[...] Having characterized the underlying rule-systems of a literary text, all the structuralist could do was sit back and wonder what to do next. There was no question of relating the work to the realities of which it treated, or to the conditions which produced it, or to the actual readers who studied it, since the founding gesture of structuralism had been to bracket off such realities. In order to reveal the nature of language, Saussure, as we have seen, had first of all to repress or forget what it talked about: the referent, or real object which the sign denoted, was put in suspension so that the structure of the sign itself could be better examined. It is notable how similar this gesture is to Husserl's bracketing of the real object in order to get to closer grips with the way the mind experiences it. Structuralism and phenomenology, dissimilar though they are in central ways, both spring from the ironic act of shutting out the material world in order to better illuminate our own consciousness of it. For anyone who believes that consciousness is in an important sense practical, inseparably bound up with the ways we act in and on reality, any such move is bound to be self-defeating. It is rather like killing a person in order to examine more conveniently the circulation of the blood.