From S/Z to The Pleasure of the Text: Readerly, Writerly, Pleasure and Bliss

In Balzac’s Sarrasine, a sculptor is captivated by a singer whose story he does not understand. A reader can follow the withheld information like a mystery. A reader can also stop to ask how the narration makes certain assumptions seem natural in the first place. Roland Barthes follows those operations in S/Z, his close reading of the story. Three years later, The Pleasure of the Text asks a related question about what such changes in reading feel like.

Readerly and writerly texts in S/Z

Barthes calls the conventional literary work readerly when its codes largely position the reader as a consumer of meanings already made legible by the text. A mystery can hold back the answer while giving the reader a recognizable question to pursue. The answer, when it comes, organizes the clues into a story that seems to have been there waiting to be found.

The writerly names a different relation to the text. The reader participates in producing meanings as different codes and connections are brought into play. Barthes puts that possibility to work on a classic story by breaking it into short units of reading. What seems to be a simple description may simultaneously advance an action, draw on cultural knowledge, and raise or postpone a question. His reading makes that activity visible even in a work he treats as readerly. See the separate guide to readerly and writerly texts for the distinction in more detail.

Reading Sarrasine twice

On a first pass, a reader might keep going to find out what the sculptor has misunderstood. On a second pass, the answer is already known. Descriptions of the singer may then draw attention to the assumptions about voice, appearance and gender that made the earlier reading seem so natural. The same words that once felt like clues can become a way to examine how the story taught its readers what to expect.

That second reading helps illustrate what Barthes is doing in S/Z. It opens up several ways a detail can work instead of giving it only a single function in the plot. It also prepares a question the earlier book does not settle. How does it feel when a reading habit that has served us well suddenly falters?

From making meaning to feeling the text

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes calls attention to the enjoyment we take in familiar forms and to the more unsettling experience he calls jouissance. Following the mystery can be pleasurable. So can noticing how Balzac delays an answer. A moment of disorientation can arrive when a detail calls into question the assumptions that had made the story easy to follow.

The pairs serve different purposes. For a closer look at the experience Barthes calls bliss, see Pleasure and Bliss in Barthes. Readerly and writerly tell us something about the reader’s part in producing meaning. Pleasure and bliss describe experiences that can arise as we read. An active, attentive reading can be deeply satisfying, and a classic story can still unsettle a reader’s sense of what its words mean. Keeping both questions in view makes it easier to see what changes when Barthes moves from the codes of a story to the experience of reading it.

Pleasure and Bliss in Barthes: What Does Jouissance Mean?

A sentence begins in a familiar voice. Halfway through, its rhythm changes and the words stop fitting together in the way you expected. You go back to see what happened. The sentence may be easy to paraphrase, yet the paraphrase leaves out the thing that made you reread it. Roland Barthes is interested in moments like this in The Pleasure of the Text: They bring into view a kind of enjoyment that can unsettle the habits on which ordinary reading depends.

What are plaisir and jouissance?

Richard Howard’s English translation generally renders plaisir as pleasure and jouissance as bliss. In one of the book’s best-known distinctions, a text of pleasure draws on the forms and habits a reader already knows. That can include the satisfaction of following a story, recognizing a voice or anticipating what an author will do with a familiar genre. An intricate novel can give this kind of pleasure. The question is how the reading feels from within the conventions that make it possible.

Bliss names a more disorienting experience. Something about the writing can disturb a reader’s expectations, tastes or sense of how language is supposed to work. The reader may feel caught between wanting to continue and having to stop. That disturbance can occur in an otherwise familiar book, and it can come from a word or a break in a sentence. Barthes sometimes uses pleasure broadly for the whole field of textual enjoyment and sometimes more narrowly for one side of this distinction. The terms remain flexible across the book’s fragments.

Why the translation matters

In English, bliss often suggests an uncomplicated state of happiness. The French word jouissance can carry a sexual resonance and a sense of intensity that includes discomfort. Translating it as bliss gives the reader a useful English term, but it takes some explanation to recover the tension in it.

Imagine a detective story whose clues begin to make sense as the final chapter approaches. That recognition is one pleasure the book offers. Now imagine that a phrase about the crime keeps changing its significance every time it returns. At some point you may find yourself reading for the sound of the phrase and for the unease it creates, even after the mystery is solved. The two experiences can occur on the same page. Difficulty by itself does little to explain either one.

Barthes and Lacan

Jacques Lacan’s concept of jouissance also points toward enjoyment that can exceed the regulation of the pleasure principle and involve discomfort or suffering. Lacan develops it in a psychoanalytic account of the subject. Barthes asks what happens in an encounter with writing. Reading the two together helps explain why enjoyment can be disruptive while keeping the questions each writer is asking in view.

