I M A G E M U S I C T E X T

ROLAND BARTHES was bom in 1915 and died in 1980. At
the time of his death he was Professor at the College de
France. Among his books are Le Degre zero de I'ecriture
(1953), Mythologies (1957), Elements de semiologie (1964),
S/Z (1970), L'Empire des signes (1970), Sade, Fourier, Loyola
(1971), Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), Fragments
d'un discours amoureux (1977), and La Chambre claire (1980).

STEPHEN HEATH is a Fellow ofJesus College and Reader in
Cultural Studies in the University of Cambridge. His books
include a study of Barthes, Vertige du deplacement (1974),
and, most recently, Gustave Flaubert: 'Madame Bovary'(\992).

R O L A N D BARTHES

Image Music Text

Essays selected and translated

by Stephen Heath

FontanaPress

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Fontana Press

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Published by Fontana Press 1977

14

Copyright © Roland Barthes 1977

English translation copyright © Stephen Heath 1977

Illustrations I, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV

are from the collection of Vincent Pinel

ISBN 0 00 686135 0

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Contents

Translator's Note 7
Sources 13

The Photographic Message 15
Rhetoric of the Image 32
The Third Meaning 52

Research notes on some Eisenstein stills

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein 69
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives 79
The Struggle with the Angel 125

Textual analysis of Genesis 32: 22-32

The Death of the Author 142

Musica Practica 149
From Work to Text 155
Change the Object Itself 165

Mythology today

Lesson in Writing 170

The Grain of the Voice 179

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers 190

Index 217

Translator's Note

Leaving aside the problems involved in any translation,
special difficulties arise when (as here) there is (as yet?)
no real overlap in theoretical context between the two
languages in question. With regard to the semiological
reference in these essays, I have tried wherever possible to
conform to the terminological solutions adopted by the
English translators of Barthes's Elements of Semiology. A
certain amount of bibliographical - and occasionally

explanatory - material has been added in footnotes which
are identified by being placed in square brackets.

The following terms pose particular difficulties:

Langue|parole - The reference here is to the distinction

made by the Swiss linguist Saussure. Where parole is the
realm of the individual moments of language use, of parti-
cular 'utterances' or 'messages', whether spoken or written,

langue is the system or code ('le code de la langue') which
allows the realization of the individual messages. As the
language-system, object of linguistics, langue is thus also
to be differentiated from langage, the heterogeneous totality

with which the linguist is initially faced and which may be
studied from a variety of points of view, partaking as it
does of the physical, the physiological, the mental, the
individual and the social. It is precisely by delimiting its

specific object and fixing as its task the description of that

object (that is, of the langue, the system of the language)
that Saussure founds linguistics as a science. (Chomsky's
distinction between competence/performance - 'the speaker-
hearer's knowledge of his language' and 'the actual use of

8 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

language in concrete situations' - resembles that between

langue|parole but, so to speak, brings within the scope of
langue elements - the recursive processes underlying
sentence formation - regarded by Saussure as belonging

to parole). The problem in translation is that in English

'language' has to serve for both langue and langage. Langue

can often be specified by translation as 'a' or 'the language'
or again as 'language-system' (in opposition to the 'language-
use' of parole), but I have included the French term in
brackets in cases where the idea of the analytic construction
of a language-system is being given crucial stress (see notably

the 'Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives').

Enonce|enonciation - Both these terms are often translated

in English as 'utterance', but whereas the first signifies what

is uttered (the statement, the proposition), the second
signifies the act of uttering (the act of speech, writing or
whatever by which the statement is stated, the proposition
proposed). This distinction rejoins and displaces that
between langue/parole: every enonce is a piece of parole;
consideration of enonciation involves not only the social
and psychological (i.e. non-linguistic) context of enonces,
but also features of langue itself, of the ways in which it
structures the possibilities of enonciation (symbol-indexes

such as personal pronouns, tenses, anaphores are the most
obvious of these linguistic features of enonciation). The

distinction - the displacement - has particular importance
in any - semiological, psychoanalytical, textual - attention

to the passage, the divisions, of the subject in language,
in the symbolic, to the slide seized in the disjunction of
the sujet de I'enonce and the sujet de l'enonciation. In the

utterance 'I am lying', for example, it is evident that the
subject of the proposition is not one with the subject of
the enunciation of the proposition - the 'I' cannot lie on
both planes at once. Dream, lapsus and joke are so many

Translator's Note | 9

disorders of the regulation of these planes, of the exchange
between subject and signifier; as too, exactly, is the text.

The distinction enonce|enonciation is rendered here, accord-
ing to context, either by 'statement' or 'proposition'/
'utterance' or, more simply and carefully, by 'enounced'/

'enunciation'.

Plaisir/jouissance - English lacks a word able to carry the

range of meaning in the term jouissance which includes
enjoyment in the sense of a legal or social possession
(enjoy certain rights, enjoy a privilege), pleasure, and,

crucially, the pleasure of sexual climax. The problem would
be less acute were it not that jouissance is specifically
contrasted to plaisir by Barthes in his Le Plaisir du texte:
on the one hand a pleasure (plaisir) linked to cultural
enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of iden-
tity, to a homogenizing movement of the ego; on the other
a radically violent pleasure (jouissance) which shatters -
dissipates, loses - that cultural identity, that ego. The
American translation of Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure

of the Text, New York 1975) uses the word 'bliss' for

jouissance; the success of this is dubious, however, since

not only does 'bliss' lack an effective verbal form (to render
the French jouir), it also brings with it connotations of
religious and social contentment ('heavenly bliss', 'blissfully
happy') which damagingly weaken the force of the original

French term. I have no real answer to the problem and have

resorted to a series of words which in different contexts
can contain at least some of that force: 'thrill' (easily

verbalized with 'to thrill', more physical and potentially
sexual, than 'bliss'), 'climactic pleasure', 'come' and

'coming' (the exact sexual translation of jouir, jouissance),

'dissipation' (somewhat too moral in its judgement but able
to render the loss, the fragmentation, emphasized by Barthes

in jouissance).

10 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

Signifiance - A theoretical concept initially proposed and

developed by Julia Kristeva (see Semeiotike: Recherches

pour une semanalyse, Paris 1969; a brief account can be

found in English in her 'The semiotic activity', Screen
Vol. 14 No. 1/2, Spring/Summer 1973). Signifiance has
sometimes been translated as 'significance', but this, with
its assent to the stressed position of the sign, is exactly
what it is not and it has here been left as signifiance. Barthes
himself introduces signifiance as follows in a passage which
gathers together a number of the terms that have been
discussed in this present note: '. . . when the text is read
(or written) as a moving play of signifiers, without any
possible reference to one or some fixed signifieds, it becomes
necessary to distinguish signification, which belongs to the
plane of the product, of the enounced, of communication,

and the work of the signifier, which belongs to the plane
of the production, of the enunciation, of symbolization -
this work being called signifiance. Signifiance is a process

in the course of which the "subject" of the text, escaping the

logic of the ego-cogito and engaging in other logics (of the
signifier, of contradiction), struggles with meaning and is

deconstructed ("lost"); signifiance - and this is what im-
mediately distinguishes it from signification is thus precisely
a work: not the work by which the (intact and exterior)

subject might try to master the language (as, for example,

by a work of style), but that radical work (leaving nothing
intact) through which the subject explores - entering, not

observing - how the language works and undoes him or her.
Signifiance is "the un-end of possible operations in a given
field of a language". Contrary to signification, signifiance
cannot be reduced, therefore, to communication, representa-
tion, expression: it places the subject (of writer, reader) in
the text not as a projection... but as a "loss", a "disappear-
ance". Hence its identification with the pleasure of jouissance:

the text becomes erotic through signifiance (no need, that is,

Translator's Note | 11

for the text to represent erotic "scenes").'

Finally, it must be said that the relatively minor part played

by grammatical gender in English, where the reference of
the pronouns he, she and it is very largely determined by
so-called 'natural' gender, creates difficulties when trans-
lating from an effectively grammatical gender language such
as French: either one produces a text in which the mascu-
line reference predominates or one specifies the feminine

equally at every point (he/she, him-or-herself, etc.). The
effect of the latter strategy - the signified determination to
move against linguistic sexism - could only be an addition
by the translator to Barthes's writing in French; for this
reason alone, it has not been adopted here.

S.H.

Sources

Original titles and sources of the essays published in this collec-
tion are as follows:

The Photographic Message: 'Le message photographique', Com-

munications 1, 1961.

Rhetoric of the Image: 'Rhetorique de Fimage', Communications

4, 1964.

The Third Meaning: 'Le troisieme sens: Notes de recherche sur

quelques photogrammes de S. M. Eisenstein', Cahiers du
cinima, 222, 1970.

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein: 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein', in

Cinima, Thiorie, Lectures (special number of the Revue

d'esthitique), 1973.

Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives: 'Introduc-

tion a 1'analyse structurale des recits', Communications 8, 1966.

The Struggle with the Angel: 'La lutte avec l'ange: Analyse
textuelle de Genese 32, 22-32', in Analyse structurale et exigise

biblique, NeuchStel 1971.

The Death of the Author: 'La mort de l'auteur', Mantela V, 1968.

Musica Practica: 'Musica practica', L'Arc 40, 1970.

From Work to Text: 'De l'ceuvre au texte', Revue d'esthitique 3,

1971.

Change the Object Itself: 'Changer l'objet lui-mSme* (Barthes's

title: 'La mythologie aujourd'hui'), Esprit, April 1971.

Lesson in Writing: 'Lecon d'ecriture', Tel Quel 34, Summer 1968.
The Grain of the Voice: 'Le grain de la voix', Musique enjeu 9,

1972.

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers: 'Ecrivains, intellectuels, pro-

fesseurs', Tel Quel 47, Autumn 1971.

The Photographic Message

The press photograph is a message. Considered overall
this message is formed by a source of emission, a channel
of transmission and a point of reception. The source of
emission is the staff of the newspaper, the group of tech-
nicians certain of whom take the photo, some of whom
choose, compose and treat it, while others, finally, give it a

title, a caption and a commentary. The point of reception
is the public which reads the paper. As for the channel of
transmission, this is the newspaper itself, or, more precisely,
a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph
as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the title,
the caption, the lay-out and, in a more abstract but no less
'informative' way, by the very name of the paper (this name
represents a knowledge that can heavily orientate the reading
of the message strictly speaking: a photograph can change

its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L'Aurore
to the communist L'Humanite). These observations are
not without their importance for it can readily be seen that
in the case of the press photograph the three traditional
parts of the message do not call for the same method of
investigation. The emission and the reception of the message
both lie within the field of a sociology: it is a matter of
studying human groups, of defining motives and attitudes,
and of trying to link the behaviour of these groups to the
social totality of which they are a part. For the message
itself, however, the method is inevitably different: whatever
the origin and the destination of the message, the photo-

graph is not simply a product or a channel but also an
object endowed with a structural autonomy. Without in

16 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

any way intending to divorce this object from its use, it is
necessary to provide for a specific method prior to socio-
logical analysis and which can only be the immanent analysis
of the unique structure that a photograph constitutes.

Naturally, even from the perspective of a purely immanent

analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated
structure; it is in communication with at least one other
structure, namely the text - title, caption or article - accom-
panying every press photograph. The totality of the informa-
tion is thus carried by two different structures (one of which
is linguistic). These two structures are co-operative but,

since their units are heterogeneous, necessarily remain
separate from one another: here (in the text) the substance
of the message is made up of words; there (in the photo-
graph) of lines, surfaces, shades. Moreover, the two struc-
tures of the message each occupy their own defined spaces,
these being contiguous but not 'homogenized', as they are
for example in the rebus which fuses words and images
in a single line of reading. Hence, although a press photo-
graph is never without a written commentary, the analysis

must first of all bear on each separate structure; it is only
when the study of each structure has been exhausted that it
will be possible to understand the manner in which they
complement one another. Of the two structures, one is
already familiar, that of language (but not, it is true, that
of the 'literature' formed by the language-use of the news-
paper; an enormous amount of work is still to be done in
this connection), while almost nothing is known about the
other, that of the photograph. What follows will be limited
to the definition of the initial difficulties in providing a
structural analysis of the photographic message.

The photographic paradox

What is the content of the photographic message? What

The Photographic Message | 17

does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene
itself, the literal reality. From the object to its image there

is of course a reduction - in proportion, perspective, colour
- but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in
the mathematical sense of the term). In order to move from
the reality to its photograph it is in no way necessary to
divide up this reality into units and to constitute these
units as signs, substantially different from the object they
communicate; there is no necessity to set up a relay, that is

to say a code, between the object and its image. Certainly
the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect
analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which,
to common sense, defines the photograph. Thus can be
seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a
message without a code; from which proposition an im-
portant corollary must immediately be drawn: the photo-
graphic message is a continuous message.

Are there other messages without a code? At first sight,

yes: precisely the whole range of analogical reproductions
of reality - drawings, paintings, cinema, theatre. In fact,
however, each of those messages develops in an immediate
and obvious way a supplementary message, in addition to
the analogical content itself (scene, object, landscape),
which is what is commonly called the style of the reproduc-
tion; second meaning, whose signifier is a certain 'treat-
ment' of the image (result of the action of the creator) and
whose signified, whether aesthetic or ideological, refers
to a certain 'culture' of the society receiving the message.
In short, all these 'imitative' arts comprise two messages:

a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a con-
noted message, which is the manner in which the society
to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it. This
duality of messages is evident in all reproductions other
than photographic ones: there is no drawing, no matter
how exact, whose very exactitude is not turned into a style

18 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

(the style of 'verism'); no filmed scene whose objectivity
is not finally read as the very sign of objectivity. Here again,
the study of these connoted messages has still to be carried
out (in particular it has to be decided whether what is called
a work of art can be reduced to a system of significations);
one can only anticipate that for all these imitative arts -
when common - the code of the connoted system is very
likely constituted either by a universal symbolic order or by a
period rhetoric, in short by a stock of stereotypes (schemes,
colours, graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of
elements).

When we come to the photograph, however, we find in

principle nothing of the kind, at any rate as regards the
press photograph (which is never an 'artistic' photograph).
The photograph professing to be a mechanical analogue
of reality, its first-order message in some sort completely

fills its substance and leaves no place for the development

of a second-order message. Of all the structures of informa-
tion

1

, the photograph appears as the only one that is

exclusively constituted and occupied by a 'denoted' mes-
sage, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence.
In front of a photograph, the feeling of 'denotation', or,
if one prefers, of analogical plenitude, is so great that the
description of a photograph is literally impossible; to

describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message

a relay or second-order message derived from a code which
is that of language and constituting in relation to the

photographic analogue, however much care one takes to
be exact, a connotation: to describe is thus not simply
to be imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to

1. It is a question, of course, of 'cultural' or culturalized structures,

not of operational structures. Mathematics, for example, constitutes a
denoted structure without any connotation at all; should mass society
seize on it, however, setting out for instance an algebraic formula in
an article on Einstein, this originally purely mathematical message now
takes on a very heavy connotation, since it signifies science.

The Photographic Message | 19

signify something different to what is shown.

1

This purely 'denotative' status of the photograph, the

perfection and plenitude of its analogy, in short its 'objec-
tivity', has every chance of being mythical (these are the
characteristics that common sense attributes to the photo-
graph). In actual fact, there is a strong probability (and this
will be a working hypothesis) that the photographic message
too - at least in the press - is connoted. Connotation is not
necessarily immediately graspable at the level of the message
itself (it is, one could say, at once invisible and active, clear
and implicit) but it can already be inferred from certain
phenomena which occur at the levels of the production
and reception of the message: on the one hand, the press
photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen,

composed, constructed, treated according to professional,
aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors
of connotation; while on the other, this same photograph
is not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more
or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a
traditional stock of signs. Since every sign supposes a code,
it is this code (of connotation) that one should try to estab-
lish. The photographic paradox can then be seen as the
co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the

photographic analogue), the other with a code (the 'art',
or the treatment, or the 'writing', or the rhetoric, of the
photograph); structurally, the paradox is clearly not the
collusion of a denoted message and a connoted message
(which is the - probably inevitable - status of all the forms
of mass communication), it is that here the connoted (or
coded) message develops on the basis of a message without

a code. This structural paradox coincides with an ethical
paradox: when one wants to be 'neutral', 'objective', one

1. The description of a drawing is easier, involving, finally, the

description of a structure that is already connoted, fashioned with a
coded signification in view. It is for this reason perhaps that psycho-
logical texts use a great many drawings and very few photographs.

20 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

strives to copy reality meticulously, as though the analogical

were a factor of resistance against the investment of values
(such at least is the definition of aesthetic 'realism'); how

then can the photograph be at once 'objective' and 'invested',

natural and cultural? It is through an understanding of the
mode of imbrication of denoted and connoted messages

that it may one day be possible to reply to that question.
In order to undertake this work, however, it must be
remembered that since the denoted message in the photo-
graph is absolutely analogical, which is to say continuous,
outside of any recourse to a code, there is no need to look
for the signifying units of the first-order message; the
connoted message on the contrary does comprise a plane of
expression and a plane of content, thus necessitating a
veritable decipherment. Such a decipherment would as yet

be premature, for in order to isolate the signifying units

and the signified themes (or values) one would have to
carry out (perhaps using tests) directed readings, artificially

varying certain elements of a photograph to see if the varia-
tions of forms led to variations in meaning. What can at

least be done now is to forecast the main planes of analysis
of photographic connotation.

Connotation procedures

Connotation, the imposition of second meaning on the
photographic message proper, is realized at the different
levels of the production of the photograph (choice, technical
treatment, framing, lay-out) and represents, finally, a coding
of the photographic analogue. It is thus possible to separate
out various connotation procedures, bearing in mind how-

ever that these procedures are in no way units of significa-
tion such as a subsequent analysis of a semantic kind may
one day manage to define; they are not strictly speaking

part of the photographic structure. The procedures in

The Photographic Message | 21

question are familiar and no more will be attempted here

than to translate them into structural terms. To be fully
exact, the first three (trick effects, pose, objects) should be
distinguished from the last three (photogenia, aestheticism,
syntax), since in the former the connotation is produced
by a modification of the reality itself, of, that is, the denoted
message (such preparation is obviously not peculiar to the
photograph). If they are nevertheless included amongst
the connotation procedures, it is because they too benefit

from the prestige of the denotation: the photograph allows
the photographer to conceal elusively the preparation to

which he subjects the scene to be recorded. Yet the fact still
remains that there is no certainty from the point of view of a

subsequent structural analysis that it will be possible to
take into account the material they provide.

1. Trick effects. A photograph given wide circulation in

the American press in 1951 is reputed to have cost Senator
Millard Tydings his seat; it showed the Senator in conversa-
tion with the Communist leader Earl Browder. In fact, the
photograph had been faked, created by the artificial bringing

together of the two faces. The methodological interest of
trick effects is that they intervene without warning in the

plane of denotation; they utilize the special credibility of
the photograph - this, as was seen, being simply its excep-

tional power of denotation - in order to pass off as merely

denoted a message which is in reality heavily connoted;
in no other treatment does connotation assume so completely
the 'objective' mask of denotation. Naturally, signification
is only possible to the extent that there is a stock of signs,
the beginnings of a code. The signifier here is the conversa-
tional attitude of the two figures and it will be noted that

this attitude becomes a sign only for a certain society, only
given certain values. What makes the speakers' attitude the

sign of a reprehensible familiarity is the tetchy anti-

Communism of the American electorate; which is to say

22 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

that the code of connotation is neither artificial (as in a true

language) nor natural, but historical.

2. Pose. Consider a press photograph of President

Kennedy widely distributed at the time of the 1960 election:
a half-length profile shot, eyes looking upwards, hands
joined together. Here it is the- very pose of the subject
which prepares the reading of the signifieds of connotation:

youthfulness, spirituality, purity. The photograph clearly
only signifies because of the existence of a store of stereo-
typed attitudes which form ready-made elements of significa-

tion (eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped). A 'historical
grammar' of iconographic connotation ought thus to look
for its material in painting, theatre, associations of ideas,
stock metaphors, etc., that is to say, precisely in 'culture*.

As has been said, pose is not a specifically photographic
procedure but it is difficult not to mention it insofar as it

derives its effect from the analogical principle at the basis
of the photograph. The message in the present instance is
not 'the pose' but 'Kennedy praying': the reader receives
as a simple denotation what is in actual fact a double

structure - denoted-connoted.

3. Objects. Special importance must be accorded to

what could be called the posing of objects, where the meaning

comes from the objects photographed (either because these
objects have, if the photographer had the time, been arti-
ficially arranged in front of the camera or because the person
responsible for lay-out chooses a photograph of this or that

object). The interest lies in the fact that the objects are
accepted inducers of associations of ideas (book-case =

intellectual) or, in a more obscure way, are veritable symbols

(the door of the gas-chamber for Chessman's execution

with its reference to the funeral gates of ancient mythologies).

Such objects constitute excellent elements of signification:

on the one hand they are discontinuous and complete in

themselves, a physical qualification for a sign, while on the

The Photographic Message | 23

other they refer to clear, familiar signifieds. They are thus
the elements of a veritable lexicon, stable to a degree which
allows them to be readily constituted into syntax. Here, for
example, is a 'composition' of objects: a window opening
on to vineyards and tiled roofs; in front of the window a
photograph album, a magnifying glass, a vase of flowers.
Consequently, we are in the country, south of the Loire
(vines and tiles), in a bourgeois house (flowers on the table)
whose owner, advanced in years (the magnifying glass), is
reliving his memories (the photograph album) - Francois
Mauriac in Malagar (photo in Paris-Match). The connota-
tion somehow 'emerges' from all these signifying units which
are nevertheless 'captured' as though the scene were immedi-
ate and spontaneous, that is to say, without signification.
The text renders the connotation explicit, developing the

theme of Mauriac's ties with the land. Objects no longer
perhaps possess a power, but they certainly possess meanings.

4. Photogenia. The theory of photogenia has already been

developed (by Edgar Morin in Le Cinema ou I'homme

imaginaire

1

) and this is not the place to take up again the

subject of the general signification of that procedure; it

will suffice to define photogenia in terms of informational

structure. In photogenia the connoted message is the image
itself, 'embellished' (which is to say in general sublimated)
by techniques of lighting, exposure and printing. An inven-
tory needs to be made of these techniques, but only insofar

as each of them has a corresponding signified of connotation
sufficiently constant to allow its incorporation in a cultural
lexicon of technical 'effects' (as for instance the 'blurring

of movement' or 'flowingness' launched by Dr Steinert and
his team to signify space-time). Such an inventory would
be an excellent opportunity for distinguishing aesthetic

effects from signifying effects - unless perhaps it be recog-
nized that in photography, contrary to the intentions of

1. [Edgar Morin, Le Cinima ou L'homme imaginaire, Paris 1956.]

24 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

exhibition photographers, there is never art but always
meaning; which precisely would at last provide an exact
criterion for the opposition between good painting, even
if strongly representational, and photography.

5. Aestheticism. For if one can talk of aestheticism in

photography, it is seemingly in an ambiguous fashion:

when photography turns painting, composition or visual

substance treated with deliberation in its very material
'texture', it is either so as to signify itself as 'art' (which was
the case with the 'pictorialism' of the beginning of the

century) or to impose a generally more subtle and complex
signified than would be possible with other connotation
procedures. Thus Cartier-Bresson constructed Cardinal
Pacelli's reception by the faithful of Lisieux like a painting
by an early master. The resulting photograph, however,
is in no way a painting: on the one hand, its display of
aestheticism refers (damagingly) to the very idea of a paint-
ing (which is contrary to any true painting); while on the
other, the composition signifies in a declared manner a

certain ecstatic spirituality translated precisely in terms of

an objective spectacle. One can see here the difference

between photograph and painting: in a picture by a Primi-
tive, 'spirituality' is not a signified but, as it were, the very
being of the image. Certainly there may be coded elements
in some paintings, rhetorical figures, period symbols, but
no signifying unit refers to spirituality, which is a mode of
being and not the object of a structured message.

6. Syntax. We have already considered a discursive

reading of object-signs within a single photograph. Natur-
ally, several photographs can come together to form a
sequence (this is commonly the case in illustrated maga-
zines); the signifier of connotation is then no longer to be
found at the level of any one of the fragments of the sequence
but at that - what the linguists would call the supraseg-

mental level - of the concatenation. Consider for example

The Photographic Message | 25

four snaps of a presidential shoot at Rambouillet: in each,
the illustrious sportsman (Vincent Auriol) is pointing his
rifle in some unlikely direction, to the great peril of the
keepers who run away or fling themselves to the ground.
The sequence (and the sequence alone) offers an effect of

comedy which emerges, according to a familiar procedure,
from the repetition and variation of the attitudes. It can be
noted in this connection that the single photograph, con-
trary to the drawing, is very rarely (that is, only with much
difficulty) comic; the comic requires movement, which is
to say repetition (easy in film) or typification (possible in
drawing), both these 'connotations' being prohibited to the
photograph.

Text and image

Such are the main connotation procedures of the photo-
graphic image (once again, it is a question of techniques,

not of units). To these may invariably be added the text
which accompanies the press photograph. Three remarks

should be made in this context.

Firstly, the text constitutes a parasitic message designed

to connote the image, to 'quicken' it with one or more
second-order signifieds. In other words, and this is an
important historical reversal, the image no longer illustrates
the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are
parasitic on the image. The reversal is at a cost: in the
traditional modes of illustration the image functioned as
an episodic return to denotation from a principal message
(the text) which was experienced as connoted since, pre-
cisely, it needed an illustration; in the relationship that now

holds, it is not the image which comes to elucidate or
'realize' the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate,

patheticize or rationalize the image. As however this opera-

tion is carried out accessorily, the new informational

26 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

totality appears to be chiefly founded on an objective

(denoted) message in relation to which the text is only a
kind of secondary vibration, almost without consequence.

Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer);

today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture,
a moral, an imagination. Formerly, there was reduction
from text to image; today, there is amplification from the
one to the other. The connotation is now experienced only
as the natural resonance of the fundamental denotation
constituted by the photographic analogy and we are thus
confronted with a typical process of naturalization of the
cultural.

Secondly, the effect of connotation probably differs

according to the way in which the text is presented. The
closer the text to the image, the less it seems to connote it;
caught as it were in the iconographic message, the verbal
message seems to share in its objectivity, the connotation

of language is 'innocented' through the photograph's

denotation. It is true that there is never a real incorporation

since the substances of the two structures (graphic and
iconic) are irreducible, but there are most likely degrees of
amalgamation. The caption probably has a less obvious

effect of connotation than the headline or accompanying

article: headline and article are palpably separate from the
image, the former by its emphasis, the latter by its distance;
the first because it breaks, the other because it distances

the content of the image. The caption, on the contrary, by
its very disposition, by its average measure of reading,

appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its
denotation.

It is impossible however (and this will be the final remark

here concerning the text) that the words 'duplicate' the

image; in the movement from one structure to the other

second signifieds are inevitably developed. What is the

The Photographic Message | 27

relationship of these signifieds of connotation to the image?

To all appearances, it is one of making explicit, of pro-
viding a stress; the text most often simply amplifying
a set of connotations already given in the photograph.
Sometimes, however, the text produces (invents) an entirely
new signified which is retroactively projected into the image,
so much so as to appear denoted there. 'They were near to

death, their faces prove it', reads the headline to a photo-
graph showing Elizabeth and Philip leaving a plane - but
at the moment of the photograph the two still knew nothing
of the accident they had just escaped. Sometimes too, the
text can even contradict the image so as to produce a

compensatory connotation. An analysis by Gerbner (The

Social Anatomy of the Romance Confession Cover-girl)

demonstrated that in certain romance magazines the verbal
message of the headlines, gloomy and anguished, on the
cover always accompanied the image of a radiant cover-
girl; here the two messages enter into a compromise, the
connotation having a regulating function, preserving the
irrational movement of projection-identification.

Photographic insignificance

We saw that the code of connotation was in all likelihood
neither 'natural' nor 'artificial' but historical, or, if it be
preferred, 'cultural'. Its signs are gestures, attitudes,
expressions, colours or effects, endowed with certain
meanings by virtue of the practice of a certain society: the
link between signifier and signified remains if not un-
motivated, at least entirely historical. Hence it is wrong to
say that modern man projects into reading photographs
feelings and values which are characterial or 'eternal'
(infra- or trans-historical), unless it be firmly specified that
signification is always developed by a given society and his-

tory. Signification, in short, is the dialectical movement

28 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

which resolves the contradiction between cultural and natural
man.

Thanks to its code of connotation the reading of the

photograph is thus always historical; it depends on the
reader's 'knowledge' just as though it were a matter of a
real language [langue], intelligible only if one has learned

the signs. All things considered, the photographic 'language'

['langage'] is not unlike certain ideographic languages which

mix analogical and specifying units, the difference being
that the ideogram is experienced as a sign whereas the
photographic 'copy' is taken as the pure and simple
denotation of reality. To find this code of connotation
would thus be to isolate, inventoriate and structure all the
'historical' elements of the photograph, all the parts of the

photographic surface which derive their very discontinuity

from a certain knowledge on the reader's part, or, if one

prefers, from the reader's cultural situation.

This task will perhaps take us a very long way indeed.

Nothing tells us that the photograph contains 'neutral'
parts, or at least it may be that complete insignificance in the
photograph is quite exceptional. To resolve the problem,
we would first of all need to elucidate fully the mechanisms
of reading (in the physical, and no longer the semantic,

sense of the term), of the perception of the photograph.
But on this point we know very little. How do we read a

photograph? What do we perceive? In what order, accord-
ing to what progression? If, as is suggested by certain

hypotheses of Bruner and Piaget, there is no perception

without immediate categorization, then the photograph is
verbalized in the very moment it is perceived; better, it is
only perceived verbalized (if there is a delay in verbalization,
there is disorder in perception, questioning, anguish for the

subject, traumatism, following G. Cohen-Seat's hypothesis
with regard to filmic perception). From this point of view,
the image - grasped immediately by an inner metalanguage,

The Photographic Message | 29

language itself - in actual fact has no denoted state, is

immersed for its very social existence in at least an initial
layer of connotation, that of the categories of language.
We know that every language takes up a position with regard
to things, that it connotes reality, if only in dividing it
up; the connotations of the photograph would thus coincide,

grosso modo, with the overall connotative planes of language.

In addition to 'perceptive' connotation, hypothetical but

possible, one then encounters other, more particular, modes
of connotation, and firstly a 'cognitive' connotation whose
signifiers are picked out, localized, in certain parts of the
analogon. Faced with such and such a townscape, I know
that this is a North African country because on the left I
can see a sign in Arabic script, in the centre a man wearing
a gandoura, and so on. Here the reading closely depends
on my culture, on my knowledge of the world, and it is
probable that a good press photograph (and they are all
good, being selected) makes ready play with the supposed
knowledge of its readers, those prints being chosen which
comprise the greatest possible quantity of information of
this kind in such a way as to render the reading fully satisfy-
ing. If one photographs Agadir in ruins, it is better to have
a few signs of 'Arabness' at one's disposal, even though

'Arabness' has nothing to do with the disaster itself;
connotation drawn from knowledge is always a reassuring

force - man likes signs and likes them clear.

Perceptive connotation, cognitive connotation; there

remains the problem of ideological (in the very wide sense of
the term) or ethical connotation, that which introduces

reasons or values into the reading of the image. This is a
strong connotation requiring a highly elaborated signifier
of a readily syntactical order: conjunction of people (as
was seen in the discussion of trick effects), development of
attitudes, constellation of objects. A son has just been

born to the Shah of Iran and in a photograph we have:

30 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

royalty (cot worshipped by a crowd of servants gathering

round), wealth (several nursemaids), hygiene (white coats,
cot covered in Plexiglass), the nevertheless human condition
of kings (the baby is crying) - all the elements, that is, of
the myth of princely birth as it is consumed today. In this
instance the values are apolitical and their lexicon is abun-
dant and clear. It is possible (but this is only a hypothesis)
that political connotation is generally entrusted to the text,
insofar as political choices are always, as it were, in bad
faith: for a particular photograph I can give a right-wing
reading or a left-wing reading (see in this connection an

IFOP survey published by Les Temps modernes in 1955).
Denotation, or the appearance of denotation, is powerless
to alter political opinions: no photograph has ever convinced

or refuted anyone (but the photograph can 'confirm')

insofar as political consciousness is perhaps non-existent
outside the logos: politics is what allows all languages.

These few remarks sketch a kind of differential table of

photographic connotations, showing, if nothing else, that
connotation extends a long way. Is this to say that a pure
denotation, a this-side of language, is impossible? If such a
denotation exists, it is perhaps not at the level of what
ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the
objective, but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely
traumatic images. The trauma is a suspension of language,
a blocking of meaning. Certainly situations which are
normally traumatic can be seized in a process of photo-
graphic signification but then precisely they are indicated
via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates and paci-
fies them. Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in

photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the cer-
tainty that the scene 'really' happened: the photographer
had to be there (the mythical definition of denotation).

Assuming this (which, in fact, is already a connotation),
the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes,

The Photographic Message | 31

violent deaths, all captured 'from life as lived') is the
photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock-
photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge,
at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold on the
process instituting the signification. One could imagine a
kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult
is connotation; or again, the 'mythological' effect of a
photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect.

Why? Doubtless because photographic connotation, like

every well structured signification, is an institutional activity;
in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man,
to reassure him. Every code is at once arbitrary and ra-
tional; recourse to a code is thus always an opportunity
for man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason
and a liberty. In this sense, the analysis of codes perhaps
allows an easier and surer historical definition of a society
than the analysis of its signifieds, for the latter can often
appear as trans-historical, belonging more to an anthro-
pological base than to a proper history. Hegel gave a better
definition of the ancient Greeks by outlining the manner in
which they made nature signify than by describing the
totality of their 'feelings and beliefs' on the subject. Similarly,
we can perhaps do better than to take stock directly of
the ideological contents of our age; by trying to reconstitute
in its specific structure the code of connotation of a mode

of communication as important as the press photograph we
may hope to find, in their very subtlety, the forms our society
uses to ensure its peace of mind and to grasp thereby the

magnitude, the detours and the underlying function of that

activity. The prospect is the more appealing in that, as was

said at the beginning, it develops with regard to the photo-
graph in the form of a paradox - that which makes of an
inert object a language and which transforms the unculture
of a 'mechanical' art into the most social of institutions.

Rhetoric of the Image

According to an ancient etymology, the word image should
be linked to the root imitari. Thus we find ourselves im-
mediately at the heart of the most important problem

facing the semiology of images: can analogical representa-
tion (the 'copy') produce true systems of signs and not merely
simple agglutinations of symbols? Is it possible to conceive
of an analogical 'code' (as opposed to a digital one)? We
know that linguists refuse the status of language to all
communication by analogy - from the 'language' of bees
to the 'language' of gesture - the moment such communica-
tions are not doubly articulated, are not founded on a
combinatory system of digital units as phonemes are. Nor
are linguists the only ones to be suspicious as to the linguis-
tic nature of the image; general opinion too has a vague

conception of the image as an area of resistance to meaning -
this in the name of a certain mythical idea of Life: the image

is re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection,
and, as we know, the intelligible is reputed antipathetic
to lived experience. Thus from both sides the image is
felt to be weak in respect of meaning: there are those who
think that the image is an extremely rudimentary system in
comparison with language and those who think that signi-
fication cannot exhaust the image's ineffable richness. Now

even - and above all if- the image is in a certain manner the
limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable
ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning
get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what

is there beyond! Such are the questions that I wish to raise

by submitting the image to a spectral analysis of the messages

Rhetoric of the Image | 33

it may contain. We will start by making it considerably
easier for ourselves: we will only study the advertising image.
Why? Because in advertising the signification of the image
is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds of the advertising
message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the
product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as
clearly as possible. If the image contains signs, we can be
sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a
view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is

frank, or at least emphatic.

The three messages

Here we have a Panzani advertisement: some packets of

pasta, a tin, a sachet, some tomatoes, onions, peppers, a
mushroom, all emerging from a half-open string bag,

in yellows and greens on a red background.

1

Let us try to

'skim off' the different messages it contains.

The image immediately yields a first message whose

substance is linguistic; its supports are the caption, which
is marginal, and the labels, these being inserted into the
natural disposition of the scene, 'en abyme'. The code from
which this message has been taken is none other than that of

the French language; the only knowledge required to deci-
pher it is a knowledge of writing and French. In fact, this
message can itself be further broken down, for the sign

Panzani gives not simply the name of the firm but also,

by its assonance, an additional signified, that of Italianicity'.
The linguistic message is thus twofold (at least in this

particular image): denotational and connotational. Since,

however, we have here only a single typical sign,

2

namely

1. The description of the photograph is given here with prudence,

for it already constitutes a metalanguage. The reader is asked to refer
to the reproduction (XVII).

2. By typical sign is meant the sign of a system insofar as it is

34 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

that of articulated (written) language, it will be counted as
one message.

Putting aside the linguistic message, we are left with the

pure image (even if the labels are part of it, anecdotally).
This image straightaway provides a series of discontinuous

signs. First (the order is unimportant as these signs are not
linear), the idea that what we have in the scene represented
is a return from the market. A signified which itself implies
two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products
and that of the essentially domestic preparation for which

they are destined. Its signifier is the half-open bag which lets
the provisions spill out over the table, 'unpacked'. To read
this first sign requires only a knowledge which is in some
sort implanted as part of the habits of a very widespread
culture where 'shopping around for oneself is opposed to
the hasty stocking up (preserves, refrigerators) of a more
'mechanical' civilization. A second sign is more or less
equally evident; its signifier is the bringing together of the
tomato, the pepper and the tricoloured hues (yellow,
green, red) of the poster; its signified is Italy or rather
Italianicity. This sign stands in a relation of redundancy
with the connoted sign of the linguistic message (the
Italian assonance of the name Panzani) and the knowledge it

draws upon is already more particular; it is a specifically
'French' knowledge (an Italian would barely perceive the
eonnotation of the name, no more probably than he would
the Italianicity of tomato and pepper), based on a familiarity

with certain tourist stereotypes. Continuing to explore the

image (which is not to say that it is not entirely clear at

the first glance), there is no difficulty in discovering at least
two other signs: in the first, the serried collection of different

objects transmits the idea of a total culinary service, on the
one hand as though Panzani furnished everything necessary

adequately defined by its substance: the verbal sign, the iconic sign, the
gestural sign are so many typical signs.

