Have these been transferred? Can we get them?

https://www.roland-barthes.org/index.html

Roland Barthes research site maintained by Mathieu Messager.

Dans le fichier de Roland Barthes. Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQX7jWqoq4o.

Watched 2023-03-03 at 11:55 AM

Mathieu Messager imagines a digital archive of Roland Barthes' Grand Fichier, but as of 2021-05-05 it has not yet been realized. He presented an imagined version of it in his presentation at the BnF.

A few times in his Grand Fichier, Barthes includes notebook paper from other sources which he's cut down to fit into his box or clippings of newspapers which he's taped to cards and included. ᔥ [00:32:00]

partir de 78 79 mais plutôt 79 et 81 donc dans les derniers dans les deux dernières années de sa vie l'avant veille de son accident l'a dit les prises de notes sont alors beaucoup moins espacées dans le temps et bar peut écrire jusqu'à une quinzaine de fiches par jour voire plus on voit ici sur ce diagramme l'année 1979 avec véritablement un bon mois à l'été 79 ou [00:29:35]

In 1978/79 Roland Barthes was making up to 15 cards per day. ᔥ

Histogram of Roland Barthes fiches between 1968 and 1980 from [29:28]

Since it seems more natural, I'm switching tags from "Roland Barthes' zettelkasten" to "Roland Barthes' fichier boîte". Future me will have to cross-correlate these.

avoir cela à l'esprit c'est vraiment du format a6 je le disais ce sont des fiches des feuilles a4 que bart devait plier et découper et à avoir un stock ainsi de feuilles pourra noter ce qui lui passait par la tête tout ce qu'ils avaient envie d'écrire jour après jour donc de petits formats elles se disent aussi en mode paysage n'est pas en mode portrait elles portent quasiment toute la date au recto comme [00:28:08]

Barthes used A4 sheets which he folded and cut by hand to make A6 sheets for his notes. Most sheets are in landscape orientation and dated by hand in the top right corner, though some appear in portrait orientation presumably as tabs with the month and year centered in the top.

de l'ensemble de cet objet le fond et sa cotation je passe très brièvement le grand fichier on l'a dit se compose ainsi on le voit 2083 fiches manuscrites qui sont datés donc entre 1968 et 1980 et conservés depuis 2010 depuis le don de michel salzedo on a dit au département des manuscrits de la bibliothèque nationale sur le site richelieu toutes ces fiches sont contenues dans deux boîtes distincts qui apparaissent ici à gauche qui porte la cotation de la bibliothèque nationale nouvelle acquisition française 28 600 34 51 et 4,52 dans ces deux boîtes [00:27:01] (via autogenerated subtitles in French)

The Grand Fichier de Roland Barthes is composed of two boxes with 1083 handwritten cards and dated between 1968 and 1980.

il existe donc un sous ensemble composite qui porte le nom de grand fichier il est composé de d'environ 1000 feuillets et 1083 pour être exact [00:19:13]

The grand fichier of Roland Barthes contains 1083 fiches. ᔥ

Roland Barthes has had published a number of works posthumously by way of his archives.

Were they all "finished" in his archive and then put out, or were they pieced together from outlines and notes? What state of preparation were they in?

There's something lovely about calling it le «Grand fichier» de Roland Barthes.

Michel Salzedo, Roland Barthes' brother, donated Barthes' papers to the BnF in 2010. [08:40]

One might have considered some of this part of his (Roland Barthes') fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.

This sounds somewhat similar to Mark Robertson's method of "live Roaming" (using Roam Research during his history classes) as a teaching tool on top of other prior methods.

link to: Roland Barthes' card collection for teaching: https://hypothes.is/a/wELPGLhaEeywRnsyCfVmXQ

https://ead.nb.admin.ch/html/comment_0.html

The layout and format of this online archive is highly reminiscent of a digital zettelkasten and could even be used as a user interface for implementing one. It has a nice alpha-numeric form.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xyhpq4/2015_exhibition_of_roland_barthes_zettelkasten/

Johanna Daniel has some interesting reflections (in French) about Barthes' reading, note taking, and writing processes: http://johannadaniel.fr/isidoreganesh/2015/06/archives-roland-barthes/ Perhaps most importantly she's got some photos from an exhibition of his work which includes portions of his note cards and writing. Roland Barthes' note cards on the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. And you thought your makeshift cardboard boxes weren't "enough"? Want more about Barthes' practice? Try my digital notes: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22Roland+Barthes%22

Files and reading sheets around the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

And you thought your slip boxes were DIY?!?

http://johannadaniel.fr/isidoreganesh/2015/06/archives-roland-barthes/

Translation:

There is one point in particular that strikes me more every day: what the archive of yesterday's researcher can teach today's researcher, in terms of methodology.

