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ROlAND BARTHES

The Rustle
of Language
Translated by Richard Howard

dol HILL AND WANG

NEW YORK

A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Translation copyright 1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

Originally published in French as Le bruissement de la langue
Copyright 1984 by Editions du Seuil
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Jack Harrison
Second printing, I986

"To Write: An Intransitive Verb?" first published [in English] in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by
Richard Macksey, 1970 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. "The Rustle
of Language" first published in Vers une esthetique sans entraves, 1975 by
U.G.E. "Rhetorical Analysis" first published in Litterature et Societe, 1967 by
L'Institut de sociologie de I'Universite libre de Bruxelles. "The Division of
Languages" first published in Une civilisation nouvelle? Hommage Ii Georges
Friedmann, 1973 by Gallimard. "Cayrol and Erasure" first published in Les
Corps etrangers by Jean Cayrol, 1964 by U.G.E. "Bloy" first published in
Tableau de la litUrature frant;aise, 1974 by Gallimard. "What Becomes of the
Signifier" first published in Eden, Eden, Eden by Pierre Guyotat, 1970 by
Gallimard. "Outcomes of the Text" first published in Bataille in the IOII8
collection, 1973 by U.G.E. "Reading Brillat-Savarin" first published in
Physiologie du gout by Brillat-Savarin, 1975 by C. Hermann. "Preface to
Renaud Camus's Tricks," 1979 by Persona. "The Image" first published in
Pretexte: Roland Barthes in the IOII8 collection, 1978 by U.G.E.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barthes, Roland.
The rustle of language.
Translation of: Le bruissement de la langue.
1. Philology-Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Discourse analysis-Addresses, essays, lectures.
3. Semiotics-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title.
P49B3513 1986 401 '.41 85- 2 7593

From Work to Text

A change has lately occurred, or is occurring, in our idea of
language and consequently of the (literary) work which owes to
that language at least its phenomenal existence. This change is
obviously linked to the present development of (among other
disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis
(the word link is used here in a deliberately neutral manner: no
determination is being invoked, however multiple and dialectical). The transformation of the notion of the work does not
necessarily derive from the internal renewal of each of these
disciplines, but rather from their intersection at the level of an
object which traditionally proceeds from none of them. We
might say, as a matter of fact, that interdisciplinary activity, today
so highly valued in research, cannot be achieved by the simple
confrontation of specialized branches of knowledge; the interdisciplinary is not a comfortable affair: it begins effectively (and
not by the simple utterance of a pious hope) when the solidarity
of the old disciplines breaks down-perhaps even violently,
through the shocks of fashion-to the advantage of a new object,
a new language, neither of which is precisely this discomfort of
classification which permits diagnosing a certain mutation. The
mutation which seems to be affecting the notion of the work
must not, however, be overestimated; it is part of an epistemological shift, more than of a real break of the kind which in fact
occurred in the last century upon the appearance of Marxism
and Freudianism; no new break has occurred since, and we
might say that for the last hundred years we have been involved
in a repetition. What History, our History, allows us today is
merely to displace, to vary, to transcend, to repudiate. Just as
Einsteinian science compels us to include within the object

From Work to Text

57

studied the relativity of reference points, so the combined action of

Marxism, Freudianism, and structuralism compels us, in literature, to relativize the relations of scriptor, reader, and observer
(critic). Confronting the work-a traditional notion, long since,
and still today, conceived in what we might call a Newtonian
fashion-there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories. This object
is the Text. I know that this word is fashionable (I myself am
compelled to use it frequently), hence suspect in some quarters;
but this is precisely why I should like to review the main
propositions at whose intersection the Text is located, as I see
it; the word proposition must here be understood more grammatically than logically: these are speech-acts, not arguments,
"hints," approaches which agree to remain metaphorical. Here
are these propositions: they concern method, genres, the sign,
the plural, filiation, reading, pleasure.
1.

The text must not be understood as a computable object.

