00111--How does Barthes establish that Author is a construct?

            In the 1920s itself, structuralism proved three things about the workings of language and hence literature.  The primary assumption is that meaning occurs through difference.  Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among sings in a signifying system.  Saussure argued that there is no natural or innate relation between the signifier and the signified.  Secondly Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system.  His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential:  primacy is given to relationships rather than to things.  Signs cannot be defined in terms of some 'essential' or 'intrinsic nature'.  Signs refer primarily to each other.  The traditional notion has been that language is a medium of communication and it communicates a reality, which is pre-existent.  But structuralism argued that it is language, which constitutes reality.  The critics like Barthes took these findings and applied it in the study of literature.  Once there arguments are applied in the care of literature, the author turns out to be a mere construct.  Barthes does only this.