any " technique," by the power of the creative "genius" alone; meanwhile, according to Barthes, in practice one can either be "immediate", but at the same time forget about "literature" forever, or be a "writer", and in this case say goodbye to any dream of "spontaneity": the expression "technique of immediacy" is a contradiction in terms, because there can only be a technique for varying literary means, codes, topoi, given to the writer by literature. "Variation" is the only means that allows the author to fight his true enemy - banality, because "banality" is nothing but the desire of a literary institution to subordinate the writer to its clichés. This remedy, Barthes recalls, was known in antiquity; his name is rhetoric, which in the Greco-Roman world was the most important discipline, just teaching how "to prevent literature from becoming either a sign of banality (if it turns out to be too straightforward) or a sign of originality (if it turns out to be too indirect) "44.

Interest in the technique of literary statements is one of the points where Barthes came closest to structuralism. A methodological step in this direction was his work "Criticism and Truth", in which a fundamental boundary is drawn between the approach to the work as a functioning mechanism and as a semantic formation that has a symbolic nature. Barthes called the first approach "the science of literature", the second - "criticism".

Under the "science of literature" (the discipline that we usually call "general poetics") Barthes means a kind of "universal grammar" of literary form, that is, the general rules for constructing literary discourse on both micro and macro levels, starting from the rules for the formation of tropes and figures and ending with composition and plot structure. In this regard, the tasks of general poetics are similar to those of Aristotle's "Rhetoric" and "Poetics", with the difference that ancient poetics was inherently normative and pragmatic, that is, it was a set of prescriptions that made it possible to separate "correct" works from "incorrect" and subject to conscious assimilation on the part of the author in order to avoid "mistakes" in the writing work; on the contrary, general poetics does not set itself normative goals; it seeks to describe all existing (or even possible) works in terms of text-generating mechanisms that govern the "language of literature" as such; these mechanisms, as a rule, are not recognized by the writers themselves, just as the mechanisms that regulate language activity are not recognized by natural language speakers. Nevertheless, no content can be transmitted outside these mechanisms: if any specific phrase of a natural language, whatever its meaning, necessarily obeys the laws of this language, then any work, regardless of its individual content, obeys the general “grammar” of literary forms. : such forms serve as a "support" for an infinite number of historically changeable meanings with which this or that transhistorical construction can be filled 45; such constructions, according to Barthes, should become the object of the "science of literature", for they are the necessary "conditions for the existence" of any meanings.

The literary interests of Barth himself from the beginning of the 60s. more and more they move into the realm of the meanings themselves, which is evident not only from Critique and Truth, but also from earlier works, such as Two Critics, What is Criticism?, History or Literature?

First of all, the anti-positivist orientation of all these works should be emphasized. The essence of positivist methodology (in all its varieties - from "biographical" to sociological and psychoanalytic) is to replace the problem of understanding the meaning of the work of the problem of its causal-genetic explanation. To “explain” a work, from the point of view of positivism, means to find such “circumstances” (the mental make-up of the individual, the social environment, social conditions, etc.) that, being outside the work, nevertheless “determine” it and it is "reflected". In itself, the search for such circumstances (or "reasons," as they were called by representatives of the cultural-historical school) is quite legitimate, but it cannot be either the only or the ultimate goal of literary research. There is no doubt, for example, that the character of Amelie in Chateaubriand's "René" reflected the traits of his own sister, that behind the figure of the protagonist of the story is the socio-psychological "character" of Chateaubriand himself, and behind the story as a whole is the Great French bourgeois revolution; without knowledge of such "circumstances", the understanding of "Rene" will be at least difficult, and in the case of works belonging to cultures distant or unfamiliar to us, perhaps simply impossible. However, it is one thing to derive certain semantic aspects of the text from such "reasons" and quite another to reduce its semantic completeness to these reasons; meanwhile, it is precisely in such a reduction that the positivist principle of "explanation" consists: E. Renan, back in the last century, argued that the task of literary criticism is not to inhale the fragrance of a flower (with which Renan compared the work), but to study the composition of the soil on which he grew up. For the methodology of positivism, meaning turns out to be identical with its own cause: it is, in fact, this cause, only transposed into the literary plane and there disguised in the clothes of artistic imagery and fictional situations, dressed up with "pictorial-expressive" decorations, etc. It turned out (and G. Lanson mentioned by Bart directly wrote about this) that one has only to find out and summarize all the various "circumstances", "sources" and "influences" that led to the emergence of this work, as an unambiguous, final and indisputable "truth" will be achieved " about him.

It is with this idea of ​​"truth" in literary criticism that Barthes argues. The "truth" of a work, according to Barthes, is not in external circumstances, but in itself, in its sense, above all, in its "historical" sense.

The “historical” meaning of a work is the result of its intentionality: intention, as it were, strains the text from within, creates its stable semantic structure, fixed in the system of characters, paradigmatics and syntagmatics of the plot, etc. To “understand” the historical meaning of a work means to get used to this structure, to see the world through the eyes of the work, to speak its language, to submit oneself to the sense of life inherent in it. The task of historical science, Barthes believes, is the reconstruction of the historical meanings of literature, a kind of resurrection of the forgotten languages ​​in which the works of bygone eras are written.

Meanwhile, along with a stable historical meaning, the work contains many mobile, changeable "transhistorical" meanings, which are no longer subject to reconstruction, but, in the words of Barthes, to "production" on the part of readers.

The reason is that any reader is in a situation of a kind of "dialogue" in relation to the work: he has a certain cultural outlook, a system of cultural coordinates in which the work is included both in its own context and, depending on the context, allows to identify such aspects of meaning that intentionally not focalized at all. The position of the reader in relation to the work is always dual: he must be able to see reality through the eyes of the work (only in this case the goal of artistic communication can be considered achieved) and at the same time - he sees the work itself as an object surrounded by other similar objects, he sees its cultural environment, the historical background, sees what the work itself is often unable to notice, knows about it what it does not know about itself, what stands behind its intention. It is clear that, insofar as the cultural horizons of readers vary individually, the occasional meanings of one and the same work are "produced" differently even by its closest contemporaries. The fundamental nature of this variation will become apparent if we transfer the problem from the individual and synchronic plane to the diachronic plane. By virtue of the very fact of the movement of history to each new generation, new era, cultural education, the work appears in a completely specific perspective, which has never been before and will not be later, and this perspective itself is the product of an interested attitude towards the work, the desire to include it in spiritual work. modernity. That is why, being generated by its time, the work is by no means closed in it, but is actively involved in its orbit, appropriated by all subsequent times. The work is historical, but at the same time "anachronistic", because, having broken the historical umbilical cord, it immediately begins an endless "journey through history"; it is "symbolic", for no history is capable of exhausting its infinite semantic fullness.

We emphasize that in the works of the early 60s. Barthes interprets this fullness still restrictively. The work appears to him as something like a sign with one denotative and a whole constellation of connotative signifieds. Barthes, as it were, differentiates literary approaches: the origin of the sign-work is within the competence of genetic methods, the understanding of its denotative meaning is subject to history, the analysis of the structure is the prerogative of the "science of literature", the polysemy of the work requires a special hermeneutical discipline, which Barthes called criticism, or interpretive literature.

In "History or Literature?" Barthes explains that the task of "criticism" is to expose the hidden meanings of a work, which are exactly the meanings that are not included in the intentional structure of this work. Thus, none of Racine's tragedies is a message that aims to tell us something about ideological differentiation or about the "social unconscious" in the 17th century, and yet these meanings can be easily "read" in Racine's tragedies precisely because our modernity has the language of sociology and the language of psychoanalysis, just as future eras, having included these tragedies in new historical contexts and developed new analytical languages ​​unknown to us, will be able to read meanings unknown to us in Racine's work.

The idea of ​​a work's "symbolism" is extremely important methodologically, but Barthes very soon noticed that "interpretative criticism" is hardly capable of capturing this symbolism adequately. Already in Criticism and Truth, Barthes wrote that interpretive trends do not at all strive to preserve the "polysemy" of the work, but, on the contrary, lay claim to its "final" interpretation, to the monopoly possession of its "true" meaning; in fact, each of these directions chooses only one of the many possible "signified" works and declares it "main" to the detriment of all the others, thereby irrevocably stopping "the infinite mobility of the metaphor that the work is", because "the desire to reduce the symbol to that or any other unambiguous meaning - this is as extreme as the stubborn unwillingness to see in it anything other than its literal meaning" 46.

To find and substantiate such research methods that would make it possible to capture and retain the semantic completeness of the work and at the same time not break with the analytical approach to literature - such is the goal that has occupied Barthes in the last, "post-structuralist" twelve years of his activity.

During this period, Bart identifies a new object of literary study - the text, as well as a new "language" in which to speak about this object - "reading-writing". So, we are talking about Barthes' transition from "work" to "text" and from hermeneutic "interpretation" to intertextual "reading-writing".

Barthes is primarily indebted for the concept of "text" to Jacques Derrida and Yulia Kristeva, whose concepts it is appropriate to dwell on briefly here.

As for Derrida, he saw his task primarily in challenging the indisputability of one of the fundamental principles of European cultural consciousness - the principle of "centration". Indeed, it is easy to see that when dealing with any oppositions (white/black, man/woman, soul/body, content/form, signified/meaning, denotation/connotation, etc.), we involuntarily strive to put in a privileged position one of the members of these oppositions, to place a value emphasis on him. The principle of centralization permeates literally all spheres of mental activity of a European person: in philosophy and psychology it leads to rationality, which affirms the primacy of discursive-logical consciousness over all its other forms, in cultural studies - to Eurocentrism, which turns European social practice and type of thinking into a criterion for "court". "over all other forms of culture, in history - to presento- or futurocentrism, proceeding from the fact that the historical present (or future) is always "better", "more progressive" than the past, whose role is reduced to "preparing" more enlightened epochs, etc. A variant of the philosophy of "centration" is substantialist reductionism, which postulates the presence of some immovable original essence that needs only to be embodied in one material or another: in philosophy, this is the idea of ​​the subject as a kind of center of semantic irradiation, "objectified" in the object, in linguistics - the idea the primacy of the signified, fixed with the help of the signifier o, or the primacy of denotation in relation to connotation; in literary criticism, this is the concept of "content" that precedes its "expressive form", or the concept of a unique author's "personality", "soul", the material otherness of which is a work; this is, finally, the already mentioned positivist causal-genetic "mythologeme".

The vulnerability of such a position is clearly seen in the example of Saussure's sign. According to Derrida, Saussure's substantialistic prerequisites for scientific thinking are clearly visible in his conception of the dualism of the sign, which encourages the interpretation of the signified as a primary substance, independent of its linguistic embodiment and preceding it. Meanwhile, Saussure's doctrine of the sign admits a different reading, to the extent that the author of the Course himself emphasized that the signifier and the signified are produced simultaneously, are inconceivable without each other and correlate like the front and back sides of a sheet of paper. And this means that we need only change our perspective, abandoning the very principle of centering, and we will understand that the signifier and the signified can easily exchange places, that the signified refers to its signifier in the same way that the signifier points to the signified, which, therefore , they are not in a static relationship of opposition and precedence, but in a dynamic relationship of reciprocity 47. An example of such reciprocity can be medieval symbolic chains (such as: "sun - gold - fire - top - masculinity", etc.), where each the symbol is both the signifier and the signified (because it itself refers to all other elements, and they in turn refer to it).

