#barthes theory

[aggressiveguitarnoises]

i have media studies exam (although mock so its fine) that i didnt study for so im gonna force myself to practice by applying barthes narrative theory to season 1 hannibal (vaguely tbh cuz its the whole seasom but ok)

hermeneutic codes(how do u even pronounce this omfg) :

enigma codes, they are def crucial to this show as each episode raises more and more unanswered questions as the audience continues watching the show, questions like who is commiting the crimes, is will ok, does he know how fucked up his clocks are, is crawford fucking stupid, is abigail ok, what the hell is hannibal doing, why are they using cat guts for strings, are the dogs gonna live oh my god please can the dogs be okay for once

usually done by leaving cliffhangers for each episode

it drives the audience forward and interests them so they continue watching the show to find out the answers to their questions

its also a convention to use hermeneutic codes for horror crime shows like hannibal

Proairetic codes:

action codes, the actions done to drive the narrative forward, previous events drive other events into action. ngl this one is fucking stupid to apply i dont get if i ever apply it correctly

in hannibal, proairetic codes tie a lot with hermeneutic codes as the actions of the characters raise questions for the audience questioning their choices and makes the audience wonder what will happen next. the action creates tension and makes the audience wonder how the created problem(if there is one) will be resolved. for example when hannibal lecter called abigails father to inform him that "they know" and that fbi is on the way. this drives the narrative forward as then the audience wonders how the characters will react and wonder how the actions will affect the story. this action ended up with abigail becoming an orphan and their suspect dead, creating a few side plots and introducing new characters. this constant tension created by each action drives the narrative forward and engages the audience to continue watching the show

semantic codes:

connotations, things associated with something, the deeper level meaning of a symbol. this one is hard yet so easy cuz theres literally SO many of them

they basically give insight into the plot and characters, building personalities and maybe even starting the deep questions the audience will have

for example, for hannibal, hes quite sophisticated, the semantic codes for that would be how he wears suits all the time, his overall style and his acquired taste. those things connote sophistication, wealth and even control and power (especially the suit and his high respected position as a psychiatrist)

but another thing that can be derived from things like how hes always careful, always has a cloth that doesn't leave any fabric fibres, how he doesn't use anything digital, only physical things like journals to leave no traces, the fact that hes literally eating his evidence lmao, his knowledge and experience of human anatomy and mind connote that hes a careful, experienced, ambitious man and prob(definitely) is a serial killer

symbolic codes:

it has such an easy concept that its literally confusing to understand. its basically symbols, binaries, a thematic/structural device, but it's basically about themes and contrary signs specifically, which is ig why its kind of difficult to understand since its specifically binary symbols

some symbolic codes in hannibal would be life vs death, clearly a reoccurring theme with all of the crimes happening, good vs bad, murderers and their victims, health? both physical and mental? stability? work vs personal life? idk its so hard to pin point it even tho its so easy and common idk

a better example woukd be the bad vs good binary used in star wars with ghe colours of light sabers

Cultural codes:

literally cultural and social conventions, knowledge that comes from the outside world of the text, specific connotations used

example, FBI for crimes and america, religion and faith, the whole fbi units especially medical, even Christmas is a cultural code as its a celebrated event of certain social and cultural and religious conventions

bruv i cant think of any more examples even tho i know theres so many

hope yall enjoyed my silly analysis of hannibal as my media studies application practice if u read it all xx

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

hello, I've sort of migrated here from Twitter. If you have the time I was wondering if the things I got from twitter/tiktok are correct.

In the books valyrian's are the only people in world who can bond with dragons?

In the books Targs are immune to heat/fire and sickness because their blood is magic?

Hightower's tower was made with dragon fire despite it predating Valyria?

There are other buildings around the world in asoiaf which also used dragon fire but also predate Valyria and their dragons?

Someone told me on tiktok that the OG asoiaf dragons went extinct and Valyrian magicians bred other magic creatures together until they got their version of dragons?

thank you for any help 🙏. I want to get around to reading the books but it's kinda daunting because there's so many of them and they're long and I'm a slow reader 😭

Hey, welcome to Tumblr! (Hope you survive the experience.) Sure, I can answer your questions (certainly better than tiktok and twitter lol sigh), but I do definitely recommend reading the books! Some people find it easier to go with audiobooks (I personally don't, since auditory processing isssues make me tune out in five seconds, same with podcasts, sigh), and that might be a big help for you? But anyway, answers below...

