...to study this text down to the last detail is to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures; it is to assume the power...of working back along the threads of meanings, of abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal); it is...to substitute for the simple representative model another model, whose very gradualness would guarantee what may be productive in the classic text; for the step-by-step method, through its very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text, giving an internal imag of it" it is never anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis; it is, finally, in the very writing of the commentary, a systematic use of digression (a form ill-accommodated by the discourse of knowledge) and thereby a way of observing the reversibility of the structures from which the text is woven; of course, the classic text is incompletely reversible (it is modestly plural): the reading of this text occurs within a necessary order, which the gradual analysis will make precisely its order in writing; but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it. (12-13)
It seems to me that starring the text contradictorily both de-structures and restructures the text, excessively on both fronts. Is it really necessary to take up a project of explicating absolutely all of what can be inferred from the text (like, say, definitions of actions, symbols, culturally-specific facts)? (Also, why have most but not all the instances of "signifier" been changed to "signified" on pages 16-19 in our copy of the reading?)
My bigger curiosity is what better or more efficient means of knowledge apprehension there may be apart from a hermeneutic approach to a text, such as the one Barthes so skillfully displays. For instance, only convention requires us to read an English text from left to right and top to bottom. Were I to read (or even "write") random words from any place in the text and move on non-linearly, Barthes' starred codes would hardly apply. Another instance of ambiguous signification is shown plainly by Barthes: how is meaning transformed by the act of direct quotation? He gives a "tauromachian" explanation of citation (22-23) which I can't exactly make sense of.
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