It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works

from texts. In particular, we must not permit ourselves to say:

the work is classical, the text is avant-garde; there is no question
of establishing a trophy in modernity's name and declaring
certain literary productions in and out by reason of their
chronological situation: there can be "Text" in a very old work,
and many products of contemporary literature are not texts at
all. The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of
substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for
example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. The
opposition may recall (though not reproduce term for term) a
distinction proposed by Lacan: "reality" is shown [se montre], the
"real" is proved [se demontre]; in the same way, the work is seen
(in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses),
the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules
(or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text
is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse
(or rather it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself to

From Work to Text

be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the

work which is the Text's imaginary tail. Or again: the Text is
experienced only in an activity, in a production. It follows that the
Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive
moment is traversal (notably, it can traverse the work, several
works).
2. Similarly, the Text does not stop at (good) literature; it
cannot be caught up in a hierarchy, or even in a simple
distribution of genres. What constitutes it is on the contrary (or
precisely) its force of subversion with regard to the old classifications. How to classify Georges Bataille? Is this writer a novelist,
a poet, an essayist, an economist, a philosopher, a mystic? The
answer is so uncertain that handbooks of literature generally
prefer to leave Bataille out; as a matter of fact, Bataille has
written texts, or even, perhaps, always one and the same text.
If the Text raises problems of classification (moreover, this is
one of its "social" functions), it is because it always implies a
certain experience of limits. Thibaudet used to speak (but in a
very restricted sense) of limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's
Life of Rance, a work which indeed seems to us to be a "text"):
the Text is what is situated at the limit of the rules of the
speech-act (rationality, readability, etc.). This notion is not
rhetorical, we do not resort to it for "heroic" postures: the Text
attempts to locate itself very specifically behind the limit of the
doxa (is not public opinion, constitutive of our democratic
societies, powerfully aided by mass communications-is not
public opinion defined by its limits, its energy of exclusion, its
censorship?); taking the word literally, we might say that the Text
is always paradoxical.

3. The text is approached and experienced in relation to the

sign. The work closes upon a signified. We can attribute two
modes of signification to this signified: either it is claimed to be
apparent, and the work is then the object of a science of the
letter, which is philology; or else this signified is said to be secret

From Work to Text

59

and final, and must be sought for, and then the work depends
upon a hermeneutics, an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic,
thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general
sign, and it is natural that it should represent an institutional
category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary,
practices the infinite postponement of the signified, the Text is
dilatory; its field is that of the signifier; the signifier must not
be imagined as "the first part of the meaning," its material
vestibule, but rather, on the contrary, as its aftermath; similarly,
the signifier's infinitude does not refer to some notion of the
ineffable (of an unnamable signified) but to a notion of play; the
engendering of the perpetual signifier (in the fashion of a
perpetual calendar) in the field of the Text is not achieved by
some organic process of maturation, or a hermeneutic process
of "delving deeper," but rather by a serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, variations; the logic governing the Text
is not comprehensive (trying to define what the work "means")
but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, crossreferences coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (if it
failed him, man would die). The work (in the best of cases) is
moderately symbolic (its symbolics runs short, i.e., stops); the Text
is radically symbolic: a work whose integrally symbolic nature one
conceives, perceives, and receives is a text. The Text is thus restored
to language; like language, it is structured but decentered,
without closure (let us note, to answer the scornful suspicion of
"fashion" sometimes lodged against structuralism, that the epistemological privilege nowadays granted to language derives
precisely from the fact that in it [language] we have discovered
a paradoxical idea of structure: a system without end or center).
4. The Text is plural. This does not mean only that it has
several meanings but that it fulfills the very plurality of meaning:
an irreducible (and not just acceptable) plurality. The Text is not
coexistence of meaning, but passage, traversal; hence, it depends
not on an interpretation, however liberal, but on an explosion,
on dissemination. The plurality of the Text depends, as a matter

60

From Work to Text

of fact, not on the ambiguity of its contents, but on what we

might call the stereographic plurality of the signifiers which
weave it (etymologically, the text is a fabric): the reader of the
Text might be compared to an idle subject (who has relaxed his
image-repertoire): this fairly empty subject strolls (this has
happened to the author of these lines, and it is for this reason
that he has come to an intense awareness of the Text) along a
hillside at the bottom of which flows a wadi (I use the word to
attest to a certain alienation); what he perceives is multiple,
irreducible, issuing from heterogeneous, detached substances
and levels: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, tenuous explosions
of sound, tiny cries of birds, children's voices from the other
side of the valley, paths, gestures, garments of inhabitants close
by or very far away; all these incidents are half identifiable: they
issue from known codes, but their combinative operation is
unique, it grounds the stroll in a difference which cannot be
repeated except as difference. This is what happens in the Text:
it can be Text only in its difference (which does not mean its
individuality); its reading is semelfactive (which renders any
inductive-deductive science of texts illusory: no "grammar" of
the text) and yet entirely woven of quotations, references,
echoes: cultural languages (what language is not cultural?),
antecedent or contemporary, which traverse it through and
through, in a vast stereophony. The intertextuality in which any
text is apprehended, since it is itself the intertext of another
text, cannot be identified with some origin of the text: to seek
out the "sources," the "influences" of a work is to satisfy the
myth of filiation; the quotations a text is made of are anonymous,
irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without
quotation marks. The work disturbs no monistic philosophy
(there are antagonistic ones, as we know); for such a philosophy,
plurality is Evil. Hence, confronting the work, the Text might
indeed take for its motto the words of the man possessed by
devils: "My name is legion, for we are many" (Mark 5:9). The
plural or demonic texture which sets the Text in opposition to
the work may involve profound modifications of reading, pre-