1. Yes... um... it's a question. It's stated that Valyrians are the only ones that can bond with dragons, and furthermore, only ones from the dragonriding families of Valyria. (This is part of the "Doctrine of Exceptionalism", which I'll describe later.) The "dragonseeds" who rode dragons during the Dance were supposedly bastards or descendants of bastards of Targaryens (I'll get to the details in a moment), and we have the example in the current books of Brown Ben Plumm, who Dany's dragons adore, and he is an extremely distant (by like 120 years) descendant of Elaena Targaryen and Aegon IV Targaryen.

However, the dragonseed and dragonrider Addam of Hull, per the histories a bastard of Laenor Velaryon (son of Rhaenys Targaryen), was almost certainly actually the bastard of Corlys Velaryon, and the Velaryons were not a dragonriding family. Though it's possible that one of the pre-Conquest Targaryen ladies married into House Velaryon, so it's not that exceptional. The greater problem is the dragonseed Nettles, of no known background, called out by the narrative as looking distinctly un-Valyrian (she's brown, and note the Velaryons are white in the books), who tamed her dragon by feeding it sheep until it started to like her. Many theorize that while Valyrian blood makes it easy to bond with dragons (due to likely blood magic/genetic bonding with dragons in ancient times, as they claim to be descended from dragons), it is still possible to create that bond the hard way, as the early Valyrians were once a mere tribe of shepherds who discovered dragons nesting in a local chain of volcanoes. The full answer is one of the greater mysteries of ASOIAF, and will hopefully be resolved in later books. (Along with whoever the riders of Dany's other two dragons will be.)

2. Per GRRM, Targaryens are not immune to fire, but they do have some heat resistance, and enjoy things like hot baths and hot weather. The only one actually immune to fire was Dany, and specifically only during the miracle of her dragons' birth. (During her taming of Drogon right before she rode him the first time, she received burns on her hands.) Many Targaryens have died or been injured by fire, including Viserys Targaryen (Dany's brother and his "golden crown"), Aerion Targaryen (he drank wildfire because he thought it would turn him into a dragon. It didn't), Rhaenys Targaryen the Queen Who Never Was, Daeron "the Daring" Targaryen, Aegon II Targaryen, and Rhaenyra Targaryen.

As for illness, the "Doctrine of Exceptionalism" was a religious precept that King Jaehaerys I worked out with the Faith of the Seven, to give the Targaryens an exception on the Faith's anti-incest stance. It stated that Targaryens were different, exceptional, special people, closer to gods than men, because of their unique silver-gold hair and purple eyes, because they alone rode dragons, and because they never got sick. "There was fire in the blood of the dragon, it was reasoned, a purifying fire that burned out all such plagues." However, only a few years after Jaehaerys made this agreement (and married his sister Alysanne), their 7-year-old daughter Daenerys died of the Shivers, a severe-flu-like epidemic. (This put great doubt in their heart, but did anyone do anything about it? lol no.) Their daughter Maegelle later died of greyscale, and their son Baelon died of appendicitis. Later Targaryens have died of other epidemics, of the pox, of tuberculosis, and other diseases.

However -- some Targaryens have shown surprising resistance to illness. Aegon III sat with many victims of the Winter Fever epidemic, and never showed any symptoms. Dany herself cannot recall ever getting sick. (She is not immune to being poisoned, though.) There may be something specifically connected to being a dragonrider (though Baelon was one), or more specifically being a potential Prince That Was Promised? Again, this is connected to the greater mysteries of ASOIAF, to be resolved later.

3 & 4. The base of the Hightower -- not the tower itself, but its first level -- is an ancient fortress made of fused black stone, which is similar to Valyrian construction made by melting stone with dragonfire (such as the castle of Dragonstone, the walls of Volantis, and the Valyrian roads). However, it predates the Valyrian empire by millennia, and is plain without decoration, unlike how the Valyrians would twist the melted stone into artistic forms. There are also other ancient structures in the world, the Five Forts on the eastern border of Yi Ti, that are also made of this fused black stone in this plain style. Some maesters also think the Hightower fortress's labyrinthine design is similar to the Mazes of Lorath, also ancient structures, made by a vanished giant not-quite-human species (called the Mazemakers) in pre-history. GRRM has said "there were dragons everywhere, once" (there are indeed records of dragons in Westeros before Valyria, and dragon bones found in far distant places in the world) and the truly ancient Asshai'i histories claim to have taught the Valyrians the secrets of dragons, so there's a theory that there was a dragonriding culture long before the Valyrians who left behind these fused black stone structures. (More on this in the next answer, and you can see an older theory post of mine on the subject here. Also note I am certain this culture was not the Great Empire of the Dawn, they're unrelated.) One more great mystery!

