Stowaway

The Writerly Text: Part 1

on 1 February 2008 at about 10:41

This item was originally posted on CEMP's Interactive Media Portal on 01 February, 2008.

Synopsis of the BAIMP1 lecture on ‘The Writerly Text’ – part 1

This lecture is an exploration of the notion of the ‘writerly text’. The readerly and writerly texts were proposed by Roland Barthes – a critic and theorist who was concerned – as have we in the first few weeks of the course – with understanding the semiological basis of how communication works, and the role ideology (Barthes might say ‘mythology’) plays in the circulation and construction of meaning.

Expertise

We began by thinking about expertise. Here’s one of my favourite slides, a photograph by Leo Reynolds:

Ascent of Man

I challenged you by arguing that, since I’m an expert in a particular field (being a lecturer in a university presumably denotes my expertise), then what I have to say about that field is better, and more important, than what you, as students, might have to say. And of course, year after year, albeit with some reservations, you agree, instead of telling me to go screw myself. After all, why else would you pay fees?

So that’s me, there, at the front of the evolutionary curve with my mortarboard, standing at my lecturn. And in the lecture you mostly placed yourselves a bit further back in the queue, no longer monkey-like, having managed to stand up straight, but not yet qualified to hold forth at the lecturn. It is a wonder of our educational system that we manage to encourage such submission and servitude in our young people.

Preferred readings

What experts do is to produce preferred readings – sometimes called ‘dominant readings’. Here’s a picture produced by Badoak for the last unit, Images:

Badoak's image

We asked Badoak to restrain any urges to tell us what he was trying to communicate with this image while we tried to analyse it ourselves. We had a variety of responses – it produced many different ‘readings’. I proposed a reading – that the image has a narrative arc which moves as it were from bottom to top: bird tracks at the bottom are mimicked by artificial, but otherwise meaningless marks, but as we look higher up the image, we see these marks begin to appear coherent, recognisable as human symbols; right in the top corner, we see 0s and 1s – binary notation. All the way up the picture, these ‘symbols’ are accompanied by human footprints – indexical signs of human presence. The image thereby communicates a narrative about human beings, their development of complexity over their evolution: the closeness to – and yet the ‘alienness’ from – nature, that human culture and technology embody. It is a story of eons within a few centimetres.

Badoak confirmed that this reading was what he was trying to achieve: so the author’s intention in this image was susceptible to interpretation by an informed reader. I found and identified the dominant reading of this image. This dominant reading was not universally shared amongst all of us though. Badoak confirmed that this was not disappointing – an author may not wish to be obvious, he might prefer for some work to be necessary to uncover dominant readings – after all without work, where is the art? The work of interpretation is what informed experts do.

Expert analysis

The expert might expound at length on the ways in which this image ‘produces’ meaning: it uses various signs, which in semiotic terms are indeces, icons and symbols: the footprints and bird-tracks are indexical – signs which are direct evidence of the ‘signified’; the artificial, mimicked marks which resemble the bird-tracks, but which are clearly copies, rather than indices, are iconic signs – they resemble the bird-tracks, and signify birds only to the extent that the mimickry has some kind of fidelity; and finally, the heiroglyphic and binary notation are symbolic signs – they signify things human beings recognise only because we have somehow grown to share understanding of these signs through custom and convention. Symbolic signs are arbitrary – which is to say that they ‘have meaning’ only through convention, not through physical relationship or resemblence.

Note, though, that we do not need to understand what the heiroglyphs and binary notation mean: this image plays on the connotations they carry, rather than what they denote; we do not know, or very much care, which words or numbers are represented here – rather they stand for something else – the very complexity of symbolic meaning which human beings utilise – so this image harnesses not only semiotic signs, but ‘figures of speech’ too: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – symbolic representations of how humans think. The binary ‘stands for’ advanced civilsation; the footprints ‘stand for’ the constant presence of human beings throughout the chronological story of the image. The image, in fact, is highly reflexive, since it uses signs to signify something about the very signs themselves. The co-evolution of the human and the sign are examined in the only way humans can examine them – through signs.

