OUTLINE of Barthes, "The Discourse of History"

Can we distinguish those discourses--"sets of sentences"--that are appropriately called "history" from other discourses, by features of the discourse itself?
 

I. THE ACT OF UTTERING--How does the historian indicate that he has the authority and ability to write as a historian, not just make guesses or imaginary statements about the past?
        Shifters of listening, also called  "testimonials"
        Shifters of organization of the text
                Indicate two co-existent time frames--the time of uttering (=amount of text in Genette/Rimmon-Kenan terms) and the time of "the matter of the utterance" (= time consumed when the things that are talked about occurred; "story-time" in Gennette/Rimmon-Kenan)
     discusses three important results:
     acceleration
     depth--perception of different times simultaneously
     beginnings
            performative--"I sing," "I am writing"
            Preface--announcement/judgment of the discourse to come
        These shifters tend to complicate time, not indicate the subjectivity of the author.

Receiver and Sender (relate to Rimmon-Kenan/Chadwick narrative participants)

 In historical discourse, the signs of the receiver are usually absent.

Signs of the utterer include all the discursive elements through which the historian constitutes himself as a person.  A particular form of this is the case where the utterer means to 'absent himself' from his discourse, and where there is in consequence a systematic deficiency of any form of sign referring to the sender of the historical message. The history seems to be telling itself all on its own. This is the type of historical discourse labelled as 'objective' (in which the historian never intervenes). Actually in this case, the utterer nullifies his emotional persona, but substitutes for it another persona, the 'objective' persona.  In discourse, objectivity is just the absence of signs of the emotions of the writer.  It is designed to create an illusion, that the objects and events are telling their own story, without any intervention from the historian, who is claiming to allow the referent to speak all on its own.

A special case: When a historian writes about events he participated in, the protagonist of the utterance is the same as the protagonist of the act of uttering.  Such a writer may refer to himself in the third person to be "objective"; but  the choice of an apersonal pronoun is no more than a rhetorical alibi.

II. THE UTTERANCE

What are history's  units of content and how can they be classified?

    existents and occurrents--things that are, things that happen

collections --structured in that there are "rules" that determine what are in them and how they relate to each other
    sets of terms and topics
    sets of themes--names chosen for those themes

These remarks are just as applicable to the occurrents as to the existents.

History has a limitation: "we recount what has been, not what has not been, or what has been uncertain."

classes of units of content
    indices--multiple signs of some implicit signified
    enthymemes--syllogistic arguments
    narrative functions--microsequences of events, which may affect each other or play roles within larger sequences.  (see Rimmon-Kenan, from Propp and Bremond, on events)

Two kinds of history: metaphorical and metonymic
"When the indexical units predominate in a historian (testifying at every moment to an implicit signified), his is drawn towards a metaphorical form and borders upon the lyrical and symbolic.  When, by contrast, it is the functional units which predominate, History takes on a metonymic form and becomes a close relation of the epic.  There exists, it is true, yet another form of History: the History which tries to reproduce in the structure of the discourse the structure of the choices lived through by the protagonists of the process described. Here reasoning is dominant; the history is a reflexive one, which we might also call strategic history, and Machiavelli would be its best demonstration. "

III. SIGNIFICATION

The signifieds of historical discourse can occupy at least two different levels:
all the meanings which the historian, of his own accord, gives to the facts which he relates.
"facts"--a linguistic entity that is (supposedly) "merely the 'copy', purely and simply, of another existence situated in the extra structural domain of the 'real'."

The historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series.
 
 OUTLINE of excerpts from S/Z
 
    The Five Codes: HER, SEM, SYM, ACT, REF

    The Five Voices: Empirics, Person, Science, Truth, Symbol

Terms: code, readerly, writerly, lexia