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Hunt the slipper
An edited version of an essay by Roland Barthes about languages at war, first published in the TLS of October 8, 1971.
It is wrong to say that there is a bourgeois
culture, because the whole of our culture is bourgeois (and to say that
our culture is bourgeois is a truism, tediously reiterated in all our
universities). To say that culture stands in contrast to nature is
doubtful because we do not really know where the limits of the two lie.
Where is nature in Man? In order to call himself Man, Man needs a
language, which is culture itself. In his biological make-up perhaps?
But today in the living organism we find the same structures as in the
speaking subject: life itself is constructed like a language. In short,
everything is culture, from clothing to books, from food to pictures:
and culture is everywhere, from one end of the social scale to the
other. This culture is, certainly, a highly paradoxical object without
contours, without any term of opposition, without remainder...TLS