With the rarer exceptions of writers like Erasmus, Melanchthon, Agricola, U. Eco, and G. Weinberg who wrote manuals or others like John Locke (on Indices), E. Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and B. Webb who tucked reasonable advice on research and note taking methods in their texts or appendices one of the benefits of of researcher archives is not just the historical record of the researcher's evolving thought, but to actually show specific types of methodology and changes through time.

https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x

The Fonds Roland Barthes (English: The Roland Barthes Fund) at the Bibliothèque National De France refers to his card index or fichier boîte written from 1968-1980 as the 'Grand fichier'.

See also: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x/cN77017

Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary.

Are there examples of this practice before this time? Certainly in the commonplace book tradition, the ideas of journal, diary, and commonplace had been mixed before.

Roland Barthes began using index cards as a student.

1. BNF, NAF 28630, ‘Grand fichier’, 3 January 1975.

Roland Barthes' biographer Tiphaine Samoyault quotes portions of what he calls Barthes' card index diary.

This can also be seen in the published cards which comprise Barthes' Mourning Diary about the period following his mother's death.

Are there other people who've used their card index as a diary the way that some use it for productivity?

syndication link

Samoyault, Tiphaine, and Jonathan Culler. Barthes: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown, 1st edition, Polity, 2017.

From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.

It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.

footnote:

Webb 1926, p. 363. The number of scholars who have used the index card method is legion, especially in sociology and anthropology, but also in many other subjects. Claude Lévy-Strauss learned their use from Marcel Mauss and others, Roland Barthes used them, Charles Sanders Peirce relied on them, and William Van Orman Quine wrote his lectures on them, etc.

Roland Barthes accumulated a card index of more than 12,250 note cards beginning in 1943 which were held after his death in 1980 at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in France.

Barthes' dates 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980 age 64

He started his card index at roughly age 28 and at around the same time which he began producing written work. (Did he have any significant writing work or publications prior to this?)

His card collection spanned about 37 years and at 12,250 cards means that was producing on average 0.907 cards per day. If we don't include weekends, then he produced 1.27 cards per day on average. Compare this with Ahrens' estimate of 6 cards a day for Niklas Luhmann.

With this note I'm starting the use of a subject heading (in English) of "card index" as a generic collection of notes which are often kept in one or more boxes. This is to distinguish it from the more modern idea of zettelkasten in the Luhmann framing which also connotes a dense set of links between the cards themselves, though this may not have been the case historically. Card index is also specifically separate from 'index card' which is an individual instance of an item that might be found in a card index. At present, I'm unaware of a specific word in English which defines the broader note taking context or portions thereof relating to index cards in the same way that a zettelkasten implies. This may be the result of the broad use of index cards for so many varying uses in the early 20th century. For these other varying uses I'll try to differentiate them henceforth with the generic 'index card files' which might also be used to describe the containers in which cards might be found.

While one can take a lot of notes in two weeks, even just six quality notes a day (Niklas Lumann's pace was six per day while Roland Barthes was closer to 1 and change per day) only provides about 84 cards or zettels. This isn't enough to make anything distressing or unintelligible. It's also incredibly far short of creating any useful links to create anything. He should have trimmed things down and continued for about 24 weeks to see any significant results. (Of course this also begs the question: what was his purpose in pursuing such a system in the first place?)

Tiago Forte self-reports that he captures two notes a day.

Link to other's notes per day including Barthes, Luhmann, et al.

Luhmann is not an outlier, he's just the only example known in English social media and the blogosphere over the past couple of years. Try searching for "card index" (English), "fichier boîte" (French), or even "commonplace book" (a simplified version of and predecessor of the zettelkasten) and you'll find lots of examples. Over the past year or so I've been working at improving the number of examples available. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten. Recently I've just uncovered Roland Barthes (12,250+ index cards) and Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita fame: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html).

Some of the common things I see people doing wrong are not putting in the work and particularly not creating links between their cards. Others don't have a clear reason why they're actually doing the practice. Based on anecdotal evidence from people who are well practiced at it and have done it a while, it can take from 500 to 1000 cards to see the sort of fun serendipity and value in having a zettelkasten. Having something specific or even an area in which you actively want to write as an end goal can be very helpful. If you're writing even 1-3 solid cards a day, that is the leverage in productivity. Barthes averaged about 1 and change compared to Luhmann's 6 cards a day. Once you have lots of cards that are all linked together, pick your favorite up with all the ones that go with it and you've got a solid article or even the start of a book.

