The prosthetic imagination

Syntagmatic freedom is clearly related to certain aleatory factors: there are probabilities of saturation of certain syntactic forms by certain contents… This phenomenon is called catalysis; it is possible to imagine a purely formal lexicon which would provide, instead of the meaning of each word, the set of other words which could catalyse it according to possibilities which are of course variable—the smallest degree of probability would correspond to a ‘poetic’ zone of speech. (Barthes, Elements of Semiology)