For Derrida, therefore, the task is not to reverse relations while remaining within the framework of "centering" thinking (by privileged, say, the signifier instead of the signified, or the "form" instead of the "content"), but to destroy the idea itself. primacy, to erase the line separating the opposing members with an impenetrable wall: the idea of ​​an opposing difference (difference) must give way to the idea of ​​difference (difference), otherness, the coexistence of a multitude of semantic instances that are not identical to each other, but quite equal in rights. Leaving "traces" on each other, generating each other and reflecting in each other, these instances destroy the very concept of the "center", of the absolute meaning. "Distinction" 48 puts an end to the power of some meanings over others, forcing us to recall not only the philosophy of the East, but also the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus' rotation, the "game".

But if the whole civilization, all the thinking of the European Modern Age owes its very existence to the principle of "centration", then where - within the framework of this civilization - can (and can it?) find a refuge for decentering semiotic practice? Yu. Kristeva tried to answer this question by distinguishing between the concepts of "geno-text" and "pheno-text".

Phenotext, according to Kristeva 49, is a ready-made, solid, hierarchically organized, structured semiotic product that has a completely stable meaning. "Pheno-texts" are real-life natural language phrases, these are various types of discourse, these are any verbal works that embody a certain subjective intention and perform an instrumental function: they are intended to directly influence communication partners. Structural semiotics is precisely concerned with the formalization, classification, and so on of systems formed by pheno-texts.

The phenotext, however, is only the proscenium of a semiotic object; behind it lies a "second stage" where intense semiotic work takes place to produce phenotextual meaning. Yu. Kristeva called this "second scene" the geno-text. The gene-text is a sovereign realm of "distinction", where there is no center and periphery, no subjectivity, no communicative task; it is an unstructured semantic multiplicity, acquiring structural order only at the level of the pheno-text, it is a kind of "cultural solution" that crystallizes in the pheno-text.

Barth's concept of a work as a whole corresponds to Kristeva's "pheno-text", and the text corresponds to Kristev's "geno-text". Therefore, the very transition from structuralism to post-structuralism is conceived by Barthes as a transition from the analysis of "work" to "textual analysis". "Text", thus, does not "cancel" either the work or the need for its analysis by the former, including structural methods; he is simply "on the other side" of the work.

As such, "textual analysis" is by no means new; it has long been the property of literary criticism and literary criticism. Indeed, any researcher who is not satisfied with the explicit meaning of a work, who tries to look beyond its proscenium, discovers various "reminiscences", literary and non-literary "borrowings", "influences", all sorts of, sometimes unexpected "sources", " hidden quotations", etc., goes to the level of "text", because his gaze opens up those numerous transitions that connect the "proscenium" with the "second scene", in his hands are the threads leading not to the author's intention, but to the context the culture in which the text is woven.

However, the study of "sources" and "influences" covers only that - very insignificant - part of the text, where the author himself has not yet completely lost his conscious connection with the cultural context, while in fact every text is woven from the vast number of cultural codes, in the existence of which the author , as a rule, does not give himself the slightest account, which are absorbed by his text quite unconsciously. The cultural "code", according to Barthes, "is the perspective of many citations, a mirage woven from many structures ...; the units formed by this code are nothing but echoes of something that has already been read, seen, done, experienced : the code is a trace of this "already". Referring to what has already been written, in other words, to the Book (to the book of culture, life, life as culture), it turns the text into a catalog of this Book" 50.

Woven from a multitude of equal codes, as if from threads, the text, in turn, is itself woven into the endless fabric of culture; he is its "memory", and "remembers" not only the culture of the past and present, but also the culture of the future: "The phenomenon that is commonly called intertextuality should include texts that arise later, works: text sources exist not only before the text, but and after him. Such is the point of view of Levi-Strauss, who very convincingly showed that the Freudian version of the myth of Oedipus is itself an integral part of this myth: when reading Sophocles, we should read him as a quotation from Freud, and Freud as a quotation from Sophocles "51 The above thought will not seem paradoxical not only to a psychoanalyst, but also, say, to a sociologist who easily reads the same Sophocles in terms of socio-economic science, which, of course, neither Sophocles nor his contemporaries had the slightest idea.

So, the text, according to Barthes, is not a stable "sign", but the conditions for its generation, it is a nutrient medium in which the work is immersed, it is a space that cannot be classified or stratified, that does not know the narrative structure, a space without a center and without a bottom. , without end and without beginning - a space with many entrances and exits (none of which is "main"), where heterogeneous cultural codes meet for a free "play". The text is an intertext, a "galaxy of signifiers", and a work is a "text effect", a visible result of the "text work" taking place on the "second stage", a trail that trails behind the text.

The interweaving and reciprocal movement of "codes" in the text Barthes designated by the term writing (thus giving a new, "post-structuralist" meaning to the word, which, as we remember, in the period of the 50s - early 60s, he used with the meaning " sociolect"), and the act of immersion in the text-writing - the term reading. The most important thought for Barthes is that the procedure of "reading" that the "text" requires must be essentially different from the critical "interpretation" that the "work" presupposes.

Already in the mid-60s. Barthes tried to draw a line between "criticism" (critical "writing") and "reading". Any criticism is a certain language that acts as a metalanguage in relation to the language of the work. Any critic is the bearer of a certain life experience, value ideas, ways of categorizing reality, etc., in the light of which he objectifies the work. In the essence of his activity, the critic always makes certain statements about the work, and this is of decisive importance, establishing an insurmountable semantic distance between the subject and object of critical discourse. “Reading” is a completely different matter, because in the act of reading the subject must completely renounce himself - the more complete will be his pleasure from the work. "Reading alone experiences a feeling of love for the work, maintains a passionate relationship with it. To read means to desire the work, to wish to become it, it means to abandon any attempt to duplicate the work in any other language than the language of the work itself: the only, forever given form of commentary which the reader as such is capable of is imitation..." 53.

Thus, in Critique and Truth, from which the above lines are taken, there is an abyss between analytical "writing" and empathic "reading"; the perceiving subject faces a rigid alternative: he can be either a "reader" or a "critic", there is no third option.

However, not surmountable at the level of "work", this alternative, Barthes believes, is quite resolvable at the level of "text". It is the "text" that allows analysis, without losing its reflective nature, to eliminate the alienating distance between the metalanguage and the language-object, and "reading" - to get rid of thoughtless hedonism and acquire the analytical functions of the metalanguage.

Barth's essay "The Pleasure of the Text" is a unique attempt to create a new type of literary-critical practice, free from both bad objectivism and undivided "getting used to" that destroys the subjectivity of the one who gets used to it. "What does this text mean for me, for the person who reads it? Answer: this is a text that I myself would like to write" 54, in other words, to experience pleasure from it, turning into a desire to put my own signature under it and even rewrite in the literal sense of the word. "The pleasure of the text guarantees its truth" 55.

The pleasure of a "work" and the pleasure (pleasure-enjoyment, Barthes explains) of a "text" are two different things. Allowing the work to "carry" ourselves (by a skillfully constructed plot, economically and expressively outlined "characters", etc.), "worrying" about the fate of its characters, obeying its verified organization, we - completely unconsciously - assimilate all its topics, and along with it, the “order of culture” of which this work is a manifestation: together with the bait of captivating intrigue and heartbreaking passions, we swallow the hook of all cultural stereotypes absorbed, focused and radiated to the reader by a novel, poem, play. From a certain point of view, a work is nothing more than a particularly effective (because it has an increased suggestive power) mechanism for suggesting such stereotypes, coded in the language of a certain culture and needed by this culture in order to regulate the behavior of its wards. The work (in this respect not much different from those "myths" that Barthes subjected to destructive analysis in the 1950s) performs a coercive function.

As for the pleasure of the "text", then, according to Barthes, it arises primarily as a result of overcoming the alienating power of the "work". Based on the principle of "distinction" and "tmesis", all consisting of various "interruptions", "breaks" and "shifts", pushing together heterogeneous sociolects, codes, genres, styles, etc., the text "disorganizes" the work, destroys its internal boundaries and headings, refutes its "logic", arbitrarily "redistributes" its language. Text 56 for Barth is that same y-topia (in the etymological sense of the word), "island of salvation", "paradise garden of words", where the laws of power, domination and subordination are invalid, where the claims of any cultural topos for privileges and where there is only one power - the power of polylogue, which is led by equal cultural "voices". "Text" for Bart is a coveted zone of freedom.

Barth's creative path can be imagined, in his own words, as a "semiological adventure", as a "journey through semiology". And although the route of this journey turned out to be rather winding, the traveler himself was always burned by the same “desire” - the desire to find such a “u-topic topos” where, without breaking with culture, admiring and enjoying all its riches, one could get rid of from the power of the coercive principle rooted in its very depths. The power that Barthes means is, first of all, the power of all kinds of cultural stereotypes, unifying the power of "universality", "herd", "indifference" over singularity, uniqueness and originality. Barthes waged a struggle against such authority throughout his thirty years of work in semiology. The demystification of bourgeois "myths", the search for an antidote against topoi secreted by "literature", the opening of the internal structure of sociolects and the exposure of the hidden "war" for hegemony that they wage among themselves, and, finally, a blow to the "power and servility" of the most natural language - these are the main stages of this struggle.

Nevertheless, literature has always remained the main field of activity for Barthes. It was in literature that he first managed to hear the despotic voices of "template discourses" and it was within literature itself that he tried to discern the forces capable of resisting the leveling power of these discourses.

Indeed, if back in the mid-1960s, as we have seen, Barthes largely perceived literature as one of the social institutions in need of "debunking" (by "unwinding"), then even then he tried to open a certain mechanism (" literariness"), neutralizing and compensating the effect of literary stereotypes. True, the whole analysis was carried out then at the level of "work". In the 70s, having entered the period of post-structuralism, in the era of the Text, Barthes gave the very word "literature" a new meaning. From now on, "literature" for him (in the unalienated sense of this term) is the embodied "text": "This means that I can say with equal right: literature, writing or text" 57.

Generally speaking, for Barth in the 70s. there are, as it were, two opposing principles - Language, symbolizing any form of coercive power 58, and Literature, personifying the impulse to "anarchy". The drama of this confrontation, according to Barthes, lies in the fact that, just as the "social man" is in principle unable to disobey the laws of "universality" that permeate all the pores of the social organism, in the same way the "talking man" is unable to throw off himself the fetters of the norms and prescriptions of the language, which he himself chose as an instrument of communication. Neither sociolects, nor mass "myths", nor the literary institution, and even less so Language, are amenable to destruction.

But they succumb to the "deception". Language cannot be destroyed, but it can be outwitted. That is why, Barthes writes (and this phrase should be taken as programmatic for him), "we, people who are neither knights of the faith nor supermen, in fact have no choice but to cheat with the language, to fool the language. This is salutary cheating, this cunning, this brilliant deceit, which makes it possible to hear the sound of an irrepressible language, embodying in all its splendor the permanent revolution of the word - I, for my part, call it: literature" 59.

Thus emerges the answer to the cardinal question for Barthes: "What is literature?" Thanks to the three "forces of freedom" contained in it (mimesis, matesis, semiosis), being an urgent "question addressed to the world," literature, according to Barthes, serves as an indispensable means of defetishizing reality. This is its social "responsibility". Literature for Barthes is not a passive product of social development, but an active principle, essentially aimed at preventing the world from freezing in immobility, one of the springs that guarantee the development of history itself.