Published on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection published for the first time from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.

Was it truly created as a "diary" from the start? Or was it just a portion of his regular note taking collection excerpted and called a diary after-the-fact? There is nothing resembling a "traditional" diary in many portions of the collection, but rather a collection of notes relating to the passing of his mother. Was the moniker "diary" added as a promotional or sales tool?

https://www.amazon.com/Mourning-Diary-Roland-Barthes/dp/080906233X

phy. In that sense, the reproduction of these three slips ironically resonates, if on a different scale, with the world tour of the mask of Tutankhamen. It refers, if not to the magic silence of a relic, at least to the ghostly parergonal quality of what French language calls a reliquat.

Hollier argues that Barthes' reproduced cards are not only completely divorced from their original context and use, but that they are reproduced for the sheen of reality and artistic fashion they convey to the reader. So much thought, value, and culture is lost in the worship of these items in this setting compared to their original context.

This is closely linked to the same sort of context collapse highlighted by the photo of Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders in Tim Ingold's Why Anthropology Matters. There we only appreciate the sense of antiquity, curiosity, and exoticness of an elder of a culture that is not ours. These rocks, by very direct analogy, are the index cards of the zettelkasten of an oral culture.

Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders; a picture taken by A. Irving Hallowell in 1930, between Grand Rapids and Pikangikum, Ontario, Canada. (American Philosophical Society)

Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397642

Read: 2022-04-20 15:36

Interesting material on Barthes' use of note cards, though not in depth. Some interesting discussion on the idea of autobiography from a philosophical perspective.

The first five sections were interesting to me, the last two a bit denser and not as clear or interesting without additional context.

Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

In his book Roland Barthes par (by) Roland Barthes, Barthes reproduces three of his index cards in facsimile. The text doesn't comment or even allude to them, they're presented only with the captions "Reversal: of scholarly origin, the note follows the various twists and turns of movement." "...outside...", and "...or at a desk".

In this setting, the card index proves itself the most direct co-author as it physically appears in Barthes' autobiography!

Nathalie Léger, “Immensément et en détail,” in R/B Roland Barthes, exh. cat. (Paris: Seuil, Centre Pompidou, IMEC, 2002), p. 91.

Nathalie Léger has indicated that there are 12,250 slips in Roland Barthes' bequest at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC).

French theorist, philosopher, and writer [[Roland Barthes]] (1915 – 1980) kept a ''fichier boîte'' or card index file beginning in 1943 until his death. Curator Nathalie Léger has indicated that there are 12,250 slips in Roland Barthes' bequest at the [[Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives|Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC)]].<ref name="Hollier">{{cite journal |last1=Hollier |first1=Denis |title=Notes (On the Index Card). |journal=October |date=2005 |volume=112 |issue=Spring |pages=35–44 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397642 |access-date=23 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Krapp |first1=Peter |editor1-last=Chun |editor1-first=W. H. K. |editor2-last=Keenan |editor2-first=T |title=New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader |date=2006 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |pages=359-373 |chapter=Hypertext Avant La Lettre}}</ref> [[Louis-Jean Calvet]] explains that in writing ''Michelet'', Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them."<ref name="Rowan">{{cite journal |last1=Wilken |first1=Rowan |title=The card index as creativity machine |journal=Culture Machine |date=2010 |volume=11 |pages=7–30 |url=https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-card-index-as-creativity-machine-Wilken/ffeae0931cc269da047d0844a6bef7e1c7424b46 |access-date=23 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Calvet |first1=Louis-Jean |title=Roland Barthes: A Biography |date=1994 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=Bloomington, IN}}</ref> In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.<ref name="Rowan"></ref> In his autobiographical ''Roland Barthes par (by) Roland Barthes'', Barthes reproduces three of his index cards in facsimile.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barthes |first1=Roland |title=Roland Barthes |date=1977 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-1-349-03520-5 |page=75}}</ref> Published posthumously in 2010, Barthes' ''Mourning Diary'' was created from a collection of 330 of his index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother. The book jacket of the book prominently features one of his index cards from the collection.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barthes |first1=Roland |title=Mourning Diary |date=2010 |publisher=Macmillan |url=https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533113/mourningdiary}}</ref> In a well known photo of Barthes in his office taken by [[Henri Cartier-Bresson]] in 1963, the author is pictured with his card indexes on the shelf behind him.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Yacavone |first1=Kathrin |title=Interdisciplinary Barthes |date=2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-726667-0 |pages=97–117 |url=https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007 |chapter=Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship}}</ref><ref name="Hollier"></ref>

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/barthess-hand

Interesting use of a card index as a diary.

