you’ve heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it
girl help there’s people on this post who can’t actually read my text
#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao
OKAY i’m fucking sick of people who can’t read leaving these comments so here we go, we’re gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand
Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: “a tissue of signs,” which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: “Once the Author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless.” This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.
When Barthes says “critic,” he doesn’t mean “anyone who has encountered the text,” however. He differentiates the critic from the “reader”:
the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.
For Barthes, the reader’s understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the “tissue of signs” into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: “to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.” In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic – not the reader, but the critic – and instead allow the reader to engage the text.
We’re gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here’s the context:
Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.
He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.
Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our “tissue of signs” is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes’ literary stage.
We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.
And in Ozymandias’ place, we have the reader.
The reader consumes a variety of “content” and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of “posts.” It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.
This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as “read the actual book,” but because we no longer have the support – however oppressive – of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.
That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.
It’s a pun, by the way: “La mort de l'auteur,” spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.
this 2kr really confirmed my suspicion that Bin has a harder time being emotionally demonstrative with Han because he loves Han in a way that is just A Lot. like if he let himself express that to its full extent it would just be too overwhelming. even in the episode he held back the tears until it was just him. but man, if 2kr has taught me anything it’s that all of these guys have such emotional intelligence.
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like “I’m not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it.” Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won’t let you copy and paste:
all these deadpool comic runs are ridiculous. Deadpool vs This. Deadpool kills That.
how about Deadpool Has a Nice Day? Deadpool Is Validated by His Peers. Someone Loves Deadpool Because of His Flaws Not in Spite of Them. Something Nice Happens to Deadpool and It Is Not Immediately Ripped Away from Him by a Cold and Unfeeling Universe.
I don’t think we’ve talked about how the front half of the episode has Ilya mostly as the passive partner in his sex with Shane. Shane is riding it like he stole it, Shane is straddling him on the couch and asking “are you gonna cum for me?” and of course competitive ass Ilya isn’t going to just give it to him (“fucking make me”) but he’s letting a lot of control slip from him to Shane and what a way to show the characters relationship developing through sex. Ilya was the one fully in control in the first two episodes but now that he likes Shane, now that he feels comfortable with him, he’s willing to drop the constant performance of dominance and let Shane happen to him. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence when everything in his life is so rigidly structured by other people and he was taking back control when he was having sex with Shane at first. This is a different type of losing control, it’s letting go and trusting someone else. No wonder it terrifies them both.
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who’s my best friend in the world and recently he was like “you’re too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!” and I was like “a niece might be more up my alley” and he just got more excited and said “ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful”
