Status Updates From S/Z by Roland Barthes (1970...

The mastery of meaning, a veritable semiurgism, is a divine attribute, once this meaning is defined as the discharge, the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing from the signified toward the signifier: the author is a god (his place of origin is the signified); as for the critic, he is the priest whose task is to decipher the writing of the god.

it is the same story, because it is the same design, the same sequence: tension, seizure or possession, explosion, fatigue, conclusion. To read into this scene at the theater a solitary orgasm, to substitute an erotic story for the euphemistic version, this operation of reading is based not on a lexicon of symbols but on a systematic cohesion, a congruence of relationships.

And yet the locus of an epoch's codes forms a
kind of scientific vulgate which it will eventually be valuable to describe: what do we know "naturally" about art?-"it is a constraint"; about youth?-"it is turbulent," etc. If we collect all such knowledge, all such vulgarisms, we create a monster, and this monster is ideology. As a fragment of ideology, the cultural code inverts its class origin [.]

Beauty, as we have seen, cannot be induced through catechesis other than from some great cultural model (written or pictorial): it is stated, not described. Contrariwise, ugliness can be abundantly described: it alone is 'realistic,' confronting the referent without an intermediate code (whence the notion that realism, in art, is concerned solely with ugliness).

Two codes are simultaneously understood: a code of connotation (in the dance of death the meaning is universal, arising from a coded knowledge, that of art history) and a code of denotation (in the dance of the living, each word, according to its dictionary meaning, is added to its predecessor); this divergence, this sort of double vision, defines the play on words.

currently agregando mis lecturas de la u porque si no ingreso nada a mi goodreads lloro

I’m having an aneurysm. But I love you Roland.