5. Yeeahh... this may be true. Or it might not be. Septon Barth (Jaehaerys's Hand of the King, and a great researcher into the origins of dragons, with theories that made maesters call him crazy and the Faith burn his books) apparently theorized in his Unnatural History that the Valyrian dragons may have been created via bloodmagic, possibly by breeding wyverns (flying reptiles that do not breathe fire), possibly with firewyrms (wingless/legless earth-boring creatures that do breathe fire). There's also (as I said above) Valyrian legends that claim they found dragons nesting in the Fourteen Flames, but ancient texts from Asshai claim that dragons first came from the Shadow (the mountains around Asshai), and an ancient nameless people brought them to Valyria and taught the Valyrians the magic needed to control them. And there's a myth from Qarth that there used to be another moon that cracked open like an egg and millions of dragons came out. We do not yet know the true answer.

GRRM recently said "Septon Barth got most of it right", but what is "most"? Was there an incredibly ancient vanished species of dragons that the original Valyrians re-created? Did these Valyrians somehow breed these new dragons with themselves to make them easier to control? What we do know is that occasionally Targaryens have had monstrous dragon-like stillbirths. We do know that very rarely a dragon egg has hatched a "broken thing" that dies quickly, or a monstrous wingless wyrm that attacks its cradlemate, with no known reason why. We know that in the ruins of Valyria since its Doom, there are apparently mutated creatures that can lay eggs containing "worms with faces" and "snakes with hands" in human flesh, a horrific experience witnessed by Septon Barth that sent him on his path. It's a great great mystery, and there will apparently be an answer one day.

BTW, many of these huge mysteries were introduced in The World of Ice & Fire, if you want to read just one book. However, TWOIAF is not a story like the actual books, it's a history/geography book, and if you want more than lore, if you want addictively enjoyable characters and amazing dialogue and a truly excellent story, again I highly recommend reading the main books. The lore and the mysteries are very interesting, sure, but they're not what's really kept me in this fandom for 13 years now, you know?

[crucifiedlovers]

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

[i-isa-i]

The songs are about me, actually …

I know swifties have been trained for years and years to read taylor swift’s songs as autobiographical. But idk it just feels so reductive and boring to look for clues about her personal and dating life in order to decode her lyrics. Even if you think the intention of the author is relevant in any way, swift herself said that her songs’ inspirations can’t simply be found via “paternity test”.

But I really don’t think we should care what swift intended the song to mean. I’m begging y’all to consider these lyrics as polysemic texts. First of all, let’s be honest and admit that the persona fed to the public isn’t actually taylor swift and we probably don’t know much about her personal life anyway. So people basically use a fictional character and narrative to apply these songs to. In that case, why not divorce the fictionalized author from the text in the first place? I know we throw around “Death of the author” in fandom spaces all the time but I think it’s something to consider here. Make your own meaning. The songs are about what you want them to be. The songs are about your OTP. The songs are about you.

[woundgallery]

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Death of the Author by Ronald Barthes (1967)

Full disclosure, I've never really liked this essay. That said, I do like Barthes' other arguments. But I always found this one lacking, not in its central thesis that readers also matter, but I find that the lines of evidence are really poor. People worship this argument far too much without examination of why it has no citations and no one seems to be willing to question the argument in full from other viewpoints of things like, does it make philosophical sense?

But then people often use this essay as a crutch to say they don't need authorcism, and in fact go towards 100% readercism and then skip out on other critical theories. This isn't exactly what it argues, but I also feel like it doesn't argue the points it wants to make well. And truly, if I handed something like this in as an undergrad to my English classes, I'd be marked down hard. I think we need the same level of scrutiny towards the so-called masters as we do towards students and don't make excuses for "Because he's well-liked". This wasn't a new idea like he suggests. Authorcism goes further back than he suggests–but because people don't want to challenge these notions (and apparently don't read all the way through Poetics?) they think he's brilliant?

Dude gave no citations. Seriously. All his assertions are on weak ground.

Man, sometimes I think being born a white straight male means never being questioned when you make wild assertions and no one will ever fact check you ever. Well, I'm fact checking this thing, and it's not coming up the way he wants.

Original file: (translated, 1977)

No one wants to say this is racist or challenge the whole, "In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or realtor whose 'performance' the mastery of the narrative code–may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'."

