Let me begin with two questions. The first of which asks whether it is possible for writing to be political, and with that in mind, be revolutionary in its content. The second of which asks whether it is possible for reading to be political, and with that in mind, be revolutionary in its outcome.
Let these questions stew in your head for a time, as these are questions that have, are, and will be asked in either the colloquial everyday small talk or in the hallowed halls of an academy. Or so I would like to believe, and proven correct shortly after once a new video game causes some manner of controversy. In any case, the first of the two questions were asked, and addressed in some way or form, by thinkers and artists from Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and many more. A question that remains charged with varying sentiments, roughly divisible between two distinct camps.
Stage
Before going on further, I shall outline that the term political here does not merely refer to the sphere of politics as a political arena. Politics as party-politics of the state, the macropolitical stage of action, the bourgeois institutions of bureaucracy – the definition of politics used here runs beyond the formalities of the state apparatuses and similar structures. It is instead experienced through everyday life, the interactions between agents and their worldviews via communication – verbal, textual, visual, and so forth. Through this definition, we see a more extensive conception of what it means for “art or artists are to be political”, where the political or the potential thereof exists through the dynamisms of societal convention. What entails from recognizing the political as this open system of networked actors and action is a potential that may move towards a revolutionary tendency. A tendency to supplant or subvert the extant conventions of the day, whereby even those in the margins of the political can exercise their political power against the formalized arena of politics as it is typically understood.
From that illustration of the political, some may react with disgust, believing that political writing, political art more broadly, is abhorrent and must be quashed to preserve some form of dignity of the works. Such a thing must not be promoted as the goal of the artist or author, a certain sentimentality of “art for art’s sake” that their work does not require, nor should, express the political. Some others in full affirmation that such activities are always necessarily political. Lauding the capacities in which writing, art more broadly, can spur a certain political fervor and reflects a political consciousness of a given society. Eventually billowing over into revolutionary ethos that may challenge the norms of the day.
There is a normative emphasis focused upon the producer of the work of text or work of art. The Author as artist, as the great initiator of a work, must see to fulfilling a certain normative intent. An intentionality that must be met in some way to demonstrate excellence or worth in their craft. I will propose that the two camps are blind to a key actor in the wider game of art. That is the role of the reader, the audience of the works. Often when discussing the political nature (or lack thereof) of such works the audience is simply secondary. Heeding to the audience’s desires may be brought up, but ultimately the audience – the reader – is merely second class. They will take what is created, what is given, and that is that. There is a great irony to this as one may have guessed, the interpreter of the text, of the work of art at large, is usually an audience member themselves. Selling oneself short with a tinge of hypocrisy. Of course, the Venn diagram between such interpreters of texts – such as the philosopher, literary critic, journalist, and so on – and Author overlaps greatly. This is especially evident in the case of someone like Jean-Paul Sartre, whose oeuvre spans many disciplines, would still affirm the role of the Author, the writer or artist of works, to possess political and ethical responsibilities that cannot be avoided or put aside. The audience and their interpretation of things is in the backseat, not even shotgun to the ride. Perhaps it is a dead end in a time of greater permanence of works. due to the digitization of text and art, to affirm the writer, this grand creator of works, as having a significant role to play as a political actor. The notion of the revolutionary subject as it pertains to works of art, text, music, and so forth should not be solely applied to the creator, author, composer – it would be greedily reductionist and myopic to situate it primarily upon them. They may be a subject of a certain kind of political responsibility, but the normative push upon them to imbue (or not imbue) politics in their works is perhaps, not an ideal starting point for the political nature of art and other such related matters. It is no longer possible to neglect the role of the reader, of the audience at large, from the analyses of political art. From here, we shall move towards a wholly different player on the scene.
Crisis
As one may have anticipated so far from the title and second question alone, it is the role of the reader who I am interested in. Not the Author or Artist, the creator of the artwork in question, but rather the one who engages with the text and artwork post its publication and creation – the audience, the viewer, the reader. To simplify things from this point onwards, anything to do with the production of a text or work of art is the domain of the Author and anything to do with the engagement of a final product the domain of the reader. Thus, the aim is not to affirm the Author’s political or apolitical convictions, but rather construct a point of departure wherein the reader’s convictions and aspirations are held in greater scrutiny. One that pertains to the reader’s relation to the text or work of art alone, rather than the reader’s relation to the Author through some mystified lineage.
