Journals, Letters, Files:Work Poetics and Scenes of Writing around 1800 Bryan Klausmeyer (bio) The pairing "writing, the scene of writing" serves as a challenge to consider two ostensibly opposing facets of writing at once: on the one hand, the thematization of writing within literature (semantics, poetics) and, on the other hand, writing in its material, technological, and historical facticity. In drawing these two sides together, "writing, the scene of writing" opens up a parallactic perspective onto its object that can in part be understood as an extension of post-structuralist approaches to writing insofar as it accentuates what David E. Wellbery has called the "exteriority of writing": the insertion of writing into the signifying scene as that which thwarts the hermeneutic presupposition of sense (16–17).1 At the same time, it also demands a consideration of the medial specificity of writing and its material history, which encompasses not merely the formation history of particular works, as in edition philology, but above all the history of writing practices, the role of writing instruments and the writing body, and the media technologies that make possible the storage and retrieval of written information. Such a technically oriented approach to writing has in recent years coalesced around the field of "cultural techniques" (Krämer; Siegert, Cultural Techniques; Zanetti), which has drawn attention [End Page 1010] to the ways in which the operations of writing and its culturally specific techné (sign systems, the hand, writing instruments, etc.) are at once shaped by cultural practices of communication and partake in shaping them. As productive as this theoretical approach has been, it has also tended to shift the interpretive focus away from literature by treating it as just one form of "symbolic work" among others. For this reason, this article's main objective is to draw together, through the prism of the "scene of writing," the cultural-technical approach to writing and the concept of the literary work. Like the related concept of authorship, the concept of the work bears directly on the institutionalization of literature in modernity (Bosse; Foucault); yet in contrast to the numerous intensive debates surrounding the concept of authorship in literary theory, the question of what constitutes a work has been largely overlooked (Danneberg et al. 3; Spoerhase, "Was ist ein Werk?" 282). To get a better sense of what is at stake in approaching the concept of the work through the analytical frame of "writing" and the "scene of writing," it is worth turning briefly to at least one prominent theoretical engagement with the concept of the work that also highlights its tension with the theme of "writing." In "De l'oeuvre au texte" (From Work to Text), Roland Barthes situates the "work" in an opposing relation to what he calls the "text." According to Barthes, this opposition stems from an epistemological shift in the field of literary studies: whereas the work is an empirical object whose meaning the author fixes, singularizes, and closes, the text is a "methodological field" and is experienced "only in an activity, in a production" (57–58). The movement from work to text appears to refer, therefore, not to a shift in the history of literature or aesthetics—as Barthes says, there can be "text" in very old works of literature2—but to a methodological shift from an understanding of literature according to which meaning is produced and determined solely by the author to one that regards the reader as an active participant in the signifying process, i.e., as engaged in the free-play of associations that deform, decenter, and dissolve the boundaries of the "work." As a result, textual reading for Barthes becomes a writerly activity. Barthes thus conceives of the "text" in connection with a process or activity through which reading and writing merge together, [End Page 1011] thereby uncoupling the latter from the unity and closure that he associates with the "work."3 Yet in order to advance his critique of the "work," Barthes' argument about the movement from "work" to "text" depends on a reception-oriented theory of the "text," to such an extent that the latter is regarded as co-extensive with language or discourse as such. For...
Read full abstract
Jan 25, 2021
Eric Bentzen + 2
Open Access