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Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

Barthes was the writer who carried semiology out of linguistics and onto the whole surface of modern culture — wrestling matches, advertisements, food, fashion, photographs — reading the everyday for the signs by which a society makes its contingent arrangements look natural. Across a restless career he moved from structural analysis toward the writer’s and reader’s pleasure, never settling into a single method.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980), French literary theorist, critic, and essayist, born in Cherbourg. Tuberculosis interrupted his education and kept him out of the wartime academic track; he taught abroad before returning to France and finding his place at the margins of the university, latterly at the Collège de France, where a chair in literary semiology was created for him in 1977. He died in 1980 after being struck by a laundry van in Paris. He belongs to no one school — he passed through and past structuralism — but his books became, each in turn, events in French intellectual life.

Key concepts

Myth as a second-order system. In Mythologies (1957) Barthes analysed myth as “a second-order semiological system”: an ordinary sign — a photograph of a young soldier saluting the French flag — becomes in turn the signifier of a further, ideological meaning (the grandeur of empire), so that culture’s loaded messages present themselves as innocent and natural. Myth is the operation by which history is dressed as nature.

Connotation. The mechanism beneath myth is connotation — a second layer of signification riding on a first. Barthes drew the device from Hjelmslev’s planes of expression and content and elaborated it in Elements of Semiology (1964) and The Fashion System (1967), where he set out to read clothing as a structured language.

The death of the author. In his 1967 essay he argued that a text’s meaning is not anchored in its author’s intention or biography but produced at the point of reading: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Writing is a tissue of quotations drawn from culture, not the expression of a single interior.

From work to text, and toward pleasure. Barthes’s late turn — S/Z (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Camera Lucida (1980) — moved from the analysis of stable structures toward the reader’s activity, the erotics of reading, and finally, in his book on photography, toward the singular detail that pierces the viewer, the punctum, which no code accounts for.

Where Barthes stops

Barthes is hard to pin because he kept leaving his own positions behind. The early Barthes of Mythologies writes as if a rigorous semiology could expose ideology from a vantage outside it; the later Barthes doubts that any such vantage exists and writes instead from inside desire, taste, and grief. He gave the analysis of culture some of its sharpest tools — myth, connotation, the constructed reader — and then declined to treat them as a system that closes, turning toward exactly the singular and unsystematic experience his early method had bracketed. What he never resolved, and seems not to have wanted to, is whether the critic stands above the signs they read or is simply another reader among them; the trajectory of his work is the steady abandonment of the first answer for the second.

Key works

See also: Semiotics · Structuralism · Saussure · Eco · Jakobson