STRUCTURALISM
83
nomenclature of signification (and not to the word itself, which is,
paradoxically, not at
all
distinctive) which we must ultimately take
as structuralism's
spoken sign:
watch who uses
signifier
and
signified,
synchronic
and
diachronic,
and you will know whether the structural–
ist vision is constituted.
This is valid for the intellectual metalanguage, which explicitly
employs methodolOgical concepts. But since structuralism is neither a
school nor a movement, there is no reason to reduce it a priori, even
in a problematical way, to the activity of philosophers; it would be
better to try and find its broadest description (if not its definition) on
another level than that of reflexive language. We can in fact presume
that there exist certain writers, painters, musicians, in whose eyes a
certain
exercise
of structure (and not only its thought) represents a
distinctive experience, and that both analysts and creators must be
placed under the common sign of what we might call
structural man,
defined not by his ideas or his languages, but by his imagination-in
other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure.
Hence the first thing to be said is that in relation to
all
its users,
structuralism is essentially an
activity,
i.e., the controlled succession of
a certain number of mental operations: we might speak of structural–
ist activity as we once spoke of surrealist activity (surrealism, more–
over, may well have produced the first experience of structural litera–
ture, a possibility which must some day be explored). But before seeing
what these operations are, we must say a word about their goal.
The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is
to reconstruct an "object" in such a way as to manifest thereby the
rules of functioning (the "functions") of this object. Structure is there–
fore actually a
simulacrum
of the object, but a directed,
interested
simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which
remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object.
Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it; this
appears to be little enough (which makes some say that the struc–
turalist enterprise is "meaningless," "uninteresting," "useless," etc.).
Yet, from another point of view, this "little enough" is decisive: for
between the two objects, or the two tenses, of structuralist activity,
there occurs
something new,
and what
is
new is nothing less than the
generally intelligible: the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and
