A Secret Practice: Roland Barthes and the Writing of the Visual

“Such, it would seem, is the major function of rhetoric and its figures:
to make us understand, at the same time, something else.”
—Roland Barthes[1]

In October 2018, I took a research trip to the Fonds Roland Barthes at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I had just started writing a book on Barthes, and I wanted to learn more about the amateur painting and doodling that flits through Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: for example, an early drawing in marker whose pleasure and stupidity Barthes comments on in the lower left corner (fig. 1) or the more calligraphic illustration that echoes the scribbles at the book’s end (fig. 2).

Only now, after finishing my book six+ years later, am I beginning to see the significance this visual practice holds for Barthes’s work, which has both everything and nothing to do with my book’s argument about literature’s fantastic interpenetration with lived experience. At that moment, though, the paintings were opaque whispers of a vivacious form of textual engagement that held my attention but repelled my comprehension. Seeking interpretive help, I looked to the preparatory documents of Barthes’s experimental autobiography, including the daily planners where he organized his schedule and logged his activities with the rigorous schematization of a good structuralist. As I traced his orderly record of almost daily painting across the early 1970s, I also noticed his regular evening visits to the Paris baths—and the irregular presence of an X next to specific dates. The repeated notations of his painting practice did little to illuminate his works, but the erratic appearance of those Xs touched something obscure in me. What I found myself wondering was if those were the visits when Barthes, as we say, got a little touch himself.

Back home in Boston (where sadly there are no bathhouses), I gushed to a friend about my hypothesis, to which she responded, “John, you have to write an article about this and call it ‘The Pleasure of the X’!” This isn’t really that article, but the sensual detour that the X sparked for me does shed some indirect light on Barthes’s painting insofar as he explains the latter, in one of the very few comments he made on his amateur hobby, as stemming from “the need to express a little of the drive that’s in this body.”[2] Both cruising and painting, that is, seem to offer fleeting relief from the verbal coding of his social and professional lives, a fluid release from the grids of seemingly straight legibility. As such, they gesture toward a regimen of determined distraction driven by a visual sensitivity that informs a somewhat overlooked strain in Barthes’s theory of writing. This is at least what I’m going to suggest here through a consideration of some of Barthes’s paintings together with a condensed collection of texts from across his career that magnify the writerly potential of the visual in his thinking. Compounding the relationship between reading and seeing, this painterly Barthes complicates the well-known semiological and affective arguments he makes about images and quite literally fleshes out his enigmatic claim that “the semiologist sees the sign moving in the field of signification, he enumerates its valences, traces their configuration: the sign is, for him, a sensuous idea.”[3]

At the same time, this distracting interplay of the sensual and the significant also provides a framework for parsing my own amateur efforts in graphic art, which the pandemic quarantine found me cutting and pasting from my periodical reading (see, for example, fig. 3). Aimed at filling the empty hours where my social life had been, these verbal–visual mashups were motivated by a desire to find recreation and even sustenance in my intellectual life, to unleash some of the excitement of ideas and interpretation without the weight of serious academic work.  All the same, they quickly began to resonate with the more formal writing I was doing about the way the texts we read inform the texture of our real lives (and vice versa), and I was ultimately able to include a handful of collages in the book as figurative illustrations of my argument.  Asking us to treat word and image in unison, the collages give material embodiment to the kind of incessant interpretive activity that sees literature as, in Barthes’s words, “a very special semantic system, whose goal is to put ‘meaning’ in the world, but not a ‘meaning.’”[4]

