Clothing Degree Zero: A Late Reading of Barthes’ Fashion ‘System’

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 97-118
Author(s):  
Feng Jie
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
Neutral Form ◽  
Late Works

Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ posthumously published notebooks from his 1974 trip to China, in which he remarks upon the ‘complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero’, this article offers a ‘late’ reading of Barthes’ interest in fashion, suggested here as a form of writing. In reference to the late works, specifically Barthes’ penultimate lecture course on the Neutral and Travels in China, supplemented by François Jullien’s comments on Barthes’ trip to China (regarding the use of the term ‘blandness’), as well as mention of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo-Cina (which Barthes viewed with ‘methodological’ interest), it is possible to draw together a reading of fashion as a neutral form. As a final step, reflection is given to Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of ‘history as passing’, as discontinuous moments (whereby fashion is symptomatic of such transformations). Barthes’ writerly mode – which works upon incidental details (also found in the work of Antonioni) – is revealed to be a pertinent method.

scholarly journals Roland Barthes : pour une écologie de l'écriture

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Alexandru Matei
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
The Future

Roland Barthes: For an Ecology of Writing Abstract Even if the theoretical prestige of the notion of ecology is recent, an ecological writing has already been racticed, without receiving this name, by Roland Barthes. On several occasions, progressively after Writing Degree zero (1953), Roland Barthes envisaged writing as a multifaceted practice, the most suitable for overturning the only order worth to be revolutionized, the symbolic order. We will take a fresh look at Barthes' writing as a theoretical concept in the early 1950s, along a shift that takes the term first to the name of a technique. Finally, in the mid-1970s, writing comes to be defined by Barthes as a practice that ignores the dichotomy between matter or body and mind or idea, and which arrives, in a spiral return movement, at an inclusive conception that recovers both the concept and the practice. This is where writing meets, in Barthes' work, the act that Latour calls "greening" and which he defines above all as a new relationship between facts and values.  In the light of the latest research in "Barthesian studies" we would like to show that the future of "theory", if it is ecology today, lies in the practice and ecological commitment of writing, as a mediator of meaning, a tool of "charitable fiction", at the confines of spirit and matter.   

scholarly journals Neutral Life: Roland Barthes’ Late Work – An Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-34
Author(s):  
Sunil Manghani
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
Lecture Courses ◽  
Late Works ◽  
Lead Article

As the introduction and lead article for a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, ‘Neutral Life/Late Barthes’, this article offers an overview of the ‘new’ Barthes that emerges from the late writings and recent ‘Barthes Studies’. The account centres upon the posthumous publication of Barthes’ three key lecture courses delivered at the Collège de France, at the end of the 1970s, which reflect his preoccupation with the everyday, yet reveal a new degree of sophistication, both formal and conceptual. Presented in their original note form, the lectures present perhaps the clearest (if incomplete) affirmative project of Barthes’ entire career. The Neutral in particular is pivotal in understanding an ethics of the late works. While Barthes is perhaps most cited for his rumination on the temporality of the photograph, the lecture courses give rise to an ethics of space and distance, rather than of time and telos. Crucially, for Barthes, the Neutral is not neutrality; it is not divestment, but ‘an ardent, burning activity’. In establishing Barthes’ ethics of a Neutral Life, the articles closes – with reference to Derrida’s mourning of Barthes – with a reminder to read Barthes again, or rather a reminder of our current postponed reading of him.

scholarly journals Utopias of the Text: Pre-Figurations of the Post-Literary

CounterText ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Noys
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Neutral Form ◽  
May 1968

Utopias of the text are the moments of the emergence of a new and radical concept of the text as overflowing all limits and boundaries. Here these utopias are traced in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. They often emerge at the margins of these texts, in fragments or boundaries at which the utopia can be glimpsed before disappearing. These utopian moments can be reconstructed as a form of thinking the post-literary and its limits. They can also be traced to the explosion of speech during May 1968 and Maurice Blanchot is a key figure who links together this political moment with the ‘neutral’ form of writing. This article explores the fading of these utopias of the text alongside this draining of political energies. These processes of critique and waning suggest the inversion of utopias of the text into dystopias of the text. Now the sign or signifier appears dispersed or even insignificant compared to the powers and forces of post-literary domination. In this situation, however, the article suggests, the persistence of the utopias of the text as a critical horizon that can still inform how we grasp the equivocations of our post-literary moment.

