Oh, Roland.

“The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to ‘express themselves’, which is a little like replacing a form of repression with a misconception).”

-Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text.” Image - Music - Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Hill and Way, 1977. (162)

Well, at least we agree on something.

(I'm still trying to decide what I think of all this discourse about discourse: thinking right now that at some point you just have to come down out of the clouds and use what you've got.)

EDIT: Based on class discussion, I suspect my first reading was a misreading. More later, perhaps.