Rhetoric of the Image | 35

for a carefully balanced dish and on the other as though the

concentrate in the tin were equivalent to the natural produce
surrounding it; in the other sign, the composition of the

image, evoking the memory of innumerable alimentary
paintings, sends us to an aesthetic signified: the 'nature
morte' or, as it is better expressed in other languages, the
'still life'

1

; the knowledge on which this sign depends is

heavily cultural. It might be suggested that, in addition to
these four signs, there is a further information pointer,
that which tells us that this is an advertisement and which
arises both from the place of the image in the magazine and
from the emphasis of the labels (not to mention the caption).
This last information, however, is co-extensive with the

scene; it eludes signification insofar as the advertising
nature of the image is essentially functional: to utter some-
thing is not necessarily to declare / am speaking, except in a
deliberately reflexive system such as literature.

Thus there are four signs for this image and we will

assume that they form a coherent whole (for they are all
discontinuous), require a generally cultural knowledge,

and refer back to signifieds each of which is global (for

example, Italianicity), imbued with euphoric values. After

the linguistic message, then, we can see a second, iconic
message. Is that the end? If all these signs are removed from
the image,' we are still left with a certain informational
matter; deprived of all knowledge, I continue to 'read' the
image, to 'understand' that it assembles in a common space
a number of identifiable (nameable) objects, not merely
shapes and colours. The signifieds of this third message are
constituted by the real objects in the scene, the signifiers

by these same objects photographed, for, given that the
relation between thing signified and image signifying in
analogical representation is not 'arbitrary' (as it is in lan-

1. In French, the expression nature morte refers to the original

presence of funereal objects, such as a skull, in certain pictures.

36 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

guage), it is no longer necessary to dose the relay with a

third term in the guise of the psychic image of the object.

What defines the third message is precisely that the relation
between signified and signifier is quasi-tautological; no
doubt the photograph involves a certain arrangement of the
scene (framing, reduction, flattening) but this transition
is not a transformation (in the way a coding can be); we
have here a loss of the equivalence characteristic of true sign

systems and a statement of quasi-identity. In other words,
the sign of this message is not drawn from an institutional

stock, is not coded, and we are brought up against the
paradox (to which we will return) of a message without
a code.

1

This peculiarity can be seen again at the level of the

knowledge invested in the reading of the message; in order
to 'read' this last (or first) level of the image, all that is
needed is the knowledge bound up with our perception.
That knowledge is not nil, for we need to know what an
image is (children only learn this at about the age of four)
and what a tomato, a string-bag, a packet of pasta are, but
it is a matter of an almost anthropological knowledge. This
message corresponds, as it were, to the letter of the image

and we can agree to call it the literal message, as opposed
to the previous symbolic message.

If our reading is satisfactory, the photograph analysed

offers us three messages: a linguistic message, a coded
iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message. The

linguistic message can be readily separated from the other

two, but since the latter share the same (iconic) substance,

to what extent have we the right to separate them ? It is certain
that the distinction between the two iconic messages is not
made spontaneously in ordinary reading: the viewer of the
image receives at one and the same time the perceptual
message and the cultural message, and it will be seen later

that this confusion in reading corresponds to the function

1. Cf. The photographic message', above pp. 13-31.

Rhetoric of the Image | 37

of the mass image (our concern here). The distinction,
however, has an operational validity, analogous to that
which allows the distinction in the linguistic sign of a
signifier and a signified (even though in reality no one is

able to separate the 'word' from its meaning except by
recourse to the metalanguage of a definition). If the distinc-
tion permits us to describe the structure of the image in a
simple and coherent fashion and if this description paves

the way for an explanation of the role of the image in society,
we will take it to be justified. The task now is thus to recon-

sider each type of message so as to explore it in its generality,
without losing sight of our aim of understanding the overall
structure of the image, the final inter-relationship of the
three messages. Given that what is in question is not a
'naive' analysis but a structural description,

1

the order of

the messages will be modified a little by the inversion of the
cultural message and the literal message; of the two iconic
messages, the first is in some sort imprinted on the second:
the literal message appears as the support of the 'symbolic'
message. Hence, knowing that a system which takes over
the signs of another system in order to make them its
signifiers is a system of connotation,

2

we may say immediately

that the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image
connoted. Successively, then, we shall look at the linguistic
message, the denoted image, and the connoted image.

The linguistic message

Is the linguistic message constant? Is there always textual

1. 'Naive' analysis is an enumeration of elements, structural descrip-

tion aims to grasp the relation of these elements by virtue of the
principle of the solidarity holding between the terms of a structure: if
one term changes, so also do the others.

2. Cf. R. Barthes, Elements de semiologie, Communications 4, 1964,

p. 130 [trans. Elements of Semiology, London 1967 & New York 1968,
pp. 89-92].

38 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

matter in, under, or around the image? In order to find
images given without words, it is doubtless necessary to go
back to partially illiterate societies, to a sort of pictographic
state of the image. From the moment of the appearance of
the book, the linking of text and image is frequent, though
it seems to have been little studied from a structural point
of view. What is the signifying structure of 'illustration' ?

Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given
in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the
text add a fresh information to the image? The problem
could be posed historically as regards the classical period

with its passion for books with pictures (it was inconceiv-
able in the eighteenth century that editions of La Fontaine's
Fables should not be illustrated) and its authors such as
Menestrier who concerned themselves with the relations
between figure and discourse.

1

Today, at the level of mass

communications, it appears that the linguistic message is
indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompany-

ing press article, film dialogue, comie strip balloon. Which

shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization
of the image - we are still, and more than ever, a civiliza-

tion of writing,

2

writing and speech continuing to be the

full terms of the informational structure. In fact, it is simply
the presence of the linguistic message that counts, for neither

its position nor its length seem to be pertinent (a long text
may only comprise a single global signified, thanks to
connotation, and it is this signified which is put in relation
with the image). What are the functions of the linguistic

message with regard to the (twofold) iconic message? There
appear to be two: anchorage and relay.

As will be seen more clearly in a moment, all images are

1. Menestrier, L'Art des emblemes, 1684.

2. Images without words can certainly be found in certain cartoons,

but by way of a paradox; the absence of words always covers an

enigmatic intention.

Rhetoric of the Image | 39

polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a
'floating chain' of signifieds, the reader able to choose
some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question
of meaning and this question always comes through as a

dysfunction, even if this dysfunction is recuperated by
society as a tragic (silent, God provides no possibility of
choosing between signs) or a poetic (the panic 'shudder of

meaning' of the Ancient Greeks) game; in the cinema itself,
traumatic images are bound up with an uncertainty (an
anxiety) concerning the meaning of objects or attitudes.
Hence in every society various techniques are developed

intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way

as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic

message is one of these techniques. At the level of the literal

message, the text replies - in a more or less direct, more or
less partial manner - to the question: what is it? The text
helps to identify purely and simply the elements of the
scene and the scene itself; it is a matter of a denoted descrip-
tion of the image (a description which is often incomplete) or,

in Hjelmslev's terminology, of an operation (as opposed to
connotation).

1

The denominative function corresponds

exactly to an anchorage of all the possible (denoted) mean-
ings of the object by recourse to a nomenclature. Shown a

plateful of something (in an Amieux advertisement), I
may hesitate in identifying the forms and masses; the caption
('rice and tuna fish with mushrooms') helps me to choose the
correct level of perception, permits me to focus not simply

my gaze but also my understanding. When it comes to the
'symbolic message', the linguistic message no longer guides

identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice
which holds the connoted meanings from proliferating,
whether towards excessively individual regions (it limits,
that is to say, the projective power of the image) or towards

dysphoric values. An advertisement (for d'Arcy preserves)

I. Elements de semiologie, pp. 131-2 [trans, pp. 90-4].

40 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

shows a few fruits scattered around a ladder; the caption
('as if from your own garden') banishes one possible signified

(parsimony, the paucity of the harvest) because of its un-
pleasantness and orientates the reading towards a more
flattering signified (the natural and personal character of
fruit from a private garden); it acts here as a counter-taboo,
combatting the disagreeable myth of the artificial usually
associated with preserves. Of course, elsewhere than in ad-
vertising, the anchorage may be ideological and indeed this is
its principal function; the text directs the reader through

the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and
receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it
remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in
advance. In all these cases of anchorage, language clearly
has a function of elucidation, but this elucidation is selec-

tive, a metalanguage applied not to the totality of the iconic
message but only to certain of its signs. The text is indeed the
creator's (and hence society's) right of inspection over the
image; anchorage is a control, bearing a responsibility - in
the face of the projective power of pictures - for the use
of the message. With respect to the liberty of the signifieds
of the image, the text has thus a repressive value

1

and we can

see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a
society are above all invested.

Anchorage is the most frequent function of the linguistic

1. This can be seen clearly in the paradoxical case where the image is

constructed according to the text and where, consequently, the control
would seem to be needless. An advertisement which wants to com-
municate that in such and such a coffee the aroma is 'locked in' the
product in powder form and that it will thus be wholly there when the
coffee is used depicts, above this proposition, a tin of coffee with a
chain and padlock round it. Here, the linguistic metaphor ('locked in')
is taken literally (a well-known poetic device); in fact, however, it is
the image which is read first and the text from which the image is
constructed becomes in the end the simple choice of one signified

among others. The repression is present again in the circular movement
as a canalization of the message.

Rhetoric of the Image \ 41

message and is commonly found in press photographs
and advertisements. The function of relay is less common
(at least as far as the fixed image is concerned); it can be
seen particularly in cartoons and comic strips. Here text
(most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a
complementary relationship; the words, in the same way
as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and

the unity of the message is realized at a higher level, that of
the story, the anecdote, the diegesis (which is ample confirma-

tion that the diegesis must be treated as an autonomous
system

1

). While rare in the fixed image, this relay-text

becomes very important in film, where dialogue functions
not simply as elucidation but really does advance the action
by setting out, in the sequence of messages, meanings that
are not to be found in the image itself. Obviously, the two

functions of the linguistic message can co-exist in the one
iconic whole, but the dominance of the one or the other is

of consequence for the general economy of a work. When

the text has the diegetic value of relay, the information is
more costly, requiring as it does the learning of a digital
code (the system of language); when it has a substitute
value (anchorage, control), it is the image which detains the
informational charge and, the image being analogical,
the information is then 'lazier': in certain comic strips

intended for 'quick' reading the diegesis is confided above

all to the text, the image gathering the attributive informa-
tions of a paradigmatic order (the stereotyped status of the
characters); the costly message and the discursive message
are made to coincide so that the hurried reader may be
spared the boredom of verbal 'descriptions', which are
entrusted to the image, that is to say to a less 'laborious'
system.

1. Cf. Claude Bremond, 'Le message narratif', Communications 4,

1964.

42 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

The denoted image

We have seen that in the image properly speaking, the dis-
tinction between the literal message and the symbolic
message is operational; we never encounter (at least in
advertising) a literal image in a pure state. Even if a totally
'naive' image were to be achieved, it would immediately

join the sign of naivety and be completed by a third -

symbolic - message. Thus the characteristics of the literal
message cannot be substantial but only relational. It is first
of all, so to speak, a message by eviction, constituted by
what is left in the image when the signs of connotation are
mentally deleted (it would not be possible actually to remove
them for they can impregnate the whole of the image, as in

the case of the 'still life composition'). This evictive state
naturally corresponds to a plenitude of virtualities: it is an

absence of meaning full of all the meanings. Then again
(and there is no contradiction with what has just been said),
it is a sufficient message, since it has at least one meaning

at the level of the identification of the scene represented;
the letter of the image corresponds in short to the first
degree of intelligibility (below which the reader would
perceive only lines, forms, and colours), but this intelligi-
bility remains virtual by reason of its very poverty, for
everyone from a real society always disposes of a knowledge
superior to the merely anthropological and perceives more
than just the letter. Since it is both evictive and sufficient,

it will be understood that from an aesthetic point of view
the denoted image can appear as a kind of Edenic state of

the image; cleared utopianically of its connotations, the
image would become radically objective, or, in the last
analysis, innocent.

This Utopian character of denotation is considerably

reinforced by the paradox already mentioned, that the

photograph (in its literal state), by virtue of its absolutely

Rhetoric of the Image | 43

analogical nature, seems to constitute a message without a
code. Here, however, structural analysis must differentiate,
for of all the kinds of image only the photograph is able to
transmit the (literal) information without forming it by

means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation.
The photograph, message without a code, must thus be
opposed to the drawing which, even when denoted, is a
coded message. The coded nature of the drawing can be
seen at three levels. Firstly, to reproduce an object or a
scene in a drawing requires a set of rule-governed trans-
positions; there is no essential nature of the pictorial copy

and the codes of transposition are historical (notably those
concerning perspective). Secondly, the operation of the

drawing (the coding) immediately necessitates a certain divi-
sion between the significant and the insignificant: the draw-

ing does not reproduce everything (often it reproduces very
little), without its ceasing, however, to be a strong message;
whereas the photograph, although it can choose its subject,

its point of view and its angle, cannot intervene within.
the object (except by trick effects). In other words, the denota-
tion of the drawing is less pure than that of the photo-
graph, for there is no drawing without style. Finally, like
all codes, the drawing demands an apprenticeship (Saussure

attributed a great importance to this semiological fact).
Does the coding of the denoted message have consequences
for the connoted message? It is certain that the coding of
the literal prepares and facilitates connotation since it
at once establishes a certain discontinuity in the image:
the 'execution' of a drawing itself constitutes a connotation.
But at the same time, insofar as the drawing displays its

coding, the relationship between the two messages is
profoundly modified: it is no longer the relationship between
a nature and a culture (as with the photograph) but that
between two cultures; the 'ethic' of the drawing is not the
same as that of the photograph.

44 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

In the photograph - at least at the level of the literal

message - the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not
one of 'transformation' but of 'recording', and the absence
of a code clearly reinforces the myth of photographic
'naturalness': the scene is there, captured mechanically, not
humanly (the mechanical is here a guarantee of objectivity).
Man's interventions in the photograph (framing, distance,

lighting, focus, speed) all effectively belong to the plane of
connotation; it is as though in the beginning (even if Utopian)
there were a brute photograph (frontal and clear) on which
man would then lay out, with the aid of various techniques,
the signs drawn from a cultural code. Only the opposition
of the cultural code and the natural non-code can, it seems,

account for the specific character of the photograph and
allow the assessment of the anthropological revolution it
represents in man's history. The type of consciousness the
photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since

it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the

thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of
its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time

category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the
photograph being an illogical conjunction between the
here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this
denoted message or message without code that the real
unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its
unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never
experienced as illusion, is in no way a. presence (claims as to
the magical character of the photographic image must be
deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in
every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of

this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality
from which we are sheltered. This kind of temporal equili-
brium (having-been-there) probably diminishes the projec-
tive power of the image (very few psychological tests resort

to photographs while many use drawings): the this was so

Rhetoric of the Image | 45

easily defeats the it's me. If these remarks are at all correct,
the photograph must be related to a pure spectatorial
consciousness and not to the more projective, more 'magical'

fictional consciousness on which film by and large depends.

This would lend authority to the view that the distinction be-
tween film and photograph is not a simple difference of
degree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be seen

as animated photographs: the having-been-there gives way

before a being-there of the thing; which omission would
explain how there can be a history of the cinema, without
any real break with the previous arts of fiction, whereas
the photograph can in some sense elude history (despite

the evolution of the techniques and ambitions of the
photographic art) and represent a 'flat' anthropological
fact, at once absolutely new and definitively unsurpassable,
humanity encountering for the first time in its history

messages without a code. Hence the photograph is not the

last (improved) term of the great family of images; it

corresponds to a decisive mutation of informational
economies.

At all events, the denoted image, to the extent to which it

does not imply any code (the case with the advertising
photograph), plays a special role in the general structure
of the iconic message which we can begin to define (returning
to this question after discussion of the third message):
the denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it
innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is

extremely dense, especially in advertising. Although the
Panzani poster is full of 'symbols', there nonetheless remains
in the photograph, insofar as the literal message is suffi-
cient, a kind of natural being-there of objects: nature seems
spontaneously to produce the scene represented. A pseudo-
truth is surreptitiously substituted for the simple validity

of openly semantic systems; the absence of code disintellec-
tualizes the message because it seems to found in nature the

46 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

signs of culture. This is without doubt an important historical

paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of
information (and notably of images), the more it provides
the means of masking the constructed meaning under the

appearance of the given meaning.

Rhetoric of the image

It was seen that the signs of the third message (the 'symbolic'
message, cultural or connoted) were discontinuous. Even
when the signifier seems to extend over the whole image,
it is nonetheless a sign separated from the others: the
'composition' carries an aesthetic signified, in much the
same way as intonation although suprasegmental is a
separate signifier in language. Thus we are here dealing with

a normal system whose signs are drawn from a cultural
code (even if the linking together of the elements of the
sign appears more or less analogical). What gives this system

its originality is that the number of readings of the same
lexical unit or lexia (of the same image) varies according to

individuals. In the Panzani advertisement analysed, four
connotative signs have been identified; probably there are

others (the net bag, for example, can signify the miraculous
draught of fishes, plenty, etc.). The variation in readings is

not, however, anarchic; it depends on the different kinds of
knowledge - practical, national, cultural, aesthetic - invested
in the image and these can be classified, brought into a

typology. It is as though the image presented itself to the
reading of several different people who can perfectly well

co-exist in a single individual: the one lexia mobilizes
different lexicons. What is a lexicon? A portion of the
symbolic plane (of language) which corresponds to a body

of practices and techniques.

1

This is the case for the different

1. Cf. A. J. Greimas, 'Les problemes de la description mecano-

graphique', Cahiers de Lexicologie, 1, 19S9, p. 63.

Rhetoric of the Image | 47

readings of the image: each sign corresponds to a body of
'attitudes' - tourism, housekeeping, knowledge of art -

certain of which may obviously be lacking in this or that
individual. There is a plurality and a co-existence of
lexicons in one and the same person, the number and identity

of these lexicons forming in some sort a person's idiolect.

1

The image, in its connotation, is thus constituted by an

architecture of signs drawn from a variable depth of lexicons
(of idiolects); each lexicon, no matter how 'deep', still
being coded, if, as is thought today, the psyche itself is
articulated like a language; indeed, the further one 'descends'
into the psychic depths of an individual, the more rarified
and the more classifiable the signs become - what could be
more systematic than the readings of Rorschach tests?
The variability of readings, therefore, is no threat to the

'language' of the image if it be admitted that that language

is composed of idiolects, lexicons and sub-codes. The image
is penetrated through and through by the system of meaning,
in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very
depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of
the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted
(for example at the level of the combiner of the signs or
creator of the message), it is also the totality of utterances
received:

2

the language must include the 'surprises' of

meaning.

Another difficulty in analysing connotation is that there

is no particular analytical language corresponding to the
particularity of its signifieds - how are the signifieds of
connotation to be named ? For one of them we ventured

the term Italianicity, but the others can only be designated

1. Cf. Elements de semiologie, p. 96 [trans, pp. 21-2].

2. In the Saussurian perspective, speech (utterances) is above all

that which is emitted, drawn from the language-system (and con-
stituting it in return). It is necessary today to enlarge the notion of
language [langue], especially from the semantic point of view, language
is the 'totalizing abstraction' of the messages emitted and received.

48 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

by words from ordinary language (culinary preparation,
still life, plenty); the metalanguage which has to take charge
of them at the moment of the analysis is not specialized.
This is a difficulty, for these signifieds have a particular

semantic nature; as a seme of connotation, 'plenty' does
not exactly cover 'plenty' in the denoted sense; the signifier
of connotation (here the profusion and the condensation of
the produce) is like the essential cipher of all possible plenties,
of the purest idea of plenty. The denoted word never refers
to an essence for it is always caught up in a contingent
utterance, a continuous syntagm (that of verbal discourse),
oriented towards a certain practical transitivity of language;
the seme 'plenty', on the contrary, is a concept in a pure
state, cut off from any syntagm, deprived of any context

and corresponding to a sort of theatrical state of meaning,
or, better (since it is a question of a sign without a syntagm),
to an exposed meaning. To express these semes of connota-
tion would therefore require a special metalanguage and
we are left with barbarisms of the Italianicity kind as best
being able to account for the signifieds of connotation, the
suffix -icity deriving an abstract noun from the adjective:
Italianicity is not Italy, it is the condensed essence of every-
thing that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting. By
accepting to regulate artificially - and if needs be
barbarously - the naming of the semes of connotation,

the analysis of their form will be rendered easier.

1

These

semes are organized in associative fields, in paradigmatic
articulations, even perhaps in oppositions, according to
certain defined paths or, as A. J. Greimas puts it, according
to certain semic axes:

2

Italianicity belongs to a certain axis

of nationalities, alongside Frenchicity, Germanicity or

1. Form in the precise sense given it by Hjelmslev (cf. Elements de

semiologie, p. 105 [trans, pp. 39-41]), as the functional organization

of the signifieds among themselves.

2. A. J. Greimas, Cours de Semantique, 1964 (notes roneotyped by

he Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud).

Rhetoric of the Image | 49

Spanishicity. The reconstitution of such axes - which may
eventually be in opposition to one another - will clearly
only be possible once a massive inventory of the systems
of connotation has been carried out, an inventory not merely
of the connotative system of the image but also of those of
other substances, for if connotation has typical signifiers
dependent on the different substances utilized (image,
language, objects, modes of behaviour) it holds all its
signifieds in common: the same signifieds are to be found in

the written press, the image or the actor's gestures (which is

why semiology can only be conceived in a so to speak total
framework). This common domain of the signifieds of
connotation is that of ideology, which cannot but be

single for a given society and history, no matter what signi-

fiers of connotation it may use.

To the general ideology, that is, correspond signifiers

of connotation which are specified according to the chosen
substance. These signifiers will be called connotators and
the set of connotators a rhetoric, rhetoric thus appearing as
the signifying aspect of ideology. Rhetorics inevitably
vary by their substance (here articulated sound, there image,
gesture or whatever) but not necessarily by their form; it
is even probable that there exists a single rhetorical form,
common for instance to dream, literature and image.

1

Thus the rhetoric of the image (that is to say, the classifica-

tion of its connotators) is specific to the extent that it is
subject to the physical constraints of vision (different, for
example, from phonatory constraints) but general to the
extent that the 'figures' are never more than formal rela-
tions of elements. This rhetoric could only be established

on the basis of a quite considerable inventory, but it is

1. Cf. Emile Benveniste, 'Remarques sur la fonction du langage

dans la deouverte freudienne', La Psychanalyse 1, 1956, pp. 3-16
[reprinted in E. Benveniste, Problimes de linguistique generale, Paris

1966, Chapter 7; translated as Problems of General Linguistics, Coral
Gables, Florida 1971].

50 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

possible now to foresee that one will find in it some of the

figures formerly identified by the Ancients and the Classics;

1

the tomato, for example, signifies Italianicity by metonymy
and in another advertisement the sequence of three scenes
(coffee in beans, coffee in powder, coffee sipped in the cup)
releases a certain logical relationship in the same way as

an asyndeton. It is probable indeed that among the meta-
bolas (or figures of the substitution of one signifier for
another

2

), it is metonymy which furnishes the image with

the greatest number of its connotators, and that among
the parataxes (or syntagmatic figures), it is asyndeton which
predominates.

The most important thing, however, at least for the

moment, is not to inventorize the connotators but to
understand that in the total image they constitute dis-
continuous or better still scattered traits. The connotators

do not fill the whole of the lexia, reading them does not

exhaust it. In other words (and this would be a valid pro-
position for semiology in general), not all the elements of
the lexia can be transformed into connotators; there always
remaining in the discourse a certain denotation without
which, precisely, the discourse would not be possible.
Which brings us back to the second message or denoted
image. In the Panzani advertisement, the Mediterranean
vegetables, the colour, the composition, the very profusion

rise up as so many scattered blocks, at once isolated and
mounted in a general scene which has its own space and,

as was seen, its 'meaning': they are 'set' in a syntagm which

1. Classical rhetoric needs to be rethought in structural terms

(this is the object of a work in progress); it will then perhaps be possible
to establish a general rhetoric or linguistics of the signifiers of connota-

tion, valid for articulated sound, image, gesture, etc. See 'L'ancienne
Rhetorique (Aide-memoire)', Communications 16, 1970.

2. We prefer here to evade Jakobson's opposition between metaphor

and metonymy for if metonymy by its origin is a figure of contiguity,
it nevertheless functions finally as a substitute of the signifier, that is as
a metaphor.

Rhetoric of the Image | 5i

is not theirs and which is that of the denotation. This last

proposition is important for it permits us to found (retro-
actively) the structural distinction between the second or
literal message and the third or symbolic message and to
give a more exact description of the naturalizing function
of the denotation with respect to the connotation. We can

now understand that it is precisely the syntagm of the
denoted message which 'naturalizes' the system of the
connoted message. Or again: connotation is only system,
can only be defined in paradigmatic terms; iconic denota-
tion is only syntagm, associates elements without any
system: the discontinuous connotators are connected,
actualized, 'spoken' through the syntagm of the denotation,
the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story
of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of
innocence.

It can thus be seen that in the total system of the image the

structural functions are polarized: on the one hand there is
a sort of paradigmatic condensation at the level of the
connotators (that is, broadly speaking, of the symbols),
which are strong signs, scattered, 'reified'; on the other a
syntagmatic 'flow' at the level of the denotation - it will
not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to
speech, and it is indeed the iconic 'discourse' which natural-

izes its symbols. Without wishing to infer too quickly from

the image to semiology in general, one can nevertheless

venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally
(structurally) between the system as culture and the syn-

tagm as nature: the works of mass communications all
combine, through diverse and diversely successful dialectics,
the fascination of a nature, that of story, diegesis, syntagm,
and the intelligibility of a culture, withdrawn into a few
discontinuous symbols which men 'decline' in the shelter of

their living speech.

The Third Meaning

Research notes on some Eisenstein stills

For Nordine Sail, director of Cinema 3

Here is an image from Ivan the Terrible (I): two courtiers,
two adjuvants, two supernumeraries (it matters little if I

am unable to remember the details of the story exactly)
are raining down gold over the young czar's head. I think
it possible to distinguish three levels of meaning in this
scene:

1) An informational level, which gathers together every-

thing I can learn from the setting, the costumes, the charac-
ters, their relations, their insertion in an anecdote with which
I am (even if vaguely) familiar. This level is that of communi-
cation. Were it necessary to find a mode of analysis for it,

I should turn to the first semiotics (that of the 'message');
this level, this semiotics, however, will be of no further
concern here.

2) A symbolic level, which is the downpour of gold and

which is itself stratified. There is the referential symbolism:
the imperial ritual of baptism by gold. Then there is the
diegetic symbolism: the theme of gold, of wealth, in Ivan

the Terrible (supposing such a theme to exist), which makes

a significant intervention in this scene. Then again there is
the Eisensteinian symbolism - if by chance a critic should

decide to demonstrate that the gold or the raining down
or the curtain or the disfiguration can be seen as held in a
network of displacements and substitutions peculiar to
S. M. Eisenstein. Finally, there is an historical symbolism, if,
in a manner even more widely embracing than the previous
ones, it can be shown that the gold brings in a (theatrical)

playing, a scenography of exchange, locatable both psycho-
analytically and economically, that is to say semiologically.

Taken in its entirety, this second level is that of signification.

The Third Meaning | 53

Its mode of analysis would be a semiotics more highly
developed than the first, a second or neo-semiotics, open
no longer to the science of the message but to the sciences of

the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy).

3) Is that all? No, for I am still held by the image. I

read, I receive (and probably even first and foremost)
a third meaning

1

- evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know

what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but
I can see clearly the traits, the signifying accidents of which
this - consequently incomplete - sign is composed: a certain
compactness of the courtiers' make-up, thick and insistent
for the one, smooth and distinguished for the other; the
former's 'stupid' nose, the latter's finely traced eyebrows,
his lank blondness, his faded, pale complexion, the affected
flatness of his hairstyle suggestive of a wig, the touching-up
with chalky foundation talc, with face powder. I am not

sure if the reading of this third meaning is justified - if it
can be generalized - but already it seems to me that its
signifier (the traits to which I have tried to give words, if
not to describe) possesses a theoretical individuality. On
the one hand, it cannot be conflated with the simple existence

of the scene, it exceeds the copy of the referential motif,
it compels an interrogative reading (interrogation bears
precisely on the signifier not on the signified, on reading
not on intellection: it is a 'poetical' grasp); on the other,
neither can it be conflated with the dramatic meaning of the
episode: to say that these traits refer to a significant 'attitude'
of the courtiers, this one detached and bored, that one
diligent ('They are simply doing their job as courtiers'),

1. In the classical paradigm of the five senses, the third sense is

hearing (first in importance in the Middle Ages). This is a happy
coincidence, since what is here in question is indeed listening: firstly,
because the remarks by Eisenstein to which reference will be made are
taken from a consideration of the coming of sound in film; second,
because listening (no reference to the phone alone) bears within it that
metaphor best suited to the 'textual': orchestration (SME's own
word), counterpoint, stereophony.

54 J IMAGE - MUSIC -- TEXT

does not leave me fully satisfied; something in the two
faces exceeds psychology, anecdote, function, exceeds

meaning without, however, coming down to the obstinacy

in presence shown by any human body. By contrast with

the first two levels, communication and signification, this
third level - even if the reading of it is still hazardous - is
that of signifiance, a word which has the advantage of
referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification)
and of linking up with, via the path opened by Julia Kristeva
who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text.

My concern here lies not with communication but with

signification and signifiance. I must therefore name as
economically as possible the second and third meanings.

The symbolic meaning (the shower of gold, the power of
wealth, the imperial rite) forces itself upon me by a double
determination: it is intentional (it is what the author wanted
to say) and it is taken from a kind of common, general

lexicon of symbols; it is a meaning which seeks me out, me,

the recipient of the message, the subject of the reading, a
meaning which starts with SME and which goes on ahead
of me; evident certainly (so too is the other), but closed
in its evidence, held in a complete system of destination.
I propose to call this complete sign the obvious meaning.

Obvius means which comes ahead and this is exactly the

case with this meaning, which comes to seek me out. In

theology, we are told, the obvious meaning is that 'which
presents itself quite naturally to the mind' and this again is
the case here: the symbolics of the raining down of gold
appears to me as for ever having been endowed with a

'natural' clarity. As for the other meaning, the third, the

one 'too many', the supplement that my intellection cannot
succeed in absorbing, at once persistent and fleeting, smooth
and elusive, I propose to call it the obtuse meaning. The word

springs readily to mind and, miracle, when its etymology

is unfolded, it already provides us with a theory of the

The Third Meaning | 55

supplementary meaning. Obtusus means that which is
blunted, rounded inform. Are not the traits which I indicated

(the make-up, the whiteness, the wig, etc.) just like the
blunting of a meaning too clear, too violent? Do they not
give the obvious signified a kind of difficultly prehensible

roundness, cause my reading to slip? An obtuse angle is
greater than a right angle: an obtuse angle of 100°, says the

dictionary; the third meaning also seems to me greater
than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the

narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally,
that is infinitely. I even accept for the obtuse meaning the
word's pejorative connotation: the obtuse meaning appears
to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analyti-

cally, it has something derisory about it: opening out into
the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in

the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of
pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral
or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the
pastiche), it is on the side of the carnival. Obtuse is thus
very suitable.

The obvious meaning

A few words with regard to the obvious meaning, even though
it is not the object of this study. Here are two images in
which it can be seen in its pure state. The four figures in
II 'symbolize' three ages of life and the unanimity of mourn-
ing (Vakulinchuk's funeral). The clenched fist in IV, given in
full 'detail', signifies indignation, anger mastered and chan-
nelled, the determination of the struggle; metonymically

joined to the whole Potemkin story, it 'symbolizes' the

working class in all its resolute strength, for, by a miracle
of semantic intelligence, this fist which is seen wrong way

up, kept by its owner in a sort of clandestinity (it is the hand
which first of all hangs down naturally along the trouser

56 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

leg and which then closes, hardens, thinks at once its future

struggle, its patience and its prudence), cannot be read as

the fist of some hoodlum, of some fascist: it is immediately
a proletarian fist. Which shows that Eisenstein's 'art' is not

polysemous: it chooses the meaning, imposes it, hammers it
home (if the signification is overrun by the obtuse meaning,
this is not to say that it is thereby denied or blurred): the
Eisensteinian meaning devastates ambiguity. How? By the

addition of an aesthetic value, emphasis. Eisenstein's

'decorativism' has an economic function: it proffers the

truth. Look at III: in extremely classic fashion, grief comes
from the bowed heads, the expressions of suffering, the hand
over the mouth stifling a sob, but when once all this has
been said, very adequately, a decorative trait says it again:

the superimposition of the two hands aesthetically arranged

in a delicate, maternal, floral ascension towards the face

bowing down. Within the general detail (the two women),
another detail is mirroringly inscribed; derived from a
pictorial order as a quotation of the gestures to be found in
icons and pietd, it does not distract but accentuates the
meaning. This accentuation (characteristic of all realist art)
has some connection with the 'truth' of Potemkin. Baudelaire
spoke of 'the emphatic truth of gesture in the important
moments of life'; here it is the truth of the 'important pro-
letarian moment' which requires emphasis. The Eisensteinian
aesthetic does not constitute an independent level: it is part
of the obvious meaning, and the obvious meaning is always,
in Eisenstein, the revolution.

The obtuse meaning

I first had the conviction of the obtuse meaning with image
V. A question forced itself upon me: what is it in this tear-
ful old woman that poses for me the question of the signifier?
I quickly convinced myself that, although perfect, it was

The Third Meaning | 57

neither the facial expression nor the gestural figuration
of grief (the closed eyelids, the taut mouth, the hand clasped
on the breast): all that belongs to the full signification, to

the obvious meaning of the image, to Eisensteinian realism

and decorativism. I felt that the penetrating trait - disturbing
like a guest who obstinately sits on saying nothing when one
has no use for him - must be situated somewhere in the
region of the forehead: the coif, the headscarf holding in

the hair, had something to do with it. In image VI, however,
the obtuse meaning vanishes, leaving only a message of
grief. It was then I understood that the scandal, supple-
ment or drift imposed on this classic representation of grief

came very precisely from a tenuous relationship: that of the

low headscarf, the closed eyes and the convex mouth; or

rather, to use the distinction made by SME himself between
'the shadows of the cathedral' and 'the enshadowed cathe-
dral', from a relation between the 'lowness' of the line of the

headscarf, pulled down abnormally close to the eyebrows

as in those disguises intended to create a facetious, simpleton
look, the upward circumflex of the faded eyebrows, faint
and old, the excessive curve of the eyelids, lowered but
brought together as though squinting, and the bar of the
half-opened mouth, corresponding to the bar of the head-
scarf and to that of the eyebrows, metaphorically speaking
'like a fish out of water'. All these traits (the funny headdress,

the old woman, the squinting eyelids, the fish) have as their
vague reference a somewhat low language, the language of a
rather pitiful disguise. In connection with the noble grief
of the obvious meaning, they form a dialogism so tenuous
that there is no guarantee of its intentionality. The charac-
teristic of this third meaning is indeed - at least in SME -
to blur the limit separating expression from disguise, but
also to allow that oscillation succinct demonstration - an
elliptic emphasis, if one can put it like that, a complex and
extremely artful disposition (for it involves a temporality

58 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

of signification), perfectly described by Eisenstein himself

when he jubilantly quotes the golden rule of the old K. S.

Gillette: 'just short of the cutting edge'.

The obtuse meaning, then, has something to do with

disguise. Look at Ivan's beard raised to obtuse meaning,
in my opinion, in image VII; it declares its artifice but with-
out in so doing abandoning the 'good faith' of its referent

(the historical figure of the czar): an actor disguised twice
over (once as actor in the anecdote, once as actor in the

dramaturgy) without one disguise destroying the other; a

multi-layering of meanings which always lets the previous
meaning continue, as in a geological formation, saying the
opposite without giving up the contrary - a (two-term)
dramatic dialectic that Brecht would have liked. The Eisen-
steinian 'artifice' is at once falsification of itself - pastiche -
and derisory fetish, since it shows its fissure and its suture:
what can be seen in image VII is the join and thus the initial
disjoin of the beard perpendicular to the chin. That the top
of a head (the most 'obtuse' part of the human person),
that a single bun of hair (in image VIII) can be the expression
of grief, that is what is derisory - for the expression, not
for the grief. Hence no parody, no trace of burlesque; there
is no aping of grief (the obvious meaning must remain
revolutionary, the general mourning which accompanies

Vakulinchuk's death has a historical meaning), and yet,
'embodied' in the bun, it has a cut-off, a refusal of contami-
nation ; the populism of the woollen shawl (obvious meaning)
stops at the bun; here begins the fetish - the hair - and a kind

of non-negating derision of the expression. The whole of the
obtuse meaning (its disruptive force) is staked on the ex-
cessive mass of the hair. Look at another bun (that of the
woman in image IX): it contradicts the tiny raised fist,
atrophies it without the reduction having the slightest
symbolic (intellectual) value; prolonged by small curls,
pulling the face in towards an ovine model, it gives the woman

The Third Meaning | 59

something touching (in the way that a certain generous

foolishness can be) or sensitive - these antiquated words,
mystified words if ever there were, with little that is revolu-
tionary or political about them, must nevertheless be as-
sumed. I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain
emotion. Caught up in the disguise, such emotion is never
sticky, it is an emotion which simply designates what one

loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion-value, an
evaluation. Everyone will agree, I think, that SME's pro-
letarian ethnography fragmented the length of Vakulin-
chuk's funeral, is constantly informed by something loving
(using the word regardless of any specification as to age or
sex). Maternal, cordial, virile, 'sympathetic' without any
recourse to stereotypes, the Eisensteinian people is essentially
lovable. We savour, we love the two round-capped heads in
image X, we enter into complicity, into an understanding
with them. Doubtless beauty can work as an obtuse meaning;
this is the case in image XI, where the extremely dense
obvious meaning (Ivan's attitude, young Vladimir's half-
wit foolishness) is anchored and/or set adrift by Basmanov's
beauty. But the eroticism included in the obtuse meaning
(or rather: the eroticism which this meaning picks up) is
no respector of the aesthetic: Euphrosyne is ugly, 'obtuse'
(images XII and XIII), like the monk (image XIV), but this
obtuseness exceeds the anecdote, becomes a blunting of

meaning, its drifting. There is in the obtuse meaning an

eroticism which includes the contrary of the beautiful., as
also what falls outside such contrariety, its limit - inver-
sion, unease, and perhaps sadism. Look at the flabby
innocence of the 'Children in the Fiery Furnace' (image
XV), the schoolboyish ridicule of their mufflers dutifully
tucked up to the chin, the curds-and-whey skin (of their

eyes, of their mouths set in the skin) which Fellini seems
to have remembered in the hermaphrodite of his Satiricon

- the very same mentioned by Georges Bataille, notably

60 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

in that text in Documents which situates for me one of the

possible regions of obtuse meaning, "The big toe'.

