What is Criticsm_Barthes

8/3/2019 What is Criticsm_Barthes

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Roland Barthes

What is Criticism? (1963)

1. It is always possible to prescribe major critical principles in accord with one’s

ideological situation, especially in France, where theoretical models have a great

prestige, doubtless because they give the practitioner an assurance that he is

participating at once in a combat, a history, and a totality; French criticism has

developed in this way for some fifteen years, with various fortunes, within four

major “philosophies.” First of all what is commonly—and questionably—called

existentialism, which has produced Sartre’s critical works, his Baudelaire, his

Flaubert , the shorter articles on Proust, Mauriac, Giraudoux, and Ponge, and

above all his splendid Genet . Then Marxism: we know (the argument is already

an old one) how sterile orthodox Marxism has proved to be in criticism,

proposing a purely mechanical explanation of works or promulgating slogans

rather than criteria of values; hence it on the “frontiers” of Marxism (and not at

its avowed center) that we find the more fruitful criticism: Lucien Goldmann’s

work explicitly owes a great deal to Luckacs; it is among the most flexible and the

most ingenious criticism which takes social and political history as its point of

departure. And then psychoanalysis; in France today, the best representative of

Freudian criticism is Charles Mauron, but here too it is the “marginal’

psychoanalysis which has been most fruitful; taking its departure from an

analysis of substances (and not of works), following the dynamic distortions of

the image in a great number of poets, Bachelard has established something of a

critical school, so influential that one might call French criticism today, in its

most developed form, a criticism of Bachelardian inspiration (Poulet,

Starobinski, Richard). Finally structuralism (or to simplify in an extreme and

doubtless abusive degree: formalism): we know the importance, even the vogue

of this movement in France since Lévi-Strauss ahs opened it to the methods of

the social sciences and a certain philosophical reflection; few critical works have

as yet resulted from it, but they are in preparation, and among them we shall

doubtless find, in particular, the influence of linguistic models constructed by



Saussure and extended by Jakobsen (who himself, early in his career,

participated in a movement of literary criticism, the Russian formalist school): it

appears possible, for example, to develop an entire literary criticism starting from

the two rhetorical categories established by Jakobsen: metaphor and metonymy.

2. As we see, this French criticism is at once “national” (it owes little or nothing to

Ango-American criticism, to Spitzer and his followers, to the Croceans) and

contemporary (one might even say “faithless”): entirely absorbed in a certain

ideological present, it is reluctant to acknowledge any participation in the critical

tradition of Saint-Beuve, Taine, or Lanson. This last model nonetheless raises a

special problem for our contemporary criticism. The work, method, and spirit of

Lanson, himself a prototype of the French professor, has controlled, throughcountless epigones, the whole of academic criticism for fifty years. Since the

(avowed) principles of this criticism are rigor and objectivity in the establishment

of facts, one might suppose that there is no incompatibility between Lansonism

and the ideological criticisms, which are all criticisms of interpretation. However,

though the majority of French critics today are themselves professors, there is a

certain tension between interpretive criticism and positivist (academic) criticism.

This is because Lansonism is itself an ideology; not content to deman the

application o f the objective rules of all scientific investigation, it implies certain

general convictions about man, history, literature, and the relations between

author and work; for example, the psychology of Lansonism is utterly dated,

consisting essentially of a kind of analogical determinism, according to which the

details of a work must resemble the details of a life, the soul of a character must

resemble the soul of the author, etc.—a very special ideology, since it is precisely

in the years following its formulation that psychoanalysis, for example, has

posited contrary relations relations of denial, between a work and its author.

Indeed, philosophical postulates are inevitable; Lansonism is not to be blamed

for its prejudices but for the fact that it conceals them: ideology is smuggled into

the baggage of scientism like contraband merchandise.



3. If these various ideological principles are possible at the same time (and for my

part, in a certain sense I subscribe to each of them at the same time), it is

doubtless because an ideological choice does not constitute the Being of criticism

and because “truth” is not its sanction. Criticism is more than discourse in the

name of “true” principles. It follows that the capital sin in criticism is not ideology

but the silence by which it is masked: this guilty silence has a name: good

conscience, or again, bad faith. How could we believe, in fact, that the work is an

object exterior to the psyche and history of the man who interrogates it, an object

which the critic would exercise a kind of extraterritorial right? By what miracle

would the profound communication which most critics postulate between the

work and its author cease in relation to their own enterprise and their own

epoch? Are there laws of creation valid for the writer but not for the critic? Allcriticism must include in its discourse (even if it is in the most indirect and

modest manner imaginable) an implicit reflection on itself; every criticism is a

criticism of the work and a criticism of itself. In other words, criticism is not at

all a table of results or a body of judgments, it is essentially an activity, i.e., a

series of intellectual acts profoundly committed to the historical and subjective

existence (they are the same thing) of the man who performs them). Can an

activity be “true?” It answers quite different requirements.