The core idea that the "author" is a modern figure is disputed by Aristotle, when Aristotle goes on and on and on about how much of a effing genius Sophocles was. I mean that Homer dude, that Homer dude wasn't good for anything and is a distant second to Sophocles. (Why do I remember this? Because I read the whole of Poetics and *cough* Aristotle waxes on poetic about Sophocles and barely mentions anyone else.)

No one wants to challenge how this basis and core of his thesis is coming off racist?

It's reading as those "primitive" people in that effing functionalist snobbery where some civilizations are "more advanced" than others storytellers aren't lauded. Ummm... OK, prove it, buddy. Your anthropology is faulty.

Often shaman, the keepers of the stories of the tribe/organization are lauded in their communities as important. If this was NOT true, the British Empire wouldn't have specifically gone after and tried to KILL those people. If he's arguing that the author was less important in those stories, that those people said, which is an interpretation, because he's not directly saying it, then the problem with that is there is a difference between losing the author, and what we'd call resonance of the words. And then you have a whole semantics question here on how much do stories outlive their authors, and how much there is over attribution issues to people that should not be lauded.

And then that's a whole other question than authorcism v. readercism. Because even those stories without the original author who might have shifted over time, still have other ways to read the text. Those are historicism, cultural relativism, race theory, etc. All of which, BTW, did exist by the time Barthes was writing. To pin his hopes on readercism, and say something this effing racist, that copyright does not matter to tribes, without textual evidence, when Kung! do respect copyright ideas, at the very least, is trying to kill the author, but also bury everything else in literary discourse, which was an issue I had with Percy Lubbock, to be fair, because I thought his way of thinking was far too reductive.

There's no citation?

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single·person, the author 'confiding' in us.

I disagree, it's an overstatement at this point in time. Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, did do some of this, but he also looked at other things to explain the text. And there was Percy Lubbock who introduced Readercism (not the coinage, but the concept) in 1921. (yes, 1921, eat it, it sounds like plagiarism....). The absolutist idea that it was always sought through the author before this point isn't true. 'cause I effing did my reading.

Percy Lubbock said it was ultimately up to the reader to know the context, etc. Earlier critics have also suggested things like partnership between audience and creators. This would be writers such as Bertolt Brecht, who was around by the time Barthes was writing and gets half-hearted cited, no less. TT I did a ton of reading. There was a ton of effort in the early 19th century to give more context to plays like Antigone. Even that jerk, Freytag tried to give context to Aristotle, though wrongly. He uses (wrong) Historcism in order to illuminate Aristotle.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it)

What? As I outlined, I don't see that. He's making assertions without citation. And then people aren't challenging it. Why? I would be 100% be required to give citations for either assertion.

In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme~s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).

Stéphane Mallarmé was born 1842. No citation of the essay. TT Again, I'd be required to cite the effing essay. No one wants to challenge this? Intertextual evidence is missing. For a guy who says the reader is most important, he isn't doing a lot to prove it in his own work.

Instead, Barthes gets lauded by later writers by interpreting what the author meant when the author didn't say it?

It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem." --Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Note" to Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pg. 301.

Isn't this against what he's arguing for? He didn't leave it on the page. He didn't say any of this. Barthes left no evidence. Reader with no context wins?

To be fair, here, I've seen Barthes other work and he does know how to do citations, but Johnson is flat out trying to explain the author for him and I don't like that. If you're arguing for readercism, then the author's intentions shouldn't need to be explained.

By putting it behind a veil of "Well, he did no citations, so we need to interpret what he meant" when he doesn't leave it on the page, that's authorcism, ironically. Makes me cranky when white men get away with doing no citations to prove their thesis.

Barthes cites Valery is Paul Valéry b. 1871, also no citation. I'd get lambasted if I did this. Ah, white male privilege.

No intertextual evidence for his assertion here, either. While I don't love Lubbock 100% and I thought he oversimplified, at least he put *effing citations* on the page to prove his assertions.

Where are the citations? He doesn't need them? Why?

Proust gave modern writing its epic.

There's no proof for this assertion. I don't think it's true either. Epic of Gigamesh. It was translated in 1875, not by Proust. Barthes knew about it. He's not giving the context well in the text either.

There's no citation for his assertions of Proust either. He makes opinions, but where is the textual evidence?

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with·Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage)

He cites Brecht, not the particular work?? But also Brecht argued for partnership between audience and author a bit at least?

Urrrgghhhh I HATE writers like this. Have I not gone over how much I dislike people who do assertions without citation and then get lauded?

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as" the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically " on a single line' divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.

Barthes, citation? No citation?

You asserted it was a "New idea" that the author reigned supreme. Prove it. Show the work that says that. Because Aristotle, nope. Aristotle worshiped the living pants off of Sophocles.

