Roland Barthes and the Tricks of Experience

"Experience is a modern figure," wrote Jean-François Lyotard in 1981,

It needs a subject first of all, the instance of an "I," someone who speaks in the first person. It needs a temporal arrangement of the type: Augustine Confessions, book XI (modern work if ever there was one), where the view of the past, the present and the future is always taken from the point of an ungraspable present consciousness. With these two axioms, one can already engender the essential form of experience: I am no longer what I am, and I am not yet what I am. Life signifies the death of what one is, and this death certifies that life has a meaning, that one is not a stone. A third axiom gives experience its full scope: the world is not an entity external to the subject, it is the common name for the objects in which the subject alienates himself (loses himself, dies to himself) in order to arrive at himself, to live. ¹

For Lyotard, experience understood in this way was derived from Christian models of salvation, whose philosophical correlate is the dialectical sublation of antitheses and whose aesthetic correlate is the aura, which still informed the work of Proust as much as Michelet. But now, he claimed, experience is in a terminal crisis, undermined by capitalist techno-science, the mass life of the metropolis and the loss of any sense of temporal dialectic culminating in retrospective meaning.

In so arguing, Lyotard was expressing a now familiar judgment shared by many French intellectuals of his post-phenomenological generation. It would be easy to multiply examples from Derrida, Althusser, and others of their cohort to show that "l'expérience vécu" was stigmatized as an ideologically suspect, discursively constructed, and woefully outmoded concept. Although as I have tried to show elsewhere, Foucault and before him Bataille were partial exceptions to the rule, most of those thinkers we now like to label structuralist and post-structuralist were deeply suspicious of any appeals to experience as a self-evident or foundational term. ² Where did Roland Barthes stand in this intellectual landscape? Can we discern a coherent attitude towards the question of experience in his remarkable oeuvre, despite its never having been the object of sustained analysis or critique? Did he provide us with alternative ways of thinking about experience that defy Lyotard's dismissive description of it as little more than a secularized Christian trope?

The first point to make in addressing these questions is that Barthes seems never to have been self-conscious or apologetic about using the word "experience" in his work, often in fact prefacing it with the first person possessive pronoun. On numerous occasions, he explicitly acknowledged learning from his personal experience. ³ When asked to define his identity, for example, he replied, "What I do within myself is philosophize, reflect on my experience." ⁴ Even during his most militantly structuralist period in 1963, he would claim that "there exist certain writers, painters, musicians in whose eyes a certain exercise of structure (and no longer merely its thought) represents a distinctive experience, and that both analysts and creators must be placed under the common sign of what we might call structural man, defined not by his ideas or his languages, but by his imagination--in other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure." ⁵

Barthes, as we know, did not remain a rigorous structuralist for very long, and so it would be a mistake to identity his own experience in general with that of homo structuralis. What then was the alternative or alternatives he proposed or, better put, embodied? Embody is, of course, not an innocent verb here, and it helps us to begin an answer, for Barthes knew that experience was not merely a mental category, but involved the somatic dimension of human existence. Accordingly, such works as The Pleasure of the Text have earned...