Cross reference: Review of Mourning Diaries: Wallowing in Grief Over Maman by Dwight Garner, New York Times, Oct. 14, 2010 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/books/15book.html

While only applicable to a small subsection of 330 index cards which were published as Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes apparently preferred blue ink pens.

Hill and Wang published Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes on October 12, 2010. It is a collection of 330 entries which he wrote following the death of his mother Henriette in 1977.

Kristina Budelis indicates that she saw them in person and reproduced four of them as index card-like notes in The New Yorker (September 2010).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_text

Within the field of semiotic analysis, an open text is one that can be interpreted by readers in a variety of ways. By way of contrast, a closed text prompts the reader to only one interpretation.

Given the definition of an open text (opera aperta), in practice, the Bible may be one of the most open texts ever written despite its more likely original intention of it being a strictly closed text.

What does a spectrum of open to closed look like? Can it be applied to other physical forms that could potentially be open to interpretation? Consider art, for example, which by general nature is far more open to interpretation (an open "text") and rarely are there artworks which are completely closed to a single interpretation.

How does time and changing audiences/publics affect a work? The Bible may have been meant as a closed text in its original historical context, but time and politics have shown it to be one of the most spectacularly open texts ever written.

Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30.

file: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf

Rowan Wilken admits that Cornelia Vismann's use of files for transmission, storage, cancellation, manipulation, and destruction are remarkable, but that the key feature of the card index as a file type is its use for creative production.

Does the fact that Barthes uses a card index in his composition and organization influence the overall theme of his final works which could be described as "non-totalizable fragments"?

a good summary of the overall paper?

Barthes used his card index as an organizational tool as well as a problem-solving tool.

Louis-Jean Calvet explains that in writing Michelet, Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them."

There is apparently an English translation by Linda Coverdale of this interview was published posthumously by University of California Press in The Grain of The Voice

There's also another edition The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 by Roland Barthes; Translated by Linda Coverdale; Northwestern University Press, 384 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in, 8 b-w Paperback, ISBN: 9780810126404; Published: December 2009, https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810126404/the-grain-of-the-voice/

Is there anything else worthwhile in this interview about note taking?

In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.

Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

While the three index cards of Barthes that were reproduced in the 1977 edition of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may have been "primarily for reality-effect value as evidence of an expanding taste for historical documents" as argued by Hollier, it does indicate the value of the collection to Barthes himself as part of an autobiographical work.

I've noticed that one of the cards is very visibly about homosexuality in a time where public discussion of the term was still largely taboo. It would be interesting to have a full translation of the three cards to verify Hollier's claim, as at least this one does indicate the public consumption of the beginning of changing attitudes on previously taboo subject matter, even for a primarily English speaking audience which may not have been able to read or understand them, but would have at least been able to guess the topic.

At least some small subset of the general public might have grown up with an index-card-based note taking practice and guessed at what their value may have been though largely at that point index card note systems were generally on their way out.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Barthes kept his system to a 'strict format' of cards which were one quarter the size of his usual sheet of writing paper, though he did adjust the size over time as paper sizes standardized within Europe. Hollier indicates that the collection had considerable 'interior mobility' and the cards were constantly reordered with use. Barthes also apparently frequently annotated and altered his notes on cards, so they were also changing with use over time.

Did he make his own cards or purchase them? The sizing of his paper with respect to his cards might indicate that he made his own as it would have been relatively easy to fold his own paper in half twice and cut it up.

Were his cards numbered or marked so as to be able to put them into some sort of standard order? There's a mention of 'interior mobility' and if this was the case were they just floating around internally or were they somehow indexed and tethered (linked) together?

The fact that they were regularly used, revise, and easily reordered means that they could definitely have been used to elicit creativity in the same manner as Raymond Llull's combinatorial art, though done externally rather than within one's own mind.

Note the idea here about how easily portable a 1,000 card index must have been or alternately how important it must have been that Barthes traveled with it.

Peter Krapp created a list of thinkers including Locke, Leibniz, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Michel Leiris, Georges Perec, and Lévi-Strauss who used index cards in his essay Hypertext Avant La Lettre on the precursors of hypertext.

see also: Krapp, P. (2006) ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge: 359-373.