1

Let us continue (if these examples will suffice to lead on to

one or two more theoretical remarks). The obtuse meaning
is not in the language-system (even that of symbols). Take
away the obtuse meaning and communication and signi-

fication still remain, still circulate, still come through:
without it, I can still state and read. No more, however, is
it to be located in language use. It may be that there is a

certain constant in Eisensteinian obtuse meaning, but in
that case it is already a thematic language, an idiolect, this
idiolect being provisional (simply decided by a critic

writing a book on SME). Obtuse meanings are to be found
not everywhere (the signifier is rare, a future figure) but

somewhere: in other authors of films (perhaps), in a certain
manner of reading 'life' and so 'reality' itself (the word is
simply used here in opposition to the deliberately fictive).
In image XVI from Ordinary Fascism (by Mikhail Romm),
a documentary image, I can easily read an obvious meaning,
that of fascism (aesthetics and symbolics of power, the
theatrical hunt), but I can also read an obtuse meaning:
the (again) disguised, blond silliness of the young quiver-

bearer, the flabbiness of his hands and mouth (I cannot
manage to describe, only to designate a location), Goering's
thick nails, his trashy ring (this already on the brink of
obvious meaning, like the treacly platitude of the imbecile
smile of the bespectacled man in the background - visibly
an 'arse-licker'). In other words, the obtuse meaning is not
situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to

its objective existence (but then what is an objective read-

ing?); and if to me it is clear (to me), that is still perhaps

(for the moment) by the same 'aberration' which compelled

the lone and unhappy Saussure to hear in ancient poetry the

1. [Georges Bataille, 'Le gros orteil', Documents, Paris 1968, pp.

75-82.]

The Third Meaning | 61

enigmatic voice of anagram, unoriginated and obsessive.
Same uncertainty when it is a matter of describing the obtuse
meaning (of giving an idea of where it is going, where it
goes away). The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a

signified, hence the difficulty in naming it. My reading
remains suspended between the image and its description,
between definition and approximation. If the obtuse mean-
ing cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the
obvious meaning, it does not copy anything - how do you
describe something that does not represent anything? The
pictorial 'rendering' of words is here impossible, with the
consequence that if, in front of these images, we remain, you
and I, at the level of articulated language - at the level, that

is, of my own text - the obtuse meaning will not succeed in
existing, in entering the critic's metalanguage. Which means

that the obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language
while nevertheless within interlocution. For if you look at
the images I am discussing, you can see this meaning, we
can agree on it 'over the shoulder' or 'on the back' of
articulated language. Thanks to the image (fixed, it is true;
a factor which will be taken up later) or much rather thanks

to what, in the image, is purely image (which is in fact very

little), we do without language yet never cease to under-
stand one another.

In short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is

metalanguage (criticism). A number of reasons can be
given for this. First and foremost, obtuse meaning is dis-

continuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious
meaning (as signification of the story). This dissociation
has a de-naturing or at least a distancing effect with regard
to the referent (to 'reality' as nature, the realist instance).
Eisenstein would probably have acknowledged this in-
congruity, this im-pertinence of the signifier, Eisenstein
who tells us concerning sound and colour: 'Art begins

the moment the creaking of a boot on the sound-track

62 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

occurs against a different visual shot and thus gives rise

to corresponding associations. It is the same with colour:
colour begins where it no longer corresponds to natural
colouration . . .' Then, the signifier (the third meaning) is
not filled out, it keeps a permanent state of depletion (a

word from linguistics which designates empty, all-purpose
verbs, as for example the French verbfaire). We could also
say on the contrary - and it would be just as correct - that
this same signifier is not empty (cannot empty itself), that it
maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding
issue in that spasm of the signified which normally brings
the subject voluptuously back into the peace of nomin-
ations. Finally, the obtuse meaning can be seen as an
accent, the very form of an emergence, of a fold (a crease
even) marking the heavy layer of informations and signifi-
cations. If it could be described (a contradiction in terms),
it would have exactly the nature of the Japanese haiku -

anaphoric gesture without significant content, a sort of
gash rased of meaning (of desire for meaning). Thus in
image V:

Mouth drawn, eyes shut squinting,
Headscarf low over forehead,
She weeps.

This accent - the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic

character of which has already been mentioned - is not
directed towards meaning (as in hysteria), does not theatrica-
lize (Eisensteinian decorativism belongs to another level),
does not even indicate an elsewhere of meaning (another
content, added to the obvious meaning); it outplays meaning
- subverts not the content but the whole practice of mean-

ing. A new - rare - practice affirmed against a majority
practice (that of signification), obtuse meaning appears
necessarily as a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange.

This luxury does not yet belong to today's politics but

The Third Meaning | 63

nevertheless already to tomorrow's.

Something has still to be said concerning the syntagmatic

responsibility of the third meaning: what is its place in the
movement of the anecdote, in the logico-temporal system

without which, so it seems, it is impossible to communicate
a narrative to the 'mass' of readers and spectators? It is
clear that the obtuse meaning is the epitome of a counter-

narrative; disseminated, reversible, set to its own tempo-
rality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite

different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences
and syntagms (technical or narrative) - an extraordinary
segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true'. Imagine
'following' not Euphrosyne's schemings, nor even the
character (as diegetic entity or symbolic figure), nor even,
again, the face of the Wicked Mother, but merely, in this

face, this attitude, this black veil, the heavy, ugly flatness-
you will then have a different time-scale, neither diegetic
nor oneiric, a different film. A theme with neither variations
nor development (the obvious meaning is fully thematic:
there is a theme of the Funeral), the obtuse meaning can
only come and go, appearing-disappearing. The play of

presence/absence undermines the character, making of it
a simple nub of facets; a disjunction expressed in another
connection by SME himself: 'What is characteristic is that
the different positions of one and the same czar . .. are given

without link between one position and the next.''

Precisely. The indifference or freedom of position of the

supplementary signifier in relation to the narrative allows
us to situate with some exactitude the historical, political,
theoretical task accomplished by Eisenstein. In his work, the
story (the diegetic, anecdotal representation) is not destroyed
- quite the contrary: what finer story than that of Ivan
or Potemkin? This importance given to the narrative is

necessary in order to be understood in a society which,
unable to resolve the contradictions of history without a

64 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

long political transaction, draws support (provisionally?)
from mythical (narrative) solutions. The contemporary
problem is not to destroy the narrative but to subvert it;

today's task is to dissociate subversion from destruction. It

seems to me that SME operates such a distinction: the

presence of an obtuse, supplementary, third meaning - if
only in a few images, but then as an imperishable signature,
as a seal endorsing the whole of the work (and the whole of
his work) - radically recasts the theoretical status of the
anecdote: the story (the diegesis) is no longer just a strong

system (the millennial system of narrative) but also and

contradictorily a simple space, a field of permanences and
permutations. It becomes that configuration, that stage,
whose false limits multiply the signifieds permutational

play, that vast trace which, by difference, compels what
SME himself calls a vertical reading, that false order

which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory
combination (chance is crude, a signifier on the cheap)
and the attainment of a structuration which slips away from
the inside. It can thus be said that with SME we have to
reverse the cliche" according to which the more gratuitous

a meaning, the more it will appear as a mere parasite of the
story being narrated; on the contrary, it is this story

which here finds itself in some sort parametric to the signi-

fier for which it is now merely the field of displacement, the
constitutive negativity, or, again, the fellow-traveller.

In other words, the third meaning structures the film

differently without - at least in SME - subverting the story
and for this reason, perhaps, it is at the level of the third

meaning, and at that level alone, that the 'filmic' finally
emerges. The filmic is that in the film which cannot be

described, the representation which cannot be represented.
The filmic begins only where language and metalanguage
end. Everything that can be said about Ivan or Potemkin
can be said of a written text (entitled Ivan the Terrible or

The Third Meaning | 65

Battleship Potemkin) except this, the obtuse meaning; I
can gloss everything in Euphrosyne, except the obtuse
quality of her face. The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in

that region where articulated language is no longer more
than approximative and where another language begins

(whose science, therefore, cannot be linguistics, soon
discarded like a booster rocket). The third meaning -
theoretically locatable but not describable - can now be
seen as the passage from language to signifiance and the
founding act of the filmic itself. Forced to develop in a

civilization of the signified, it is not surprising that (despite
the incalculable number of films in the world) the filmic
should still be rare (a few flashes in SME, perhaps else-
where?), so much so that it could be said that as yet the

film does not exist (any more than does the text); there is
only 'cinema', language, narrative, poetry, sometimes

extremely 'modern', 'translated' into 'images' said to be
'animated'. Nor is it surprising that the filmic can only

be located after having - analytically - gone across the
'essential', the 'depth' and the 'complexity' of the cinematic
work; all those riches which are merely those of articulated
language, with which we constitute the Work and believe

we exhaust it. The filmic is not the same as the film, is as
far removed from the film as the novelistic is from the novel

(I can write in the novelistic without ever writing novels).

The still

Which is why to a certain extent (the extent of our theoretical
rumblings) the filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped
in the film 'in situation', 'in movement', 'in its natural
state', but only in that major artefact, the still. For a long

time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being
interested and even fascinated by photos from a film
(outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and

66 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

of then losing everything of those photos (not just the capti-

vation but the memory of the image) when once inside the
viewing room - a change which can even result in a com-
plete reversal of values. I at first ascribed this taste for stills
to my lack of cinematic culture, to my resistance to film;
I thought of myself as like those children who prefer the

pictures to the text, or like those clients who, unable to
attain the adult possession of objects (because too expensive),
are content to derive pleasure from looking at a choice of
samples or a department store catalogue. Such an explana-
tion does no more than reproduce the common opinion

with regard to stills which sees them as a remote sub-
product of the film, a sample, a means of drawing in custom,
a pornographic extract, and, technically, a reduction of

the work by the immobilization of what is taken to be the

sacred essence of cinema - the movement of the images.

If, however, the specific filmic (the filmic of the future)

lies not in movement, but in an inarticulable third meaning
that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting

can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon, the possi-
bility of configuration mentioned earlier,

1

then the 'move-

ment' regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux,

I. There are other 'arts' which combine still (or at least drawing)

and story, diegesis - namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am
convinced that these 'arts', born in the lower depths of high culture,
possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related
to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic-

strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with
certain photo-novels: 'their stupidity touches me' (which could be
a certain definition of obtuse meaning). There may thus be a future -
or a very ancient past - truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical
forms of consumer subculture. And there is an autonomous 'art' (a
'text'), that of the pictogram ('anecdotalized' images, obtuse meanings

placed in a diegetic space); this art taking across historically and cultur-
ally heteroclite productions: ethnographic pictograms, stained glass
windows, Carpaccio's Legend of Saint Ursula, images d'Epinal, photo-
novels, comic-strips. The innovation represented by the still (in com-
parison with these other pictograms) would be that the filmic (which

it constitutes) is doubled by another text, the film.

The Third Meaning | 67

mobility, 'life', copy, but simply the framework of a
permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes
necessary, a theory whose possible points of departure must
be given briefly here in conclusion.

The still offers us the inside of the fragment. In this

connection we would need to take up - displacing them -
Eisenstein's own formulations when envisaging the new
possibifities of audio-visual montage: '. . . the basic centre

of gravity . . . is transferred to inside the fragment, into
the elements included in the image itself. And the centre of

gravity is no longer the element "between shots" - the shock -
but the element "inside the shot" - the accentuation within

the fragment. . .' Of course, there is no audio-visual mon-

tage in the still, but SME's formula is general insofar as it
establishes a right to the syntagmatic disjunction of images
and calls for a vertical reading of the articulation. More-
over, the still is not a sample (an idea that supposes a sort
of homogeneous, statistical nature of the film elements)

but a quotation (we know how much importance presently
accrues to this concept in the theory of the text): at once
parodic and disseminatory. It is not a specimen chemically
extracted from the substance of the film, but rather the
trace of a superior distribution of traits of which the film

as experienced in its animated flow would give no more than
one text among others. The still, then, is the fragment of a
second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment;
film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship
without it being possible to say that one is on top of the
other or that one is extracted from the other. Finally, the
still throws off the constraint of filmic time; which con-

straint is extremely powerful, continuing to form an obstacle
to what might be called the adult birth of film (born tech-
nically, occasionally even aesthetically, film has still to be
born theoretically). For written texts, unless they are very
conventional, totally committed to logico-temporal order,

68 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

reading time is free; for film, this is not so, since the image

cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual

figure. The still, by instituting a reading that is at once
instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time (which is
only an operational time); it teaches us how to dissociate

the technical constraint from what is the specific filmic and
which is the 'indescribable' meaning. Perhaps it was the
reading of this other text (here in stills) that SME called
for when he said that a film is not simply to be seen and heard
but to be scrutinized and listened to attentively. This seeing
and this hearing are obviously not the postulation of some
simple need to apply the mind (that would be banal, a pious

wish) but rather a veritable mutation of reading and its
object, text or film - which is a crucial problem of our time.

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein

For Andre Techine

Let us imagine that an affinity of status and history has
linked mathematics and acoustics since the ancient Greeks.
Let us also imagine that for two or three millennia this
effectively Pythagorean space has been somewhat repressed
(Pythagoras is indeed the eponymous hero of Secrecy).
Finally, let us imagine that from the time of these same
Greeks another relationship has been established over

against the first and has got the better of it, continually
taking the lead in the history of the arts - the relationship
between geometry and theatre. The theatre is precisely
that practice which calculates the place of things as they
are observed: if I set the spectacle here, the spectator will
see this; if I put it elsewhere, he will not, and I can avail

myself of this masking effect and play on the illusion it
provides. The stage is the line which stands across the path
of the optic pencil, tracing at once the point at which it is
brought to a stop and, as it were, the threshold of its
ramification. Thus is founded - against music (against the
text) - representation.

Representation is not defined directly by imitation:

even if one gets rid of notions of the 'real', of the 'vraisem-
blable', of the 'copy', there will still be representation for
so long as a subject (author, reader, spectator or voyeur)
casts his gaze towards a horizon on which he cuts out the
base of a triangle, his eye (or his mind) forming the apex.

The 'Organon of Representation' (which it is today becom-
ing possible to write because there are intimations of
something else) will have as its dual foundation the sover-

eignty of the act of cutting out [decoupage] and the unity

70 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

of the subject of that action. The substance of the various
arts will therefore be of little importance; certainly, theatre
and cinema are direct expressions of geometry (unless, as
rarely, they carry out some research on the voice, on

stereophony), but classic (readable) literary discourse,
which has for such a long time now abandoned prosody,

music, is also a representational, geometrical discourse in
that it cuts out segments in order to depict them: to discourse
(the classics would have said) is simply 'to depict the tableau
one has in one's mind'. The scene, the picture, the shot,
the cut-out rectangle, here we have the very condition that

allows us to conceive theatre, painting, cinema, literature,
all those arts, that is, other than music and which could be
called dioptric arts. (Counter-proof: nothing permits us to
locate the slightest tableau in the musical text, except by
reducing it to a subservience to drama; nothing permits

us to cut out in it the slightest fetish, except by debasing
it through the use of trite melodies.)

As is well known, the whole of Diderot's aesthetics rests

on the identification of theatrical scene and pictorial tableau:

the perfect play is a succession of tableaux, that is, a gallery,
an exhibition; the stage offers the spectator 'as many real
tableaux as there are in the action moments favourable to

the painter'. The tableau (pictorial, theatrical, literary)
is a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges,
irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it
is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while
everything that it admits within its field is promoted into
essence, into light, into view. Such demiurgic discrimination
implies high quality of thought: the tableau is intellectual,

it has something to say (something moral, social) but it

also says that it knows how this must be done; it is simul-
taneously significant and propaedeutical, impressive and
reflexive, moving and conscious of the channels of emotion.
The epic scene in Brecht, the shot in Eisenstein are so many

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein | 71

tableaux; they are scenes which are laid out (in the sense

in which one says the table is laid), which answer perfectly

to that dramatic unity theorized by Diderot: firmly cut out
(remember the tolerance shown by Brecht with regard to
the Italian curtain-stage, his contempt for indefinite theatres

- open air, theatre in the round), erecting a meaning but
manifesting the production of that meaning, they accom-
plish the coincidence of the visual and the ideal dicoupages.
Nothing separates the shot in Eisenstein from the picture
by Greuze (except, of course, their respective projects:
in the latter moral, in the former social); nothing separates

the scene in epic theatre from the Eisenstein shot (except

that in Brecht the tableau is offered to the spectator for

criticism, not for adherence).

Is the tableau then (since it arises from a process of cutting

out) a fetish-object? Yes, at the level of the ideal meaning
(Good, Progress, the Cause, the triumph of the just History);
no, at that of its composition. Or rather, more exactly, it
is the very composition that allows the displacement of the
point at which the fetish comes to a halt and thus the setting
further back of the loving effect of the dicoupage. Once

again, Diderot is for us the theorist of this dialectic of
desire; in the article on 'Composition', he writes: 'A well-
composed picture [tableau] is a whole contained under a
single point of view, in which the parts work together to
one end and form by their mutual correspondence a unity as

real as that of the members of the body of an animal; so
that a piece of painting made up of a large number of figures
thrown at random on to the canvas, with neither propor-

tion, intelligence nor unity, no more deserves to be called a

true composition than scattered studies of legs, nose and
eyes on the same cartoon deserve to be called a portrait

or even a human figure.'' Thus is the body expressly intro-
duced into the idea of the tableau, but it is the whole body

that is so introduced - the organs, grouped together and as

72 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

though held in cohesion by the magnetic power of the
segmentation, function in the name of a transcendence,
that of the figure, which receives the full fetishistic load and
becomes the sublime substitute of meaning: it is this mean-

ing that is fetishized. (Doubtless there would be no difficulty
in finding in post-Brechtian theatre and post-Eisensteinian
cinema mises en scene marked by the dispersion of the
tableau, the pulling to pieces of the 'composition', the
setting in movement of the 'partial organs' of the human
figure, in short the holding in check of the metaphysical
meaning of the work - but then also of its political meaning;
or, at least, the carrying over of this meaning towards
another politics).

Brecht indicated clearly that in epic theatre (which proceeds
by successive tableaux) all the burden of meaning and
pleasure bears on each scene, not on the whole. At the level
of the play itself, there is no development, no maturation;

there is indced an ideal meaning (given straight in every
tableau), but there is no final meaning, nothing but a
series of segmentations each of which possesses a sufficient
demonstrative power. The same is true in Eisenstein: the
film is a contiguity of episodes, each one absolutely mean-

ingful, aesthetically perfect, and the result is a cinema by
vocation anthological, itself holding out to the fetishist,
with dotted lines, the piece for him to cut out and take
away to enjoy (isn't it said that in some cinematheque or

other a piece of film is missing from the copy of Battleship

Potemkin - the scene with the baby's pram, of course -

it having been cut off and stolen lovingly like a lock of hair,
a glove or an item of women's underwear?). The primary

force of Eisenstein is due to the fact that no image is boring,
you are not obliged to wait for the next in order to under-
stand and be delighted; it is a question not of a dialectic

(that time of the patience required for certain pleasures)

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein | 73

but of a continuous jubilation made up of a summation of

perfect instants.

Naturally, Diderot had conceived of this perfect instant

(and had given it thought). In order to tell a story, the painter
has only an instant at his disposal, the instant he is going to
immobili2e on the canvas, and he must thus choose it well,
assuring it in advance of the greatest possible yield of mean-

ing and pleasure. Necessarily total, this instant will be
artificial (unreal; this is not a realist art), a hieroglyph in
which can be read at a single glance (at one grasp, if we
think in terms of theatre and cinema) the present, the past
and the future; that is, the historical meaning of the repre-
sented action. This crucial instant, totally concrete and
totally abstract, is what Lessing subsequently calls (in the

Laocoon) the pregnant moment. Brecht's theatre, Eisenstein's

cinema are series of pregnant moments: when Mother
Courage bites on the coin offered by the recruiting sergeant
and, as a result of this brief interval of distrust, loses her
son, she demonstrates at once her past as tradeswoman and
the future that awaits her - all her children dead in conse-
quence of her money-making blindness. When (in The
General Line) the peasant woman lets her skirt be ripped
up for material to help in repairing the tractor, the gesture
bears the weight of a history: its pregnancy brings together
the past victory (the tractor bitterly won from bureaucratic
incompetence), the present struggle and the effectiveness of

solidarity. The pregnant moment is just this presence of all
the absences (memories, lessons, promises) to whose
rhythm History becomes both intelligible and desirable.

In Brecht, it is the social gest which takes up the idea of

the pregnant moment. What then is a social gest (how much
irony has reactionary criticism poured on this Brechtian
concept, one of the clearest and most intelligent that drama-
tic theory has ever produced!)? It is a gesture or set of
gestures (but never a gesticulation) in which a whole social

74 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

situation can be read. Not every gest is social: there is
nothing social in the movements a man makes in order to
brush off a fly; but if this same man, poorly dressed, is
struggling against guard-dogs, the gest becomes social. The
action by which the canteen-woman tests the genuineness of
the money offered is a social gest; as again is the excessive
flourish with which the bureaucrat of The General Line
signs his official papers. This kind of social gest can be

traced even in language itself. A language can be gestual,
says Brecht, when it indicates certain attitudes that the
speaker adopts towards others: 'If thine eye offend thce,
pluck it out' is more gestual than 'Pluck out the eye that
offends thce' because the order of the sentence and the
asyndeton that carries it along refer to a prophetic and
vengeful situation. Thus rhetorical forms may be gestual,
which is why it is pointless to criticize Eisenstein's art (as
also that of Brecht) for being 'formalizing' or 'aesthetic':
form, aesthetic, rhetoric can be socially responsible if they
are handled with deliberation. Representation (since that is
what we are concerned with) has inescapably to reckon
with the social gest; as soon as one 'represents' (cuts out,

marks off the tableau and so discontinues the overall
totality), it must be decided whether the gesture is social
or not (when it refers not to a particular society but to
Man).

What does the actor do in the tableau (the scene, the

shot)? Since the tableau is the presentation of an ideal
meaning, the actor must present the very knowledge of
the meaning, for the latter would not be ideal if it did not
bring with it its own machination. This knowledge which the
actor must demonstrate - by an unwonted supplement - is,
however, neither his human knowledge (his tears must not
refer simply to the state of feeling of the Downcast) nor his
knowledge as actor (he must not show that he knows how
to act well). The actor must prove that he is not enslaved

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein | 75

to the spectator (bogged down in 'reality', in 'humanity'),
that he guides meaning towards its ideality - a sovereignty
of the actor, master of meaning, which is evident in Brecht,
since he theorized it under the term 'distanciation'. It is
no less evident in Eisenstein (at least in the author of The
General Line which is my example here), and this not as a
result of a ceremonial, ritual art - the kind of art called for
by Brecht - but through the insistence of the social gest

which never ceases to stamp the actors' gestures (fists
clenching, hands gripping tools, peasants reporting at the
bureaucrat's reception-desk). Nevertheless, it is true that in
Eisenstein, as in Greuze (for Diderot an exemplary painter),
the actor does sometimes adopt expressions of the most
pathetic quality, a pathos which can appear to be very little
'distanced'; but distanciation is a properly Brechtian method,

vital to Brecht because he represents a tableau for the spec-
tator to criticize; in the other two, the actor does not neces-

sarily have to distance: what he has to present is an ideal
meaning and it is sufficient therefore that he 'bring out' the

production of this value, that he render it tangible, intel-
lectually visible, by the very excess of the versions he gives
it; his expression then signifies an idea - which is why it
is excessive - not some natural quality. All this is a far cry
from the facial affectations of the Actors' Studio, the much
praised 'restraint' of which has no other meaning than its
contribution to the personal glory of the actor (witness in
this respect Brando's grimacings in The Last Tango in

Paris).

Does the tableau have a subject (a topic)? Nowise; it has a
meaning, not a subject. The meaning begins with the social
gest (with the pregnant moment); outside of the gest,
there is only vagueness, insignificance. 'In a way,' writes
Brecht, 'subjects always have a certain naivety, they are

somewhat lacking in qualities. Empty, they are in some sort

76 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TBXT

sufficient to themselves. Only the social gest (criticism,
strategy, irony, propaganda, etc.) introduces the human
element.' To which Diderot adds (if one may put it like

that): the creation of the painter or the dramatist lies not
in the choice of a subject but in the choice of the pregnant
moment, in the choice of the tableau. It matters little, after
all, that Eisenstein took his 'subjects' from the past history
of Russia and the Revolution and not - 'as he should have
done' (so say his censors today) - from the present of the
construction of socialism (except in the case of The General

Line); battleship or czar are of minor importance, are

merely vague and empty 'subjects', what alone counts is
the gest, the critical demonstration of the gesture, its
inscription - to whatever period it may belong - in a text
the social machination of which is clearly visible: the

subject neither adds nor subtracts anything. How many
films are there now 'about' drugs, in which drugs is the
'subject'? But this is a subject that is hollow; without any
social gest, drugs are insignificant, or rather, their signi-
ficance is simply that of an essential nature - vague, empty,

eternal: 'drugs lead to impotence' (Trash), 'drugs lead to
suicide' (Absences ripities). The subject is a false articula-
tion: why this subject in preference to another? The work
only begins with the tableau, when the meaning is set into

the gesture and the co-ordination of gestures. Take Mother
Courage: you may be certain of a misunderstanding if you

think that its 'subject' is the Thirty Years War, or even^the
denunciation of war in general; its gest is not there, but in
the blindness of the tradeswoman who believes herself to
live off war only, in fact, to die of it; even more, the gest
lies in the view that I, spectator, have of this blindness.

In the theatre, in the cinema, in traditional literature,

things are always seen from somewhere. Here we have the
geometrical foundation of representation: a fetishist subject

is required to cut out the tableau. This point of meaning

Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein | 77

is always the Law: law of society, law of struggle, law of
meaning. Thus all militant art cannot but be representational,
legal. In order for representation to be really bereft of
origin and exceed its geometrical nature without ceasing to

be representation, the price that must be paid is enormous -
no less than death. In Dreyer's Vampyr, as a friend points
out, the camera moves from house to cemetery recording
what the dead man sees: such is the extreme limit at which

representation is outplayed; the spectator can no longer
take up any position, for he cannot identify his eye with
the closed eyes of the dead man; the tableau has no point
of departure, no support, it gapes open. Everything that
goes on before this limit is reached (and this is the case of
the work of Brecht and Eisenstein) can only be legal: in
the long run, it is the Law of the Party which cuts out the

epic scene, the filmic shot; it is this Law which looks, frames,
focusses, enunciates. Once again Eisenstein and Brecht
rejoin Diderot (promoter of bourgeois domestic tragedy,
as his two successors were the promoters of a socialist
art). Diderot distinguished in painting major practices,
those whose force is cathartic, aiming at the ideality of

meaning, from minor practices, those which are purely
imitative, anecdotal - the difference between Greuze and
Chardin. In other words, in a period of ascendency every
physics of art (Chardin) must be crowned with a meta-
physics (Greuze). In Brecht, in Eisenstein, Chardin and
Greuze co-exist (more complex, Brecht leaves it to his

public to be the Greuze of the Chardin he sets before their
eyes). How could art, in a society that has not yet found
peace, cease to be metaphysical ? that is, significant, read-
able, representational? fetishist? When are we to have
music, the Text?

It scems that Brecht knew hardly anything of Diderot

(barely, perhaps, the Paradoxe sur le comidien). He it is,

78 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

however, who authorizes, in a quite contingent way, the
tripartite conjuncture that has just been proposed. Round
about 1937, Brecht had the idea of founding a Diderot

Society, a place for pooling theatrical experiments and studies

- doubtless because he saw in Diderot, in addition to the
figure of a great materialist philosopher, a man of the theatre

Introduction to the Structural Analysis

of Narratives

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is
first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves

distributed amongst different substances - as though any
material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried
by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving
images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these

substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale,
novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime,

painting (think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula), stained glass
windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. More-
over, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative
is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it

begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere
is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all
human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which
is very often shared by men with different, even opposing,

1

cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division
between good and bad literature, narrative is international,

transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life
itself.

Must we conclude from this universality that narrative

is insignificant? Is it so general that we can have nothing

to say about it except for the modest description of a few
highly individualized varieties, something literary history

occasionally undertakes? But then how are we to master
even these varieties, how are we to justify our right to

1. It must be remembered that this is not the case with either

poetry or the essay, both of which are dependent on the cultural level
of their consumers.

80 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

differentiate and identify them? How is novel to be set
against novella, tale against myth, drama against tragedy
(as has been done a thousand times) without reference to a
common model? Such a model is implied by every proposi-

tion relating to the most individual, the most historical, of
narrative forms. It is thus legitimate that, far from the
abandoning of any idea of dealing with narrative on the
grounds of its universality, there should have been (from

Aristotle on) a periodic interest in narrative form and it is
normal that the newly developing structuralism should make
this form one of its first concerns - is not structuralism's
constant aim to master the infinity of utterances [paroles]
by describing the 'language' ['langue'] of which they are the
products and from which they can be generated. Faced with
the infinity of narratives, the multiplicity of standpoints -
historical, psychological, sociological, ethnological, aes-

thetic, etc. - from which they can be studied, the analyst
finds himself in more or less the same situation as Saussure
confronted by the heterogeneity of language [langage] and
seeking to extract a principle of classification and a central
focus for description from the apparent confusion of the

individual messages. Kceping simply to modern times, the

Russian Formalists, Propp and Levi-Strauss have taught us
to recognize the following dilemma: either a narrative is
merely a rambling collection of events, in which case nothing

can be said about it other than by referring back to the

storyteller's (the author's) art, talent or genius - all mythical
forms of chance

1

- or else it shares with other narratives a

common structure which is open to analysis, no matter
how much patience its formulation requires. There is a
world of difference between the most complex randomness

1. There does, of course, exist an 'art' of the storyteller, which is the

ability to generate narratives (messages) from the structure (the code).
This art corresponds to the notion of performance in Chomsky and is
far removed from the 'genius' of the author, romantically conceived as

some barely explicable personal secret.

Structural Analysis of .Marratives | 81

and the most elementary combinatory scheme, and it is

impossible to combine (to produce) a narrative without
reference to an implicit system of units and rules.

Where then are we to look for the structures of narrative?

Doubtless, in narratives themselves. Each and every nar-
rative? Many commentators who accept the idea of a
narrative structure are nevertheless unable to resign them-
selves to dissociating literary analysis from the example of
the experimental sciences; nothing daunted, they ask that a

purely inductive method be applied to narrative and that
one start by studying all the narratives within a genre, a
period, a society. This commonsense view is Utopian.
Linguistics itself, with only some three thousand languages
to embrace, cannot manage such a programme and has
wisely turned deductive, a step which in fact marked its

veritable constitution as a science and the beginning of its
spectacular progress, it even succeeding in anticipating facts
prior to their discovery.

1

So what of narrative analysis,

faced as it is with millions of narratives? Of necessity, it

is condemned to a deductive procedure, obliged first to
devise a hypothetical model of description (what American

linguists call a 'theory') and then gradually to work down
from this model towards the different narrative species

which at once conform to and depart from the model.
It is only at the level of these conformities and departures
that analysis will be able to come back to, but now equipped
with a single descriptive tool, the plurality of narratives,
to their historical, geographical and cultural diversity.

2

1. See the history of the Hittite a, postulated by Saussure and

actually discovered fifty years later, as given in Emile Benveniste,
Problimes de linguistique generate, Paris 1966, p. 35 [Problems of
General Linguistics, Coral Gables, Florida 1971, p. 32].

2. Let us bear in mind the present conditions of linguistic descrip-

tion: ' . . . linguistic "structure" is always relative not just to the data or
corpus but also to the grammatical theory describing the data' E.

Bach, An Introduction to Transformational Grammars, New York

1964, p. 29; 'it has been recognized that language must be described as a

82 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

Thus, in order to describe and classify the infinite number

of narratives, a 'theory' (in this pragmatic sense) is needed
and the immediate task is that of finding it, of starting to
define it. Its development can be greatly facilitated if one

begins from a model able to provide it with its initial terms
and principles. In the current state of research, it seems
reasonable

1

that the structural analysis of narrative be

given linguistics itself as founding model.

I. The Language of Narrative

1. Beyond the sentence

As we know, linguistics stops at the sentence, the last unit
which it considers to fall within its scope. If the sentence,
being an order and not a series, cannot be reduced to the sum
of the words which compose it and constitutes thereby a
specific unit, a piece of discourse, on the contrary, is no

more than the succession of the sentences composing it.

From the point of view of linguistics, there is nothing in

discourse that is not to be found in the sentence: 'The
sentence,' writes Martinet, 'is the smallest segment that is

perfectly and wholly representative of discourse.'

2

Hence

there can be no question of linguistics setting itself an
object superior to the sentence, since beyond the sentence

formal structure, but that the description first of all necessitates
specification of adequate procedures and criteria arid that, finally,
the reality of the object is inseparable from the method given for

Its description', Benveniste, op. cit., p. 119 [trans, p. 101].

1. But not imperative: see Claude Bremond, 'La logique des

possibles narratifs', Communications 8, 1966, which is more logical
than linguistic. [Bremond's various studies in this field have now been
collected in a volume entitled, precisely, Logique du ricit, Paris 1973;
his work consists in the analysis of narrative according to the pattern
of possible alternatives, each narrative moment - or function - giving
rise to a set of different possible resolutions, the actualization of any

one of which in turn produces a new set of alternatives.]

2. Andre Martinet, 'Reflexions sur la phrase', in Language and

Society (Studies presented to Jansen), Copenhagen 1961, p. 113.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 83

are only more sentences - having described the flower, the
botanist is not to get involved in describing the bouquet.

And yet it is evident that discourse itself (as a set of sen-

tences) is organized and that, through this organization, it
can be seen as the message of another language, one operat-
ing at a higher level than the language of the linguists.

1

Dis-

course has its units, its rules, its 'grammar': beyond the
sentence, and though consisting solely of sentences, it must
naturally form the object of a second linguistics. For a long
time indeed, such a linguistics of discourse bore a glorious
name, that of Rhetoric. As a result of a complex historical
movement, however, in which Rhetoric went over to belles-

lettres and the latter was divorced from the study of
language, it has recently become necessary to take up the

problem afresh. The new linguistics of discourse has still
to be developed, but at least it is being postulated, and by

the linguists themselves.

2

This last fact is not without

significance, for, although constituting an autonomous
object, discourse must be studied from the basis of linguistics.
If a working hypothesis is needed for an analysis whose
task is immense and whose materials infinite, then the most
reasonable thing is to posit a homological relation betwcen
sentence and discourse insofar as it is likely that a similar

formal organization orders all semiotic systems, whatever

their substances and dimensions. A discourse is a long
'sentence' (the units of which are not necessarily sentences),

just as a sentence, allowing for certain specifications, is a

short 'discourse'. This hypothesis aceords well with a num-

ber of propositions put forward in contemporary anthro-

1. It goes without saying, as Jakobson has noted, that between the

sentence and what lies beyond the sentence there are transitions;
co-ordination, for instance, can work over the limit of the sentence.

2. See especially: Benveniste, op. cit., Chapter 10; Z. S. Harris,

'Discourse Analysis', Language 28, 1952, pp. 18-23 & 474-94; N.
Ruwet, 'Analyse structural d'un poeme francais', Linguistics 3, 1964,
pp. 62-83.

84 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

pology. Jakobson and Levi-Strauss have pointed out that
mankind can be defined by the ability to create secondary -
'self-multiplying' - systems (tools for the manufacture of
other tools, double articulation of language, incest taboo

permitting the fanning out of families) while the Soviet
linguist Ivanov supposes that artificial languages can only
have bcen acquired after natural language: what is important
for men is to have the use of several systems of meaning and
natural language helps in the elaboration of artificial lan-

guages. It is therefore legitimate to posit a 'secondary'

relation between sentence and discourse - a relation

which will be referred to as homological, in order to respect
the purely formal nature of the correspondences.

The general language [langue] of narrative is one (and

clearly only one) of the idioms apt for consideration by the

linguistics of discourse

1

and it aceordingly comes under

the homological hypothesis. Structurally, narrative shares
the characteristics of the sentence without ever being
reducible to the simple sum of its sentences: a narrative is a

long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in

a way the rough outline of a short narrative. Although there
provided with different signifiers (often extremely complex),
one does find in narrative, expanded and transformed
proportionately, the principal verbal categories: tenses,

aspects, moods, persons. Moreover the 'subjects' themselves,
as opposed to the verbal predicates, readily yield to the
sentence model; the actantial typology proposed by A. J.
Greimas

2

discovers in the multitude of narrative characters

the elementary functions of grammatical analysis. Nor does

1. One of the tasks of such a linguistics would be precisely that of

establishing a typology of forms of discourse. Three broad types can
be recognized provisionally: metonymic (narrative), metaphoric (lyric
poetry, sapiential discourse), enthymematic (intellectual discourse).

2. See below III.l. [Also, section II of "The struggle with the angel'

in the present volume. Greimas's own account can be found in Simon-
tique structurale, Paris 1966, Chapter 10.]