I will go over, in brief, a select reading of Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author to further ease in this focus on the reader as a political agent. This is a work that is often misunderstood and poorly utilized. The rather cartoonish applications of this short, seminal piece end up caricaturizing the task of interpretation, as if it were “open season” to bowdlerize texts in purple garb, recuperating it into a larger institutional structure neutering it of its emancipatory potentiality. Such errors may be seen in literary pedagogy, in particular the tendency to guide interpretations, rather than attempting a provocative engagement that liberates the text and text’s meaning from the confines of intentionality. Errors that are themselves a product of tacitly accepting the theological weight of authorship, referencing towards some originator or origin, some true meaning to be discovered by the reader that was somehow embedded within the text by the Author. This search for an authentic, true meaning of a text qua authorial intent is an allure that in the end serves no other purpose than to root the text with an arbitrary, necromantic essence of the Author itself. Any attempt at deciphering text derived through such rigid methods, while certainly engaged on some level with the text by analyzing every inch of detail that is present, is doomed by a modality where the Author’s spirit, the Author’s seeming intent is the word of Law. A cult and religious order is formed, whereby the Author is viewed as the Lord of the work and textual world, governing actively as a demiurge. A theology that is assumed to be drawn out through what may very well be a séance, a foolish ritual of bringing out a voice that could never have really existed to begin with. It is a futile affair that has uninterrogated premises – let alone defensible ones. We see a total rebuke of such approaches to text opening salvo of the essay, where the text discusses Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, which serves to criticize in kind those lackluster applications of the Death of the Author and other such interventions towards a liberated meaning of the text.
“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 paint 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.” (Barthes, 142)
“Who is speaking thus” is the important key question to be asked in understanding Barthes’ project in a radical light. An attempt at reconstructing the intentions through analysis of the context, history, and psychology, to better ascertain the full picture of the text, instead of merely using these as intertextual markers and a point of departure, is a doomed and unsatisfying affair. The end goal – and I use this word goal very loosely – is to free it from whatever the Author could conceivably thought and bring forth what the text could possibly ‘say’ of the existing, present context. Rather than the Author, it is by reading the text that constructs those potentialities, potentialities for new meanings to be made sensible through existing, living contexts. Meaning, and specifically political meaning, is emancipated from the authority of the Author and instead situated in the stage and paradigm of the present, ready to be continually forged by the reader, given the existing situation and context they exist in. Meaning can be said to be fluid with respect to the reader, always with new potentials of reassessment and interpretation.
To that end, art – be it images, auditory, or textual – is only made political after the fact. Whether the text was intrinsically political or the otherwise, perhaps it could have been a political piece for its time, we as the reader cannot know nor discover that element through interrogations that revolve around the Author or those “deep” contexts. What is “discovered” here is less meaning and more so the facts and figures, dates, history, reconstructions of language and certain psychosocial attitudes. These are the component parts of a text, things that do not in themselves contribute to a particular truth aside from serving as mereological being of the text as a tangible object to be interacted with. Meaning and political meaning takes cues the cartographic terrain of a text, the information as presented within, towards different trajectories through applicability that terminates any intention believed to exist in a work. In this light the Author too becomes a one of these markings on the map of a text or work of art. The ideas presented may be possessed at some point by this named entity who created the work, but the meanings that may be expressed – that may be derived and drawn out by the countless readers who encounter the work – is beyond any notion of formal ownership to speak of. A phenomenon that rejects the very notion of intellectual property and the authenticity of ideas.
Creation
Thus, meaning is made and justified through the process of reading the text on its own terms. It is through engaging with the text on the text’s terms, its inner life and as a reflection of the code manifest by the extant, tangible reality that the reader is situated in, that shapes the way the text may be envisioned by that reader. A reader is always in this sort of active engagement with these newly contextualized perspectives, molded by the extant cultural code and interrogates the textual world based on such worldly referents. It is within this dimension of code that carries with it a certain dynamism of semiosis through the various connotations of each sign, each textual event, each scene that develops through a reading of the text. There exists a conversation – between the reader, the text in question, other texts the reader may encounter, and the world system as it is in the present – that shape the understanding of a particular text or work of art, by way of signified connotations that signify other signifieds. Connotations that themselves are open systems of reference that fluctuate and transform over various paradigms across different individuated experiences, never for one moment static in its existence. It is for this reason that there cannot be a specific, authentic manner of interpretation, a correct way of approaching a text, let alone an intentionality that is embedded and written that secures the Author’s psyche within said text. The actual process of reading – the engagement of the reader with the textual and contextual worlds – does not become an attempt at discovering the secret truths that only the Author could have known, but rather the continuous creation and reconfiguration of meaning in an outward manner. Every reading of a text, a piece of media or a work of art, will never be identical to the last time it is read – differentiation made manifest. The experience of the text to the reader will always be defined by those differences, arising from the psyche, the environment, and so on. This becomes increasingly the case when this creative act of meaning making manifests as applicability and recontextualization for the political. How a text or work of art may be understood politically will be variable and contingent upon a multitude of factors, laid out as a complex network of communication and comprehension. A thousand meanings may bloom forth, yet this does not suggest all meanings must be asserted and accepted without question. Rather, all these meanings can come to the foreground and receive their respective scrutiny or praise, none of these may be suggested as ultimately true or worthy of unconditional respect. Thus, there is no validity beyond the applicability and commensurability of meaning to those multifarious ways of life – especially so for the political.
