Roland Barthes Overview PDF

Roland Barthes
Overview
Contributors: Mike Gane & Nicholas Gane
Editors: Mike Gane & Nicholas Gane
Book Title: Roland Barthes
Chapter Title: "Overview"
Pub. Date: 2004
Access Date: May 22, 2014
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780761949527
Online ISBN: 9781446263280
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446263280
2004 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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University of St Andrews
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Page 2 of 30 Roland Barthes: Overview
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446263280.d7
Editors' Introduction: Roland Barthes and
Social Theory
MikeGane & NicholasGane
I claim to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well
make sarcasm the condition of truth.
(Barthes, 1972a: 12)
political and moral obsession is followed by a minor scientific delirium,
which in its turn sets off a perverse pleasure
(Barthes, 1977b: 145).
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg in November 1915. His family moved to
southwest France, Bayonne, after his father had been killed in the First World War in
1916, and then to Paris in 1924. His religious background was protestant (1985: 261).
He attended the Lyces Montagne and Louis-le-Grand from 1930 to 1934. He then
entered the Sorbonne but his studies were interrupted by illness (tuberculosis), and he
was never able to complete courses leading to entry to the Ecole Normale Suprieur.
Between 19391941 he taught in Lyces in Biarritz and Paris. After attaining a certificat
de licence (grammar and philology) in 1943, and then long periods of convalescence,
he taught at the French Institute in Bucharest (1948), and Alexandra in Egypt (1949
1950). From 1950 to 1952 he worked in the cultural affairs section of the French Foreign
Office. Between the end of 1952 and 1955 he was a researcher in lexicology and
sociology in Paris (CNRS) after which he took a position in the publishers Editions de
l'Arche and was active as a director of the Thtre Populaire. His move into higher
education came finally in 1960 when he began teaching at the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, a position he held for almost eighteen years. In 1977 he was appointed
to the chair of literary semiology at the Collge de France. On 25th February 1980,
he attended a luncheon arranged by Jack Lang on behalf of presidential candidate
Franois Mitterand. Shortly after leaving the luncheon Roland Barthes was knocked
over by a vehicle on the rue des Ecoles. He died from severe pulmonary complications
from his injuries on 26th March.
Roland Barthes first came to prominence as a literary and cultural theorist in the 1950s
during a long period outside academia. His first major academic position in higher
education was attained only in his mid-40s after years in sanatoria and in research
and publishing. His first writings were famously denounced by Raymond Picard in
1965 as threatening the whole ethos of traditional French literary criticism and theory.
But this confrontation, and particularly the way Barthes dealt with it, only served to
place his name at the centre of new controversies around the important shift of the
dominant frame in French theory from existential to structuralist methods. Barthes
met and became friends with Foucault in 1955, a close friendship that lasted till 1960
(Macey, 1993: 8081). Unlike Foucault, Barthes explicitly championed structuralism
as philosophy and technique, with a direct allegiance to Marxism in theory and artistic
practice Barthes was a passionate advocate of Brecht's theatrical ideas (1972b:
3740) yet in his political practice he appeared to distance himself from any explicit
involvement (Calvet, 1994: 133, 164). This has given rise to the idea that he may
gradually have moderated his earlier attachment to radicalism, but this view is not
supported by a close reading of his texts, which, right to the end maintain a militant,
but indirect, political utopianism. In the 1960s, his work moved into an alignment with
the structural theoretical Marxism of the journal Tel Quel, which championed avant-
garde writing (eg the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet, and new aesthetic theory of
Sollers and Kristeva) and the high theory of the Althusserian school just as the student
movement was to induce the revolt of May 68. Barthes' attitude towards the student
revolt was known to be one of disdain. A slogan Structures do not take to the streets
neither does Roland Barthes' appeared at the Sorbonne. This challenge has been
often noted in commentaries on Barthes, but his response to students has rarely been
picked up. When he saw an announcement that a group of revolutionary students is
preparing a destruction of the structuralist myth he counter-attacked. I am captivated
by the stereotypic consistency of the expression he said sarcastically. To speak in
stereotypes is to side with the power of language, an opportunism which must (today)
be refused (1977: 1989; Barthes wrote a short note on May 68, in Writing the event,
1986: 149154).
Immediately after May 68 it seemed that Barthes was a changed man his heart
no longer in his work (Calvet, 1994: 166, 170). He taught for a time in Morocco
but returned to Paris sooner than planned, in 1970, where he began to produce a
new programme that both built on but also significantly departed from his previous
perspectives and methods. On the one hand there were statements that seemed to
point in the direction of a deepening of his Marxist ideas, indicating a shift towards
Althusser. On the other, he veered away from Marxist structuralism towards what
came to be known as post-structuralism and post-modernism (and perhaps towards
a utopianism inspired by Fourier). His influence began to extend across the spectrum
to the new generation of writers such as Julia Kristeva (who was a doctoral student
of Barthes) and to Jean Baudrillard (who was at one point a close colleague). This
influence began to extend beyond the French boundaries, and his ideas played a key
part in the evolution of anglophone cultural studies, literary theory in the 1970s and
1980s. Barthes, even by the mid-1950s, was very far from the mode of existential ideas
developed by Sartre, and had attempted a radical fusion of Saussure, Durkheim and
Brecht: linguistic, cultural and sociological structuralism in a radical political aesthetic.