NOTES

1 Barth borrowed the term "zero degree" from the Danish glossematist Vigo Bröndal, who denoted by him a neutralized member of an opposition. (at the beginning of the article)
2 Barthes R. Reponses // Tel Quel, 1971, no. 47, p. 95. (to the beginning of the article)
3 Since 1973 - Interdisciplinary Center for Sociological, Anthropological and Semiological Research. (at the beginning of the article)
4 Among the articles of this period, one should mention "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative Texts" (1966), which summarizes the state of European (mainly Russian and French) narratology and indicates the ways of its possible development. (at the beginning of the article)
5 Barthes used the term "semiology" to refer to the general science of sign systems, and "semiotics" gave a concretizing meaning ("semiotics of food", "semiotics of clothing", etc.). (at the beginning of the article)
6 See: Mounin G. Semiologie de la communication et semiologie de la signification // Mounin G. Introduction a la semiologie, P., 1970, p. 11-15. (at the beginning of the article)
7 Greimas A.-J, Courte J. Semiotics. Explanatory Dictionary of Language Theory // Semiotics, M., 1983, p. 528.(to the beginning of the article)
8 Compare: "for the Saussurian, ideology as a set of connotative signifieds is an integral part of semiology" (Barthes R. Reponse a une enquete sur le structuralime // Catalogo generale dell "Saggiatore, 1965 p, LIV. (to the beginning of the article)
9 Compare: "ideological realities are not directly related to linguistics" (Molino J. La connotation // La linguistique, 1971, no. 1, p. 30). (at the beginning of the article)
10 Barthes R. A propos de deux ouvrages de Cl. Levi-Strauss: Sociologie et socio-logique // Information sur les sciences sociales, 1962, v. l, No. 4. (at the beginning of the article)
11 Barthes R. Reponses, b. 97. (to the beginning of the article)
12 Barthes R. Intrview // Bellour R. Le livre des autres, P, 1971, p. 171. (to the beginning of the article)
13 In 1966 Yu. Kristeva made a report on Bakhtin at Barth's seminar. Later, from the second half of the 60s. Bakhtin's works began to be widely translated in France. (at the beginning of the article)
14 Barth did not hide such influences, moreover, he directly pointed to them (see: Barthes R. Roland Barthes, R., 1975, p. 148); he knew how to rethink borrowed things in such a way that those from whom he began to study later happened to willingly recognize him as their teacher. (at the beginning of the article)
15 Barthes R. Interview, p. 172. (to the beginning of the article)
16 Mamudyan M. Linguistics, M., 1985, p. 50. (to the beginning of the article)
17 See: VN Voloshinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language, L., 1930 (the main text of the book belongs to Bakhtin); Bakhtin M. M. Questions of Literature and Aesthetics, M., 1975. Bakhtin, in particular, showed that each specific linguistic statement is involved not only in the centralizing tendencies of linguistic universalism, but also in the decentralizing tendencies of socio-historical "heterogeneity", that "social languages "The essence is the embodied" ideological horizons "of certain social groups, that, being" ideologically filled ", such a language forms an elastic semantic environment through which the individual must with an effort" break through to his meaning and to his expression ".
On the contribution of M. M. Bakhtin to the philosophy of language, see: Ivanov Vyach. Sun. The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin's Ideas on the Sign, Statement and Dialogue for Modern Semiotics // Proceedings on Sign Systems, VI, 1973, p. 5-44. (at the beginning of the article)
18 Bakhtin M. M. Questions of literature and aesthetics, p. 104. (to the beginning of the article)
19 Elmslev L. Prolegomena to the theory of language // New in linguistics, vol. I, M., 1960, p. 369. (to the beginning of the article)
20 Thus, clothes serve to protect against the cold, food products are needed for nutrition, etc., however, these items can also take on a social and semantic load: an ordinary sweater and a fur cape perform the same practical function, but at the same time they can indicate a completely different social and property status of their owners. (at the beginning of the article)
21 Being dependent on the socio-cultural context, connotative meanings, as a rule, are not recorded in any explanatory dictionaries, and therefore their recognition largely depends on the outlook and instinct of the interpreter; for example, the demonstrative meaning of wearing a Russian dress by Moscow Slavophiles was quite intelligible to the Slavophils themselves and their Westernizing opponents; outside this circle, the same famous murmolka Konstantin Aksakov was perceived as nothing more than an eccentricity: "K. Aksakov dressed so nationally that the people on the streets mistook him for a Persian ..." (Herzen A. I. Soch. in nine volumes, vol. 5, M., 1956, p. 148). Due to this property of the ideological sign, the historian of culture faces serious difficulties: from the past, he is left with only the backbone of denotative meanings, almost completely cleansed of the flesh of social meanings. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of these meanings, the revival of such overtones of the sign, which often have not been clarified in the minds of their users themselves, is precisely the task of the historian. (at the beginning of the article)
22 Connotative meanings actively live as long as the ideological context that gave rise to them actively lives, and as long as we ourselves freely navigate in this context. The dying of the context is fraught with the dying of meaning: people who grew up in the 60s and 70s. of our century, knowing the dictionary meaning of the word "cosmopolitanism", they no longer remember the threat that emanated from it in the late 40s. (at the beginning of the article)
23 Thus, according to Dahl, a "native" is "a local, local native, a natural inhabitant of the country in question." However, in the "pro-colonialist" phrase "One billion people and four billion natives live on Earth" the denotative meaning is lost almost completely due to the ideological content of the word. P. Valery said that it is not difficult to imagine such a literary phrase that would draw attention not to its subject content, but to its "literaryness", as if winking: "Look at me; I am a beautiful literary phrase." It is precisely this phrase (about the "elegant Amazon") that Grant painfully composes in A. Camus' "The Plague" (see: A. Camus. Selected, M., 1969, pp. 216, 240). (at the beginning of the article)
24 "The area common to connotative signifieds is the area of ​​ideology" (Bart R. Rhetoric of the Image // Bart R. Selected Works. Semiotics. Poetics, M., 1989, p. 316). (at the beginning of the article)
25 "Explaining a myth is the only effective way for an intellectual to fight it" (Barthes R. Maitres et Esclaves // Lettres Nouvelles, 1953, mars, p. as a form of ideology, "it is impossible to end only with the help of ridicule and attacks. It must also be overcome scientifically, that is, explained historically, and even natural science is not able to cope with this task" (Marx K. and Engels F. Soch., vol. 18 , p. 578). (to the beginning of the article)
26 "Unmasking is impossible without the finest analytical tool; no semiology is possible without eventually becoming a semioclast" (Barthes R. Mythologies, P., 1970, p. 8). (at the beginning of the article)
27 See: Prieto L.J. Messages et signaux., P., 1966. (to the beginning of the article)
28 See: Mounin G. Introduction a la semiologie, P., 1970, p. 11-15, 189-197. (at the beginning of the article)
29 See: E. Benveniste. General linguistics, M., 1984, p. 69-96. (at the beginning of the article)
30 Bart R. Fundamentals of semiology // Structuralism: "for" and "against", M., 1975, p. 115. (to the beginning of the article)
31 Ibid. (at the beginning of the article)
32 Bart R. Fundamentals of Semiology, p. 160; see also "Structuralism as activity" // Bart R. Selected Works, p. 261. (to the beginning of the article)
33 Ibid., p. 79. (to the beginning of the article)
34 "Myth" really exists only with the help of denotative language, but at the same time, this secondary phenomenon only uses the primary language for its own purposes, that is, "interprets" it like any other metalanguage. (at the beginning of the article)
35 "... the act of "demystification" is not an Olympic act... I claim to fully experience the contradictions of my time, capable of turning sarcasm into a condition for the existence of truth" (Bart R. Selected Works, p. 47). (at the beginning of the article)
36 "Anyone who wants to write accurately ... inevitably writes for others (after all, if he only addressed himself, the peculiar nomenclature that constitutes his own experiences would be enough for him, since every experience is a direct name for himself)." - Barthes R. Essais critiques, R., 1964, p. 13. The best example of this is all sorts of "intimate diaries", which, contrary to the illusion of their authors, are not written "for themselves" at all, but in the unconscious hope that "someone" will read them, marveling at the depth and originality of the writer's personality. (at the beginning of the article)
37 Bart R. Zero degree of writing // Semiotics, M., 1983, p. 341. (to the beginning of the article)
38 "Only the mythical Adam, approaching with the first word to the yet unspecified virgin world, lonely Adam could really completely avoid this dialogic mutual orientation with someone else's word about the subject. This is not given to a specific historical human word ..." (Bakhtin M.M. Questions of Literature and Aesthetics, pp. 92). (at the beginning of the article)
39 "Yes, today I can quite choose for myself this or that letter ... - to claim novelty or, on the contrary, to declare my adherence to tradition, but the whole point is that I am unable to remain free further, because little little by little I turn into a prisoner of other people's or even my own words "(Bart R. Zero degree of writing, p. 313). (at the beginning of the article)
40 Bart R. Drama, poem, novel // Call a spade a spade. Program performances of the masters of Western European literature of the XX century, M., 1987, p. 142. (to the beginning of the article)
41 Bart R. Writing Degree Zero, p. 349. (to the beginning of the article)
42 Barthes R. Essais critiques, P., 1964, p. 12. (to the beginning of the article)
43 "..."Spontaneity" that we are usually told about is in fact the height of conventionality: it is the same petrified, completely ready-made language that is found right at our fingertips at the very moment when we set out to speak "spontaneously" "(Bart R. Drama, poem, novel // Call a spade a spade, p.143). (at the beginning of the article)
44 Barthes R. Essais critiques, p. 13-14. Calling for the revival of Greco-Roman rhetoric, the traditions of which lived actively in Europe until the end of the 18th century. and were forgotten only in the era of romanticism and post-romanticism, Barthes expresses a general trend characteristic of literary criticism of the 20th century and manifested itself, in particular, in the emergence of a powerful school of French "neorhetoric" of the 60-70s. (see, for example: Dubois J. et al. General rhetoric, M., 1986). Barthes himself, who used the rhetorical principles of analysis in a number of works, is also the author of a special "memo" (see: Barthes R. L "ancienne Rhetorique (Aide-memoire) // Communications, 1970, No. 16). (to the beginning of the article)
45 An example is the plot construction of the "initiatory" type (the plot is based on the fact that the hero goes through a trial or a series of trials). This construction underlies a number of mythical narratives, but it also organizes the narrative structure of a fairy tale, spun off from myth; moreover, it passed into the medieval chivalric novel, then into the picaresque novel, and so on, right up to the novel of modern and contemporary times: this means that for thousands of years the same "hollow" structure was constantly filled with new historical contents. (at the beginning of the article)
46 Bart R. Selected Works, p. 369. (to the beginning of the article)
47 Wed. "generalization of the Frege triangle by rotation" // Stepanov Yu.S. Semiotics, M., 1971, p. 85-91. (at the beginning of the article)
48 "Difference is what makes the movement of signification possible only when each element, called "present" and appearing on the stage of the present, is related to something other than itself, keeps an echo generated by the sound of the past element and at the same time is destroyed by the vibration of its own relation to the element of the future; this trace applies equally to the so-called future and to the so-called past; it forms the so-called present by virtue of its very relation to what it itself is not ... "(Derrida J. Marges de la philosophie, P., 1972, p. 13). (at the beginning of the article)
49 On pheno-text and geno-text, see in particular: Kristeva J. Shmeiwtikh. Recherches pour une semanalyse, P., 1969, p. 280-284. (at the beginning of the article)
The geno-text/pheno-text opposition justified by Yu. Kristeva should be fundamentally distinguished from the Chomskian opposition deep structure/surface structure in at least two respects. First, Chomsky's generative model deals only with isolated sentences, not with discourse. Secondly, the "deep structure" is nothing more than a reflection on the conceptual and logical level of the same construction, which - in a grammatically and syntactically formalized form - is also present at the "surface" level; structurally, the components in both cases are identical (such, for example, is the "subject-predicate" scheme in the Indo-European languages). Chomsky's theory, therefore, contrary to its name, does not know true generation-transformation, the transition from one type of category (or logic) to another. According to Kristeva, "geno-text is an abstract level of linguistic functioning, which, far from reflecting phrase structures, precedes these structures and exceeds them, represents their anamnesis." "The geno-text is an infinite signifier which cannot 'be' something 'determined', since it does not exist in the singular; it is better suited to be called 'signifiers' (multiple and infinitely differentiated signifiers), in relation to which the present signifier... is only a limiter..., an accident... It is a multiplicity of signifiers in which (and not outside of which) the directly formulated (pheno-textual) signifier is placed and thereby overdetermined. "To the communicative function of the pheno-text, the geno-text opposes the process of production of meanings" (Kristeva J. Op. cit., p. 282-284). (at the beginning of the article)
50 Bart R. S/Z, M., 1994, p. 32-33. (at the beginning of the article)
51 Barthes R. L "aventure semiologique, R., 1985, p. 300. (to the top of the article)
52 "The literary-critical aspect of the old system is interpretation, in other words, the operation by which a certain structure is given to the play of vague or even contradictory visible forms, a deep meaning is attributed, a "true" explanation is given. This is why interpretation must, little by little, give way to discourse. of a new type; its goal will not be the disclosure of any one, "true" structure, but the establishment of the play of many structures ...; more precisely, the object of the new theory should be the relations themselves, connecting these structures combined with each other and subject to so far unknown rules "(Barthes R. L" ecriture de l "evenement // Communications, 1968, No. 12, p. 112). (at the beginning of the article)
53 Bart R. Selected Works, p. 373. (to the beginning of the article)
54 Barthes R. Les sorties du texte // Bataille, P., 1973, p. 59. (to the beginning of the article)
55 Barthes R. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, P., 1971, p. 14. (to the beginning of the article)
56 Any "work" has its own "text"; a work cannot exist without a text, just as a shadow cannot exist without its owner. But the relationship between the work and the text can develop in different ways: there are works that suppress their own text (the dramaturgy of classicism), and there are works where the text asserts itself with all possible urgency (Villon, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Lautréamont, Mallarme, who dreamed of A book that will be able to absorb the whole culture at once, Jarry, Joyce, H.L. Borges; a relatively recent example is the "Name of the Rose" by W. Eco). (at the beginning of the article)
57 Bart R. Selected Works, p. 551. (to the beginning of the article)
58 "Thus, in language, due to its very structure, there is a fatal relation of alienation. To speak, and even more so to reason, does not mean at all to enter into a communicative act (as one often hears); it means to subjugate the listener: all language is a compulsory form of coercion "(Bart R. Lecture // Bart R. Selected Works, p. 549). (at the beginning of the article)
59 Ibid., p.550. (at the beginning of the article)