Look, Lubbock did a better job supporting his assertions in this area. He actually cited living works and did intertextual evidence. I agreed that his assertions are reductive like Virginia Woolf, but at least the man cited Tolstoy. He didn't make wild assertions about Tolstoy and then hoped that someone would get the references, and then cite no works.

In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now.

Modern from when? What time period? If you're trying to argue anyone before Stéphane Mallarmé existed, again, effing Poetics. Not to effing mention the whole of Aelius Donatus's entire treaties on how plays should go was based on a single author: Terence. In what time period are you talking about? Author worship goes way back in time. Effing reading about Aelius Donatus loving the hell out of Terence's play with r*** made me cranky for a week. He found it sooo funny. And I was struggling with the Latin too.

The fact is (or, it·follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say)

which ones, Barthes, which ones? Give me an effing citation. 'cause I can't see that the "depiction" reigned supreme over the "author" through Aristotle literally ranking Sophocles as better than Homer. Aristotle kept going on and on about it. Plus you just cited Brecht earlier, who hates Aristotle's ass. So, make it mesh together. Which parts of the "Classics" are you citing, and which parts of Brecht are you taking from? Brecht HATES Aristotle, and most of the time when people talk of Classics, they are talking about Greek plays. You need to delineate which parts you are taking and which you leave behind.

rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered - something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets.

No citation again. I'm cranky. No citation or quotes for all these pages. For an author whose supposedly arguing for "readercism" and "simplicity" by leaving it on the page, as the critic earlier, Johnson, is saying, he's not doing either, honestly.

Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

Honestly, there is more burying of citations.

He's saying in the fanciest of words to make it sound like he's smarter than he is, that "You aren't dumb 'cause you don't understand the author." If he's arguing for simplicity and leaving on the page, he's not practicing the same himself. So I don't know if the earlier argument by Johnson works in his favor at all.

We know now that 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. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.

I have issues with this from a philosophical PoV.

The question of originality, is certainly something that rose with industrialization, but that's more of an individualism, rather than an authorcism, I would argue–given how much that Aristotle, Aelius Donatus and others around the world tried very hard to preserve authorship. An argument of lost authorship overtime is a totally different affair, and one I've been dealing with as people over attribute, and I find that quotes are wrongly attributed because people don't remember the author or are too lazy to look up the texts they are talking about (I'm staring at you Barthes).

Individualism, is well, well argued to have risen with industrialization. Off the top of my head, though not in Barthes' time, you have Lucy Worsley, who in A Very British Romance argued that individualism in Romance is a very modern notion (argued, first episode within the first few minutes). Not to mention a lot of social sciences, in general, argue for this type of individualism, and then that argument, in general, leading to the arguments for why industrialization often leads to loneliness. To be contextually fair to Barthes, he didn't have the bit about loneliness yet, since that's a more recent sort of studying, but the scholarship on individualism as a part of industrialization should have been emerging in his time period, IIRC. This might have spurred this essay, but the notion that historicism and other ways of examining the text along with the author did not exist is a farce, at best.

One could argue the Butterfly effect, which is Henri Poincaré, prior to Barthes' existence of his essay, would disprove the idea of originality, but we're getting neck deep into physics and philosophy here. I am a nerd and interdisciplinary, so...

Say huip is a new thingy. It weighs 200 lbs. It does a bunch of new stuff–very theoretical. It doesn't matter. Someone newly buys this object that can do new stuff. It is a result of culture. Yes? Interwoven culture, as Barthes describes.

Bob has bought this huip thingy, and drops it down some stairs and finds that it rolls, not doing the original intended function. This is his particular life experience with huip. He thinks that 200lbs being able to bounce down stairs is awesome. I mean, dude, it defies all physics and is able to go down and turn on stair landings.

Bob posts this information somewhere, puts it into text, and then his interpretation, is by writing it, it is fun.

Sally, say, does the same thing, but kills a cat.

The first ripple is that it has killed a cat. Oh no, Sally's interpretation of huip is that the cat is dead and she's getting sued.

Isn't Sally's interpretation of huip and this thing it can do, but wasn't designed for novel as Bob's interpretation? If they both post about it, they are authors of a new experience.

If the manufacturers of huip say, but Huip isn't supposed to do that and do a total recall of the product and start doing things like making it so it can't roll, or weigh that amount, then the experience of the object changes. A new novel experience happens.

