Barthes, reversed

My reading of Barthes in my post on structuralism (and post-structuralism) was, I'll maintain, right in the direction it wished to go, but absolutely wrong (that is, going in the exact opposite direction) in how I put it. I said:

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident... is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural.

What I should have said is that this detaching takes place not through a moving away from semiotics and towards structure, but the more rigorous development of structure through semiotics--to the point where the older semiotic model (that only gives us the sign), reaches its limit and breaks, forcing us to found and find at this limit "another semiotics." This is what Barthes says in "The Structural Analysis of Narratives:" the detaching of structure from semiotics calls for a recognition of when and where the limit of a particular semiotic analysis must pause, and where it becomes necessary "to shift to another semiotics," to constitute another code, another langue or language (Image--Music--Text, 115-6).

But what this means is that we have to reconceptualize semiotics constantly: it is not the fixed thing that is taught in America as only the analysis of the sign  in its signifying act (or the failure of this signification to occur). Semoitics is not rigid, it is in fact extremely "flexible," as Barthes says earlier (109, it is in a revealing context, in contrast to psychological analysis). But it is not flexible in the sense that it can be applied as the same thing to all sorts of fields of data: this is precisely how America views semiotics, from what I gather. Rather, each time a new field or language is constituted, it must work at establishing the limits at which its functioning might break down. There, at that point, it must again seek another language, analyze a different code. This means that the sign constantly traverses itself as it gets imbricated with a metalanguage. Structuralism picks up this traversing, this cutting across a constituted semiotics, and develops it, transforms it into something other. This is the way we must revisit structuralism: not by fleeing its cooperation or coexistence with semiotics as I stupidly put it, but by developing our sense (so concretely grasped by Barthes) of the flexibility of semiotics and the ability of it to respect the need and the possibilities for new fields for analysis--developing our sense of all this, I say, as structuralism.