In Britain these ideas were taken up enthusiastically by the Centre for Cultural Studies
under Stuart Hall (Hall et al, 1980, and see Harris, 1992: 112119). Barthes' later ideas
were important in the shift toward postmodern literary theory led by Fredric Jameson
(see Anderson, 1998: 50) in cultural theory (see Huyssen, 1984, Harvey, 1989 and
Zurbrugg, 2000) and in post-colonial theory (see Bhabha in Grossberg et al 1992:
5666). The autobiographical writings of Barthes' last period on pleasure, the lover's
discourse, and on photography have proved to be best sellers, and their controversial
impact is still being felt and assessed today (Rebat, ed., 1997, and Knight, ed., 2000).
Intellectual Career
Jameson has suggested that Barthes' works constitute a veritable fever-chart
of all the significant intellectual and critical tendencies since World War II and
lists phenomenology, Sartrean Marxism, Hjelmslevian linguistics, Brechtianism,
Freudianism, semiotics, Lacanianism, and poststructuralism (1988: 21). Barthes himself
offers a number of self-presentations. One, of 1974, suggests a division of his works
into three periods: a first analysis of discourse in the mode of amazement and hope,
secondly, between 1957 and 1963, the moment of scientificity (an intoxication with
classification known to Sade and Fourier), and a third period which was dominated
by the theory of the text (influenced by Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and the Tel
Quel group) (1988: 38). Barthes seems to suggest elsewhere (1977b) and this is the
one adopted in this introduction, that his work is divided into two clear moments: the
early period of ideological and semiological analysis of the collective representations
of a consumer society (where critique is distanced from its objects), and a later period
in which previous assumptions about the existence of a class alternative to bourgeois
society are replaced by a utopian strategy which is declared to be airy, light, spaced,
open, decentred, noble and free. There is only one way to escape current forms of
alienation, he said, to retreat ahead of it (1975a: 40)
It is clear then that there are important shifts of emphasis, technique, and orientation
in the work of Roland Barthes. He was a reader of Les Temps Modernes when it
first appeared with its new literary philosophical programme, and his early writings
are in large part an attempt to come to terms with the aesthetic ideas of Sartre and
Camus (see Rybalka, 1986 [Part One]). But Barthes' first major essay of 1953, Writing
Degree Zero, with its emphasis on the crisis of political engagement through writing,
clearly indicated a path of work which diverged theoretically from that of Sartre and
Camus (the book is made up of articles that first appeared in Combat, a journal
associated with Camus, and that were initially offered to and rejected by Camus
publisher Gallimard (Thody, 1977:6). Barthes' Marxism was certainly not an orthodox
one, and unfortunately there is no definitive study of it (Stafford, 1998: 2033; 159
187)). He had been introduced to Marxism through his meeting with Georges Fourni of
Trotskyist persuasion (Calvet, 1994: 62), and he was close to Brechtian ideas not just of
theatrical practice but also of wider cultural and political concerns (which he developed
in the journal Thtre Populaire, and continued, not uncritically, into the 1970s). Once
asked, in 1955, are you a Marxist? He replied: Marxism is a method not a religion
(Freedman, 1983: 147). Writing Degree Zero broke with both conventional Marxism
and the existential Marxism of Sartre and marked out the terrain for theory of late
capitalism (Marcuse famously cited Barthes at key points in his analysis of his social
shift towards the one dimensional society, 1968: 77). He suggests that for the writer
of fiction the literary act has taken on a strange alienation, since the writer is unable to
pen a word without taking a pose characteristic of an out-of-date, anarchic or imitative
language ([1953] 1967a: 91). Previously, bourgeois writing expressed an intemporal
essence of man but now it is writing which absorbs the whole identity of a literary
work (p 91). (Sartre's The Reprieve for example is only possible through the narration in
homogeneous time and this burdens the unfolding of History with a parasitical unity (p
91)). It means the writing of the modern masterpiece is impossible (p 92). Existential
analysis of human alienation was out of date: writing is a blind alley and the writers
of today feel this; for them the search for a non-style for a zero level is, all things
considered, the anticipation of a homogeneous social state (p 93). The problem of
revolution is that Revolution must of necessity borrow from what it wants to destroy, the
very image of what it wants to possess (p 93) (Thody, 1977: 617; Moriarty, 1991: 31
43).
Revolutionary literary activity seeks a world where language would no longer be
alienated (1967a: 94). Barthes very soon began to develop an analysis that included
not only literature but also the new alienated culture of consumerism in France, its
advertising styles, its objects and its fashions. He began to apply an analysis based on
semiotics after reading the work of Saussure, and combined this with neo-Marxist social
criticism (he was associated at this time with the left wing journal Arguments founded by
Edgar Morin in 1956). This fusion of Marx and Saussure raised the possibility of a new
and genuinely systematic, scientific sociology of signs (Knight, 1997: 4466). Barthes'
most famous work Mythologies was published as a collection of short essays in 1957
but the English translation of that name omits some 23 items from the French edition
(they are to be found in the collection called The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
(1997)). Around 19701971 Barthes wrote both a second Preface to a new edition of
Mythologies, and a short essay called Change the Object Itself concerning what he
regarded as an essential shift in his approach that had occurred during the intervening
period. His objective in the mid-1950s, he said, had been to apply the ideas of Saussure
on the nature of the sign to an analysis of collective representations (Durkheim's
concept) in a Marxist perspective. This was intended to show how class culture
universalizes itself in order to be effective as an ideological system (Barthes, 1972a: 9).
