Barthes takes some issue with the statement "I read the text." (300). He writes:
. . . this is not always true. The more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it; I do not make it undergo a predicative operation, consequent upon its being, an operation known as reading, and I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. This 'I' which approaches the texts is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost) . [...] (300)
So we, the readers, are really approaching everything from our environment as a part of the 'web' of humanity, and our experiences, which are not unique to ourselves but are part of this web (as much as this blog is part of this internet-web) is part of a collective human experience.
In the second part of our reading, the 'web' takes a larger voice in his work. The five codes form a sort of network which everything must pass through (301), though I get confused when he states things like "if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility" (301). Huh? And why he used the chemistry term "multivalence" (meaning 'having more than two layers'), I don't quite know. Perhaps to emphasise the complexity of the web of which texts are woven?
One thing I do get is his re-emphasis on the point of the commonality of all texts: that the "[c]ode is a perspective of quotations . . . so many fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done, experience: the code (by which are those five codes and thus conspire together to produce text, I think) is the wake of that already." (Parenthetical insert is mine) (301-2).
Anyway - the five codes:
1. Hermeneutic - the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed (these terms will not always occur, they will often be repeated; they will not appear in any fixed order) (300). I had to look this term up on dictionary.com, and found that it means "the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural texts" (2006, The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed). Better, it can be viewed as "plot."
2. Semes - I was thrown by what this is. I went to Merriam-Webster.com, typed in "semes," and got "seme - 1. a linguistic sign, 2. any of the basic components of the meaning of a morpheme." So I went and looked up "morpheme - a distinctive collation of phonemes (as the free form pins or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful part." This is becoming a search. "Phoneme - any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar sounds which are perceived to be a distinctive singular sound in the language." I'm at a bit of a loss after all this, for Barthes says we do not try to "link them to character" and that we attribute to them the characteristics of "motes of dust." I don't know why these "linguistic signs" or "basic components of the meaning of a morpheme" are important, and I get the feeling that despite Barthes' attention to these five codes, and the editor, Raman Selden's, expression that there may be more than five (291), that the "semes" are not that important. Can anyone explain this one to me?
3. Symbolic Grouping. Barthes starts off introducing this code with the line "we shall refrain from structuring the symbolic grouping . . ." I get this, I think, insomuch as we discuss this as the symbols a writer works into his textual web and that they can be approached from an infinite number of directions, limited only by the points of views of the readers.
4. Actions (terms of the proairetic code). For the record, my MS Word spell check doesn't think "proairetic" is a word. So, I typed "proairetic" in Google and everything between Hermeneutics and Proairetics - the interaction between plot structure (hermeneutics) and actions (proairetics) is explained: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/narratology/terms/hermeneutic.html
5. Cultural codes. Barthes says these are "references to a science or a body of knowledge; in drawing attention to them, we merely indicate the type of knowledge (physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical, etc.) referred to, without going so far as to construct (or reconstruct) the culture they express" (301). I believe this is affects us in our background researches; how do we know what happens in a murder trial, for example? Or, perhaps, our own backstories bleeding into the characters that we write, especially the ones we like (or, if we're not particularly fond of ourselves, those characters we don't like). Even further, with the "reconstruction" of a culture, I think he's discussing when an author is writing about a culture that has passed, whether that be recent (coverage of Britney Spears) or way in the past (writing about Egyptians or The Bible).
And that's all I'm thinking. Please, please, tell me if I'm wrong or refute me! Cheers!
