RDA BENSMAA:

THE BARTHES EFFECT. THE ESSAY AS REFLECTIVE TEXT

Blanchot
Perpetual displacement
S/Z: turning-point. Programmatic text. Program of his work to come. Ideal text
[en este texto ideal las redes son mltiples y juegan entre ellas sin que ninguna
pueda reinar sobre las dems; este texto no es una estructura de significados, es
una galaxia de significantes; no tiene comienzo; es reversible; se accede a l a
travs de mltiples entradas sin que ninguna de ellas pueda ser declarada con oda
seguridad la principal; los cdigos que movilizan se perfilan hasta perderse de
vista, son indecibles (el sentido no est sometido a un principio de decisin sino
al azar); los sistemas de sentido pueden apoderarse de este texto absolutamente
plural, pero su nmero no se cierra nunca, al tener como medida el infinito del
lenguaje].
Renounced criticism, philosophical system and rhetorical composition: no
generic category.
Intermediate category entre el TE y el TL: the reflective text. No longer a
question the meaning of literary works but are a practical interrogation of
reading and writing, of literature as a product of writing/reading. Text that as
transgressed the paradigmatic slash mark (divorcio de la institucin literaria).
Rhetorico-formal economy of the essay as a reflective text.
Mquina literaria (Deleuze)

Montaigne: Supernumerary effect. Unity: resonance, oblique, transverse.

Disjuntive synthesis (Deleuze) of opposite terms. Not a concept followed by
illustration: at an identical semantic and formal level there are heterogeneous
series (I allow myself to add, since it is an ill-fitted patchwork, some
supernumerary emblems, III, 9). Sufficient (paradoxical) word: Pandora`s box,
dark precursor, differentiator. Its potencialities con be deployed only by means of
certain literary strategies, certain ways in wich stories and thoughts are brought
together in a montage. Logic of complicatio. Perpetual movement. Fragment.
*
Mana-word: the body. Organ of irreducible difference: principle of all
structuration. Proliferations of signs in the essay. Text. Figure. Neither a simple
origin nor a substance: site of atopia, where one con change postures and
perspectives endlessly without any of them being obliges to submit to a hierarchy
or unified subject. In mobilizing an infinite corpus, the discourse of the essay is a
generalized exploration of the body by means of the most diverse languages.
Mana word producing an indefinite series of other words
Organizing elements stemming from plural word that permits the collection and
arrangement of all types of possible discourses.
Nature of the elements? Taken from any semantic or cultural register.
Distinguished only by the way they are inserted: specificity in the arrangement:
montage of heterotopic elements. Objects that he manipulates independently of
the system from wich they are taken.
As if a fundamental structure of gap were questioning the double temptation
offered by classical system and classical rhetoric: Totality-Truth.

Intelectual objects / Sensual objects. Tokio-Lacan: allocutionari connection

between two heterogeneous registers that no scientific or theoretical discourse
can permit. Body: word that couples differences, arranges gaps, and enables the
production of infinite essays.
The discourse is produced as a translation of words in an other site and as an
unfolding of all their potentialities. In the interval between two fragments, words,
objects: the body that reconciles the inconciliabila, but never to the advantage os
a third term of synthesis or of a concept: third term, another dialectic, came back
as fiction, subtle subversion. Escape the dualistic paradigm: Zambinella, Neuter.
Disturbing the good conscience, questioning the objects of Knowledge.
Essayistic writing consist more in mobilizing an image and its opposite. Word
as emblem, but: the barthesian fragments shifts (glisse) continuously and its
meaning is situated not in the bits of content that will appear here anf there, but,
on the contrary, in the shifting (glissement) itself Robbe-Grillet.
Born practically and aesthetically with Montaigne, the essay was to born
theoretically whit Barthes: theoretically entrance in the history of literature as a
reflective text, a text that destroy utterly, to the point of contradiction, its own
discursive category, its sociolinguistic reference: a new approach to the very
substance of language.
The essay as a reflective text is literally occupied on the symbolic plane by only
one object: the body: plural reality irreducible to a simple entity, body as literary
topography. Essay as thinking of the body in a state of language. (1 entrance)
The body (irreducible-srtucturation) refers to an infinity of other objects:
intellectual, sensual. (2 entrance)