Barthes provides an account of the elements of this first programme: if modern
collective representations can be read in modern publicity and popular media, a Marxist
analysis shows that their form of representation is an inversion (culture into nature) so
that class authority becomes a matter of common sense or appears simply beyond
question as natural. Such myth is no longer organised around a long grand narrative
so that even phrases, stereotypes, and discourses can be considered mythical and
can become the subject matter of a new semiology. The technique of such a discipline
breaks up the elements of such discourses into what he calls two semantic systems: a
connoted system whose signified is ideological and a denoted system (the apparent
literalness of the image, object, sentence) whose function is to naturalize the class
proposition by lending it the guarantee of the most innocent of natures (1977a: 1667).
But in the late 1960s things changed. Not essentially the culture, but, he says, the
science of reading. The simple continuous denunciation of bourgeois and petit-
bourgeois ideology as myth had become an obstacle because it had produced its own
stock of stereotyping phrases. Analysis has to shift its place and stop (provisionally)
further on (1972a: 1667). The analysis henceforth, he said, should not focus
exclusively on myth but should, because it had been absorbed into the system, include
the sign itself: it was now necessary to challenge the symbolic itself (p 167). The
former method was aimed at the dismantling of myth at the lexical level as a form of
representation, the latter was to be more far-reaching and pitched at the syntactical
level: what are the articulations, the displacements, which make up the mythological
tissue of a mass consumer society? (p. 167).
At the end of this short essay, Change the Object Itself [1971], Barthes draws on
Althusser's reading of Marx. The new task, he says, is no longer simply to upend (or
right) the mythical message, to stand it back on its feet, with denotation at the bottom
and connotation at the top, nature on the surface and class interest deep down, but
rather to change the object itself, to produce a new object, point of departure for a new
science. This new programme is not a break with the ideas of Writing Degree Zero but
developed radically from them. Its new task is to go from myth analysed through the
notions of sign, signifier and connotation, to an analysis of sociolects using concepts
of citation, reference, stereotype. Here any thick language (including myth) can be
combated by text, conceived as a trans-writing (trans-criture) which is established in
that region which Barthes now describes in utopian terms as airy, light, spaced, open,
decentred, noble and free. Barthes called this the new semiology, and it is conceived
in the mode of a semioclasm, the very antidote to myth (1977a: 1689).
The use of the notion of text is evidently crucial. For Barthes it appears to have
liberating force: the dense language structure of myth which here is called an idiolect or
a sociolect, was in his first essay identified as a writing (criture). Very directly in 1953,
the problem of power was confronted: power, or the shadow cast by power, always
ends in creating an axiological writing (1967a: 26). Barthes insists in his famous short
essay on Myth Today (written in September 1956 and appended to Mythologies) that
there are two levels of analysis: that of substance (object of an ideology-critique), and
that of form (object of semiological analysis); these are two methods that, ideally, have
to be combined (1973: 137). In the 1950s it was clear that his strategy was primarily one
aimed at combating the mystifications of class ideology aided by a scientific analysis of
the semiotic displacements. But by the 1970s he conceded two important things. The
first was that in the very conception of denotation there had been an epistemological
flaw in assuming a simple relation between denotation and object (see Leak, 1994:
73). The second was that he had been mistaken in thinking there was a possibility of
finding a pure and innocent position outside bourgeois class mythology as a counter
mythology, there is no language site outside of bourgeois ideology (1976: 10). The
only remaining option, he said, was the method of theft: fragment the old text of culture,
science, literature, and change its features (p. 10). Thus Barthes here reaches another
conception of writing (criture): the excess by which a text transgresses the laws that
a society, an ideology, a philosophy establish for themselves (p. 10). The analytic
technique he suggests is to force the displacement (but not to suppress; perhaps even
to accentuate) the text's social responsibility (p. 9). Unlike the existential method of
achieving the analysis of a writer's engagement by following the insertion into period,
history, class, Barthes suggests another more radical method which puts to one side
all social contextualisation in order to unglue the text from its purpose of guarantee of
truth (p. 9).
The first programme of writing indeed was perhaps successful because it was an
exemplary model of a research programme: a politico-theoretical general statement
(Writing Degree Zero), and a statement of method ('Myth Today) and a set of
exemplary studies (Mythologies). A systematic working out of the theoretical and
analytical programme then followed the initial stages of this work: in theory (Elements
of Semiology (1964), and many other studies) and in analysis (The Fashion System
(1967) and other studies (such as the pieces collected in The Semiotic Challenge
([1985] 1988). The second programme remained uncompleted and did not, at first
sight appear to have matched the heuristic force of the first programme (although the
more general programme of work of the group Barthes now worked with, Tel Quel, did
provide an idea of what could be achieved). His theoretical essays of this period include
The Pleasure of the Text ([1973]) together with the general theory of intertextuality
(a key statement of which is the essay From Work to Text ([1971] 1977a: 155164).
The analyses associated with this new programme include, S/Z ([1970]), The Empire
of Signs ([1970]), Sade, Fourier, Loyola ([1971]), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
([1975]), A Lover's Discourse ([1977]), Camera Lucida ([1980]) and most of the pieces
included in a collection such as The Responsibility of Forms ([1982]). Announcing the
commencement of this second programme Barthes suggested that attention would
move away from the (narrow) sphere of French society to the whole of Western
civilization (Graeco-Judeo-Islamo-Christian), unified under one theology (1977a:
167). But the writings which have become famous from this period, particularly his
autobiography ([1975]), the essay A Lover's Discourse, and his book on photography,
are ones that only in part carry out the explicit aims of the programme: that part of the
programme defined as moving from the analysis of myth to sociolect following up the
previous analyses of consumer culture was never produced.
