Roland Barthes

The starting point of his essay “The Death of the Author” is that language is the one that rules over a work of art and not the author. So to assume that a text represents a meaning that can be deducted from the author’s intention is misleading, a direct connection between the author and the text does not exist because the text itself is a compilation of “unconscious quotes”: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

The death of the author means death of the theory of origin. Originality is put into question: ”a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins”.

Because the text has no ‘intentional’ meaning it can only be perceived as an open field for research and as inter-textual within a network of texts. “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

The author becomes, should be called scriptor, all literature should be called writing and work of art becomes simply a text: “In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law“.

The claims he latter develops even further in his essay “From Work to Text” entered into the agenda of poststructuralism, such as the celebration of liberation from (pha)logocentric axioms like Father, Law, Reason; the polyphony of different language games (Lyotard); the concept of play and jouissance (Derrida, Lyotard): “text is the jubilant celebration of its uncontrollable semantic openness, which constitutes an anarch(isti)c act of subversion against any center of a structure – through history also known as God, Reason, Science, Law”.

One of his latest essays “The centre of the city –the empty centre” can be perceived as an allegory of the condition of postmodern art, as well as critique.

The Implied Order

Claude Levi Strauss

Considered an ‘avatar of structuralism’ he studied culture, as language, as a “system characterized by an internal order of interconnected parts that obey certain rules of operation” (Literary theory, an anthology / edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54). The ‘notion of the implied order’ is central to his work.

Levi Strauss argues that social life on all its levels: economic, political, religious, aesthetic are formulating one significant whole, or system, which can be understood only if one takes all of its parts into consideration. Therefore, the culture and society were seen as a significant totality, and the key aspect of this concept would be the structure itself. According to this conception the society is one significant whole (totality) which rules over its parcels.

“Structure is both like a skeleton and like a genetic code in that that is the principle of stability and coherence in any cultural system” (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54).

After meeting Jakobson in New York during their mutual exile during World War II, Levi-Strauss began to think about culture as a form of communication like language. What was communicated between cultural participants were tokens, like words, that enacted and reproduced the basic assumptions and rules of the culture. In his analysis of kinship systems, Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Levi-Strauss argued that primitive cultures maintain peace between social groups by using women as tokens in marriage. Such inter-familial and inter-tribal marriages function as a form of communication and create personal or family relations that work to diminish the possibility of conflict (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54).

In his detailed structural analysis on myths he transfers the basic linguistic distinction between langue and parole, between synchronic and diachronic into the analysis of mythology. Mythology is the structure as whole, and every separate myth is the single event, the utterance. However he is strictly concerned to reveal the rules of operation of these myths and of the mythology as a system and he is not dealing with the explanation of their meaning. So he consequently follows De Saussure method of analysis by focusing on separate myths (Oedipus myth for example) and their smaller particles ‘mythemes’, the concurrent units of an individual myth (their parallel in linguistics would be the term ‘phoneme’ as the smallest phonetic particle of the language system). Although ‘mythemes’ are representations of the binary logic, they don’t produce the meaning by themselves. The meaning renders by the complexity of the interrelations between mythemes, by the invisible, implied structure that stands behind them.

Although such ‘rational monism’ gave certain significant results in the field of anthropology and ethnology (especially his latter extensive work “Mythologica”) his method of analysis will show all his weaknesses when he tries to apply it on works of art. His attempt to attest a system which is implied to all artistic and aesthetic manifestations will reduce the complexity of the artistic work only to its relations with other artistic works and within itself.

In the final instance, by insisting on the ‘model of the oppositions’ in every aspect of society and culture, he cannot escape from philosophical and aesthetic essentialism which prescribes universal structure as a carrier of unexplainable essentials. Therefore he has been accused for “kind of metaphysical colonization”. Such philosophical tenet will be strongly deconstructed by his latter colleagues of Sorbonne: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida.

The Concept of Palimpsest

Palimpsest is a term that denotes a manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the new. The concept of palimpsest has recurrently been used to explain the layered construct of architectural monuments and urban morphologies developed through the course of history. This application of the concept of palimpsest is associated with Sigmund Freud’s use of Roman palimpsest to model the structure of human mind. He recognizes a similarity  between the way Rome evolved in stages and the mind of the individual person. He suggests that the city of Rome can be imagined not as a human habitation but as a psychical entity with similarly long past, an entity in which nothing that has once come into existence would have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one (Freud, 1989).

It is also the case in a palimpsest when just the appearance of the layers of partially erased texts is concerned. In this sense cities are not comparable with human mind. However, when the focus is not just put on the appearance of the physical construct of cities but on the intangible underlying spatial systems, deep similarities between cities and human mind, as it is understood by Freud, can be uncovered. Spatial layers in cities and their interrelations, like unconscious and conscious memories in human mind, are dynamic and ever changing. The reference to the metaphor of palimpsest can be useful when the content of the texts, and not just their appearance, is the focus of consideration.

The Palimpsest introduces the idea of erasure as part of a layering process. There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. Texts and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures. A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.

Barthes' use of the words perverse palimpsest highlights the will involved. This is not an accidental covering of one line with another, but a conscious 'un-writing', or rewriting. This is picked up again by Barthes in a separate piece of writing:

“Twombly seems to cover up other marks, as if he wanted to erase them, without really wanting to, since these marks remain faintly visible under the layer covering them; this is a subtle dialectic: the artist pretends to have "spoiled" some piece of his canvas and to have wanted to erase it; but then he spoils this erasure in its turn; and these two superimposed "failures" produce a kind of palimpsest”. (Barthes, 1985, p.179-80)

       

There is a suggestion that the play of truth and fiction is something that could be described as an undecidable element within erasure "undecidable truth and fiction of every erased stroke, title, word, writing, text, etc." (Leavey intro. to Derrida, 1980, p.15).), a balancing factor that prevented the erased text from being altogether obliterated. This fiction of an erasure, is like the theatrical staging of a death, where it is not the obliteration of that character or thing that is the aim, but rather that it is a means of gaining new knowledge about that character or thing which is (fictionally) killed or erased, and gaining new knowledge about the process of death or erasure itself.