From work to play?

Commanding the field of the evening's readings on this, the first class meeting of my new doctoral program, was Roland Barthes' essay "From Work to Text." I've studied it many times before, but it's useful to reread (as if for the first time) and reconsider such a foundational text in poststructuralist thought.

In class discussion we touched on the terminological problem at the core of this essay -- one which Barthes himself acknowledges, though it is surely complicated by the translation from French: it is not possible to maintain a rigorous distinction between works and texts.

On the one hand I feel he is too eager to dismiss the word "work": I find nothing in its etymology or common usage that dictates its ascription to a static, monistic materiality. If you think of "work" from a process-oriented perspective, ditching the definite and indefinite articles and regarding it as ongoing work (as Heidegger might have said), then it comes to operate very much as text.

On the other hand I feel he is too eager to embrace the rich metaphors that drive "text." He wards off accusations of a trendy adoption of the word, but I think the problem is more crucial than that: unlike work, text, thought of in terms of those metaphors (texture, textile) suggests an inert, material thing. (In English the most common usage of "material" is in reference to textiles.) This is a rather limiting frame-work to in which to place something as dynamic as the evanescent play of differences he describes as his primary interest in this essay.

It feels obscene to throw out "work," facilely dismissed as closed, static, and monistic (i.e. a god-form), and simply replace it with another word that after all is only a noun, and one bearing a distinctly material constellation of meanings. How is this moving us closer to dynamism, process, and play?

Some commentators in the past have tried to get around this limitation by verbing "text" as "texting." I understand and appreciate the motives for this gesture, but I'm not sure it's a necessary neologism. A better alternative is already available to us: play.

Barthes uses it himself throughout this essay, as did Jacques Derrida in his groundbreaking essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Play is the term poststructuralist critics resort to when they have to explain how text works. Play cannot be thought outside of a process-oriented perspective. So why not let play play? Why make it the understudy to text?

Perhaps it is simply a problem of language translation. Certainly in English it would cause headaches if we all started referring to all manner of text as "play." Dramatis personae would stage a revolt, just as scientists have objected to the co-optation of "theory." But then "text" causes its own headaches -- say "text" to academics who have not been inculcated into poststructuralist discourse and they'll picture a dull, expensive, hardcover book filled with lots of "facts."

Under the benefits column, "play" offers a handy and ready-made antonym to "work" and nicely suggests the ludic ethos of poststructuralist critique.

Of course, this is all moot -- text is here to stay. But in these postings you may find me playing more than texting.