We rarely speak plainly about what it means to write after reading. Reading, as it actually happens (loose, recursive, full of hesitations), is more formative than we often acknowledge. Barthes puts it flatly: “You don’t create an idea.” This statement is neither a complaint nor a theory. It is a description of the condition from which one begins. Before anything can be written, the writer must come to terms with the limits of invention. That confrontation is what allows for serious work with form.
What continues to strike me, when I return to this brief translated piece by Chris Turner: Simply a Particular Contemporary, is how little Barthes claims for originality. He does not locate it in the sequence of ideas, nor in their arrangement. According to him, the intellectual economy is simply too vast. Ideas do not belong to any one person; they move through time and language. The task, then, is not to originate but to interrupt, to stop what is circulating and to configure it into a form. “A little bit the way they do in films.” The phrase is nearly offhand, technical in tone. But what it gestures toward is a private and careful act. I think of the splices that hold a film together, points of contact that become visible only when the image fails.
At an earlier point in my thinking, I would have resisted this view. I might have called it a kind of resignation. Now I understand it as a way of working that frees the writer from the burden of singularity. The beginning does not have to be new. Instead, it requires an ability to dwell among what already exists and to do so without losing one’s own tonal integrity. I no longer believe the essential distinction lies between the original and the borrowed. It lies, rather, between the unreflective transmission of ideas and their careful recombination.
There are certain phrases that remain with me, not because of what they state directly, but because of what they allow to happen later. These phrases act as joints in a structure whose shape is not yet clear. I have held onto some of them. They are scattered across notebooks that are now closed and shelved. One sentence in particular, a remark from a translator’s preface, returns each time I believe I am about to begin something new. I shan’t identify it. Its meaning must remain dormant, like a silence in the architecture of a future work.
Barthes does not resolve the dilemma he outlines. He describes a process. In calling it a “major transaction,” he reframes the act of writing. It is no longer a declaration of possession. It becomes a kind of ethical encounter. To write is to stand at a point of convergence, to recognise what has passed through one’s thinking, and to decide, quietly and precisely, what to hold onto. If anything endures, it is not because it was new. It is because it was exact.
For critics and academics maybe.
Those were the frames of reference available to Barthes.
I tend to the opinion that there are orders of creation. At the highest order, when form and content find a “total” fusion—arguably only possible in music—are, say, the late Beethoven quartets. Writing, painting (and mathematics?) have their own order from, in literature, the magnificence of Woolf or Kafka down to more mediocre ephemera (like the fatuous Opinions of this blogger!)
Do you agree with that quote, that there’s never any originality, that no ideas are ever created?
Does it matter whether I agree? I found it a passage worthy of reflection, as were the comments generated.
What do you mean by ‘originality’? If the question is whether I think it possible to provide fresh or novel insight into the human condition, then I would say a definite Yes. Do I believe it is possible to form ideas ex nihilo, then I think the answer is No. Every idea is shaped by its sociocultural system. There is too much ambiguity in how we use these English words.
Fair point sir. Sorry if I seem overly critical, I’m only exercised about it because it’s a bit of bugbear of mine. I think the attitude that quote sums up has had bad effects. Puts everything in quotation marks. I’ve seen a lot of young people who don’t feel they can create anything because of that.
I can imagine and understand the frustration. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Barthes was espousing the ‘every text is a pretext’ Derridean concept, nor do I think Derrida meant his wordplay to be interpreted in the way that second-rate postmodern critics favour. Thanks for taking time to comment.
Anyone who’s actually tried to create something knows that isn’t true. And the link between finance and creativity is weird.
It’s the sort of thing that sounds cool, but is actually pernicious.
It’s a perfect expression of French ‘theory’ in that era. What did it accomplish?
What did ‘it’ accomplish? For better of worse ‘it’ reshaped notions of “truth”; reshaped notions of “discourse”; reshaped the existence of the “margin(al)”, allowing this space to infiltrate the mainstream. Of course this was not all down to “French ‘theory'” but it remains astonishing the way in which this band of “theorists” succeeded in inserting themselves into both left and right wing academic and socio-political thinking, punching far above their apparent weight.
Why are you using all those quotation marks? What are you actually saying?
Having read your comment again, it makes sense. Sorry.
In other words, it accomplished nothing.
Very telling, those financial metaphors.