sologdin’s Reviews > S/Z: An Essay > Status Update

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.

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.