Logosphere is Barthes’ term for the current state of language as a medium, its whole body. His essay on Brecht is again superbly brilliant, and on rereading it I am infinitely enlightened.
What about this concept of “reinventing quotations”?
In Marxism itself, Brecht is a permanent inventor; he reinvents quotations, accedes to the inter-text: “He thought in other heads; and in his own, others besides himself thought. This is true thinking.” (213)
Yes, I know that feeling. I have even been practicing it, but look at this formula! How couldn’t I have said it as simply as this?
Over maybe twenty years I have used the term logosphere, forgetting where in Barthes’ text I first learned of it. According to Barthes:
[The] logosphere is given to us by our period, our class, our métier: it is a “datum” of our subject. Now, to displace what is given can only be the result of a shock; we must shake up the balanced mass of words, pierce the layer, disturb the linked order of the sentences, break the structures of the language (every structure is an edifice of levels). Brecht’s work seeks to elaborate a shock-practice (not a subversion: the shock is much more “realistic” than subversion); his critical art is one which opens a crisis: which lacerates, which crackles the smooth surface, which fissures the crust of languages, loosens and dissolves the stickiness of the logosphere; it is an EPIC art: one which discontinues the textures of words, distances representation without annulling it. (213)
Now, this shock, this shaking-up, takes shape as the audience (or readers) become aware of signs as signs. The usual transmission of meaning is disturbed, disrupted, and each sign is thickened into opacity. The Brechtian epic theater puts a stop to any NATURAL flow of meanings and emotions. The Barthesian theater, played not on a framed stage but a larger amorphous stage of linguistic circulation, also aims at making the people conscious about the unnatural pretension of words-signs to communicate. The logosphere is made up of logos plus material. It is by stressing on this material aspect that logos becomes unnnatural, suspect. Our stage corrupses. Then we realize anew that we know nothing about this strange phenomenon called "communication."
