Michael Sugrue, Barthes, Semiotics and the Revolt Against Structuralism, Feb 12, 2021.

https://www.facebook.com/Alla-El-114443414577758

"it's worth comparing bart's work to the
work of some of the other structuralists
or marxists to see
the uniqueness of his sort of position
and also to see how
in some respects it all simultaneously
expresses a general collective tendency
in particularly french intellectual high
culture.

one of his contemporaries altaser tried
to unify marxism in structuralism
and that in some ways is the last of the
modernist paradigms. we get these giant
deterministic systems and then try and
show that they both operate
simultaneously and are both part of some
larger
meta system. well bart knew altaser and
just
and his reaction to this was saying look
this is the worst thing you can possibly
do.
the reason we are giving up
structuralism the reason we are giving
up marxism
is because these large deterministic
systems first of all
inhibit and as a matter of fact prohibit
human freedom.
right freedom turns out to be an
illusion. you get these giant
deterministic systems
and in addition to that they all entail
totalizing discourses
huge meta narratives big picture stories
which no one believes in anymore.
no one takes seriously at least bart
says that the people who are on the
cutting edge of high culture at the time
that he is writing
can no longer take seriously the idea
that everything has
a secret algebra hidden inside it and
it's the job of structuralists to find
the secret algebra hidden in mathematics
hidden in crystals hidden in biological
life forms
hidden in literacy constructs and also
hidden in anthropology.
he says no there's no secret algebra
hidden in everything that's a myth that
you people made up
so that you could legitimize
structuralist discourse.

he says the
party's over for that
we got so good at being critical we got
so good at being negative and negating.
we
negated the sort of structures which
made this criticism and negation
possible.
in some respects uh i think it was a one
of the the the artists involved in the
data movement
who constructed a machine that the first
time you plugged it in it destroyed
itself.
well that is very much this conception
of culture. you plug the machine in
it criticizes everything around it and
then when it gets kind of antsy it
starts to criticize itself and that
process of destruction
that niche philosophizing with a hammer
becomes a sort of intellectual vandalism.
and nothing is left except the ego. but
there isn't even a complete self
because when we break down the
structures of communication
the structures of knowledge and the
structures of linguistic interaction,
which give us
some real hold to the external world it
ultimately means that we're moving in
the direction of solipsism. remember why
i call this cartesian aesthetics.
and that means that it's just me and my
world and whatever i might happen to
wish to do with it.

the advantage of this is it allows us
completely free play within the domain
of our experience and within the domain
of our mental activity.
the disadvantage of it is that it is a
hopeless attempt to avoid the external
world.
and the problem is that the external
world is still there whether you like it
or not.
as dr johnson said i refuted thus there
it is.
bart thinks that this is another
ideological construct, and that
the external world is socially
constructed linguistically constructed
and we could
simply unconstruct it if it gets in our
way.

it's amazing the degree of egoism
and wishful thinking
that you need to engage in before you
can argue a project like this.
it is a it takes one set of
presuppositions and radicalizes them
take them as far as you can possibly go.
the problem is that the snake ultimately
ends up eating its own tail
and the whole project disappears. this is
what we get when we get to the end of
towards the end of bart's life the last
seven or eight years.
his work becomes intensely personal and
it's not clear
at some times whether he's writing a
novel or whether he's writing a piece of
literary criticism or whether he's
writing a series of essays whether he's
writing one essay or whether he's
writing a book formally like that of
nietzsche or say the gay science where
it's just a
series of vignettes that don't really
hold together. he completely gives up on
the idea of structure
or form it all begins to break down and
this breakdown of literary structure
this
breakdown of communicative or
communicative form
is analogous to the breakdown of
external reality.
and when we lose that direct
mooring to the external world, what
happens is that
the self begins to become contingent and
dubious
and fragmentary. may i suggest that as
wittgenstein pointed out
the self like language is socially
constructed. and that when we try and
remove ourselves from this from the
external world,
the result is that we end up talking to
ourselves.
right now i'm not certain that's a
problem for bart.