For Barthes, one way to read attentively is to notice the places where a work changes your pace. Where do you skim? Where do you go back? Which words make you hesitate even though you have understood what happened? The answers can tell you something about the experience of reading that a summary of the story leaves out.

Anthony Giddens’s New Rules of Sociological Method: Summary and Key Arguments

Someone raises a hand in a room. Is she voting, asking to speak, or signalling to a friend? The movement alone will not settle the matter. To describe what happened, an observer needs to know something about the occasion and about the rules the people in the room are already using.  Anthony Giddens starts from this problem in New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, first published in 1976.

What interpretive sociology gets right

Giddens reviews approaches that take seriously the work people do to make social life intelligible. Phenomenological sociology asks how an apparently ordinary world becomes available to people as shared knowledge. Ethnomethodology looks at the methods people use in practice to make their actions recognizable to one another. The question for Giddens is how far a social science can go if it begins with that knowledge.

An outsider learning to observe a meeting has to learn what counts as taking a turn, what a vote settles and what an interruption signifies. This requires some of the same competence as participating in the meeting. People may be able to follow the rules with little difficulty even when they would struggle to state them in an interview. Social inquiry therefore begins with attention to how an activity is carried on as well as to what participants say about it.

How social life gets reproduced

The people in the meeting use existing rules and resources. A chair may recognize speakers, a secretary may record decisions, and a person with a particular role may be able to put an issue on the agenda. These arrangements have histories. They also depend on people taking them up again in what they do. If participants repeatedly decline to recognize the chair’s authority, the meeting may start to work differently.

This is one of the book’s steps toward structuration theory. Structure is implicated in action as both its medium and its outcome. Rules and resources make a practice possible, and that practice can reproduce or alter them. Giddens leaves room for unequal power, conditions people do not know about, and consequences they did not intend. Understanding what a participant meant to do gives the researcher a starting point for explaining the wider result.

Why the method is a double hermeneutic

Sociologists give technical descriptions of a world already organized by the concepts and understandings of its participants. Those technical descriptions can circulate back into ordinary life. A researcher might describe a pattern in meetings as informal gatekeeping. If participants adopt the term, they may start noticing who gets interrupted or whose proposals reach the agenda. They might even change the way meetings are run. Giddens calls this relation the double hermeneutic.

That relation places a distinctive demand on sociological explanation. A researcher needs enough familiarity with a practice to recognize it, and enough analytical distance to examine conditions and consequences that are harder to see from inside it. The findings can then become part of what people in the practice know and do.

The title recalls Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method. Where Durkheim asks how sociology can establish social facts as objects of inquiry, Giddens asks what is involved in studying a world whose members are already competent interpreters. It is a useful difference to keep in mind when reading the two books together.

Further reading: Examples of the double hermeneutic 

Stuart Hall’s The Work of Representation Explained

A photograph of a crowd can illustrate a story about a public celebration or a story about a breakdown of order. The people in the photograph have stayed where they were. A caption, a crop and a headline can change what their gathering is taken to mean. This everyday operation is a good place to begin with Stuart Hall’s The Work of Representation, the opening chapter of Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997).

What is representation for Stuart Hall?

For Hall, representation is the production of meaning through language. He uses language in a broad sense. Words, photographs, facial expressions and traffic lights can all serve as signs. A red light tells drivers to stop because they have learned a code that connects the visible signal to an instruction. The physical properties of red leave the question of what to do open.

Hall distinguishes two systems of representation. First we use a conceptual map to recognize and organize what we encounter. We can recognize different kinds of chairs as chairs and distinguish them from tables. Second, a system of signs allows us to communicate these concepts. A culture supplies enough shared conventions for people to make sense of one another, even when they disagree about a particular image or word.

Three theories of representation

The reflective approach treats language as a mirror of a meaning already present in the world. The intentional approach locates meaning in what a speaker or author wants to say. Hall sees part of the problem in each account. A photograph can record something that took place, and a photographer can have a purpose. Both still depend on conventions shared with the people looking at the image.

In the constructionist approach, meaning is made through systems of concepts and signs. The people and the street in the photograph exist. The category under which a newspaper presents them, and the associations that come with it, are produced through representation. Change the caption from “residents gather” to “crowds block the road” and you invite readers to organize much of the same visual information differently.

From Saussure to Foucault

Hall turns first to Ferdinand de Saussure. A sign joins a perceptible form, the signifier, to a concept, the signified. Signs gain meaning through their relations and differences within a system. On a traffic signal, red acquires its practical meaning through its place alongside other signals in a code.

Michel Foucault shifts attention to discourse. A discourse includes the terms, institutions and practices that make certain things possible to say and certain people authorized to say them. In the newspaper example, a semiotic analysis can show how the headline guides the reading of the image. A study of discourse can ask how officials, journalists and residents acquire unequal authority to name what happened. The two questions lead to different kinds of evidence.