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 85

the homology suggested here have merely a heuristic value:

it implies an identity between language and literature
(inasmuch as the latter can be seen as a sort of privileged
vehicle of narrative). It is hardly possible any longer to
conceive of literature as an art that abandons all further
relation with language the moment it has used it as an
instrument to express ideas, passion or beauty: language
never ceases to aceompany discourse, holding up to it the
mirror of its own structure - does not literature, particu-
larly today, make a language of the very conditions of
language?

1

2. Levels of meaning

From the outset, linguistics furnishes the structural analysis
of narrative with a concept which is decisive in that,

making explicit immediately what is essential in every
system of meaning, namely its organization, it allows us
both to show how a narrative is not a simple sum of
propositions and to classify the enormous mass of elements
which go to make up a narrative. This concept is that of
kvel of description.

2

A sentence can be described, linguistically, on several

levels (phonetic, phonological, grammatical, contextual)
and these levels are in a hierarchical relationship with one

1. Remember Mallarme's insight at the time when he was contemplat-

ing a work of linguistics: 'Language appeared to him the instrument

of fiction: he will follow the method of language (determine it).
Language self-reflecting. So fiction seems to him the very process of
the human mind - it is this that sets in play all method, and man is
reduced to will' (Euvres complites, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Paris

1961, p. 851. It will be recalled that for Mallarme 'Fiction' and 'Poetry'

are taken synonymously (cf. ibid., p. 33S).

2. 'Linguistic descriptions are not, so to speak, monovalent. A

description is not simply "right" or "wrong" in itself . . . it is better
thought of as more useful or less', M. A. K. Halliday, 'General linguis-
tics and its application to language teaching', Patterns of Language,
London 1966, p. 8.

86 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

another, for, while all have their own units and correlations
(whence the necessity for a separate description of each of

them), no level on its own can produce meaning. A unit
belonging to a particular level only takes on meaning if it
can be integrated in a higher level; a phoneme, though
perfectly describable, means nothing in itself: it partici-
pates in meaning only when integrated in a word, and the
word itself must in turn be integrated in a sentence.

1

The

theory of levels (as set out by Benveniste) gives two types of
relations: distributional (if the relations are situated on the
same level) and integrational (if they are grasped from one
level to the next); consequently, distributional relations alone
are not sufficient to account for meaning. In order to conduct a
structural analysis, it is thus first of all necessary to distinguish
several levels or instances of description and to place these in-
stances within a hierarchical (integrationary) perspective. ]

The levels are operations.

2

It is therefore normal that,

as it progresses, linguistics should tend to multiply them.
Discourse analysis, however, is as yet only able to work on

rudimentary levels. In its own way, rhetoric had assigned

at least two planes of description to discourse: dispositio
and elocutio.

3

Today, in his analysis of the structure of myth,

Levi-Strauss has already indicated that the constituent
units of mythical discourse (mythemes) acquire meaning
only because they are grouped in bundles and because these
bundles themselves combine together.

4

As too, Tzvetan

1. The levels of integration were postulated by the Prague School

(vid. J. Vachek, A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, Bloomington

1964, p. 468) and have been adopted since by many linguists. It is

Benveniste who, in my opinion, has given the most illuminating
analysis in this respect; op. tit., Chapter 10.

2. 'In somewhat vague terms, a level may be considered as a system

of symbols, rules, and so on, to be used for representing utterances',
Bach, op. tit., p. 57.

3. The third pact of rhetoric, invent io, did not concern language - it

had to do with res, not with verba.

4. Claude L6vi-Strauss, Anthropologic structural, Paris 1958, p.

233 [Structural Anthropology, New York and London 1963, p. 211].

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 87

Todorov, reviving the distinction made by the Russian
Formalists, proposes working on two major levels, them-
selves subdivided: story (the argument), comprising a
logic of actions and a 'syntax' of characters, and discourse,
comprising the tenses, aspects and modes of the narrative,

1

But however many levels are proposed and whatever defini-
tion they are given, there can be no doubt that narrative is
a hierarchy of instances. To understand a narrative is not
merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to
recognize its construction in 'storeys', to project the horizontal

concatenations of the narrative 'thread' on to an implicitly
vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a narrative is not merely
to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from
one level to the next. Perhaps I may be allowed to offer a
kind of apologue in this connection. In The Purloined

Letter, Poe gives an acute analysis of the failure of the

chief commissioner of the Paris police, powerless to find
the letter. His investigations, says Poe, were perfect 'within
the sphere of his speciality';

2

he searched everywhere,

saturated entirely the level of the 'police search', but in
order to find the letter, protected by its conspicuousness,

it was necessary to shift to another level, to substitute the
concealer's principle of relevance for that of the policeman.

Similarly, the 'search' carried out over a horizontal set of

narrative relations may well be as thorough as possible but
must still, to be effective, also operate 'vertically': meaning
is not 'at the end' of the narrative, it runs across it; just as
conspicuous as the purloined letter, meaning eludes all
unilateral investigation.

1. See T. Todorov, 'Les categories du recit litteraire', Communications

8,1966 [Todorov's work on narrative is now most easily accessible in
two books, Litter-attire et Signification, Paris 1967; Po&tique de la prose,
Paris 1972. For a short account in English, see 'Structural analysis of
narrative', Novell, 3,1969, pp. 70-6].

2. [This in accordance with the Baudelaire version of the Poe story

from which Barthes quotes; Poe's original reads: 'so far as his labours
extended'.]

88 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

A great deal of tentative effort is still required before

it will be possible to ascertain precisely the levels of narra-

tive. Those that are suggested in what follows constitute
a provisional profile whose merit remains almost exclusively
didactic; they enable us to locate and group together the
different problems, and this without, I think, being at
variance with the few analyses so far.

1

It is proposed to

distinguish three levels of description in the narrative work:

the level of 'functions' (in the sense this word has in Propp

and Bremond), the level of 'actions' (in the sense this word
has in Greimas when he talks of characters as actants)
and the level of 'narration' (which is roughly the level of

'discourse' in Todorov). These three levels are bound to-

gether according to a mode of progressive integration: a
function only has meaning insofar as it occupies a place in
the general action of an actant, and this action in turn
receives its final meaning from the fact that it is narrated,
entrusted to a discourse which possesses its own code.

II. Functions

1. The determination of the units

Any system being the combination of units of known
classes, the first task is to divide up narrative and determine
the segments of narrative discourse that can be distributed

into a limited number of classes. In a word, we have to

define the smallest narrative units.

Given the integrational perspective described above, the

analysis cannot rest satisfied with a purely distributional
definition of the units. From the start, meaning must be
the criterion of the unit: it is the functional nature of certain
segments of the story that makes them units - hence the

name 'functions' immediately attributed to these first units.

1. I have been concerned in this introduction to impede research in

progress as little as possible.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 89

Since the Russian Formalists,

1

a unit has been taken as

any segment of the story which can be scen as the term of a
correlation. The essence of a function is, so to speak, the
sced that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that
will come to fruition later - either on the same level or
elsewhere, on another level. If in Un Caeur simple Flaubert
at one point tells the reader, scemingly without emphasis,
that the daughters of the Sous-PreTet of Pont-1'EvSque
owned a parrot, it is because this parrot is subsequently
to have a great importance in Felicite's life; the statement

of this detail (whatever its linguistic form) thus constitutes a
function, or narrative unit.

Is everything in a narrative functional ? Does everything,

down to the slightest detail, have a meaning? Can narrative
be divided up entirely into functional units? We shall sce
in a moment that there are several kinds of functions, there

being several kinds of correlations, but this does not alter
the fact that a narrative is never made up of anything other
than functions: in differing degrees, everything in it signifies.

This is not a matter of art (on the part of the narrator), but
of structure; in the realm of discourse, what is noted is by
definition notable. Even were a detail to appear irretrievably

insignificant, resistant to all functionality, it would none-
theless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or

uselessness: everything has a meaning, or nothing has. To

put it another way, one could say that art is without noise
(as that term is employed in information theory):

2

art is a

1. See especially B. Tomachevski, 'Thematique' (1925), in Thiorie

de la literature ed. T. Todorov, Paris 1965, pp. 263-307. A little later,
Propp defined the function as 'an act of a character, defined from the
point of view of its significance for the course of the action' Morphology
of the Folktale, Austin and London 1968, p. 21.

2. This is what separates art from 'life', the latter knowing only

'fuzzy' or 'blurred' communications. 'Fuzziness' (that beyond which it
is impossible to see) can exist in art, but it does so as a coded element

(in Watteau for example). Even then, such 'fuzziness' is unknown to
the written code: writing is inescapably distinct.

90 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

system which is pure, no unit ever goes wasted,

1

however

long, however loose, however tenuous may be the thread

connecting it to one of the levels of the story.

2

From the linguistic point of view, the function is clearly

a unit of content: it is 'what it says' that makes of a state-
ment a functional unit,

3

not the manner in which it is said.

This constitutive signified may have a number of different

signifiers, often very intricate. If I am told (in Goldfinger)
that Bond saw a man of about fifty, the piece of information
holds simultaneously two functions of unequal pressure:
on the one hand, the character's age fits into a certain
description of the man (the 'usefulness' of which for the rest
of the story is not nil, but diffuse, delayed); while on the
other, the immediate signified of the statement is that Bond
is unacquainted with his future interlocutor, the unit thus
implying a very strong correlation (initiation of a threat and
the nced to establish the man's identity). In order to deter-
mine the initial narrative units, it is therefore vital never to
lose sight of the functional nature of the segments under
consideration and to recognize in advance that they will not
necessarily coincide with the forms into which we tradi-

tionally cast the various parts of narrative discourse (actions,

scenes, paragraphs, dialogues, interior monologues, etc.)
still less with 'psychological' divisions (modes of behaviour,

1. At least in literature, where the freedom of notation (in conse-

quence of the abstract nature of articulated language) leads to a much
greater responsibility than in the 'analogical' arts such as cinema.

2. The functionality of a narrative unit is more or less immediate

(and hence apparent) according to the level on which it operates: when
the units are situated on the same level (as for instance in the case of
suspense), the functionality is very clear; it is much less so when the
function is saturated on the narrational level - a modern text, weakly
signifying on the plane of the anecdote, only finds a full force of mean-
ing on the plane of the writing.

3. 'Syntactical units beyond the sentence are in fact units of content'

A. J. Greimas, Cows de simantique structurate (roneoed), 1964,
VI, 5 [cf. Simantique structurate, pp. 116f.]. The exploration of the
functional level is thus part of general semantics.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 91

feelings, intentions, motivations, rationalizations of charac-
ters).

In the same way, since the 'language' ['langue'] of narra-

tive is not the language [langue] of articulated language

[langage articuli] - though very often vehicled by it - nar-

rative units will be substantially independent of linguistic
units; they may indeed coincide with the latter, but occa-
sionally, not systematically. Functions will be represented
sometimes by units higher than the sentence (groups of
sentences of varying lengths, up to the work in its entirety)
and sometimes by lower ones (syntagm, word and even,
within the word, certain literary elements only

1

). When we

are told that - the telephone ringing during night duty at
Secret Service headquarters - Bond picked up one of the four

receivers, the moneme four in itself constitutes a functional
unit, referring as it does to a concept necessary to the story
(that of a highly developed bureaucratic technology). In
fact, the narrative unit in this case is not the linguistic unit
(the word) but only its connoted value (linguistically, the
word /four/ never means 'four'); which explains how certain

functional units can be shorter than the sentence without
ceasing to belong to the order of discourse: such units then
extend not beyond the sentence, than which they remain
materially shorter, but beyond the level of denotation,
which, like the sentence, is the province of linguistics pro-
perly speaking.

2. Classes of units

The functional units must be distributed into a small num-
ber of classes. If these classes are to be determined without
recourse to the substance of content (psychological substance

1. The word must not be treated as an indivisible element of literary

art, like a brick in building. It can be broken down into much finer
"verbalelements'", J. Tynianov, quoted by T. Todorov in Langages
6,1971, p. 18.

92 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

for example), it is again necessary to consider the different
levels of meaning: some units have as correlates units on

the same level, while the saturation of others requires a
change of levels; hence, straightaway, two major classes of
functions, distributional and integrational. The former
correspond to what Propp and subsequently Bremond
(in particular) take as functions but they will be treated here

in a much more detailed way than is the case in their work.
The term 'functions' will be reserved for these units (though
the other units are also functional), the model of description
for which has become classic since Tomachevski's analysis:
the purchase of a revolver has for correlate the moment
when it will be used (and if not used, the notation is reversed
into a sign of indecision, etc.); picking up the telephone has
for correlate the moment when it will be put down; the

intrusion of the parrot into Felicity's home has for correlate
the episode of the stuffing, the worshipping of the parrot,
etc. As for the latter, the integrational units, these comprise

all the 'indices' (in the very broad sense of the word

1

),

the unit now referring not to a complementary and con-

sequential act but to a more or less diffuse concept which is
nevertheless necessary to the meaning of the story: psycho-
logical indices concerning the characters, data regarding

their identity, notations of 'atmosphere', and so on. The
relation between the unit and its correlate is now no longer
distributional (often several indices refer to the same signi-
fied and the order of their oceurence in the discourse is
not necessarily pertinent) but integrational. In order to

understand what an indicial notation 'is for', one must
move to a higher level (characters' actions or narration),

for only there is the indice clarified: the power of the admini-

strative machine behind Bond, indexed by the number of
telephones, has no bearing on the sequence of actions in

which Bond is involved by answering the call; it finds its

1. These designations, like those that follow, may all be provisional.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 93

meaning only on the level of a general typology of the actants

(Bond is on the side of order). Indices, because of the, in
some sort, vertical nature of their relations, are truly
semantic units: unlike 'functions' (in the strict sense), they

refer to a signified, not to an 'operation'. The ratification of
indices is 'higher up', sometimes even remaining virtual,
outside any explicit syntagm (the 'character' of a narrative
agent may very well never be explicitly named while yet
being constantly indexed), is a paradigmatic ratification.

That of functions, by contrast, is always 'further on', is a
syntagmatic ratification.

1

Functions and indices thus overlay

another classic distinction: functions involve metonymic
relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond
to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of
being.

2

These two main classes of units, functions and indices,

should already allow a certain classification of narratives.
Some narratives are heavily functional (such as folktales),
while others on the contrary are heavily indicial (such as
'psychological' novels); betwcen these two poles lies a

whole series of intermediary forms, dependent on history,
society, genre. But we can go further. Within each of the
two main classes it is immediately possible to determine
two sub-classes of narrative units. Returning to the class
of functions, its units are not all of the same 'importance':
some constitute real hinge-points of the narrative (or of a
fragment of the narrative); others merely 'fill in' the narrative
space separating the hinge functions. Let us call the former
cardinal functions (or nuclei) and the latter, having regard to
their complementary nature, catalysers. For a function to

1. Which does not mean that the syntagmatic setting out of functions

may not finally hold paradigmatic relations between separate functions,
as is recognized since Levi-Strauss and Greimas.

2. Functions cannot be reduced to actions (verbs), nor indices to

qualities (adjectives), for there are actions that are indicial, being

'signs' of a character, an atmosphere, etc.

94 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

be cardinal, it is enough that the action to which it refers
open (or continue, or close) an alternative that is of direct
consequence for the subsequent development of the story,
in short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty. If,
in a fragment of narrative, the telephone rings, it is equally
possible to answer or not answer, two acts which will
unfailingly carry the narrative along different paths.
Betwcen two cardinal functions however, it is always possible
to set out subsidiary notations which cluster around one or
other nucleus without modifying its alternative nature:
the space separating the telephone rang from Bond answered
can be saturated with a host of trivial incidents or descrip-
tions - Bond moved towards the desk, picked up one of the
receivers, put down his cigarette, etc. These catalysers are

still functional, insofar as they enter into correlation with a
nucleus, but their functionality is attenuated, unilateral,
parasitic; it is a question of a purely chronological func-
tionality (what is described is what separates two moments of
the story), whereas the tie between two cardinal functions
is invested with a double functionality, at once chrono-

logical and logical. Catalysers are only consecutive units,

cardinal functions are both consecutive and consequential.
Everything suggests, indced, that the mainspring of nar-
rative is precisely the confusion of consecution and con-

sequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is
caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic

application of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism
in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc - a good motto for

Destiny, of which narrative all things considered is no more

than the 'language'.

It is the structural framework of cardinal functions

which accomplishes this 'telescoping' of logic and tempor-

ality. At first sight, such functions may appear extremely
insignificant; what defines them is not their spectacularity

(importance, volume, unusualness or force of the narrated

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 95

action), but, so to speak, the risk they entail: cardinal
functions are the risky moments of a narrative. Betwcen

these points of alternative, these 'dispatchers', the catalysers
lay out areas of safety, rests, luxuries. Luxuries which are
not, however, useless: it must be stressed again that from

the point of view of the story a catalyser's functionality
may be weak but not nil. Were a catalyser purely redundant
(in relation to its nucleus), it would nonetheless participate
in the economy of the message; in fact, an apparently

merely expletive notation always has a discursive function:
it accelerates, delays, gives fresh impetus to the discourse,
it summarizes, anticipates and sometimes even leads astray.

1

Since what is noted always appears as being notable, the
catalyser ceaselessly revives the semantic tension of the
discourse, says ceaselessly that there has bcen, that there is
going to be, meaning. Thus, in the final analysis, the cata-
lyser has a constant function which is, to use Jakobson's

term, a phatic one:

2

it maintains the contact between

narrator and addressee. A nucleus cannot be deleted without
altering the story, but neither can a catalyst without altering
the discourse.

As for the other main class of units, the indices, an inte-

grational class, its units have in common that they can only
be saturated (completed) on the level of characters or on the
level of narration. They are thus part of a parametrical
relation

3

whose second - implicit - term is continuous,

extended over an episode, a character or the whole work.

1. Valery spoke of 'dilatory signs'. The detective novel makes

abundant use of such 'confusing' units.

2. [For the scheme of the six factors of verbal communication and

their corresponding linguistic functions - emotive, conative, referential,
phatic, metalinguistic and poetic - see R. Jakobson, 'Linguistics and

Poetics' in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok, New York 1960,
pp. 350-77.]

3. N. Ruwet calls 'parametrical' an element which remains constant

for the whole duration of a piece of music (for instance, the tempo in
a Bach allegro or the monodic character of a solo).

96 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

A distinction can be made, however, between indices
proper, referring to the character of a narrative agent, a
reeling, an atmosphere (for example suspicion) or a philo-
sophy, and informants, serving to identify, to locate in time

and space. To say that through the window of the office where

Bond is on duty the moon can be seen half-hidden by thick

billowing clouds, is to index a stormy summer night, this
deduction in turn forming an index of atmosphere with
reference to the heavy, anguish-laden climate of an action

as yet unknown to the reader. Indices always have implicit
signifieds. Informants, however, do not, at least on the level
of the story: they are pure data with immediate significa-

tion. Indices involve an activity of deciphering, the reader
is to learn to know a character or an atmosphere; informants
bring ready-made knowledge, their functionality, like that
of catalysers, is thus weak without being nil. Whatever its
'flatness' in relation to the rest of the story, the informant
(for example, the exact age of a character) always serves to
authenticate the reality of the referent, to embed fiction in
the real world. Informants are realist operators and as such
possess an undeniable functionality not on the level of the
story but on that of the discourse.

1

Nuclei and catalysers, indices and informants (again, the

names are of little importance), these, it scems, are the initial
classes into which the functional level units can be divided.
This classification must be completed by two remarks.
Firstly, a unit can at the same time belong to two different

classes: to drink a whisky (in an airport lounge) is an
action which can act as acatalyser to the (cardinal) notation
of waiting, but it is also, and simultaneously, the indice of a

1. In 'Frontieres du recit', Communications 8, 1966 [reprinted in

Figures II, Paris 1969], Gerard Genette distinguishes two types of
description: ornamental and significant. The second clearly relates to
the level of the story; the first to that of the discourse, which explains
why for a long time it formed a perfectly coded rhetorical 'piece':
descriptio or ekphrasis, a very highly valued exercise in neo-rhetoric.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 97

certain atmosphere (modernity, relaxation, reminiscence,

etc.). In other words, certain units can be mixed, giving a
play of possibilities in the narrative economy. In the novel
Goldfinger, Bond, having to search his adversary's bedroom,
is given a master-key by his associate: the notation is a
pure (cardinal) function. In the film, this detail is altered
and Bond laughingly takes a set of keys from a willing
chamber-maid: the notation is no longer simply functional
but also indicial, referring to Bond's character (his easy
charm and success with women). Secondly, it should be
noted (this will be taken up again later) that the four

classes just described can be distributed in a different way
which is moreover closer to the linguistic model. Catalysers,
indices and informants have a common characteristic: in
relation to nuclei, they are expansions. Nuclei (as will be

seen in a moment) form finite sets grouping a small number
of terms, are governed by a logic, are at once necessary and
sufficient. Once the framework they provide is given, the
other units fill it out aceording to a mode of proliferation in
principle infinite. As we know, this is what happens in the
case of the sentence, which is made Up of simple propositions

endlessly complicated with duplications, paddings, em-
beddings and so on. So great an importance did Mallarme"
attach to this type of structure that from it he constructed
Jamais un coup de dis, a poem which with its 'nodes' and

'loops', its 'nucleus-words' and its 'lace-words', can well

be regarded as the emblem of every narrative - of every
language.

3. Functional syntax

How, according to what 'grammar', are the different units
strung together along the narrative syntagm? What are the
rules of the functional combinatory system? Informants and
indices can combine freely together: as for example in the

98 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

portrait which readily juxtaposes data concerning civil

status and traits of character. Catalysers and nuclei are
linked by a simple relation of implication: a catalyser
necessarily implies the existence of a cardinal function to

which it can connect, but not vice-versa. As for cardinal
functions, they are bound together by a relation of solid-
arity: a function of this type calls for another function of the

same type and reciprocally. It is this last relation which needs

to be considered further for a moment - first, because it
defines the very framework of the narrative (expansions can
be deleted, nuclei cannot); second, because it is the main
concern of those trying to work towards a structure of
narrative.

It has already been pointed out that structurally narrative

institutes a confusion between consecution and consequence,
temporality and logic. This ambiguity forms the central
problem of narrative syntax. Is there an atemporal logic

lying behind the temporality of narrative? Researchers
were still quite recently divided on this point. Propp, whose
analytic study of the folktale paved the way for the work
going on today, is totally committed to the idea of the
irreducibility of the chronological order: he sees time as
reality and for this reason is convinced of the necessity for
rooting the tale in temporality. Yet Aristotle himself, in his
contrast between tragedy (defined by the unity of action)
and historical narrative (defined by the plurality of actions
and the unity of time), was already giving primacy to the

logical over the chronological.

1

As do all contemporary

researchers (Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Bremond, Todorov),
all of whom (while differing on other points) could subscribe
to LeVi-Strauss's proposition that 'the order of chronological
succession is absorbed in an atemporal matrix structure'.

2

1. Poetics, 1459a.

2. Quoted by Claude Bremond, 'Le message narratif', Communica-

tions 4, 1964 [Claude Levi-Strauss, 'La structure et la forme', Cahiers

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 99

Analysis today tends to 'dechronologize* the narrative
continuum and to 'relogicize' it, to make it dependent on

what Mallarm6 called with regard to the French language
'the primitive thunderbolts of logic';

1

or rather, more exactly

(such at least is our wish), the task is to succeed in giving a
structural description of the chronological illusion - it is
for narrative logic to account for narrative time. To put it
another way, one could say that temporality is only a
structural category of narrative (of discourse), just as in
language [langue] temporality only exists in the form of a
system; from the point of view of narrative, what we call

time does not exist, or at least only exists functionally, as
an element of a semiotic system. Time belongs not to dis-
course strictly speaking but to the referent; both narrative
and language know only a semiotic time, 'true' time being
a 'realist', referential illusion, as Propp's commentary shows.

It is as such that structural analysis must deal with it.

2

What then is the logic which regulates the principal

narrative functions? It is this that current work is actively
trying to establish and that has so far bcen the major focus
of debate. Three main directions of research can be seen.
The first (Bremond) is more properly logical in approach: it
aims to reconstitute the syntax of human behaviour utilized

in narrative, to retrace the course of the 'choices' which
inevitably face

3

the individual character at every point in

de rinstitut de Science Economique Appliquee 99, March 1960 (Serie

M, No. 7), p. 29; article reprinted in Anthropologic structural II,

Paris 1974].

1. CEuvres completes, p. 386.

2. In his own way - as always perspicacious but left undeveloped -

Valery well expressed the status of narrative time: "The belief in time
as agent and guiding thread is based on the mechanism of memory and
on that of combinatory discourse', Tel Quel, CEuvres Vol. II, Biblio-
theque de la Pleiade, Paris 1957, p. 348 (my italics); the illusion is
precisely produced by the discourse itself.

3. This idea recalls Aristotle: proairesis, the rational choice of

actions to be undertaken, is the foundation of praxis, the practical

100 I IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

the story and so to bring out what could be called an

energetic logic,

1

since it grasps the characters at the moment

when they choose to act. The second (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson)

is linguistic: its essential concern is to demonstrate paradig-

matic oppositions in the functions, oppositions which, in
aceordance with the Jakobsonian definition of the 'poetic',

2

are 'extended' along the line of the narrative (new develop-

ments in Greimas's work correct or complete the conception
of the paradigmatic nature of functions

3

). The third

(Todorov) is somewhat different in that it sets the analysis

at the level of the 'actions' (that is to say, of the characters),

attempting to determine the rules by which narrative com-
bines, varies and transforms a certain number of basic
predicates.

There is no question of choosing between these working

hypotheses; they are not competitive but concurrent, and

at present moreover are in the throes of elaboration. The
only complement we will attempt to give them here concerns
the dimensions of the analysis. Even leaving aside the indices,
informants and catalysers, there still remains in a narrative
(especially if it is a novel and no longer a tale) a very large

number of cardinal functions and many of these cannot be
mastered by the analyses just mentioned, which until now
have worked on the major articulations of narrative.

Provision needs to be made, however, for a description

science which, contrary to poiesis, produces no object-work distinct
from its agent. Using these terms, one can say that the analyst tries to

reconstitute the praxis inherent in narrative.

1. Such a logic, based on alternatives {doing this or thai), has the

merit of accounting for the process of dramatization for which nar-
rative is usually the occasion.

2. [The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence of the

axis of selection on to the axis of combination.' Jakobson, 'Linguistics
and Poetics', p. 3.]

3. See A. J. Greimas, 'Elements pour une thiorie de l'interpretation

du recit mythique', Communications 8, 1966 [article reprinted in

Du Sens, Paris 1970].

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 101

sufficiently close as to aceount for all the narrative units, for
the smallest narrative segments. We must remember that

cardinal functions cannot be determined by their 'import-
ance', only by the (doubly implicative) nature of their rela-
tions. A 'telephone call', no matter how futile it may scem,
on the one hand itself comprises some few cardinal functions
(telephone ringing, picking up the receiver, speaking, putting
down the receiver), while on the other, taken as a whole, it

must be linkable - at the very least proceeding step by step -
to the major articulations of the anecdote. The functional
covering of the narrative necessitates an organization of
relays the basic unit of which can only be a small group of
functions, hereafter referred to (following Bremond) as a
sequence.

A sequence is a logical succession of nuclei bound together

by a relation of solidarity:

1

the sequence opens when one of

its terms has no solidary antecedent and closes when another
of its terms has no consequent. To take a deliberately
trivial example, the different functions order a drink,
obtain it, drink it, pay for it, constitute an obviously closed
sequence, it being impossible to put anything before the
order or after the payment without moving out of the homo-
geneous group 'Having a drink'. The sequence indeed is
always nameable. Determining the major functions of the
folktale, Propp and subsequently Bremond have been led
to name them (Fraud, Betrayal, Struggle, Contract, Seduc-

tion, etc.); the naming operation is equally inevitable in the
case of trivial sequences, the 'micro

4

sequences' which often

form the finest grain of the narrative tissue. Are these
namings solely the province of the analyst? In other words,
are they purely metalinguistic? No doubt they are, dealing
as they do with the code of narrative. Yet at the same time

they can be imagined as forming part of an inner meta-

1. In the Hjelmslevian sense of double implication: two terms

presuppose one another.

102 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

language in the reader (or listener) him who grasps

every logical succession of actions as a nominal whole: to

read is to name; to listen is not only to perceive a language,
it is also to construct it. Sequence titles are similar enough
to the cover-words of translation machines which acceptably
cover a wide variety of meanings and shades of meaning.
The narrative language [la langue du ricit] within us com-
prises from the start these essential headings: the closing
logic which structures a sequence is inextricably linked to its
name; any function which initiates a seduction prescribes
from the moment it appears, in the name to which it gives
rise, the entire process of seduction such as we have learned
it from all the narratives which have fashioned in us the
language of narrative.

However minimal its importance, a sequence, since it is

made up of a small number of nuclei (that is to say, in fact,
of 'dispatchers'), always involves moments of risk and it
is this which justifies analysing it. It might seem futile to
constitute into a sequence the logical succession of trifling
acts which go to make up the offer of a cigarette {offering,
accepting, lighting, smoking), but precisely, at every one of
these points, an alternative - and hence a freedom of mean-
ing - is possible. Du Pont, Bond's future partner, offers
him a light from his lighter but Bond refuses; the meaning
of this bifurcation is that Bond instinctively fears a booby-
trapped gadget.

1

A sequence is thus, one can say, a threatened

logical unit, this being its justification a minima. It is also
founded a maximo: enclosed on its function, subsumed under
a name, the sequence itself constitutes a new unit, ready to
function as a simple term in another, more extensive se-

1. It is quite possible to identify even at this infinitesimal level an

opposition of paradigmatic type, if not between two terms, at least
between two poles of the sequence: the sequence Offer of a cigarette
spreads out, by suspending it, the paradigm Danger/Safety (demon-
strated by Cheglov in his analysis of the Sherlock Holmes cycle),
Suspicion/Protection, Aggressiveness/Friendliness.

Structural Analysis of Narratives \ 103

quence. Here, for example, is a micro-sequence: hand held
out, hand shaken, hand released. This Greeting then becomes
a simple function: on the one hand, it assumes the role of
an indice (flabbiness of Du Pont, Bond's distaste); on the
other, it forms globally a term in a larger sequence, with the
name Meeting, whose other terms {approach, halt, inter-

pellation, sitting down) can themselves be micro-sequences.

A whole network of subrogations structures the narrative
in this way, from the smallest matrices to the largest func-
tions. What is in question here, of course, is a hierarchy that
remains within the functional level: it is only when it has
been possible to widen the narrative out step by step,
from Du Pont's cigarette to Bond's battle against Goldfinger,
that functional analysis is over - the pyramid of functions
then touches the next level (that of the Actions). There is
both a syntax within the sequences and a (subrogating)
syntax betwcen the sequences together. The first episode
of Goldfinger thus takes on a 'stemmatic' aspect:

I

Bequest Aid

1 H 1 i r 1

Meeting Solicitation Contract Surveillance Capture Punishment

I 1 1 1

Approach Interpellation Greeting Installation

I 1 1

Hand held out Hand shaken Hand released Etc

Obviously this representation is analytical; the reader
perceives a linear succession of terms. What needs to be

noted, however, is that the terms from several sequences can

easily be imbricated in one another: a sequence is not yet
completed when already, cutting in, the first term of a new

sequence may appear. Sequences move in counterpoint;

1

functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued: thus it

1. This counterpoint was recognized by the Russian Formalists who

outlined its typology; it is not without recalling the principal 'intricate'
structures of the sentence (see below V.I.).

104 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is this that narrative at once 'holds' and 'pulls on'. Within
the single work, the imbrication of sequences can indeed
only be allowed to come to a halt with a radical break if
the sealed-off blocks which then compose it are in some sort
recuperated at the higher level of the Actions (of the charac-
ters). Goldfinger is composed of three functionally indepen-

dent episodes, their functional stemmas twice ceasing to

intercommunicate: there is no sequential relation between
the swimming-pool episode and the Fort Knox episode;
but there remains an actantial relation, for the characters
(and consequently the structure of their relations) are the
same. One can recognize here the epic pattern (a 'whole
made of multiple fables'): the epic is a narrative broken at
the functional level but unitary at the actantial level (some-
thing which can be verified in the Odyssey or in Brecht's
plays). The level of functions (which provides the major
part of the narrative syntagm) must thus be capped by
a higher level from which, step by step, the first level units

draw their meaning, the level of actions.

Z17. Actions

1. Towards a structural status of characters

In Aristotelian poetics, the notion of character is secondary,
entirely subsidiary to the notion of action: there may be
actions without 'characters', says Aristotle, but not charac-
ters without an action; a view taken over by classical
theoreticians (Vossius). Later the character, who until then
had been only a name, the agent of an action,

1

acquired a

psychological consistency, became an individual, a 'person',
in short a fully constituted 'being', even should he do
nothing and of course even before acting.

2

Characters

1. It must not be forgotten that classical tragedy as yet knows only

'actors', not 'characters'.

2. The 'character-person* reigns in the bourgeois novel; in War and

Structural Analysis of Narratives \ 105

stopped being subordinate to the action, embodied immedi-
ately psychological essences; which essences could be drawn

up into lists, as can be seen in its purest form in the list of

'character parts' in bourgeois theatre (the coquette, the

noble father, etc.). From its very outset, structural analysis
has shown the utmost reluctance to treat the character as
an essence, even merely for purposes of classification;

Tomachevski went so far as to deny the character any
narrative importance, a point of view he subsequently
modified. Without leaving characters out of the analysis
altogether, Propp reduced them to a simple typology based
not on psychology but on the unity of the actions assigned
them by the narrative {Donor of a magical agent, Helper,

Villain, etc.).

Since Propp, the character has constantly set the structural

analysis of narrative the same problem. On the one hand,
the characters (whatever one calls them - dramatis personae
or actants) form a necessary plane of description, outside

of which the slightest reported 'actions' cease to be intel-
ligible; so that it can be said that there is not a single
narrative in the world without 'characters',

1

or at least

without agents. Yet on the other hand, these - extremely
numerous - 'agents' can be neither described nor classified
in terms of 'persons' - whether the 'person' be considered
as a purely historical form, limited to certain genres (those
most familiar to us it is true), in which case it is necessary

to leave out of aceount the very large number of narratives

Peace, Nikolay Rostov is from the start a good fellow, loyal, courageous

and passionate, Prince Andrey a disillusioned individual of noble
birth, etc. What happens illustrates them, it does not form them.

1. If one section of contemporary literature has attacked the

'character', it is not in order to destroy it (which is impossible) but to
depersonalize it, which is quite different. A novel seemingly devoid of
characters, such as Drame by Philippe Sollers, gets rid of the person to
the benefit of language but nonetheless retains a fundamental play of
actants confronting the very action of discourse. There is still a 'subject'

in this literature, but that 'subject' is henceforth that of language.

106 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

(popular tales, modern texts) comprising agents but not

persons, or whether the 'person' is declared to be no more

than a critical rationalization foisted by our age on pure

narrative agents. Structural analysis, much concerned not
to define characters in terms of psychological essences, has
so far striven, using various hypotheses, to define a character
not as a 'being' but as a 'participant*. For Bremond, every
character (even secondary) can be the agent of sequences
of actions which belong to him {Fraud, Seduction);

when a single sequence involves two characters (as is usual),

it comprises two perspectives, two names (what is Fraud

for the one is Gullibility for the other); in short, every charac-
ter (even secondary) is the hero of his own sequence.
Todorov, analysing a 'psychological' novel (Les Liaisons
dangereuses), starts not from the character-persons but
from the three major relationships in which they can engage

and which he calls base predicates (love, communication,

help). The analysis brings these relationships under two
sorts of rules: rules of derivation, when it is a question of
accounting for other relationships, and rules of action,
when it is a question of describing the transformation of the
major relationships in the course of the story. There are
many characters in Les Liaisons dangereuses but 'what is said

of them' (their predicates) can be classified. Finally, Greimas
has proposed to describe and classify the characters of
narrative not according to what they are but according

to what they do (whence the name actants), inasmuch as
they participate in three main semantic axes (also to be
found in the sentence: subject, object, indirect object,
adjunct) which are communication, desire (or quest) and

ordeal.

1

Since this participation is ordered in couples, the

infinite world of characters is, it too, bound by a paradig-
matic structure (Subject!Object, Donor/Receiver, Helper)

Opponent) which is projected along the narrative; and since

1. Semaniique structural, pp. 129f.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 107

an actant defines a class, it can be filled by different actors>

mobilized according to rules of multiplication, substitution
or replacement.

These three conceptions have many points in common.

The most important, it must be stressed again, is the defini-
tion of the character according to participation in a sphere of
actions, these spheres being few in number, typical and classi-
fiable; which is why this second level of description, despite
its being that of the characters, has here been called the
level of Actions: the word actions is not to be understood

in the sense of the trifling acts which form the tissue of the
first level but in that of the major articulations of praxis

(desire, communication, struggle).

2. The problem of the subject

The problems raised by a classification of the characters
of narrative are not as yet satisfactorily resolved. Certainly
there is ready agreement on the fact that the innumerable
characters of narrative can be brought under rules of sub-
stitution and that, even within the one work, a single figure

can absorb different characters.

1

Again, the actantial model

proposed by Greimas (and adopted by Todorov in another
perspective) seems to stand the test of a large number of

narratives. Like any structural model, its value lies less in its
canonic form (a matrix of six actants) than in the regulated
transformations (replacements, confusions, duplications,
substitutions) to which it lends itself, thus holding out the

hope of an actantial typology of narratives.

3

A difficulty,

1. Psychoanalysis has widely accredited these operations of con-

densation. Mallarme was saying already, writing of Hamlet: 'Super-

numeraries, necessarily! for in the ideal painting of the stage, everything

moves according to a symbolic reciprocity of types amongst themselves
or relatively to a single figure.' Crayorme' au thi&tre, CEuvres computes,

p. 301.

