Are we Imprisoned by meaning?

Roland Barthes’s continuing project it would appear was meaning; the way societies make meaning, the way meaning surrounds and imprisons us, like some Wittgensteinian fly-bottle. ‘The notion of meaning,’ Lavers remarks, ‘can be said to govern the whole of his thinking,’ and she shrewdly comments that his attacks on single meaning may well be attacks on ‘meaning altogether’. His works and conversations are full of eloquent and dramatic images: the temptation of meaning, a festival of meaning, the adventure of the intelligible, the itinerary of meaning, the dream of meaning. ‘The act of writing is racked by the need for meaning.’

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The Meaninglessness of Meaning

Michael Wood