once pristine:
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| Roland Barthes: 'Technically, according to Roman Jakobson's definition, the "poetic" (i.e., the literary) designates that type of message which takes for object its own form, and not its contents. Ethically, it is solely by its passage through language that literature pursues the disturbance of the essential concepts of our culture, "reality" chief among them.' : earlier: 'One last feature unites science and literature, but this feature is also the one which divides them more certainly than any other difference: both are discourses (which was well expressed by the idea of ancient logos),' : In another essay from the same book, he outlines some principles of contemporary linguistics: '2. A second principle, especially important with regard to literature, is that language cannot be considered as a simple instrument—utilitarian or decorative—of thought. Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to "express" what is happening within him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.' and '... 4. these few preliminaries are contained in a final proposition which justifies all semio-critical research. Culture increasingly appears to us as a general system of symbols, governed by the same operations: there is a unity of the symbolic field, and culture, in all its aspects, is a language. Hence, it is possible today to foresee the constitution of a unique sicence of culture, which will certainly be based on various disciplines, but all devoted to analyzing, at different levels of description, culture as language.' |
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