lacansmirror, Barthes

Barthes

Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text was a little more complex than last week’s episode of American Idol.  However, just like American Idol, I eventually got through it although I still don't fully understand it.  Here is my initial reaction, but I could have been misled by my own imagination.  

Top: Signified; Bottom: Signifier

When addressing the signifier and the signified, textual pleasure is easily incorporated.  As a basic example, a bottle might be signifier, but a bottle of shampoo is signified.  In this case, the details of something make it signified.  Therefore, any text could be a signifier, but certain pleasurable texts are signified.  At the end of this section Barthes asks, “How can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure (boredom of all narratives of dreams, of parties)? How can we read criticism?” (Barthes, 111). When something is simply a signifier, it is difficult to be criticized.  Until it is signified there might not be enough evidence to criticize.  As Barthes points out earlier, “conflict is nothing but the moral state of difference” (Barthes, 110).  To criticize something doesn't mean there will be conflict, however with enough evidence, conflict is often the result.

In order to receive pleasure from a text, Barthes feels that there must be evidence or signification.  Without being signified, there is simply boredom or misunderstanding.  The conflict aspect of this idea is that the reality of pleasure could be a combination of signifiers and therefore not just experiences or and anything signified.  Criticizing something that is not signified seems to contradict Barthes idea but Barthes explains it further.  This is the part that I have trouble following.  Barthes argues that “the writer’s perversity (his pleasure in writing is without function), the doubled, the trebled, the infinite perversity of the critic and of his reader.  The critic of a text can take the signifier or in this case perversity much further than the writer imagined or intended.  This can be true for a positive, negative, or neutral critique, it is basically just a critic continuing the perverse dream the writer initially created.