The famous writings of this later period seem therefore to map out a theory of the
text, or as he then expressed it: Text with a capital T. Barthes' reflection on what was
happening is interesting. It is not, he said, an epistemological break (which marks the
revolutionary arrival of a new science) between the periods of his work but more of an
epistemological slide (glissement) (1977a: 154) marking the mutation within a set of
disciplines from an analysis of a writer's literary works to that of Text. It is this object
which now also becomes defined in opposition to the sign and analysed in terms of
an irreducible plurality of codes. Text is not conceived as the co-existence of a fixed
number of meanings but an overcrossing corresponding not to stable interpretations
but, adopting a term from Derrida, to disseminations (1977a: 159). This position
recognises in a new way the death of the author previously announced by Barthes in
the essay of that title (in 1968). The author does return, not as Author with all the rights
of the Father, but as guest who no longer has the power to guarantee the meaning
and sense, of a reading. The author of a text comes back as one of its characters.
Importantly, in considering the utopian aspect, always significant for Barthes, he
suggests at this point that such analysis, if it is to be genuinely radical, must involve the
question of pleasure, for at this juncture the Text participates in its own way in a social
utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism) the Text is
that space where no language has hold over any other. Indeed the Text is that social
space which leaves no language safe nor any subject of enunciation in a position of
judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder (1977a: 164).
These radical, anti-puritanical and anti-authoritarian ideas became central to what
became known as post-structuralism or post-modernism, but with Barthes their political
significance is plain from the beginning. In his very brief reflections on China after his
visit there in 1974, his key observation was that it was a society evincing a level of
blandness he had not come across elsewhere (Knight, 1997). His inaugural lecture at
the Collge de France in 1977 ends with a plea not for learning but for unlearning.
The principle of this must be, he said, no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom,
and as much flavour as possible (1982a: 478). Barthes did not present this as a break
with Marxism itself and even invoked Brecht's call for a Marxism which could develop
an aesthetics absorbed into an art of living (1986: 2212). In Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes, there is an entry called Doxa/paradoxa. It is clearly a statement about
Barthes' own intellectual trajectory: he says there was an initial attempt to demystify
myth in Mythologies, but then such effort became repetitive the work was revivified
with semiological method. As work moved to the analysis of image-repertoires this
to became immobilized and it was necessary to introduce the texture of desire, the
claims of the body. This too became immobile and being too often repeated it now
counterfeits itself in lustreless texts. Finally the Text tends to degenerate into prattle.
Where to go next? (1977b: 71). Barthes concluded that he had travelled between
two ideas of utopia: in Writing Degree Zero, utopia had been the idea of an indivisible
social universality, but later on the image became closer to that of Fourier where utopia
is an infinitely fragmented society, whose division would no longer be social, and,
consequently, no longer conflictive (1977b: 77).
Effects and Responses
(i) Structuralism, Semiotics and Marxism
As mentioned, Barthes' excursions into literary criticism in France met with resistance.
In 1965, Raymond Picard, a leading French academic, wrote a bitter attack on Barthes
as a new impostor and new literary criticism inspired by him as a new imposture.
Barthes reply was called Criticism and Truth (1987a). In fact it was a pivotal moment
in the rise of new structuralist forms of writing, for it was clear Barthes was not the only
writer Picard deemed to be travelling the wrong way (Stafford, 1998: 96103). The shift
from existential and humanist traditional forms of philosophy to structuralism was clearly
evident in the rise of structural anthropology (Lvi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan),
philosophy (Althusser, Foucault, Serres), economics (Bettelheim), politics (Poulantzas)
(Thody, 1977, Gutting 2001, Gane 2003). The debate around the work of Barthes
focused the issues in a dramatic and very public way, and in fact the controversy has
never completely come to an end, the issues being worked over at regular intervals (eg
Merquior, 1986).
At the heart of these issues, however, is the anchoring role of Marxist theory itself as
a point of constant reference. Barthes however did not write orthodox Marxist social
analysis in terms of economic mode of production and forms of political superstructure
which involve physical repression in class struggle. He rarely mentions the proletariat
and proletarian political positions as such. There is no analysis of socio-economic
struggle in the classic manner of Marxists, even say of an existentialist such as Sartre.
For this reason, some of Barthes' writings often seem somewhat formal, and even
dogmatic, since the critique he offers of bourgeois norms and consumerism appears
as the product of a purely revelatory style and is combined with a technical illumination
not of how class power works but how it conceals itself (Denman, 1990 [Part Two]).
Where Barthes' works have been taken up and developed this has almost always been
by inserting his ideas into a framework (from Hebdige, 1979, to Gottdiener 1995, and
Game, 1991) that does attempt to theorize the larger picture.