The expert utilises these specialised examples of vocabulary (sign, signifier, signified, index, icon, symbol, connotation, denotation, reflexivity, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche) in order to more precisely provide evidence for the preferred, or dominant reading; we need only to throw in ‘genre’ and ‘juxtaposition’ and we might have a whole academic essay on our hands.

Red Riding Hood

Let’s look at another example of an image. Prior to this lecture, you explored how to adapt the fairy-tale of Little Red Riding Hood by using other adaptations as a starting point. In the lecture we looked at this image, Little Red Riding Hood by John Wehr:

Little Red Riding Hood - John Wehr

Some of you adapted the story based on this image as Red Riding Hoodie – a (carnivalesque!) inversion of the story, where Red Riding Hood is a dangerous, disaffected youth, and the wolf had better watch out. How is it that you were able to create such a subversive interpretation of the story? Where has the dominant reading in this image gone?

Look at the construction of the image: we assume it is night; is the face lit by a streetlamp? Look at the cropping: is Red Riding Hood moving? what is he looking at? what is he thinking? what is off-shot? These contextual necessities are absent, and so the meanings we want to ascribe in this image are absent – left to our imagination. The inscrutability of this youth’s face is just the starting point for constructing meanings – and the expert can use all the vocabulary they like, but cannot identify a dominant reading.

These imposed meanings – in this case the hoodie – come from somewhere in our imaginations, and are informed by our ideological concerns. What is a hoodie, with all its connotations, if not an idea we circulate, attaching implications to it as it goes? Where do those implications come from? Those implications are just snippets of our ideological hinterland which inform how we interpret the world.

Seeds of meaning

Here’s a famous phrase:

CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME

In the session, some of the resonances or meanings we coaxed from this phrase, on its own, included the archaic spelling of ‘child’ and the syntax (verb at the end of the sentence) which implied a kind of poetic discourse. The ‘dark tower’ connoted a sense of the Gothic, perhaps. These ‘hooks’ or ‘clues’ start to push us towards constructing or imagining possible stories, forms and genres which we might generate from this short phrase.

In fact, it is a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear, a fragment spoken by Edgar who is disguised as mad Tom. From this fragment, Robert Browning later constructed a poem in 1855 – from just a tiny fragment of meaning, Browning was inspired to write an allegory of knightly quest. From a few ‘seeds’ the creative imagination produces and transforms meaning.

Or consider this fragment:

COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY

We identified paradoxes and oxymorons here – mutually exclusive words joined together. The sentence is grammatically and syntactically correct, but implies nonsense, impossibility and paradox.

Actually, this phrase was used as an example by Noam Chomsky as part of his exploration of the relationship between language and human nature, and as an illustration of how meaning is created through more than simply grammar or syntax, since we can create syntactically correct sentences which are literally meaningless. (Incidentally, though not of direct relevance here, Chomsky argues that the ability to create syntactical structures necessary for language are hard-wired into human biology – a view shared to some extent by anthropological psychologist Steven Pinker).

Having seen Chomsky’s example, some people considered it as a throwing down of the gauntlet, and set about creating texts in which such a sentence, apparently absent of any possible meaning, would actually make sense. Here’s one of their efforts:

Behold the pent-up power of the winter tree;
Leafless it stands, in lifeless slumber.
Yet its very resting is revival and renewal:
Inside the dark gnarled world of trunk and roots,
Cradled in the chemistry of cell and sap,
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
In deep and dedicated doormancy,
Concentrating, conserving, constructing:
Knowing, by some ancient quantum law
Of chlorophyll and sun
That come the sudden surge of spring,
Dreams become reality, and ideas action.

Bryan O. Wright

See this archived thread to see a few more examples of how people explored the prompts of their imaginations, fed with just an apparently dry and meaningless piece of academic cruft.

The instability of meaning

These examples illustrate how, when given the opportunity, the human imagination expresses enormous creativity. The power of the imagination allows us to create and produce meanings, which are simply not present, or intended, by an author. Meaning is not stable and fixed, it is produced, created and constructed, and it mutates under the pressure of usage by creative human imaginations. Indeed, reading any kind of text, whether this text you read now, or fragments of text such as Chomsky’s nonsense phrase, is not a passive, but an active activity.