Hall’s chapter gives us a way of reading familiar things more closely. The next time a picture looks self-explanatory, ask which words made it so, whose account supplied those words, and what a different caption would allow you to see.

Further reading· The Politics of Looking · Encoding and Decoding 

What Is Diasporic Identity? Stuart Hall on Identity as Positioning

When Stuart Hall visited Martinique, what struck him was how different it felt from Jamaica. He had grown up in Kingston and recognised much in the French Caribbean. There was also a great deal he could only understand by paying attention to a different colonial history. From the vantage point of a European metropolis, both islands could be treated as part of the same periphery. From either island, the differences mattered. Hall uses the comparison to ask what we mean when we say a people has a cultural identity.

In Cultural Identity and Diaspora, diasporic identity is a way of belonging formed through dispersal and through the histories people make in the places where they settle. You can inherit a memory or a language and still have to learn what it means in a new setting. Hall calls this positioning. Institutions, images and inherited stories place us in relation to others. We also take up positions of our own when we tell those stories back.

What a shared past can do

Hall gives real weight to the idea that a people might recognise itself through a shared history. An empire can teach people to regard their past as unworthy of study. Recovering names, stories and practices that official histories have dismissed gives people grounds for solidarity. It also changes what can be imagined in the present. The first account of identity in Hall’s essay starts from that experience of recognition.

Consider what had to happen for a common Caribbean past to take shape. The people forced across the Atlantic came from different places and spoke different languages. Enslavement, displacement and plantation labour created conditions in which they made new forms of life together. The history that people share includes the break that brought them into relation in the first place. This is why Hall treats continuity and rupture as two parts of the same story. The second account of identity asks how people came to inherit a shared past, and what that inheritance lets them do now.

Who gets to name the position?

A person can claim to be Black and British in the same sentence. Whether those words sound entirely ordinary or seem to require an explanation depends on who is listening and on the history of the institutions in which the claim is made. An official category may offer one answer. A family memory, a political movement or a film may offer another. The person speaking has some room to act, and the conditions under which they will be heard have already been shaped by others.

This is the useful distinction in Hall’s idea of positioning. It gives us a way to ask what people do with the identities they inherit while keeping the history of those identities in view. In Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities, Hall follows this problem into debates about Britishness and the forms of belonging available to people who grew up inside more than one tradition.

Return to the two islands. Hall can say that Martinicans and Jamaicans share a Caribbean history and that they occupy different positions within it. The scale at which we look changes what comes into focus. So does the place from which we speak. A good account of diasporic identity has room for both observations.

For more of Hall’s work on race, culture and representation, see our guide to Stuart Hall’s theory and works.

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (1990), pp. 222–237, especially pp. 225–228.

Bourdieu and Giddens on Routine: Habitus, Ontological Security, and Reflexive Modernity

Why do people keep doing things in familiar ways even when alternatives are available? Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens both reject the idea that everyday action consists mainly of conscious decisions. Social life works because much of it is habitual, tacit, and practically understood.

Yet the two theorists explain this practical continuity differently. Bourdieu asks how social history becomes embodied as habitus. Giddens asks how routines reproduce social structures while sustaining the individual’s sense that the world is dependable. Their theories converge around everyday practice but diverge when they confront reflexivity and social change.

Bourdieu: habitus and the feel for the game

Bourdieu’s habitus consists of socially formed dispositions acquired through past experience. Class background, education, family relations, professional training, and other social conditions produce ways of perceiving and acting that generally do not need to be consciously articulated.

A person familiar with a particular social field develops what Bourdieu calls a practical feel for the game. The successful academic, football player, politician, or art dealer does not calculate every possible move before acting. Practical competence means knowing, often bodily, what the situation calls for.

This also explains social reproduction. Because habitus is produced by past social conditions, it tends to generate practices compatible with those conditions. History survives as disposition.

But this compatibility is never guaranteed. When fields change rapidly, habitus may lag behind them. Bourdieu calls this temporal mismatch hysteresis.

Giddens: routine and ontological security

Giddens also emphasizes practical rather than purely reflective knowledge. His concept of practical consciousness describes what actors know how to do without necessarily being able to explain that knowledge discursively.

For sociologists, recognizing what people are doing can require learning some of this practical knowledge. Giddens develops that point in his account of the double hermeneutic.

Routine has another function in Giddens’s theory, however. Repeated practices contribute to what he calls ontological security: a basic confidence in the continuity of self, other people, and the surrounding social world. Everyday routines make existence predictable enough for us to function without confronting every possibility at once.

