Roland Barthes: St. Ignatius de Loyola: Matthew Barney

Begin then, with a fairly long quotation from Roland Barthes' essay on St. Ignatius Loyola. In this excerpt Barthes is analyzing the 'multiple texts' of Ignatius' Exercises, a document written in the sixteenth century for the successful administration and practice of a retreat for meditation and prayer.

"Our reading habits, our very concept of literature, make every text appear today as if it were the simple communication of an author (in the present instance a spanish saint who founded the society of Jesus [jesuit order] in the sixteenth century) and of a reader (in the present instance ourselves): Ignatius loyola wrote a book, this book was published, and today we are reading it. This outline, suspect for any book (since we can never never definitively demonstrate who is the author and who is the reader) is assuredly false with regard to the Exercises. For if it is true that a text is defined through the unity of it's communication, we are not reading one text, but rather four texts, disposed in the shape of a small book in our hands.

The first text is the one Ignatius addresses to the director of the retreat. This text represents the literal level of the work, it is objective, historical in nature: in fact, criticism assures us that the Exercises was not written for the retreatants themselves, but for their directors. The second text is the one the director addresses to the exercitant; the relationship of the two interlocutors is different here; it is no longer a relationship of reading or even of instruction, but of donation, implying credit on the part of the receiver, help and neutrality on the part of the donor, as in the case of psychoanalyst and analysand: the director gives the exercises (virtually as one gives food or a whipping), he manages the material and adapts it so that he may transmit it to single organisms (at least this is how it used to be, today it seems the Exercises are given in a group). A maliable material, which can be elongated, shortened, softened, hardened, this second text is in a way the contents of the first (thus it can be called the semantic text); by that, we mean that if the first text constitutes the proper level of the discourse (as we read it), the second text is like the argument; and it follows that there need not necessarily be the same order; thus, in the first text the Annotations precede the four weeks: this is the order of the discourse; in the second text these same Annotations, bearing on the matters that can continuously concern the four weeks, are not anterior to them, but somehow parametric, which attests to the independence of the two texts. This is not all. The first and second texts had a common actor: the director of the retreat, here receiver, there donor. Similarly, the exercitant is going to be both receiver and and sender; having received the second text, he writes it with a third, which is an acted text made up of the meditation, gestures, and practices given him by his director: it is in a way the exercising of the Exercises, different from the second text insofar as one can detach oneself from it by imperfectly accomplishing it. To whom is this third text addressed, this speech elaborated by the exercitant on the basis of the preceding texts? It can be no other than the Divinity. God is the receiver of a language whose speech here is prayers, colloquia, and meditations; furthermore each exercise is explicitly preceded by a prayer addressed to God asking him to receive the message that will follow: essentially an allegorical message, since it consists of images and imitations. To this language the Divinity is called upon to respond: there thus exists, woven into the letter of the Exercises, a reply from God, of which God is the donor and the exercitant the receiver: fourth text, strictly anagogic, since we must trace back from stage to stage, from the letter of the Exercises to its contents and then to their action, before attaining the purest meaning, the sign liberated by the Divinity."

...And another, further on, "here the drama is that of interlocution; on the one hand the exercitant is like a subject speaking in ignorance of the end of the sentence upon which he has embarked; he lives the inadequacy of the spoken chain, the opening of the syntagm, he is cut off from the perfection of language, which is assertive closure; and on the other hand the very basis of all speech, interlocution, is not given him, he must conquer it, invent the language in which he must address the Divinity and prepare his possible response: the exercitant must accept the enormous and yet uncertain task of a constructor of language, of a logo-technician."

What to make of this? Barthes' reading of this instructive religious manual as a sort of generator of multiple layers, or hypostases of texts is widely applicable. Any text which takes as it's purpose the incitement of the interlocutor to act, that is to act according to a set of formal, or to use Barthian language, linguistic principles which are implicit in the text itself, can be considered a multiple text in the sense that Barthes describes Ignatius' Exercises to be. Essentially, the Exercises are a script for a performance, mediated by a director, enacted by the exercitant for an audience (which for Ignatius is God but can be any formulation of an absolute or totality) and from whom a response, whatever signified form this may take, is expected.