Roland Bart

mythology

Roland Barthes - theorist and practitioner of mythology

Interpreting Roland Barthes is both easy and difficult. Easy - because he has many specific, well-articulated, persistently repeated ideas; difficult - because they rely on rich and original imagery, but already these images, also persistently repeated, turn out to be purely ambiguous, ambivalent. Barth's book Mythologies (1957) is an excellent example of such an irreducible plurality. Any attempt to "straighten" it according to some ideological concept (and the first such attempt was made by the author himself in a theoretical afterword) inevitably leads to simplification. Willy-nilly, one has to, firstly, make figurative structures, intuitive author's reactions and assessments, in which conceptual ideas are immersed, the subject of analysis and interpretation; and secondly, to proceed in advance from the fact that these deep structures of Barth's thinking were not and could not be unambiguous.

Aesthetics of myth

In the work of Roland Barthes, there is clearly a single through desire - not to be like oneself, like one's own "image of the author", which, once having arisen, enslaves its "owner". Hence the rapid changeability of Barthes - in the choice of material, genre, method, and partly even ideological positions. This is not how an academic scientist feels, preoccupied precisely with the sequence, the logical interconnection of his works, but rather writer, acutely aware of the literary "rules of the game", almost physiologically experiencing the rapid "wear and tear" of creative techniques, themes and structures.

The book "Mythologies" stands out even against this background: it demonstrates the variability of the author "in motion", in the development of this particular book itself. As critics often do (as he himself often did before and after), Barthes compiled a collection of his journal articles, providing him with a generalizing theoretical article; moreover, this article - "Myth Today" - is not placed before, a after cycle of critical essays. It is attributed to them retroactively, and Bart, avoiding mystifying the reader (which, in fact, is the main pathos of the "Mythologies"), does not mask this fact with a compositional rearrangement, openly demonstrates the course of his thought - look, from what observations I set off and to what theoretical conclusions came. As a result, the book - a case unique in Barth's work - from the very beginning had both an afterword and a preface, the second partly serving to justify the first:

Having examined a certain number of facts from the current chronicle, I also made an attempt at a methodological definition of modern myth; naturally, I placed this text at the end of the book, since it only systematizes the materials processed above.

However, in reality, the relationship between the first and second parts of the Mythologies is more than the relationship between search and result. These two parts are oriented towards different genres, different discourses, embody different gestures towards the world, different creative impulses. The final section "Myth Today" is a scientific (though at the same time politically biased) theoretical article, in a certain sense, even a methodological manifesto of semiology (semiotics) founded by Barth. As for the essays from the first section, they clearly do not pretend to be academic scientific, but they also do not apply to traditional “criticism”. In relation to the theoretical conclusion, they certainly represent a practice, a work on concrete life material, but it is worth comparing them with the other (rather rich) production of Barth the critic of 1953-1956, when they were written, in order to notice a sharp difference. It can be seen that Bart very early realized their genre specificity and no longer deviated from it, without mixing these texts with his usual speeches about novelties in literature or theater.

With all the breadth of Barth's interests, his "practical mythologies" (for convenience, we will use this term to designate the essays that made up the first part of the book) are striking in their special "omnivorousness."

The material of reflection could be the most diverse (a newspaper article, a photograph in an illustrated weekly, a film, a play, an exhibition), the choice of plot could be purely arbitrary: they were, of course, my topics of the day.

Often he goes beyond the "themes of the day", embarking on an analysis of the constant values ​​of culture (at least the French national culture). Generally speaking, the whole world falls into his field of vision, since in the human world practically everything is socially comprehended, everything is significant, everything lends itself to critical deciphering. This tendency to directly "read the world", not limited to linguistic or paralinguistic sign phenomena, was vigorously emphasized in the article by Umberto Eco and Isabella Pezzini "The Semiology of the "Mythologies""; Italian scholars hailed it as Barth's broad and fruitful approach to semiotics:

... He instinctively deals with semiology as the great founders of this discipline in ancient Greece did with it ... his merit was the realization that semiology is a general epistemology ... that is, the main thing is that he comprehended the art of considering the world in its entirety as a totality iconic facts.

In his later and more academic semiological writings (Fundamentals of Semiology, 1965, The System of Fashion, 1967), which he himself disliked and quickly moved away from, Barthes artificially narrowed his field of vision, limiting it to the analysis of sign facts, learned by us through language(for example, not fashion itself as real features of the appearance of people, but only the discourse of fashion magazines). In the Mythologies, it is precisely the boundless breadth of material that is deliberately selected subjectively that is striking (“they were, of course, my topics of the day”), without looking back at the accepted value hierarchy of objects. This was expressively recalled in 1977 by one of the listeners of Barth's seminar in 1962 at the Paris Higher School of Practical Studies, J.-A. Miller:

In Roland Barthes, I was immediately attracted by the calm confidence with which he was able to talk about everything in the world, and every time fairly and systematically, about empty, lightweight, vulgar, insignificant things. Right, it was a real happiness to meet every week with a man who He knew how to prove to any occasion that everything in the world is significant. who did not reject anything ordinary, because everything in human life was structured in his eyes like the language of Saussure. That is why I read Mythologies for the first time with such unforgettable ardor.

Bart Roland

Semiotics, Poetics (Selected Works)

Roland Bart

SELECTED WORKS

Semiotics. Poetics

Translations from French

The collection of selected works of the famous French literary critic and semiologist R. Bart (1915-1980) includes articles and essays reflecting different periods of his scientific activity. The studies of R. Barth - the head of the French "new criticism", who developed along with Kl. Levi-Strauss, J. Lacan, M. Foucault and other structuralist methodology in the humanities are devoted to the problems of semiotics of culture and literature. Among the culturological works of R. Barth, the reader will find for the first time published in Russian translation "Mythologies", "The Death of the Author", "The Pleasure of the Text", "The War of Languages", "About Racine", etc.

The book is intended for semiologists, literary critics, linguists, philosophers, historians, art historians, as well as all those interested in the problems of cultural theory.

In the design of the binding, materials provided by the Sey publishing house and a drawing by Maurice Henri were used.

Editorial Board of Literature in the Humanities

Roland Barthes - semiologist, literary critic 7

From the book "Mythologies" 50

Foreword 50

I. Mythologies 52

Literature and Mino Drouet 52

Einstein's brain 60

The poor and the proletarian 63

Photo shocks 65

Novels and children 68

Martians 70

Lost Continent 73

II. Myth today 76

Myth as a statement. 76

Myth as a semiological system. 78

Form and concept. 85

Meaning. 90

Reading and deciphering the myth. 98

Myth is like a stolen language. 102

The bourgeoisie as an anonymous society. 109

Myth as a depoliticized word. 115

Myth on the left. 119

Myth right. 122

Graft. 124

2. Deprivation of History. 125

4. Tautology. 126

5. Ninism. 127

6. Quality quantification. 128

7. Statement of fact. 128

Necessity and limits of mythology. 130

Literature and metalanguage. 135

Writers and Writers. 135

From the book "About Racine". 139

Preface 139

I. Rasinovsky man * 140

1. Structure 140

Three outer spaces: death, flight, event. 141

Two Eros. 143

Confusion. 146

Erotic scene. 147

Racino's "twilight". 148

Fundamental relationship. 150

methods of aggression. 152

Indefinitely personal construction. 155

Split. 156

coup. 158

"Dogmatism" of Racine's hero. 161

Way out of the impasse: possible options. 163

Confidant. 164

familiarity. 165

Logos and Praxis. 166

III. History or literature? 167

Literature today. 176

Imagination sign. 181

Structuralism as an activity. 183

Two critics. 187

What is criticism? 189

Literature and Meaning. 192

Image rhetoric. 199

Three messages 200

Language message 202

Denotative image 204

Image rhetoric 205

Criticism and Truth. 208

Objectivity 210

Clarity 214

Crisis Comment 219

Multiple language 220

Science of Literature 223

Criticism 225

Reading 229

From science to literature. 230

Reality effect. 236

Where to begin? 240

From work to text. 244

Text analysis of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe 248

Text analysis 248

Lexis analysis 1 -17 250

Actional analysis of lectures 18-102 255

Text analysis of lectures 103-110 257

Methodological conclusion 260

Text pleasure. 262

Separation of languages. 283

War of languages. 289

The hum of the tongue. 291

Lecture. 293

R. Bart. 1971 303

Comments. 303

Mythologies. - Translation made according to the publication: Barthes R. Mythologies. P.: Seuil, 1957. Published for the first time. 303

I. Mythologies 303

Literature and Minou Drouet (La Litterature selon Minou Drouet). - For the first time in the newspaper "Lettres nouvelles", 1956, January. 303

