"Roland Barthes recognized
that the nature of the discourse and the events in France gave a completely new power to the
spoken word and the taking of power by the spoken word. May 1968 was the
historical consummation of a process of mass communication based both on the
media and the immediate, on the message and the ephemeral, on unreflective
imagination and the need for mastery. Barthes was merely denouncing an
anti-intellectualism that he had rejected ever since the polemics around his
controversial On Racine that
did indeed threaten any possible cultural critique. “There is an
intellectual Poujadism* that is always possible: a brutal distrust of language,
a dismissal of forms that are always considered sophistical, the accusation of
“jargon”, the rejection of writing, etc.’ In saying this, he was repeating his
position against the arrogance of the spoken word. His disaffection for
theater, earlier in the 1960s, was already evidence of a similar difficulty
with the spoken word that was always, when it was imposed and violent, on the
side of the law. Yet again, he contrasted it with the polysemia of writing,
where everything always needs to be invented: writing alone can be the site of
a real revolution.
This is a leitmotif in Barthes’
work: it expresses his disdain for the spontaneity of events and his conviction
that a written text - not as a transcription of the spoken word, but as a
reflection of the plurality of meaning – could bring together the cultural and
the political. “We will regard as suspect any eviction of writing, any
systematic primacy of speech, because, whatever the revolutionary alibi, both
tend to preserve the old symbolic system and refuse to link its revolution to
that of society. As cultural capitalism has merely strengthened its grip since
Barthes wrote these lines, we can simply point out how acute his analysis was.
The other point on which Barthes
proved to be a real visionary was the advent of technocracy as a moment in
capitalism less concerned with human labor than with the profitability of
science.In his lecture of 21 November 1968, he said: “The present day is
certainly a turning point or at least a significantly new emphasis. How are we
to define it? The conjunction or confluence of an ideology and a politics: an
ideology, that of the human sciences, and a technocratic politics. The objective
alliance between the human sciences and technology risks invading our schools,
with its technological demands (research, specialization, qualification) shared
by bodies and assemblies set up in May (the document of the reform committee: ‘Cutting-edge
or very specialized sectors,’ etc.). Elsewhere, he pointed out how the
slogans of ’68 on the university system, if they were assembled like the pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle, form an image which ‘resembled the contemporary American
university.’ This denunciation of everything that sacrificed culture to
efficiency is such an accurate projection of the university system as we find
it now that we cannot accuse Barthes of having adopted a reactionary attitude
in 1968. It was always in the name of the same principles that he established
his line of behavior. While his relation to writing included the possibility of
contradiction, in the name of plurality and the fragmentation of meaning, his
political behavior and the reasons for his rejections or his denunciations did
not alter."
* The movement's
"common man" populism led to antiparliamentarism (Poujade called the
National Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris" and the deputies a
"pile of rubbish" and "pederasts"), a strong
anti-intellectualism (Poujade denounced the graduates from the École
Polytechnique as the main culprits for the woes of 1950s France and boasted
that he had no book learning), xenophobia, and antisemitism especially aimed
against Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France (claiming "Mendès is French
only as the word added to his name"), who was perceived as responsible for
the loss of Indochina. Poujadism also supported the cause of French Algeria.
Tiphaine Samoyault in Barthes, A Biography
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