Sorry for that long post. Hope I haven't permanently killed the discussion.
What about returning to Barthes' second "slogan":
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture."
Yes authors are all part of an inherited tradition and could hardly write what they write without it. The crazy quilt picture might not be a bad one for what third rate writers (unconsciously)do.
But for original thinkers, isn't Newton's image a better one? "I could only see so far because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Yes, I know that the book _On the Shoulders of Giants_ shows that this was not one of Newton's original statements.)
If the structuralist account of signs forces us to treat Shakespeare, Plato and Darwin as merely stitching cliches together, like Danielle Steele, isn't this a reason to reject structuralism?
Or what about this question:
At the beginning, I mentioned as one of my commonsense assumptions, that there were non-manipulative (autonomy-preserving) means of persuading people.
If there are, then recognizing manipulation should be an important part of the work of literary criticism. (And we do in fact criticize movies and poems as "manipulative".)
Yet postmodernists seem to believe that all discourse is ideological.
Reason seemed to promise us a way out of being manipulated, but reason turns out to be just another ideology (logocentrism).
There is no liberation -- only irony and the embracing of contradiction.
Is there really no way to distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative persuasion? Is it morally responsible for us to give up the hope of finding one?
[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 04, 2004).]
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