Binary Oppositions - Levi Strauss and Barthes - Symbolic Codes

Levi-Strauss and Barthes were fascinated by Saussure’s realisation that meaning (and thus any concept of what we call reality) can exist only at the level of idea. At the core of this is the recognition that any meaning we attribute to a thing can neither be inherent in the thing itself nor be something we arrive at independently; instead, meaning must always be, at least in part, a ‘construct’ and a ‘given’, i.e. something we learn from others for more on this look at binary opposition.pdf

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