That said, the aims and suggestion towards political writing, political art more generally, cannot be dismissed outright. These are interventions that serve the purpose in either provoking the norms with its transgressions or initiate much desired discourses, often to provoke novel ways of expression that subvert attempts at calcifying conventions of the status quo. Challenges towards so called common sense. However, we would be fooling ourselves to believe that there is no place for the radical reader and that the political is only initiable by the Author. The audience who engages with the material is a subject to be affirmed as full of potential, as full of creative prowess to partake in the dynamism of language and communication. The appropriation of how signs may be understood overall cannot be merely through the act of writing. The assertion that the Author has the primary role within the communicative network cannot be simply taken for granted, simply left unquestioned. Creation is not simply a physical act of putting pen to paper, clacking along on a keyboard with an idea in mind. This theological, vulgarly eschatological, quality that posits responsibility towards the Author as an authority on text is a flawed conception of creativity, one that fails to capture the complex dynamism of the notion that exists through meaning making and the reshaping of the sign systems extant in communication. It must be said that this cultic reverence of texts as bestowed upon by the Author-God confines and declares the text a static, enclosed system. A naïve and deeply mistaken belief considering what is known and established regarding the dynamism of the open system of the political as well as the system of signs itself.
"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." (Barthes, 146)
Illustrated here, the creative output and force of writing is put on trial. The political creativity of a political writing must already reflect its message through a series of other cues, be it other texts or social norms at large. The enclosure of meaning to only that has been written chafes in its eschato-theological hubris. It is from here that one must see creativity as an unfolding process that manifests immanently through a multitude of actors, rather than solely the words of the Author-God. Storming against the enclosure of texts as they may appear, to embrace the dynamic openness of signification as it exists.
Formulating a definition of creativity that itself analyzes the conditions of this vulgarized eschatology must take seriously a call towards a Birth of a Reader as the outcome of a long dead, long absent Author. A self-liberating soteriology that affirms the dynamism of conventions as created through meaning making and the subjects of communication, as created through reflections upon the extant modes of living. One that may recontextualize works in new modes of intertextuality, allowing the reader to burst forth into the world a meaning that corresponds with an interrogated interrogation, a re-enlivened understanding of the text in the present that defiles the given norms of the present. It is the politicization of a work rather than the political essence of intention that liberates the reader by way of its emancipated and free flowing meaning. Politicization is forged through such defilements, often flagrant bastardization, a process that itself is not necessarily forced upon by the reader unto the text, but itself arises with respects to the reader’s desire for meaning itself to be emancipated. An iconoclasm against the Author-God and the extant social order to assert the creative joys of the reader. A creativity that situates the politics of daily life as a stage that unshackles oneself from the passivity of being a mere spectator to the world. Thus, politicized meaning wanders freely in its transgressions against the norms of the day, against the attempts to govern it, nothing more.
A violence is inflicted upon the written text. Especially so if one still believes it to be the Author’s words, for it shall always be ‘disrespected’ in such a manner when it comes to the political – once more an indictment of the projects of the intentionally political. It is not simply enough to ask that works be political when they are conceived, that the birth of text must necessarily be political, as the meaning of the text to the reader is ultimately individuated and diverges away from any seeming original purpose. These miscarriages of the political work are perhaps the primary reason for such vitriol and revulsion towards the notions of a political art, a political text, insofar as they often end up being seen as imposing and forceful – not belonging to the creative self-projects that may affirm oneself. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with this, in fact many feel – as authors – that their works must be political at all costs to upend what they may see as unjust or deserves interrogation through the forms of art possible. Nevertheless, these claims that the political work of art must be intended from the beginning, that there is a responsibility on part of the author, are not viable positions to be held as established earlier. It is an arrogance of simplicity. Novel approaches to the politics of everyday life require a recognition of the multitude of actants that exists within the world. The Author is neither a messiah nor a saviour, the simplicity of demanding political responsibility on the point of conception is itself is incapable of spurring the dialogues we see that alters the terrain of the political. Communication rooted within the dialogue of intertextuality, between text and context, and between text and reader. A communication that demands and accepts the liberation of the text and its meanings from any suggestion of authenticity and paternalistic necessity.
The politicization of works offers the autonomy of the audience, the reader of the text, to experiment on their own terms upon what sorts of meanings may arise. The task of politicization, the political reading, is both interrogative and subversive as it is creative and affirmatory – a truly novel manner of interpretation liberated from Author and the confinement of text to more ‘correct’ readings. The engagement with the text that is most applicable and gives way to enlivened autonomy is the one ought to be pursued by oneself as a reader. A soteriology of and through text from the standpoint of the audience, the multitudinous masses who desire nothing more than an unfettered, unburdened life. One that is truly revolutionary in its outcome. To that end, perhaps asking for political works and how certain mediums are political is the wrong question to ask. Instead, the question should be, how may such and such a work be politicized?
If you managed to get this far, is it not incredibly ironic that this article sets out to do an explicitly political call for the politicization of works through the activity of creating meaning by way of defenestrating the Author-God? To that I conclude with this rather tongue in cheek faux-koan.
If you see an Author on road, kill them.
Source Text
Barthes, Roland. "Death of the Author." Image-music-text: Roland Barthes. Trans. Stephen Heath. Collins, 1977. 142-48. Print.