Yet there are in Barthes' writings important discussions of the issues of wider framework
even if they are brief and allusive. The most significant of these discussions comes
in the last sections of Myth Today (in 1972a). First of all, if the bourgeoisie itself
rules it does so in a mode of exnomination it does not name itself as such (1972a:
138), myth is depoliticised speech (p 142). Paradoxically perhaps Barthes discusses
Stalinism and the nature of Marxist deviations, cults of personality, as forms of mythic
ex-nomination of the revolution (1972a: 147). In French society, myths on the left are
rare and inessential, and further they are povertystriken. Between the worker and
the object worked on, says Barthes, in a fundamental, existential statement, there is
action, and any language is operational and transitive. For those beyond the worker,
the relation to the object is intransitive, and it is an image-at-one's-disposal (1972a:
146). This is why according to Barthes a genuine revolutionary language cannot be
mythical. The Barthean doctrine suggests that Revolution is defined as a cathartic act
meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world; and its language, all
of it, is functionally absorbed in this making. It is because it generates speech which
is fully, that is to say initially and finally, political, and not, like myth, speech which is
initially political and finally natural, that Revolution excludes myth (1972a: 146). Barthes'
doctrine suggests that the oppressed can only be poor, monotonous, immediate. For
Barthes there is no real possibility of a sociology of popular culture that concerns itself
with an alternative culture or subculture. And this was noted by Huyssen (1984: 41
2) who immediately drew the conclusion that Barthes positions himself safely in high
culture and the modernist canon. The suggestion that the bastard form of mass culture
is humiliated repetition (Barthes, 1975a: 412) could have been written, says Huyssen,
by Adorno in the 1940s. There is in Barthes no general theory of dominant culture or
hegemonic ideology of the ruling class as such in the mode of Gramsci or Althusser. But
Huyssen ignores or overlooks Barthes' very clear observation that mass culture is to
be distinguished like fire from water from the actual culture of the masses (1975a: 38),
and he ignores the specific reference to the significance of the dominant ideology in
The Pleasure of the Text (see Gallop, 1988: 114). For Barthes, as far as doctrine goes,
the revolution is driven against myth itself, it is not driven by popular myth as it is for
Sorel (see Tager, 1986 [Part One]).
The examination of myth also involved methodological and conceptual considerations,
and as Rojek has noted the thrust of this combination of method and heuristic exemplar
was as if Barthes had dropped a spoon of liver salts into social and cultural analysis,
and unleashed a ferment of dissolving hierarchies and melting presuppositions (in
Elliott et al, 2001: 168). There is here no elaborated theorization of myth within modern
capitalist society as a level of societal superstructure. Barthes' approach is to analyse
the ways myths work as myth. A theory of myth is situated within a general semiological
analytic that Barthes attempts to work through systematically. Barthes' contribution here
has become a classic part of social and cultural theory best understood in opposition
to (not a bridge between, Merquior, 1986) existential and phenomenological theories of
language (such as that developed by Sartre, who was never able to build a convincing
counter-position (see the problems in his Replies to Structuralism, 1971)).
Crucial to Barthes' approach are a set of basic semiological terms which build up a
conception of language from non-signifying units into elements of a system governed
by rules of combination, grammar, and signifying formations (a language code), which
permit the generation of meaningful sentences (speech) with their emergent relations
of denotation, connotation, and rhetoric. Barthes here uses language as a model for
the analysis of a further level of signifying phenomena: clothes (both its language and
the way clothes are worn), food (the language and the menu), objects (eg furniture (see
Barthes [1964] 1988: 179190, and Baudrillard, 1996)), and photography (in Rhetoric
of the Image [1964] in 1977a: 3251). The fundamental object of analysis is not the
praxis of individuals or groups which can produce and subvert an alienated process, as
it would be for Sartre. The object here is the semiotic system in its functioning, either as
a particular instance of myth, or, as in his study of fashion, an example of a hierarchy of
myth-relations around a particular social and power function (cf Baudrillard, 1993: 87
99).
There are two very common critical responses to Barthes' analysis of individual
myths. The first is that Barthes exposes the mechanism of false naturalisation, but
generally fails to provide either a political economy of its role, or an adequate empirical
sociological analysis in terms of social class or gender, so that the process by which
class rule brings a mythic dimension to popular culture is incompletely theorized
(Thompson, 1990: 135145). Certainly in Barthes there is little on the specifics of
capitalism as an economic system, little on class formation, almost nothing on the state
and politics and nothing on the structure of ownership and control of media (Harris,
1992: 112). The analysis is also structural and synchronic, rather than dialectical and
historical. The specific quality of Barthes' analysis, by contrast, tends to be formal
and abstract rather than situating historically the specific forms of discrimination and
oppression.
The second critical response proceeds through an examination of specific cases. Naomi
Schor, for example, has criticised specifically the way that Barthes deals with gender in
his study of fashion, which she describes as an erasure of sex, now to the advantage of
the neutral, now to the advantage of age (1987: 104). Schor quotes Barthes as saying
that masculine clothing is permitted to women so that a kind of androgyny is established
but what is remarkable in this new term is that it effaces sex to the advantage of age
in other words the boyish look itself has more a temporal than a sexual value.
But there are problems with these two critiques. The first is that Barthes does not
claim to provide a totalising analysis, and his focus is defined as a limited one. Even
when he does discuss class in relation to, say, myth, this is not done in terms of an
overdetermination in a structure of dominance. The analysis is done in terms of the
process itself. This is very clear in the analysis of fashion which does say something
about women and gender (to be fair Naomi Schor does admit to not reading the
argument itself (1987:103)). Having worked his way up the hierarchy of significations in
the fashion system, Barthes gets to the rhetoric of the signified (the world of fashion),
which Schor has quoted, and then to the rhetoric of the sign (the reason of fashion).