So the philosophical question is "What is then new?" in this scenario. If Barthes says "nothing" then it becomes an issue. Because humans aren't the same over time. And if you say that the author, Bob of the huip meme, didn't have a novel experience, dude, it is 200 lbs of menace and he discovered something new.

The fact that Sally interpreted it and then it ran over the cat and killed it... who is liable in that scenario? Bob, who didn't follow the instructions and accidentally found out and memed out what huip can do, the manufacturer, or Sally or all three?

Something clearly new happened.

BTW, I randomly pressed letters to come up with said object, huip.

If the experience is always anterior and not original, then how come witnesses never agree on anything? I don't think Barthes thought this part through completely. It's missing some key French Philosophers.

His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them.

Writers go outside and do things like experience seeing a new animal. Saying that a writer only mixes previous writing and cultural functions... meh, I'm not quite sure about this.

If his total argument is culture shapes the writer, and the writer has no free will, and the writer is merely mixing other writers, thus there is nothing new, this is more like an argument for determinism over free will, which runs into philosophical problems as I illustrated with Bob up there. Bob had a novel experience he wrote about. It wasn't the intention of the manufacturer, but gravity is not manufactured by culture. Stairs are manufactured by culture. Did an accident with gravity and a manufacturing error shape Bob into writing and memeing what he did with the huip? Or was it really Sir Issac Newton whom Bob never bothered to read, but loosely heard about once in Science Class for a test and he can't bother to remember the numbers for gravity.

Writers have experiences outside of books. The filter might be culture, but the filter doesn't always shape everyone's opinion exactly the same. Perspective, worldviews, and experiences do, and that's what's novel.

Barthes further argues that because the author has a dictionary, they are caught in culture. Urrggg. I made up huip on the spot. You still have no idea what the primary function of the object is. I'm sure someone is trying to make up one in their head. Or I typed that up and someone is making it up. But I don't particularly need to know much in order to make up that context. I need stairs, some name, and a mythical object I banged my keyboard for. Gravity is a natural force I personally experience. Especially when I was struggling to put an air conditioner in my window, heard a cat and then wondered what would happen if said air conditioner landed on the cat and then posted about it on Nanowrimo in 2008-ish.

Barthes might argue that I got it from literature somewhere. But the filter of words had nothing to do with the initial experience. I didn't have to put it into words. No one else was there.

Where did I get 200 lbs? Uhhh... random number.

Where did I get the runs over cat–from the original experience of worrying about the air conditioner falling from the window.

Where did I get magically rolls down stairs? I had an experience with a friend of mine that liked to roll down stairs. It was a novel experience for me. She liked to bounce around corners. (Hello, Libbie). If writing is purely words, culture, not nature, experience, worldview, opinion, Barthes has an issue with the treaties here.

My novel experience with the air conditioner and feeling like a weakling and hearing a cat though cat is not a controllable object in my framework, lead me to post about air conditioner falling from my apartment window into a roof, killing a cat, and typing it into Nanowrimo's boards.

Is Barthes saying the entire incident is mediated purely by words? That's a lot of coincidences, don'tcha think?

Gravity isn't a cultural experience and not everyone thinks in words either. In order to write you have to use words, certainly, but the initial experience still is not necessarily mediated by words or culture as he'd expect.

Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the·very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Untrue. Aristotle spends a HUGE amount of time on it. HUGE. !@#$. (We need the play to have negative reinforcement on the reader in a morality PoV–he spends a lot of his treaties on this. How do you achieve this as author. About how the audience should feel. How plays are inferior if they don't achieve this. About how Homer was a poor writer for not doing it correctly and the impact being wrong.) Aelius Donatus even talks about it. (We Latins this. We Latins that. What does the audience think. What's the difference between 'us' Latins and the Greeks? Should we account for the differences?)

His idea is that in the past authors were never worshiped, until the "modern era" and copyright didn't matter. (Untrue, Aristotle). And that the reader has forever been ignored in literary criticism before him. (Brecht, Aristotle, Aelius Donatus?)

We should ignore the author because the reader is the ultimate decider–honestly Percy Lubbock did a better job arguing this in 1921 with less convoluted language.

That everything is mediated by culture for the author and previous texts. (Didn't read Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss? Levi-Strauss, BTW, was French and published before him) And that copyright didn't exist in those all oral tradition tribes. TT Kung! Anyone?

Because you see, according to him, writers don't experience or mediate it through their own lives. Only through texts.

I think the better argument for readercism would follow like this:

Readers have their own experiences and worldviews. This will not be universal or resonate reader to reader because inherently no two people will agree on anything. Despite that there is a sort of cultural agreement to tame what seems like chaos. Writing comes into this chaos and tries to pull meaning from it.

