STRUCTURALISM
81
ings to the objects it discovers than to know how meaning is possible,
at what cost and by what means. Ultimately, one might say that the
object of structuralism is not man endowed with meanings, but man
fabricating meanings, as if it could not be the
content
of meanings
which exhausted the semantic goals of humanity, but only the act by
which these meanings, historical and contingent variables, are pro–
duced.
Homo significans:
such would be the new man of structural
inquiry.
According to Hegel, the ancient Greek was amazed by the
natural
in nature; he constantly listened to it, questioned the meaning of
mountains, springs, forests, storms; without knowing what all these
objects were telling him by name, he perceived in the vegetal or
cosmic
order a tremendous
shudder
of meaning, to which he gave the name
of a god: Pan. Subsequently, nature has changed, has become social:
everything that is given to man is
already
human, down to the forest
and the river which we cross when we travel. But confronted with this
social nature, which is quite simply culture, structural man is no dif–
ferent from the ancient Greek: he too listens for the natural in
culture, and constantly perceives in it not so much stable, finite, "true"
meanings as the shudder of an enormous machine which is humanity
tirelessly undertaking to create meaning, without which it would no
longer be human. And it is because this fabrication of meaning is
more important, to its view, than the meanings themselves, it is be–
cause the function is extensive with the works, that structuralism con–
stitutes itself as an activity, and refers the exercise of the work and the
work itself to a single identity: a serial composition or an analysis by
Levi-Strauss are not objects except insofar as they have been
made:
their present being
is
their past act: they are
having-been-mades;
the
artist, the analyst recreates the course taken by meaning, he need not
designate it: his function, to return to Hegel's example, is a
manteia;
like the ancient soothsayer, he
speaks
the locus of meaning but does
not name it. And it is because literature, in particular, is a mantic
activity that it is both intelligible and interrogating, speaking and
silent, engaged in the world by the course of meaning which it re–
makes with the world, but disengaged from the contingent meanings
which the world elaborates: an answer to the man who consumes it
