Roland Barthes’s 1979 essay “From Work to Text” outlined a program for poststructuralist theory by proclaiming the end of the literary “work.” The work, Barthes said, as an object that occupies library space, as a document with fixed and stable meaning that can be consumed by a passive reader, would be replaced by the text, conceived of as a “methodological field” (74). This text would be situated entirely in language and would remain in a continual state of production. Henceforth, the activity of the literary critic would take place solely within the realm of language production, of textuality. Critical flights of fancy would no longer be constrained by such conventional limitations as authors or their intentions or even, in some cases, the words on the page. As I have suggested, this movement from work to text was profoundly disturbing for many feminists. It seemed to dissolve the object of feminist investigations, the material woman who suffers oppression or the woman writer who triumphs in spite of it, into immaterial language—air—which seemed, to quote Falstaff, “a trim reckoning” indeed. Deconstruction seemed to offer to replace the newly discovered woman writer of feminist literary criticism with the tyranny of the (usually male) critic, who could appropriate for himself whatever creative power we used to attribute to the (usually male) author.
This book participates, along with several others—Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction to name just two—in attempts to refine poststructuralist feminist inquiry by shifting the focus from text to work. This movement is not a return to the work considered as a static object, a noun, but to work as a verb, conceived of as the cultural, intellectual, and ideological activity that constitutes individuals and texts within specific social formations. In this sense, work includes practices that are material as well as discursive; analyses of this work must account for the free play of linguistic and literary production and for the specific power relations that constrain this free play as well as the resistances to that power.
In “From Work to Text,” Barthes organizes his theory of the text around seven propositions. By way of summary, I would like to revise those seven propositions and suggest their implications for a feminist theory of complexity which explores the cultural work of gender.
(1) Unlike the text, which is experienced exclusively in the activity of language production, cultural and ideological work—and this includes the work of gender—is experienced not only in discursive practice but in countless material practices of everyday life as well. The method that explores the cultural work of gender must examine the interrelationships between the symbolic and material orders. Neither gender nor sex is an “eternal verity,” a given; they are the work of specific cultural practices, which have histories. If there is any such thing as a “woman’s sentence,” it can only be the product of the interplay among material and discursive practices; it does not point to anything essentially female. In examining the historical practices of such apparently ahistorical concepts as love, kinship, and pain, I have tried to show how such practices participate in the production of gendered individuals. These historically situated practices, in turn, can be seen as both producers and products of linguistic and literary productions, including poetry, religious writing, political treatises, or even of something as amorphously abstract as “style” or literary “value."
(2) A theory of complexity, of cultural work, must examine the power relations that attempt to determine and fix the “limits and rules of rationality and readability” (75) as well as the practices of resistance that transgress them. It must negotiate the boundaries between the order that produces reason and meaning and the chaos that challenges and resists culturally hegemonic meanings. Such negotiations are always tricky; the analysis must account for the apparent coherence and stability ideological order seems to promise and at the same time show the cracks and gaps in the facade which continually threaten its collapse. If I have occasionally seemed to lose track of that balance in my analyses, if I make larger claims for the resistance and subversion of the medieval trobairitz and mystics than may seem warranted, or if I seem to stress the failures of a Wollstonecraft or a Chopin to transcend the ideologies of gender, it is because I feel that feminists have generally seen medieval women almost solely in terms of their oppression, that they have located the emergence of organized feminist resistance in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft and others or the success of gynocriticism in figures such as Chopin. My aim has been to show that women have always been able to resist the ideological work of gender, just as they have always fallen prey to its ordering principles.
(3) While recognizing the persuasiveness of poststructuralist theories of the sign which hold that the signified is endlessly deferred through the disruptive free play of signifiers and that such disruption is potentially subversive of structures of order (including gender), theorists of cultural work also examine those hegemonic practices that create the illusion of a center that closes off this free play—practices that create the illusion of fixed meanings. If, at least since the eighteenth century, gender has been organizing individuals into two opposing and mutually exclusive sexes, then it is crucial to examine both how that organization has naturalized and fixed differences and how its control has been, in Poovey's words, “uneven” and unstable (Poovey 1988b, Laqueur 1990).
