Clothing Degree Zero: Barthes in China

Clothing Degree Zero: Barthes in China

A. Versteegh: Barthes in China

“It will be necessary to start off with the major fact,” writes Roland Barthes in Travels in China, “the absolute uniformity of clothes.” That this should count as a “major fact”—partway through a journal that opens with a gripe about freshly stained trousers—ought to provide some sense of what the French semiotician is up to as, over the span of three weeks in the spring of 1974, he tries, and fails, to decipher the late stages of the Cultural Revolution for a European intelligentsia busily bickering over its fractured Marxist patrimony. What comes through instead, in this collection of notebooks translated into English for the first time, is a Barthes intent on reading himself as closely as he does the social scene: a farraginous and sometimes cryptic compendium of observations, annoyances, insights, and misgivings. And as in Mythologies, serendipitously released this spring by Hill and Wang in Richard Howard’s new (and at last complete) translation, Barthes’s close readings open into critical aloofness. But where the earlier work made use of this distance to explode the putatively “natural” commonplaces of bourgeois life—riffing on the signifying function of household detergents, say, or hacking away at the cultural investments of steak and wine in France—the China notebooks are more a chronicle of frustration, most telling where they record Barthes’s political disillusionments and his growing discomfiture with the ideological abandon of his peers.

It was Mythologies that made, and mostly maintains, Barthes’s name. When the fifty-three short magazine pieces, written over two years on subjects ranging from the drama of wrestling to the automobile as modern-day cathedral, were collected in 1957, Barthes took the opportunity to add a lengthy essay sketching out the theory behind his methods. Heavily indebted to Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, “Myth Today” lays out the schematics of sign, signifier, and signified—the building blocks of semiotics—that would become so familiar to a generation of liberal arts students trained to “denaturalize” the mythic cargo of television shows and consumer goods. (Barthes himself wrote extensively on the language of advertising and mass culture.)

Although hailed as an exponent of structuralism and at times publicly dedicated to the so-called “scientific” study of literature and signs, Barthes disdained fads and consistency in equal measure. Critiques of his work often charge him with a predisposition toward the former and a dearth of the latter. Positioning his earliest writings as a response to existentialism, Barthes brushed past academic labels—structuralism, post-structuralism—without quite letting any stick. By the early seventies, his work was insisting that scholarly attention be devoted to the text itself—never mind authorial intent or biography—a position he staked out in the famous 1967 paper “The Death of the Author.” In 1977, three years after his return from China, Barthes was appointed Professor of Literary Semiology (a title of his own choosing) at the Collège de France, settling upon the cushy pinnacle of French academe. Western Marxism could hardly have offered the world a more lionized, or more mythologized, ambassador.

Barthes traveled to China as part of a cadre of intellectuals associated with the journal Tel Quel, a publication still legendary today in some circles but caught up at the time in a Maoist phase that had prompted sniping with, among others, the official organ of the French Communist Party. The invitation had been extended via the Chinese embassy to the writer Philippe Sollers, co-founder of Tel Quel and translator of several of Mao’s poems. Aside from Barthes, the delegation comprised Sollers, the Franco-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (Sollers’s then- and current wife), and the critics François Wahl and Marcelin Pleynet, the last of whom would go on to publish his impressions of the visit in 1980 as Le Voyage en Chine (which, coincidentally, has reappeared this year in a corrected and expanded edition from Éditions Marciana). Barthes too expected to produce a book based on the journey, and sketches out plans for such a work toward the end of his notes, but although he carefully indexed and paginated his notebooks the project went unrealized. It fell to Wahl—who has been alternately praised and condemned in his role as Barthes’s literary executor—to release the jottings as the latest in the series of posthumous volumes that have kept us continually reevaluating Barthes over the more than three decades since his death. Published initially as Carnets du voyage en Chine by IMEC in 2009, the present edition has been superbly translated by Andrew Brown and furnished with a foreword and well-considered annotations by editor Anne Herschberg.

Whether Barthes would have wanted his incipient work published—and of course he would not—is one question, but better now to ask what we get out of the bargain. As a theorist, Barthes was enamored of the fragment, and his literary delvings—into Michelet, Gide, Sade, Robbe-Grillet—proceed by a sort of whimsical dissection. Here, instead, we have Barthes himself laid open for us, largely because the official face of his surroundings was so monolithically resistant to sustained interest. Like most western visits of the era, Tel Quel’s was organized by China’s state travel bureau, the Luxingshe Agency, which carefully shepherded the intellectuals through factories, universities, museums, and cultural sites, treating them to scripted presentations and queries about perceptions of the PRC among the French Left. “The rational tablecloth has been draped over us,” Barthes writes, “so incidents, folds, the absurd are rare.” Instead, we look to Barthes to provide the wrinkles. Alongside the dutiful recording of facts and figures—so many tons of shipping capacity here, so many hospital beds there—the old structuralist is still at play, proposing typologies of women’s hairstyles, local clothing, and the arrangement of furniture in welcome lounges (several of Barthes’s sketches are reproduced).