This formulation of Barthes' tetradic structure can be used to describe any form of text which acts as a script for public performance or dissemination. The film script, perhaps the obvious example of this paradigm, can be shown to follow Barthes' criterion exactly. The literal text, the written script itself, is intended first for the director, whose conception of that text forms the second level, the semantic text. This semantic text is used to facilitate the exercitants (everyone involved in the project) in creating the acted text, the performance. It is particularly worthwhile to note that in this context the performance is not solely the one that will be seen on the screen by the audience, but every action which goes towards the building of the completed project, from acting out scenes to moving cameras and lights, serving food, discussing ideas, even sleeping between working hours; everything which occurs during the duration of the project becomes a sign in the acted text inasmuch as it is dictated by the schedules derived from the initial literal text. Finally, the anagogical fourth level emerges, no less so than that of Ignatius' Exercises despite its ostensibly secular nature; for the documentation of actions, and the dissemination -through documentation- of the rituals of the acted text, is a statement, an offering, which implies a response, if only the passive response which consists of the augmentation of the whole, the totality of texts, of actions; the imperceptible shifting of the absolute.

The written musical score functions in much the same way, passing from the composer through the conductor and through the players transformed from written text into action and resultantly into independent physical medium, carried into the plenum of collective consciousness to wait for the inevitable silence which prefigures response.

However many transmogrifications of the multiple text there may be (and their are essentially an infinite amount) continuing to focus on the film as multiple text, we may suggest a compelling subject for analysis: the Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney's inscrutable biological opera, the apogee of turn of the millennium neo-baroque conceptualism and a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk par excellence. No argument need be made here as to whether the Cremaster Cycle may be considered as a multiple text in the sense Barthes meant it, what can be asked is how does it function as such? To begin with, an augmentation of Barthes' tetradic structure is in order. The tetrad was chosen it seems to accommodate the four part structure of Ignatius' Exercises; the Cremaster Cycle has a five part structure and may therefore be better suited to five layers of text. An elucidation of these five hypostases may reveal what meaning this obscure work has for those individuals looking for a vehicle by which to communicate with the divine, as the exercitants of Ignatius' Exercises surely were. Moreover, the kind of formal examination outlined by Barthes' for the investigation of multiple texts will afford an understanding of how this communication takes place.

In the instance of the Cremaster Cycle the literal text is the initial conception of the work in the mind of the artist (before he begins to construct the work itself) this is essentially the mental image of the potential work of art as a vague and undefined totality. The semantic text then is the series of conceptions of the work in the mind of the artist (and any discourse between artist and collaborators) as the piece is physically created. This concept of the semantic text fulfills Barthes' criterion that it encompasses the literal text, is the argument for that text. In the case of the Cremaster Cycle this semantic stage is a unique process. One must consider this semantic stage to be concerned fundamentally with the fabrication of works of physicality and plasticity: primarily sculpture and architectural spaces. Essentially what is happening in this stage is the creation of the space in which the drama will unfold. To return to Barthian language this stage corresponds to the linguistic stage of articulation, in which a new closed system is created through the exclusion of external forms and is delineated by those forms that are allowed to remain inside the system (or organism as the case may be, as from this point on the linguistic and the biological are inextricably wound together). For Matthew Barney this process of articulation is an analog of fetal development. Such a system (or organism), once defined, will then constitute a language, in the orthographic sense, which may produce various interdependent texts (the biological analog here being genetic and genomic processes, particularly gene transcription and protein synthesis). In the context of the Cremaster Cycle this language is the ineffable form of the Cycle itself, which must be understood to be, like the organism, more than the sum of it's [narrative, or formal] parts. The total amount of textual (or genetic) permutations which can occur within the system, are the sum total of possible dramatic or narrative conflicts which could potentially occur in the linguistic 'world' of Cremaster (it is important to remember when considering this point that the Cremaster Cycle as a film series represents only one revolution of the cycle, which can be assumed to be infinite).