Einstein's brain (Le cerveau d "Einstein). - For the first time in the newspaper "Lettres nouvelles", 1955, June. 304

The Poor and the Proletarian (Le Pauvre et le Proletaire). - For the first time in the newspaper "Lettres nouvelles", 1954, November. 304

Novels and children (Romans et Enfants). 304

Martians. 304

Lost Continent (Continent perdu). 304

II. Myth today (Le Mythe, aujourd "hui) 304

Literature and meta-language (Litterature et meta-langage). 305

Writers and writers (Ecrivains et ecrivants). 306

About Sur Racine. 306

Imagination of a sign (L "imagination du signe). 307

Structuralism as activity (L "activite structuraliste). 307

Two Critics (Les deux critiques). 307

What is criticism? (Qu "est-ce que la critique?). 308

The rhetoric of the image (Rhetorique de l "image) 309

Criticism and Truth (Critique et Verite). 309

From work to text (De l "?uvre au texte). 313

Text analysis of one short story by Edgar Poe (Analyse textuelle d "un conte d" Edgar Poe). 313

The Pleasure of the Text (Le Plaisir du texte). 314

Separation of languages ​​(La division des langages). 315

War of languages ​​(La guerre des langages). 315

The buzz of the tongue (Le bruissement de la langue). 315

Lecture (Lecon). 315

Bibliography .............. 601 316

Works by R. Barth 316

I. Monographs, essays, collections of articles 316

II. Russian translations 316

Literature about R. Barth 1. Monographs 317

II. Special issue magazines 317

III. Colloquium 317

Name index. 317

Roland Barthes - semiologist, literary critic

R. Barthes - along with Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault is considered one of the largest representatives of modern French structuralism, and such a reputation is fair, if only structuralism is understood broadly enough. That is why it should be borne in mind that in addition to the "structuralist" stage, oriented towards the corresponding direction in linguistics (60s), in Barth's work there was not only a long and fruitful "pre-structuralist" (50s), but and the brilliant "post-structuralist" (70s) period. It should also be remembered that the vicissitudes of Barth's thirty-year "semiological adventure" in some way turned out to be external to him: through all these vicissitudes, Bart managed to carry several fundamental ideas, which he only deepened, varied and persistently played out in the key of one or another " isms". What are these ideas? In answering this question, let us first trace the main milestones of Barth's scientific biography.

Barthes was born November 12, 1915 in Cherbourg; a few years after the death of his father, a naval officer, in the war, he moved with his mother to Paris, where he received a classical liberal arts education - first at the lyceums of Montaigne and Louis the Great, and then at the Sorbonne. In his youth, two characteristic features of Bart's spiritual appearance were determined - left-wing political views (in his lyceum years, Bart was one of the founders of the Republican Anti-Fascist Defense group) and an interest in the theater (at the Sorbonne, he actively participated in the student "Antique Theatre").

A supposed teaching career was interrupted by a disease of a tuberculous process in the lungs,

discovered in the early 1930s. Declared unfit for military service, Bart spent six years, from 1941 to 1947, in various sanatoriums. It was at this time that the process of his active intellectual formation took place - a process during which Marxism, on the one hand, and French existentialism (Sartre, Camus), which was gaining strength, on the other, had a significant influence on him.

In 1948-1950. Barth taught abroad - in Bucharest and Alexandria, where he met the 33-year-old linguist A.-Zh. Greimas, who was probably one of the first to draw Barth's attention to the methodological possibilities of linguistics as a humanities.

However, having an interest in linguistic theory, Barthes still chooses a career as a literary publicist: in 1947-1950, with the support of the well-known critic Maurice Nadeau, he publishes a series of literary and methodological articles in the Combat newspaper, where he tries, in his own words, to , "to Marxize existentialism" in order to identify and describe the third (along with "language" as a universally binding norm and the individual "style" of the writer) "dimension" of the artistic form - "writing" (note that it was thanks to Barthes that this expression acquired in the modern French literary criticism status of the term). An essay compiled from these articles and published as a separate edition in 1953, Bart called it: "Zero degree of writing"1. This was followed by the book "Michelet" (1954) - a kind of substantial psychoanalysis of the texts of the famous French historian, comparable in terms of research principles with the works of Gaston Bachelard.

Fluctuating between linguistics (in 1952, Barth received a scholarship to write a dissertation on "social lexicology") and literature, Barth, nevertheless, until the end of the 50s. acts mainly as a journalist who sympathizes with Marxism and analyzes the current literary product from these positions

1 Barth borrowed the term "zero degree" from the Danish glossematist Vigo Bröndal, who denoted by him a neutralized member of an opposition.

tion - "new novel", "theater of the absurd", etc., and the dramaturgy and stage attract Bart's special attention: he publishes a lot in the magazine "People's Theater", supports the creative program of Jean Vilar, and since 1954, after a Paris tour " Berlin? Ensemble", becomes an active propagandist of the stage theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht, whose ideas would influence him throughout his life: the meaning of Brecht - Barthes wrote seventeen years later - is to combine "Marxist reason with semantic thought"; therefore Brecht "continues to be relevant to me to this day. He was a Marxist who thought about the effects of the sign: a rare case" 2.

"Camera lucida. Commentary on photography” by Roland Barthes is one of the first fundamental studies of the nature of photography and at the same time a homage to the late mother of the author.

Interest in a photograph of 1870 that accidentally fell into the hands of Barthes made him want to know what essential feature makes a photograph stand out from the totality of images. Having asked the question of classification, systematization of photographs, the philosopher builds his own phenomenology, introducing the concepts of Studium and Punctum. Studium denotes a cultural, linguistic and political interpretation of photography, Punctum - a purely personal emotional meaning that allows you to establish a direct connection with the photographic image.

S Z

The famous essay by Roland Barthes "S/Z" is the first manifesto of intertextuality and the first practical experience of the post-structuralist deconstruction of a literary work.

By “exploding” Balzac’s short story “Sarrasin” from the inside, Barthes releases and makes her Text speak, the bottomless cultural “memory” compressed in the work. "Any text is an intertext" - "a new fabric woven from used quotes." The text is hidden in the bowels of the work, preserving everything that “has already been read, seen, done, experienced”; it is a stereophonic space where countless “voices” sound and intertwine — ideological codes, sociolects, discourses, genre and style topoi. "The text confronts the work with its multiple, demonic texture."

Selected works. Semiotics. Poetics

The collection of selected works of the famous French literary critic and semiologist R. Bart includes articles and essays reflecting different periods of his scientific activity.

The studies of R. Barthes, the head of the French "new criticism", who, along with Cl. Levi-Strauss, J. Lacan, M. Foucault and others, developed a structuralist methodology in the humanities, are devoted to the problems of the semiotics of culture and literature. Among the culturological works of R. Barth are "Mythologies", "Death of the Author", "Pleasure from the Text", "War of Languages", "About Racine", etc.

Empire of signs

An illustrated collection of travel notes by the famous French intellectual, written as a result of his trip to Japan and covering various aspects of Japanese life from the point of view of a person of Western culture, who is both delighted and surprised by the life world of another civilization.

How to live together. Romantic simulations of some everyday spaces

How to Live Together was the first of three lecture courses given by Roland Barthes at the Paris Collège de France in the late 1970s.

In this edition, for the first time, posthumously published author's lecture notes are translated into Russian, where Barthes, based on data from various sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, semiology, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.), as well as works of fiction, explores the relationship people living together, the patterns of behavior and understanding of the world that arise in such circumstances.

An important, though not the only, source of factual material is the history of monasticism in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Myth today

In the mid 1950s. R. Barth wrote a series of essays on the "universal" modern mythologization. "Mythologies" is a brilliant analysis of modern mass culture as a sign system. According to the author, the lifestyle of the average Frenchman is “saturated” with mythologisms.

In the book, R. Barth semiotically explains the mechanism of the emergence of political myths as the transformation of history into an ideology, subject to the symbolic design of this process. In the generalizing part of R. Barth's work - the article "Myth Today", both an explanation and a method of opposing modern mythologization are proposed - the creation of a new artificial myth, the construction of a conditional, third level of mythology, if the first is understood as archaic-traditional, the second - "new" ( as a scientific class, for example, the Soviet one). In the studies of R. Barth, the leading definition of myth is the word.

mythology

In the mid 1950s. R. Barth wrote a series of essays on the "universal" modern mythologization.

"Mythologies" is a brilliant analysis of modern mass culture as a sign system. According to the author, the lifestyle of the average Frenchman is “saturated” with mythologisms.

In the book, R. Barth semiotically explains the mechanism of the emergence of political myths as the transformation of history into an ideology, provided that this process is signified.

Zero Degree Writing

Barthes has developed an analytical toolkit of "connotative semiology", which makes it possible to undermine the power of "false consciousness", turn ideological myths inside out and break into the "new and perfect Adamic world", where words, having learned to convey the meaning of "things themselves", will acquire their original "freshness" and become finally happy.

Works about the theater

Roland Barthes is little known to our reader as a theater critic. Meanwhile, he was deeply fascinated by the theater, and not only as a spectator, but also as one of the founders and regular contributors to the magazine "Theater Populaire".

The 1950s were an exceptionally important time for the French theater; it was then that the lines that make up the current theatrical landscape were outlined. The texts collected here, whether it is a critical review of a long-forgotten performance, its political sound, its theoretical aspect or an excursion into history, invariably touch the very essence of the theater, and therefore do not lose interest today.

Roland Barthes about Roland Barthes

The French publishing house "Say" published a series called "Writers for All Seasons" and invited Bart to publish a book about himself in it.

The proposed form turned into an opportunity to experience and analyze the sharpest sensation - the struggle of the writer with his own "image".

Garden, Fourier, Loyola

The book of the famous French thinker is devoted to the reconstruction of the discursive practices of three figures - the writer de Sade, the socialist Fourier and the founder of the Jesuit order of Loyola.

At first glance, these figures have nothing in common, but all three can be seen as logothetes, the founders of new languages. These languages, unlike ordinary ones, are not aimed at communication; they are self-contained texts.

The filmic in film is that which cannot be described, it is a representation which cannot be presented. The filmic (despite the infinite number of films produced in the world) is still very rare (Eisenstein has a few flashes, maybe somewhere else?), it is so rare that it allows one to assert: the film, like the text, does not yet exist.

There is only "cinema, something of a language, a story, a poem", sometimes very "modern", translated into the language of "moving images"...

Fragments of a lover's speech

The necessity of this book lies in the following consideration: love speech is today in the utmost loneliness.

This speech may be spoken by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but no one supports it; the surrounding languages ​​do not care about it: they either ignore, or underestimate, or ridicule it, it is cut off not only from power, but also from power mechanisms (science, knowledge, art).

When a discourse like this, by itself, drifts towards the irrelevant, beyond the limits of all herd interests, it has no choice but to be a place, arbitrarily limited, of some kind of assertion. This statement is, in general, the plot of the book that begins here.

Poststructuralism. Deconstructivism. Postmodernism Ilyin Ilya Petrovich

Roland Barthes: from "textual analysis" to "enjoyment from the text"

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) is the brightest and most influential representative of French literary post-structuralism in the field of criticism. A brilliant literary essayist, theorist and critic, who did - or, rather, underwent, along with the general evolution of the literary-theoretical thought of France from the mid-50s to the 70s. - a rather stormy and winding path, by the beginning of the 70s he came to post-structuralism.