i think that he finds this a sort of how
can i put it um
a sort of uh transcendence.
a sort of way of getting beyond the mere
contingency the
mere limitations of human life towards
some new
external other realm. in a way i'd almost
be saying
i'd almost be tempted to say that he's
reinventing metaphysics.
and instead of putting it somewhere else
outside of space and time he's putting
it
within the domain of his own
consciousness. and then he's shooing away
the rest of the world saying i'll allow
you to exist if i decide to invent you
linguistically but elsewise
do not interfere with my activity. i wish
to be totally free
so if shakespeare were to come to him
and say i think you're misinterpreting
one of my plays. he would say well what
does your opinion have to do with my
freedom. get away from my face.
right i have totally free play and what
that amounts to,
is the idea that bart is a sort of
anti-dedalist.
if you know the dedalist myth from
greek mythology he's the one who found
the way out of the labyrinth.
bart's reply is labyrinth what labyrinth
i live here we're not trying to get out
there is no
out.this is it you happen to be locked
in your subjectivity and the domain of
your universe ends with your fingertips.
and the idea that there is a way out of
this problem that will allow us to find
the way the world really is as opposed
to the way the world is,
within the domain of our semiotic system,
is just the hopeless platonic dream
of modernist meta of metaphysics from
the time of the ancient greeks to the
time of the moderns up to
say levy strauss.
so what he's saying is
this is it
i live here get used to the absolute
contingency of subjectivity.
and get used to replacing all your other
standards,
things like logical coherence or
correspondence to the external world,
move away from all that reality
principle stuff just towards pleasure,
because that's the only thing that could
ever justify any of your intellectual
activity.
and even that doesn't justify
there is
no justification for intellectual
activity.
what could we gesture at besides our own
semiotic system, and we're locked into
that.
semiotic systems are incommensurable and
untranslatable.
and because they're incremental and
untranslatable there's no necessarily
conflict
between freudianism and marxism it's
just there's no privileged position
from which we can decide that
freudianism as opposed to marxism is the
true semiotic system.
which discloses ultimate reality .
there's
just no such thing.
there's an infinite number of
perspectives.
all right and that means that we break
down into a work into
a world in which we're all profoundly
lonely.
40:19

and we have whole societies
composed of atomized individulers

speaking their own language
living in their own world
can you see how this is gonna tend to
liberate the centripedal forces of the mind.
And keep us from having some of the centriguful forces
which hold language, and societies and culture togethere
and available and culture together and
and
can you see then
why this is a a negative critique
which finds certain tactical uses in
asserting
that demythologizing is at least
possible or at least occasionally useful
in advancing left-wing politics.

what we
have here then
is the artist or critic as political
dilettante.
in other words bart likes to pursue
politics once in a while because he
finds it pleasurable.
and the sort of politics he likes to
pursue is the politics which increases
and
extends his own pleasure. and the reason
why he does it well
at the fundamental level is because he
finds it pleasurable. pleasure is the
only thing that one can refer to
but for tactical reasons it may be
useful not to suggest that.
it may be worthwhile to write a book
suggesting that
left-wing myths are very different from
right-wing myths. and they're not nearly
so mythological somehow.
and what he's doing is just creating a
meta-myth. a new myth.
and that means that we have a new order
of poetry called literary criticism.
we have a new order of critic, who is now
the ultimate poet.
because where the poets had to accept
accept contingency,
and had to accept the simple
determination of the external world, the
critic
is not bound by nature the critic is
trying to undermine nature.
the critic flees from nature into the
realm of the text.

and that's why i would be i think it's
correct to describe bart as
anti-dedalist.
the guy who says stop asking the
question, of how to get out of the
labyrinth.
stop asking the question of how to find
substantial reality, independent of your
semiotic mythologizing.
in fact it's masks all the way down.

and
for that reason,
he adopts a sort of ironic stance.
because what is there left for the
critic to do,
certainly he can't communicate any
substance any reality about a text to
anybody else.
because it won't be any more real than
whatever they already believe, whatever
they already think.
the only thing he can do is indulge
himself is gratify his desire for
pleasure,
by increasing the domain of his freedom
so that it covers
all communicative behavior. so it covers
the whole set of signs.
nature for example is one of our signs,
for external coercion the externality of
things,
well we can treat that as a myth as well.
the whole world then becomes a human
domain, constructed by human beings
in society and constructed by human
beings in language.
it is cartesianism raised to a social
collective level,
based not upon physics but upon
aesthetics.

for some reasons that i think are clear
they caught such a great thinker
french culture has never been able to
get out from under the shadow of
descartes.
they all have a problem with either
accepting their own selfhood or
demonstrating the reality of the
external world. it easily slips off into
solidism, if you start your philosophical
investigations
from the inside,
it's gonna be so hard to
make that jump, to outside stuff it may
be there but then again it may not.

summing up then let's think about what
this amounts to
first of all it's very clear that the
demystifier in this case bart is also a
remystifier, that the critic is an artist.
this is a position of extreme solitude a
sort of epicurean withdrawal into the
safety
and sanctity and security of the soul.
and the result is that we have an ironic
meta myth.
he intends to communicate
us, to us, the the fact that there's
really nothing to communicate
about these texts. except the fact that
they are totally free and open and
there's no authority which you can refer
to
as coercing or limiting your
interpretation .
what i would say goes on
here then,
is that in constructing this cartesian
aesthetics,
bart makes readers little gods, and gives
them
omnipotence over an infinite domain
called,
the literary text."

Michael Sugrue, Barthes, Semiotics and the Revolt Against Structuralism, Feb 12, 2021.