According to Me The Reader: Education

Ok so….

            In our reading and especially in the discussion today I noticed an important concept that Barthes seems to bring up in Death of an Author. It is when Barthes is talking about how “the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone that who holds gathered into a single field all of the paths in which the text is constituted” Barthes talks of the reader as being more important in the interpretation of a text than the author and that ultimately the author does not matter so much as the reader himself. Since books are one of the most key devices utilized in education this idea seems very unusual. Usually when we are explained the concept of education we are told are intelligence is like an empty glass of water and that with each book or article we read that glass fills up just a tiny bit more. Obviously things like comic strips are more like drops, while textbooks are a full-on slosh from the faucet. However the end product is always the same, we become more educated and less empty. Barthes argument for the importance of the reader seems to emphatically reject this notion.

            In order for a human being to fully grasp the complexity of something that is written the reader must be empty. This emptiness is the absence of all prejudices that might inhibit the reader’s ability to fully grasp the subtleties of a written piece. What does a greater understanding of concepts like psychology, biology, literature, or even religion do but deliver to us even more prejudices in which we can then turn on a selected piece and then use these prejudices to analyze the given selection.

“Sally’s insecurities on page 20 came from her insecure attachment issues”

“No, No they came from low serotonin levels”

“You guys don’t know anything they clearly came from her exclusion in society due to social predetermination”

            All the discussions and debates we have pertaining to facts and certainties are just regurgitation. It is I metaphorically sticking my finger down your throat while you do the same to me. Unless the argument was about whose finger tastes worse in which case the physical act would become much more likely. Education is not like an empty glass, but more like bucket of sand.  It is only until we sift through the sand that we can truly see the contents of the bucket. This sifting and removing of unnecessary and irrelevant materials is our education, the tragedy is that many of us will never bother to do so. (A very Buddhist idea, no?)

            This is what, to me, Barthes was touching on in his article. Lucky for me according to him you can never definitively say I’m wrong. I think I like this guy….