Is it scientifically productive to read McLuhan? An embarrassing problem, because you have to take care not to liquidate in the name of academic common sense someone who writes the Canticle of Sister Electricity. How much fertility is concealed behind this perpetual intellectual erection?
McLuhan does not confine himself to saying to us “Ace of Spades equals death,” but he makes further affirmations that, though still kabbalistic, are of the type of “legs: eleven”: in which case we do not have a totally unmotivated relationship, as in the former statement, but a certain structural homology. And the search for homological structures frightens only narrow minds and alphabets incapable of seeing beyond their own primers. When Panofsky discovered a structural homology between the plan of Gothic cathedrals and the form of medieval theological treatises, he tried to compare two modus operandi that give life to relational systems that can be described by a single diagram, a single formal model.
And when McLuhan sees a relationship between the disappearance of the Gutenbergian mentality and certain ways of conceiving organizational structures in a linear and hierarchical way, he is undoubtedly working on the same plane of heuristic happiness. But when he adds that the same process had led to the disappearance of the lines of porters waiting the arrival of guests in a hotel then he begins to enter the realm of the unverifiable, and when he comes to the disappearance of the vertical lines in nylon stockings he is in the realm of the imponderable. When he then cynically plays with current opinions, knowing they are false, he arouses our suspicions. McLuhan knows that a computer performs many operations at instantaneous speed, in a single second, but he also knows that this fact does not authorize him to declare that the instantaneous synchronization of numerous operations had put an end to the old syntax of linear sequences.
In fact the programming of a computer consists precisely in the arranging of linear sequences of logical operations broken down into binary signals; if there is something not very tribal, enveloping, polycentric, hallucinatory, and nonGutenbergian, it is precisely the programmer’s job. It’s wrong to take advantage of the ingenuousness of the average humanist, who has learned all he knows about electronic brains from science fiction. Precisely because his discussion offers some valid intuitions, we ask McLuhan not to play the shell game with us.
But and this is a fairly melancholy conclusion the popular success of his thought is due, on the contrary, to this very technique of nondefinition of terms and to that cogitointerruptus logic that has given such cheap celebrity also to the Apocalyptics, popularized in one-size-fits-all dimensions in well-intentioned newspapers. In this sense McLuhan is right: Gutenbergian man is dead, and the reader seeks in the book a message at low definition, in which to find hallucinatory immersion. At this point isn’t it better to watch television?
That television is better than Sedlmayr is beyond any doubt. With McLuhan, things are different. Even when they are merchandised in a jumble, good and bad together, ideas summon other ideas, if only to be refuted. Read McLuhan; but then try to tell your friends what he says. Then you will be forced to choose a sequence, and you will emerge from the hallucination.
1967
Language, Power, Force
On January 17, 1977, Roland Barthes, before the kind of capacity audience attracted by great social and cultural occasions, delivered his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, where he had just been invited to occupy the chair of literary semiology. This lecture, which the newspapers reported at the time (Le Monde devoted an entire page to it), has now been published by the Editions du Seuil, under the humble and very proud tide Leçon* Just over forty pages, it is divided into three parts. The first deals with language, the second with the function of literature with regard to the power of language, the third with semiology and, in particular, literary semiology. I must immediately say that here I will not go into the third part (which, brief as it is, nevertheless would demand an extended discussion of method), and I will mention the second part only in passing. It is the first part that, I feel, raises a problem of fer broader scope, going beyond both literature and the techniques of enquiry into literature, to arrive at the question of Power—a question that informs also the other books referred to briefly in this article.
Barthes’s inaugural lecture is constructed with splendid rhetoric and begins with praise of the position he is about to occupy. As many perhaps know, the professors of the Collège de France confine themselves to speaking: They give no examinations and have no power to promote or fail the students, who listen to them solely out of love for what they say. Hence Barthes’s contentment (once both humble and very proud): I am entering a place beyond power. Hypocrisy, to be sure, because nothing confers more cultural power in France than teaching at the
Collège de France, producing knowledge. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In this lecture (which, as we shall see, focuses on play with language), Barthes, however innocently, is playing: He offers one definition of power and presupposes another.
In fact, Barthes is too subtle to ignore Foucault, whom he actually thanks for having been his patron at the Collège; therefore he knows that power is not “one” and that, as it infiltrates a place where it is not felt at first, it is “plural,” legion, like demons. “. . . Power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, information, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it.”
Whence: “I call the discourse of power any discourse which engentlers blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.” You carry out a revolution to destroy power, and it will be reborn, within the new state of affairs. “. . . Power is the parasite of a trans-social organism, linked to the whole of man’s history and not only to his political, historical history. This object in which power is inscribed, for all its human eternity, is language, or, to be more precise, its necessary expression: the language we speak and write,” the given language.
It is not the ability to speak that establishes power, it is the ability to speak to the extent that this ability becomes rigid in an order, a system of rules, the given language. The given language, Barthes says (in an argument that repeats broadly, I don’t know how consciously, the positions of Benjamin Lee Whorf), obliges me to enunciate an action, placing myself as subject, so from that moment on what I do will be the consequence of what I am. The given language obliges me to choose between masculine and feminine, and forbids me to conceive a neuter category; it obliges me to engage the other by either “thou” or “you”; I have no right to leave my affective and social relationship unspecified.
Naturally Barthes is speaking of French; English would restore to him at least the last two grammatical freedoms mentioned but (as he would rightly say) it would take others from him. Conclusion: “Thus by its very structure, my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation.” To speak is to subject oneself; the given language is a generalized reaction. Moreover —“it is neither reactionary nor progressive, it is quite simply fascist; because fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”
From the polemical point of view, this is the affirmation that, since January of 1977, has provoked the most reaction. All the other affirmations which follow are its consequences; we must not be amazed then to hear people say that the given language is power because it compels me to use already formulated stereotypes, including words themselves, and that it is structured so fatally that, slaves inside it, we cannot free ourselves outside it, because outside the given language there is nothing.
How can we escape what Barthes calls, Sartre-like, this huis clos? By cheating. You can cheat with the given language. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature. Hence the outline of a theory of literature as writing, a game of and with words. A category involving not only so-called literary practices but also ones operative in the text of a scientist or historian. The model of this liberating activity, however, is for Barthes always that of the “creative” or “creating” activities.
Literature puts language on stage, exploits its interstices, is not measured by the statements already made, but through the very game of the subject it states, it reveals the flavor of words. Literature says something and, at the same time, it denies what it has said; it doesn’t destroy signs, it makes them play and it plays them. If and whether literature is liberation from the power of the given language depends on the nature of this power.
And here Barthes seems to us very evasive. For that matter he mentioned Foucault not only as a friend, and directly, but also indirectly in a sort of paraphrase, when he spoke a few sentences on the “plurality” of power. And
