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Post-Structuralism
and events in the real world are experienced as lifeless and alienated, if history seems to have lost direction and lapsed into chaos, it is always possible to put all of this 'in brackets', 'suspend the referent' and take words as your object instead. Writing turns in on itself in a profound act of narcissism, but always troubled and overshadowed by the social guilt of its own uselessness. Unavoidably complicit with those who have reduced it to an unwanted commodity, it nevertheless strains to free itself from the contamination of social meaning, either by pressing towards the purity of silence, as with the Symbolists, or by seeking an austere neutrality, a 'degree zero of writing' which would hope to appear innocent but which is in reality, as Hemingway exemplifies, just as much a literary style as any other. There is no doubt that the 'guilt' of which Barthes speaks is the guilt of the institution of Literature itself - an institution which, as he comments, testifies to the division of languages and the division of classes. To write in a 'literary' way, in modern society, is inevitably to collude with such divisiveness. Structuralism is best seen as both symptom of and reaction to the social and linguistic crisis I have outlined. It flees from history to language - an ironic action, since as Barthes sees few moves could be more historically significant. But in holding history and the referent at bay, it also seeks to restore a sense of the 'unnaturalness' of the signs by which men and women live, and so open up a radical awareness of their historical mutability. In this way it may rejoin the very history which it began by abandoning. Whether it does so or not, however, depends on whether the referent is suspended provisionally, or for good and all. With the advent of post-structuralism, what seemed reactionary about structuralism was not this refusal of history, but nothing less than the very concept of structure itself. For the Barthes of The Pleasure of the Text (1973), all theory, ideology, determinate meaning, social commitment have become, it appears, inherently terroristic, and 'writing' is the answer to them all. Writing, or reading-as-writing, is the last uncolonized enclave in which the intellectual can play, savouring the sumptuousness of the signifier in heady disregard of whatever might be going on in the Elysee palace or the Renault factories. In writing, the tyranny of structural meaning could be momentarily ruptured and dislocated by a free play of language; and the writing/reading subject could be released from the straitjacket of a single identity into an ecstatically diffused self. The text, Barthes announces, 'is [. . .] that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father'. We have come a long way from Matthew Arnold. That reference to the Political Father is not fortuitous. The Pleasure of the