Though the impulse behind these rudimentary image-texts was hazy, I drew encouragement and inspiration from Barthes’s own inarticulate avocation as a “Sunday painter.”[5] I also found some clarifying comments in the preface to his early collection, Critical Essays. Elaborating his assertion that “the critic is a writer”—perhaps the most readily recognizable characterization of Barthes’s overall intellectual project—he explains that “the critic does not ask to be conceded a ‘vision’ or a ‘style,’ but only to be granted the right to a certain discourse, which is indirect discourse.”[6] At stake in these lines is the rejection of a criticism that doesn’t engage its own textuality and establishes too blunt or too fixed of a meaning—that doesn’t spark deeper reading and further analysis. Indeed, the slipperiness of the word “certain” (meaning, in English and French, both particular and definite) resists the very certainty it would suggest, carrying instead a sense of ambiguity tantamount to writerly indirection itself. And although, at this early point in his career, the indirect is most obviously a function of the verbal—a mode exploited more and more extensively in Barthes’s increasing experimentalism—we should not disregard the way that the italic emphasis of his phrasing simultaneously functions by way of the visual, as if to link seeing directly to the indirect discourse he claims for himself. 

The ambiguous meanings sparked by the interaction of the verbal and the visual in my collages allowed me to think of them as my own form of discursive indirection in a way that resonated with the place of Barthes’s painting in his intellectual life. Insisting that this practice is “not, assuredly, a second-rate thing,” he describes “the relief (the restfulness) of being able to create something that isn’t directly caught in the trap of language” (“Colouring,” 124). Turning to two works from 1971, we thus find Barthes pursuing his ideas in a different register (figs. 4 and 5). The interlocking sets of colors, in either block or line form, visually approximate the complex braiding of textuality: not so much the orderly warp and weft of traditional weaving as the formalizing repetitions and reverberating variations that animate the writerly account of literary meaning in a text like S/Z. Even more, the rectangular format that these examples share with the vast majority of the images he made evokes the spread of an open book, in which the text is graphically bounded by margins that never quite fully contain the mobile operation of its significations (to say nothing of its process of signification more generally). In short, these multi-colored plaits of ink escape the “trap of language” by becoming a picture of it. Withholding any clear sense of conceptual import beyond their visual arrangement, they offer no site where our mind might rest and instead continually divert the eye across the tessellated rhythm of their surfaces. In place of logos, we seem to get praxis—both the endless exercise of our analytical imagination and the “switch[ing] from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it” that constitutes Barthes’s famously “obsessive relation to writing instruments” (“Obsessive Relation,” 178).

This kind of sensually deliberative distraction provides a more radical perspective on writing, which he further encourages in a statement toward the conclusion of the Critical Essays preface: “What marks the critic is therefore a secret practice of the indirect” (xxi). As the abstract category of “discourse” clarifies into the more concrete vocabulary of “practice,” this line emphasizes the critic’s active production of a work’s meaning, even granting them a kind of creative intentionality. But more significant to me is that tantalizing word “secret,” which seems to screen the oblique formulation of meaning behind an obscure veil. If I thus characterize Barthes’s painting as itself a “secret practice,” it’s not just because he kept his leisurely pastime mostly to himself—Severo Sarduy describes how “he never spoke of it, except to intimate friends, and refused display”—but also because it visualizes the visual as one of the covert modes of writing’s practical indirection.[7] What the paintings make transparent, in and through their explicit sensory availability, is the fundamental opacity of the world that secretly and ceaselessly drives all meaning-making (fig. 6).

At the same time, these “semiographic” works—to coopt a word Barthes applies to some of his favorite painters—also highlight the opacity attending the visuality of written words and letters themselves.[8] It is that visuality which our practiced alphabetics looks past in our skillful approach to the dark marks that hover on our screens and stream from our pens and printers. Barthes glancingly comments on this idea in a short piece about spelling entitled “Freedom to Write,” where he imagines a “free orthography” in which “the written physiognomy of the word might acquire a properly poetic value.”^[9] But it is only in his contemporaneous discussions of painting, particularly his rhapsodic comments on Cy Twombly, that the poetically distracting dynamic of this secret visuality comes out into the open. 

