Editing Roland Barthes (section)

===Neutral and novelistic writing===
{{refimprove section|date=March 2018}}
In the late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal.{{sfn|Allen|2003|p=[https://archive.org/details/RolandBarthesRoutledge/page/n115/mode/2up 99–100]}} He called these two conflicting modes the [[Doxa]] (the official and unacknowledged systems of meaning through which culture is absorbed)<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Natoli|first1=Joseph P.|title=A Postmodern Reader|last2=Hutcheon|first2=Linda|publisher=SUNY Press|year=1993|isbn=0-7914-1638-0|location=New York|pages=299}}</ref>) and the [[paradox|Para-doxa]]. While Barthes had sympathized with Marxist thought in the past (or at least parallel criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language with assertive meanings, as was [[bourgeois]] literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to this, he wrote ''[[The Pleasure of the Text]]'' (1975), a study that focused on a subject matter he felt was equally outside the realm of both conservative society and militant leftist thinking: [[hedonism]]. By writing about a subject that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa. The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that, while reading for pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself to the ideas of the writer, the final [[catharsis|cathartic]] climax of this pleasurable reading, which he termed the bliss in reading or [[jouissance]], is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within the text or immersion in the text, signifies a final impact of reading that is experienced outside the social realm and free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral with regard to social progress.

Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes remained concerned with the difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing, which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, like ''[[Mythologies (book)|Mythologies]]'', had suffered from this. He became interested in finding the best method for creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product of this endeavor was ''[[A Lover's Discourse: Fragments]]'' in 1977, in which he presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover's search for signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved in such a pursuit. The lover's attempts to assert himself into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to criticism but also understanding from the reader. The result is one that challenges the reader's views of social constructs of love, without trying to assert any definitive theory of meaning.