Here, instead of examining styles of masculine femininity as a modification of the
boyish, Barthes works towards an analysis of how fashion operates as a power which
renders femininity obligatory, like public education or military service. It establishes
the prescription: every woman will shorten her skirts to just above the knee, etc. Thus
what happens in fashion is not the explicit dictate of a fashion group but a form of
ex-nomination: it is the necessary event and legal prescription which results in the
formula this summer, dresses will be made of raw silk (1983: 270). The woman who
does figure in the fashion system is, according to Barthes, unique in mass culture:
she has no knowledge of evil. She is the monster, both who the reader is and what
she dreams of being. The language of fashion, he says, immerses the Woman about
whom and to whom it speaks in a state of innocence, where everything is for the
best it is the language of a mother who preserves her daughter from all contact with
evil (p 261). Thus fashion is a monarch (1983: 270) whose laws work through a kind
of euphoric novel where nothing seems to happen (Thody, 1977: 100, Lavers 1982,
Merquior 1986: 127).
Barthes' theoretical work therefore essentially took the place of a political engagement.
When asked about his relation to Marxism he replied that it was discrete but
obsessed (1985: 218). After May 68, the problem for him had changed: The heart of
my personal problem is that there is (now) an arrogant leftist discourse (1985: 219).
(ii) Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism
Some of the leading commentators hold fast to the view that Barthes' fame rests
squarely on the brilliance of his early works. This, for example, is Culler's view (1983,
2002) which suggests that not only does the later work rest on the achievements of
the earlier period of structuralist analysis, but that the later works actually fall prey to
many weaknesses diagnosed earlier (Barthes, it is suggested, creates his own myths of
pleasure and own forms of bourgeois sentimentality (Merquior, 1985 [Part Seven])).
However, it is clear that Barthes himself took close interest in the critique of
structuralism developed by Derrida in particular, but also that developed by the whole
Tel Quel group of writers (Kristeva, Sollers and others (Ffrench, 1995, Marx-Scouras
1996)). As Barthes himself pointed out this meant that Nietzsche became a leading
influence on his thought (Barthes, 1977b: 145; Ulmer, 1977). Barthes was a participant
in the famous symposium on structuralism held at Johns Hopkins University in October
1966 (see Macksey and Donato, 1972), in which the radical deconstruction of classical
structuralism was clearly triumphant (against Lvi-Strauss and Goldmann in particular).
Barthes, who had been such a champion of structuralist methodology, did not dig in
against the critique as did some who argued they could not understand it, but gradually
abandoned structuralism as a totalising ambition. There is no clear period of self-
criticism in Barthes' intellectual autobiography as there was with Althusser, who tried
to define what was wrong with structuralism (Althusser, 1976). With Barthes there
is more of a process of self-deprecation in which he refers to former delusions or
deliriums, and a growing disillusionment with the former project. But this does not
lead to a conservatism, rather to a renewed effort to reinvent a critical relationship to
culture. Contrary to some interpretations, Barthes does not simply reverse his former
positions so that austerity is replaced by hedonism, or the dead author resurrected
in order to produce a sentimental literary practice (Culler, 2002). The project remains
constant in the rejection of the naturalistic form and even this has been criticised, since
perhaps today a recourse to nature against the simulacra might be of value (Jameson,
1988). In this second period Barthes finds spirits, ghosts, authors resurrected among
the fragments. It is not therefore a theology that Barthes finds here, but rather that more
primitive form, the fetish (Burke, 1998, Brown, p 127131). Again it is not the closed
highly coded system that preoccupies him, but those dispersed bodies of literature,
such as those of Sade, Loyola, or Fourier, which cannot be reduced to system, and
cannot be summarised (Burke, 1998: 41; Rylance, 1994: 66102).
Thus in the second period a number of subtle changes occur in Barthes' practice of
writing and in the content of his analyses. Depth notions of denotation and connotation
are replaced with new horizontal dichotomies like those introduced in S/Z: readerly/
writerly texts, a new theory of intertextuality (see Worton and Still, eds., 1990, and
Allen, 2000: 6194), a new interest in pleasure and emotion. Barthes moves through
structuralism to post-structuralism (Payne, 1997). There also seems to be a changed
gradually more ethically nuanced interest in marginality and social exclusion. These
changes were accompanied by what seemed to be a new set of ideals developed
out of the previous ones but which are now very explicitly those of the fragment,
the system of fragments which cannot be reduced to summary, the punctum, the
singularity (that which is not neutralised by forms of social inclusion), and the utopia
of Zen Buddhism projected by him as a utopian system from his reading/writing of
Japan. The move towards what has been read as hedonism is very clearly defined
by Barthes as embracing those intensities which are excluded from the dominant
discourses of modernism whether they be liberal, Marxist, Christian, or psychoanalytic.
Barthes is interested in those marginalised forms which cannot establish systematic
resistance (such as the lover's discourse). Even in his own autobiography, he describes
his object as those forms of resistance against himself. Against the narrative, which
Barthes believes is a paramount mean by which society tames intensities, he privileges
the fragment (cf Baudrillard, 2003 who develops these ideas in a Barthean manner). In
these subtle changes of emphasis, tone and sensibility Barthes, it has been suggested,
moves from modernism to postmodernism (Marshall, 1992, Lucy, 1997, but see the
more guarded analysis of Zurbrugg, 2000: 1763).
Barthes emphasised, however, that these changes did not amount to a rupture because
many of the themes were already in place in his work. The thematic of pleasure
certainly has an important place in many of the writings of the 1960s. For example,
as Knight has pointed out, even in a paper of 1952 Barthes talked of the modern city
as having introduced a new aesthetic of space, one which is linked to the muscular
timescale of the walker on the alert for adventure (cited 1997: 152), and there are
clear indications in his paper of 1967 on Semiology and Urbanism which not only
discuss Japanese cities, but also suggest that the words eroticism and sociality he
intends to use without differentiation (1988: 199). Knight suggests The Empire of
Signs is virtually a gay guide to Japan, or rather, the gay vocabulary is so explicit that
what we have here is a parody of an Orientalist sexual tourism (1997: 152, Knight,
1993 [Part Five]). Japanese culture, as he writes it, is thus a substitute perhaps for
that lost popular counter-culture in the West which could be the basis of resistance.
