from work to text

http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lisa_smith.barthes.html

After discussing Roland Barthes' essay "from work to text" in class I was inclined to look up more information regarding this subject. To be honest, I was hoping to come across something more explanatory in order to help me better understand Barthes' essay. However, i came across something much more interesting. There is an essay online by a writer named Lisa Smith. She is a member of the English Department at Brock University and her her essay was entitled "from Work to Text?"

Smith begins her essay by attempting to explain the distinctions Barthes makes between "work" and "text." She admits that the main purpose of her essay is to "explore how Barthes delineates a methodology of reading." for the purposes of introduction, Smith then proposes to look at Barthes' own essay as a work and as a text. This is the part of her essay that caught my attention. What better way to attempt to understand Barthes meaning of work vs. text than to apply it to his own essay. Here is an excerpt:


"In this context, it would be interesting to look at Barthes' own essay as a work and as a text. In many ways, Barthes signals his own separation from the "Newtonian" texts that claim to be works (Barthes 192). In other ways, however, the philosophy of the work inevitably permeates his own claims to avoid its dictates. As a work, as an entity which is separable from the discourse surrounding it, Barthes can claim that his essay is in conformation with the view of the text. Paradoxically, when viewed as a text, this separation from those texts which claim to be works is not achieved.
If I were analyzing Barthes' essay from the point of view of the theory of the work, I would accept his authorial claims to place "text" at the critical centre of attention and to throw the concept of "work" onto the periphery. At the beginning and at the end of his essay, Barthes clearly indicates his intention to separate his own critical formulations from critical formulations of the work. Since meta-language employs logic in order to set its own string of signifiers apart from the text, he will avoid doing so. He sets up the "arguments" and the "logic" which others employ in opposition to his "propositions" which are to be "understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense" (Barthes 192). During the course of the work, he attempts to maintain the distance between the binary opposition of "work" and "text" by defining each term in contrast to its Other. At the end of his essay, he again insists that his "few propositions . . . inevitably" fail to form a meta-language which would dictate how a text should be read (Barthes 197).
In other ways, however, the essay belongs to the textual world consisting of texts conceived as works. For instance, though he claims to avoid formulating a Theory of the Text, he cannot in fact escape the need to understand language through theorizing. Though he signals his aversion to logical constructs by attempting to assert rather than attempting to explain what constitutes a work and what constitutes a text, he cannot do so without operating according to the dictates of a meta-language. "

To the best of my understanding I think that what Smith is saying is undermining what Barthes was trying to do in his essay. Essentially, because it is difficult to compartmentalize Barthes' essay into either a work or a text his own theories about the two fall flat. The distinctions between the two seem almost abstract and cannot be applicable even to his own essay. Yes, there are elements of both in his writing, but when it comes to choosing the one that best fits his essay, one runs into some difficulty.

This is where Barthes' essay confuses me. I absolutely understand the distinctions he is making between the work and the text. We outlined them in class, and they are very logical distinctions. The problem however, arises when the attempt is made to apply these distinctions to a sample of writing. It is not so cut and dried then.