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PARTISAN REVIEW
meanings," he selects a specimen passage which does incorporate the
radical shift in emphasis that is in part the object of our discussion.
It
is
the polarization of these processes in Barthes's statement that in some
measure accounts for the radicalism, as it does for the instability and
indeterminateness that one feels as impelling forces behind such
statements. Yet such statements do amount to simplifications of
previously put forward accounts of meaning. For example, it was Max
Weber's representative opinion that man was a creature strung up in
webs of meaning that were his own creation. That is to say man both
fabricates meanings and is endowed with the meanings that he himself
has devised or invented. To say this is to be no more paradoxical or
mystifying than it is to say that it is in man 's nature to create artifacts
and civilizations, and that artifacts and civilizations are in fact natural
creations of humanity-or any more paradoxical than it is to say that
for man the state of nature is society. In other words the systems of
meaning-in language, art, ritual, thought, etc. -that human beings
live within are both our own creations-our essential artifacts-and
the boundaries or constraints within which we comprehensively live.
What is peculiar about this circumstance is that we live within and
cannot go beyond the very meanings that we ourselves have created–
and that creation and discovery in this context are exceptionally
difficult
to
tease apart. In other words, the problematics o.f epistemo–
logical uncertainty and paradoxicality are by no means the same thing
as limitless equivalences nor do they necessarily imply them.
A further extension of these problems is to be found in the
historically relativist assertion that texts do not have any "permanent
nature or value," that they are continually being refabricated, recon–
structed, and reinvented by readers. This is certainly true to a consider–
able degree, but what such a proposition overlooks is the circumstance
of permanence itself, that some texts persist as apparently permanent
and others do not. Why is it that some texts continually solicit or
inspire us to invent and/ or discover new meanings in them, while
others do not? (Why is it that some texts force themselves upon us as
masqueraders; or, to reverse the process, why do we force ourselves
upon certain texts and continue to transform their meanings?) Such
texts in their apparent permanence and endurance seem to resemble
such institutions as marriage and the family-no matter what we do
to
them or about them, they seem not to go away; they seduce us as if they
knew our meanings beforehand, yet they were invented by no one
except oursel
~es.
Which brings us ineluctably back to the idea that one of the major
