Barthes Orthophrased (Good Gravy, Marie)

Copyright © 2010 Ernest Bloom.

All structure all
structural works of a certain formal
small structure clerks of a
short stature all works of a
contained formalism and restraint
are extremely divergent, but

text and syntax, being
less important than stability,
Hervé bow down before more
regular constraints
straints straints
saints aints
ts ssss.



Nota bene: "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."