The Situation of Practice

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-186
Author(s):  
Victor Burgin
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Geopolitical Context

The Situation of Practice In Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes addresses the dilemma of the writer who wishes to be free from the grip of bourgeois history as enshrined in language: the doxa of style. Thus at the end of that book, he invokes the image of the writer facing the blank page. The confrontation with the blank page is the degree zero of any art practice, the schematic centre of the situation of the practice. In everyday speech the word 'situation' is used in disparate senses: from the gallery space in which it is encountered to the geopolitical context of its production and reception. The issues explored apply to the material means specific to Burgin's own art practice - writing and camera images - and at other times concern 'art' in general.

Seeing Degree Zero

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Visual Exploration ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Cultural Order ◽  
Zero Degree ◽  
Visual Impact

In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes' 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, but with reference to broader historical discourse that picks up on critical notions of 'zero', 'zero degree', and the 'neutral, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors' ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin. The book is composed of key chapters by the editors and Burgin, a series of collaborative texts with Burgin and four commissioned essays concerned with the relationship between Barthes and Burgin in the context of the spectatorship of art. It includes an in-depth dialogue regarding Burgin's long-term reading of Barthes and a lengthy image-text, offering critical exploration of the Image (in echo of earlier theories of the Text). Also included are translations of two projections works by Burgin, Belledonne and Prairie, which work alongside and inform the collected essays. Overall, the book provides a combined reading of both Barthes and Burgin, which in turn leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and the political aesthetic. Taken together, the volume argues that the critical concept of 'zero degree' presents a common, underlying interest threaded through the work of Roland Barthes and Victor Burgin. With respect to literature and the visual arts, it specifies a 'neutral' aesthetic situated in response to and outside of the dominant cultural order. This book provides an historical, theoretical and visual exploration of this term as it pertains to the writing and art practices of both Barthes and Burgin.

scholarly journals Roland Barthes : pour une écologie de l'écriture

Labyrinth ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Alexandru Matei
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
The Future

Even if the theoretical prestige of the notion of ecology is recent, an ecological writing has already been racticed, without receiving this name, by Roland Barthes. On several occasions, progressively after Writing Degree zero (1953), Roland Barthes envisaged writing as a multifaceted practice, the most suitable for overturning the only order worth to be revolutionized, the symbolic order. We will take a fresh look at Barthes' writing as a theoretical concept in the early 1950s, along a shift that takes the term first to the name of a technique. Finally, in the mid-1970s, writing comes to be defined by Barthes as a practice that ignores the dichotomy between matter or body and mind or idea, and which arrives, in a spiral return movement, at an inclusive conception that recovers both the concept and the practice. This is where writing meets, in Barthes' work, the act that Latour calls "greening" and which he defines above all as a new relationship between facts and values.  In the light of the latest research in "Barthesian studies" we would like to show that the future of "theory", if it is ecology today, lies in the practice and ecological commitment of writing, as a mediator of meaning, a tool of "charitable fiction", at the confines of spirit and matter. 

scholarly journals Os impasses da escrita & o lugar da poesia: uma leitura de "o grau zero da escrita", de Roland Barthes

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Marcio Renato Pinheiro da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
Modern Poetry

Despite being usually known by his diversity of interests as well as of theoretical knowledges mobilized by his writing, the work of the French essayist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) keeps a constant which, unlike the aforementioned diversity, remains unexplored even today: the extremely tense and problematic relation with poetry. Tense and problematic because rare are the moments in which Barthes comes to poetry; when it does, he is extremely harsh with it (mainly on Writing Degree Zero). This paper aims to study this relation between Barthes and poetry based on the following hypothesis: these critics on poetry are explained and justified by what Barthes means by modernity (more precisely, such as originally conceived in Writing Degree Zero and resumed in some of his early Essays Critical). Thus, knowing what does the critic mean by modernity, as well as which are its demands, it will be possible analyze how modern poetry responds to them according to Barthes.

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