James has a belated post asking Roland Barthes a question. Much of what James says is good, and Barthes would absolutely agree that the social is fundamanental. The essay was written at a time, and out of a period of work, where it was thought ‘meaning’ would be explainable with almost scientific precision. It is not that words don’t have meanings, but that to write and argue in a way where meaning is thought to be fixed, and as James says “social factors and learnt behaviours that give words their meaning are constantly shifting”, is to not recognise precisely this. On the other hand the comparison to Hawking doesn’t work. Here we are reading Barthes as the primary source. Hawking, while doing an excellent job of communicating to a lay public, is in this case writing to a lay public. We are not reading the Hawking’s that talks to the discipline of physics. That is, like Barthes, full of complex, dense, obdurate mathematics. The more accurate comparison would be Barthes writing about Barthes for beginners (which is what the Hawking book does). We haven’t done this, we have done the equivalent of reading Hawking’s “The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime”. The image above is from the introduction, the ‘easy’ part of the book. Just as physicists, when talking physics to each other, use a complex language, so Barthes, writing to literary and cultural theorists, also needs a complex language. After the work has been done, perhaps, then you can revisit it in simpler form, but here you have been invited to read the theoretical original work, not the popularised introduction.

Alene has a good post linking Barthes, the writerly, and k-films. This way of seeing how the theory can help to understand what we are doing, and not just explain it, is very good and is the sort of thing the written part of the final project is inviting you to do.

Sophie has a thumbnail list which is actually a cognitive map of Barthes’. Remember, find an entry into the work and exploit it. It is less about being faithful to the essay than using its terms to launch ideas. July has her own sketch of this map.

Annie corrects my lack of understanding about classical ballet. She’s right. I have none. So luckily I have her to correct me. So the ballet example makes a lot of sense for Annie, but I’d be interested in the distinction I tried to make between work as classical ballet and text as, say, modern dance (Chunky Move’s Tense Dave was my example). Is this a better example than various variations around Swan Lake?

Alene finds the dance example useful too, feels scolded (I do do that too much, don’t I) and makes good use of the garden versus forest analogy. There’s a nice list of dot points that could come in handy too.

Jo is struggling with the ideas of work and text, while Sophie has a useful listing from the first lecture. Zach stil can’t make head or tail of it (and it is good to say so, how else would I know?), while Jason wonders about Korsakow and decides he’s just followed ideas a la Barthes! Sophie has thumbnail notes from the second lecture, which just reminds me that it really didn’t make a lot of sense. Alene has very good notes, though I did make a mess of the object relations stuff and didn’t even explain why I went that particular way anyway (for goodness sake Adrian, you really confused yourself there so how could anyone else join the bits?).

However, this might help. Or it might not. YMMV.

OK, simplest thing and hardest thing for y’all. Stop trying to read “From Work to Text” like it is a normal academic essay that has an introduction, body, and conclusion. Imagine, instead, that if he’d been able to write a hypertext, then it would be a hypertext. No middle, all links. It is about the movement of ideas because that is what they do. How, in our world, of ideas, of thinking what a story might be, or mean, or what media will look like in five years, can we even think to begin from a position where things are stable, sure, solid? So read Phoebe. She nails it. You are reading the academic version of a dance, where (to keep that metaphor going), most of the time, in most of your academic lives, you’ve only been shown, and read, the academic version of classical ballet. This is Chunky Move (for example Tense Dave clip here) not The Royal Ballet (say, Swan Lake).