4. Every novelist, every poet, whatever detours literary theory may take, is

presumed to speak of objects and phenomena, even if they are imaginary,

exterior and anterior to language: the world exits and the writer speaks: that is

literature. The object of criticism is very different; the object of criticism is not

“the world” but a discourse, the discourse of someone else: criticism is discourse

upon discourse; it is a second language, or a metalanguage (as the logicians

would say), which operates on a first language (or language object ). It follows

that the critical language must deal with two kinds of relations: the relation of the

critical language to the language of the author studied, and the relation of this

language object to the world. It is the “friction” of these two languages which

defines criticism and perhaps gives it a great semblance to another mental



activity, logic, which is also based on the distinction between language object and

metalanguage.

5. For if criticism is only a metalanguage, this means that its task is not at all to

discover “truths,” but only “validities.” In itself, a language is not true or false, it

is or is not valid: valid, i.e., constitutes a coherent system of signs. The rules of

literary language do not concern the conformity of this language to reality

(whatever the claims of the realistic schools), but only its submission to the

system of signs the author has established (and we must, of course, give the word

system a very strong sense here). Criticism has no responsibility to say whether

Proust has spoken “the truth,” whether Baron de Charlus was indeed the Count

de Montesquiou, whether Françoise was Céleste, or even, more generally, whether the society Proust described reproduces accurately the historical

conditions of the nobility disappearance at the end of the nineteenth century; its

role is solely to elaborate a language whose coherence, logic, in short whose

systematics can collect or better still can “integrate” (in the mathematical sense of

the word) the greatest possible quantity of Proustian language, exactly as a logical

equation tests the validity of reasoning without taking sides as to the “truth” of

the arguments it mobilizes. One can say that the critical task (and this is the sole

guarantee of its universality) is purely formal: not to “discover” in the work or the

author something “hidden,” “profound,” “secret” which hitherto passed

unnoticed (by what miracle? Are we more perspicacious than our predecessors?),

but only to adjust the language his period affirms him (existentialism, Marxism,

psychoanalysis) to the language, i.e., the formal system of logical constraints

elaborated by the author according to his own period. The “proof” of a criticism is

not of an “alethic” order (it does not proceed form truth), for critical

discourse—like logical discourse, moreover—is never anything but tautological: it

consists in saying ultimately, though placing its whole being within that delay,

what thereby is not insignificant: Racine is Racine, Proust is Proust; critical

“proof,” if it exists, depends on an aptitude not to discover the work in question

but on the contrary to cover it as completely as possible by its own language.



6. Thus we are concerned, once again, with an essentially formal activity, not in the

esthetic but in the logical sense of the term. We might say that for criticism, the

only way of avoiding “good conscience” or “bad faith” is to take as a moral goal

not the decipherment of the work’s meaning but the reconstruction of the rules

and constraints of that meaning’s elaboration; provided we admit at once that a

literary work is a very special semantic system, whose goal is to put “meaning” in

the world, but not “a meaning”; the work, at least the work which ordinarily

accedes to critical scrutiny—and this is perhaps a definition of “good”

literature—the work is never entirely non-signifying (“mysterious” or “inspired”),

and never entirely clear; it is, one may say, a suspended meaning: it offers itself to

the reader as an avowed signifying system yet withholds itself from him as a

signified object. This disappointment of meaning explains on the one hand why the literary work has so much power to ask the world questions (undermining the

assured meanings which ideologies, beliefs, and common sense seem to possess),

yet without every answering them (there is no great work which is “dogmatic”),

and on the other hand why it offers itself to endless decipherment, since there is

no reason for us to stop speaking of Racine or Shakespeare (unless by a

disaffection which will itself be a language): simultaneously an insistent

proposition of meaning and a stubbornly fugitive meaning, literature is indeed

only a language, i.e., a system of signs; its being is not in its message but in this

“system.” And thereby the critic is not responsible for reconstructing the work’s

message but only its system, but as the linguist is not responsible for deciphering

the sentence’s meaning but for establishing the formal structure which permits

this meaning to be transmitted.

7. It is by acknowledging itself as not more then a language (or more precisely, a

metalanguage) that criticism can be—paradoxically but authentically—both

objective and subjective, historical and existential, totalitarian and liberal. For on

the one hand, the lanaguage each critic choose to speak does not come down to

him from Heaven; it is one of the various languages his age affords him, it is

objectively the end product of a certain historical ripening of knowledge, ideas,

intellectual passions—it is a necessity; and on the other hand, this necessary



language is chosen by each critic as a consequence of a certain existential

organization, as the exercise of an intellectual function which belongs to him in

his own right, an exercise in which he puts all his “profundity,” i.e., his choices,

his pleasures, his resistances, his obsessions. Thus begins, at the heart of the

critical work, the dialogue of two histories and two subjectivities, the author’s and

the critic’s. But this dialogue is egoistically shifted toward the present: criticism is

not an “homage” to the truth of the past or to the truth of “others”—it is a

construction of the intelligibility of our own time.

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