Indeed, Barthes’s account of writing in Twombly’s work is where the indirect discourse of his private paintings meets the circuitous interplay of word and images in my collages a bit more concretely. He describes how Twombly “alludes to writing (as he often does, as well, to culture, through words: Virgil, Sesostris), and then he goes off somewhere else.”[10] Such allusive detouring activates the kind of entangled textuality that we’ve seen Barthes picture for us, but its overtly verbal aspect also claims a visual depth for words themselves, positioning them as an entrée into an insistent and elusive elsewhere. To say this, of course, is to describe the general operation of linguistic meaning as such. But Barthes’s particular reaction to a Twombly painting helps us see the secret difference visuality makes. He writes: “the spectator . . . wants to join the canvas, not in order to consume it aesthetically, but in order to produce it in his turn (to ‘re-produce’ it), to try his hand at a making whose nakedness and clumsiness afford him an incredible (and quite misleading) illusion of facility.”[11] As logos once again dissolves into praxis, we get a sense of sense-making itself that seems to divert the work of words from the intellectual into the bodily realm—a kind of embodied, living textuality. 

This physical diversion of meaning is also what animates my collages as practical, tactile attempts to re-produce—through my fingers as much as through my mind—the interpretive energy and free-floating significance that art and literature bring to life. I see this especially in the tension between form and fragmentation in a composition I made around March 2022 (fig. 7). Most obviously, the collage’s components require a subtle regulation of concentration, as visual perception and verbal intellection contend with and bleed into one another. The combination of image and text, that is, sparks a toggling back-and-forth between seeing and reading in which we are always going somewhere else in the piece—and in our modes of attention—to make its meaning cohere.[12] At the same time, this unstable, dynamic coherence is what each of the piece’s pieces addresses: the flashing facets of the diamonds, the reordered Bovaryan lexicon, and the rapid strokes of Antonello da Massina’s painting that loosely bring things together. Or not. For the point also seems to be the extent to which these various fragments incorporate disintegration, the brilliance of the gemstones depending on the jeweler’s cutting in a way that recalls not just the fastidious enunciations by which Flaubert uses the discontinuity of verbal language to evoke the world but also the slice of the razor used to make the collage itself. What this meditation on and with words and images appears to be about is the sensuousness of signification and, in the keen edges of its display, maybe even meaning’s own incisive materiality.

In producing this commentary on my own graphic work, I’m resisting the distinction between the material act of making this collage and the intellectual act of reading or interpreting it. Part of the collage’s aesthetic quality, part of its visual effect, inheres in the way it both allows and forces me to say something more, to say something else—as if I am really just extending the operation of its construction. Which brings me to the ultimate secret of this entire discussion (perhaps of this entire Visualities forum), namely the verbal supplement that we, as speaking animals, necessarily bring not just to visual art but to the visual as such. Though Barthes might have viewed his painting as “something that isn’t directly caught in the trap of language,” the very fact of his statement situates the images he made—like this one with its startling use of white gouache that simulates the paper it’s painted on—within a network of verbal signs and signifiers (fig. 8). 

He asserts as much in an essay on the work of his former student Jean-Louis Schefer, the art critic and visual theorist who shows how, in Barthes’s paraphrase, “The picture, whoever writes it, exists only in the account given of it; or again, in the total and the organization of the various readings that can be made of it: a picture is never anything but its own plural description.”[13]  Cutting across the assumed divide that would keep language and painting apart—that would keep language and visual perception itself apart—these lines imply the fundamental chiasm of word and image that my collages take as the basic principle of their composition. In so doing, they also imagine a situation in which verbal meaning is given almost phenomenological status: notice the claims for “existence” that seem to leak from the painting to the words that variously describe it, granting commentary itself a kind of visual presence. And if this image of language receives its abstractly structural illustration in Barthes’s labyrinths of colors and lines, my reproduction of Twombly’s paintings and the meaningful elsewhere they incite in this final collage is my indirect way of letting the textuality of the visual come iridescently alive (fig. 9).