For, by the 1970s, Barthes had concluded that as far as working class culture was
concerned there was to be found only disappearance of all magical or poetic activity: no
more carnival, no more play with words, the end of metaphors, the rule of stereotypes
imposed by petty-bourgeois culture (1975a: 38, see Moriarty, 1991: 164). His evident
preference for Zen Buddhist Japanese over Chinese communist culture was noted by
interviewers (especially from French communist journals). His reply to such questions
was to say that what attracted his interest was the way that a feudal and aristocratic
culture survived in capitalist Japan, and made it livable (Thody, 1977: 122).
The ideal culture he describes here, and again there is a reference to Brecht, is one
that does not naturalise reality, but maintains distance and theatricality free from a will
to master reality and meaning. What interests him is described as a fissure in the
symbolic order, even though as he writes it, it takes the form of a system drawn from
selected features of an existing country. The key element is, perhaps, Zen culture
itself, which becomes in these late writings a model of a kind of aesthetics of living.
Barthes examines this exotic language for it tests the limits of the language of criticism
found in the West, since as critics we try to destroy the wolf by lodging comfortably
in its gullet (1982b: 8). Barthes' thinking here was not without critical response. The
fact that he could not read or write, or converse, in Japanese, said critics, gave a new
meaning to the project for a liberation from the signifier. Barthes was indulging in a new
form of irresponsibility (Merquior, 1986: 1467).
For critics like Eagleton the notion that there is such a site, such an oasis as the pure
text outside of power and social contradiction is seriously mistaken. Barthes does not
reinvent Brecht, said Eagleton, he merely becomes rogue, scavenger, opportunist and
bricoleur, the burr on the ass of the Establishment (in Appignanesi, 1989: 28). There
is an absurdist quality to the work such that the shared task of struggling to make
sense of the world is violated said Rojek (in Elliott et al, 2001: 171). Modleski also
points out that Barthes' very passive notion of the masses is in striking contrast to that
of Baudrillard who places a positive value on the masses refusal of meaning (1991:
31). For other more sympathetic readers, Barthes' new writing introduced a new tonality
that was refreshingly different from the stridency of post-May 68 Marxism even when
combined with deconstruction. Meagan Morris, for example, wrote a long comparative
review of Howard Felperin's book called Beyond Deconstruction (1985) together with
two of Barthes' collected essays (1986a and 1986b). Against Felperin, Barthes's essays
reveal a new sensibility. Barthes does not kill off admiration of art [but] returns again
and again to beloved texts always to rethink the question of his own attachment to
them not to lay claim on their behalf to dominance and power (1988: 130). But it is
more than this. Barthes does not have a restrictive concept of identity and the social
institutions framing criticism, and no concept of an institutional interpretive community.
His conception is one of a fixed body politic but rather of the flux of power and
desire in voice, gesture, speech, writing, as we talk, listen, write, read (1988: 130).
So Barthes writes, not as a professional critic, but through a rhetoric that is intimate, as
though arguing with himself, and courteous, as though anybody could be listening (p
131). Tellingly she notes that to read Barthes on pathos in Michelet or on kitsch in
Wilhelm von Gloeden, is to realize the poverty of a professionalist ethic which can
only envisage mutually intolerant egalitarian and elitist positions in culture (p. 131).
Derrida holds much the same view in his long obituary (in 2001: 3167).
There are important theoretical issues here. They also appear again in relation to two
approaches to sexuality and gender in Barthes: on the one hand his book A Lover's
Discourse: Fragments, which has been taken as a model for the analysis of encounters;
on the other is his consideration of Sade in Sade/Fourier/Loyola which has been taken
as an example of how not to analyse relationships.
Lynn Pearce in her Feminism and the Politics of Reading draws her inspiration from A
Lover's Discourse in order to establish the framework for analysing amorous encounters
in the chronological form: I ravissement enchantment, devotion, fulfilment, II the
sequel anxiety, frustration, jealousy, disappointment. The definition of these terms
are all from Barthes and are used to analyse a number of other fictional texts. Without
discussing Barthes' thesis that social control emerges through the taming effect of the
love story itself, Pearce indeed reaches this same conclusion by other means (Pearce,
1997: 256). Meanwhile other commentators have noticed how Barthes situates his
problem as a lover's discourse that resists integration into stereotyping culture. The
mode of construction of A Lover's Discourse is specifically not that of a love story,
since it is through the story form that the erotic is reconciled with society (Barthes, 1985:
292, 302, Brown, 1992: 2567).
