Page 89 - Decoding Culture

82 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

Y e t we must have limits, and for my purposes post-structuralism
begins at just that point when structuralists turn away from the
classic semiological project. Barthes, with whom the last chapter
ended, offers as good a symptomology as any. In Elements o f
Semiology, and in the work surrounding it, he is concerned to
establish the concepts necessary to explore the underlying lan­
guage systems of different forms of signification: Saussure's
enterprise of semiology. But with S/Z that project changes.
Barthes' interest in narrative is no longer focused on extracting the
master narrative structure, because to do so is to deny 'difference'
and 'plurality' within the text and thereby to fail to grasp the pro­
ductivity of reading. Even classical narratives, 'readerly' texts (as
opposed to 'writerly') which limit the freedom of the reader to be
'no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text' (Barthes, 1990:
4) , even such texts display at least a partial plurality. So, Barthes
takes Balzac's story 'Sarrasine' and subjects it to a microscopic
analysis with a view to grasping its multiplicity. To describe this
attack on the text he uses expressions like 'manhandling' and
'interrupting', collapsing it into lexias (fragments of various lengths
that are his units of reading) and examining them using five cate­
gories of code. But this does not invoke the socially grounded
conventions of classical semiology, a formal mechanism regulating
signification: 'we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a para­
digm that must be reconstituted. The code is a perspective of
quotations, a mirage of structures' (ibid: 20) . Examining in rich
detail the play of difference in the text, Barthes seeks to produce
what he calls a 'structuration', an understanding of reading-in­
process rather than an account of underlying structure.
Here, then, we see the early steps in a move away from classical
structuralism. First, the individual text has edged nearer to the
centre of things, no longer one instance among many to be placed
and understood formally within the system of a langue, but a field

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