(Apologies for not putting this up earlier, I sort of confabulated the blog post attached to the audiobook project with what seems to be called Blog Post #3.)

As a major proponent of Barthes, I was excited to read From Work to Text, which is in fact a piece of his I’ve never read. While I’ve never been a particularly large fan of annotation, the current work in this course has caused my mind to fixation on the subject lately, which had a degree of effect on my reading. Early on, Barthes lists “method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure” as a set of propositions, and establishes that these are propositions meant to be “to be understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense.” That is, rather than proposals to be supported or refuted, his propositions serve the purpose of existing primarily to support themselves – “[remaining] metaphorical.” I think these propositions, while not created with annotation necessarily in mind, can be used to examine annotation and annotations just as they are used to examine the “work” and the “text.”

I want to focus primarily on the propositions of “methods,” “reading,” and “pleasure.” In the case of the first of these, Barthes refers to the “text” as “a methodological field,” or something that exists only in method, or largely in an non-physical state, or, as he puts it, as something that is closer to embodying “demonstration” more than anything else. I feel like this holds a lot in common with the idea of annotation, especially the idea of virtual annotation. Annotation, at least in my own mind, is something very much grounded in method and non-physicality – however, one could very much argue that the result of the process of annotation, the annotations themselves, are closer to Barthes’ idea of the “work” as opposed to the “text.”

Thinking about “reading,” the process of annotation presupposes that one has engaged in reading the piece that is being annotated. In fact, one could argue that annotation intrinsically requires reading, or at the very least, interacting with a piece in a way contextually equivalent to reading, such as watching a play or movie, viewing a painting or photograph, or playing a game. Barthes remarks that “the [t]ext requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice” – I think this could be seen in the relationship between annotation and annotations. When I think about Barthes’ assertion, I think about how writing requires reading, but reading doesn’t require writing – however, annotation requires both reading and writing, which produces annotations, which rely on the process of annotation.

Finally, “pleasure.” A key point Barthes makes here is that “if [one] can read [an author], [one] also [knows] that [one] cannot re-write them.” This almost lends itself too well to the parallels relating to annotation and annotations – I would argue that the closest, at least in some terms or senses, at least without delving into plagiarism or turning to fanwork, one could come to rewriting a work is through annotating that work. While it’s not truly rewriting it, it could certainly be seen as a form of self-produced augmentation or addition to the work, which is at least related to the concept of rewriting.