Authors and Writers

V V no speaks? Who writes? We still lack a sociology oflanguage. What we know is that language is a power and that,from public body to social class, a group of men is sufficientlydefined if i t possesses, to various degrees, the national lan-guage. Now, for a very long time-probably for the entireclassical capitalist period, i.e., from the sixteenth to the nine-teenth century, in p13nss-the uncontested owners of the lan-guage, and they alone, were authors; if we except preachersand jurists (enclosed moreover in functional languages), noone else spoke, and this "monopoly" of the language pro-duced, paradoxically, a rigid order, an order less of producersthan of production: it was not the literary profession whichwas structured (it has developed greatly in three hundredyears, from the domestic poet to the businessman-writer), butthe very substance of this literary discourse, subjected to rulesof use, genre, and composition, more or less immutable fromMarot to Verlaine, from Montaigne to Gide. Contrary to so-called primitive societies, in which there is witchcraft onlythrough the agency of a witch doctor, as Mauss has shown, theliterary institution transcended the literary functions, and

From Critical Essat,s.

185

1 B 6 . B - - , A B A R T H E S R E A D E Rwithin this institution, its essential raw material, language. In-stitutionally, the literature of France is its language, a half-l inguistic, half-aesthetic system which has not lacked a mythicdimension as well, that of its clarity.

When, in France, did the author cease being the only one tospeak? Doubtless at the time of the Revolution, when therefirst appear men who appropriate the authors' language forpolit ical ends. The institution remains in place: it is sti l l amatter of that great French language, whose lexicon andeuphony are respectfully preserved throughout the greatestparoxysm of French history; but the functions change, thepersonnel is increased for the next hundred years; the authorsthemselves, from Chateaubriand or Maistre to Hugo or Zola,help broaden the l iterary function, transform this institution-alized language of which they are still the acknowledged own-ers into the instrument of a new action; and alongside theseauthors in the strict sense of the word, a new group is consti-tuted and develops, a new custodian of the public language.Intellectuals? The word has a complex resonance;1 I prefercalfing them here writers. And since the present may be thatfragile moment in history where the two functions coexist, fshould like to sketch a comparative typology of the author andthe writer with reference to the substance they share: language.

The author performs a function, the writer an activity. Notthat the author is a pure essence: he acts, but his action isimmanent in its object, it is performed paradoxically on itsown instrument: language; the author is the man who labors,who works up his utterance (even if he is inspired) and func-tionally absorbs himself in this labor, this work. His activityinvolves two kinds of norm: technical (of composition, genre,style) and artisanal (of patience, correctness, perfection). The

'Apparently the word intellectual, in the sense we give it today, was bornat the time of the Dreyfus affair, obviously applied by the anti-Dreyfusardsto the Dreyfusards.

Authors and Writers e4 187paradox is that, the raw material becoming in a sense its ownend, literature is at bottom a tautological activity, like that ofthose cybernetic machines constructed for themselves (Ash-by's homeostat) : the author is a man who radically absorbsthe world's why in a how to write. And the miracle, so tospeak, is that this narcissistic activity has always provoked aninterrogation of the world: by enclosing himself in the how towrite, the author ultimately discovers the open question parexcellence: why the world? What is the meaning of things? Inshort, it is precisely when the author's work becomes its ownend that it regains a mediating character: the author conceivesof l i terature as an end, the world restores it to him as a means:and it is in this perpetual inconclusiveness that the authorrediscovers the world, an alien world moreover, since l iteraturerepresents it as a question-never, finally, as an answer.

Language is neither an instrument nor a vehicle: it is astructure, as we increasingly suspect;but the author is the onlyman, by definition, to lose his own structure and that of theworld in the structure of language. Yet this language is an(infinitely) labored substance; it is a l itt le l ike a superlanguage-reality is never anything but a pretext for it (for the author,to write is an intransitive verb);hence it can never explain theworld, or at least, when it claims to explain the world, it doesso only the better to conceal its ambiguity: once the explana-tion is fixed in a work, it immediately becomes an ambiguousproduct of the real, to which it is linked by perspective; inshort, l i terature is always unrealistic, but its very unrealitypermits it to question the world-though these questions cannever be direct: starting from a theocratic explanation of theworld, Balzac finally does nothing but interrogate. Thus theauthor existentially forbids himself two kinds of language,whatever the intelligence or the sincerity of his enterprise:first, doctrine, since he converts despite himself, by his veryproject, every explanation into a spectacle: he is always an