It is this time of the “late Barth” that is analyzed in this section, although, of course, it would be an unforgivable mistake to reduce the significance of all his work only to this time: anyone who read his first book, Mythologies (1953) (83) and now has the opportunity to do this in Russian translation (10, pp. 46–145), is able to feel the charm of his personality and imagine the impression that his work made already at that time. But even if we remain within the stage of evolution of the critic that interests us, it should be noted that many of his researchers (W. Leich, M. Moriarty, J. Kaller, M. Wiseman, etc.) tend to distinguish various phases in the “late Barth” already post-structuralist period. In any case, given the Proteus variability, the mobility of his views, this is hardly surprising. First of all, it is important to note that at the turn of the 70s. Barth created one of the first deconstructive theories of analysis of a work of art and continued to practice what he called "text analysis" until about 1973. This period includes such of his works as "S / Z" (1970),

"Where to start?" (1970), From Work to Text (1971), Textual Analysis of a Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe (1973) (89, 10).

However, already in the same 1973, his collection of “essay analyzes” (I really find it difficult to call it otherwise) “The Pleasure of the Text” (84) was published, followed by a number of other works written in the same spirit: “Roland Barthes about Roland Barthes" (1975), "Fragments of a Love Discourse" (1977), etc. (85, 80), which clearly marked an undoubted dissatisfaction with the practice of "textual analysis" and the transition to the concept of an "erotic text" not constrained by petty regulation a strictly normalized structural approach modeled on the natural sciences. Now Barth's credo is a free flight of free associativity, characteristic of the "poetic thinking" of the postmodern sensibility.

However, speaking about another paradigm shift in Barthes, one has to take into account the fact that the signs of the late Barthes can also be found in his earlier works. So, back in the 1967 article “From Science to Literature” (10), he cites Coleridge’s statement: “A poem is a kind of composition that differs from scientific works in that it considers pleasure, and not truth, as its immediate goal” (10, cit. from the translation of S. Zenkin, pp. 381–382) and draws from it a very remarkable (from the point of view of its further evolution) conclusion: “an ambiguous statement, since although it recognizes to some extent the erotic nature of a poetic work (literature), but it is still assigned a special, as it were, supervised area, fenced off from the main territory where truth reigns. Meanwhile, pleasure (today we are more willing to admit it) implies a much wider, much more significant sphere of experience than just the satisfaction of “taste”. Until now, however, the pleasure of language has never been seriously considered ... only the baroque, whose literary experience has always met in our society (at least in French) a attitude at best tolerant, ventured to some extent to scout that area, which can be called the Eros of language” (ibid., p. 382). It is hard not to see in this the origins of the later conception of the text as "an anagram of the erotic body" in The Pleasure of the Text (84, p. 74).

However, before moving on to the actual theory and practice of analysis in the late Barth, it is necessary to make a few remarks about Barth as a "literary and social phenomenon" of the era. If you try to give yourself an account of the general impression that Barthes' works make, then one cannot get rid of the feeling that the leitmotif that runs through all of his work was an obsessive desire to escape from the captivity of bourgeois thinking, worldview, worldview. Moreover, the dramatic nature of the situation consisted in the fact that the universal was perceived as bourgeois, that the very nature of the man of the New Age was considered as bourgeois, and therefore everything that was regarded as opposed to this nature, this thinking was considered a natural way out of it: Marxism, Freudianism, Nietzscheism. Naturally, all this pushed towards left-wing, nihilistic-destructive, sexual-erotic "theoretical extremism" in theory, relatively speaking, to "political avant-gardism." Such moods, of course, were not only the prerogative of Barthes alone, they were characteristic, as has been said more than once, of Foucault, Deleuze, and - in an extremely emotional form - Kristeva.

The same sentiments were characteristic of practically the entire left intelligentsia, and the tragedy of the situation was, and still is, that the radicalism of left theorism constantly stumbled, if not shattered, against the practice of the political and cultural realities of those countries where anti-bourgeois principles were laid down in the basis of the social order.

Hence the feeling of constant dichotomy and disappointment, feverish attempts to find a "theoretical equivalent" to failed hopes: if by the mid-60s. Rive gauche rejected the Soviet version, then at the turn of the 60-70s. it was replaced by a nervous enthusiasm for Maoism, which gave way to (naturally, we can say with a haughty grin) another collapse of illusions. But with any change in political winds, one thing has always remained unchanged: the rejection of the bourgeoisie and the entire complex of cultural, social and moral phenomena that stands behind it. At the same time, bourgeoisness in the theories of the left-wing radical French post-structuralists is identified with universal human values; as a result, universal human values ​​begin to be perceived as bourgeois and there is no strict theoretical distinction between them.

But I would not like to talk much about it: although the entire “Telkelist” movement, if Barth is included there, was a symbiosis of political commitment and literary avant-garde (a phenomenon so characteristic of the 20th century and appearing so often that, at least in at the moment, it is hardly capable of arousing special interest), nevertheless, the specific subject of our study is post-structuralism in general, where various political and social orientations are represented.

Bart and the Spirit of High Essayism

It is difficult to understand Barthes's role in shaping the literary critique of post-structuralism without considering one, albeit very significant, fact. Of course, one cannot deny the importance of Barthes as a theoretician of poststructuralism, as the creator of one of the first variants of deconstructivist literary analysis - all this is undoubtedly important, but, in my subjective opinion, not the most important thing. In order for rather complex (and even more complexly formulated) theories and ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc. to migrate from the “air sphere” of the empiricism of “high” philosophical reflection to the “empiricism” of practical literary analysis (even with a certain “literary artistry”) "philosophical post-structuralism, prone to" poetic thinking, which has been repeatedly discussed and will be discussed in the section on postmodernism), a mediator was needed. And Barthes, a brilliant, universally erudite essayist, who managed to create a striking symbiosis of literature, ethics and politics, the topical relevance of which has always aroused the keenest interest of the intellectual elite of the West, became such an intermediary. In addition, the sincerity of tone is always attractive in Bart - a genuine passion for everything he talks about. Sometimes one gets the impression that he ignites spontaneously by the very act of his "provocative evidence", the free play of the mind in the spirit of "intellectual shocking" of his reader, with whom he conducts an endless dialogue. In general, it is extremely difficult to imagine Bart outside the constant polemic with his reader, moreover, he himself is always internally polemical, his very thought cannot exist outside the atmosphere of the “eternal agony”, where the lively immediacy of self-expression is combined with Gallic wit, and even cunning, and on everyone bears the imprint of a certain publicity of public speaking. Even in those passages that at first glance appear as lyrical passages of intimate self-deepening, the spirit of the agora, the intellectual arena, is inexplicably felt.

I do not mean at all that Barth's texts are easy reading (unless, of course, they are compared with Derrida's texts, the complexity of which, among other things, is due to the predominance of philosophical problems and terminology - all comparisons are relative), just their great attachment to the literary and social specifics, to the prevailing topic of the day, provided him with a more direct access to the literary audience. As a result, the latter's acquaintance with many concepts, concepts and ideas of post-structuralism - the same Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva and others - went through Barth, and a touch of Barth's reception of post-structuralist ideas is clearly visible in the works of practicing post-structuralist critics, especially at the initial stage of the formation of this movement.

Barthes formulated almost all the main explicit and implicit provisions of post-structuralist critical thinking, creating a whole set of key expressions and phrases or giving previously used terms their post-structuralist meaning: "writers / writers", "writing", "zero degree of writing", "combatism", formulated them by analogy with "iconoclasm", "echo chamber", "death of the author", "reality effect" and many others. He picked up and developed the Lacanian and linguistic concepts of the splitting of the "I", Derridean's criticism of the structure of any text, the Derridean-Christian interpretation of artistic communication. The classic definition of intertext and intertextuality also belongs to Barth.

Although at the same time he did not create either an integral system or a clear terminological apparatus, leaving all his ideas in a rather disturbed state, which actually allows critics of various orientations to draw conclusions from his legacy, sometimes of a completely opposite nature. In particular, Michael Moriarty in one of the notes, speaking, it would seem, about one of the main provisions of Barth's theory, notes that "the difference between text and work should not be given that conceptual rigor from which Barth tries to stay away" (323, p. 231). In addition, Barthes reacted very vividly to new impulses of thought, "connecting" to them his argumentation, based on a huge variety of information gleaned from various fields of knowledge.

In order not to be unfounded, we give a few examples. On the pages of Tel Kel, there were long heated discussions about the theoretical foundations for distinguishing between readable and unreadable literature, but it was Barthes who gave that classic explanation of the relationship between “readable” and “rewritten” (lisible/scriptible), which was picked up by post-structuralist criticism as Barthes’s definition of difference. between realistic (as well as mass, trivial) and modernist literature.

"Aesthetic Plausibility", "Doxa"

Michael Moriarty, summing up those features in Barthes's theoretical reflection on "aesthetic plausibility" (le vraisemblable esthetique) as an outwardly meaningless description, cluttered with useless details of everyday life, where the interpretation of the plausible coincides with the point of view of "traditional rhetoric", which asserted that "plausible is what corresponds to public opinion - doxa (doxa) ”(Bart, 73, p. 22), writes:“ Barth follows Aristotle to the extent that he accepts his distinction between those areas where knowledge is possible (scientific - I. I.) and those spheres where opinion inevitably dominates, such as law and politics” (323, p. 111). It is not strict proof that operates here, but “only the factor of persuading the audience. Belief is based not on scientific truth, but on plausibility: what is plausible is simply what the public believes to be true. Both scientific and rhetorical discourse resort to proofs: but if the proofs of the former are based on axioms, and therefore are certain, then the proofs of the latter are based on general assumptions and are thus no more than plausible. And this concept of the plausible is transferred from life to literature and becomes the basis of common sense judgments about characters and plots as “life-like” or vice versa” (ibid.).

Barthes (Moriarty believes) brings his own interpretation of this problem: “He does not so much accept the authority of verisimilitude as justified in certain areas, but is simply outraged by it. “Believable” stories (based on generally accepted psychological categories, actually literary in their origin) turn out to be the source material for legal sentences: the doxa sentences Dominici to death” (ibid., p. 111). Barthes repeatedly returned to the case of Gaston Dominici, sentenced to death for murder in 1955, which he analyzed in detail in his essay "Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature" (83, pp. 50-53). How fervently Barthes fought the concept of plausibility as early as 1955, i.e., in fact, in his pre-structuralist period, can be felt by the passion of his invective in another article, "Literature and Mino Drouet": "This is another example of the illusory nature of that police science , which so zealously proved itself in the case of old Dominici: relying entirely on tyranny credibility, it develops something like a truth closed in itself, diligently dissociating itself both from the real accused and from the real problem; any investigation of this kind is to reduce everything to the postulates that we ourselves put forward: in order to be found guilty, old Dominici had to fit into the “psychological” image that the prosecutor general had in advance, to combine, as if by magic, with the idea of ​​​​the criminal that the assessors had, to turn into a scapegoat, because credibility is nothing else than the readiness of the accused to be like his own judges” (quoted from G. Kosikov’s translation, 10, pp. 48–49).

To avoid the temptation of parallels with the domestic realities of today in a country where the traditions of the Shemyakin court have been preserved in an imperishable integrity, let us return to the interrupted quotation from Moriarty, describing the course of reasoning of the French literary publicist: “Doxa absorbs all the negative values ​​that belong to the concept of myth. What the masses of people consider to be true is not just "truth" accepted only in certain areas of activity, including literature: it is what the bourgeoisie wants to make us believe and what the petty bourgeoisie wants to believe and what the working class it remains only to believe” (323, p. 111). How can one not recall how contemptuously Barthes characterized doxa in his book Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (1975): “‘Doxa’ is public Opinion, the Spirit of the majority, the petty-bourgeois Consensus, the Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice” (85, p. 51 ).

