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framework, can be considered the cnuque of a certain formalism from
the standpoint of a certain historical content.
In the second instance, the quotation taken from the
Critical Essays,
Barthes adopts the very formula he earlier derogates. Here, his intention,
symmetrical but inverse, is to defend a mode of criticism, structuralist
criticism, whose aim is to liberate literature from the tyranny of meaning
to which "bourgeois" culture submits it. For when "bourgeois" ideology
encounters a phenomenon it cannot easily formalize, it resorts to a
second-line defense, complicitous with Ithe
f~rst,
that seeks to reduce the
cultural object to its message.
As
long as the work of art
means
some–
thing, it can
be
safely encompassed. In contrast to a content analysis,
Barthes proposes a formal description that aims, not to decipher the
meaning of the work, but to reconstruct "the rules and constraints of
that meaning's elaboration"; "not to
discover
the work in question, but
on the contrary to
cover
it as completely as possible by its own language."
Barthes hamself, the most self-conscious of critics, is perfectly aware
of the movement in his work from a critique of content to a critique of
form, from tJhematic criticism to structuralist criticism, and he
views
that movement as a progress. In a second preface to
Mythologies,
writ–
ten in 1970, he indicates the historical as well as the technical reasons
why his early mode of thematic analysis must be abandoned in favor
of a more subtle, semiological one. But where Barthes sees a certain
progression, the parallel quotations at the beginning of this essay suggest
a fundamental complicity of terms. In the first instance, the tautology
"Racine ce'st Racine" is the innocent-looking formula whose ideological
content - its false naturalness, its agressive antiintellectualism - is un–
masked by a critical method grounded in historical materialism. In the
second quotation, the same formula becomes the rallying cry of a
polemical formalism that seeks to liberate the signifier from the reduc–
tive, univocal meaning by which "bourgeois" culture secures its domain.
But the parallel suggests the difficulty of distinguishing in principle
between thematic criticism and the mystifications of bourgeois interpreta–
tion, between structuralist criticism and the ahistorical formalism of
"bourgeois" myth-making. That both modes of criticism may share a
certain identity with their objects, mass culture and high bourgeois
culture, that both poles of both sets of terms are reducible to the same
empty tautology should not come as a surprise. In the Preface to the
Phenomenology,
Hegel demonstrates that both Fichte's thematic critique
of consciousness and Schelling's formalist one can be resumed by the
identical proposition: "Ich bin Ich."