In Barthes' analysis the semantic gives way inevitably to the acted text, the discrete physical manifestation of those initial conceptions which originated in the mind of the author of the primary text. In Barney's Cremaster Cycle however, the interlocutors are multiplied. The acted text (which in this case must be different for each cycle performed by the Cremaster system) is informed by the eternal abstractions which make up the supra-formal characteristics of the Cremaster system itself, the inscrutable anatomy of the total organism (it is interesting to note that these eternal, supra-formal characteristics would be as Platonically ineffable to the individual 'characters' within the cycle as the forms which govern the body must be to the individual cells whose tireless actions sustain and generate it). As Barney himself states the characters/actors function as "host bodies" which the supra-formal agents of the Cremaster system "inhabit temporarily in each chapter." In other words, the same process of transubstantiation by which the abstraction that inhabits Gary Gilmore in Cremaster 2 transfers itself to the female corpse in the beginning of Cremaster 3, or the sign for the state of the organism transfers from a football field in Boise, Idaho to the Utah salt flats, to the Chrysler building, to the Isle of Mann, to Budapest, is the same inscrutable process by which ever new 'host bodies' or vehicles are chosen by the supra-formal agents of the Cremaster system in each new revolution of the cycle. It is precisely here, where the exercitants of the acted text are trapped in a strange platonic interlocutory relationship with the agents of the language (or system, or organism) itself, where the bifurcation of the acted text occurs: into transitory exercitants, and eternal supra-formal agents whose ultimate formlessness requires host bodies for their manifestation.

Drama, or conflict in the narrative, results from the the performance of the acted text by the exercitants (the actors/characters), and in the particular case of the Cremaster Cycle this drama is produced by the dialectical relationship between the exercitants and the supra-formal agents who, like the Olympian gods, may descend to the level of the acted text to inhabit a suitable host body of their choosing. As Matthew Barney put it, " the characters carry out a pre-determined biological role, to do what they were programmed to do, any conflict or emotion comes from a combination of those roles." That is to say that all dramatic conflict in the narrative comes from the structural quality of each character's functional (or formal) role within the system. The inevitability of the drama is itself a characteristic of the system. The ascension and descension of the cycle, with the attendant gathering and releasing of tension condition the drama in such a way that no character can escape their role as a host, as a sign. The more one struggles against their symbolic role the more fully the role is achieved, it is in this respect that Barney's work is wholly in accordance with the aesthetics of classical Greek tragedy, and possesses, at least symbolically, all the potency of catharsis. As every narrative cell performs its functions and the metaphors are burned for fuel there is victory and defeat, digestion and nourishment, pathos and hubris, there is gestation and synthesis. The drama of the Cremaster Cycle is a metabolic one.

The anagogical meaning, or intention, of such a work of art seems inscrutable. Primarily because the work is entirely self referential. The initial process of articulation required for the creation of the system has been carried to such an extreme as to eradicate all external context. This is ultimately the strength of the work, the self sustaining independent reality of the open system, the open text. Any content may be consumed by the system and the excreted and digested material both will always be purely Cremaster. This is the transcendental quality of the organism, (the organism as hypertext) and it is this quality which can lead us to the anagogical significance of the Cremaster Cycle. While Ignatius' religious rituals were meant to be a language for the open discourse of the individual and the absolute, the Cremaster Cycle posits an alternative absolute, it attempts to usurp the universality of the divine by offering it a microcosm of itself. The organism as the microcosm of the universe. If Ignatius hopes to interrogate the deity through ritualized communication designed to provoke answers to particular questions, then the Cremaster Cycle attempts to capture the deity by offering it a double, to capture it and thereby bring it back to earth, to envelope the spirit once more, in blood and flesh.