Justyna Magdziarz, IMA The difference between Work and Text as expanded by Barthes in his essay From Work

to Text.

It seems that there is a fine line between the notion of a work and a text. As a rule, these two are very often used interchangeably and only few actually notice the subtle difference between them. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a work is a thing or things done or made; [] the artistic production of a particular author, composer, or artist. A text, however, is defined as a book or other written or printed work, regarded in terms of its content rather than its physical form. Seen from this perspective, the difference in question indeed appears of little significance. Notwithstanding, the theory of literature, influenced by poststructural thought, came to view these two concepts as two totally different ideas. The guiding spirit for this trend was Roland Barthes and his essay From Work to Text. The essay From Work to Text is one of the works that represents Barthes transition from limited in scope structuralism to the so called post-structuralism. Indeed, as Eagleton notices, this very movement which concerns not only Barthes but also other contemporary literary theorists, is actually a movement from work to text (120). As Barthes elucidates in the beginning of his essay, Text, as opposed to Work which is a traditional notion, is a product of a new demand. According to him, our perspective of literature has changed over the course of time and due to the function which certain literary works of art perform nowadays, they can no longer be subsumed under the outdated, according to Barthes, concept of Work. Thus, he suggests using another term, which is Text, and throughout his essay, he shows to what extent it differs from the previous one.

To begin with, Work to Barthes is a material object, a thing that needs space on the shelf and can be held in someones hand. It is processed through institutions, [] classified, as novel, poem, and so forth, and also interpreted, provided with the signified, according to various scholarly or critical techniques (Moriarty 143). Text, however, is a non-computable methodological field that can be experienced only in an activity of production. It is held in language (Barthes 157) and remains traversal it is constantly moving in the discourse. Another difference is that Work is subject to classification and is identified by the tradition to which it belongs. It is contained in hierarchy and thus, divided into traditional categories, such as genres. On the other hand, Text cannot be placed in a canon; it is unclassifiable. It can be only identified by how it is different and subversive from other texts since it always locates itself in opposition to the common beliefs, behind the limit of the doxa (Barthes 158). Furthermore, the meaning of Work is constructed only by means of signified it can be either a literal meaning, e.g. scientific or philological works, or a hidden meaning in the case of the work that falls under the scope of hermeneutics (Barthes 158). Besides, Work is always closed and only moderately symbolic, if it all. Still, the meaning of the Text can be constructed by a free interplay of perpetual signifiers which constantly move their positions resulting in their overlapping. Consequently, Text becomes radically symbolic. It has no closure and its logic is based on metonymy the activity of associations, contiguities, [and] carryings-over (Barthes 158). In the consecutive point of his essay, Barthes argues that what further differentiates Work from Text is that the previous has a single unified meaning that depends to a large extent on its interpretation, whereas the latter is characterized by the plurality of meaning which stems from its plurality of signifiers. As Berger notices, Text cannot be fixed no

transcendental meaning can be abstracted from it because Text operates on the level of the signifier, not the signified (182). Thus, it escapes interpretation and is rather a single semelfactive experience, a heterogeneous body built up of various inter-texts. Having established this, Barthes highlights another crucial difference between Work and Text concerning their filiation. Work, according to Barthes, always has its father, its owner, whom it respects and who has a right to it (e.g. intellectual property right). Hence, Work is always entangled in some relation to history, literary tradition, or even other literary works. When it comes to Text, though, it is an orphan as no filiation process operates in its case. It has no respect for its author as the I that writes the text becomes immediately only the I on paper his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work (Barthes 161). Drawing to a close, another disparity between Work and Text is brought to the light by Barthes. He describes Work as an object of consumption which augments the distance between the process of reading and writing. Because the meaning of the Work is limited and hindered by the authors background, the reader is not able to participate actively in the production of the Work and therefore, it becomes a sheer commodity. Consequently, the act of reading is reduced to the act of consuming. Yet, Text decants the work [] from its consumption (Barthes 162) and focuses on practice, thus reducing the distance between reading and writing. Therefore, the reader of the text is able to actively produce it and play it like a game or music. Now, Text can be indeed seen as something in production that is produced not only by the language but also by the reader himself (Allen 81). Finally, Barthes ponders on the question of the pleasure of the Text. First, he admits that though one may find pleasure in reading works of certain artists such as Proust, Flaubert, or Balzac, this is merely the pleasure of consumption. The reader of these must notice and

accept his limitations and the fact that he is separated from the production of the work. Reading Text, however, is a pleasurable delectation of the process of co-creating the text together with its author. It is a kind of pleasure without the sense of separation, bound to jouissance (Barthes 164). Thus, it is actually no longer only a pleasure, as in the case of Work, but a bliss, a readers fulfillment that is on a par with orgasm after a sexual intercourse. Notwithstanding, as Miklitsch notices, [p]art of the problem of describing the difference between pleasure and bliss [] is that there is no absolute difference between them, no absolute point [] at which it is possible to say that one ends and the other begins (109110). To recapitulate, in his essay From Work to Text Barthes notices a great change in how the literature and literary written works are approached nowadays and how various disciplines begin to interact with each other. This interdisciplinarity, however, has altered the traditional notion of a literary work and shifted readers attention from a piece of work as a whole to an object defined by Barthes as Text. This shift, as Eagleton sees it, is a shift from seeing the poem or a novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critics task to decipher, to seeing it as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be fully nailed down to a single center, essence or meaning (120).

References Allen, Graham. 2003. Textuality, in: Graham Allen, Roland Barthes. New York: Routledge, 79-94. Barthes, Roland. 1977. From Work to Text, in: Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 155-164. Berger, Roger A. 1993. From Text to (Field)Work and Back Again: Theorizing a Post(Modern)-Ethnography, Anthropological Quarterly 66, 4: 174-186. Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Post-Structuralism, in: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 110-130. Miklitsch, Robert. 1983. Difference: Roland Barthes Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure, boundry 2 12, 1: 101-114. Moriarty, Michael. 1991. Text and its Pleasures, in: Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes. California: Stanford University Press, 143-168. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2002. (2nd edition.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Philip J. 1977. Barthes/Barth: Textual/Sensual. The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, Salmagundi 37: 133-139.