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Summary: Johnson's "Writing"

Barbara Johnson's 1990 essay "Writing" examines the link between deconstruction/post-structuralism and the history of writing. It traces how scholars like Barthes, Derrida, Saussure, Marx, and Lacan shaped our understanding of writing. Johnson shows that writing is more than just transcribing speech, but is a system that both obscures and conveys meaning in its own logic. This gives readers a new responsibility to focus on what is written rather than attempting to intuit an author's intended meaning.

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Norman Marin
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443 views2 pages

Summary: Johnson's "Writing"

Barbara Johnson's 1990 essay "Writing" examines the link between deconstruction/post-structuralism and the history of writing. It traces how scholars like Barthes, Derrida, Saussure, Marx, and Lacan shaped our understanding of writing. Johnson shows that writing is more than just transcribing speech, but is a system that both obscures and conveys meaning in its own logic. This gives readers a new responsibility to focus on what is written rather than attempting to intuit an author's intended meaning.

Uploaded by

Norman Marin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Summary: Johnson’s “Writing”

Barbara Johnson’s 1990 essay “Writing” examines the link between

deconstruction/post-structuralism and the history of writing. In this selection from

“Writing,” Johnson traces historical analysis of literature through Barthes, Derrida,

Saussure, Marx, Lacan, and others to underscore the importance of “writing” for

deconstruction. Describing and leaning on the works of Barthes, Saussure, Lacan, and

Derrida, Johnson shows that within this order of thought writing is more than a simple

“transcription of the spoken word,” it is “a system of marks that simultaneously obscure

and convey meaning” with a particular logic of its own, thus giving us readers a new

responsibility when we read.

Explication of “Literature” and “textuality” leads to Barthes’s theory of writing that

“Literature is seen as a series of discrete and highly meaningful Great Works, [but]

textuality is the manifestation of an open-ended, heterogeneous, disruptive force of

signification and erasure that transgresses all closure” (Johnson 341).  She further contends

that this theory of writing picks up a hint of Marxism and psychoanalysis “through the

mediation of Saussurian linguistics” (341).  Saussure’s mediation entails his analysis of the

signified and signifier producing the sign.  This analysis indicates that meaning is generated

not from substance, but from difference, an idea that will be furthered significantly by

Derrida’s work.

Johnson cites Barthes for showing how within this “tension” exists two ideas of

what writing can be: the notion of the written word as a “work, … a closed, finished,

reliable representational object,” and the notion of it as a “text, … an open, infinite process

that is both meaning-generating and meaning-subverting” (341).


Johnson beings to look at some feminist approaches including the interest “in the

gender implications of the relations between writing and silence” (347). 

Through this “non-intuitive logic” and in the “syntactic and semantic ambiguities”

of a text, multiple meanings are made possible: “when one writes, one writes more than (or

less than, or other than) one thinks” (346). For Johnson in light of these multiple meanings,

it is our task as readers then “to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit

what might have been meant” (346).

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