From Work to Text

cisely where monologism seems to be the law: certain "texts" of
Scripture, traditionally adopted by theological (historical or
anagogical) monism, may lend themselves to a diffraction of
meanings (i.e., finally, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist
interpretation of the work, hitherto resolutely monistic, may
become more materialist by pluralizing itself (if, of course,
Marxist "institutions" permit this).
5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. What is
postulated are a determination of the world (of the race, then of
History) over the work, a consecution of works among themselves,
and an appropriation of the work to its author. The author is
reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; literary
science thus teaches us to respect the manuscript and the author's
declared intentions, and society postulates a legality of the
author's relation to his work (this is the "author's rights," actually
a recent affair, not legalized in France until the time of the
Revolution). The Text, on the other hand, is read without the
Father's inscription. The metaphor of the Text is here again
detached from the metaphor of the work; the latter refers to
the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by
"development" (a significantly ambiguous word: biological and
rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if
the Text expands, it is by the effect of a combinative operation,
of a systematics (an image, moreover, close to the views of
contemporary biology concerning the living being); no vital
"respect" is therefore due to the Text: it can be broken (moreover,
this is what the Middle Ages did with two nonetheless authoritarian texts: Scripture and Aristotle); the Text can be read
without its father's guarantee; the restoration of the intertext
paradoxically abolishes inheritance. It is not that the Author
cannot "return" in the Text, in his text, but he does so, one
might say, as a guest; if he is a novelist, he inscribes himself
there as one of his characters, drawn as a figure in the carpet;
his inscription is no longer privileged, paternal, alethic, but
ludic: he becomes, one can say, a paper author; his life is no

From Work to Text

longer the origin of his fables, but a fable concurrent with his
life; there is a reversion of the work upon life (and no longer
the contrary); the work of Proust and Genet permits us to read
their lives as a text: the word bio-graphy regains a strong,
etymological meaning; and thereby the sincerity of the speechact, a veritable "cross" ofliterary ethics, becomes a false problem:
the I that writes the text is never anything but a paper I.
6. The work is ordinarily the object of consumption; I intend
no demagoguery by referring to what is called a consumer
culture, but we must recognize that today it is the work's "quality"
(which ultimately implies an appreciation of "taste") and not the
actual operation of reading which can make differences between
books: "cultivated" reading is not structurally different from
reading on trains. The Text (if only by its frequent "unreadability") decants the work (if it permits it at all) from its consumption and recuperates it as play, task, production, practice.
This means that the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at
least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, not
by intensifying the reader's projection into the work, but by
linking the two together into one and the same signifying
practice. The distance that separates reading from writing is
historical. In the period of strongest social division (before the
instauration of democratic cultures), reading and writing were
equally class privileges: Rhetoric, the great literary code of that
time, taught writing (even if what was ordinarily produced were
discourses, not texts); it is significant that the advent of democracy reversed the watchword: the (secondary) school prides itself
on teaching reading and no longer writing. In fact, reading, in
the sense of consuming, is not playing with the text. "Playing"
must be taken here in all the polysemy of the term: the text
itself "plays" (like a door that "plays" back and forth on its
hinges; like a fishing rod in which there is some "play"); and
the reader plays twice over: he plays at the Text (ludic meaning),
he seeks a practice which reproduces it; but, so that this practice
is not reduced to a passive, interior mimesis (the Text being