(4) In poststructuralist theory the text is a tissue of intertextual references, citations, echoes, and languages, which are ultimately "anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read” (Barthes 1979, 77). In theories of complexity, if intertextuality answers to dissemination rather than truth, it is also the occasion for dialogue and the transgression of the boundaries of the disciplines as they have been constituted to serve the administrative needs of such institutions as the university. Feminist theory did not require poststructuralism to intuit that its “work” must be truly interdisciplinary in Barthes’s sense of that term. “Interdisciplinary activity,” he writes,” . . . cannot be accomplished by simple confrontations between various specialized branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is not a peaceful operation: it begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down . . . to the benefit of a new object and a new language, neither of which is in the domain of those branches of knowledge that one calmly sought to confront” (1971, 73 ).
(5) If the author, in poststructuralist theory, is no longer paternal or privileged, neither can she be maternal and protected. I have, somewhat disingenuously, used the phrase “woman writer" throughout this book only to call into question its foundationalism as the organizing principle of feminist inquiry by constantly locating writing in a complex network of gender and other social relations that fracture the author’s apparent solidity as the locus of meaning in her texts. I do this most explicitly in my analyses of The Book of Margery Kempe and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but this aim is implicit in my choice of texts throughout. In adopting this necessary but somewhat duplicitous practice, quite frankly, I attempt to have it both ways. If the woman writer visits her texts only as a guest, I do not want her to be merely “ludic.” If she is not the origin or end of the text, its sole source of meaning, her political presence is nevertheless important, if only because authorship is still the ideological means—and perhaps the illusion—by which the institution of literature constitutes and organizes literary texts.1 It is important for feminist theory to proceed strategically on two opposing fronts: recognizing that “woman” is a production of culture, feminists must simultaneously insist that women have always been producers of culture.
(6) If the text is produced by the reader, all readers—and all the texts produced by readers—are not equal. Once again, the material practices of social institutions—universities, English and literature departments, publishers, book reviews—and particular social relations, such as those of gender, make some productions more likely than others. This is the argument of the last chapter. If reading is an act of collaboration between an “author” and a “reader,” it is also an act of consumption, bound up in the modes of production and reception which organize the activity of reading in a particular social formation.
(7) Finally, it is not enough simply to declare the utopian or sexual pleasure of the text without examining the political consequences of erotic pleasure, especially for women, whose sexuality has always been tied to the reproductive labor of society and controlled according to the reproductive needs of the dominant classes. If the sexual and linguistic promiscuity of the libertine pose is seen as liberating for the troubadour poets or for radicals like Shelley or Byron, its consequences for women—whether for Castelloza in the twelfth century, Aphra Behn in the seventeenth, Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth, or even for a fictional character like Edna Pontellier—are often disastrous. Feminist theory has much work to do to articulate a feminist analysis of sexuality which reclaims eroticism for women as well as for men.
The texts examined in this book range widely over time and place—from twelfth-century France to nineteenth-century America—perhaps more than is usual or even comfortable given the specialization that has characterized literary studies in the last half of the twentieth century. But my theoretical argument is tied to particular and local histories and to the identification of disparate examples of "cultural noise,” of information excluded from universalizing histories of order, so that my method has been to link chapters paratactically rather than hypotactically. My aim is to identify ruptures and gaps within a literary history that in this century has been resolutely linear and teleological. It has not been my intention to offer a new teleology to replace the old one, to show how feminist theory got here from there; nor am I interested in writing the “history of the woman writer.” Rather my hope is to glimpse in the margins of several local histories the possibilities for a different genre of history altogether, one that challenges the ontological necessity of categories of gender at the same time as it recognizes the importance of the political struggles and local resistance of women everywhere.
1Of course Barthes himself was aware of the political fallout the death of the author would create. As Vincent Leitch suggests: “The job of deconstructing the authority of the author involves desedimentizing a historical formation, which long ago installed itself as a purposeful ideology. So long has this notion reigned that it seems 'natural' to us now. Yet this 'social natural' serves demonstrable political and economic purposes. Propounding the death of the author, Barthes uncovers the pernicious combined forces of empiricism, rationalism, individualism, positivism, and capitalism—as they influence and direct a theory of literature and criticism. De-construction, of the telquel variety produced during the late 1960s and early 1970s, springs forth with an ideological agenda and a political mission” (1983, 106). Yet as it proliferated in American universities in the 1980s, deconstruction seemed to lose the force of this ideological agenda and political mission. The death of the author served more to aggrandize the (male) critic than to expose the pernicious effects of patriarchal order as an ideological formation. That it did perhaps suggests why the Paul de Man scandal has proved so painful for American academics who have invested so heavily in deconstruction.