The interpretation of the idea of ​​"death of the author" shared by structuralism and post-structuralism had the same fate. Who just did not write about it? And Foucault, and Lacan, and Derrida, and their numerous followers in the USA and Great Britain, however, it was in the interpretation of Barthes that it became a “common place”, a “topos” of post-structuralist and deconstructivist thought. It is curious to note that although the article “Death of the Author” appeared in 1968 (10), Moriarty considers it evidence of Barth’s transition to post-structuralist positions: “Death of the Author is in a certain sense the culmination of Barth’s critique of the ideology of the Institute of Literature with its two main supports: mimesis and author. However, in its style and conceptualization of the status of writing and theory, it clearly marks a break with the structuralist phase” (323, p. 102).

"Text Analysis"

As noted above, the first version of deconstructivist analysis in the proper sense of the word, proposed by Barthes, was the so-called text analysis, where the researcher shifts the focus of his scientific interests from the problem of "work" as a whole with a stable structure, to the mobility of the text as a process of "structuring": "Text analysis does not aim description structure of the work; the task is seen not in registering a certain stable structure, but rather in producing a mobile structuring of the text (a structuring that changes throughout history), penetrating into the semantic volume of the work, into the process meaning, Textual analysis does not seek to find out what determines a given text, taken as a whole as a consequence of a particular cause; the goal is rather to see how the text explodes and dissipates in the intertextual space ... Our task: to try to capture and classify (in no way without claiming to be rigorous) by no means all the meanings of the text (this would be impossible, since the text is infinitely open to infinity: no reader, no subject, no science is able to stop the movement of the text), but rather those forms, those codes through which the emergence of text meanings. We will trace ways of making sense. We do not set ourselves the task of finding the only one meaning, not even one of the possible meanings of the text... Our goal is to think, imagine, experience the multiplicity of the text, the openness of the signification process” (quoted in the translation of S. Kozlov, 10, pp. 425–426).

In essence, the entire Barthian concept of textual analysis is a literary reworking of the theories of text, language, and structure by Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze. Barthes not so much even summed up and revealed the literary potential contained in them (they themselves took care of this enough), but clearly demonstrated what far-reaching consequences they entail. In the late Barthes, paradoxically, both relapses of structural thinking and super-radical conclusions of post-structuralist theoretical "relativism" are combined, which allowed him, so to speak, not only to predict some features of the critical mentality of post-structuralist and postmodernist literary criticism of the second half of the 80s - early 90s years, but also the techniques of postmodern writing. Here Barth was clearly "ahead of his time."

However, if he got ahead of anything, it was the mainstream of American deconstructivism: if you turn to writers (J. Fowles, T. Pynchon, R. Federman, etc.), it immediately catches your eye how often the name of Bart flashes in their thoughts about literature. The fact that Barthes's influence on literary practice went beyond the reflexed moments of his theory, which had already been fundamentally mastered by the deconstructivist doctrine and included in its canon, indicates that even in the postmodern period, when artists' attention to theory is clearly suffering from excessive redundancy, writers tend to turn to first of all, to what suits them best in their practical literary work. And the attractiveness of Barthes lies precisely in the fact that in his concepts he took into account not only the theoretical experience of his colleagues, but also the literary experience of the latest French avant-garde. And in interpreting it, he turned out to be more influential than Kristeva as the theorist of the "new new novel."

"S / Z" - French version of deconstruction

The most significant example of Barth's proposed textual analysis is his essay "S/Z" (1970). It is noteworthy that in terms of its volume this work is approximately six times larger than the Balzac novel “Sarrasin” analyzed in it. According to the American researcher W. Leitch, Barthes "gave an uncommonly banal realistic story an unusually fruitful interpretation" (294, p. 198). Let us leave Leitch's assessment of Balzac's "Sarrazin" to Leitch's conscience, since it is by no means a matter of the merits or demerits of the work in question: here the paths of the writer and criticism have diverged so far that truly angelic tolerance and condescension is required to recognize the legitimacy of the principle of "non-literal interpretation".

Therefore, there is nothing left but to consider this analysis of Barthes according to his own laws - those that he established for himself and tried to implement. And having taken his position, we cannot but pay tribute to the virtuosity of analysis, literary intuition and the brilliance of associative outrageousness with which he expresses his thoughts. It is not for nothing that S/Z enjoys well-deserved recognition among post-structuralists as a "masterpiece of modern criticism" (W. Leitch, 294, p. 198). True, the followers of this type of analysis, who strictly adhere to such a methodology, can literally be counted on the fingers, because fulfilling all its requirements is a rather exhausting task. Barthes very soon abandoned it himself, finally moving into the sphere of free flight of essayism, not burdened by the strict rules of scientific and logical conclusion.

In many ways, it is a striking mixture of structuralist techniques and post-structuralist ideas. First of all, the discrepancy is striking (whether it was conscious or unconscious, it is rather difficult to say, given Barthes's general disposition towards the theoretical ludus serius) between the desire for structuralist classificatoryness and constantly undermining its statements that one should not accept the rules he himself introduces and restrictions are too severe. In other words, "S/Z" balances on the very edge of the line between the manie classlcatrice of structuralism and the demence fragmentatrice of poststructuralism.

In its genre, "S/Z" is primarily a systematized (as far as the concept of strict systemicity is applicable to Barth) commentary, functioning on four levels. First, the researcher divided the text into 561 "lexia" - the minimum unit of the Balzac text, acceptable for the proposed analysis of its connotative meaning. Secondly, the critic introduces 5 codes - cultural, hermeneutic, symbolic, semitic and pro-airetic or narrative - intended to "explain" the connotations of the lexicons. Thirdly, 93 micro-essays are added to this - lyrical-philosophical and literary-critical reasoning, not always directly related to the analyzed material. And, finally, two appendices, the first of which presents the text of the novel itself, and the second sums up the main topics covered in the microessay - a kind of summarizing conclusion.

The classifier madness of Barth's codes

We will not understand the specifics of Barthes's textual analysis and the key concept of text for him, if we do not first try to understand one of the main methods of parsing a work - in Barthes' interpretation of the concept of a code, which is a purely structuralist concept of a set of rules or restrictions that ensure the communicative functioning of any sign, including, of course, the language system. How are these rules presented in Bart's "S/Z"?

“We summarize them in order of appearance, without trying to arrange them according to their importance. By a hermeneutic code we mean the various formal terms by which the riddle of narration can be outlined, suggested, formulated, supported, and finally solved (these terms will not always appear explicitly, although they will often be repeated, but they will not appear in any or in a clear order). As for the semes, we will simply point them out - not trying, in other words, to associate them with a character (or a place and an object) or organize them in such a way that they form a single thematic group; we will allow them to be unstable, diffuse, a property characteristic of the flickering of dust particles, the flickering of meaning. Moreover, we refrain from structuring the symbolic grouping; this is the place for polysemy and reversibility; the main task is always to demonstrate that this semantic field can be considered from any number of points of view, in order to thereby increase the depth and problematics of its mystery. Actions (terms of a pro-airetic code) can break down into various chains of sequences, indicated only by their simple enumeration, since a pro-airetic sequence can never be anything other than the result of a trick, a performance of reading ... Finally, cultural codes are referential links to a science or body of knowledge; in drawing attention to them, we simply indicate the type of knowledge (physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical, etc.) to which we refer, without going so far as to create (or recreate) the culture that they reflect” (89, pp. 26–27).

First of all, the fuzziness in the definition of the codes themselves is striking - obviously, Barthes himself felt this and in the Textual Analysis of a Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe revised, albeit slightly, the scheme of codes proposed in C / Z. She took on this form:

Cultural code with its numerous divisions (scientific, rhetorical, chronological, socio-historical); “Knowledge as a body of rules worked out by society is the reference of this code” (quoted in the translation by S. Kozlov, 10, p. 456).

Communication code, or addressing, which "certainly does not cover everything meaning, unfolding in the text. The word "communication" here refers only to those relations to which the text gives form. appeal to the addressee"(ibid.). In fact, the "communicative code" took the place of the semitic, or connotative code that fell out during the final enumeration; although Barthes throughout the analysis of the novel turns to the interpretation of connotations, he correlates them with other codes, mainly cultural and symbolic.

The symbolic code, here called "field" ("field" is a less rigid concept than "code") and, in relation to this novel, is summarized as follows:

"The symbolic framework of Poe's short story consists in breaking the taboo on Death" (ibid.).

“The action code, or actional code, supports the plot framework of the novel: the actions or statements that denotate them are organized into chains” (ibid.).

And, finally, 5) "The Riddle Code", otherwise called "enigmatic", or "hermeneutic".

At the same time, the very form in which, according to Barthes, the meaning of any story exists, is an interweaving of various voices and codes; it is characterized by "discontinuity of action", its constant "interruption" with other meanings, creating "reader's impatience".

It is not difficult to see in Barth's interpretation of the concept of "code" an intention to abandon its strict definition: "The word "code" itself should not be understood here in the strict, scientific sense of the term. We call codes simply associative fields, supertextual organization of meanings that impose an idea of ​​a certain structure; code, as we understand it, belongs mainly to the realm of culture: codes are certain types already seen, already read, already done; the code is the concrete form of this ‘already’ which constitutes all writing” (ibid., pp. 455–456).

One gets the impression that Barthes introduces the concept of "code" only in order to subject it to that operation, which is called "deconstruction": "We have listed the codes that passed through the fragments we analyzed. We consciously shy away from a more detailed structuring of each code, we do not try to distribute the elements of each code according to some logical or semiological scheme; the fact is that the codes are important for us only as starting points of "already read", as springboards for intertextuality: not only does the code’s “disarrangement” not contradict structure (the common opinion is that life, imagination, intuition, disorder contradict systematicity, rationality), but, on the contrary, is an integral part of the process structures, It is this “pulling the text into strings” that makes the difference between structure (the object of structural analysis in the proper sense of the word) and structuration (the object of textual analysis, an example of which we tried to demonstrate) ”(ibid., p. 459).

According to Leitch, Barthes from the very beginning "frankly played" with codes: using them, he simultaneously disavows them: he immediately expresses doubts about their analytical suitability and semantic acceptability (to put it in terms accepted in post-structuralist circles, he refuses them " validity"); Obviously, one can agree with Leitch on this.

Two principles of text analysis

We should pay attention to two more provisions summing up the textual analysis of Poe's story. For Barthes, of course, there is no doubt that this work is, in his terminology, a “classical”, that is, a realistic story, although he interpreted it as a modernist novella, or, to be more correct, subjected it to an “avant-garde” interpretation, revealing in it (or attributing to it) features common with the avant-garde, and, at the same time, pointing out its differences from the latter. This difference is due to the existence of two structural principles that manifest themselves differently in avant-garde and classical prose:

a) the principle of "curvature" and b) the principle of "irreversibility". The curvature correlates with the so-called “floating microstructure”, which creates “not a logical object, but expectation and resolution of expectation” (ibid., p. 460), and below this “floating microstructure” is already called “structuration”, which more accurately corresponds to its inherent inevitable instability due to the reader’s uncertainty as to which code this or that phrase refers to: “As we have seen, in Poe’s short story, the same phrase very often refers to two simultaneously acting codes, and it is impossible to decide which of them is “true” (for example , scientific code and symbolic code): a necessary property of a story that has reached the level of a text is that it dooms us to irresolvable choice between codes” (ibid., p. 461). Consequently, the "first principle" brings Poe's classical text closer to the avant-garde one.