From Work to Text

precisely what resists this reduction), he plays the Text; we must
not forget that play is also a musical term; the history of music
(as practice, not as "art") is, moreover, quite parallel to that of
the Text; there was a time when, active amateurs being numerous (at least within a certain class), "to play" and "to listen"
constituted a virtually undifferentiated activity; then two roles
successively appeared: first of all, that of the interpreter, to which
the bourgeois public (though it could still playa little itself: this
is the entire history of the piano) delegated its playing; then
that of the (passive) amateur who listens to music without being
able to play it (the piano has effectively been replaced by the
record); we know that today post-serial music has disrupted the
role of the "interpreter," who is asked to be in a sense the coauthor of the score which he completes rather than "expresses."
The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from
the reader a practical collaboration. A great novation this, for
who executes the work? (Mallarme raised this question: he wanted
the audience to produce the book.) Today only the critic executes
the work (pun intended). The reduction of reading to consumption is obviously responsible for the "boredom" many feel
in the presence of the modern ("unreadable") text, the avantgarde film or painting: to be bored means one cannot produce
the text, play it, release it, make it go.
7. This suggests one final approach to the Text: that of
pleasure. I do not know if a hedonist aesthetic ever existed
(eudaemonist philosophies are certainly rare). Of course, a
pleasure of the work (of certain works) exists; I can enjoy
reading and rereading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, and even-why
not?-Alexandre Dumas; but this pleasure, however intense,
and even when it is released from any prejudice, remains partly
(unless there has been an exceptional critical effort) a pleasure
of consumption: for, if I can read these authors, I also know
that I cannot rewrite them (that one cannot, today, write "like
that"); and this rather depressing knowledge suffices to separate
me from the production of these works, at the very moment

From Work to Text

when their distancing founds my modernity (to be modern-is
this not really to know that one cannot begin again?). The Text
is linked to delectation, i.e., to pleasure without separation.
Order of the signifier, the Text participates in its way in a social
utopia; before History (supposing that History does not choose
barbarism), the Text fulfills if not the transparency of social
relations, at least the transparency of language relations: it is
the space in which no language prevails over any other, where
the languages circulate (retaining the circular meaning of the
word).
These few propositions do not necessarily constitute the
articulation of a Theory of the Text. This is not merely the
consequence of the presenter's inadequacies (moreover, in many
points he has merely recapitulated what is being investigated
and developed around him). This is a consequence of the fact
that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied with a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language, or at
least (for it may be necessary to resort to it provisionally) calling
it into question, is part of the theory itself: discourse on the
Text should itself be only text, research, textual activity, since
the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe,
outside, and no subject of the speech-act in a situation of judge,
master, analyst, confessor, decoder: the theory of the Text can
coincide only with a practice of writing.
Revue d'esthetique, 1971

Mythology Today
Some fifteen years ago, a certain idea of contemporary myth
was proposed. This idea, which on its first appearance was
hardly developed at all (the word retained an openly metaphoric
value), nonetheless included several theoretical articulations. 1.
Myth, close to what Durkheimian sociology calls a "collective
representation," can be read in anonymous statements of the
press, advertising, mass consumption; it is a social determinate,
a "reflection." 2. This reflection, however, in accord with Marx's
famous dictum, is inverted: myth consists in turning culture into
nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the ideological,
the historical into the "natural": what is merely a product of
class division and its moral, cultural, aesthetic consequences is
presented (stated) as a natural consequence; the quite contingent
grounds of the statement become, under the effect of mythic
inversion, Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, Public
Opinion, in a word, the Endoxa (the secular figure of the Origin).
3. Contemporary myth is discontinuous: it is no longer stated
in extended, constituted narratives, but only in "discourse"; at
most, it is a phraseology, a corpus of phrases (of stereotypes);
myth disappears, but the mythic remains, all the more insidious.
4. As speech (this was, after all, the meaning of muthos) ,
contemporary myth issues from a semiology which permits the
"correction" of mythic inversion by decomposing the message
into two semantic systems: a connoted system whose signified is
ideological (and consequently "straight," "non-inverted," or, to
be clearer, even by speaking a moral jargon, cynical), and a
denoted system (the apparent literalness of the image, of the
object, of the sentence), whose function is to "naturalize" the
class proposition by giving it the guarantee of the most "inno-

