Structuralism Roland Barthes SZ To interpret a text

Structuralism

Roland Barthes, S/Z To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. Let us first posit the image of a trimphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoratatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as they eye can reach. . .

Barthes The interpretation demanded by a specific text, in its plurality, is in no way liberal: it is not a question of conceding some meanings, of magnanimously acknowledging that each one has its share of truth; it is a question, against all indifference, of asserting the very existence of plurality, which is not that of the true, the probable, or even the possible.

Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958)

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975) When one takes as object of study not physical phenomena, but artefacts or events with meaning, the defining qualities of the phenomena become the features which distingish them one from another and enable them to bear meaning within the symbolic system from which they derive. The object is itself structured and is defined by its place in the structure of the system, whence the tendency to speak of “structuralism. ”

Culler - fashion One of the most striking features of the [fashion] system is the variety of procedures designed to “motivate” its signs: “it is obviously because Fashion is tyrannical and its signs arbitrary that it must convert them into natural facts or rational laws” [Barthes]. First of all, the system assigns fuctions to garmets, asserting their “practicality” (A linen coat for cool summer evenings) without explaining why they should be more appropriate than unfashionable garmets. It can, moreover, use particularizing descriptions (A raincoat for evening strolls along the docks at Calais) which, because of the functions they propose are so contingent, even pointless, appear the more “natural. ”

Barthes on fashion It is the very preciseness of the reference to the world that makes the function unreal; one encounters here the paradox of the art of the novel: any fashion so detailed becomes unreal, but at the same time, the more contingent the function the more “natural” it seems. Fashion-writing thus comes back to the postulate of realist style, according to which an accumulation of small and precise details confirms the truth of the thing represented.