2. For example: narratives where object and subject are confounded

108 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

however, is that when the matrix has a high classificational
power (as is the case with Greimas's actants) it fails ade-
quately to account for the multiplicity of participations as
soon as these are analysed in terms of perspectives and that

when these perspectives are respected (as in Bremond's
description) the system of characters remains too frag-

mented. The reduction proposed by Todorov avoids both

pitfalls but has so far only bcen applied to one narrative. All
this, it seems, can be quickly and harmoniously resolved.
The real difficulty posed by the classification of characters
is the place (and hence the existence) of the subject in any
actantial matrix, whateverlts formulation. Who is the subject
(the hero) of a narrative? Is there - or not - a privileged

class of actors? The novel has aceustomed us to emphasize
in one way or another - sometimes in a devious (negative)
way - one character in particular. But such privileging is

far from extending over the whole of narrative literature.

Many narratives, for example, set two adversaries in con-

flict over some stake; the subject is then truly double, not
reducible further by substitution. Indeed, this is even perhaps
a common archaic form, as though narrative, after the fashion
of certain languages, had also known a dual of persons.

This dual is all the more interesting in that it relates narrative

to the structures of certain (very modern) games in which
two equal opponents try to gain possession of an object put

into circulation by a referee; a schema which recalls the

actantial matrix proposed by Greimas, and there is nothing
surprising in this if one is willing to allow that a game,
being a language, depends on the same symbolic structure

as is to be found in language and narrative: a game too is

in a single character, that is narratives of the search for oneself, for
one's own identity (The Golden Ass); narratives where the subject
pursues successive objects (Madame Bovary), etc.

Structural Analysis of Narratives \ 109

a sentence.

1

If therefore a privileged class of actors is

retained (the subject of the quest, of the desire, of the action),
it nceds at least to be made more flexible by bringing that
actant under the very categories of the grammatical (and

not psychological) person. Once again, it will be necessary to
look towards linguistics for the possibility of describing and
classifying the personal (jeltu, first person/second person)
or apersonal (il, third person), singular, dual or plural,
instance of the action. It will - perhaps - be the grammatical
categories of the person (accessible in our pronouns) which
will provide the key to the actional level; but since these

categories can only be defined in relation to the instance of
discourse, not to that of reality,

2

characters, as units of the

actional level, find their meaning (their intelligibility) only if
integrated in the third level of description, here called
the level of Narration (as oppossed to Functions and

Actions).

IV. Narration

1. Narrative communication

Just as there is within narrative a major function of exchange
(set out between a donor and a beneficiary), so, homologi-
cally, narrative as object is the point of a communication:

there is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the

narrative. In linguistic communication, je and tu (/ and
you) are absolutely presupposed by one another; similarly,

there can be no narrative without a narrator and a listener
(or reader). Banal perhaps, but still little developed. Cer-
tainly the role of the sender has been abundantly enlarged
upon (much study of the 'author' of a novel, though

1. Umberto Eco's analysis of the James Bond cycle ('James Bond:

une combinatoire narrative', Communications 8, 1966) refers more to

game than to language.

2. See the analyses of person given by Benveniste in Probl&mes de

linguistique generate.

110 I IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

without any consideration of whether he reajly is the 'nar-
rator'); when it comes to the reader, however, literary
theory is much more modest. In fact, the problem is not to

introspect the motives of the narrator or the effects the
narration produces on the reader, it is to describe the code
by which narrator and reader are signified throughout the
narrative itself. At first sight, the signs of the narrator
appear more evident and more numerous than those of the
reader (a narrative more frequently says I than you); in

actual fact, the latter are simply more oblique than the
former. Thus, each time the narrator stops 'representing*
and reports details which he knows perfectly well but which
are unknown to the reader, there oceurs, by signifying
failure, a sign of reading, for there would be no sense in
the narrator giving himself a piece of information.

Leo was the owner of the joint,

1

we are told in a first-person

novel: a sign of the reader, close to what Jakobson calls the
conative function of communication. Lacking an inventory
however, we shall leave aside for the moment these signs of
reception (though they are of equal importance) and say
a few words concerning the signs of narration.

2

Who is the donor of the narrative? So far, three concep-

tions seem to have bcen formulated. The first holds that a
narrative emanates from a person (in the fully psycho-
logical sense of the term). This person has a name, the author,
in whom there is an endless exchange between the 'per-
sonality' and the 'art' of a perfectly identified individual who

periodically takes up his pen to write a story: the narrative
(notably the novel) then being simply the expression of an I

1. Double Bang d Bangkok [secret agent thriller by Jean Bruce,

Paris 1959]. The sentence functions as a 'wink' to the reader, as if he
was being turned towards. By contrast, the statement 'So Leo had

just left' is a sign of the narrator, part of a process of reasoning con-

ducted by a 'person'.

2. In 'Les categories du recit litteraire' Todorov deals with the

images of narrator and reader.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 111

external to it. The second conception regards the narrator
as a sort of omniscient, apparently impersonal, conscious-
ness that tells the story from a superior point of view, that

of God:

1

the narrator is at once inside his characters

(since he knows everything that goes on in them) and outside

them (since he never identifies with any one more than
another). The third and most recent conception (Henry
James, Sartre) decrees that the narrator must limit his
narrative to what the characters can observe or know,
everything proceeding as if each of the characters in turn
were the sender of the narrative. All three conceptions are

equally difficult in that they scem to consider narrator and
characters as real - 'living' - people (the unfailing power
of this literary myth is well known), as though a narrative
were originally determined at its referential level (it is a

matter of equally 'realist' conceptions). Narrator and
characters, however, at least from our perspective, are
essentially 'paper beings'; the (material) author of a narra-

tive is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that

narrative.

2

The signs of the narrator are immanent to the

narrative and hence readily accessible to a semiological

analysis; but in order to conclude that the author himself
(whether declared, hidden or withdrawn) has 'signs' at his
disposal which he sprinkles through his work, it is necessary
to assume the existence between this 'person' and his
language of a straight descriptive relation which makes the
author a full subject and and the narrative the instrumental

expression of that fullness. Structural analysis is unwilling

to accept such an assumption: who speaks (in the narrative)

1. 'When will someone write from the point of view of a superior

joke, that is as God sees things from above?' Flaubert, Preface a la

vie d'icrivain, ed. G. Bolleme, Paris 1965, p. 91.

2. A distinction all the more necessary, given the scale at which we

are working, in that historically a large mass of narratives are without
authors (oral narratives, folktales, epics entrusted to bards, reciters,

tc).

112 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is.

1

In fact, narration strictly speaking (the code of the nar-

rator), like language, knows only two systems of signs:
personal and apersonal. These two narrational systems do
not necessarily present the linguistic marks attached to
person (/) and non-person (he): there are narratives or at
least narrative episodes, for example, which though written
in the third person nevertheless have as their true instance
the first person. How can we tell? It suffices to rewrite the

narrative (or the passage) from he to /: so long as the

rewriting entails no alteration of the discourse other than
this change of the grammatical pronouns, we can be sure
that we are dealing with a personal system. The whole of
the beginning of Goldfinger, though written in the third
person, is in fact 'spoken' by James Bond. For the instance
to change, rewriting must become impossible; thus the
sentence 'he saw a man in his fifties, still young-looking...'
is perfectly personal despite the he ('I, James Bond, saw...'),
but the narrative statement 'the tinkling of the ice against
the glass appeared to give Bond a sudden inspiration'
cannot be personal on account of the verb 'appeared',
it (and not the he) becoming a sign of the apersonal.
There is no doubt that the apersonal is the traditional mode
of narrative, language having developed a whole tense
system peculiar to narrative (based on the aorist

2

), designed

to wipe out the present of the speaker. As Benveniste puts
it: 'In narrative, no one speaks.' The personal instance
(under more or less disguised forms) has, however, gradually
invaded narrative, the narration being referred to the hie
et nunc of the locutionary act (which is the definition of
the personal system). Thus it is that today many narratives

1. J. Lacan: 'Is the subject I speak of when I speak the same as the

subject who speaks?'

2. E. Benveniste, op. cit. [especially Chapter XIX].

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 113

are to be found (and of the most common kinds) which

mix together in extremely rapid succession, often within the
limits of a single sentence, the personal and the apersonal;
as for instance this sentence from Goldfinger:

His eyes, personal
grey-blue, apersonal
looked into those of Mr Du Pont who did
not know what face to put on personal
for this look held a mixture of candour,
irony and self-deprecation. apersonal

The mixing of the systems is clearly felt as a facility and

this facility can go as far as trick effects. A detective novel
by Agatha Christie (The Sittaford Mystery) only keeps the
enigma going by cheating on the person of the narration:
a character is described from within when he is already the
murderer

1

- as if in a single person there were the con-

sciousness of a witness, immanent to the discourse, and the
consciousness of a murderer, immanent to the referent,

with the dishonest tourniquet of the two systems alone
producing the enigma. Hence it is understandable that at
the other pole of literature the choice of a rigorous system

should have been made a necessary condition of a work -

without it always being easy fully to meet that condition.

Rigour of this kind - the aim of certain contemporary

writers - is not necessarily an aesthetic imperative. What is
called the psychological novel usually shows a mixture of the
two systems, successively mobilizing the signs of non-
person and those of person; 'psychology', that is, para-

doxically, cannot accommodate itself to a pure system, for
by bringing the whole narrative down to the sole instance
of the discourse - or, if one prefers, to the locutionary

1. Personal mode: 'It even seemed to Burnaby that nothing looked

changed . . .' The device is still more blatant in The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, since there the murderer actually says /.

114 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

act - it is the very content of the person which is threatened:
the psychological person (of referential order) bears no
relation to the linguistic person, the latter never defined by

states of mind, intentions or traits of character but only by
its (coded) place in discourse. It is this formal person that
writers today are attempting to speak and such an attempt

represents an important subversion (the public moreover

has the impression that 'novels' are no longer being written)
for it aims to transpose narrative from the purely consta-
tive plane, which it has occupied until now, to the performa-
tive plane, whereby the meaning of an utterance is the very
act by which it is uttered:

1

today, writing is not 'telling'

but saying that one is telling and assigning all the referent

('what one says') to this act of locution; which is why part

of contemporary literature is no longer descriptive, but
transitive, striving to accomplish so pure a present in its

language that the whole of the discourse is identified with

the act of its delivery, the whole logos being brought down
- or extended - to a lexis.

2

2. Narrative situation

The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of nar-
rativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions
and actions in the narrative communication articulated on

its donor and its addressee. Some of these signs have already
received study; we are familiar in oral literatures with certain
codes of recitation (metrical formulae, conventional
presentation protocols) and we know that here the 'author'
is not the person who invents the finest stories but the person

1. On the performative, see Todorov's 'Les categories du recit

Htteraire'. The classic example of a performative is the statement /
declare war which neither 'constates' nor 'describes* anything but
exhausts its meaning in the act of its utterance (by contrast to the
statement the king declared war, which constates, describes).

2. For the opposition logos/lexis, see Genette, 'Frontieres du recit'.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 115

who best masters the code which is practised equally by his

listeners: in such literatures the narrational level is so clearly
defined, its rules so binding, that it is difficult to conceive
of a 'tale* devoid of the coded signs of narrative ('once

upon a time', etc.). In our written literatures, the 'forms of

discourse' (which are in fact signs of narrativity) were early
identified: classification of the modes of authorial inter-
vention (outlined by Plato and developed by Diomedes

1

),

coding of the beginnings and endings of narratives, defini-
tion of the different styles of representation (oratio directa,
oratio indirecta with its inquit, oratio tecta),

2

study of

'points of view' and so on. All these elements form part of

the narrational level, to which must obviously be added the
writing as a whole, its role being not to 'transmit' the nar-

rative but to display it.

It is indeed precisely in a display of the narrative that the

units of the lower levels find integration: the ultimate
form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents
and its strictly narrative forms (functions and actions).
This explains why the narrational code should be the final
level attainable by our analysis, other than by going outside
of the narrative-object, other, that is, than by transgressing

the rule of immanence on which the analysis is based.

Narration can only receive its meaning from the world
which makes use of it: beyond the narrational level begins
the world, other systems (social, economic, ideological)
whose terms are no longer simply narratives but elements
of a different substance (historical facts, determinations,
behaviours, etc.). Just as linguistics stops at the sentence,

so narrative analysis stops at discourse - from there it is

1. Genus activum vel imitativum (no intervention of the narrator ia

the discourse: as for example theatre); genus ennarativum (the poet
alone speaks: sententiae, didactic poems); genus commune (mixture
of the two kinds: epic poems).

2. H. Sorensen in Language and Society (Studies presented to

Jansen), p. 150.

116 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

necessary to shift to another semiotics. Linguistics is
acquainted with such boundaries which it has already
postulated - if not explored - under the name of situations.
Halliday defines the 'situation' (in relation to a sentence)
as 'the associated non-linguistic factors',

1

Prieto as 'the

set of facts known by the receiver at the moment of the semic
act and independently of this act'.

2

In the same way,

one can say that every narrative is dependent on a 'narrative
situation', the set of protocols according to which the narra-

tive is 'consumed'. In so-called 'archaic' societies, the
narrative situation is heavily coded;

3

nowadays, avant-garde

literature alone still dreams of reading protocols - spectacu-

lar in the case of Mallarme' who wanted the book to be

recited in public according to a precise combinatory scheme,
typographical in that of Butor who tries to provide the
book with its own specific signs. Generally, however,
our society takes the greatest pains to conjure away the
coding of the narrative situation: there is no counting the
number of narrational devices which seek to naturalize
the subsequent narrative by feigning to make it the outcome
of some natural circumstance and thus, as it were, 'dis-
inaugurating' it: epistolary novels, supposedly rediscovered
manuscripts, author who met the narrator, films which
begin the story before the credits. The reluctance to declare
its codes characterizes bourgeois society and the mass
culture issuing from it: both demand signs which do not
look like signs. Yet this is only, so to speak, a structural

epiphenomenon: however familiar, however casual may
today be the act of opening a novel or a newspaper or of
turning on the television, nothing can prevent that humble

1. M. A. K. Halliday, op. cit., p. 4.

2. L. J. Prieto, Principes de noologte, Paris and The Hague 1964,

p. 36.

3. A tale, as Lucien Sebag stressed, can be told anywhere anytime,

but not a mythical narrative.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 117

act from installing in us, all at once and in its entirety,
the narrative code we are going to need. Hence the narra-

tional level has an ambiguous role: contiguous to the nar-
rative situation (and sometimes even including it), it gives
on to the world in which the narrative is undone (consumed),

while at the same time, capping the preceding levels, it
closes the narrative, constitutes it definitively as utterance
of a language [langue] which provides for and bears along

its own metalanguage.

V. The System of Narrative

Language [langue] proper can be defined by the concurrence

of two fundamental processes: articulation, or segmentation,
which produces units (this being what Benveniste calls

form), and integration, which gathers these units into units

of a higher rank (this being meaning). This dual process
can be found in the language of narrative [la langue du

ricit] which also has an articulation and an integration, a
form and a meaning.

1. Distortion and expansion

The form of narrative is essentially characterized by two
powers: that of distending its signs over the length of the
story and that of inserting unforeseeable expansions into
these distortions. The two powers appear to be points of

freedom but the nature of narrative is precisely to include
these 'deviations' within its language.

1

The distortion of signs exists in linguistic language

[langue] and was studied by Bally with reference to French

1. Valery: 'Formally the novel is close to the dream; both can be

defined by consideration of this curious property: all their deviations

form part of them.'

118 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

and German.

1

Dystaxia occurs when the signs (of a message)

are no longer simply juxtaposed, when the (logical) linearity
is disturbed (predicate before subject for example). A notable

form of dystaxia is found when the parts of one sign are
separated by other signs along the chain of the message

(for instance, the negative ne jamais and the verb a pardonni

in elle ne nous a jamais pardonni): the sign split into frac-

tional parts, its signified is shared out amongst several
signifiers, distant from one another and not comprehensible

on their own. This, as was seen in connection with the

functional level, is exactly what happens in narrative: the
units of a sequence, although forming a whole at the level
of that very sequence, may be separated from one another

by the insertion of units from other sequences - as was
said, the structure of the functional level is fugued.

2

According to Bally's terminology, which opposes synthetic
languages where dystaxia is predominant (such as German)

and analytic languages with a greater respect for logical

linearity and monosemy (such as French), narrative would

be a highly synthetic language, essentially founded on a
syntax of embedding and enveloping: each part of the
narrative radiates in several directions at once. When
Bond orders a whisky while waiting for his plane, the whisky

as indice has a polysemic value, is a kind of symbolic node
grouping several signifieds (modernity, wealth, leisure); as
a functional unit, however, the ordering of the whisky has

to run step by step through numerous relays (consump-
tion, waiting, departure, etc.) in order to find its final mean-
ing: the unit is 'taken' by the whole narrative at the same
time that the narrative only 'holds' by the distortion and

1. Charles Bally, Linguistique ginirale et linguistique franfaise,

Paris 1932.

2. Cf. Levi-Strauss: 'Relations pertaining to the same bundle may

appear diachronically at remote intervals' Anthropologic structurale,
p. 234 [trans, p. 211]. A. J. Greimas has emphasized the spacing out of
functions.

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 119

irradiation of its units.

This generalized distortion is what gives the language of

narrative its special character. A purely logical phenomenon,
since founded on an often distant relation and mobilizing
a sort of confidence in intellective memory, it ceaselessly
substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the

events recounted. On meeting in 'life', it is most unlikely
that the invitation to take a seat would not immediately
be followed by the act of sitting down; in narrative these
two units, contiguous from a mimetic point of view, may
be separated by a long series of insertions belonging to
quite different functional spheres. Thus is established a kind

of logical time which has very little connection with real

time, the apparent pulverization of units always being
firmly held in place by the logic that binds together the
nuclei of the sequence. 'Suspense' is clearly only a privileged

- or 'exacerbated' - form of distortion: on the one hand, by

keeping a sequence open (through emphatic procedures of
delay and renewal), it reinforces the contact with the reader
(the listener), has a manifestly phatic function; while on the
other, it offers the threat of an uncompleted sequence, of
an open paradigm (if, as we believe, every sequence has two
poles), that is to say, of a logical disturbance, it being this
disturbance which is consumed with anxiety and pleasure
(all the more so because it is always made right in the end).
'Suspense', therefore, is a game with structure, designed to
endanger and glorify it, constituting a veritable 'thrilling'
of intelligibility: by representing order (and no longer
series) in its fragility, 'suspense' accomplishes the very idea
of language: what seems the most pathetic is also the most
intellectual - 'suspense' grips you in the 'mind', not in the
'guts'.

1

1. J. P. Faye, writing of Klossowski's Baphomet: 'Rarely has fiction

(or narrative) so clearly revealed what it always is, necessarily: an
experimentation of "thought" on "life".' Tel Quel 22, p. 88.

120 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

What can be separated can also be filled. Distended, the

functional nuclei furnish intercalating spaces which can be
packed out almost infinitely; the interstices can be filled in

with a very large number of catalysers. Here, however, a

new typology comes in, for the freedom to catalyse can be
regulated according both to the content of the functions
(certain functions are more apt than others for catalysing -
as for example Waiting

1

) and to the substance of the nar-

rative (writing contains possibilities of diaeresis - and so of
catalysing - far superior to those of film: a gesture related

linguistically can be 'cut up' much more easily than the

same gesture visualized

2

). The catalystic power of narrative

has for corollary its elliptic power. Firstly, a function (he

had a good meal) can economize on all the potential cata-
lysers it covers over (the details of the meal)

3

; secondly, it is

possible to reduce a sequence to its nuclei and a hierarchy
of sequences to its higher terms without altering the meaning

of the story: a narrative can be identified even if its total

syntagm be reduced to its actants and its main functions
as these result from the progressive upwards integration of
its functional units.

4

In other words, narrative lends itself to

summary (what used to be called the argument). At first sight
this is true of any discourse, but each discourse has its own
kind of summary. A lyric poem, for example, is simply the

1. Logically Waiting has only two nuclei: 1. the wait established

2. the wait rewarded or disappointed; the first, however can be
extensively catalysed, occasionally even indefinitely ( Waiting for Godot):
yet another game - this time extreme - with structure.

2. Valery: 'Proust divides up - and gives us the feeling of being

able to divide up indefinitely - what other writers are in the habit of
passing over.'

3. Here again, there are qualifications according to substance:

literature has an unrivalled elliptic power - which cinema lacks.

4. This reduction does not necessarily correspond to the division of

the book into chapters; on the contrary, it seems that increasingly
chapters have the role of introducing breaks, points of suspense (serial
technique).

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 121

vast metaphor of a single signified

1

and to summarize it is

thus to give this signified, an operation so drastic that it
eliminates the poem's identity (summarized, lyric poems

come down to the signifieds Love and Death) - hence the
conviction that poems cannot be summarized. By contrast,
the summary of a narrative (if conducted according to
structural criteria) preserves the individuality of the message;
narrative, in other words, is translatable without fundamental
damage. What is untranslatable is determined only at the
last, narrational, level. The signifiers of narrativity, for

instance, are not readily transferable from novel to film,
the latter utilizing the personal mode of treatment only very
exceptionally;

2

while the last layer of the narrational level,

namely the writing, resists transference from one language
to another (or transfers very badly). The translatability of
narrative is a result of the structure of its language, so that
it would be possible, proceeding in reverse, to determine
this structure by identifying and classifying the (varyingly)
translatable and untranslatable elements of a narrative.
The existence (now) of different and concurrent semiotics
(literature, cinema, comics, radio-television) would greatly

facilitate this kind of analysis.

2. Mimesis and meaning

The second important process in the language of narrative

1. N. Ruwet: 'A poem can be understood as the outcome of a

series of transformations applied to the proposition "I love you".'
'Analyse structural d'un poeme francais', Linguistics 3, 1964, p. 82.
Ruwet here refers precisely to the analysis of paranoiac delirium given
by Freud in connection with President Schreber ('Psychoanalytic
Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia',
Standard Edition Vol. 12).

2. Once again, there is no relation between the grammatical 'person'

of the narrator and the 'personality' (or subjectivity) that a film director
puts into his way of presenting a story: the camera-I (continuously
identified with the vision of a particular character) is exceptional in
the history of cinema.

122 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is integration: what has been disjoined at a certain level

(a sequence for example) is most often joined again at a

higher level (a hierarchically important sequence, the global
signified of a number of scattered indices, the action of a
class of characters). The complexity of a narrative can be
compared to that of an organization profile chart, capable
of integrating backwards and forwards movements; or,
more accurately, it is integration in various forms which
compensates for the seemingly unmasterable complexity of
units on a particular level. Integration guides the under-
standing of the discontinuous elements, simultaneously
contiguous and heterogeneous (it is thus that they appear
in the syntagm which knows only one dimension - that of
succession). If, with Greimas, we call isotopy the unity of
meaning (that, for instance, which impregnates a sign and
its context), then we can say that integration is a factor of

isotopy: each (integrational) level gives its isotopy to the
units of the level below, prevents the meaning from 'dangl-

ing' - inevitable if the staggering of levels were not perceived.

Narrative integration, however, does not present itself in a
serenely regular manner like some fine architectural style
leading by symmetrical chicaneries from an infinite variety
of simple elements to a few complex masses. Very often
a single unit will have two correlates, one on one level
(function of a sequence), the other on another (indice with
reference to an actant). Narrative thus appears as a succes-

sion of tightly interlocking mediate and immediate elements;

dystaxia determines a 'horizontal' reading, while integration

superimposes a 'vertical' reading: there is a sort of structural
'limping', an incessant play of potentials whose varying falls
give the narrative its dynamism or energy: each unit is
perceived at once in its surfacing and in its depth and it is

thus that the narrative 'works'; through the concourse of
these two movements the structure ramifies, proliferates,

uncovers itself - and recovers itself, pulls itself together:

Structural Analysis of Narratives | 123

the new never fails in its regularity. There is, of course, a

freedom of narrative (just as there is a freedom for every

speaker with regard to his or her language), but this freedom
is limited, literally hemmed in: between the powerful code
of language [langue] and the powerful code of narrative a
hollow is set up - the sentence. If one attempts to embrace
the whole of a written narrative, one finds that it starts
from the most highly coded (the phonematic, or even the

merismatic, level), gradually relaxes until it reaches the

sentence, the farthest point of combinatorial freedom,
and then begins to tighten up again, moving progressively
from small groups of sentences (micro-sequences), which are
still very free, until it comes to the main actions, which
form a strong and restricted code. The creativity of narrative
(at least under its mythical appearance of 'life') is thus
situated between two codes, the linguistic and the trans-
linguistie. That is why it can be said paradoxically that art
(in the Romantic sense of the term) is a matter of statements

of detail, whereas imagination is mastery of the code: 'It
will be found in fact,' wrote Poe, 'that the ingenious are
always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise
than analytic .. .**

Claims concerning the 'realism' of narrative are therefore

to be discounted. When a telephone call comes through in
the office where he is on duty, Bond, so the author tells us,
reflects that 'Communications with Hong-Kong are as bad
as they always were and just as difficult to obtain'. Neither

Bond's 'reflection' nor the poor quality of the telephone call
is the real piece of information; this contingency perhaps

gives things more 'life' but the true information, which will
come to fruition later, is the localization of the telephone

call, Hong-Kong. In all narrative imitation remains con-
tingent.

2

The function of narrative is not to 'represent', it

1. The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

2. G- Oenette rightly reduces mimesis to passages of directly

124 I IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but
in any case not of a mimetic order. The 'reality' of a sequence
lies not in the 'natural' succession of the actions composing

it but in the logic there exposed, risked and satisfied. Putting
it another way, one could say that the origin of a sequence is

not the observation of reality, but the need to vary and
transcend the first form given man, namely repetition: a
sequence is essentially a whole within which nothing is
repeated. Logic has here an emancipatory value - and with
it the entire narrative. It may be that men ceaselessly

re-inject into narrative what they have known, what they
have experienced; but if they do, at least it is in a
form which has vanquished repetition and instituted the
model of a process of becoming. Narrative does not show,
does not imitate; the passion which may excite us in reading
a novel is not that of a 'vision' (in actual fact, we do not
'see' anything). Rather it is that of meaning, that of a
higher order of relation which also has its emotions, its
hopes, its dangers, its triumphs. 'What takes place' in a
narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view
literally nothing? 'what happens' is language alone,
the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its

coming. Although we know scarcely more about the
origins of narrative than we do about the origins of language,
it can reasonably be suggested that narrative is contem-
poraneous with monologue, a creation seemingly posterior
to that of dialogue. At all events, without wanting to strain
the phylogenetic hypothesis, it may be significant that it is at
the same moment (around the age of three) that the little
human 'invents' at once sentence, narrative, and the
Oedipus.

reported dialogue (cf. 'Frontieres du recif*); yet even dialogue always
contains a function of intelligibility, not of mimesis.

1. Mallarme: 'A dramatic work displays the succession of exteriors

of the act without any moment retaining reality and, in the end,
anything happening.' Crayonni au thi&tre, CEuvres complites, p. 296.

The Struggle with the Angel

Textual analysis of Genesis 32: 22-32

(22) And he rose up that night, and took his two wives,
and his two women-servants, and his eleven sons, and
passed over the ford Jabbok. (23) And he took them, and
sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.
(24) And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a

man with him until the breaking of the day. (25) And when
he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the

hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was
out of joint as he wrestled with him. (26) And he said,
Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not

let thee go, except thou bless me. (27) And he said unto

him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. (28) And
he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but

Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and

with men, and hast prevailed. (29) And Jacob asked him,
and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said,
Wherefore is it thou dost ask after my name? And he
blessed him there. (30) And Jacob called the name of the
place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my

life is preserved. (31) And as he passed over Penuel the

sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh. (32)
Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew
which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh,
unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's
thigh in the sinew that shrank. (Authorized Version)

The clarifications - or precautionary remarks - which will

serve as an introduction to the following analysis will in

126 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

fact be largely negative. First of all, it must be said that I shall
not be giving any preliminary exposition of the principles,
perspectives and problems of the structural analysis of
narrative. That analysis is not a science nor even a discipline

(it is not taught), but, as part of the newly developing
semiology, it nevertheless represents an area of research
which is becoming well known, so much so that to set out
its prolegomena on the occasion of every fresh analysis

1

would be to run the risk of producing an impression of
useless repetition. Moreover, the structural analysis presented

here will not be very pure. I shall indeed be referring in the
main to the principles shared by all those semiologists

concerned with narrative and, to finish, I shall even show
how the piece under discussion lends itself to an extremely
classic and almost canonical structural analysis, this ortho-
dox consideration (orthodox from the point of view of the
structural analysis of narrative) is all the more justified in
that we shall be dealing with a mythical narrative that may
have entered writing (entered Scripture) via an oral tradition.
At the same time, however, I shall allow myself every so often
(and perhaps continuously on the quiet) to direct my investi-
gations towards an analysis with which I am more at home,
textual analysis ('textual' is used with reference to the con-
temporary theory of the text, this being understood as
production of signifiance and not as philological object,
custodian of the Letter). Such an analysis endeavours to

'see' each particular text in its difference - which does not
mean in its ineffable individuality, for this difference is
'woven' in familiar codes; it conceives the text as taken up
in an open network which is the very infinity of language,
itself structured without closure; it tries to say no longer

from where the text comes (historical criticism), nor even

1. On this subject (and in relation to exegesis), see R. Barthes,

'L'analyse structurale du recit: a propos d'Actes 10-11', in Exegise et

Hermeneutique, Paris 1971, pp. 181-204.

The Struggle with the Angel | 127

how it is made (structural analysis), but how it is unmade,
how it explodes, disseminates - by what coded paths it

goes off. Finally, the last of these precautionary remarks

and intended to forestall any disappointment, there is no
question in what follows of a methodological confrontation
between structural or textual analysis and exegesis, this
lying outside my competence.

1

I shall simply analyse the

text of Genesis 32 (traditionally called 'Jacob's struggle with

the angel') as though I were at the first stage of a piece of

research (which is indeed the case). What is given here is not
a 'result' nor even a 'method' (which would be too ambitious
and would imply a 'scientific' view of the text that I do
not hold), but merely a 'way of proceeding'.

J. Sequential Analysis

Structural analysis embraces roughly three types or three
objects of analysis, or again, if one prefers, comprises
three tasks. 1) The inventorization and classification of the
'psychological', biographical, characterial and social attri-
butes of the characters involved in the narrative (age, sex,

external qualities, social situation or position of importance,
etc.). Structurally, this is the area of indices (notations, of
infinitely varied expression, serving to transmit a signified
- as, for example, 'irritability', 'grace', 'strength' - which the
analyst names in his metalanguage; it being under-
stood that the metalinguistic term may very well not figure
directly in the text - as indeed is generally the case - which
will not employ 'irritability' or 'grace' or whatever, if

1. I wish to express my gratitude to Jean Alexandre whose socio-

historical, linguistic and exegetical knowledge, together with his
intellectual openness, helped me to understand the text analysed here.
Many of his ideas are to be found in this analysis and only fear of
having distorted them has prevented me from acknowledging them
each time they appear.

128 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

one establishes a homology between narrative and (the
linguistic) sentence, then the indice corresponds to the
adjective, to the epithet (which, let us not forget, was a
figure of rhetoric). This is what we might call indicial
analysis. 2) The inventorization and classification of the

functions of the characters; what they do according to their

narrative status, in their capacity as subject of an action that
remains constant: the Sender, the Seeker, the Emissary, etc.
In terms of the sentence, this would be the equivalent of the

present participle and is that actantial analysis of which

A. J. Greimas was the first to provide the theory. 3) The
inventorization and classification of the actions, the plane
of the verbs. These narrative actions are organized in se-
quences, in successions apparently ordered according

to a pseudo-logical schema (it is a matter of a purely empiri-
cal, cultural logic, a product of experience - even if ancestral
- and not of reasoning). What we have here is thus sequential
analysis.

Our text lends itself, if in fact briefly, to indicial analysis.

The contest it describes can be read as an indice of Jacob's
strength (attested in other episodes of the chronicle of this
hero's exploits) and that indice leads towards an anagogical
meaning which is the (invincible) strength of God's Elect.
Actantial analysis is also possible, but as the text is essenti-
ally made up of seemingly contingent actions it is better to

work mainly on a sequential (or actional) analysis of the
episode, being prepared in conclusion to add one or two
remarks concerning the actantial. I shall divide the text
(without, I think, forcing things) into three sequences: 1.
the Crossing, 2. the Struggle, 3. the Namings.

1. The Crossing (v. 22-24). Let us straightaway give the

schema of the sequences of this episode, a schema which is
twofold or at least, as it were, 'strabismic' (what is at stake
here will be seen in a moment):

The Struggle with the Angel | 129

rise up gather together pass over

I · - · ·

22 22 22

gather together send over remain alone

I «

m

,

0

23 23 24

It can be noted at once that structurally rise up is a simple
operator for beginning; one might say, putting things quickly,
that by rise up is to be understood not only that Jacob starts
moving but also that the discourse gets underway. The

beginning of a narrative, of a discourse, of a text, is an
extremely sensitive point - where to begin ? The said must
be torn from the not-said, whence a whole rhetoric of begin-
ning markers. The most important thing, however, is that
the two sequences (or sub-sequences) seem to be in a state
of redundancy (which is perhaps usual in the discourse of
the period: a piece of information is given and then repeated;
but the rule here is reading, not the historical and philo-
logical determination of the text: we are reading the text
not in its 'truth' but in its 'production' - which is not its
'determination'). Paradoxically moreover (for redundancy

habitually serves to homogenize, to clarify and assure a
message), when read after two millennia of Aristotelian
rationalism (Aristotle being the principal theoretician of
classic narrative) the redundancy of the two sub-sequences
creates an abrasion, a grating of readability. The sequential
schema, that is, can be read in two ways: 1) Jacob himself

crosses over the ford - if need be after having made several
trips back and forth - and thus the combat takes place on
the left bank of the flood (he is coming from the North)
after he has definitively crossed over; in this case, send over
is read cross over himself; 2) Jacob sends over but does not
himself cross over; he fights on the right bank of the

130 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

Jabbok before crossing over, in a rearguard position. Let

us not look for some true interpretation (perhaps our very
hesitation will appear ridiculous in the eyes of the exegetes);
rather, let us consume two different pressures of readability:

1) if Jacob remains alone before crossing the Jabbok, we are
led towards a 'folkloric' reading of the episode, the mythical
reference then being overwhelming which has it that a trial

of strength (as for example with a dragon or the guardian
spirit of a river) must be imposed on the hero before he
clears the obstacle, so that - once victorious - he can clear it;
2) if on the contrary Jacob having crossed over (he and his
tribe), he remains alone on the good side of the flood
(the side of the country to which he wants to go), then the
passage is without structural finality while acquiring on the
other hand a religious finality: if Jacob is alone, it is no
longer to settle the question of and obtain the crossing but

in order that he be marked with solitude (the familiar setting
apart of the one chosen by God). There is a historical

circumstance which increases the undecidability of the
two interpretations. Jacob's purpose is to return home, to

enter the land of Canaan: given this, the crossing of the
River Jordan would be easier to understand than that of
the Jabbok. In short, we are confronted with the crossing of
a spot that is neutral. The crossing is crucial if Jacob has
to win it over the guardian of the place, indifferent if what
is important is the solitude, the mark of Jacob. Perhaps
we have here the tangled trace of two stories, or at least of
two narrative instances: the one, more 'archaic' (in the

simple stylistic sense of the term), makes of the crossing

itself an ordeal; the other, more 'realist', gives a 'geo-

graphical' air to Jacob's journey by mentioning the places
he goes through (without attaching any mythical value to
them).

If one carries back on to this twofold sequence the pattern

of subsequent events, that is the Struggle and the Naming,

The Struggle with the Angel | 131

the dual reading continues, coherent to the end in each of
its two versions. Here again is the diagram;

Not pass over Struggle and Have
oneself Naming passed over (31)

Send

the othenT

Pass over

.oneself

Go on (31)

If the Struggle stands between the 'not pass over' and the
'have passed over' (the folklorizing, mythical reading),
then the mutation of the Names corresponds to the very
purpose of every etymological saga; if on the contrary
the Struggle is only a stage between a position of immobility
(of meditation, of election) and a movement of setting off

again, then the mutation of the Name has the value of a
spiritual rebirth (of 'baptism'). All of which can be sum-
marized by saying that in this first episode there is sequential
readability but cultural ambiguity. No doubt the theologian

would grieve at this indecision while the exegete would
acknowledge it. hoping for some element of fact or argument

that would enable him to put an end to it. The textual
analyst, judging by my own impression, savours such

friction between two intelligibilities.

2. The Struggle (v. 24-29). For the second episode we

have once again to start from a complication (which is not
to say a doubt) of readability - remember that textual

analysis is founded on reading rather than on the objective
structure of the text, the latter being more the province of
structural analysis. This complication stems from the inter-
changeable character of the pronouns which refer to the

132 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

two opponents in the combat: a style which a purist would
describe as muddled but whose lack of sharpness doubtless
posed no problem for Hebrew syntax. Who is 'a man'?
Staying within verse 25, is it 'a man' who does not succeed
in getting the better of Jacob or Jacob who cannot prevail

over this someone? Is the 'he' of 'he prevailed not against

him' (25) the same as the 'he' of'And he said' (26) ? Assuredly
everything becomes clear in the end but it requires in some

sort a retroactive reasoning of a syllogistic kind: you have

vanquished God. He who is speaking to you is he whom you

vanquished. Therefore he who is speaking to you is God.
The identification of the opponents is oblique, the reada-
bility is diverted (whence occasionally commentaries which
border on total misunderstanding; as for example: 'He
wrestles with the Angel of the Lord and, thrown to the
ground, obtains from him the certainty that God is with
him').

Structurally, this amphibology, even if subsequently

clarified, is not without significance. It is not in my opinion
(which is, I repeat, that of a reader today) a simple complica-
tion of expression due to an unpolished, archaizing style;
it is bound up with a paradoxical structure of the contest

(paradoxical when compared with the stereotypes of mythical

combat). So as to appreciate this paradox in its structural
subtlety, let us imagine for a moment an endoxical (and no
longer paradoxical) reading of the episode: A wrestles with
B but fails to get the better of him; to gain victory at all
costs, A then resorts to some exceptional strategy, whether
an unfair and forbidden blow (the forearm chop in wrestling
matches) or a blow which, while remaining within the rules,
supposes a secret knowledge, a 'dodge' (the 'ploy' of the
Jarnac blow

1

). In the very logic of the narrative such a

blow, generally described as 'decisive', brings victory to the

1. [In 1547 Guy de Jarnac won a duel by an unexpected thrust

which hamstrung his opponent.]

