The Problem of Origins
The problem of “origins” weaves through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes. The word “origin” takes on similar and dissimilar meanings with each writer; Saussure frames the notion of origin with his theory of language as a system and the arbitrariness of the sign. In Barthes’ work the notion of origin relates to his notion of the death of the Author.
In Saussure, the notion of origin is related to his theory of language as a system and the arbitrariness of the sign. I will, for the purposes of this writing bypass Saussure’s critique of philology and its quest for an original language or Ur-language. First, origin as a pre-existing source is connected to Saussure’s notion of language as a system. For Saussure language has no origin in a domain of pre-existing ideas or concepts. As he states in Course in General Linguistics
If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next;but this is not true.
There are no universal ideas or concepts outside of language that serve as the basis or origin for all languages. Language – each unique language – slices the world into different categories located within that particular linguistic construction; language constitutes our thought
In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure.
According to Saussure, language does not stand outside a structure and order of the world that we apprehend independently of language and then express and represent through language. The system of language structures our thought and constitutes our reality. It is the linguistic structure that cuts up reality and makes it something we can know. Language is not a dressing to be hung on an already constituted epistemology. It constitutes any epistemology. Secondly, Saussure’s concept of the arbitrariness of the sign dismantles any notion of linguistic origins. Saussure departs from the Lockean notion that states words, ideas, and external things have a natural correspondence or connection. There is no necessary link between a sound and the concept it signifies. Names do not naturally originate in ideas or in things. What is the case for Saussure is that language is made up of signs and that each sign consists of a signifier and a signified. These connections are arbitrary. This arbitrariness of the sign means that there are no intrinsic connections between signifiers and signifieds or in what signifieds stand for
Instead of pre-existing ideas then, we find in all the foregoing examples (Saussure gives examples from different languages) values emanating from the system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms in the system
The meaning of a word does not originate from a natural connection to its concept (or thing) but from its position within the linguistic system. The arbitrariness of the sign means that it is only in its relation to other signs that meaning or value is derived. The meaning of a signified is derived not from its positive connection to a thing but in its difference from all the terms that it is not within the system. Further on Saussure states
Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.
For Saussure, no term has any meaning outside the system of language. If signs were motivated this would not be the case.
For Roland Barthes, origin takes on a different connotation. Barthes was concerned with literary texts. In The Death of the Author Barthes builds on and goes beyond Saussure’s work. Barthes critiques the idea of the author as being the origin of meaning for a literary text. In ordinary culture
The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if 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.
For Barthes the nature of language goes against this misconception. For the writer it “is language which speaks, not the author.” This echoes Saussure’s insight that language precedes the subject. For Barthes and Saussure language constitutes human thought. The single authorial voice dissolves in this “pure gesture of inscription” which negates any personal expression. It is language which is at the origin of the text and a language which “ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” Barthes see language as writing through the writer. Barthes is building here on Saussure’s notion that each term within the system of language gains its meaning from its relation to the other terms.
Barthes is also critiquing the notion of origin as “originality.” The writer never creates original works of art, a work that emanates from a unique, original genius. His work is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” The author is too much inside his language and culture to do anything but create a “tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.” There is always some other text or set of words preceding the author and his “message.” His work is “always anterior never original.” This is perhaps what Lautréamont meant in his Poésies when he said “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.” For Barthes, all writers are plagiarists.
The death of the author relates to the notion of origins and its effect on interpretation. For Barthes the death of the author dismantled any notion of closure or finding a theological meaning within the text. As Barthes states
To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author…beneath the work: when the author has been found, the text is explained.
Any attempt to decipher the text in order to arrive at a single meaning is a form of authoritarianism and a form of repression. Without the author as the origin of the single correct meaning, the text is liberated into a multitude of readings and the play of signification The authority of the author reflects, for Barthes, the notion that signifier and signified are locked together in a single denotative meaning which is ultimately an expression of hierarchy. Once the author passes away, texts are liberated from any singular “theological” meaning. Texts are no longer deciphered but “disentangled.” This linguistic rebellion is ultimately “revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases–reason, science, law.” The death of the author is a local disturbance which Barthes sees as spreading to the death of the origin and releasing meaning from an array of metaphysical and authoritarian origins. From the ashes of the author rises the reader. “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The various quotations and multiple writings are unified in the reader. However this reader is not the Author written in lower case letters, with the same attributes denied in the author reborn in the reader. This reader is impersonal. He or she is a reader “without history, biography, psychology.” Barthes’ reader is more of a site, a specific location or “field that holds together in a single field all the traces by which a written text is constituted.” Barthes’ reader is a linguistic field where the text is never complete because of the powerful destabilizing play of language. This incompleteness and infinite play of the text is the jouissance of the reader. Just as the author’s meaning is no longer the signified of the text, the reader’s utterance of “I” is no longer the signifier for the signified “self.” The reader’s self is opened up to the vertiginous play of the text. It dissolves in the many and varied voices of the text.
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