3 entrance: multiplicity of figures of production and text operators that allow

the different elements to be generated and articulated. Minimal conditions of the
structure of the essay. Movements of language, figures of production: evaluation,
nomination,

amphibology,

etymology,

paradox,

emphasis,

enumeration,

tourniquet, forgery. Montaigne/Barthes: whenever they encounter a word whit a

double entrance (enantioseme) or an opposition (paradigm), it is to draw out of it
a complicated story or meaning that calls forth a multiplicity of other meanings.
All figures will have to aid in multiplying perspectives and perpetuating the
semantic duplicity that is sought. They are all subordinated to a single one: the
figure of duplication.
Multiplying points of view, juxtaposing images, word that leads the idea, reasons
by series of methafors, argues by unfolding of an image: connections?
System / systematic Structure / structuration
The essayistic texts constitution. Questions: 1) topical (organization, form), 2)
economic (utterances, thought), 3) dynamic (effects). 1: logical probleam of its
apparent incompletion compared to the clousure of a system / the rhetorical of its
constitution compared to a composed text.
Rhetorical composition: historically justified by the double economy: limited
mnemic and synoptic powers of the human mind. Barthes dismisses both
philosophical system and rhetorical composition (notion of mastery).
Reformulate: can a text whose ideal of writing is to contest the rules of rhetoric
still constitute a work?
The possibility of system as procedure: opening out of structure into
structuration. Procedure is the essaystis tactical response to the problem of the
text constitution (opposed to rhetorical composition and philosophical system):
effects of the implementation of procedure: 1) no development nor plan:

pulverization, dissemination of signifiers, 2) discourse without subject and

object, 3) type of operations, 4) type of uses: not application but circulation, 5)
quality of language: open, infinite, free from any referential illusion, lexicon
renewed, syntax disrupted. // From a formal point of view: 1) generalized: certain
treatment of words, texts, objects, languages in an open intertextual space 2)
Qualified: method systematically implemented in order to obtain a certain result:
art of effect, 3) Sepecified: different forms assumed by the unfolding of a process
of textual production: spiral, slant, zig-zag, swivel, and an entire series of
secondary formal procedures engendered by the principal.
It is the heterogeneity of the principles and forms that procedure implements in
order to produce its utterances that explains the heterogeneity and the multiplicity
of qualifications and therefore of forms that an Essay con integrate without
degenerating into cacophony. Multiplicity of tones and registers.
This is perhaps the most that can be said at this point concerning the problem of
unity in the essayistic text: it works, it functions.
Structural reflex. If an essay connot be summarized or translated into terms other
than those it presents, it is because the procedure at the origin of its objects
designates less a form than an activity, less a structure than a structuration.
If procedure is an instrument that produces the essay as an integral work of
literature in its own right (as a reflective text) this is primarily because or its
organization in series: the essential thing is the heterogeneity of the series
(classes), the duality or the antagonism of two codes, of two antipathetic edges,
and an irreducible difference between them, the existence of a gap between them
that no word, no concept can saturate.
Only the mana word (as irreducible difference and atopic principle of
structuration or as paradoxical object makes possible such a term-for-term
telescoping of two series; only the body allows the complication of their

respective differences. What procedure designates is, above all, the power of the
mana word as the dark precursor (Deleuze) of always dissimilar and unequal
series that became increasingly remote and different. A pure difference that put al
least two heterogeneous series into contact (intellectual and sensual objects): play
as long as possible the game of difference that the mana word makes possible.
The complex movement of profusion and dissemination has a name in Barthes
works: structural reflex.
The essay as an intensive system. Each time that a coupling of divergent series
takes place, an internal resonance occurs in the system: the text. Takes 2 forms:
1) pensive sonority, song of sentence ideas, music of figures, methafors, thoughtwords: level of minimal unities of the system (emphibologies, puns, etc).
Resonating series of sensual and intellectual objects under the action of the mana
word as linguistic precursor conditioning their couplage: gestures of the idea. 2)
form of a doctrinal vibration, musical idea of a song cycle. Units of higher rank:
the fragments of the Essay as partial textual objects impossible to totalize.
Development would be countered by tone, something articulated and sung:
timbre. Only the formal structure of the work enables the fragment to be
deciphered not as a part of a whole, and even less as the germ of an organic
totality, but as an intercalated piece in a cycle: intermezzo, a pure resonance
between intermezzi.
The intensive system creates this ideal of a high condensation, not of thought, or
of wisdom, or of truthbut of music, that assures the exchange between the
most heterogeneous fragments and produces the internal solidarity specific to
each essay.
It is impossible to assimilate fragment and detail without another form of
process. Detail belongs to another cutting up of the text: elucidate the nature of