The second principle - the “principle of irreversibility” counteracts it: “in a classic, readable story (such is Poe’s story), there are two codes that support the vector orientation of structuring: this is an actional code (based on logical-temporal ordering) and a Riddle code (the question is crowned with an answer) ; this creates the irreversibility of the story” (ibid., p. 460). From this characterization of non-modernist classics, Barthes draws a very remarkable conclusion about modern literature: “As you can see, it is precisely this principle that today’s literary practice encroaches on: the avant-garde (to use the usual term for convenience) tries to make the text partially reversible, to expel the logical-temporal basis from the text. , he aims his blow at empiricism(logic of behavior, action code) and on the truth(riddle code)" (ibid.).

All these arguments lead Bart to the main thesis of the article - to the thesis about the fundamental undecidability of choice, which the reader finds himself in front of: present many codes, many voices, and none of them is preferred. Writing consists in this loss of the starting point, the loss of the first impulse, the motive, instead of all this, a certain volume of indeterminations or overdeterminations is born: this volume is meaning. Writing appears precisely at the moment when speech stops, that is, at the second from which we can no longer determine who says but we can only state: something is said here"(ibid., p. 461)

Actually, this last paragraph of the article contains the germ of all later deconstructivist criticism. Here is given a purely literary concretization of Derrida's principle of unsolvability, in its textual manifestation understood as a multi-vector, multi-directional "power attraction of code fields". Barthes' assertion that writing appears only at the moment when it acquires anonymity, when it becomes irrelevant or impossible to determine "who is speaking", and the intertextual principle comes first, also translates Derrida's philosophical reasoning about the loss of the "first impulse", the first principle, into the literary plane. as the conditions of writing, i.e., literature.

"Structure/Text"

Harari believes that the concept of the text in Barthes, as in Derrida, became the area where “the Barthian critical mutation occurred. This mutation represents a transition from the notion of a work as a structure, the functioning of which is explained, to a theory of the text as the productivity of language and the generation of meaning” (368, p. 38). From Harari's point of view, criticism of Barth's structural analysis was primarily directed against the concept of "cloture" - the closedness, closeness of the text, i.e., the formalized completeness of the statement. In his 1971 work "Changing the Object Itself" (75), Barthes, according to Harari, openly changed and reoriented the purpose of his criticism: he doubted the existence of a model according to whose rules meaning is generated, i.e. he questioned the very structure of the sign. Now “the very idea of ​​a sign must be undermined: the question now is not about discovering a latent meaning, characterization or narrative, but about splitting the very representation of meaning; not about changing or purifying symbols, but about calling the symbolic itself” (meaning the symbolic order of Lacan - I.I.) (ibid., pp. 614–615).

According to Harari, Barthes and Derrida were the first to face the problem of the sign and the final, integral design of meaning (the same question of cloture), caused by the consequences of rethinking the concept of “text” in the modern spirit. If for the early Barthes “narrative is a big sentence”, then for the later one “the phrase ceases to be a model of the text” (quoted from the translation of G. Kosikov, 10, p. 466): “First of all, the text destroys any metalanguage, and that is why it and is a text: there is no voice of Science, Law, Social Institute, the sound of which could be heard over voice the text itself. Further, the text unconditionally, without fear of contradictions, destroys its own discursive, sociolinguistic belonging to its “genre”); the text is “a comic that does not cause laughter”, it is an irony devoid of contagious power, a jubilation in which no soul or mystical beginning is invested (Sarduy), the text is an unquoted quotation. Finally, the text, if desired, is able to rebel even against the canonical structures of the language itself (Sollers) - both against its vocabulary (an abundance of neologisms, compound words, transliterations) and against syntax (there is no longer a logical cell of the language - phrases) "(ibid. , p. 486).

Here Harari sees the beginning of Barthes' undermining of the classical notion of the work - henceforth the text has come to mean "a methodological hypothesis which, as a strategy, has the advantage of breaking down the traditional distinction between reading and writing. The problem was to change the level at which the literary object was perceived. The fundamental task of "S/Z" is to discover in Balzac's work, in all respects ordinary, conventional, the "text" as a hypothesis and with its help "to radicalize our perception of the literary object" (368, p. 39).

In C/3, which was being written at the same time as From Work to Text, is an attempt, as Harari writes, "to illustrate in practice the methodological hypotheses proposed in this essay" (ibid.). Barthes accomplishes this task by practically rewriting Balzac's "Sarrazine" in such a way as to "block the accepted distinctions between writing/reading, uniting them within the framework of a single activity" (ibid.): some large ensemble, to a finite structure” (Bart, S/Z, 89, p. 12).

Barthes' extensive commentary on this small novella, Harari writes, firstly transforms a conventional work into a text that unfolds as linguistic and semiotic material, and secondly, causes a change in our traditional understanding of the production of meaning; hence the new conception of the text as "self-generated productivity" or "text productivity" (368, p. 39).

Accordingly, “From Work to Text” can, following Harari, be considered as an attempt to create a “theory” of the changing perception of a “literary object”, which is no longer an object as such and which passes from the state of “formal integral, organic whole to the state of “methodological field”, a concept that presupposes the concept of activity, generation and transformation” (ibid., p. 39). Harari notes that only a fundamental change in "traditional methods of knowledge" made it possible to give birth to this new concept of the text as "an indefinite field in a permanent metamorphosis" (ibid., p. 40), where "sense is an eternal stream and where the author - or all only a product of a given text or its “guest”, and by no means its creator” (ibid.).

So, in Barth's textual analysis, we are dealing with the theoretical practice of blurring the concept of "code": we have before us nothing but a transitional stage of theoretical reflection from structuralism to poststructuralism.

But in general, the activity of almost the entire left-wing radical wing of French post-structuralism turned out to be transitional (if we take the most famous names, then Kristeva, Deleuze, and many former adherents of the Tel Kel group will be among them). Of course, in this transition one can also see one of the stages in the development of poststructuralism proper.

Barthes was so defiantly sloppy with the definition of codes that in the subsequent post-structuralist literature one rarely finds their practical application for the needs of analysis. Moreover, the very notion of a code, in the eyes of many, if not most, of the later deconstructivists was too directly linked to the structuralist inventory. Bart had already doubted that the code is a set of clear rules. Later, when exceptions to all rules began to be enthusiastically looked for, which turned into a favorite practice of deconstructivists, the code began to be regarded as a dubious concept from a theoretical point of view and fell out of use.

Barthes subsequently returned to his technique of textual analysis several times, but he was already fascinated by new ideas. It can be said that to some extent he lost his taste for "foreign" works of art; personal co- or simply feeling about literature, or even without a direct connection with it, became the center of his reasoning: he turned into an essayist of pure water, into a prophet of the pleasure of reading, which, in the spirit of the time, received a “theoretical-erotic” coloring. The Pleasure of the Text (1973) (84), Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (1975) (85), Fragments of a Love Discourse (1977) (80) and the somewhat stand-alone Camera Lucida: Notes on Photography (1980) (74), taken together, create the image of Barthes, when, for all his egocentric self-absorption in purely personal reflections on his individual perception, he nonetheless formulated many concepts that formed the basis of the conceptual representations of late post-structuralism.

Erotic text

Here he develops the concept of an "erotic textual body" - a verbal construct created by a double analogy: the text as a body and the body as a text: "Does the text have human forms, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but our erotic body” (84, p. 72). At the same time, Bart openly declares his distrust of science, reproaching it for impassivity, and tries to avoid this with the help of an “erotic attitude” to the text under study (80, p. 164), emphasizing that “the pleasure of the text is the moment when my body starts to follow its own thoughts; after all, my body does not have the same thoughts as mine” (quoted from the translation of G. Kosikov, 10, p. 474).

As we have already seen, discussions about the "erotic body" in relation to the problems of literature or text were a topos - a common place in French literary post-structuralism. In French theoretical thought, the mythologeme of the body was also previously very significant: suffice it to recall Merleau-Ponty, who argued that the human body is the “center of meaning” and the instrument of meanings that the world is endowed with (315). What Barthes and Kristeva posit as the erotic body is in fact a curious metamorphosis of the "transcendental ego" into a "transcendental erotic body" which is just as impersonal, despite all Kristeva's attempts to "root" it in the mother's or child's body, as is Cartesian-Husserlian transcendental ego.

Perhaps that is why Barthes' most significant contribution to the development of poststructuralism and deconstructivism was not so much his concept of textual analysis as his latest work. It was in these works that that tone was created, that emotional and psychological attitude towards the perception of literature, which in its spirit is purely post-structuralist and which in many respects contributed to the special transformation of the critical mentality that gave rise to the deconstructivist generation of literary critics.

"Text Pleasure / Text Pleasure"

It is thanks to these works that post-structuralist terminology has been enriched. more one pair of very popular concepts: “text-pleasure / text-pleasure”. Although here I graphically presented them as a two-term opposition, this is nothing more than a convention that pays tribute to the structuralist mode of presentation, because in fact they largely overlap each other, or rather, are inseparable from each other as two eternal companions of the reader, which Barthes himself admits with discouraging frankness, so typical of him: “in any case, there will always be room for uncertainty” (quoted in the translation of G. Kosikov, 10, p. 464). Nevertheless, in the tradition of French literary post-structuralism, a line was quite clearly established between them, comprehended as the opposition of lisible / illisible, i.e., the opposition of traditional, classical and avant-garde, modernist literature (in Barthes, this opposition was more often found in the lisible / scriptible formula), to which Barthes gave erotic overtones typical of his late style: “A pleasure text is a text that brings satisfaction, fills us without a trace, causes euphoria; it comes from culture, does not break with it and is connected with practice comfortable reading. A text-pleasure is a text that causes a feeling of loss, discomfort (sometimes reaching sadness); it shakes the reader's historical, cultural, psychological foundations, his habitual tastes, values, memories, causes a crisis in his relationship with the language” (ibid., p. 471).

Ultimately, there are two ways of reading: the first one takes you straight through “through the climaxes of the intrigue; this method takes into account only the length of the text and does not pay any attention to the functioning of the language itself” (ibid., pp. 469–470; the work of Jules Verne is given as an example); the second way of reading “encourages you to savor every word, as if to cling, to cling to the text; it really requires diligence, enthusiasm ... with such reading, we are no longer captivated by the volume (in the logical sense of the word) of the text, which is stratified into many truths, but by the layering of the very act of signification” (ibid., p. 470). Naturally, such reading also requires a special reader: “in order to read modern authors, one must not swallow, not devour books, but reverently taste, gently savor the text, one must regain the leisure and privilege of readers of bygone times - to become aristocratic readers" (highlighted by the author - I.I.)(ibid.).

Before us is already a completely deconstructivist attitude to the “undecidability” of the semantic certainty of the text and the related fundamental “undecidability” of the reader’s choice in front of the semantic prospects of the text that have opened up to him, the reader acting as not a “consumer, but a producer of the text” (Bart, 89, p. p. 10): “That is why the reader is anachronistic, trying to keep both of these texts in his field of vision, and in his hands - both the reins of pleasure and the reins of pleasure; for in this way he simultaneously (and not without internal contradiction) is involved both in culture with its deepest hedonism (freely penetrating into it under the guise of the “art of living”, which, in particular, was taught by old books), and in its destruction: he experiences joy from the stability of his own self (this is his pleasure) and at the same time strives for his death (this is his pleasure). This is a doubly split, doubly perverted subject” (10, pp. 471–472).

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