86
ROLAND BARTHES
virtual group or reservoir an intelligent organism, subject to a sovereign
motor principle: that of the smallest difference.
Once the units are posited, structural man must discover in them
or establish for them certain rules of association: this is the activity of
articulation, which succeeds the summoning activity. The syntax of
the arts and of discourse is, as we know, extremely varied; but what
we discover in every work of structural enterprise is the submission to
regular constraints whose formalism, improperly indicted, is much
less important than their stability; for what is happening, at this second
stage of the simulacrum-activity, is a kind of battle against chance;
this is why the constraint of recurrence of the units has an almost
demiurgic value: it is by the regular return of the units and of the
associations of units that the work appears constructed, i.e., endowed
with meaning; linguistics calls these rules of combination
forms,
and it
would
be
advantageous to retain this rigorous sense of an overtaxed
word: form, it has been said, is what keeps the contiguity of units from
appearing as a pure effect of chance: the work of art is what man
wrests from chance. This perhaps allows us to understand on the one
hand why so-called nonfigurative works are nonetheless to the highest
degree works of art, human thought being established not on the
analogy of copies and models but with the regularity of assemblages;
and on the other hand why these same works appear, precisely, for–
tuitous and thereby useless to those who discern in them no
form:
in front of an abstract painting, Khrushchev was certainly wrong to
see only the traces of a donkey's tail whisked across the canvas; at
least he knew in his way, though, that art is a certain conquest of
chance (he simply forgot that every rule must be learned, whether
one wants to apply or interpret it) .
The simulacrum, thus constructed, does not render the world as it
has found it, and
it
is here that structuralism is important. First of all,
it manifests a new category of the object, which is neither the real nor
the rational, but the
functional,
thereby joining a whole scientific com–
plex which is being developed around information theory and research.
Subsequently and especially,
it
highlights the strictly human process
by which men give meaning to things. Is this new? To a certain degree,
yes; of course the world has never stopped looking for the meaning of
what is given
it
and of what it produces; what is new is a mode of
thought (or a "poetics") which seeks less to assign completed mean-
