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

the theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

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 when their distancing founds my modernity (to be modern-is this not really to know that one cannot begin again?)

“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 play a 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then that of the (passive) amateur who listens to music without being able to play it (the piano has effectively been replaced by the record); we know that today post-serial music has disrupted the role of the “interpreter,” who is asked to be in a sense the co- author of the score which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 avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means one cannot produce the text, play it, release it, make it go.

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.

literary science thus teaches us to respect the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions,

cultural languages (what language is not cultural?),

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).

the Text is always paradoxical.

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 be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work which is the Text’s imaginary tail.

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;

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.