1BB ps, A B A R T H E S R E A D E Rinductor of ambiguity,2 second, evidence, since he has con-signed himself to language, the author cannot have a naiveconsciousness, cannot "work up" a protest without his mes-sage finally bearing much more on the working-up than on theprotest: by identifying himself with language, the author losesall claim to truth, for language is precisely that structurewhose very goal (at least historically, since the Sophists), onceit is no longer rigorously transitive, is to neutralize the trueand the false.3 But what he obviously gains is the power todisturb the world, to afford it the dizzying spectacle of praxiswithout sanction. This is why it is absurd to ask an author for"commitment": a "committcd" author claims simultaneousparticipation in two structures, inevitably a source of decep-tion. What we can ask of an author is that he be responsible;again, let there be no mistake: whether or not an author isresponsible for his opinions is unimportant; whether or not anauthor assumes, more or less intell igently, the ideological im-plications of his work is also secondary; an author's trueresponsibil i ty is to support l i terature as a failed commitment,as a Mosaic glance at the Promised Land of the real (this isKafka's responsibil i ty, for example ) .

Naturally, l i terature is not a grace, it is the body of theprojects and decisions which lead a man to fulf i l l himself (thatis, in a sense, to essentialize himself) in language alone: anauthor is a man who wants to be an author. Naturally too,society, which consumes the author, transforms project intovocation, labor into talent, and techniclue into art: thus is bornthe myth of f ine writ ing: the author is a salaried priest, he isthe half-respectable, half-ridiculous guardian of the sanctuary' An author can produce a system, but it will never be consumed as such.3Structure of reirlity and structure of language: no better indication of thedifficulty of a coincidence between the two than the constant failure ofdialectic, once it becomes discourse: for language is not dialectic, it canonly say "we must be dialectical," but it cannot be so itself: language isa representation without perspective, except precisely for the author's; butthe author dialecticizes hirnself, he does not dialecticize the world.

Authors and Writers ,2-B 189

of the great French language, a kind of national treasure' a

sacred merchandise, produced, taught' consumed, and ex-

ported in the context of a sublime economy of values' This

iacralization of the author's struggle with form has great con-

sequences, and not merely formal ones: it permits society-orSociety-to distance the work's content when it risks becom-

ing an embarrassment, to convert it into pure spectacle' to

*hl.tr it is entitled to apply a liberal (i'e', an indifierent)judgment, to neutralize the revolt of passion, the subversion ofcriticism (which forces the "committed" author into an inces-sant and impotent Provocation)-in short, to recuperate theauthor: every author is eventually digested by the literary in-

stitution, unless he scuttles himself, i.e., unless he ceases to

identify his being with that of language: this is why so few

authors renounce writ ing, for that is l i terally to kil l themselves,to die to the being they have chosen; and if there are suchauthors, their silence echoes like an inexplicable conversion(Rimbaud).4

The writer. on the other hand, is a "transitive" man, he

posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), ofwhich language is merely a means; for him language supportsa praxis, it does not constitute one. Thus language is restoredto the nature of an instrument of communication, a vehicle of"thought." Even if the writer pays some attention to style, thisconcern is never ontological. The writer performs no essentialtechnical action upon language; he employs an utterancecommon to all writers, a koinE in which we can of course

distinguish certain dialects (Marxist, for example, or Chris-tian, or existentialist), but very rarely styles' For what definesthe writer is the fact that his project of communication isnaive: he does not admit that his message is reflexive' that it

a These are the modern elements of the problem' We know that on thecontrary Racine's contemporaries were not it- all surprised when he suddenlystoppeci writing tragedies and became a royal functionary'

I

1 9 0 1 3 s . ' A B A R T H E S R E A D E Rcloses over itself, and that we can read in it, diacritically,anything else but what he means: what writer would tolerate apsychoanalysis of his language? He considers that his workresolves an ambiguity, institutes an irreversible explanation(even if he regards himself as a modest instructor); whereasfor the author, as we have seen, it is just the other wayaround: he knows that his language, intransitive by choice andby labor, inaugurates an ambiguity, even if i t appears to beperemptory, that it offers itself, paradoxically, as a monumen-tal silence to be deciphered, that it can have no other mottobut Jacques Rigaut's profound remark: and even when Iaffirm,l am sti l l questioning.