As in L’Empire des signes, which recounts approvingly his experiences in Japan, Barthes’s attention is directed at surface detail, perennially on the lookout for the signifier. But with the exception of an opera, whose perfect artifice recalls the self-conscious conventionalism of Japanese culture (“AN ADORABLE PEOPLE,” he gushes afterward), there is simply too much surface in China, even for Barthes. The Tel Quel visit coincided with a nationwide propaganda campaign to discredit Confucius and Lin Biao (a military officer and former ally of Mao whose death in 1971 is still a subject of speculation), and this permeates the discourse to the extent that Barthes characterizes it as an assemblage of briques—which Brown translates as “bricks,” although the French term connotes something more like stereotypes or modules of social code that can be deployed and ceaselessly reconfigured to deflect inconvenient lines of inquiry. “The indisputable fact,” Barthes decides, is “the complete blocking out of information, of all information, from politics to sex. The most incredible thing is that this blocking is successful, i.e. nobody, whatever the length and conditions of his or her stay, manages to force it open at any point.”

The mention of sex is significant, for by the seventies Barthes had shifted his focus from conventional political concerns to the body and its potential as the locus of a hedonistic subjectivity. His analytic forays are tempered by a continual self-reflexivity, as he records his appetites, his difficulty sleeping, his near daily migraines, and even the sensations of temperature. A “visit to a public urinal!” merits a rare exclamation point (echoes here of the weight placed in his autobiography on primary sensations: “In the country I like to piss outside in the garden”). From the first morning of the trip—which opens with Barthes looking down at a badminton game from his window in a Beijing hotel, searching the players’ elastic limbs and wondering, “But wherever do they put their sexuality?”—his attempts to tease more than a spark of Eros from his hosts are stymied. An immense but sedately choreographed May Day celebration evinces “no eroticism, and no ‘joy,’” conjuring only “the terrifying image of a humanity engaged in a political struggle to the death in order to…infantilize itself.” Barthes singles out calligraphy—omnipresent on dazibao (propaganda posters), or represented in children’s classrooms—as an instance of authentic art, but real pleasure eludes him. “For a week,” he concedes midway through the journey, “I haven’t felt any opening up in my writing, any jouissance in it. Dry, sterile.”

So rather than the joyful aesthete of L’Empire des signes, we get the bored celebrity philosopher, comfortably reconciled by this point to his own bourgeois indulgences. The academics go shopping, and Barthes’s quest for a made-to-measure suit becomes something of a running joke, as does the repeated enumeration of his deprivations. “What I am dispossessed of,” he writes: “coffee, salad, flirting.” And later, en route home: “The Air France lunch is so vile that I’m on the verge of writing a letter of complaint.” It’s the sheer dullness of much of Barthes’s journal that forces us to appreciate the depth of his ennui and disillusionment. Barthes made “Dare to be lazy!” a personal maxim, but by this he meant a form of recalcitrance, a dogged refusal to hew even to one’s own calcified habits, to reject even the whiff of orthodoxy. Here, idleness manifests as nothing more than exasperation.

Most telling, the targets of Barthes’s irritation aren’t just his authoritarian minders but his compatriots and ostensible friends—most of all Sollers, about whom Barthes had written an admiring book some years earlier (Sollers écrivain), and whose Sinophilia extended even to his adoption of Chinese dress. Barthes’s notes disclose an increasing annoyance with Sollers’s dogmatism, his pomposity, and his constant willingness to argue the minutiae of dialectical materialism with religious ferocity. “Trips in the minibus are irritating,” Barthes declares at one point, “because they are an opportunity for Sollersian orations aimed at the interpreters.” Before the journey’s end the opinions and pronouncements of Barthes’s colleagues have apparently become almost as “predictable” and “tiresome” as official Party bromides.

Barthes ought to have listened to his boredom. One of his signal virtues as a critic was an unflagging openness to revising his own positions, a glee in periodically dismantling the “Roland Barthes” of popular acquaintance—an impulse that came off like a healthy allergy to the mainstream. It’s tempting to imagine Travels in China as a preliminary gesture toward the sort of demythologization of Maoism that he would never carry out in public life. But Barthes would live for another six years before his fatal brush with a laundry truck in the rue des Écoles, and his few comments on China—tepid interviews and remarks about the “blandness” of the People’s Republic—never rise to the level of disillusionment adumbrated here. Only in these heretofore-private notebooks do we encounter a Barthes who can say, wistfully but with dead certainty, “So it would be necessary to pay for the Revolution with everything I love.” Toward the end of his notes there’s something like a moment of resignation: his order having arrived at last from the tailor, Barthes wonders, with an air of defeat, “My outfit, the high point of the trip?” French Marxist goes to China for revolution, brings back cheap western suit. Plus ça change.

Adrian Versteegh is a Henry MacCracken Fellow at New York University. He writes about digital literature for Poets & Writers Magazine.

Photo by Oliver F. Atkins, 1972, U.S. National Archives, Wikimedia Commons