The writer and reader's experience will not close to always match, so the impact of the writing is not going to be the same no matter what you will do. The best you can do is mediate your experiences, whether it's with culture, nature or your personal experiences through writing which is interpreted by others.

As Lubbock said, the text doesn't come alive until a reader reads the text.

To me, Barthes' argument is far, far more poor than Lubbock's argument for the same. At least Lubbock's argument for the same wasn't effing blatantly racist. (I give more leeway to Lubbock in 1921, before the 1960's than Barthes in 1965 who is also French and has clearly access to Levi-Strauss and even talks about ethnographies) It's based on assumptions, the majority of which aren't backed up. Plus he has more to work with if what he says is true. D- argument. He doesn't argue for what to replace it with, doesn't talk about the other critical theories at all. Urgghh. He's done better. But I know, I'm not supposed to question the greats when people worship them. But it irks me that he gives one citation, maybe, and then we blindly believe everything else he wrote. Why? I want some critical thinking here.

For the record, I hated Derrida too. His major flaw for me, BTW, was that he said everything is mediated through words, which is not true. Functionalists suck. Structuralists suck less, but are still effing prone to racism.

Sometimes I wonder if academics purposefully like to teach convoluted texts like this without citations, rather than a cautionary tale, of what will happen, but because it sounds smart and convoluted and because they don't check the assertions as true or not and plus there is a bonus points for the level of racism they can force their students to read, but they gloss over it and say ignore it. I mean, you absolutely need to read Emmanuel Kant, even if you can't with his hatred of women and you're supposed to ignore that part because there are no substitutes in the world that might have said the same things he said better. Urrgghh. Do you purposefully choose the most uptight racist white men to teach and tell that they are lauded? Lubbock made a far, far better argument. Lack of citations and blind worship because of lack of citations+white maleness makes me cranky.

[enigmasandepiphanies]

babygirl I have pdfs saved in my computer that you don't even know about

[tragicmelpomene]

I feel like an academic genius every time I read a piece of french theory and actually come out the other side with even a semblance of comprehension.

[hautaaja]

from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

[unwingedunplumed]

shimeji simulation x a book I had to read twice in its entirety for two different classes. but it’s a banger so I didn’t mind

[zabrozo]

✨📕My TBR booklist for this summer 📗📚

(a.k.a. SOME of the e-books in my bootleg kindle that are collecting digital dust as we speak)

Fiction

Nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enriquez (in progress)

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (in progress)

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (in progress)

Il Nome della Rosa by Umberto Eco (in progress)(having a hard time with my Italian)

La vita bugiarda degli adulti by Elena Ferrante

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Tierra amarilla by Germán Marín

Tengo miedo torero by Pedro Lemebel

Ladrilleros by Selva Almada

Non Fiction

s/z by Roland Barthes (in progress)

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art) by Claire Bishop

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop (in progress)

Contra el canon: El arte contemporáneo en un mundo sin centro by Andrea Giunta

Growing up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children by April Nowell (in progress)

Estética de la Emergencia by Reinaldo Laddaga

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (in progress)

[inkykeiji]

I like to think he does love Fuyumi, though. Deep down. Like he acts like he doesn't care but if anybody hurt her they'd be DONE.

that’s fair! you can def love someone without necessarily liking them. when it comes to canon dabi i 100% agree with u!!! i think that even if he treated fuyumi as, like, below him as a child (as in not on his level, not someone who could understand him, def at least partially due to her ‘annoying’ concern for him—she just doesn’t get it, she still holds onto hope that their family can be mended, fixed, made whole, as if it isn’t irrevocably, inherently broken, she doesn’t understand what it’s like, to have this desire blazing inside of him, because dad never did that to her), he still very clearly cared for her and loved her, and still does even after everything, as indicated by his ‘fuyumi-chan’ when he’s mumbling to himself half naked on that ratty old couch.

when it comes to my touya-nii in particular, i’m unsure. i’m kind of right on the fence, because i can totally see where ur coming from, but at the same time i wrote him as someone who is a certified sociopath and has very little empathy for anyone other than his core three people (reader, mom, natsuo; and even then it barely exists). either way, you’re more than welcome to interpret him & his actions and behaviours towards her however you like! death of the author n all that c:

and when it comes to literally any of my other dabi iterations (minus sd!nat touya), yes 100% i agree with you, especially for bmb dabi n tag dabi oh my GOD yes

[crucifiedlovers]

And yet: it is the very rhythm is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives... Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

[basil-isk]

Can The Author Be Killed Today?