The author participates in the priest's role, the writer in theclerk's; the author's language is an intransitive act (hence, in asense, a gesture), the writer's an activity. The paradox is thatsociety consumes a transitive Ianguage with many more res-ervations than an intransitive one: the writer's status, eventoday when writers abound, is much more problematic thanthe author's. This is primarily the consequence of a materialcircumstance: the author's language is a merchandise offeredthrough traditional channels, it is the unique object of an insti-tution created only for l i terature; the writer's language, on thecontrary, can be produced and consumed only in the shadowof institutions which have, originally, an entirely differentfunction than to focus on language: the university, scientif icand scholarly research, polit ics, etc. Then, too, the writer'slanguage is dependent in another way: because it is (or con-siders itself) no more than a simple vehicle, its nature asmerchandise is transferred to the project of which it is theinstrument: we are presumed to sell .,thought', exclusive ofany art:' now the chief mythic attribute of ,,pure" thought (itwould be better to say "unapplied" thought) is precisely that itis produced outside the channel of money: contrary to form(which costs a lot, as Val6ry said), thought costs nothing, but

Authors and Writers ,r-B 191it also does not sell itself, it gives itself-generously. Thispoints up at least two new differences between author andwriter. First, the writer's production always has a free but alsoa somewhat "insistent" character: the writer offers societywhat society does not always ask of him: situated on themargin of institutions and transactions, his language appearsparadoxically more individual, at least in its motifs, than theauthor's language: the writer's function is to say at once andon every occasion what he thinks;' and this function sufficcs,he thinks, to justify him; whence the crit ical, urgent aspect ofthe writer's language: it always seems to indicate a conflictbetween thought's irrepressible character and the inertia of asociety reluctant to consume a merchandise which no specificinstitution normalizcs. Thus we see a contr6yi6-snd this isthe second difference-that the social function of l i terary lan-guage (that of the author) is prccisely to transform thought(or consciousness, or protest) into merchandise; sociely wagesa kind of vital warfare to appropriate, to acclimatize, to insti-tutionalize the risk of thought, and it is language, that modelinstitution, which affords it the means to do so: the paradoxhere is that "provocative" language is readily accommodatedby the l iterary institution: the scandals of language, fromRimbaud to Ionesco, are rapidly and perfectly integrated;whereas "provocative" thought, insofar as it is to be immedi-ate (without mediation), can only exhaust itself in the noman's land of form: the scandal is never total.

I am describing here a contradiction which, in fact, is rarelypure: everyone today moves more or less openly between thetwo postulations, the author's and the writer's; it is doubtlessthe responsibility of history which has brought us into the

"This {unction of immediate nnnilestation is the very opposite of the author's:(l) the author hoards, he publishes at a rhythm which is not that of hisconsciousness; (2) he mediatizes what he thinks by a laborious and "regular"form; (3) he permits a free interrogation of his work, he is anylhing butdosmal ic.

192 d-' A B A R T H E S R E A D E Rworld too late to be complacent authors and too soon (?) tobe heeded writers. Today, each member of the intelligentsiaharbors both roles in himself, one or the other of which he"retracts" more or less well: authors occasionally have theimpulses, the impatiences of writers; writers sometimes gainaccess to the theater of language. We want to write something,and at the same time we write (ifitransitively)' In short, ourage produces a bastard type: the author-writer. His function isinevitably paradoxical: he provokes and exorcises at the sametime; formally, his language is free, screened from the institu-tion of literary language, and yet, enclosed in this very free-dom, it secretes its own rules in the form of a common style;having emerged from the club of men-of-letters, the author-writer finds another club, that of the intelligentsia. On thescale of society as a whole, this new group has a complemcn-tary function: the intellectual's style functions as the paradox-ical sign of a nonlanguage, it permits society to experiencethe dream of a communication without system (without in-stitution) : to write without "style," to communicate "purethought" without such communication developing any para-sitical message-that is the model which the author-writercreates for society. It is a model at once distant and necessary,with which society plays something of a cat-and-mouse game:it acknowledges the author-writer by buying his books (how-ever few), recognizing their public character; and at the sametime it keeps him at a distance, obliging him to support himselfby means of the subsidiary institutions it controls (the univer-sity, for instance), constantly accusing him of intellectualism,i.e., in terms of myth, sterility (a reproach the author neverincurs). In short, from an anthropological viewpoint, theauthor-writer is an excluded figure integrated by his very ex-clusion, a remote descendant of the accursed: his function insociety as a whole is perhaps related to the one L6vi-Straussattributes to the witch doctor: a function of complementarity,

Authors and Writers ',-B 193both witch doctor and intellectual in a sense stabilizing a dis-ease which is necessary to the collective economy of health'And naturally it is not surprising that such a conflict (or sucha contract, if you prefer) should be joined on the level oflanguage; for language is this paradox: the institutionalizalionof subjectivity.

1960