Notice that Krapp was the translator of Paper Machines About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929 (MIT Press, 2011) by Marcus Krajewski. Which was writing about hypertext and index cards first? Or did they simply influence each other?

Roland Barthes' use of index cards has been documented by the following:

Krapp, P. (2006) ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge: 359-373.

Hollier, D. (2005) ‘Notes (on the Index Card)’, October 112 (Spring): 35-44.

Calvet, J.-L. (1994) Roland Barthes: A Biography. Trans. S. Wykes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Includes some research on the use Roland Barthes made of index cards for note taking to create his output.

Want to read this:

see: https://hypothes.is/a/Zp03rLg6Eey_90cC_8HS4g

Wait, what?! Someone's written an essay on index card use by these two?!

First time I've run across the French term fichier boîte (literally 'file box') for index card boxes or files.

As someone looking into note taking practices and aware of the idea of the zettelkasten, the suspense is building for me. I'm hoping this paper will have the payoff I'm looking for: a description of Roland Barthes' note taking methods!

Could this be a zettelkasten or similar sort of note keeping device?!

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roland Barthes, 1963. © PAR79520 Henri CartierBresson/Magnum Photos.

An alternate view of Roland Barthes, likely taken in his 1963 session with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Index card boxes can be seen on the shelf behind him.

via https://newrepublic.com/article/144518/laurent-binet-case-dead-author-seventh-function-language-novel-whodunit-french-intellectuals

A photo of Roland Barthes from 1963 featured in Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2020) DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007

There appears to be in index card file behind him in the photo, which he may have used for note taking in the mode of a zettelkasten.

link to journal article notes on:

Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. https://culturemachine.net/creative-media/

Definition of lexia (or French lexie).

A couple of notes for first-time users of hypothes.is:

• you can format your text with italics or bullet-points or bold
• you can also insert images or links
• you can add tags (please use allred720 for everything so we can pull out our class's comments if needed; you might also use thematic tags like Barthes or theoryjargon
• you can respond to each other's comments
• This is a "page comment" that refers to the entire document; you'll be primarily making annotations that are tied to whatever you highlight in the text.

Here Barthes joins a robust tradition of artist-critics who abolish the distinction between "primary" (imaginative literature) and "secondary" (criticism): Derrida, Brecht, Godard, and so on...

Barthes: "in other words, I practice what I preach."

I love this idea that readers/writers of the "text" are like friends gathered around the piano in olden times in which to hear music, you had to make it. Reminds me of Matt Rubery's work on oralizations of Victorian literatur.

This is basically the mission statement of this course...

Profound point with an extremely compressed history within it: access to reading and writing are always bound up in class distinctions. Indeed, in our own moment it's clear that, the more expensive the education, the more it is oriented towards writing and the production of texts; the cheaper, the more it's oriented towards the inscription, as it were of the student via automated ed-tech interfaces with its XP and badges and Foucaultian surveillance techniques.

Another gorgeous metaphor and very French!

Here we see the return of the physics analogy: as in quantum physics, the object has no autonomous existence apart from the process of its creation or recreation via reading/observation/reenactment.

Further elaboration of the "paradoxical" aspect of the text. His critique comes into clearer focus in light of the dominance of "formalist" or "structuralist"modes of criticism that presupposed a unity of the text. Barthes's own famous "mythologies" of pop cultural objects like soap or the Tour de France themselves were relatively "monistic" in this sense.

(in certain Arabic-speaking countries) a valley, ravine, or channel that is dry except in the rainy season. Thanks, dictionary.com.

Man, I love this dude's metaphorics: explosion, indeed.

For those of you who are not theory nerds, this riff is based on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, which exerted enormous influence on 20thC cultural theory in France and, really, everywhere. "Signifier" means the arbitrary combination of sounds or letters that makes up an "utterance" in language and "signified" means the idea that signifier points to. The letters T-R-E-E is the signifier; the mental image of the thing with leaves in the signified.

Nice turn of phrase that digs into etymology: the text is next to but not connected to (para) the common belief structure or "common sense" (doxa).

I started to lose him above, but this last couple of sentences secures it for me, as the primacy of practice, of process comes into focus. To borrow from the language of the course, one "does things" with texts; one "reads" works.

Barthes is speaking metaphorically and at a time when computing is in its adolescence, if not infancy. But it's kind of funny to read this sentence now, when texts are eminently computable in a much more literal sense!

That's all? Quite a menagerie of terms here, Roland...