Barthes’ Death of the Author

So: we must re-examine the relationship between reader and author: what an author ‘intends’, the meaning that we might call the ‘dominant’ reading, is not as easy to pin down as we might at first have thought. Barthes’ important essay The Death of the Author (1977), addresses this issue – let’s see what he has to say.

“The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions…”

So Barthes begins by framing the business of understanding culture as centred ‘tyranically’ around the author. The author has historically been the main focus of interpretation. This is borne out by a long tradition in academic fields such as English Literature, in which the ‘correct’ interpretation of a text is approached more closely by knowing more about the author and their biography. Or in art, the work of someone like Vincent Van Gogh can only be properly appreciated by understanding the contingent details of his life – the severed ear, the mental illness, the sojourn in Brixton, etc. Barthes continues:

“… there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism […] is today undermined along with the Author.”

Hand in hand with the concentration on the author – and the ever increasing detail one must know of the author’s life in order to ‘properly’ interpret the author’s work – comes the ‘reign of the Critic’, or the pre-eminence of the ‘expert’. Experts are the repositories of correct interpretations, because they are the ones who have taken the trouble to discover the ‘true’, intended meaning of the author’s text. Barthes also states that these privileges that have been granted the author and the critic are being eroded and ‘undermined’. How so?

Well… a detour into the details of post-structuralist thought is beyond the scope of this lecture. Suffice to say that with the advent of postmodernist thought, and the dissolution of faith in ‘absolute’ values, which require an ultimate author (say, a God), notions of truth, and the importance of ‘intention’ have come to be undermined. Barthes is applying his understanding of a general shift in cultural thought to a specific idea about meaning – that shift in cultural thought which occurs as modernism gives way to postmodernism, structuralism gives way to post-structuralism, and reason and concrete ‘evidence’ give way to desire and ‘contingency’.

Anyway: let’s continue with Barthes on the role of the reader.

“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination […] we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Don’t look for ‘unity’ and meaning in the intentions of the author: meaning can only be created by the reader. The emphasis that we’ve seen on the dominant reading is essentially vain. It is part and parcel of the vanity of the author, seeking to control their reputation with posterity through their memoirs and diaries, and it is an expression of the critic’s desire to be legitimate – the business of academia and the ‘cultural industry’ ensuring that they are still important and necessary. After all, without experts, surely we’d sink into a morass of dumbed-down ignorance and anarchy?

Actually, Barthes argues, the reader creates meaning, not the author, and the reader is potentially infinitely varied: not every reader is an expert. So are non-expert readings less valid? Is an expert’s reading more valid? What is the point, or need, for such elitism? Is it anything but elitism?

Forget the author, Barthes says; who cares where he was living, what he was drinking, who he was seeing, what he was thinking, when he wrote the text? The text is all that exists, and what we bring to the text in our interpretation is what we should care about.

Outside the text

In part two of this lecture, we’ll look in more detail at Barthes’ complex but deeply stimulating book, S/Z in which he first describes the writerly and readerly texts. We’ll also see what relevance these conceptual propositions have to interactive media in particular; ways in which the writerly text can help us to approach many other theoretical models; and we’ll also consider the irony (if you haven’t already spotted it) in someone claiming to have expertise (like me) explaining what Barthes’ text means.

[Original] Comments

Very interesting read Joe. Despite being 40 years on, I think there is still an unfounded pressure for one ultimate meaning to be located within texts, supported by today’s ideology. Think of a school trip to an art gallery, children often are told they cannot appreciate the art unless they consider what the artist was attempting to portray… Would art without the artist’s signiture be more valuable to education? Foucault points out that the author is a ‘socially constructed entity’ (Foucault in Rabinow 1984), as many centuries ago stories and poems were circulated without a name attached. Perhaps if the ‘Author’ was born as a result of society, we will one day choose to acknowledge it’s death, as Barthes has started to suggest.