The Struggle with the Angel | 133

person who administers it: the emphatic mark of which this
blow is structurally the object cannot be reconciled with its

being ineffective - by the very god of narrative it must
succeed. Here, however, the opposite occurs: the decisive
blow fails; A, who gave the blow, is not the victor; which is
the structural paradox. The sequence then takes an un-
expected course:

Combat Powerlessness Decisive (Ineffectiveness) Negotiation
(durative) of A blow

· · ·

m

24 25 25 26

I

A's Bar- Accep-
request gaining tance

· ·

m

26 26 29

It will be noted that A (it matters little from the point of

view of the structure if this be someone, a man, God or the
Angel) is not strictly speaking vanquished but held in check.

For this to be seen as a defeat, the adjunction of a time
limit is needed: this is the breaking of day ('for the day

breaketh' 26), a notation which picks up verse 24 ('until the
breaking of day') but now in the explicit context of a

mythical structure. The theme of the nocturnal combat is

structurally justified by the fact that at a certain moment,
fixed in advance (as is the rising of the sun, as is the duration
of a boxing match), the rules of the combat will no longer

obtain, the structural play will come to an end, as too the
supernatural play (the 'demons' withdraw at dawn).
Thus we can see that it is within a quite 'regular' combat

that the sequence sets up an unexpected readability, a
logical surprise: the person who has the knowledge, the

secret, the special ploy, is nevertheless defeated. The

sequence itself, however actional, however anecdotal it
may be, functions to unbalance the opponents in the combat,

134 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

not only by the unforeseen victory of the one over the other,
but above all (let us be fully aware of the formal subtlety of
this surprise) by the illogical, inverted, nature of the victory.
In other words (and here we find an eminently structural

term, well known to linguists), the combat, as it is reversed
in its unexpected development, marks one of the comba-
tants: the weakest defeats the strongest, in exchange for
which he is marked (on the thigh).

It is plausible (moving somewhat away from pure struc-

tural analysis and approaching textual analysis, vision

without barriers of meanings) to fill out this schema of the

mark (of the disequilibrium) with contents of an ethno-
logical kind. The structural meaning of the episode, once
again, is the following: a situation of balance (the combat
at its outset) - and such a situation is a prerequisite for any
marking (ascesis in Ignatius of Loyola for instance functions
to establish the indifference of the will which allows the

manifestation of the divine mark, the choice, the election) -
is disturbed by the unlikely victory of one of the participants:
there is an inversion of the mark, a counter-mark. Let us
turn then to the family configuration. Traditionally, the
line of brothers is in principle evenly balanced (they are all
situated on the same level in relation to the parents);
this equality of birth is normally unbalanced by the right
of primogeniture: the eldest is marked. Now in the story
of Jacob, there is an inversion of the mark, a counter-mark:
it is the younger who supplants the elder {Genesis 27: 36),
taking his brother by the heel in order to reverse time; it is
Jacob, the younger brother, who marks himself. Since
Jacob has just obtained a mark in his struggle with God,
one can say in a sense that A (God) is the substitute of the
elder brother, once again beaten by the younger. The
conflict with Esau is displaced (every symbol is a displace-
ment', if the 'struggle with the angel' is symbolic, then it
has displaced something). Commentary - for which I am

The Struggle with the Angel | 135

insufficiently equipped - would at this point doubtless have
to widen the interpretation of the inversion of the mark,
by placing it either in a historico-economic context - Esau
is the eponym of the Edomites and there were economic

ties between the Edomites and the Israelites; figured here

perhaps is an overthrow of the alliance, the start of a new
league of interests? - or in the field of the symbolic (in
the psychoanalytical sense of the term) - the Old Testament
seems to be less the world of the Fathers than that of the
Enemy Brothers, the elder are ousted in favour of the
younger; in the myth of the Enemy Brothers Freud pointed
to the theme of the smallest difference: is not the blow on the
thigh, on the thin sinew, just such a smallest difference?
Be that as it may, in this world God marks the young, acts
against nature: his (structural) function is to constitute a
counter-marker.

To conclude discussion of this extremely rich episode of

the Struggle, of the Mark, I should like to add a remark as
semiologist. We have seen that in the binary opposition of
the combatants, which is perhaps the binary opposition
of the Brothers, the younger is marked both by the reversal
of the anticipated distribution of strengths and by a bodily
sign, the touch on the thigh, the halting (not without re-
calling Oedipus, Swollen Foot, the Lame One). A mark is
creative of meaning. In the phonological representation of
language, the 'equality' of the paradigm is unbalanced in
favour of a marked element by the presence of a trait

absent from its correlative and oppositional term. By
marking Jacob (Israel), God (or the Narrative) permits an

anagogical development of meaning, creates the formal
operational conditions of a new 'language', the election of
Israel being its 'message'. God is a logothete, a founder of

a language, and Jacob is here a 'morpheme' of the new
language.

3. The Namings or Mutations (v. 27-32). The object of the

136 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

final sequence is the exchange of names, that is to say the
promotion of new statuses, new powers. Naming is clearly
related to Blessing: to bless (to accept the homage of a
kneeling suppliant) and to name are both suzerain acts.
There are two namings:

Request for name,

from God to Jacob Jacob's reply Result: Mutation

m · ·

27 27 28

Request for name,
from Jacob to God Indirect reply (Result: Decision)

· · #

2 9 2 9 : )

I

Mutation: Penuel

·

31

The mutation bears on Names, but in fact it is the entire
episode which functions as the creation of a multiple trace
- across Jacob's body, the status of the Brothers, Jacob's
name of the place, the kind of food (creation of an alimentary
taboo: the whole story can also be interpreted a minimo
as the mythical foundation of a taboo). The three sequences
that have been analysed are homological; what is in question
in each is a change - of place, parental line, name, ali-
mentary rite; all this keeping very close to an activity of

language, a transgression of the rules of meaning.

Such is the sequential (or actional) analysis of our text.

As has been seen, I have tried to remain always on the level
of the structure, that is to say of the systematic correlation
of the terms denoting an action. If I have chanced to men-
tion certain possible meanings, the purpose has not been
to discuss the probability of those meanings but rather to

show how the structure 'disseminates' contents - which each
reading can make its own. My object is not the philological

The Struggle with the Angel | 137

or historical document, custodian of a truth to be discovered,
but the volume, the signifiance of the text.

//. Structural Analysis

The structural analysis of narrative being in part already
constituted (by Propp, Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Bremond),
I wish to conclude - putting myself even more in the back-
ground - by confronting the text under discussion with two
modes of structural analysis so as to demonstrate the interest
of these two modes, though my own work has a somewhat
different orientation:

1

Greimas's actantial analysis and

Propp's functional analysis.

1. Actantial analysis. The actantial grid worked out by

Greimas

2

- to be used, as he himself says, with prudence and

flexibility - divides the characters, the actors, of a narrative
into six formal classes of actants, defined by what they do
according to narrative status and not by what they are
psychologically (thus one actant may combine several
characters just as a single character may combine several
actants; an actant may also be figured by an inanimate
entity). The 'struggle with the angel' forms a very familiar
episode in mythical narratives: the overcoming of an
obstacle, the Ordeal. As far as the particular episode is
concerned (things might perhaps be different over the whole
set of Jacob's exploits), the actants are 'filled' as follows:
Jacob is the Subject (subject of the demand, the quest, the
action); the Object (of the same demand, quest, action) is
the crossing of the guarded and forbidden place, the flood,
the Jabbok; the Sender, who sets in circulation the stake
of the quest (namely the crossing of the flood), is obviously
God; the Receiver is Jacob again (two actants are here

1. My work on Balzac's story Sarrasine (S/Z, Paris 1970; [trans.

S/Z, New York and London 1975]) belongs more to textual than to

structural analysis.

2. See especially A. J. Greimas, Simantique structural and Du Sens.

138 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

present in a single figure); the Opponent (the one or ones who
hinder the Subject in his quest) is God himself (it is he who,
mythically, guards the crossing); the Helper (the one or ones
who aid the Subject) is Jacob who provides help to himself
through his own, legendary, strength (an indicial trait, as was
noted).

The paradox, or at very least the anomic nature of the

formulation, can be seen at once: that the subject be con-
founded with the receiver is banal; that the subject be his
or her own helper is less usual (it generally occurs in 'volun-
tarist' narratives or novels); but that the sender be the
opponent is very rare and there is only one type of narrative
that can present this paradoxical form - narratives relating
an act of blackmail. If the opponent were only the (pro-
visional) holder of the stake, then of course there would be
nothing extraordinary: it is the opponent's role to have and
defend ownership of the object that the hero wants to
obtain (as with the dragon guarding a place to be crossed).
Here however, as in every blackmail, God, at the same time
that he guards the flood, also dispenses the mark, the

privilege. The actantial form of the text is thus far from
conciliatory: structurally, it is extremely audacious - which

squares well with the 'scandal' represented by God's defeat.

2. Functional analysis. Propp was the first to establish

the structure of the folktale, by dividing it into its functions
or narrative acts.

1

The functions, according to Propp, are

stable elements, limited in number (some thirty or so)
and always identical in their concatenation, even if occa-
sionally certain functions are absent from this or that
narrative. It so happens - as will be seen in a moment -

1. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. Unfortunately, the word

'function' is always ambiguous; at the beginning of the present piece
we used it to define actantial analysis which assesses characters by their
roles in the action (precisely their 'function*); in Propp's terminology,
there is a shift from character to the action itself, grasped in its
relations to the actions surrounding it.

The Struggle with the Angel \ 139

that our text fulfills perfectly a section of the functional
schema brought to light by Propp who would have been
unable to imagine a more convincing application of his
discovery.

In a preparatory section of the folktale (as analysed by

Propp) there necessarily occurs an absence of the hero,
something already the case in the tale of Jacob: Isaac
sends Jacob far from his homeland to Laban {Genesis 28:
2 and 5). Our episode effectively begins at the fifteenth
of Propp's narrative functions and can be coded in the
following manner, showing at each stage the striking
parallelism between Propp's schema and the Genesis
narrative:
Propp and the folktale

15. Transference from one

place to another (by
bird, horse, ship, etc.)

16. Combat between the Vil-

lain and the Hero

17. The hero is branded,

'marked' (generally it is
a matter of a mark on
the body, but in other
cases it is simply the gift
of a jewel, of a ring)

18. Victory of the Hero,

defeat of the Villain

19. Liquidation of the mis-

fortune or lack: the mis-
fortune or lack had been
established in the initial

absence of the Hero:
this absence is repaired

Genesis
Set out from the North,
from the Aramaeans, from
the house of Laban, Jacob

journeys home, to his father's

house (29: 1, Jacob sets out)

This is the sequence of the
Struggle (32: 24-27)
Jacob is marked on the
thigh (32: 25-32)

Jacob's victory (32: 26)

Having succeeded in crossing

Penuel (32: 31), Jacob
reaches Schechem in Canaan

(33: 18)

140 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

There are other parallels. In Propp's function 14, the

hero acquires the use of a magical object; for Jacob this

talisman is obviously the blessing that he surprises his
blind father into giving him {Genesis 27). Again, function
29 represents the transfiguration of the hero (for example,
the Beast transformed into a handsome nobleman); such

a transfiguration seems to be present in the changing of
the Name {Genesis 32: 28) and the rebirth it implies. The
narrative model stamps God with the role of the Villain
(his structural role - it is not a question of a psychological
role); the fact is that a veritable folktale stereotype can be

read in the Genesis episode - the difficult crossing of a ford
guarded by a hostile spirit. A further similitude between
episode and tale is that in both cases character motivations
(their reasons for acting) go unnoted, the ellipsis of such
notations being not a stylistic element but a pertinent
structural characteristic of the narration. Structural analysis
in the strict sense of the term would thus conclude empha-
tically that the 'struggle with the angel' is a true fairytale,
since according to Propp all fairytales belong to the same
structure, the one he described.

So we can see that what might be called the structural

exploitation of the episode is very possible and even im-
perative. Let me indicate in conclusion, however, that what
interests me most in this famous passage is not the 'folk-
loristic' model but the abrasive frictions, the breaks, the
discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition of narrative

entities which to some extent run free from an explicit logical
articulation. One is dealing here (this at least is for me the
savour of the reading) with a sort of metonymic montage:
the themes (Crossing, Struggle, Naming, Alimentary Rite)
are combined, not 'developed'. This abruptness, this asyn-
detic character of the narrative is well expressed by Hosea

(12: 3-4):

The Struggle with the Angel | 141

'He took his brother by the heel in the womb / / and by
his strength he had power with God.'

Metonymic logic is that of the unconscious. .Hence it is
perhaps in that direction that one would need to pursue
the present study, to pursue the reading of the text - its
dissemination, not its truth. Evidently, there is a risk in so

doing of weakening the episode's economico-historical

force (certainly existent, at the level of the exchanges of

tribes and the questions of power). Yet equally in so doing
the symbolic explosion of the text (not necessarily of a
religious order) is reinforced. The problem, the problem at

least posed for me, is exactly to manage not to reduce the

Text to a signified, whatever it may be (historical, economic,
folkloristic or kerygmatic), but to hold its signifiance fully

open.

The Death of the Author

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised
as a woman, writes the following sentence: 'This was

woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims,

her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings,
and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it
the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the
castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the
individual, furnished by his personal experience with a

philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing

'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom?
Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good
reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of
every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite,
oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity

of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a

fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on
reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any
function other than that of the very practice of the symbol

itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin,
the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The

sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethno-

graphic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never
assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator
whose 'performance' - the mastery of the narrative code -
may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'. The author

is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as,

emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,

The Death of the Author | 143 *

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reforma-

tion, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is
more nobly put, the 'human person'. It is thus,logical that

in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and
culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the
greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The
author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of

writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness
of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their
work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature
to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on
the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while

criticism still consists for the most part in saying that
Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man,
Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The
explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman
who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the
more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of
a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the

new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it),
it goes without saying that certain writers have long since
attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarm6 was doubtless
the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity
to substitute language itself for the person who until then
had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it
is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through

a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with
the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach
that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not

'me'. Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the

author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen,
to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a

psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme's

144 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to

the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question
and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it
were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his
prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal
condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to
the writer's interiority seemed to him pure superstition.

Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological
character of what are called his analyses, was visibly con-
cerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme
subtilization, the relation between the writer and hip

characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen
and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to
write (the young man in the novel - but, in fact; how old is
he and who is he? - wants to write but cannot; the novel

ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave
modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of

putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained,

he made of his very life a work for which his own book was

the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not
imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou - in his anec-
dotal, historical reality - is no more than a secondary
fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further
than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though
unable to accord language a supreme place (language being
system and the aim of the movement being, romantically,
a direct subversion of codes - itself moreover illusory:

a code cannot be destroyed, ,only 'played off'), contributed

to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by cease-
lessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expecta-
tions of meaning (the famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting

the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible
what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by

accepting the principle and the experience of several people
writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such dis-

The Death of the Author | 145

tinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently

provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable
analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation
is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there
being any need for it to be filled with the person of the inter-
locutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the
instance writing, just as / is nothing other than the instance

saying /: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and

this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which
defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices,
that is to say, to exhaust it.

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with

Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing
like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not
merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly
transforms the modern text (or - which is the same thing -
the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at
all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different.
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the
past of his own book: book and author stand automatically
on a single line" divided into a before and an after. The
Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that
he exists before it, thinksTsuffers, lives for it, is in the same

relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.
In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simul-
taneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being
preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with
the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the
enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.
The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer desig-
nate an operation of recording, notation, representation,

'depiction' (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates
exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a

performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the
first person and in the present tense) in which the enuncia-

146 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

tion has no other content (contains no other proposition)
than the act by which it is uttered - something like the /
declare of kings or the / sing of very ancient poets. Having
buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer

believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors,
that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that
consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize
this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on
the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a
pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a

field without origin - or which, at least, hap no other origin

than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into
question all origins.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing

a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres

of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal
copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound

ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth, of writing,
the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter
the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on

any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at
least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate'
is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only

explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely;

something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young

Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in

order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into
that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis

Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary,

vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting
from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes'.

The Death of the Author | 147

Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within
him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this

immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can
know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book,
and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation
that is lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text

becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose
a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to

close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very
well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of
discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history,
psych6, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has
been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic.
Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the
reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor
again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today under-
mined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing,
everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the
structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stock-
ing) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing
beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not
pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to
evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of
meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better

from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign .a 'secret',

an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity,
an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to
fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases
- reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no

'person', says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of
the writing, which is reading. Another - very precise -

148 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

example will help to make this clear: recent research
(J.-P. Vernant

1

) has demonstrated the constitutively ambi-

guous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from

words with double meanings that each character under-
stands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is
exactly the 'tragic'); there is, however, someone who
understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition,
hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front

of him - this someone being precisely the reader (or here,

the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing:
a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many
cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue,
parody, contestation, but there is tane place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not,
as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space
on which all the quotations that make up a writing are
inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination
cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the

written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to
condemn the new writing in the name of" a humanism
hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights.
Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader;
for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are
now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the
arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in
favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or
destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is
necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

1. [Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant (with Pierre Vidal-Naquet), Mythe et

tragedie eh Grice ancienne, Paris 1972. esp. pp. 19-40, 99-131.)

Musica Practica

There are two musics (at least so I have always thought):
the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two
musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history,
its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the
same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tre-

mendous if you play him (even badly) - such is Schumann.

The music one plays comes from an activity that is very

little auditory, being above all manuat (and thus in a way

much more sensual). It is the music which you or I can play,
alone or among friends, with no other audience than its
participants (that is, with all risk of theatre, all temptation
of hysteria removed); a muscular music in which the part
taken by the sense of hearing is one only of ratification,
as though the body were hearing - and not 'the soul';
a music which is-not played 'by heart': seated at the key-
board or the music stand, the body controls, conducts,
co-ordinates, having itself to transcribe what it reads,
making sound and meaning, the body as inscriber and not

just transmitter, simple receiver. This music has disappeared;

initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, it
lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the
democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady,
the drawing room, the nocturne) and then faded out al-

together (who plays the piano today?). To find practical

music in the West, one has now to look to another public,

another repertoire, another instrument (the young genera-
tion, vocal music, the guitar). Concurrently, passive, recep-

tive music, sound music, is become the music (that of concert,
festival, record, radio): playing has ceased to exist; musical

150 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneadingly physical,
but merely liquid, effusive, 'lubrificating', to take up a word
from Balzac. So too has the performer changed. The
amateur, a role defined much more by a style than by a

technical imperfection, is no longer anywhere to be found;

the professionals, pure specialists whose training remains
entirely esoteric for the public (who is there who is still

acquainted with the problems of musical education?),
never offer that style of the perfect amateur the great value
of which could still be recognized in a Lipati or a Panzera,
touching off in us not satisfaction but desire, the desire to
make that music. In short, there was first the actor of music,
then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally
the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even
by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the
very notion of doing.

The work of Beethoven seems to me bound up with this

historical problem, not as the straightforward expression
of a particular moment (the transition from amateur to
interpreter) but as the powerful germ of a disturbance of
civilization, Beethoven at once bringing together its elements

and sketching out its solution; an ambiguity which is that
of Beethoven's two historical roles: the mythical role
which he was made to play by the whole of the nineteenth

century and the modern role which our own century is
beginning to accord him (I refer here to Boucourechliev's
study

1

).

For the nineteenth century, leaving aside a few stupid

representations, such as the one given by Vincent dTndy
who just about makes of Beethoven a kind of reactionary
and anti-Semitic hypocrite, Beethoven was the first man of
music to be free. Now for the first time the fact of having

several successive manners was held to the glory of an artist;
he was acknowledged the right of metamorphosis, he could

1. [A. Boucourechliev, Beethoven, Paris 1969.]

Musica Practica | 151

be dissatisfied with himself or, more profoundly, with his

language, he could change his codes as he went through

life (this is what is expressed by Lenz's naive and enthusiastic
image of Beethoven's three different manners). From this

, moment that the work becomes the trace of a movement,

of a journey, it appeals to the idea of fate. The artist is in

search of his 'truth' and this quest forms an order in itself,
a message that can be read, in spite of the variations in its
content, over all the work or, at least, whose readability
feeds on a sort of totality of the artist: his career, his loves,
his ideas, his character, his words become traits of meaning;
a Beethovian biography is born (one ought to be able to
say a bio-mythology), the artist is brought forward as a
complete hero, endowed with a discourse (a rare occurrence
for a musician), a legend (a good ten or so anecdotes), an
iconography, a race (that of the Titans of Art: Michelangelo,
Balzac) and a fatal malady (the deafness of he who creates

for the pleasure of our ears). Into this system of meaning
that is the Romantic Beethoven are incorporated truly
structural features (features which are ambiguous, at once
musical and psychological): the paroxysmal development
of contrasts in intensity (the signifying opposition of the

piano and the forte, an opposition the historical importance

of which is perhaps not very clearly recognized, it charac-

terizing after all only a tiny portion of the music of the world
and corresponding to the invention of an instrument whose
name is indicative enough, the piano-forte), the shattering

of the melody, taken as the symbol of restlessness and the

seething agitation of creativeness, the emphatic redundancy
of moments of excitement and termination (a naive image

of fate dealing its blows), the experience of limits (the
abolition or the inversion of the traditional parts of musical
speech), the production of musical chimera (the voice rising
out of the symphony) - and all this, which could easily be
transformed metaphorically into pseudo-philosophical

152 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

values, nonetheless musically acceptable since always
deployed under the authority of the fundamental code of
the West, tonality.

Further, this romantic image (the meaning of which

finally is a certain discord) creates a problem of performance:
the amateur is unable to master Beethoven's music, not so
much by reason of the technical difficulties as by the very
breakdown of the code of the former musica practica.
According to this code, the fantasmatic (that is to say cor-
poral) image which guided the performer was that of a
song ('spun out' inwardly); with Beethoven, the mimetic
impulse (does not musical fantasy consist in giving oneself
a place, as subject, in the scenario of the performance?)
becomes orchestral, thus escaping from the fetishism of a
single element (voice or rhythm). The body strives to be
total, and so the idea of an intimist or familial activity is
destroyed: to want to play Beethoven is to see oneself as

the conductor of an orchestra (the dream of how many
children? the tautological dream of how many conductors,
a prey in their conducting to all the signs of the panic of
possession?). Beethoven's work forsakes the amateur and
seems, in an initial moment, to call on the new Romantic

deity, the interpreter. Yet here again we are disappointed:
who (what soloist, what pianist?) can play Beethoven well?
It is as though this music offers only the choice between a
'role' and its absence, the illusion of demiurgy and the prud-
ence of platitude, sublimated as 'renunciation'.

The truth is perhaps that Beethoven's music has in it

something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the
exact locality), and this brings us to the second Beethoven.
It is not possible that a musician be deaf by pure contingency
or poignant destiny (they are the same thing). Beethoven's
deafness designates the lack wherein resides all significa-
tion; it appeals to a music that is not abstract or inward,

but that is endowed, if one may put it like this, with a

Musica Practica | 153

tangible intelligibility, with the intelligible as tangible.
Such a category is truly revolutionary, unthinkable in the
terms of the old aesthetics; the work that complies with it
cannot be received on the basis of pure sensuality, which is
always cultural, nor on that of an intelligible order of
(rhetorical, thematic) development, and without it neither
the modern text nor contemporary music can be accepted.
As we know since Boucourechliev's analyses, this Beethoven
is exemplarily the Beethoven of the Diabelli Variations
and the operation by which we can grasp this Beethoven
(and the category he initiates) can no longer be either
performance or hearing, but reading. This is not to say that
one has to sit with a Beethoven score and get from it an
inner recital (which would still remain dependent on the
old animistic fantasy); it means that with respect to this

music one must put oneself in the position or, better, in the
activity of an operator, who knows how to displace, assemble,
combine, fit together; in a word (if it is not too worn out),
who knows how to structure (very different from con-
structing or reconstructing in the classic sense). Just as the
reading of the modern text (such at least as it may be
postulated) consists not in receiving, in knowing or in
feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its

writing with a fresh inscription, so too reading this Beet-

hoven is to operate his music, to draw it (it is willing to be
drawn) into an unknown praxis.

In this way may be rediscovered, modified according to

the movement of the historical dialectic, a certain musica

practica. What is the use of composing if it is to confine

the product within the precinct of the concert or the solitude
of listening to the radio ? To compose, at least by propensity,
is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write.
The modern location for music is not the concert hall, but

the stage on which the musicians pass, in what is often a
dazzling display, from one source of sound to another. It

154 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is we who are playing, though still it is true by proxy;
but one can imagine the concert - later on ? - as exclusively
a workshop, from which nothing spills over - no dream, no
imaginary, in short, no 'soul' and where all the musical
art is absorbed in a praxis with no remainder. Such is the
Utopia that a certain Beethoven, who is not played, teaches
us to formulate - which is why it is possible now to feel in
him a musician with a future.

From Work to Text

It is a fact^that over the last few years a certain change has
taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language
and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least
its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change
is clearly connected with the current development of
(amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology,
Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term 'connection' is used
here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a
determination, be it multiple and dialectical). What is new
and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily
from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but
rather from their encounter in relation to an object which
traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed
as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as

a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the
simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge.

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it
begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a
pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks
down - perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion - in
the interests of a new object and a new language neither

of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to

be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification

being precisely the point from which it is possible to diag-
nose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea
of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be

over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemo-

logical slide than of a real break. The break, as is frequently
stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with

156 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then
there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be
said that for the last hundred years we have been living in

repetition. What History, our History, allows us today is
merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as
Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames
of reference be included in the object studied, so the com-
bined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism
demands, in literature, the relativi2ation of the relations of
writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the tradi-
tional notion of the work, for long - and still - conceived
of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the require-
ment of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning
of former categories. That object is the Text. I know the
word is fashionable (I am myself often led to use it) and
therefore regarded by some with suspicion, but that is
exactly why I should like to remind myself of the principal
propositions at the intersection of which I see the Text as
standing. The word 'proposition' is to be understood
more in a grammatical than in a logical sense: the following
are not argumentations but enunciations, 'touches',
approaches that consent to remain metaphorical. Here then
are these propositions; they concern method, genres,
signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.

1. The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can

be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out
materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency
must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text
avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude
honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain
literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their
chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient
work, while many products of contemporary literature

are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a

fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of

From Work to Text \ 157

books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological
field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing
term for term) Lacan's distinction between 'reality' and

'the real': the one is displayed, the other demonstrated;

likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues,
in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration,
speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules);
the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language,
only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is
Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the
Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that
is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is

experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that
the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf);
its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in
particular, it can cut across the work, several works).

2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good)

Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a
simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on
the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of
the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like

Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist,
philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the
literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille
who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single
text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is
furthermore one of its 'social' functions), this is because it
always involves a certain experience of Unfits (to take up an
expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet used already to
talk - but in a very restricted sense - of limit-works (such

as Chateaubriand's Vie de Ranci, which does indeed come
through to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that which goes
to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, reada-
bility, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some

'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly

158 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion - con-
stitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by

mass communications - denned by its limits, the energy
with which it excludes, its censorshipl). Taking the word
literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.

3. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction

to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two
modes of signification which can be attributed to this
signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is
then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is
considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought

out, and the work then falls under the scope of a herme-
neutics, of an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic,
thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as
a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an
institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The
Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite deferment of the
signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the

signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of

meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition
to this, as its deferred action. Similarly, the infinity of the

signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the un-

nameable signified) but to that of a. playing; the generation

of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual
calender) in the field of the text (better, of which the text is
the field) is realized not according to an organic progress
of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investi-
gation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of dis-
connections, overlappings, variations. The logic regulating

the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what the work
means') but metonymic; the activity of associations,
contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of

symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die); the work -
in the best of cases - is moderately symbolic (its symbolic
runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic:

From Work to Text I 159

a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally
symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text restored to lan-
guage; like languagej it is structured but off-centred, without
closure (note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of
the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at structuralism, that
the epistemological privilege currently accorded to language

stems precisely from the discovery there of a paradoxical
idea of structure: a system with neither close nor centre).

4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it

has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very
plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an accept-
able) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but

a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an inter-

pretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemi-
nation. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the
ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the
stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologic-
ally, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the
Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone

slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty
subject strolls - it is what happened to the author of these
lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text - on
the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below {oued is
there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity);
what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a
disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and
perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender
explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices
from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of
inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-
identifiable: they come from codes which are known but
their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference

repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only
in its difference (which does not mean its individuality),
its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any

160 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

inductive-deductive science of texts - no 'grammar' of the
text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, refer-
ences, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?),
antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through
and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in
which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of
another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the
text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work,
is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go

to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet

already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.
The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy
(we know that there are opposing examples of these); for

such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work,
therefore, the text could well take as its motto the words

of the man possessed by demons {Mark 5:9): 'My name is
Legion: for we are many.' The plural of demoniacal texture
which opposes text to work can bring with it fundamental
changes in reading, and precisely in areas where mono-
logism appears to be the Law: certain of the 'texts' of Holy
Scripture traditionally recuperated by theological monism
(historical or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to
a diffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a material-

ist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so
far resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more
by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions'
allow it).

5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are

postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by
race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst
themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author.
The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work:

literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript
and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts

the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit

From Work to Text | 161

d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact of recent date since it was

only really legalized at the time of the Frenqh Revolution).
As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father.
Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that
of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism
which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' (a word
which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and
rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network;
if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory
systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological
conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is
due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the
Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts
- Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the
guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text

paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author
may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then
does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the
novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no

longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription
is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life

is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contribut-
ing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the
life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust,
of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The
word 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense,
at the same time as the sincerity of the enunciation -
veritable 'cross' borne by literary morality - becomes a
false problem: the / which writes the text, it too, is never
more than a paper-/.

6. The work is normally the object of a consumption;

no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-called
consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it
is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally an

appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of reading

162 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

itself which can differentiate between books: structurally,
there is no difference between 'cultured' reading and casual
reading in train*. The Text (if only by its frequent 'un-

readability') decants the work (the work permitting) from
its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, produc-
tion, practice. This means that the Text requires that one
try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance

between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the
projection of the reader into the work but by joining them
in a single signifying practice. The distance separating
reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest
social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures),
reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric,
the great literary code of those times, taught one to write
(even if what was then normally produced were speeches,
not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed
the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides
itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write
(consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable
again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils

to 'express themselves', which is a little like replacing a
form of repression by a misconception)! In fact, reading,

in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text.

'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the

text itself plays (like a door., like a machine with 'play')
and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one
plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it,
but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive,
inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such
a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of
the term. The history of music (as a practice, not as an
'art') does indeed parallel that of the Text fairly closely:
there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous
(at least within the confines of a certain class) and 'playing'
and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity;

From Work to Text \ 163

then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the

performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public
(though still itself able to play a little - the whole history of
the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive)
amateur, who listens to music without being able to play

(the gramophone record takes the place of the piano).
We know that today post-serial music has radically altered
the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some
sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than
giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this

new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration.
Which is an important change, for who executes the work?
(Mallarme" posed the question, wanting the audience to
produce the book). Nowadays only the critic executes the
work (accepting the play on words). The reduction of
reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the
·boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern

('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be
bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out,
set it going.

7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach

to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know whether there
has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philoso-
phies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists a pleasure
of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading
and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even - why not?

- Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen

and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part
(unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of

consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know
that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to
write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough,

suffices to cut me off from the production of these works,
in the very moment their remoteness establishes my moder-
nity (is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be

164 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

started over again?). As for the Text, it is bound to jotris
sance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the
signifies, the Text participates in its own way in a social
Utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt
for barbarism), the Text achieves, if not the transparence of
social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text
is that space where no language has a hold over any other,
where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the
term).

These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the

articulations of a Theory of the Text and this is not simply
the result of the failings of the person here presenting them

(who in many respects has anyway done no more than pick
up what is being developed round about him). It stems from
the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a
metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language,
or at least (since it may be necessary provisionally to resort
to meta-language) its calling into doubt, is part of the theory
itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing
other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is
that social space which leaves no language safe, outside,
nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge,
master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text
can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Change the Object Itself

Mythology today

Some fifteen years ago now a certain idea of contemporary
myth was put forward.

1

That idea, which at its outset was

really very little developed, nevertheless contained a number
of theoretical articulations:

1. Myth, close to what Durkheimian sociology calls a

'collective representation', can be read in the anonymous
utterances of the press, advertising, mass consumer goods;
it is something socially determined, a 'reflection'.

2. This reflection, however, in accordance with a famous

image used by Marx, is inverted: myth consists in overturning

culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the
ideological, the historical into the 'natural'. What is nothing
but a product of class division and its moral, cultural and
aesthetic consequences is presented (stated) as being a
'matter of course'; under the effect of mythical inversion,
the quite contingent foundations of the utterance become
Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, General Opinion,
in short the doxa (which is the secular figure of the Origin).

3. Contemporary myth is discontinuous. It is no longer

expressed in long fixed narratives but only in 'discourse';
at most, it is a phraseology, a corpus of phrases (of stereo-
types); myth disappears, but leaving - so much the more
insidious - the mythical.

4. As a type of speech (which was after all the meaning of

muthos), contemporary myth falls within the province of a
semiology; the latter enables the mythical inversion to be

1. R. Barthes, Mythologies, Paris 1957 [translated as Mythologies,

London and New York 1972]; the texts which make up the volume
were written between 1954 and 1956.

166 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

'righted' by breaking up the message into two semantic
systems: a connoted system whose signified is ideological
(and thus 'straight', 'non-inverted' or, to be clearer - and
accepting a moral language - cynical) and a denoted system

(the apparent literalness of image, object, sentence) whose
function is to naturalize the class proposition by lending it
the guarantee of the most 'innocent' of natures, that of

language - millennial, maternal, scholastic, etc.

Thus appeared, thus at least appeared to me, myth today.

Has anything changed ? Not French society, at any rate not

at this level, mythical history having a time-scale different
to that of political history. Nor the myths, nor even the
analysis: in our society the mythical still abounds, just as
anonymous and slippery, fragmented and garrulous,
available both for ideological criticism and semiological
dismantling. No, what has changed these fifteen years is the
science of reading under whose gaze myth, like an animal
long since captured and held in observation, does never-
theless become a different object.

A science of the signifier (even if still in process of develop-

ment), that is, has taken its place in the work of the period
and its purpose is less the analysis of the sign than its disloca-
tion. With regard to myth, and though this is a work that is
yet to be carried through, the new semiology - or the new
mythology - can no longer, will no longer be able to,
separate so easily the signifier from the signified, the ideo-
logical from the phraseological. It is not that the distinction

is false or without its use but rather that it too has become
in some sort mythical: any student can and does denounce
the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of such and such
a form (of life, of thought, of consumption). In other
words, a mythological doxa has been created: denunciation,
demystification (or demythification), has itself become
discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration; in the

face of which, the science of the signifier can only shift its

Change the Object Itself | 167

place and stop (provisionally) further on - no longer

at the (analytic) dissociation of the sign but at its very
hesitation: it is no longer the myths which need to be
unmasked (the doxa now takes care of that), it is the sign
itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal
the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative,
but to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to
change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic
itself. In this, (mythological) semiology finds itself a little
in the same situation as psychoanalysis before it: the latter
began necessarily by drawing up lists of symbols (a tooth
falling out is the subject castrated and so on) but its concern

today, much more than with such a lexicon (which, without
being false, is no longer of interest to it - though of enormous

interest to those who dabble in the psychoanalytic vulgate),
is with the interrogation of the very dialectic of the signifier;
similarly, semiology, which started by establishing a mytho-
logical lexicon, is today confronted with a task that is of
a more syntactical order (what are the articulations, the
displacements, which make up the mythological tissue of a
mass consumer society?). In an initial moment, the aim was
the destruction of the (ideological) signified; in a second,
it is that of the destruction of the sign: 'mythoclasm' is

succeeded by a 'semioclasm' which is much more far-

reaching and pitched at a different level. The historical field
of action is thus widened: no longer the (narrow) sphere
of French society but far beyond that, historically and geo-
graphically, the whole of Western civilization (Graeco-
Judaeo-Islamo-Christian), unified under the one theology
(Essence, monotheism) and identified by the regime of
meaning it practices - from Plato to France-Dimanche.

The science of the signifier brings contemporary mytho-

logy a second rectification (or a second enlargement).
Taken aslant by language, the world is written through

and through; signs, endlessly deferring their foundations,

168 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

transforming their signifieds into new signifiers, infinitely

citing one another, nowhere come to a halt: writing is
generalized. If the alienation of society still demands the
demystification of languages (and notably the language of

myths), the direction this combat must take is not, is no
longer, that of critical decipherment but that of evaluation.

Faced with all the writings of the world, with the skein of
different forms of discourse (didactic, aesthetic, informative,
political, etc.), it is a question of estimating levels of reifica-
tion, degrees of phraseological density. Will we be able to
render precise a notion which seems to me essential, that of
the compactness of a language? Languages are more or
less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most
mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity (there is a

real force of meaning, a war of meanings): woven with habits
and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses
and key-words, each constitutes an idiolect, or more

exactly a sociolect (a notion to which twenty years ago I

gave the name of writing

1

). Thus, rather than myths, it is

sociolects which must today be distinguished and described;

which means that mythologies would be succeeded by an
idiolectology - more formal and thereby, I believe, more
penetrating - whose operational concepts would no longer

be sign, signifier, signified and connotation but citation,

reference, stereotype. In this way, thick languages (such as
the discourse of myth) could be taken up in the line of a

trans-writing of which the text (that we still refer to as
'literary'), the antidote of myth, would be the extreme pole

or rather the region - airy, light, spaced, open, uncentred,
noble and free - where writing spreads itself against the
idiolect, at its limit and fighting it. Myth, indeed, must be

included in a general theory of language, of writing, of
the signifier, and this theory, resting on the formulations of

1. [R. Barthes, Le Degri ziro de Vicritwre, Paris 1953; translated as

Writing Degree Zero, London 1967 and New York 1968.]