66

From Work to Text

cent" of natures: that of language (age-old, maternal, academic,

etc.).
This was how myth today appeared, or at least appeared to
me. Has anything changed? Not French society, at least on this
level, for mythic history is on a different time scale from political
history; nor the myths, nor even the analysis; there is still a
great deal of the mythic in our society: equally anonymous,
slippery, fragmented, garrulous, available both to an ideological
criticism and to a semiological dismantling. No, what has changed
in the last fifteen years is the science of reading, under whose
scrutiny myth, like an animal long since captured and observed,
nonetheless becomes a different object.
A science of the signifier (even if it is still being elaborated)
has in fact taken its place in the work of the period; its goal is
not so much the analysis of the sign as its dislocation. With
regard to myth, and though this is still a task which remains to
be accomplished, the new semiology---or the new mythologycan no longer (or will no longer be able to) separate so easily
the signifier from the signified, the ideological from the phraseological. Not that this distinction is false or ineffectual, but it
has become mythic itself: any student can denounce the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of a form (of life, of thought,
of consumption); in other words, a mythological endoxa has been
created: demystification (or demythification) has itself become
a discourse, a corpus of phrases, a catechistic statement; confronting which a science of the signifier can only be displaced
and stop (provisionally) farther on: no longer at the (analytic)
dissociation of the sign, but at its vacillation: it is no longer the
myths which must be unmasked (the endoxa now undertakes
that), but the sign itself which must be perturbed: not to reveal
the (latent) meaning of a statement, of a feature, of a narrative,
but to fissure the very representation of meaning; not to change
or to purify symbols, but to contest the symbolic itself. What is
happening to (mythological) semiology is a little like what
happened to psychoanalysis: it began, necessarily, by establishing
lists of symbols (a loosened tooth = the castrated subject, etc.),

Mythology Today
but today, much more than interrogating this lexicon which,
without being false, is no longer of much interest (except to
amateurs of the psychoanalytic vulgate), it examines the very
dialectics of the signifier; semiology began in the same way by
establishing a mythological lexicon, but the task facing it today
is rather of a syntactical order (which articulations, which
displacements constitute the mythic fabric of a mass-consumption society?); initially, we sought the destruction of the (ideological) signified; now we seek the destruction of the sign:
"mythoc1asm" is succeeded by a "semioc1asm" that is much
broader and raised to a higher level. The historical field is
thereby extended: it is no longer French society, but far beyond
it, historically and geographically, the whole of Western (GrecoJudeo-Islamo-Christian) civilization, unified in one and the same
theology (essence, monotheism) and identified by the system of
meaning it practices, from Plato to France-Dimanche.
The science of the signifier contributes a second correction
(or a second extension) to contemporary mythology. The world,
taken obliquely by language, is written, through and through;
signs, constantly deferring their foundations, transforming their
signifieds into new signifiers, quoting each other to infinity,
nowhere come to a halt: writing is generalized. If society'S
alienation still compels us to demystify languages (and notably
that of the myths), the means of this combat is not-is no
longer-a critical decipherment, it is evaluation. Faced with the
world's writing systems, the tangle of various discourses (didactic,
aesthetic, propagandistic, political, etc.), we must determine
levels of reification, degrees of phraseological density. Shall we
succeed in specifying a notion which seems to me essential: that
of a language's compactness? Languages are more or less dense;
some-the most social, the most mythical-present an unshakable homogeneity (there is a power of meaning, there is a war
of meanings): woven of habits, of repetitions, of stereotypes, of
obligatory fragments and key words, each one constitutes an
idiolect (a notion which twenty years ago I designated as writing);
today, more than myths, it is idiolects which we must distinguish,

68

From Work to Text

describe; mythologies are succeeded by a more formal, and

thereby, I believe, more penetrating, idiolectology, whose operative concepts are no longer sign, signifier, signified, and
connotation, but citation, reference, stereotype. Thus, the dense
languages (such as mythic discourse) can be apprehended in
the cross fire of the trans-writing whose still literary "text,"
antidote to myth, would occupy the pole, or rather the regionairy, light, open, spaced, decentered, noble, free-where writing
deploys itself against the idiolect, i.e., at its limit, and combats
it there. Myth in fact must be included in a general theory of
the language of writing, of the signifier, and this theory,
supported by the formulations of ethnology, psychoanalysis,
semiology, and ideological analysis, must extend its object to
take in the sentence, or better still, to take in sentences (the plural
of the sentence); by which I mean that the mythic is present
wherever sentences are turned, where stories are told (in every sense
of these expressions): from interior monologue to conversation,
from the newspaper article to the political speech, from the
novel (if there are any left) to the advertising image-all
utterances that can be included in the Lacanian concept of the
image-repertoire.
This is no more than a program, perhaps in fact no more than
a "desire." Yet I believe that, even if the new semiology-mainly
concerned, recently, with the literary text-is no longer applied
to myths of our time since the last text of Mythologies, in which I
sketched an initial semiotic approach to social speech, it is at least
conscious of its task: no longer merely to reverse (or to correct) the
mythic message, putting it right side up, with denotation at the
bottom and connotation at the top, nature on the surface and class
interest deep down, but to change the object itself, to engender a
new object, point of departure for a new science; to shift-making due allowance, of course, for differences in importance, and
according to Althusser's scheme-from Feuerbach to Marx, from
the young Marx to the great Marx.
Esprit, 1971