Introduction: Codes, Lenses, and Starring Deleuze's "Postscript"

In reading Barthes’ methodology for ‘starring’ a text, I was immediately drawn to the footnote. Footnotes are typically seen as explanatory or referencing notes included by the author at the bottom or the end of a text. They are simultaneously part of the text and subservient to the text, often viewed as outside of or apart from the formal text itself. In this way, footnotes can be read as digressions from the text, which Barthes notes as being ‘a form ill-accomodated by the discourse of knowledge’ (13). While footnotes are a form of digression, they’re an authoritarian form of digression. Footnotes expand and disperse meaning in a text, but this expansion is still carefully controlled by the text’s author. Since starring a text is akin to a “systematic use of digression”, I will be playing with footnoting as a method of textual analysis in starring Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”

Footnotes have an interesting relationship to hypertext. The use of links and images in hypertext is somewhat analogous to the use of footnotes in print. Links and images can give voice to dissenting opinions, document or reference supporting material, and provide additional explanation beyond the master text. In this way, links and images provide a space for expanding or digressing from the single narrative or the coherent textual unit. My footnotes, then, will be in the form of hypertextual links and I will be experimenting with what happens to footnotes when they go online. Look out for links within links, ‘broken’ links, incomprehensible links, and other forms of digression or decomposition of the text. In this way, I will be exploring Barthes’ notion that “the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances.” (12)

Barthes’ codes are more akin to ‘lenses’ (Barthes prefers the term ‘voices’) available for viewing a text than the kind of formal or rule-based method of analysis the term implies. In fact, Barthes refers to his codes as a convergence of interweaving voices (21) and not “the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted.” (20) In my analysis of “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, I will draw from a number of ‘lenses’ for analysis, each of which has a relationship to the footnote. These lenses include:

- Hermeneutic (e.g.) – This lens is identical to Barthes' Hermeneutic code. It references unexplained or mysterious information in the text and leads to the articulation of a question and search for an answer. Such a lens corresponds to the traditional purpose of a footnote in providing answers to unexplained information.
- Connotation/Denotation (e.g.,e.g.) – This lens is related to Barthes' Semantic code. Here I will explore the relationship between connoted and denoted meanings throughout the text. Footnotes traditionally provide insight into the denotation and etymology of words, but not their connotations.
- Memory/Forgetting (e.g.) – Barthes contends that there is a close relationship between reading and forgetting. He describes, "forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems" (11). The footnote is often traditionally employed to overcome the transgression of forgetting and ensure the reader ascribes to the author's intended meaning. Here, I assess what the reader might be expected to remember/forget in a given part of the text and how that affects the meaning he/she might ascribe.
- Truth/Opinion (e.g.) – This lens is a spin on Barthes' Cultural code. Here I look at what’s presented as ‘true’ and assess whether, in what ways, and to what extent the assertion is supportable. This is a play on the footnote's referencing function, in which the author provides additional support or documentation for what he/she posits as 'true'.