Thursday, May 26, 2005

Contre Barthes (lovingly)

Barthes’ title essay “The Rustle of Language” is a truly admirable short piece; it’s only four-page long and its vastness is overwhelming. It ends, however, with this statement and there I find Barthes utterly irreconcilable. Says he:

I imagine myself today something like the ancient Greek as Hegel describes him: he interrogated, Hegel says, passionately, uninterruptedly, the rustle of branches, of springs, of winds, in short, the shudder of nature, in order to perceive in it the design of an intelligence, And I—it is the shudder of meaning I interrogate, listening to the rustle of language, that language which for me, modern man, is my Nature. (79)

This chronology is of course a metaphor, or a prejudice. The Greek may have done so, and so many people across history and even today do so. Language conceived as coordinator of collectivehuman action must remain linked to the elements of nature. To think of language as an isolatable environment, or Nature, is but a form of fetishism. It is precisely this kind of fetishism that needs to be kept in check, if you want to resist the economy of desire endorsed by the flow of arbitrary currency. (The currency being a supreme form of fetish.)

Barthes does teach me to read, to write, but he and his fetishism can’t offer me any clue to change the status of this Life. I'd rather return to the way of the Greeks, or the Hopis, or any people of the land. (Pre-consumer economy, pre-crisis-of-representation.)