STRUCTURALISM
85
so to speak, the way that makes the work; this is why we must speak
of the structuralist activity rather than the structuralist work.
The structuralist activity involves two typical operations: dissec–
tion and articulation. To dissect the first object, the one which is given
to the simulacrum-activity, is to find in it certain mobile fragments
whose differential situation engenders a certain meaning; the fragment
has no meaning in itself, but it
is
nonetheless such that the slightest
variation wrought in its configuration produces a change in the whole;
a
square
by Mondrian, a
series
by Pousseur, a
versicle
of Butor's
Mobile,
the "mytheme" in Levi-Strauss, the phoneme in the work of
the phonologists, the "theme" in certain literary criticism- all these
units (whatever their inner structure and their extent, quite different
according to cases) have no significant existence except by their
frontiers: those which separate them from other actual units of the
discourse (but this is a problem of articulation) and also those which
distinguish them from other virtual units, with which they form a
certain class (which linguistics calls a
paradigm);
this notion of a
paradigm is essential, apparently, if we are to understand the struc–
turalist vision: the paradigm is a group, a reservoir- as limited as
possible-of objects (of units) from which one summons, by an act
of citation, the object or unit one wishes to endow with an actual
meaning; what characterizes the paradigmatic object is that it is,
vis-a.-vis other objects of its class, in a certain relation of affinity and
dissimilarity: two units of the same paradigm must resemble each
other somewhat
in order
that the difference which separates them bc
indeed evident: sand
z
must have both a common feature (dentality)
and a distinctive feature (presence or absence of sonority) so that we
cannot, in French, attribute the same meaning to
poisson
and
poison;
Mondrian's squares must have both certain affinities by their shape as
squares, and certain dissimilarities by their proportion and color; the
American automobiles (in Butor's
Mobile)
must be constantly re–
garded in the same way, yet they must differ each time by both their
make and color; the episodes of the Oedipus myth (in Levi-Strauss's
analysis) must be both identical and varied-in order that all these
languages, these works may be intelligible. The dissection-operation
thus produces an initial dispersed state of the simulacrum, but the units
of the structure are not at all anarchic: before being distributed and
fixed in the continuity of the composition, each one forms with its own