Your point about expertise is also another interesting discussion. Couldn’t we claim that anyone with the ability to read has an equally worthy opinion? If expertise comes from experience, two people encountering a new text at the same time would have equally valid conclusions about the text’s meaning. Unless we remember that most texts are reliant on other texts (or other signifiers and their meanings), in which case one person may be deemed more skilled at decoding the message, as a result of more exposure to other texts. However, back to the begining, who is to say after the expert has decuded a certain meaning based on prior knowledge, that this is then ‘correct’? The arbitrary connection of signifiers and it’s infinite signifieds, are what make it impossible to deduce that we have the same interpretation as any author has intended. And so the idea of an expert is actually a false phenomena.. Being an ‘expert’, What do you think?

What a fascinating article, thanks Joe

I find the idea of how things aquire “meaning” to be most interesting, along with the notion of the associated value that we give to things.

For example, my guitar is worth nothing, but an identical one once owned by McCartney would be worth a fortune. They may be identical artefacts, but they have been given different associated “meanings”, and hence different values. If you took the two guitars, shuffled them round and showed them to me again, i would have no physical way of knowing which one had “value” and which one didn’t. If we both agreed that it was the one on the left, we could reassign the value.

Meaning in this sense is only present by consensus.

Joe, I stumbled across your article doing a Google search for Red Riding Hood images. I’m writing a screenplay, and as an “author” I was drawn to the context of that image, and in fact ended up reading your entire article. My contribution to the discussion would be about “context” and “relativity”. Language is a growing thing and so therefore is meaning, and relative to who is doing the reading (though when I was at university my lecturers disagreed). The first thing that came to mind on reading your work was: show the image with the footprints and cuneform to an unschooled aboriginal youth in outback Australia and you’ll get a different interpretation to the educated attendees of your university lectures in England (who have been largely screened and certified as being successfully indoctrinated with sufficient doses of dominant meaning). All readings are valid if one values human experience, and has compassion and respect. Expertise is valuable, but not absolute; just as feelings cannot be outweighed by logic – there needs to be a balance, in society and within the individual, between heart and head. That is why ‘art’ is so important. I learnt a lot from your authorship Joe, because you have put in the hard yards. You have been able to summarize and consolidate a lot of information about semiotics that is interesting and useful. Experts help expand the lexicon – I learnt a new word tonight. For that I am grateful. When dealing with experts we need to mindful though of the positions they take – socially, politically, professionally, as well as things like personal motive. In any context where experts emerge, we’d do well to consider a range of “expert” opinions and not only those opinions. We need to be mindful of such things as bias, objectivity, academic rigor, breadth of inquiry, arrogance, manner, etc. Without being paranoid, one should approach anyone presenting themselves as an expert with a questioning attitude, if not a degree of suspicion. Experts can be very dangerous as well as helpful. Having said that Joe, perhaps I read you as somebody who knows a lot about semiotics and human communication, rather than an expert in these fields. And, if you ever come to Melbourne, lets do lunch! Thank you for a wonderful article.

Lecture archive

  • Media & The Body Readings
  • The Use of Theory
  • Play
  • Production - [Critical Media Concepts and Contexts]
  • Narratives: Endlessnesses and Existence
  • Narratives: Endings, Meaning and Morals
  • Narratives: Performers and Players
  • Narratives: Performers and Players
  • Narratives: Familiarity and Strangeness
  • Intro to Media and Participation 2008 - 2009
  • Narratives: Stories and Structures
  • Narratives: Opening and Introductions
  • The Writerly Text: Part 1
  • Media & Participation: Identity
  • Media & Participation: Truth
  • Media & Participation: Citizenship
  • Media & Participation: Culture
  • Ownership of Ideas: Part 2: The History of Copyright
  • Ownership of Ideas: Part 1: The Romantic Author
  • Bournemouth Soundseeing: collaborative authorship
  • Marx's Critique of Capital: 101
  • Key concepts: Ideologies ...a historical view
  • Narrative and Structuralism and the brothers Grimm
  • Intro to Digital Media at BU
  • Small Print

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