Language is the Collage (The Medium is the Massage)

Language is expressive. This triviality is complicated in the very next instant of thought, when we realize that expressivity implies non-immediacy, and thus, imperfection. On this level, it would seem Barthes and myself would be in agreement. Words are, after all, merely a construct. More than this however, they are the rough worn edges of other people's thought, expressed (usually) in the form of an animal articulation of teeth and gum and tongue. On this too we would seem to be in agreement. It is from this that we must realize that Barthes does not kill the author. No, he asserts the author was never alive, in the sense that we think of him.
We might like to think of the author as being central to the understanding of his work, perhaps even the end of his work. We might like to imagine that the centralized, atomized "soul" of the author is what speaks to us, about something "it" has to say. Truth be told, the "it" might be better understood, and his critique better analyzed, if the "it" was seen as a "they", this "they" in turn... Perhaps a "we"?.
This thought process, which depends on the Freudian understanding of the self born from the unconscious, and the group unconscious being best expressed through the way that language (read: the ideas expressed by language) fit together, comes to see that language is, as such a self fitting societal puzzle, the true constructor of the work. Further, it is the substance of what can also be analyzed, since there is no atomized Author. Simply and succinctly put, because of this, the reader is the only point at which any of this does atomize in a way the reader can talk about.

Perhaps the most interesting quote is the comment about Surrealism on page 144, Because of it's application to both our own potential work in this course, and postmodern art in general.

"I slew the Dragon with my pen, who first declared that he was me. For I thought were I this beast, surely would I wish to die. Since thus I cannot die, I weep at worthless immortality. At least I would tire of the eyes rolling back in my head."