Change the Object Itself | 169

ethnology, psychoanalysis, semiology and ideological
analysis must widen its object so as to take in the sentence
or, better, to take in sentences (the plural of the sentence).
What I mean by this is that the mythical is present every-
where sentences are turned, stories told (in all senses of
the two expressions): from inner speech to conversation,
from newspaper article to political sermon, from novel

(if there still are any) to advertising image - all utterances

which could be brought together under the Lacanian concept

of the imaginary.

This is no more than a programme, perhaps only an

'inclination'. I believe, however, that even if the new semio-
logy - concerned in particular recently with the literary
text - has not applied itself further to the myths of our time
since the last of the texts in Mythologies where I sketched
out an initial semiotic approach to social language, it is at
least conscious of its task: no longer simply to upend (or
right) the mythical message, to stand it back on its feet,
with denotation at the bottom and connotation at the top,
nature on the surface and class interest deep down, but
rather to change the object itself, to produce a new object,
point of departure for a new science, to move - with all
due allowance for difference in importance (obviously)
and according to Althusser's scheme - from Feuerbach to

Marx, from the young Marx to the mature Marx.

Lesson in Writing

The puppets of Bunraku theatre are from three to five feet
in height. They are little men or women with movable limbs,
hands and mouth. Each puppet is worked by three men who
remain in view, surrounding, supporting and accompanying
it. The principal operator controls the upper part of the
doll and its right arm; his face is visible, smooth, clear,
impassive, cold like 'a white onion freshly washed'

1

. The

two assistants are clad in black, their faces hidden by a

piece of cloth; the first, gloved but with thumb exposed,

holds a large scissors mechanism with which he operates

the doll's left arm and hand; the second, crawling along on
his knees, supports the body, makes it walk. These men

move about along a low trench which leaves them un-
concealed. The scenery is behind them, as at the theatre.
To the side, there is a dais for the musicians and the narrators
whose role is to express the text (a little as one presses out
the juice of a fruit); this text is half-spoken, half-sung and,
punctuated with great plectrum strokes by the samisen
players, is at once measured and thrown off, given with
violence and artifice. Sweating and motionless, the mouth-
pieces sit behind little lecterns on which rests the writing
they must vocalize, its vertical characters glimpsed from
afar when they turn a page of their libretto; a triangle of
stiff canvas fixed to their shoulders like a kite frames their

faces, faces in throes to all the torments of the voice.

1. Haiku by Bashft:

A white onion
freshly washed.

Feeling of cold.

Lesson in Writing | 171

Antithesis is a privileged figure of our culture, doubtless

because it corresponds well to our vision of good and evil

and to that inveterate emblematism which has us turn every
word into a watchword against its opposite (creativity
versus intelligence, spontaneity versus reflection, truth
versus appearance, etc.). Bunraku cares nothing for these
contraries, for this antonymy that regulates our whole
morality of discourse; concerned with a fundamental
antilogy, that of the animatejinanimate, it disturbs it,
dissipates it to the advantage of neither of the terms. With
us, the marionette (Punch for example) is there to hold up
to the actor the mirror of his opposite, animating the in-
animate but so as the better to reveal its degradation,
the abjectness of its inertia; a caricature of 'life', it affirms

precisely thereby life's moral limits and serves to confine

beauty, truth and emotion in the living body of the actor -
he who nevertheless makes of that body a lie. Bunraku on
the other hand does not ape the actor, it rids us of him.
How? Exactly by a certain reflection on the human body
here conducted by inanimate matter with infinitely more
rigour and excitement than by the animate body (endowed

with a 'soul'). The (naturalistic) Western actor is never
beautiful, his body is intended as essentially physiological

and not plastic; it is a collection of organs, a musculature of
passions, whose every resource (voice, facial expressions,

gestures) is subject to a kind of gymnastic drill. By a reversal
that is specifically bourgeois, the actor's body, although
built on a division of the essences of passion, then borrows
from physiology the alibi of an organic unity, the unity of
'life'. In this way it is the actor who is a marionette and this
despite the smooth flow of his acting, the model for which
is not the caress but only the visceral 'truth'.

Thus, beneath a 'living' and 'natural' outward appearance,

the Western actor maintains the division of his body and,

consequently, the food of our fantasies. Voice, look,

172 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

figure are in turn eroticized, like so many pieces of the body,
like so many fetishes. The Western marionette too (as is
evident in Punch) is a by-product of fantasy: as reduction,

a grating reflection with an adherence to the human order

ceaselessly recalled by a caricatural simulation, it lives not

as a total body, totally vibrating, but as a rigid portion of
the actor of whom it is an emanation; as automaton, it is
again a fragment of movement, a start, a jolt, essence of

discontinuity, fractured projection of bodily gestures; as

doll finally, a reminiscence of the bit of material, of the

genital swathe, it is indeed the phallic 'little thing' (das

Kleine), fallen from the body to become a fetish.

It may well be that the Japanese marionette retains some-

thing of this fantasy origin; the art of Bunraku, however,

endows it. with a different meaning. Bunraku does not aim
at 'animating' an inanimate object in such a way as to bring

to life a piece of the body, a scrap of man, while preserving

its vocation as 'part'; it is not the simulation of the body
that it is after, but, as it were, its concrete abstraction.
Everything which we attribute to the total body and which
is refused to our actors under pretence of a 'living' organic
unity is taken up and stated without any falsehood by the
Bunraku puppet: fragility, discretion, sumptuousness,

extraordinary nuance, abandonment of all triviality,
melodic phrasing of gestures, in short those very qualities
that the dreams of the old theology granted to the glorified
body, namely impassiveness, clarity, agility, subtlety. This
is what Bunraku accomplishes, this is how it converts the
body-fetish into a lovable body, this is how it refuses the
antinomy of animate I inanimate and dismisses the concept
hiding behind all animation of matter, that, quite simply,
of 'the soul'.

Another opposition destroyed is that of inner/outer.

Consider the Western theatre of the last few centuries. Its
function is essentially to reveal what is reputed to be secret

Lesson in Writing | 173

('feelings', 'situations', 'conflicts') while concealing the very
artifice of the process of revelation (machinery, painting,
make-up, sources of light). The Italian stage is the space of
this deceit, everything there taking place in a room sur-
reptitiously thrown open, surprised, spied on and relished
by a hidden spectator; a theological space, that of the moral

failing: on the one side, under a light of which he pretends
to be unaware, the actor, that is to say, gesture and speech;
on the other, in the darkness, the public, that is to say,
consciousness and conscience. Bunraku does not directly
subvert the relation between stage and auditorium (any
more than did Brecht), though Japanese theatres are in-
finitely less confined, less suffocating, less ponderous
than ours. What it changes, more profoundly, is the driving
link between character and actor which is always conceived
by us as the expressive channel of an interiority. It has to be
remembered that the agents of the spectacle in Bunraku
are both visible and impassive. The men in black busy
themselves around the doll but without any affectation
of skill or discretion, without any promotional demagogy:

silent, rapid, elegant, their actions are eminently transitive,
operational, coloured by that mixture of strength and subtlety
that characterizes Japanese gestuality and that can be seen
as the aesthetic envelope of efficacy. As for the master, it
has already been said that his head is left uncovered, smooth
and bare, without make-up, this conferring on him a civic
(and not a theatrical) appearance; his face is offered to the
spectator for reading, but what is so carefully and so
preciously given to be read is that there is nothing to be
read - here we find that exemption from meaning which does
indeed illumine so many works of the East and which we
are scarcely able to comprehend, since for us to attack
meaning is to conceal or oppose it, never to absent it. With

Bunraku, the sources of the theatre are exposed in their void.

What is expelled from the stage is hysteria, that is theatre

174 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

itself, and what is put in its place is the action necessary for
the production of the spectacle - work is substituted for

interiority.

It is thus futile to ask oneself as do certain Europeans

(Claudel among them) whether or not the spectator can
forget the presence of the manipulators. Bunraku practises

neither the dissimulation nor the emphatic disclosure of its
various mechanisms, hence ridding the animation of the
actor of any suggesiton of the sacred and abolishing the

metaphysical bond that the West cannot stop itself from

setting up between soul and body, cause and effect, motor
and machine, agent and actor, Fate and man, God and

creature:

1

if the manipulator is not hidden, then why and

how turn him into a God? In Bunraku, the puppet is held
by no thread; without a thread, there is no longer any
metaphor, any Fate; puppet no longer aping creature,
man is no longer a puppet in the hands of the deity, the
inner no longer controls the outer.

Finally, a still more radical undertaking, Bunraku

attacks the writing of the spectacle. With us, such writing
involves an illusion of totality. 'We find nothing more
difficult,' says Brecht, 'than to break with the habit of
considering an artistic production as a whole.'

2

No doubt

it is for this reason that periodically, from the Greek

enormia to the bourgeois opera, we conceive of lyric art

as the simultaneity of several modes of expression (acted,
sung, mimed) with a sole, indivisible, origin. This origin is
the body and the required totality has for its model organic

1. 'Bunraku . . . is, quite simply, metaphysical theatre . . . The

puppet is man. The manipulator is God. The assistants are the mes-
sengers of Fate.' J.-L. Barrault, 'Le Bunraku', in Cahiers Renaud-

Barrault 31, November 1960, p. 53.

2. Bertolt Brecht, 'Effets d'iloignement dans Tart du comddien

chinois', Ecrits sur le thiatre I, Paris 1963, p. 121 ['Alienation effects
in Chinese acting', Brecht on Theatre, London 1973. p. 91 -withsome*
what different wording].

Lesson in Writing | 175

unity. Western spectacle is anthropomorphous :* gesture and
speech (not to mention song) form but a single tissue, con-
glomerate and lubrificated like a unique muscle that sets

expression going without ever dividing it: the unity of
movement and voice produces the one who acts; in other

words, it is in this unity that is constituted the person of
the personage, that is, the actor. In Bunraku, however, no
one is on stage, or, more precisely, no person has taken up
position there. The (personal) corporal illusion disappears,
not because the actors are made of wood and cloth (we saw

that Bunraku designates on the contrary a certain lovableness
of the human body) but because the codes of expression are
detached from one another, pulled free from the sticky
organicism in which they are held by Western theatre.

In fact then, Bunraku practises three separate writings

which are given for reading simultaneously in three areas
of the spectacle: the marionette, the manipulator, the voci-
ferator; the effected gesture, the effective gesture, the vocal

gesture. The voice is what is really at stake in modernity,
the voice as specific substance of language everywhere
triumphantly pushed forward. Modern society (as has
been repeated often enough) believes itself to be ushering

in a civilization of the image, but what it actually establishes
overall, and particularly in its leisure activities which are
massively spoken, is a civilization of speech. In complete

contrast, Bunraku has a limited conception of the voice;
not suppressing it, it assigns it a clearly defined function that
is essentially trivial. The narrator's voice gathers together
extravagant declamation, tremulous quiver, shrill feminine
tones, broken intonations, tears, paroxysms of anger and
lamentation, supplication and astonishment, indecent
pathos, the whole concoction of emotion openly prepared
at the level of this visceral, inner body of which the larynx

1. Aristotle: 'The action . . . being one and whole like a living

being' Poetics 1459a.

176 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is the mediating muscle. Even then, such excess is only
presented in terms of the very code of the excessive: the
voice moves only through a few discontinuous signs of

fury; expelled from a body that remains motionless, moun-
ted in the triangle of the costume, linked to the book which
guides it from the lectern, studded sharply by the slightly
off-phased (and so non-pertinent) strokes of the samisen

player, the vocal substance stays written, discontinued,
obedient to an irony (if one accepts the word free from any
sense of a caustic humour). Thus what the voice exteriorizes
finally is not what it carries in it ('feelings') but itself, its
own prostitution; while pretending to deliver over contents
(anecdotes, passions), the signifier artfully does nothing
but turn itself inside out, like a glove.

Hence the voice, without being eliminated (which would

be a way of censuring it, that is, of indicating its importance),
is set aside (theatrically, the narrators occupy a lateral

dais). Bunraku gives the voice a counterbalance, or better

a countermarch, that of gesture. Gesture here is twofold:
emotive gesture with the marionette (people cry at the
suicide of the doll-lover); transitive action with the mani-

pulators. In our theatrical art the actor pretends to engage
in action but his actions are never anything but gestures:
on stage, nothing but theatre, and yet a theatre that is
ashamed. Bunraku (this is its definition) separates the act
from the gesture: it exhibits the gesture, it allows the act to
be seen; it exposes at once the art and the work, keeping
for each its own particular writing. The voice (and there is
then no risk in letting it run the gamut of its excesses) is

folded into an immense volume of silence in which other
traits, other writings, are inscribed with so much finesse.
It is here that an extraordinary effect occurs: far from the
voice and almost without mimicry, these silent writings -
the one transitive, the other gestural - produce an exaltation
as special, perhaps, as the intellectual hyperaesthesia

Lesson in Writing | 177

attributed to certain drugs. Speech being not purified
(Bunraku knows no ascetic ambition) but, as it were,

massed on the side, the tackily clinging substances of Western
theatre are dissolved: emotion no longer submerges every-

thing in its flood but becomes matter for reading; the stereo-
types disappear without however the spectacle falling into
originality, the 'stroke of genius'. All of which has an
evident kinship with the distancing effect recommended
by Brecht who was, as perhaps needs recalling, the first to
understand and state the critical importance of oriental
theatre. This distance, reputed by us to be impossible,
useless or derisory and speedily abandoned, despite its

being placed by Brecht very precisely at the centre of revolu-

tionary dramatic art (the latter doubtless explains the former),
is what Bunraku shows - shows how it can function: by
the discontinuity of codes, by the caesura imposed in the
different traits of the representation, so that the copy

elaborated on the stage is not destroyed but shattered,

scored, freed from the metonymical contagion of voice
and gesture, soul and body, which entangles our actors.

A total spectacle, but divided, Bunraku evidently excludes

improvization, doubtless aware that the return to spon-
taneity is the return to all those stereotypes which go to
make up our 'inner depths'. Here we have, as Brecht saw
in connection with the oriental actor whose lesson he wished
to receive and propagate on this point too, the reign of

the quotation,

1

the pinch of writing, the fragment of code,

none of the promoters of the action being able to take

1. 'He limits himself from the start to simply quoting the character

played. But with what art he does this! He only needs a minimum of
illusion. What he has to show is worth seeing even for a man in his
right mind.' Brecht, ibid., p. 121 [trans, p. 94]; and elsewhere: 'Once
the idea of total transformation is given up, the actor speaks his part
not as if he were improvising it himself but like a quotation.' 'Nouvelle
technique d'interpretation', ibid., p. 150 ['New techniques of acting',

trans, p. 138].

178 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

responsibility in his own person for what he is never alone

in writing. As in the modern text, the tressing of codes,
references, discontinuous observations, anthological ges-
tures, multiplies the written line, and this not by virtue of
some metaphysical appeal but by the play of a combinatory
set which opens in the entire space of the theatre: what
is started by the one is continued by the other, unendingly.

The Grain of the Voice

Language, according to Benveniste, is the only semiotic
system capable of interpreting another semiotic system
(though undoubtedly there exist limit works in the course
of which a system feigns self-interpretation - The Art of the
Fugue). How, then, does language manage when it has to
interpret music? Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at
the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often
the same thing, of conversations 'on' music), it can readily
be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever trans-
lated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective.
Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an
adjective. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this,
this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an
art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there

is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music,
however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile
and trivial form, that of the epithet. Naturally, this epithet,
to which we are constantly led by weakness or fascination
(little parlour game: talk about a piece of music without
using a single adjective), has an economic function: the
predicate is always the bulwark with which the subject's
imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it.
The man who provides himself or is provided with an
adjective is now hint, now pleased, but always constituted.
There is an imaginary in music whose function is to re-
assure, to constitute the subject hearing it (would it be that
music is dangerous - the old Platonic idea? that music is
an access to puissance, to loss, as numerous ethnographic

and popular examples would tend to show?) and this

180 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

imaginary immediately comes to language via the adjective.
A historical dossier ought to be assembled here, for adjec-
tival criticism (or predicative interpretation) has taken on
over the centuries certain institutional aspects. The musical
adjective becomes legal whenever an ethos of music is
postulated, each time, that is, that music is attributed a
regular - natural or magical - mode of signification. Thus

with the ancient Greeks, for whom it was the musical

language (and not the contingent work) in its denotative

structure which was immediately adjectival, each mode
being linked to a coded expression (rude, austere, proud,

virile, solemn, majestic, warlike, educative, noble, sumptu-

ous, doleful, modest, dissolute, voluptuous); thus with the
Romantics, from Schumann to Debussy, who substitute

for, or add to, the simple indication of tempo {allegro,

presto, andante) poetic, emotive predicates which are

increasingly refined and which are given in the national
language so as to diminish the mark of the code and
develop the 'free* character of the predication (sehr krSftig,

sehr prdcis, spirituel et discret, etc.).

Are we condemned to the adjective ? Are we reduced to the

dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable? To ascer-
tain whether there are (verbal) means for talking about
music without adjectives, it would be necessary to look at
more or less the whole of music criticism, something which
I believe has never been done and which, nevertheless, I

have neither the intention nor the means of doing here.
This much, however, can be said: it is not by struggling
against the adjective (diverting the adjective you find on

the tip of the tongue towards some substantive or verbal

periphrasis) that one stands a chance of exorcising music
commentary and liberating it from the fatality of predica-
tion; rather than trying to change directly the language on

music, it would be better to change the musical object
itself, as it presents itself to discourse, better to alter its

The Grain of the Voice | 181

level of perception or intellection, to displace the fringe of
contact between music and language.

It is this displacement that I want to outline, not with

regard to the whole of music but simply to a part of vocal

music {lied or milodie): the very precise space (genre) of
the encounter between a language and a voice. I shall straight-

away give a name to this signifier at the level of which,
I believe, the temptation of ethos can be liquidated (and
thus the adjective banished): the grain, the grain of the voice
when the latter is in a dual posture, a dual production -
of language and of music.

What I shall attempt to say of the 'grain' will, of course,

be only the apparently abstract side, the impossible account
of an individual thrill that I constantly experience in listening
to singing. In order to disengage this 'grain' from the ack-
nowledged values of vocal music, I shall use a twofold
opposition: theoretical, between the pheno-text and the
geno-text (borrowing from Julia Kristeva), and paradigma-

tic, between two singers, one of whom I like very much
(although he is no longer heard), the other very little
(although one hears no one but him), Panzera and Fischer-
Dieskau (here merely ciphers: I am not deifying the first

nor attacking the second).

Listen to a Russian bass (a church bass - opera is a genre

in which the voice has gone over in its entirety to dramatic
expressivity, a voice with a grain which little signifies):
something is there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only

that), beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their

form (the litany), the melisma, and even the style of execu-
tion: something which is directly the cantor's body, brought
to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down
in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages,
and from deep down in the Slavonic language, as though a
single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the

182 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

music he sings. The voice is not personal: it expresses
nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original (all Rus-

sian cantors have roughly the same voice), and at the same
time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil
identity, no 'personality', but which is nevertheless a
separate body. Above all, this voice bears along directly

the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive: here,

thrown in front of us like a packet, is the Father, his phallic
stature. The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body
speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost
certainly signifiance.

Thus we can see in song (pending the extension of this

distinction to the whole of music) the two texts described
by Julia Kristeva. The pheno-song (if the transposition be
allowed) covers all the phenomena, all the features which

belong to the structure of the language being sung, the rules
of the genre, the coded form of the melisma, the composer's
idiolect, the style of the interpretation: in short, everything
in the performance which is in the service of communica-

tion, representation, expression, everything which it is
customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of cultural

values (the matter of acknowledged tastes, of fashions, of
critical commentaries), which takes its bearing directly
on the ideological alibis of a period ('subjectivity', 'expres-
sivity', 'dramaticism', 'personality' of the artist). The

geno-song is the volume of the singing and speaking voice,

the space where significations germinate 'from within
language and in its very materiality'; it forms a signifying
play having nothing to do with communication, representa-
tion (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth)

of production where the melody really works at the
language - not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its
sounds-signifiers, of its letters - where melody explores how
the language works and identifies with that work. It is, in a

very simple word but which must be taken seriously, the

The Grain oj the Voice | 183

diction of the language.

From the point of view of the pheno-song, Fischer-

Dieskau is assuredly an artist beyond reproach: everything

in the (semantic and lyrical) structure is respected and yet
nothing seduces, nothing sways us to jouissance. His art
is inordinately expressive (the diction is dramatic, the pauses,

the checkings and releasings of breath, occur like shudders
of passion) and hence never exceeds culture: here it is the
soul which accompanies the song, not the body. What is

difficult is for the body to accompany the musical diction
not with a movement of emotion but with a 'gesture-

support';

1

all the more so since the whole of musical peda-

gogy teaches not the culture of the 'grain' of the voice but

the emotive modes of its delivery - the myth of respiration.

How many singing teachers have we not heard prophesying

that the art of vocal music rested entirely on the mastery,
the correct discipline of breathing! The breath is the

pneuma, the soul swelling or breaking, and any exclusive

art of breathing is likely to be a secretly mystical art (a
mysticism levelled down to the measure of the long-playing
record). The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells

but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the
phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that

signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance.
With FD, I seem only to hear the lungs, never the tongue,

the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose.

All of Panzera's art, on the contrary, was in the letters, not
in the bellows (simple technical feature: you never heard
him breathe but only divide up the phrase). An extreme
rigour of thought regulated the prosody of the enunciation
and the phonic economy of the French language; prejudices

1. 'Which is why the best way to read me is to accompany the

reading with certain appropriate bodily movements. Against non-
spoken writing, against non-written speech. For the gesture-support.*

Philippe Sollers, Lois, Paris 1972, p. 108.

184 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

(generally stemming from oratorical and ecclesiastical
diction) were overthrown. With regard to the consonants,
too readily thought to constitute the very armature of our
language (which is not, however, a Semitic one) and always
prescribed as needing to be 'articulated', detached, empha-
sized in order to fulfil the clarity of meaning, Panzera recom-
mended that in many cases they be patinated, given the wear
of a language that had been living, functioning, and working
for ages past, that they be made simply the springboard
for the admirable vowels. There lay the 'truth' of language

- not its functionality (clarity, expressivity, communication)
- and the range of vowels received all the signifiance (which
is meaning in its potential voluptuousness): the opposition

of 6 and e (so necessary in conjugation), the purity - almost
electronic, so much was its sound tightened, raised, exposed,
held - of the most French of vowels, the u (a vowel not

derived by French from Latin). Similarly, Panzera carried
his r's beyond the norms of the singer - without denying
those norms. His r was of course rolled, as in every classic
art of singing, but the roll had nothing peasant-like or
Canadian about it; it was an artificial roll, the paradoxical

state of a letter-sound at once totally abstract (by its
metallic brevity of vibration) and totally material (by its

manifest deep-rootedness in the action of the throat).
This phonetics - am I alone in perceiving it? am I hearing
voices within the voice? but isn't it the truth of the voice
to be hallucinated? isn't the entire space of the voice an
infinite one ? which was doubtless the meaning of Saussure's
work on anagrams - does not exhaust signifiance (which is
inexhaustible) but it does at least hold in check the attempts
at expressive reduction operated by a whole culture against
the poem and its melody.

It would not be too difficult to date that culture, to define

it historically. FD now reigns more or less unchallenged
over the recording of vocal music; he has recorded every-

The Grain of the Voice \ 185

thing. If you like Schubert but not FD, then Schubert is

today forbidden you - an example of that positive censorship
(censorship by repletion) which characterizes mass culture

though it is never criticized. His art - expressive, dramatic,

sentimentally clear, borne by a voice lacking in any 'grain',

in signifying weight, fits well with the demands of an
average culture. Such a culture, defined by the growth of

the number of listeners and the disappearance of practi-

tioners (no more amateurs), wants art, wants music,
provided they be clear, that they 'translate' an emotion

and represent a signified (the 'meaning' of a poem);, an
art that innoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known,
coded emotion) and reconciles the subject to what in
music can be said: what is said about it, predicatively, by
Institution, Criticism, Opinion. Panzera does not belong

to this culture (he could not have done, having sung before

the coming of the microgroove record; moreover I doubt

whether, were he singing today, his art would be recognized
or even simply perceived); his reign, very great between the

wars, was that of an exclusively bourgeois art (an art, that
is, in no way petit-bourgeois) nearing the end of its inner
development and, by a familiar distortion, separated from
History. It is perhaps, precisely and less paradoxically
than it seems, because this art was already marginal,
mandarin, that it was able to bear traces of signifiance, to
escape the tyranny of meaning.

The 'grain' of the voice is not - or is not merely - its

timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined,
indeed, than by the very friction between the music and
something else, which something else is the particular

language (and nowise the message). The song must speak,
must write - for what is produced at the level of the geno-
song is finally writing. This sung writing of language is,

as I see it, what the French me'lodie sometimes tried to

HHH

186 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

accomplish. I am well aware that the German lied was
intimately bound up with the German language via the
Romantic poem, that the poetical culture of Schumann

was immense and that this same Schumann used to say of
Schubert that had he lived into old age he would have set

-the whole of German literature to music, but I think never-

theless that the historical meaning of the lied must, be sought
in the music (if only because of its popular origins). By

contrast, the historical meaning of the milodie is a certain
culture of the French language. As we know, the Romantic
poetry of France is more oratorical than textual; what the
poetry could not accomplish on its own, however, the
milodie has occasionally accomplished with it, working at
the language through the poem. Such a work (in the specifi-

city here acknowledged it) is not to be seen in the general
run of the melodies produced which are too accommodating
towards minor poets, the model of the petit-bourgeois
romance, and salon usages, but in some few pieces it is
indisputable - anthologically (a little by chance) in certain
songs by Faur6 and Duparc, massively in the later (prosodic)
Faure" and the vocal work of Debussy (even if Pellias is

often sung badly - dramatically). What is engaged in these
works is, much more than a musical style, a practical
reflection (if one may put it like that) on the language;
there is a progressive movement from the language to the
poem, from the poem to the song and from the song to its

performance. Which means that the me'lodie has little to
do with the history of music and much with the theory
of the text. Here again, the signifier must be redistributed.

Compare two sung deaths, both of them famous: that of

Boris and that of Melisande. Whatever Mussorgsky's
intentions, the death of Boris is expressive or, if preferred,
hysterical; it is overloaded with historical, affective contents.
Performances of the death cannot be but dramatic: it
is the triumph of the pheno-text, the smothering of signifiance

The Grain of the Voice \ 187

under the soul as signified. Meiisande, on the contrary,

only dies prosodically. Two extremes are joined, woven

together: the perfect intelligibility of the denotation and the

pure prosodic segmentation of the enunciation; between
the two a salutary gap (filled out in Boris) - the pathos,
that is to say, according to Aristotle (why not?), passion
such as men speak and imagine it, the accepted idea of death,

endoxical death. Meiisande dies without any noise (under-
standing the term in its cybernetic sense): nothing occurs
to interfere with the signifier and there is thus no compulsion
to redundance; simply, the production of a music-language
with the function of preventing the singer from being

expressive. As with the Russian bass, the symbolic (the
death) is thrown immediately (without mediation) before
us (this to forestall the stock idea which has it that what is

not expressive can only be cold and intellectual; Melisande's
death is 'moving', which means that it shifts something in

the chain of the signifier).

The milodie disappeared - sank to the bottom - for a

good many reasons, or at least the disappearance took on a

good many aspects. Doubtless it succumbed to its salon
image, this being a little the ridiculous form of its class
origin. Mass 'good' music (records, radio) has left it behind,

preferring either the more pathetic orchestra (success of

Mahler) or less bourgeois instruments than the piano

(harpsichord, trumpet). Above all, however, the death of
the milodie goes along with a much wider historical
phenomenon to a large extent unconnected to the history
©f music or of musical taste: the French are abandoning
their language, not, assuredly, as a normative set of noble

values (clarity, elegance, correctness) - or at least this does
mot bother me very much for these are institutional values -
but as a space of pleasure, of thrill, a site where language

works for nothing, that is, in perversion (remember here the

singularity - the solitude - of Lois by Philippe Sollers,

188 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

theatre of the return of the prosodic and metrical work of
the language).

The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand

as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the 'grain'

in a piece of music and accord this 'grain' a theoretical
value (the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably

set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly
be individual - I am determined to listen to my relation
with the body of the man or woman singing or playing and

that relation is erotic - but in no way 'subjective' (it is not
the psychological 'subject' in me who is listening; the climac-

tic pleasure hoped for is not going to reinforce - to express -

that subject but, on the contrary, to lose it). The evaluation

will be made outside of any law, outplaying not only the
law of culture but equally that of anticulture, developing
beyond the subject all the value hidden behind 'I like' or

'I don't like'. Singers especially will be ranged in what
may be called, since it is a matter of my choosing without
there being any reciprocal choice of me, two prostitutional
categories. Thus I shall freely extol such and such a

performer, little-known, minor, forgotten, dead perhaps,
and turn away from such another, an acknowledged star
(let us refrain from examples, no doubt of merely bio-
graphical significance); I shall extend my choice across all
the genres of vocal music including popular music, where I
shall have no difficulty in rediscovering the distinction
between the pheno-song and the geno-song (some popular
singers have a 'grain' while others, however famous, do not).
What is more, leaving aside the voice, the 'grain' - or the
lack of it - persists in instrumental music; if the latter no
longer has language to lay open signifiance in all its volume,
at least there is the performer's body which again forces me
to evaluation. I shall not judge a performance according

to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style (any-

The Grain of the Voice | 189

way highly illusory), which almost all belong to the pheno-
song (I shall not wax lyrical concerning the 'rigour', the
'brilliance', the 'warmth', the 'respect for what is written',

etc.), but according to the image of the body (the figure)

given me. I can hear with certainty - the certainty of the
body, of thrill - that the harpsichord playing of Wanda
Landowska comes from her inner body and not from the

petty digital scramble of so many harpsichordists (so
much so that it is a different instrument). As for piano
music, I know at once which part of the body is playing -
if it is the arm, too often, alas, muscled like a dancer's
calves, the clutch of the finger-tips (despite the sweeping
flourishes of the wrists), or if on the contrary it is the only
erotic part of a pianist's body, the pad of the fingers whose

'grain' is so rarely heard (it is hardly necessary to recall that
today, under the pressure of the mass long-playing record,

there seems to be a flattening out of technique; which is
paradoxical in that the various manners of playing are all
flattened out into perfection: nothing is left but pheno-text).

This discussion has been limited to 'classical music'. It

goes without saying, however, that the simple consideration
of 'grain' in music could lead to a different history of music
from the one we know now (which is purely pheno-textual).
Were we to succeed in refining a certain 'aesthetics' of
musical pleasure, then doubtless we would attach less
importance to the formidable break in tonality accomplished
by modernity.

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers

What follows depends on the idea that there is a funda-
mental tie between teaching and speech. The idea is a very
old one (did not the whole of our teaching spring from
Rhetoric?) but it is possible today to consider it differently
from yesterday: firstly, because there is a (political) crisis
in teaching; secondly, because (Lacanian) psychoanalysis
has shown the mechanism of the twists and turns of empty
speech; lastly, because the opposition between speech and

writing has become an obvious fact with effects that now
need to be gradually drawn out.

Over against the teacher, who is on the side of speech, let

us call a writer every operator of language on the side of
writing; between the two, the intellectual, the person who

prints and publishes his speech. Between the language
of the teacher and that of the intellectual there is hardly
any incompatibility (they often co-exist in a single indivi-
dual); but the writer stands apart, separate. Writing begins
at the point where speech becomes impossible (a word that
can be understood in the sense it has when applied to a

child).

Two constraints

Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except

precisely by saying that one retracts it. To cross out is here
to add: if I want to erase what I have just said, I cannot do
it without showing the eraser itself (I must say: 'or rather...'
'I expressed myself badly . . . ' ) ; paradoxically, it is ephemeral

speech which is indelible, not monumental writing. All that

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 191

one can do in the case of a spoken utterance is to tack on
another utterance. The correcting and improving movement
of speech is the wavering of a flow of words, a weave which
wears itself out catching itself up, a chain of augmentative

corrections which constitutes the favoured abode of the

unconscious part of our discourse (it is not by chance that
psychoanalysis is linked to speech and not writing: dreams

are spoken not written). The eponymous figure of the speaker
is Penelope.

Nor is this all. We can only make ourselves understood

(well or poorly) if we maintain a certain speed of delivery.
We are like a cyclist or a film obliged to keep going so as
to avoid falling or scratching. Silence and vacillation are
equally forbidden: the articulatory speed binds each
point of the sentence to what immediately follows or pre-
cedes (impossible to have the word 'set off' towards distant
and strange paradigms). Context is a structural given not of
language but of speech and it is the very status of context
to be reductive of meaning. The spoken word is 'clear';

the banishment of polysemy (such banishment being the

definition of 'clarity') serves the Law - all speech is on the
side of the Law.

Whoever prepares to speak (in a teaching situation)

must realize the mise en scene imposed by the use of speech
under the simple effect of a natural determination (stemming

from the physical nature of articulatory breathing). This

mise en scene develops as follows. Either the speaker chooses
in all good faith a role of Authority, in which case it suffices
to 'speak well', in compliance with the Law present in
every act of speech - without hesitation, at the right speed,
clearly (which is what is demanded of good pedagogic
speech: clarity, authority); the precise phrase is truly a
sentence, a sententia, an act of penal speech. Or the speaker

is bothered by all this Law that the act of speaking is going

to introduce into what he wants to say, in which case, since

192 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

it is impossible to alter the delivery (condemning one to
'clarity') but possible to excuse oneself for speaking (for
laying out the Law), he uses the irreversibility of speech

in order to disturb its legality: correcting, adding, wavering,
the speaker moves into the infinitude of language, super-
imposes on the simple message that everyone expects of
him a new message that ruins the very idea of a message
and, through the shifting reflection of the blemishes and
excesses with which he accompanies the line of the discourse,
asks us to believe with him that language is not to be reduced
to communication. By all these operations, which come
near the wavering movement of the Text, the imperfect
orator hopes to render less disagreeable the role that makes
every speaker a kind of policeman. Yet at the end of all this

effort to 'speak badly' another role is enforced, for the
audience (nothing to do with the reader), caught in its own
imaginary, receives these fumblings as so many signs of
weakness and sends the speaker back the image of a master
who is human, too human - liberal.

The choice is gloomy: conscientious functionary or free

artist, the teacher escapes neither the theatre of speech nor
the Law played out on its stage: the Law appears not in
what is said but in the very fact of speech. In order to subvert
the Law (and not simply get around it), the teacher would
have to undermine voice delivery, word speed, and rhythm
to the point of another intelligibility. Or not speak at all;

which, however, would be to rejoin other roles again -
that of the great silent mind, mute with the weight of experi-
ence, or that of the militant who in the name of praxis
dismisses all discourse as futile. Nothing to be done:
language is always a matter of force, to speak is to exercise
a will for power; in the realm of speech there is no innocence,

no safety.

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 193

The summary

Statutorily the discourse of the teacher is marked by the
following characteristic: one can (one may) summarize it
(a privilege it holds in common with the discourse of
Members of Parliament). There is an exercise in our schools
called text reduction} a term which expresses nicely the
ideology of the summary: on the one side the 'thought',
object of the message, element of knowledge, transitive

or critical force; on the other the 'style', ornament, province

of luxury and leisure and thus futility. To separate the
thought from the style is in some sort to relieve the discourse
of its sacerdotal robes, to secularize the message (hence the
bourgeois conjuncture of the teacher and the Member of
Parliament). 'Form' is believed to be compressible and such
compression is not judged essentially harmful - from a
distance indeed, from our Western promontory, is the
difference really so very great between the head of a living

Jivaro and a shrunken Jivaro head?

It is difficult for a teacher to see the 'notes' taken during

his courses. He hardly wants to, either out of discretion
(nothing more personal than 'notes', despite the formal
nature of the practice) or, more likely, from fear of con-
templating himself in a reduced state, at once dead and

substantial like a Jivaro treated by his fellows. No knowing
whether what is taken (culled) from the flow of speech is
scattered statements (formulae, sentences) or the gist of
an argument, but in both cases what is lost is the supple-
ment, the point of the advance of the state of language.
The summary is a disavowal of writing.

In contrasting consequence, the term 'writer' (a term

which here always refers to a practice, not to a social value)
may be applied to any sender whose 'message' (thereby
immediately destroying its very nature as message) cannot

1. [''reduction de texte', i.e. a form of precis]'

194 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

be summarized, a condition the writer shares with the mad-
man, the chatterbox and the mathematician but which
precisely writing (namely a certain practice of the signifier)
has as its task to specify.

The teaching relationship

How can the teacher be assimilated to the psychoanalyst?
It is exactly the contrary which is the case: the teacher is
the person analysed.

Imagine that I am a teacher: I speak, endlessly, in front

of and for someone who remains silent. I am the person who
says / (the detours of one, we or impersonal sentence make

no difference), I am the person who, under cover of setting
out a body of knowledge, puts out a discourse, never
knowing how that discourse is being received and thus for
ever forbidden the reassurance of a definitive image - even
if offensive - which would constitute me. In the exposi,
more aptly named than we tend to think, it is not knowledge
which is exposed, it is the subject (who exposes himself
to all sorts of painful adventures). The mirror is empty,
reflecting back to me no more than the falling away of my
language as it gradually unrolls. Like the Marx Brothers
disguised as Russian airmen (in A Night at the Opera - a

work which I regard as allegorical of many a textual
problem), I am, at the beginning of my expose, rigged out
with a large false beard which, drenched little by little with

the flood of my own words (a substitute for the jug of water

from which the Mute, Harpo, guzzles away on the Mayor of
New York's rostrum), I then feel coming unstuck piecemeal
in front of everybody. Scarcely have I made the audience
smile with some 'witty' remark, scarcely have I reassured
it with some progressive stereotype, than I experience all

the complacency of such provocations; 1 regret the hysterical

drive, would like to retract it, preferring too late an austere

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 195

to a 'clever' discourse (but in that contrary case it is the
'severity' of the discourse that would seem hysterical to
me). Should some smile answer my remark or some gesture
of assent my stereotype of intimidation, I immediately

persuade myself that these manifestations of complicity
come from imbeciles or flatterers (I am here describing
an imaginary process). It is I who am after a response and

who let myself go as far as to provoke it, yet it suffices that

I receive a response for me to become distrustful. If I

develop a discourse such that it coldly averts any response,

I do not thereby feel myself to be any more in true (in the
musical sense), for I must then glory in the solitude of my
speech, furnish it with the alibi of missionary discourses

(science, truth, etc.).