This extended metaphor linking theoretical physics and the humanities makes me wonder whether our present-day fascination with text mining, distant reading, and so on represents another turn of the screw that (to extend the analogy) resembles discussions of "quantum gravity" that try to link Einstein and Heisenberg, the macro and the nano scales.

Certainly the early years of DH felt like an echo of the late 60s-early 70s moment Barthes is feeling here.

A couple of notes for first-time readers of this text:

• yes, everyone wrote like this in 1970s French academic life
• light up a Gauloises cigarette and feel free to complain about jargon-words in the margins
• think about how the act of reading/writing on/around/with Barthes and classmates interacts with the argument

Barthes is not thinking about this valence, but the phrase makes me think of the three permissions levels that structure access to texts in UNIX: read/write/execute. Readers of the "work" have read-only access: they consume it without inscribing it. Execute permission allows changes to the operating system itself: the energy of the passage points us towards hacking texts at this root level...

This could be the slogan for our course! Doing things with novels means engaging them in a "practical collaboration," not only with the text but with other writer/readers.

I hope y'all can feel the force of using hypothes.is on this text in particular: we are engaging in precisely the kind of work/play that RB assigns to the world of the "text."

I love this passage. Once you publish something, it ceases to be yours, or at least exclusively yours. If you return to it, you are just another reader or critic. Think of all the readings you've been to when someone from the peanut gallery disagrees with the author's take on the motives of a character or the after-life of the plot! In a few weeks, we will literalize this idea via the Ivanhoe concept, having Melville visit Billy Budd as a "guest" among its characters, narrator, critics, editors, etc.

Man, the metaphors are thick on the ground here! The stereograph is a 19thC cultural technology that shows the viewer two images in an apparatus they look through to create the illusion of depth. RBs point here is that the coherence of the "text," such as it is, is constantly drawn back into the "plurality" of the "weave" that creates it.

Note that this section is really obscure if you haven't read the work of Ferdinand de Sassure, a Swiss linguist who basically created "semiotics," the systematic study of sign-systems, and whose influence on Barthes is enormous. RBs basic point is that, following Saussure, the "sign" in a symbolic system (say, language) is composed of two components: a "signifier," which is the material inscribed word or aural sound, and a "siginified," which is the meaning conventionally associated with that sound or combination of letters. The "work," for RB, gives up its "signified," its meaning or interpretation, after the critical labor of exegesis (THE ODYSSEY shows the emergence of "civilization," in all its discontents, from the spontaneity of kinship-based cultures), whereas the "text" remains in the field of the signifier in a field of "play" that resists reduction to a meaning (Gertrude Stein, "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...").

Reminiscent of the roughly contemporary statement by Derrida that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte: really "there is no outside-text"). In other words, textuality is a web that can't be contained within the hermetic walls of a book's covers; all textuality bleeds over into other texts. RBs reading does not go quite so far, in that he emphasizes the position of texts that pretend, as it were, to be "works" that are hermetic and separable.

That is a super cute metaphor and encapsulates the entire set of oppositions RB develops here: a) the priority of text over work; b) text as living process v. work as epiphenomenal thing.

Practically like hypothes.is this very scholarly website invites us to weigh in on Barthes FAQ http://www.vipfaq.com/Roland%20Barthes.html

References Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. He often interrogated the structure of great writers with distinctive style, such as Voltaire.

Compare with the definitions of these terms in original text by Barthes here: PDF of Pleasures. Relevant quote "If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer's complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee-guarantee me, the writer-my reader's pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must "cruise" him) without knowing where he is, A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader's "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictabilIty of blIss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game" (Barthes 4).

Hird, Alastair. 2010. “‘WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING,’ SOMEONE SAID, ‘WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING’: Beckett, Foucault, Barthes.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 22: 289–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781931.

Picks up point that Beckett features very strongly in both Barthe's Death of an Author and Foucault's "What is an Author."

Again a literary conception of purpose

Intertextuality and (literary) authorship

Really, he's tying this to the ironic self-consciousness of postmodern authors: performance as opposed to realism.

Literary writing: "disjunction" from individual when writing for "intransitive" ends.

Why science authorship is not the same as poetic authorship: the lack of identity of the author. cf. Booth 1961, Rhetoric of Fiction

Interesting that the prompt is gender fluidity.

Barthes, Roland. 1967. “Death of the Author.” Edited by Brian O’Doherty. Translated by Richard Howard. Aspen 5+6 (Fall/Winter): Item 3. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes.

The modern scriptor is no longer the owner of an article