Page 122 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 113

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

For Barthes himself, the key moment of transition probably
occurred with S/Z, his study of Balzac’s short story, Sarrasine.
In what appeared initially as conventionally structuralist nar-
ratology, he divided the text into 561 ‘lexias’, or units of reading,
and analysed them, exhaustively, in terms of five main codes.
He also distinguished between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts—
those which position the reader as passive consumer, and those
which demand that the reader actively participate as co-author
of the text, respectively (Barthes, 1974, p. 4). But if Sarrasine was
a writerly text, as Barthes argued, then it followed that it
could have no single meaning: ‘to decide on a hierarchy of
codes...is impertinent... it overwhelms the articulation of the
writing by a single voice’ (p. 77). The five codes were thus self-
confessedly arbitrary, and the story itself possessed of no
determinate meaning, but rather both plural and diffuse. This
distinction between readerly and writerly texts was soon refor-
mulated as that between plaisir and jouissance, or ‘pleasure’ and
‘bliss’, in a move that called attention to the corporeal erotics
of reading. Barthes was still too much of a structuralist to con-
template a return to the reading subject, but the reading body,
‘my body of bliss’ (Barthes, 1975, p. 62) had become a very differ-
ent matter. The text of jouissance was thus necessarily incomplete,
just as the body is more erotic ‘where the garment gapes’ than
when completely naked (p. 9). This was Barthes at play in a
double sense, then, both as eroticism and also as indeterminacy,
that is, as the play of meanings that would fascinate Derridean
deconstruction.

POST-STRUCTURALISM: DECONSTRUCTION AND GENEALOGY

Post-structuralism is itself a portmanteau concept, so polysemic
as to be of only questionable theoretical value. In general,
however, it has been used to denote four relatively distinct
theoretical movements: Derridean ‘deconstruction’; Foucault’s
‘genealogical’ writings on the theme of the knowledge/power
relation; the various reworkings of psychoanalysis as semiotics
inspired by the work of Jacques Lacan (1901–81); and the

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