84
ROLAND BARTHES
this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself,
his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which
nature offers to his mind.
We see, then, why we must speak of a structuralist
activity:
crea-
tion or reflection are not, here, an original "impression" of the world,
but a veritable fabrication of a world which resembles the first one,
not in order to copy it but to render it intelligible. Hence one might
say that structuralism is essentially
an activity of imitation)
which is
also why there is, strictly speaking, no
technical
difference between
structuralism as an intellectual activity on the one hand and literature
in particular, art in general on the other: both derive from a
mimesis)
based not on the analogy of substances (as in so-called realist art), but
on the analogy of functions (what Levi-Strauss calls
homology).
When
Troubetskoy reconstructs the phonetic object as a system of variations;
when Dumezil elaborates a functional mythology; when Propp con–
structs a folktale resulting by structuration from all the Slavic tales
he has previously decomposed; when Levi-Strauss discovers the homo–
logic functioning of the totemic imagination, or Granger the formal
rules of economic thought, or Gardin the pertinent features of pre–
historic bronzes; when Richard decomposes a poem by Mallarme into
its distinctive vibrations- they are all doing nothing different from
what Mondrian, Boulez or Butor are doing when they articulate a
certain object- what will be called, precisely, a
composition-by
the
controlled manifestation of certain units and certain associations of
these units. It is of little consequence whether the initial object liable
to the simulacrum-activity is given by the world in an already as–
sembled fashion (in the case of the structural analysis made of a consti–
tuted language or society or work) or is still scattered (in the case of
the structural "composition"); whether this initial object is drawn
from a social reality or an imaginary reality. It is not the nature of
the copied object which defines an art (though this is a tenacious
prejudice in all realism), it is the fact that man adds to it in recon–
structing it: technique is the very being of all creation. It is therefore
to the degree that the goals of structuralist activity are indissolubly
linked to a certain technique that structuralism exists in a distinctive
fashion in relation to other modes of analysis or creation: we recom–
pose
the object
in order
to make certain functions appear, and it is,
