PARTISAN REVIEW
549
the occasionally moving horror of self and the effort to erase the fa ct
of birth which we have in the hermetic, bloody and rather snobbish
novels of Philippe Sollers.
The demystification of traditional fictions (a proud structuralist
project) deserves in turn to be at least somewhat demystified from
both political and psychological points of view. Politically, for ex–
ample, the effort, as Barthes puts it, "to substitute the instance of
discourse for the instance of reality" can have two quite different
implications. On the one hand, such statements could reinforce a
politics of freedom. Human reality, in society as well as in literature,
can be thought of as the continuous creation of multiple contexts and
occasions which are always too rich to be controlled by any pre–
existent "program" - whether it be the program of given literary
conventions, or of a pre-existent self, or of a political blueprint for
society's future. On the other hand, the structuralist emphasis on the
text's autonomy has most frequently led not to a use of the text as
a model illustrating some of the undiagrammed multiplicities of
choice in human experience, but has rather led to an effort to find
the laws governing all texts. The structuralists would be equally inter–
ested in discovering the laws of political behavior. And while they
have cleverly exposed some of the brainwashing techniques in con–
temporary propaganda, popular art, ads, etc., the very notion that
human behavior
can
be adequately accounted for by "scientific laws"
could easily serve authoritarian political ambitions.
Structuralism wavers between an emphasis on permanent struc–
tural laws independent of any particular manifestation of these laws,
and an interest in the indeterminate manifestations (the innumerable
"instances of discourse" in reality ) which cannot be derived from any
sources or laws whatsoever. The latter interest is consistent with a
political ideology which, for rigorous scientific reasons, would have to
leave a wide margin in its planning for indeterminacy, that is to say,
for what we usually call human freedom.
If,
however, structural laws
are emphasized, the goal of politics, as well as of literary studies,
might be thought of as the reduction to insignificance (or even the
elimination) of all those particular texts - or instance of behavior -
whose merely contingent, individual peculiarities are troublesome rom–
principal axiological models, the paradigms of variation and the
transformational rules of current ideological structures in the hope