their relations (the economy of exchanges): this problem is at the heart of the
question of the genre of the Essay as specific fragmental text. Film.
Fragment is no defined by its position in a compositional chain: it is
syntagmatically irresponsible (asyndeton, anacoluto, corto circuito) A
phenomenon of the same order occurs at the level of details: discontinuous,
indifferent to all narrative, disseminated, reversible.
The dominant figure that governs the formation of fragments is indisputably that
of complication (the diagonal encounter of several languages, the montage of
different texts, the telescoping of quotations from various sources, etc). But the
figure that governs the formation of allegories is implicatios: word of double
meaning, enantionsemas, etc. Double economy controlling elements of different
magnitudes: typo of resonance which they induce in the system and the novel
kind of unity. Unprecedented displacement occurs at the very heart of the
traditional reading: 1) in place of lexeological continuum, it substitutes a reading
wich is at once instantaneous and vertical, different dimension: vertical, oblique,
transversal (it establishes the resonance of the details. Tone: reading as traversing
through sings and writing), 2) the presence of detail as a disseminating and
inarticulable element provokes a mutation of the text: in place of a composed
text, it substitutes a polyphonic and discontinuous. Unity and totality are no
longer principles of organization, but rather oblique effects of the specific mode
of production and arrangement by wich the text is composed.
In reading such a text one must appeal no longer to a synoptic vision but rather to
a third sense: the hearing, a reading of the text but as orchestration,
counterpoint, stereophony. Only a reading of this kind can keep track of the
permutative deployment of details and their dissemination in the text, only such a
reading allows one to render an account of, to orchestrate, the units of different
magnitude, fragments and details.

Opposition as occasion of writing.

The Neutral gives rise to a generalized collapse of the economics of the text: 1)
the economics of language (usually protected by the separation of opposites), 2)
the economics of genres (it is no longer possible to represent).
Sentido-Conocimiento-Gnero-Texto-Sujeto-Autor-Lectura-Obra: cuestionados.
Perpetual anticipation of the of the work. Provisional commentary. The book that
in not being written, becomes this work itself.
The category of the subject of enunciation, as originary principle of the text`s
production, always appears at one moment or another. Not in the essay. Te origin
of the work is no longer Subject, identified and identical to itself, but the formal
structure of the work which at each o its levels produces subjects. Proliferation of
sites and subjects of enunciation (and therefore of reception). Personal pronouns.
Third dimension which enables us to account for the proliferation of the centers
of enunciation and for their fundamental heterogeneity, enables us to understand
that a text need not to be the product of a unified or unique source in order to
have a real unity: here is no the Author who produces a Work, but rather the
formal structure of the text (the procedures molded by it) that produces at once
the utterances and the subjects that will serve as their supports. Genres (novel
without names).
Like every modern work, the essay does not raise problems of meaning, but
rather a problem of usage (Deleuze), problems of effect and of functioning.
A new reading space. The subject of enunciation is always a partial effect of the
overall functioning of the text. When the identity and unicity of the Author of the
essayistic txt are fortuitous and fragmentary the identity of the reader himself are

undetermined as well. The essay is the text that destroys the last category that
was to provide a resolution of the problem of the Unity so peculiar to the
fragmental work in general: the reader. Essay: text that is based less on the
psychology or thought of one Author than on a theory of the different postures
assumed in a necessarly desultory and circular manner by the presumed Author
of the text and by the Reader. Rotation of roles.
The traditional hierarchy that separates the Author of a work from its Reader
(precedence) is obsolete: neither surpasses the other, neither can be considered
the unique donor or the ultimate organizer of the work. The author is no more the
master of what he wrote than the reader is the slave of what he reads. Author is
producer and product of his work, and the reader no longer a passive consumer.
No longer consumption but play. The Author appears as a produced figure, it
refers to a multiplicity of possible readers that defines a new reading space of the
text: open and no hierarquized.
Reconsideration of the classical category of thought (questioned and subverted).
Essay no longer presents itself as a homogeneous text that expounds a thought
but as a literary machine intended to produce effects. Not based on an instance of
truth the essay reflect a double movement. 1) mode of production: certain mode
of utilization and transfiguration of the objects of knowledge and dissertation.,
certain way of arranging the apparently most heteroclitic contents without
totalization. new intellectual art. Less expounding a system of thoughts tan in
playing in a festive manner, in miming or simulating all the postures and all the
figures that a given theme can arouse in any potencial reader: the essential being
that it works, and hat there an here, dicontinously but surely the reader be taken
in. 2) modes of possible reception. Type of efficacy it seeks. It offers the reader a
discursive site in a generalized system of exchanges among the most diverse
languages. Simulation. Making the reader recognize (herself in) a scene of
language, and taken an active part in the text.

Essay as simulation or theater, the effect of the functioning of detail, of the

secene of language as literary machine.
Signaletics as theatrical simulation designates the power to produce an effect.
Essay is a set of simulations events (Deleuze) where the categories of Author,
Reader and Critics can exchange their role in a superimposition of figures in
which each one will at one moment or another find its place.
The Barthes effect, and what could be called the reflecting-effect as fourth
dimension of the essayistic text in general is the power of simulation. It is the
phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the founctioning of the simulacrum as
textual machine.