Image, Body, Text: Situating the New German Studies

Roland Barthes's announcement of the death of the author (Image, Music, Text) was one of several statements uttered by European intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s that transformed the critical enterprise. In suggestively allusive titles such as Writing Degree Zero and S/Z (Barthes), On Grammatology and Glas (Derrida), Discipline and Punish and The Order of Things (Foucault), criticism was subsumed under a taxonomy as different from what had preceded it as night is from day. If the intellectual inheritance of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault had been the exegetical strategies of hermeneutics and the moral certainty of humanism, the legacy these critics bequeathed to posterity, by contrast, was a programmatically antiexegetical, amoral hermeneutics of "deconstruction," where the multiplicity of textual traces spoke against the gesture of closure evident in works of literature "filially" connected with the social systems in which they were embedded. In the demonstration of these filial connections with the power relations of social networks and the perceived order of things, canonical works of literature could be seen as nothing more than writings elevated to special status as the result of the activity of a particular class of readers. While the focus on this activity of readers marked literature's crisis – a crisis that obliged literature to renounce any claim to final truth – it is perhaps fair to say that it also marked literature's salvation, the moment when literature discovered the true conditions of its reception and its reliance on the animating presence of readers, the moment, that is to say, when literature became performative.

Since this dramatic recasting of the nature of literature and reading, the critical enterprise has expanded into specialist fields once held to be profoundly unrelated. Barthes himself provided the lead by speaking of a new open and interdisciplinary engagement not just with literature, but, more pointedly, with "texts." For criticism no longer found its role in the pretense of literature's timelessness, critics no longer borrowed back their own reason for being from the transcendent quality of the literary work. Rather, the critical reader thought against the work of literature as much as with it, highlighting the striations of a text and its semiotic strategies, not smoothing them out, and critiquing the assumptions of authorship, rather than guilelessly advancing them. Barthes was even able to suggest that authors were only partly responsible for the work of literature they created. The literary work was a text, Barthes contended, that could not but give evidence of the structures (Foucault would speak of the "discourses") that consciously and unconsciously brought it to life. Moreover, as Friedrich Kittler was later to argue, such structures had to be understood in the context of historically situated "discourse networks" that lay behind and before a text, creating the technical conditions for the possibility of utterances and the conditions under which they could be perceived. In the new activity of critics and criticism, it was the business of the reader, among other things, to cultivate attentiveness towards such networks of utterability and, by applying insights from a range of disciplinary specialisms, render them intelligible. Moreover, that intelligible disclosure was an "intervention" among many other types of engagement with writing, was only further evidence that "there is nothing outside of [the discursivity of] the text" (Derrida, De la grammatologie 158), and that the state common to writings both literary and critical is an ecumenical condition of "textuality." Readers and writers thus met on the common ground of the text, broadly conceived, and readers themselves belonged to the universal category of writing of which the authors of canonical literature, at most, were only a special instance.

In responding to these new conditions for criticism and scholarship, the essays in this volume have followed both the linguistic turn of philosophy (Rorty) as well as the structuralist turn of literature in the direction of écriture postulated which derives insights not merely from the more traditional style of literary-historical research in which classical hermeneutics was steeped, but also from the interdisciplinary cross-connections that condition what we now take texts to be: web-like multiplicities, not singular statements about...