The Death of the Reader

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author," published in 1967, is an iconic and  ground breaking text in literary critical theory in which Barthes argues that the key to understanding a text can be found in the reader. Barthes posits that the author's biography and intentions when writing are far less important than the multiple interpretations that the readers of the text will create. It is readers who matter in the creation of meaning in any given text and not the creator authoring the text. 

Barthes states this unequivocally in his essay "the author is not the source of meaning; rather, the meaning is produced through the interaction between the text and the reader."

This, of course, is a very postmodern notion: there are no absolute truths. Truth and meaning are relative, fluid and changeable. This affects not only the interpretation of an individual text but whole fields of academic study.

At school my teachers would reduce the Middle Ages to a period of darkness in history existing between the "lights" of  Classical Greece and Rome and the Renaissance. This responded to a very 20th century perspective influenced by scientific positivism, rationalism and secularism which has shifted in the 21st century towards a new appreciation of this historical period. An appreciation not merely enjoyed by some historians and academics but by the culture at large. The certainties - or perceived certainties of the feudal period - where everyone knew his place and the world was ruled by a God who had earthly enforcers and a straightforward set of rules, is an attractive proposition to many people living in a world devoid of meaning. 

For Barthes, literary criticism should therefore focus on studying the reader's cultural context and how it  produces this multiplicity of meanings. 

The importance of Barthes' text is impossible to ignore in the context of 20th century literary criticism. It is a very interesting and progressive approach to literary criticism and possibly one the most pivotal essays written on the topic. But has the reader or end user of texts become too powerful in the age of Internet? Has postmodernity taken us to our present age where misinformation and conspiracy theories run rampant ? From an acceptance, validation and understanding of multiple interpretations of texts, we have gone to a period in which Truth seems to have completely disappeared. 

There is no truth. There are no truths. 

Although it may seem a counterintuitive thing to say, Postmodernity is the logical conclusion that follows from the traditional grand narratives of western civilization it sets out to critique. Postmodernity brings a fundamental  skeptical approach to the forefront of philosophical discourse, focusing on the importance of  cultural and social contextualization. This perspective aligns with the ideas of philosophers like Michel Foucault, who emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge, suggesting that what we consider "truth" is often a product of dominant discourses and ideologies.

Hindsight is a great thing. But it could not have been any other way: a global world demands multiple interpretations, multiple understandings of truth, multiple meanings. A democratization of meaning was unavoidable. Furthermore, it was desirable.

But the postmodern age and its cynical lack of respect for traditional grand narratives has also brought us to an age of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy. A new Dark Age where meaning no longer exists because the semblance of absolute truth is a long forgotten memory. 

All this renders the reader 

(digital reader or consumer of reels, videos and podcasts) worthless. If the original ideas being communicated are flawed, each user of the text ( who I will call reader) will just add to the problem almost as if infected by a virus.

The reader is dead.