    The concept of “Death of The Author”, once primarily used by literary critics, has become a common phrase in the online landscape surrounding media criticism of all sorts. Twitter media critics throw around the verbiage recklessly, often times caught up in a cross fire of whether it is morally justifiable to enjoy a piece of media created by someone now seen as “problematic.” But when the scriptor Roland Barthes explained the concept in his famous essay “The Death of The Author” it wasn’t simply about the righteousness of consumption – but rather a critical look on how we criticize literature and writing.

    Barthes provides an argument for why analyzing a narrative should not be about finding the author, but rather about creating a meaning. “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled nothing deciphered;” Reading should be about critically thinking through the complex signs and signifiers one is viewing, and the context they hold through the relation they have with each other. There is no one true meaning to a piece of writing. The meaning of a text has its own standpoint to readers as thinkers, and it should not be our goal to use a narrative to biographically pick apart an Author – but instead to simply pick apart the text which is on the page. Barthes proposes, instead of an Author, a scriptor – whose purpose is to “preform” the concept of a narrative by using an immense knowledge of signs and their cultural significance. A scriptor uses cultural significance to guide, but is not limited by their own world view – thus the reader is not limited by the viewpoint of a specific person, but can be open to a myriad of perspectives being told through the signs on the page.

    Barthes also argues that the idea of the Author is a contemporary one, an idea which has been perpetuated by capitalist desires of Property ownership – which has in turn created Intellectual Property ownership. A scriptor removes this elitist “IP” owner, and instead insists writers to preform narratives in a way that has inherent value –  not just out of a desire for the recognition of being the Author.

    Barthes is proposing not simply returning to a time with no authors - but a way of viewing writers as a consequence of their writing, rather than the opposite. A framework where we know the narrative itself before the creator, and the narrative is not fixed on a right or wrong way to interpret. By removing this fixed interpretation, it is removing the control of a singular entity over an entire concept – and thus killing God in a literary sense.

    So how does this relate to a modern audience, one which is bombarded with a variety of pieces of media which may have many different creators involved.

    I believe what Barthes is somewhat proposing is for writing to be open-source. In the software world, open-source projects are simply tools, lines of code which anyone can propose edits to or use in a way which they see fit. Sometimes open-source requires credit given to the original creator, sometimes it doesn’t, but the point is that there is no one dictating how one person can use the code the original scriptor created – it has been released, free to the public to use or change how they see fit.

    Authorship, creates a proprietary view of a narrative – there is only one way to interpret it (the author's way) and if the narrative is to be transformed by another creator, the original Author must be a guiding hand in the entire process. There is no freedom for creativity, or critical thought, just a simple answer. Barthes also explains that Narratives should distance themselves from having some sort of deeper theological, singular meaning to be deciphered and found. The scriptor is an actor preforming a concept in the best way possible, simply interpreting the abstract script ideas have gifted them and portraying it through language.

    As Barthes alluded to, Capitalism has created a system which perpetuates Authorship. Consuming a narrative isn’t simply consuming a narrative, it can have consequences. Regardless of whether the author exists within the text, you still have to purchase a book to read it (usually) and that money goes to the seller, the publisher, and the author. Those in the modern age have a lot of consideration over where their money, or influence will end up. Consumption of media SHOULD be a neutral act, an act where you can think about the narrative separately from why it exists – by the very act of consuming something tells the endless algorithms to make more of that product. There has been a death of thoughtful media consumption, because media is not created as art, but rather as product.

    While yes, thoughtful reading and watching can still happen, the discussion in the modern age is less about Authorial Intent and about where the money goes and about whether you support the people it goes to.

    The Author is alive and well in the modern age, while reading a text individually it is possible to kill them in your own mind – the modern media consumer is still incredibly focused on who is behind the creation rather than the work itself. Consumers are critical of work before they have even seen it, simply based on who is behind it and how they have branded themselves. Social media has allowed for a closer connection to creators, which has thus influenced the creation of ideas following the names attached to new pieces of work. A complex web of moral considerations, about wanting to support the “right” people rather than interesting concepts, due to a social context where people themselves have become narratives in their own right.

[daffodillz]

rhaenyra: is not particularly scholarly

also rhaenyra to anyone who will listen: are you familiar with septon barth’s theory that dragons do not have a gender but are “as mutable as flame” ???  👀 👀

[almondcynosura]

9 hours since i had a seminar on the death of the author and i'm still thinking of all the things i could and should have brought up in the discussion