Wednesday, March 27, 2019
The Blackmail of Theory
Barthes talks about this in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The avant-garde text that is written to serve theory, and that thus the theorist (like Barthes) is blackmailed into accepting. Of course he doesn't! By denouncing this kind of text he is saying that the avant-garde text cannot be written to order. The avant-garde must come first, not be written by someone who has read a theory of the avant-garde.
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To write wishing for the applause of Barthes ... - I don't know how that could be done.
I've been reading his last books recently - about his Mom, about his young lovers - with the same amazement I have always had reading Barthes. He is unsurpassable.
Is this essentially the same thing as student writers who "serve the assignment", and perhaps scholars who "serve the reviewers", rather than just saying what they think to their reader? (In both cases, there's sometimes this feeling of being "blackmailed" because the writer is "only doing what they've been told to do".)
The assignment is assigned by the professor. People are sending Barthes their work unsolicited. Also, the professor cannot say, yes, I know I assigned an academic exercise, but you were supposed to know that what I really wanted was something beyond that. Well, you can say that, as I often have... but it doesn't get you very far.
One might turn it around and say the student signed up for the class.
Though it's a kind of legal fiction, I think everything goes awry in the classroom when the students are allowed to think of themselves as conscripts. Even a required course is part of curriculum they have freely chosen. We should teach students as thought they are there of their own free will.
So, in that sense, the students are sending you their work "unsolicited"; you didn't make yourself their judge. They are asking for it.
But once again, the professor willingly offers the course and thus solicits students implicitly. It is a mutual arrangement. The professor cannot then say, but I want something anti-academic. It goes against the mutual contract. If Barthes were offering a course in creative writing then he would be wrong to say that the students are blackmailing him by giving him what they thought he wanted.
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