Thus, in accordance with psychoanalytic description

(Lacan's, the perspicacity of which in this respect any
speaker can confirm), when the teacher speaks to his
audience, the Other is always there, puncturing his discourse.

Were the discourse held tightly fastened by an impeccable
intelligence, armed with scientific 'rigour' or political
radicality, it would nevertheless be punctured: it suffices
that I speak, that my speech flow, for it to flow away.

Naturally however, though every teacher occupies the
position of a person in analysis, no student audience can
claim the advantage of the opposite situation: firstly, because
the psychoanalytic silence has nothing pre-eminent about,

it; secondly, because it happens that a subject, carried away,
emerges and rushes to burn on speech, to join in the ora-
torical promiscuity (and should the subject remain obstin-
ately silent, this is simply to give voice to the obstinacy
of his muteness). Yet for the teacher, the student audience
is still the exemplary Other in that it has an air of not

speaking - and thus, from the bosom of its apparent
flatness, speaks in you so much the louder: its implicit

speech, which is mine, touches me all the more in that I

196 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

am not encumbered by its discourse.

Such is the cross borne in every public act of speech.

Whether the teacher speaks or whether the listener urges
the right to speak, in both cases we go straight to the analytic
couch: the teaching relationship is nothing more than the
transference it institutes; 'science', 'method', 'knowledge',
'idea' come indirectly, are given in addition - they are
left-overs.

The contract

'Most of the time, the relations between humans suffer, oft

to the point of destruction, from the fact that the contir
established in those relations is not respected. As soon as tv

human beings enter into reciprocal relationship, their contra
generally tacit, comes into force, regulating the form of the'

relations, etc' - Brecht

Although the demand expressed in the community space

of a course is fundamentally intransitive, as is natural in
any transferential situation, it is nonetheless overdetennined
and shelters behind other, seemingly transitive, demands.

These latter constitute the conditions of an implicit contract
between the teacher and the taught, a contract which is
'imaginary', no way in contradiction with the economic
determination which impels the student to be in search of

a career and the teacher to fulfil the terms of an employment.

Here pell-mell (in the order of the imaginary there is no

founding motive) is what the teacher demands of those
taught: 1) to acknowledge him in whatever 'role' it may be
- authority, benevolence, militancy, knowledge, etc. (any
newcomer who cannot be placed as to the image he asks of
you is immediately disturbing); 2) to act as relay, to extend
him, to spread his style and ideas far afield; 3) to let himself

be seduced, to assent to a loving relationship (granting all
the sublimations, the distances, the checks consonant with

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 197

the social reality and the presentiment of the futility of the
relationship); 4) to allow him to honour the contract he
has himself entered into with his employer, with society:

the person taught is the necessary part of a (remunerated)

practice, the object of a job, the matter of a production

(even if difficult to define).

From his side, here pell-mell is what the person taught

demands of the teacher: 1) to help him to a good professional
training; 2) to fulfil the roles traditionally devolving to the
teacher (scientific authority, transmission of a capital of
knowledge, etc.); 3) to reveal the secrets of a technique (of
research, for passing an examination); 4) under the banner
of the secular saint Method, to be an instructor in ascesis,
a guru; 5) to represent a 'movement of ideas', a School, a
Cause, to be its spokesman; 6) to admit him, the student,

into the complicity of a special language; 7) for those
possessed by the fantasy of the thesis (a timid practice of
writing, at once disfigured and shielded by its institutional
finality), to guarantee the reality of that fantasy; 8) to lend

service - the teacher signs registration forms, testimonials,
and so on.

This is simply a topic, a fund of choices which are not

necessarily all actualized at the same time in a particular
individual. It is at the level of the contractual totality,
however, that is decided the comfort of the teaching relation-
ship: the 'good' teacher, the 'good' student are those
who accept philosophically the plurality of their determina-
tions, perhaps because they know that the truth of a relation-

ship of speech is elsewhere.

Research

What is a piece of'research'? To find out, we would need
to have some idea of what a 'result* is. What is it that one
finds? What is it that one wants to find? What is missing?

g

198 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning
brought out, the statistical discovery be placed? No doubt

it depends each time on the particular science approached,

but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text
(and the text extends very much further than the literary
work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it,
any 'result' is literally im-pertinent. 'Research' is then the
name which prudently, under the constraint of certain
social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research
here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the
signifier, an excess of exchange - impossible to maintain

the equation of a 'result' for a 'piece of research'. Which
is why the discourse to which a piece of research must be
submitted (in teaching it) has as speciality, besides its parenetic
function ('Writer), to recall the research to its epistemo-

logical condition: whatever it searches for, it must not forget
its nature as language - and it is this which renders finally

inevitable an encounter with writing. In writing, the enuncia-
tion deludes the enounced by the effect of the language
which produces it, a good enough definition of the produc-
tive, dissatisfied, progressive, critical element which is
indeed ordinarily granted to 'research'. Such is the historical

role of research: teach the scientist or scholar that he speaks

(but if he knew it, he would write - and the whole idea of

science, the whole of scientificity would be changed thereby).

The destruction of stereotypes

Someone writes to me that 'a group of revolutionary students
k preparing a destruction of the structuralist myth'. 1 am
captivated by the stereotypic consistency of the expression.

The destruction of the myth begins from the very announce-
ment of its putative agents with the finest of myths, the

'group of revolutionary students' - quite as good as 'war

widows' or '©Id soldiers'.

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 199

Usually the stereotype is a sad affair, since it is constituted

by a necrosis of language, a prosthesis brought in to fill
a hole in writing. Yet at the same time it cannot but occasion
a huge burst of laughter: it takes itself seriously, believes
itself to be closer to the truth because indifferent to its
nature as language. It is at once corny and solemn.

Setting the stereotype at a distance is not a political task,

for political language is itself made up of stereotypes, but
a critical task, one, that is, which aims to call language into
crisis. Such an activity allows one first and foremost to
isolate the speck of ideology contained in every political
discourse and to attack it like an acid capable of dissolving
the greasiness of 'natural' language (that is to say of language
which feigns ignorance of the fact of its nature as language).
It is a way too of breaking with the mechanistic conception

of language as mere response to stimuli of situation or
action, a way of opposing the production of language to
its simple and fallacious utilization. Then again, it jolts
the discourse of the Other and constitutes a permanent
operation of pre-analysis. Lastly, the stereotype is at bottom
a form of opportunism: one conforms to the reigning
language, or rather to that in language which seems to
govern (a situation, a right, a struggle, an institution, a

movement, a science, a theory, etc.); to speak in stereotypes
is to side with the power of language, an opportunism which
must (today) be refused.

But is it not possible to 'transcend' stereotypes instead

of 'destroying' them? The wish is unrealistic; operators of
language have no other activity at their command than that
of emptying what is full: language is not dialectical - it
allows only a movement in two stages.

The chain of discourses

It is because language is not dialectical (does not allow the

200 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

third term other than as pure oratorical flourish, rhetorical
assertion, pious hope) that discourse (discursivity) moves,
in its historical impetus, by clashes. A new discourse can
only emerge as the paradox which goes against (and often

goes for) the surrounding or preceding doxa, can only see

the day as difference, distinction, working loose against
what sticks to it. For example, Chomskyan theory is con-
structed against Bloomfieldian behaviourism; linguistic

behaviourism once liquidated by Chomsky, it is then
against Chomskyan mentalism (or anthropologism) that a
new semiotics is being developed, while Chomsky himself,
in quest of allies, is forced to jump over his immediate
predecessors and go back as far as the Port-Royal Grammar.

But doubtless it is in one of the greatest thinkers of dialec-

tics, Marx, that it would be the most interesting to verify
the undialectical nature of language: Marx's discourse is
almost entirely paradoxical, the doxa being now Proudhon,
now someone else, and so on. This twofold movement of
separation and renewal results not in a circle but, according
to Vico's great and beautiful image, in a spiral and it is in

this<2r(/ir of circularity (of paradoxical form) that historical

determinations are articulated. Hence it is always necessary
to establish what doxa an author is opposing (this can some-
times be a very minority doxa, holding sway over a limited

group). A teaching may equally be evaluated in terms of
paradox, provided it is built on the following conviction:
that a system calling for corrections, translations, openings,
and negations is more useful than an unformulated absence

of system - one may then avoid the immobility of prattle
and connect to the historical chain of discourses, the

progress (progressus) of discursivity.

Method

Some people talk avidly, demandingly of method; what they

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 201

want in work is method, which can never be too rigorous or

too formal for their taste. Method becomes a Law, but since
that Law is devoid of any effect outside itself (nobody can
say what a 'result' is in 'human sciences') it is infinitely

disappointed; posing as a pure meta-language, it partakes
of the vanity of all meta-language. The invariable fact is
that a piece of work which ceaselessly proclaims its deter-

mination for method is ultimately sterile: everything has
been put into the method, nothing is left for writing; the
researcher repeatedly asserts that his text will be methodo-
logical but the text never comes. No surer way to kill a
piece of research and send it to join the great waste of aban-
doned projects than Method.

The danger of Method (of a fixation with Method) is to

be grasped by considering the two demands to which the
work of research must reply. The first is a demand for
responsibility: the work must increase lucidity, manage to
reveal the implications of a procedure, the alibis of a lan-

guage, in short must constitute a critique (remember once
again that to criticize means to call into crisis). Here Method
is inevitable, irreplaceable, not for its 'results' but precisely

- or on the contrary - because it realizes the highest degree

of consciousness of a language which is not forgetful of
itself. The.second demand, however, is of a quite different
order; it is that of writing, space of dispersion of desire,

where Law is dismissed. At a certain moment, therefore, it

is necessary to turn against Method, or at least to treat it

without any founding privilege as one of the voices of
plurality - as a view, a spectacle mounted in the text, the

text which all in all is the only 'true' result of any research.

Questions

To question is to want to know something. Yet in many

intellectual debates the questions that follow the lecturer's

202 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

talk are in no way the expression of a lack but the assertion

of a plenitude. Under the cover of asking questions, I
attack the speaker. To question then takes on its police
sense: to question is to challenge, to interpellate. The

person interpellated, however, must pretend to reply to
the letter of the question, not to the manner in which it is
posed. So a game is set up: although each person knows
exactly what the intentions of the other really are, the
game demands a reply to the content and not to the manner.
If I am asked in a certain tone of voice 'What's the use of
linguistics?', thereby signifying to me that it is of no use

whatsoever, I must pretend to reply naively '// helps to do

this and that,' and not, in accordance with the truth of the

dialogue, 'Why are you attacking me?' What I receive is the
connotation; what I have to return is the denotation. In
the space of speech, science and logic, knowledge and reason-
ing, questions and answers, propositions and objections are
the masks of the dialectical relationship. Our intellectual
debates are coded every bit as much as were the Scholastic
disputations; we still have the stock roles (the 'sociologistic',
the 'Goldmannian', the 'Telquelian', etc.) but contrary to
the disputatio, where such roles would have been ceremonial

and have displayed the artifice of their function, our

intellectual 'intercourse' always gives itself 'natural' airs:

it claims to exchange only signifieds, not signifiers.

In the name of what?

I speak in the name of what? Of a function? A body of
knowledge? An experience? What do I represent? A

scientific capacity? An institution? A service? In fact, I
speak only in the name of a language: I speak because I have
written; writing is represented by its contrary, by speech.
This distortion means that in writing o/speech (on the subject

of speech) I am condemned to the following aporia:

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 203

denounce the imaginary of speech through the irreality of

writing. Thus at this moment I am not describing any

'authentic' experience, giving the picture of any 'real'

teaching, opening any 'university' dossier. For writing can
tell the truth on language but not the truth on the real (we

are at present trying to find out what a real without language
it).

The standing position

Can one imagine a more doubtful situation than that of
talking for (or in front of) people who are standing up or
who are visibly badly seated? What is being exchanged
here? What is this discomfort the price of? What is my

speech worth! How could the awkwardness of the hearer's
position not lead to questions as to the validity of what is
being heard? Is not the standing position eminently
criticall And is it not thus, changing the scale, that political
consciousness begins, in un-easel Listening returns me the
vanity of my own speech, its price, for, whether I like it or

not, I am placed in a circuit of exchange; and listening
is also the position of the person to whom I address my-

self.

Familiarity

It sometimes happens, remnant of May '68, that a student

speaks to a teacher in the familiar fu-form, which gives us a

strong, full sign, referring to the most psychological of
signifieds: the will for militancy or mateyness -- muscle.
Since a morality of the sign is here imposed, it can be
challenged in its turn and a subtler semantics preferred.

Signs must be handled on a neutral ground and in French

that ground is the polite vous-form. The fi*-form can only

break loose from the code in cases where it constitutes a

204 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

simplification of grammar (as, for example, when talking
to a foreigner with poor French). In such cases it is a
matter of substituting a transitive practice for a symbolic

attitude: instead of seeking to signify just who I think the
other is (and so just who I think I am), I simply try to make
myself clearly understood to him. But the strategy is also
itself finally devious: the fu-form is like all attitudes of

flight; when a sign displeases me, when the meaning
bothers me, I shift towards the operational, which becomes
a censorship of the symbolic and thus the symbol of asym-
bolism. A great many political and scientific discourses
are characterized by a shift of this kind (on which depends,
notably, the whole of the linguistics of 'communication').

An odour of speech

As soon as one has finished speaking, there begins the
dizzying turn of the image: one exalts or regrets what one
has said, the way in which one said it, one imagines oneself
(turns oneself over in image); speech is subject to remanence,

it smells.

Writing has no smell: produced (having accomplished

its process of production), it falls, not like a bellows deflating
but like a meteorite disappearing; it will travel far from my
body, yet without being something detached and narcis-
sistically retained like speech; its disappearance holds no

disappointment; it passes, traverses, and that's all. The time

of speech exceeds the act of speech (only a jurist could have
us believe that spoken words disappear, verba volant).
Writing, however, has no past (if society obliges you to
administer what you have written, you can only do it with
the most profound boredom, the boredom of a false past).
Which is why the discourse applied in commenting writing

has a much less striking effect than that applied in comment-
ing speech (though the stake is greater): I can objectively

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 205

take account of the first for T am no longer there; the
second, even if it is in praise, I can only try to get rid of,
for it does no more than retighten he impasse of my
imaginary.

(How is it then that this present text preoccupies me, that

once completed, corrected, let go of, the text remains or
returns in me as a state of doubt and, in a word, of fear?
Is it not written, liberated by writing? I see that I cannot
improve the piece, I have achieved the exact form of what
I wanted to say; it is no longer a question of style. I con-
clude, therefore, that it is the very status of the piece which
disturbs me; what plagues me in it is precisely that, dealing

with speech, it cannot, in writing itself, fully liquidate

speech. In order to write of speech (about speech) I am
compelled to refer to illusions of experiences, memories,

and feelings had by the subject I am when I speak, that I
was when speaking: in such a writing the referential lingers
on and it is that which smells to my own nostrils.)

Our place

Just as psychoanalysis, with the work of Lacan, is in the

process of extending the Freudian topic into a topology
of the subject (the unconscious is never there in its place),
so likewise we need to substitute for the magisterial space
of the past - which was fundamentally a religious space

(the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with
the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd) - a less

upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher
nor students, would ever be in his final place. One would
then be able to see that what" must be made reversible are

not social 'roles' (is there any point in squabbling for

'authority', for the 'right' to speak?) but the regions of
speech. Where is speech? In locution? In listening? In the
returns of the one and the other? The problem is not to

206 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

abolish the distinction in functions {teacherI student -
after all, as Sade has taught us, order is one of the guarantees
of pleasure) but to protect the instability and, as it were,
the giddying whirl of the positions of speech. In the teaching
space nobody should anywhere be in his place (I am com-
forted by this constant displacement: were I to find my

place, I would not even go on pretending to teach, I would

give up).

Yet is it not the case that the teacher has a fixed place,

that of his remuneration, the place he occupies in the
economy, in production? We come back to the same prob-
lem, our sole and continuing concern: the origin of a spoken
discourse does not exhaust that discourse; once set off, it

is beset by a thousand adventures, its origin becomes blurred,
all its effects are not in its cause. It is this excess which here
concerns us.

Two types of criticism

The mistakes that may be made in typing out a manuscript

are so many meaningful incidents, incidents which by ana-
logy help to shed light on the attitude it is necessary to
adopt with regard to meaning when commenting a text.

Either the word produced by the mistake (if spoilt by a

wrong letter) has no meaning, finds no textual contour, in
which case the code is interrupted, creating an asemic
word, a pure signifier; for example, instead of writing

officier [officer] I write offivier which is meaningless. Or the
erroneous - mistyped - word, though not the word one

intended to write, is a word identifiable in the lexicon, a
word which means something: should I write ride [wrinkle]

instead of rude [rude, rough], the new word exists in French
and the sentence retains a meaning, even if eccentric. This is

the choice (the voice ?) of pun, anagram, semantic metathesis,

spoonerism: there is a sliding within the codes - meaning

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 207

remains but pluralized, cheated, without law of content,

message, truth.

Each of these two types of mistake figures (or prefigures)

a type of criticism. The first dismisses all meaning of the
support text which is to lend itself only to a signifying
efflorescence: its phonism alone is to be treated, but not
interpreted; one associates, one does not decipher. Giving
the reading qffivier as opposed to officier, the mistake opens
up for me the right of association - I am free to explode
offivier towards obvier [obviate], vivier [fish stock], etc. It
is not simply that the ear of this first criticism hears the
cracklings of the phono pick-up but rather that it desires

to hear only them, making them into a new music. In the
second type of criticism nothing is rejected by the 'reading
head'; it perceives both the meaning (the meanings) and
its cracklings. The (historical) stake of these two types of
criticism (I should like to be able to say that the field of the
first is signifiosis and that of the second signifiance) is
clearly different.

The first has in its favour the right of the signifier to

spread out where it will (where it can ?): what law, and what
meaning, and with what basis, would restrain it? Once

the philological (monological) law has been relaxed and

the text eased open to plurality, why stop? Why refuse

to push polysemy as far as asemy ? In the name of what ?
Like any radical right, this one supposes a Utopian vision

of freedom: the law is lifted all at once, outside of any history,

in defiance of any dialectic (hence the finally petit-bourgeois
aspect of this style of demand). Yet the moment it evades
all tactical reason while nevertheless remaining implanted
in a specific (and alienated) intellectual society, the disorder
of the signifier reverts into hysterical rambling: liberating
reading from all meaning, it is ultimately my reading which
I impose, for in this moment of History the economy of the

subject is not yet transformed and the refusal of meaning

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(of meanings) falls back into subjectivity. At best, one can
simply say that this radical criticism, defined by a fore-
closure of the signified (and not by its slide), anticipates
History, anticipates a new, unprecedented state in which the

efflorescence of the signifier would not be at the cost of any

idealist counterpart, of any closure of the person. To
criticize, however, is to put into crisis, something which is
not possible without evaluating the conditions of the crisis
(its limits), without considering its historical moment. Thus
the second type of criticism, that which applies itself to the
division of meanings and the 'trickery' of interpretation,
appears (at least to me) more historically correct. In a
society locked in the war of meanings and thereby under the
compulsion of rules of communication which determine its
effectiveness, the liquidation of the old criticism can only
be carried forward in meaning (in the volume of meanings)
and not outside it. In other words, it is necessary to practice

a certain semantic enterism. Ideological criticism is today
precisely condemned to operations of theft: the signified,
exemption of which is the materialist task par excellence, is
more easily 'lifted' in the illusion of meaning than in its
destruction.

Two types of discourse

Let us distinguish two types of discourse:

Terrorist discourse is not necessarily bound up with the

peremptory assertion (or the opportunist defence) of a faith,
a truth, a certain justice; it can simply be the wish to accom-
plish the lucid adequation of the enunciation with the true
violence of language, the inherent violence which stems
from the fact that no utterance is able directly to express
the truth and has no other mode at its disposal than the
force of the word; thus an apparently terrorist discourse

ceases to be so if, reading it, one follows the directions it

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 209

itself provides, re-establishing in it the gap or dispersion,
that is to say the unconscious. Such a reading is not always

easy: certain small-scale terrorisms which function above all
by stereotypes themselves operate, like any discourse of
good conscience, the foreclosure of the other scene; in short,
these terrorisms refuse writing (they can be detected by
something in them that remains rigid - the odour of serious-
ness given off by the commonplace).

Repressive discourse is not linked to declared violence

but to the Law. The Law here enters language as equili-
brium: an equilibrium is postulated between what is forbid-
den and what is permitted, between commendable meaning
and unworthy meaning, between the constraint of common

sense and the probationary freedom of interpretations.
Hence the taste shown by such discourse for motions of
balance, verbal opposites, antitheses formulated and evaded,
being neither for this nor for that (if, however, you do the

double addition of the neithers and nors, it will be seen that
our impartial, objective, human speaker is for this, against
that). Repressive discourse is the discourse of good con-
science, liberal discourse.

The axiomatic field

'All that is necessary', comments Brecht, 'is to determine
those interpretations of facts appearing within the prole-
tariat engaged in the class struggle (national or international)
which enable it to utilize the facts for its action. They must
be synthesized in order to create an axiomatic field.' Thus
every fact possesses several meanings (a plurality of 'inter-

pretations') and amongst those meanings there is one which

is proletarian (or at least which is of use to the proletariat

in its struggle); by connecting the various proletarian
meanings one constructs a revolutionary axiomatics. But

who determines the meaning? According to Brecht, the

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210 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

proletariat itself ('appearing within the proletariat'). Such a
view implies that class division has its inevitable counterpart
in a division of meanings and class struggle its equally
inevitable counterpart in a war of meanings: so long as
there is class struggle (national or international), the
division of the axiomatic field will be inexpiable.

The difficulty (despite Brecht's verbal assurance - 'All

that is necessary') comes from the fact that a certain number
of objects of discourse do not directly concern the pro-

letariat (they find no interpretation within it) which cannot,

however, remain indifferent to them, since they constitute,
at least in advanced States which have wiped out both
misery and folklore, the plenitude of the other discourse

within which the very proletariat is compelled to live,

nourish, and amuse itself. This discourse is that of culture
(it is possible that in Marx's day the pressure of culture on
the proletariat was weaker than it is now; in the absence of
'mass communications', there was as yet no 'mass culture').
How can you attribute a meaning for the struggle to some-
thing of no direct concern to you? How could the prole-
tariat determine within itself an interpretation of Zola,
Poussin, pop music, the Sunday sports paper or the latest
news item? To 'interpret' all these cultural relays it needs
representatives - those whom Brecht calls the 'artists' or

the 'workers of the intellect' (a particularly malicious expres-
sion, at least in French where the intellect is so nearly off
the top of the head), those who have at their command the
language of the indirect, the indirect as language; in a word,
oblates who devote themselves to the proletarian interpreta-
tion of cultural facts.

Then begins, however, for these procurators of proletarian

meaning, a real headache of a problem since their class
situation is not that of the proletariat: they are not producers,
a negative situation they share with (student) youth - an

equally unproductive class with whom they usually form

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 211

an alliance of language. It follows that the culture from which
they have to disengage the proletarian meaning brings them

back round to themselves and not to the proletariat. How

is culture to be evaluatedl According to its origin ? Bourgeois.

Its finality? Bourgeois again. According to dialectics?

Although bourgeois, this does contain progressive elements;
but what, at the level of discourse, distinguishes dialectics
from compromise ? And then again, with what instruments ?
Historicism, sociologfsm, positivism, formalism, psycho-
analysis ? Every one of them bourgeoisified. There are some
who finally prefer to give up the problem, to dismiss all
'culture' - a course which entails the destruction of all

discourse.

In fact, even within an axiomatic field thought to be

clarified by the class struggle, the tasks are various, occa-
sionally contradictory, and, most importantly, established
on different temporalities. The axiomatic field is made up
of several specific axiomatics: cultural criticism proceeds
successively, diversely and simultaneously by opposing the
Old with the New, historicism with sociologism, formalism
with economism, psychoanalysis with logico-positivism, and
then again, by a further turn, empirical sociology with
monumental history, the New with the strange (the foreign),
historicism with formalism, scientism with psychoanalysis,

and so on. Applied to culture, critical discourse can only
be a silk shot through with tactics, a tissue of elements now
past, now circumstantial (linked to contingencies of fashion),
now finally and frankly Utopian. To the tactical necessities
of the war of meanings is added the strategic conception
of the new conditions which will be given the signifier when
that war comes to an end. Cultural criticism, that is, must

be impatient, it cannot be carried on without desire. Hence

all the discourses of Marxism are present in its writing: the
apologetic (glorify revolutionary science), the apocalyptic

(destroy bourgeois culture), and the eschatological (desire

2 1 2 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

and call for the undi vision of meaning, concomitant on class

un division).

Our unconscious

The problem posed is this: how can the two great epistemes
of modernity, namely the materialist and the Freudian
dialectics, be made to intersect, to unite in the production

of a new human relation (it is not to be excluded that a third
term may be hidden in the inter-diction of the first two)?
That is to say: how can we aid the inter-action of these two
desires - to change the economy of the relations of production
and to change the economy of the subject? (For the moment

psychoanalysis appears to be the force best fitted for the
second of the tasks but other topics can be imagined, those
of the East for example.)

The path of this comprehensive work lies through the

following question: what is the relation between class
determination and the unconscious ? By what displacement
does this determination slip in between subjects? Certainly
not by 'psychology' (as though there were mental contents

- bourgeois/proletarian/intellectual/etc.) but quite obviously
by language, by discourse: the Other - who speaks, who is
all speech - is social. On the one hand, the proletariat may
well be separated but it is still bourgeois language, in its

degraded petit-bourgeois form, which speaks unconsciously
in the proletariat's cultural discourse; on the other, the
proletariat may well be mute but it still speaks in the dis-
course of the intellectual, not as canonical founding voice
but as unconscious. It suffices in this respect to see how it

knocks on all our discourses (explicit reference by the
intellectual to the proletariat in no way prevents the latter

from occupying the place of the unconscious in our dis-
course). Only the bourgeois discourse of the bourgeoisie

is tautological: the unconscious of bourgeois discourse is

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 213

indeed the Other, but that Other in another bourgeois
discourse.

Writing as value

Evaluation precedes criticism. There is no putting into crisis
without evaluation. Our value is writing, an obstinate

reference which, apart from the fact that it must often

irritate, seems in the eyes of some to involve a risk - that of

developing a certain mystique. The reproach has its malice,
for it reverses point by point the importance we attach to
writing, regarded, in this tiny intellectual region of our
Western world, as the materialist field par excellence.
Though issuing from Marxism and psychoanalysis, the
theory of writing tries to displace - without breaking with
- that place of origin: on the one hand, it rejects the tempta-
tion of the signified, that is the deafness to language, to the
excessive return of its effects; on the other, it is opposed
to speech in that it is not transferential and outplays -
admittedly partially, in extremely narrow, particularist

social limits even - the traps of'dialogue'. There is in writing

the beginnings of a mass gesture: against all discourses
(modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols,
social symbolics), writing alone today, even if still in the form
of luxury, makes of language something atopical, without

place. It is this dispersion, this unsituation, which is material-

ist.

Peaceable speech

One of the things that can be expected from a regular meeting

together of speakers is quite simply goodwill, that the meeting
figure a space of discourse divested of all sense of aggressive-
ness.

Such a divestiture arouses resistances. The first is of a

2 1 4 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

cultural nature: the refusal of violence is commonly seen as
a humanist lie, courtesy (minor mode of that refusal) as a
class value and openness as a mystification related to the
liberal idea of dialogue. The second resistance is of an
imaginary order: many people want a conflictual discourse
from motives of psychic liberation; the removal of confronta-

tion is said to have something frustrating about it. The third
resistance is of a political order: polemic is an essential arm

in the struggle, any space of discourse must be splintered
in order that its contradictions may emerge - it must be kept
under scrutiny.

What is preserved in these three resistances, however, is

ultimately the unity of the neurotic subject, which comes

together in the forms of conflict. Yet we know that violence

is always there (in language) and it is precisely this that can
lead us to decide to bracket out its signs and thus to dispense
with a rhetoric; violence must not be absorbed by the code
of violence.

The first advantage of this would be to suspend or at least

to delay the roles of speech - so that listening, speaking,
replying, I never be the actor of a judgement, a subjection,
an intimidation, the advocate of a Cause. No doubt peace-
able speech will finally secrete its own role, since, whatever
I say, the other continues to read me as an image; but in
the time put into eluding such a role, in the work of language
accomplished by the community week after week towards
the abolition from its discourse of all stichomythia, a
certain appropriation of speech (from then on close to
writing) may be attained - or again, a certain generalization
of the subject.

Perhaps this is what is found in certain experiences with

drugs (in the experience of certain drugs). Though not smok-

ing oneself (if only because of bronchial inability to inhale
the smoke), it is impossible to remain insensible to the

general goodwill that pervades certain places abroad where

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers | 215

cannabis is smoked. The movements, the (few) words
spoken, the whole relationship of the bodies (a relationship
nevertheless immobile and distant), everything is relaxed,
disarmed (hence totally unlike drunkenness, the legal form

of violence in the West); the space seems to be the product
of a subtle ascesis (one can sometimes read in it a certain
irony). A meeting for speech should, I think, aim at this

suspension (no matter of what - the desire is for a form),
try to rejoin an art of living, the greatest of all the arts
according to Brecht (such a view is more dialectical than
it appears, in that it compels the distinction and evaluation
of the customs of violence). In short, within the very limits
of the teaching space as given, the need is to work at patiently
tracing out a pure form, thaXofB.floating (the very form of the
signifier); a floating which would not destroy anything
but would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The
necessities of promotion, professional obligations (which
nothing then prevents from being scrupulously fulfilled),
imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method, ideological
criticism - everything is there, but floating.

INDEX | 219

Narrative cont'd

temporality, 94, 98-9, 119

Obtuse ('third') meaning, 53,

54, 56-68

Obvious meaning, 52-3, 54, 55-

6, 58, 62

Performative, 114 and n.l,

145-6

Pheno-/geno-text, 181, 182,

186, 187, 188

Photogenia, 23-4
Photograph, photographic im-

age, 15-51

and drawing, 17, 19 «., 25,

43 44

and film, 17, 18, 25, 45
and painting, 24
connotation procedures,

20-7

connotation, status of codes

of, 19, 28-31, 46-51

denotation/connotation, 18-

20, 34-7 passim

denotation, status of photo-

graphic, 30, 32-3, 42-6

in advertising, 32-51
in press, 15-31, 40

message without code, 17,

19, 36, 43, 45

new space-time category,

44-5

process of naturalization of

message, 20, 26, 45-6, 50-1

relations of linguistic matter

to, 16, 25-7, 33-4, 37-41

structures of linguistic under-

standing of, 28-9

Pose (photographic), 22

Quotation, 160, 177 and n.

Relay (image and linguistic

matter), 38, 41

Representation, 64, 69-78, 182

{see also Narrative)

Research, 197-8
Rhetoric, 49, 50 n.1, 83, 86,

96 /!., 128, 162, 190

of image, 18, 46-51
signifying aspect of ideology,

49-50

Sentence, 82-4, 91, 165, 169

(see also Narrative)

Sequence (in narrative), 101-4,

106, 128

sequential analysis, 128-36

Signifiance, 12-13, 54, 65, 66

«., 126, 137, 141, 182, 183,

184, 185, 186, 207

Sollers, Philippe, 105 n., 157,

183 /»., 187

Speech, 189

and Law, 191-2
and Other, 195
irreversibility of, 190-2
myth as, 165-6
peaceable, 213-15

(see also Writing)

Stereotype, 18, 165, 166, 168,

194-5, 198-9

StUl, 65-8
Structural analysis, 37 «.l, 79-

141 passim

Subject

generalization of, 214
in writing, 142, 145-6
Lacanian topology of, 205
linguistic analysis of, 105 n.,

109, 112, 145

status of in narrative analy-

sis, 107-9

Summary, 193-4

220 | INDEX

Summary cont'd

and different modes of dis-

course, 120-1

Suspense (in narrative), 102

and 7i., 119

Teaching, 190-215
Text, 126, 141, 146, 148, 153,

155-64, 168, 178

and author, 142-7, 160-1
and plural, 159-60
and symbolic, 158-9
and writing, 148
as limit-work, 157-8

as methodological field, 156-

7

pleasure of, 163-4

practice for future Quxury,

expenditure, Utopia), 62-3,

65, 77, 154, 164

reader and reading, 131,148,

153, 157, 161-2, 163

(see also Literature, Writing)

Textual analysis, 126-7, 131,

134, 137 «.l

Theatre, 17, 69-78,170-80

theatrical, hysteria, 62,173-4

Traumatic images, 28, 29-30
Trick effects (photographic),

21-2, 29

Unconscious, 111-12 and «.2,

141, 191, 205, 212-13

Voice, 70, 175-6, 179-89

Writing, 142, 145-6, 147-8,

167-8, 194, 213

and speech, 190,202-3,204-5
sociolect, 168
(see also Text)

Atfthony Storr

Music and the Mind

'Anyone who feels like reflecting about the origins, the impact and

the significance of music will find Dr Storr's book helpful and
stimulating.' Alfred Brendel

In this challenging book, Anthony Storr, one of Britain's leading
psychiatrists, explores why music, the most mysterious and intangible
of all forms of art, has such a powerful effect on our minds and bodies.
He believes that music today is a deeply significant experience for a
greater number of people than ever before, and argues that the

patterns of music give structure and coherence to our feelings and
emotions. It is because music possesses this capacity to restore our
sense of personal wholeness - in a culture which requires us to separate
rational thought from feelings - that many people find it so life-
enhancing that it justifies existence.

'This beautifully written book, humane, intelligent and thoughtful, is
a significant contribution to our understanding of those mysterious

movements of the mind.' Adam Lively, Times Educational Supplement

'It is a stimulating inquiry aimed at discovering what it is about music
that so profoundly moves so many people, in the course of which he
describes the physical effects of mescaline, considers the relation of
bird-song, the burbling of babies and the language of literature to

music, and touches on many other fascinating topics, concluding that
its most significant aspect for us is its power to create order out of
chaos.' Frances Partridge, Spectator

'Reading Storr's work is always like being taken on a journey through a

foreign country by a great enthusiast. It doesn't matter if you don't
know the language because he teaches you what you need to know
along the way. His knowledge is vast and his enthusiasm infectious...
Storr is an extraordinarily gifted communicator.'

Mary Loudon, New Statesman & Society

ISBN 0 00 686186 5

Landscape & Memory

Simon Schama

'This is one of the most intelligent, original, stimulating, self-indul-

gent, perverse and irresistibly enjoyable books that I have ever had
die delight of reviewing...'

P H I L I P Z I E G L E R ,

Daily Telegraph

Landscape & Memory is a history book unlike any odier. In a series
of exhilarating journeys through space and time, it examines our
relationship with the landscape around us - rivers, mountains,
forests - me impact each of them has had on our culture and imagi-
nations, and the way in which we, in turn, have shaped them to
answer our needs. Schama does not make his argument by any
conventional historical method. Instead he builds it up by a series
of almost poetic stories and impressions, which cumulatively have

the effect of a great novel. The forest primeval, die river of life, the
sacred mount - at die end of Landscape & Memory we understand
where these ideas have come from, why they are so compelling,

what diey meant to our forebears, and how they still lie all around
us if only we know how to look.

'Schama long ago established himself as one of die most learned,
original and provocative historians in die English-speaking world...
Landscape & Memory is that rarest of commodities in our cultural
marketplace, a work of genuine originality.'

ANTHONY GRAFTON, New Republic

This is a tour deforce of vivid historical writing... It is astoundingly
learned, and yet die learning is offered with verve, humour and an
unflagging sense of delight.'

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, Independent on Sunday

'Schama's intensely visual prose is die product of a historical imagi-
nation which is not restrained by conventional academic inhibi-
tions...It is his ability (and willingness) to write mis sort of narrative
prose mat makes Simon Schama die obvious modern successor to
Macaulay'

K E I T H T H O M A S ,

New York Review of Books

ISBN: 0 00 686348 5
Price: £16.99

The Interpretation of Cultures

Clifford Geertz

'One of the most original and stimulating anthropologists of his
generation.' Contemporary Sociology

Clifford Geertz is arguably the most distinguished anthropologist
of our time. First published in 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures
has become an established classic. Through a discussion of
subjects ranging from ritual and sacred symbol to nationalism and
revolution, Geertz consistently attempts to clarify the meaning of
'culture' and to relate that concept to the actual behaviour of
individuals and groups. Not only do these essays embody his
view of what culture is, they also put forward a particular view of
the role culture plays in social life, and how it ought properly to
be studied.

Geertz's elegance of thought and style, his gift for startling and
illuminating juxtaposition, his easy movement between the most
exotic and the most commonplace cultures, have made this
collection of essays one of the most widely read and influential
works in modern social science. The Interpretation of Cultures is
essential reading for students of anthropology, sociology and
history.

'Geertz's "reading" of the cockfight is a composite pageant of
erudition and insight, and is deservedly famous as an example of

what skilled "interpretative anthropology" can be.'

New York Review of Books

'One could celebrate the range of subjects on which he knowledge-
ably touches... the toughness of [his] mind, as well as the acerbity
with which he exercises that toughness . . . It's invigorating to
stretch one's mind on the Nautilus machine of his prose.'

New York Times

ISBN 0 00 686260 8