Breakfast at roughly the same hour, familiar routes to work, recognizable professional roles, and stable interactions with other people appear mundane precisely because they work. Their repetition prevents ordinary life from becoming an endless existential problem. Later scholarship drawing on Giddens continues to stress the connection between routine, self-identity, and ontological security.

The crucial difference: reflexive modernity

The divergence becomes clearer when Bourdieu and Giddens discuss modern social change.

In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens argues that late modernity makes personal identity increasingly reflexive. Traditions no longer automatically determine how individuals should work, marry, believe, consume, or organize their lives. The self consequently becomes a reflexive project, maintained through a continuously revised narrative of who one is.

Bourdieu gives us reasons to hesitate over this picture. Choices about lifestyle and identity are not made on an empty field. What appears to be free self-fashioning remains conditioned by cultural capital, class position, embodied taste, and unequal access to social possibilities.

Sociologist Paul Sweetman identified exactly this tension. Perhaps contemporary life does demand continuous self-revision, he suggested, but that does not necessarily defeat Bourdieu. Reflexivity itself might become habitual. Some people may acquire a “reflexive habitus” that makes flexibility and self-reinvention feel natural.

That possibility changes the debate. Habit and reflexivity need not always be opposites.

Giddens helps explain why disrupted routines can threaten our sense of continuity and why modern institutions demand repeated self-revision. Bourdieu asks the more uncomfortable question: who has acquired the dispositions and resources that make successful reinvention possible?

Late modernity may tell everyone to keep becoming someone new. Sociology begins by noticing that not everyone has been equally prepared for the task.

Bourdieu and Thomas Kuhn: Hysteresis, Paradigm Shifts, and the Persistence of Old Categories

What happens when reality changes but our established ways of understanding it do not? Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions approach this problem from very different intellectual traditions.

Bourdieu is explaining social practice. Kuhn is explaining the historical development of science. Habitus is not a paradigm, and a social field is not a scientific theory. Yet placing the two thinkers side by side reveals a shared problem: practices and systems of thought acquire stability precisely because people become skilled at operating within them. That stability becomes visible when it begins to fail.

Bourdieu: when habitus belongs to yesterday

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus explains how social conditions become durable dispositions. People learn ways of judging situations, anticipating possibilities, and acting effectively inside particular social fields.

Normally, this relationship creates fluency. Habitus fits the field; expectation roughly fits reality.

Hysteresis names the moment when that correspondence weakens. The social field changes faster than the dispositions formed within it. Practices that previously appeared sensible become maladapted because their original conditions no longer exist.

Bourdieu sometimes associated this with a “Don Quixote effect”: like Cervantes’s character imagining himself as a knight in a world where the social reality of knighthood has passed, actors can inhabit categories inherited from a disappearing social order.

Hysteresis therefore reveals something normally hidden. Our practical categories have histories.

Kuhn: normal science, anomalies, and crisis

Thomas Kuhn makes a different argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Scientific development, he argues, is not simply a continuous accumulation of facts.

During periods of normal science, researchers work within a shared disciplinary framework. Paradigms, exemplars, methodological commitments, instruments, and theoretical assumptions establish legitimate problems and recognizable ways of solving them.

This stability is productive. Scientists do not have to reconsider the foundations of their discipline every morning. They can solve puzzles because many basic assumptions remain fixed.

Trouble begins with anomalies: problems that resist satisfactory solution within the established framework. A single anomaly does not automatically destroy a paradigm. Scientists may initially set it aside, reinterpret it, or assume that further research will solve it. Only particularly serious or accumulating anomalies may produce a crisis, potentially followed by scientific revolution and a reorganization of the disciplinary matrix.

Is a paradigm like a habitus?

Only up to a point.

Both concepts explain how established structures make competent action possible. The Bourdieusian actor has practical mastery of a social game; the Kuhnian scientist learns how legitimate puzzles are recognized and solved. In both cases, mastery can initially make anomalies look like exceptions rather than evidence that the rules themselves are changing.

But the analogy has limits.

Habitus is embodied and socially distributed. It concerns dispositions shaped by trajectories of class, education, institutions, and fields. Kuhn’s paradigm concerns organized scientific practice and shared disciplinary commitments. Kuhn is not primarily explaining why an individual psychologically refuses to change beliefs.

Nor does hysteresis equal scientific crisis. A field can change while an actor’s habitus lags behind it. In Kuhn, crisis occurs within the scientific community when confidence in its existing problem-solving framework is significantly disturbed.

The comparison becomes useful precisely when these differences are preserved.

Both Bourdieu and Kuhn show that knowledge and action require a certain conservatism. We cannot reconsider every assumption before every move. Usually this makes expertise possible.

During periods of rapid transformation, however, yesterday’s expertise can become today’s blindness. The categories that once helped us recognize reality may become the very things preventing us from seeing what has changed.