Structuralism Quotes

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
― Rumi

“That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.”
― Claude Calame, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece

“... the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.”
― Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play

“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“In order to dismantle such a discourse we must begin with the realization that desire is never “outside all social constraint.” Desire may be outside one set of constraints or another; but social constraints are what engender desire; and, one way or another, even at its most apparently catastrophic, they contour desire’s expression.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

“Barthes me lisait, donc on s’est rencontrés.”
― Philippe Sollers

“This page is related to that page.

You're reading something constructed using a rhetorical practice, something informed both directly and indirectly by the entire history of composition up until this point, from the Sophists to Derrida. But you're navigating it using pure logical statements, using spans of text or images that, when clicked or selected, get other files and display them on your screen. The text is based in the rhetorical tradition; the links are based in the logical tradition; and somewhere in there is something worth figuring out.

...the entire history of Western pedagogy [is] an oscillation between these two traditions, between the tradition of rhetoric as a means for obtaining power — language as just a collection of interconnected signifiers co-relating, without a grounding in "truth," and the tradition of seeking truth, of searching for a fundamental, logical underpinning for the universe, using ideas like the platonic solids or Boolean logic, or tools like expert systems and particle accelerators ... what is the relationship between narratives and logic? What is sprezzatura for the web? Hell if I know. My way of figuring it all out is to build the system and write inside it, because I'm too dense to work out theories.”
― Paul Ford

“Every main character has an enemy with a face and a body that they can chase or kill or confront or appease; when unfortunately your enemies are probably intangible and structural and a tiny speck of them is in everyone you know.”
― Leena Norms

“Așa trece viața, prefăcându-se în nimic. Automatismul ca fenomen înghite lucrurile, hainele, mobilele, nevasta și teama de război.”
― Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky

“Așa trece viața, prefăcându-se în nimic. Automatismul ca fenomen înghite lucrurile, hainele, mobilele, nevasta și teama de război

(V.B Șklovski, Arta ca procedeu, 1925, în Mihai Pop, coord., Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă, p. 386)”
― Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky

“Apropo de digresiuni. La Fielding, în Joseph Andrews, există un capitol, introdus după o descriere de încăierare. Capitolul cuprinde relatarea discuției dintre scriitor și actor și poartă următorul titlu: Introdus anume pentru a frâna acțiunea".

(V. B. Șklovski, Literatura fără subiect, în Mihai Pop, coord., Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă, p. 447)”
― Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky

“While Mussolini toiled long hours at his desk, Hitler continued to indulge in the lazy bohemian dilettantism of his art-student days. When aides sought his attention for urgent matters, Hitler was often inaccessible. He spent much time at his Bavarian retreat; even in Berlin he often neglected pressing business. He subjected his dinner guests to midnight monologues, rose at midday, and devoted his afternoons to personal passions such as plans by his young protege Albert Speer to reconstruct his hometown of Linz and the center of Berlin in a monumental style benefiting the Thousand-Year Reich. After February 1938 the cabinet ceased to meet; some cabinet ministers never managed to see the Fuhrer at all. Hans Mommsen went so far as to call him a 'weak dictator.' Mommsen never meant to deny the unlimited nature of Hitler's vaguely defined and haphazardly exercised power, but he observed that the Nazi regime was not organized on rational principles of bureaucratic efficiency, and that its astonishing burst of murderous energy was not produced by Hitler's diligence.

Neither an extreme intentionalist view of the all-powerful leader ruling alone nor an extreme structuralist view that initiatives from below are the main motor of fascist dynamism is tenable. In the 1990s, the most convincing work established two-way explanations in which competition among midlevel officials to anticipate the leader's intimate wishes and 'work toward' them are given due place, while the leader's role in establishing goals and removing limits and rewarding zealous associates plays its indispensable role.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“The full derivation of Grand Master System PAISX triangulation revealed of It the PREFIX and SUFFIX for I/O respectively.”
― Jonathan Roy