By contrast Barthes' reading of Sade (in Sade/Fourier/Loyola) has been taken as a
negative heuristic (Roger, 1997 [Part One]). The critique of Barthes is made forcefully
by Susan Kappeler in her The Pornography of Representation. She cites Barthes'
comment that de Sade relies on the opposition between two sexual responses: to
suffer pain as victim or to enjoy pleasure as libertine, this paradigm is the beginning of
choice, ie, of Sadean meaning (cited 1986: 135). Kappeler remarks immediately that
Barthes' trick is achieved by means of rhetoric. However it is clear from Kappeler's
next citation that Barthes is talking of the way in which Sade writes: when a sentence
begins with the tale of vexation, it is impossible to know who pronounces it the
sentence is free until the last moment (cited 1986: 139). Feminist criticism here argues
that Barthes has fallen for the mythic structure of Sade's own mode of writing since
the apparent choice of victim or libertine emerges as an apparently natural feature
objectively described, and like the victim, choosing to do so by adopting a particular
practice of language (1986: 140). Thus for Kappeler there is a kind of equality at issue
here, but it is not one that is at all politically reflexive: the opportunity looks equal for the
androgynized females/he can participate in the reading and even the writing so long
as they are inscribed in the plot, are those plotted by the author, so long as they are
equal (1986: 145).
But the most serious, balanced and wide-ranging discussion of Barthes' ideas and
feminism is to be found in Jane Gallop's Thinking Through the Body (1988: 1119, 100
16, 1204, 14960). It is therefore significant that Gallop also suggests that Barthes
makes a choice; this time it is to choose the fragmentary itself for this becomes a
strategy to recontain the violence of contradiction by means of an overarching theory of
inconsistencyso that Barthes does not recognise Sade's failure (1988: 18).
Barthes' last book was on photography, and this has become a celebrated link between
post-structural theory and a new sociology. Ann Game's Undoing the Social: Towards
a Deconstructive Sociology (1991: 137147) takes this late work by Barthes as a
key to a new way of understanding the object of sociology, and Celia Lury takes this
book as way of examining technology, the body and memory in the development of
a prosthetic culture. Game opens the discussion of her project for a new sociology
with an examination of Barthes' texts of disturbing pleasure (1991: 18). Barthes' book
on photography (Barthes, 1984) challenges profoundly, she argues, the way we think
about representation, time, and the body. Here there are a new set of dichotomies
which move beyond pleasure/jouissance, to photographs which are either tamed or
ecstatic (1984: 119). The former are marked by the studium which is heavily coded,
the latter by the punctum which is an uncoded singularity and highly subjective. Game
examines the way Barthes discusses a photograph of his mother taken when she was
a child, and notices the subtleties of the analysis of time, for the photograph does not
recall the past rather as a simple effect on memory. Rather it attests to and is directly
related to love and death, for the referent, here adheres, it is the emanation of past
reality. Game suggests that there is here also an important process of undoing for
in the end Barthes opts for the madness of the truth of photography, that is, for what
escapes representation and language (1991: 1389). It is significant that Game does
not take up Barthes' more explicit and direct avoidance of the institutional here, for
Barthes is guided by his own rule that he will never reduce experience to the socius,
and avoids discussion of the family or mother as form or role, thus distancing his
approach as far as possible from, and undoing, anthropology and sociology (1984:
74). The implications of this turn to the subjective are not discussed as Game focuses
her discussion on the way that Barthes' argument places the question of the body at
the heart of the processes of mediation: duration is mediation; but as it is lived, in
the body, it is a form of mediation that disrupts the opposition between immediacy
and mediation (1991: 145). Celia Lury begins from this observation to examine how
Barthes' analyses actually chart a new way of looking at the body and its technological
extensions such that the photograph provides a new potential to mark an interruption or
suspension in the human relationship with time, memory and death (1998: 89104).
There is an important issue of the way in which these late texts of Barthes arise from
and circle around his own experiences (Wiseman, 1989: 108130, Rylance, 1994: 103
142). A Lover's Discourse, he admitted, did arise out of an intense personal relationship
(1985: 3034), and Camera Lucida arose out of his response to his mother's death,
indeed he suggests that it is from the experience of looking at one photograph of his
mother after she had died that he had decided to derive all photography from it (1984:
73). As Sarkonak (1982 [Part Eight (i)]) has shown there are indications that the very
formal construction of Barthes' book is governed by a secret order of numbers, and
may indeed have anagrammatic aspects. In this respect Barthes is a writer who follows
a distinguished if little known path in French intellectual history (see Gane, 2003: 33).
Barthes adopts, unlike Comte's socio-centric methodology, a subjective position that
is, despite its professed emphasis on singularity, strangely ego-centric: a photograph
chosen that I was sure existed for me (Calvino, 1989: 306).
Conclusions
This evidently raises a question: from where does Barthes speak? Do intellectuals
simply recycle personal experience and the singular myths and ideologies of their time?
Surprisingly perhaps Barthes himself posed the question: From what position do I
speak? His answer: I simply wanted to protest. And consistently he said the only
possible subversion is to displace things (in) revolutionary practice (1985: 1612).
Importantly he insisted that intellectuals should not speak for other groups, but should
fight against their own caste-like alienation.
Marxists and socialists at the beginning of his career supported Barthes. But he lost
much of this support later when he took his own route into post-structuralism. The
Barthesian route appeared to many to become idiosyncratic, a post-modern hedonism
detached from any wider critical vision. Others have seen in his writings an attempt
to reinvent a revolutionary practice and to face up to the challenge of a new situation.
The two sides to this controversy can be seen in the very different conclusions. On the
one hand, Rojek suggests that Barthes' mistrust of collective formations and rational
co-operative strategies left him with no place to go except aesthetics. The conviction
that this is sufficient to explain culture and society is perhaps the biggest mythology
of all (in Elliott and Turner, 2001: 172). Jameson suggests that it is less productive to
read Barthes as a theorist than as the intuitive and idiosyncratic practitioner of a host of
different methods, whose perspicacity, shot through with sudden fits of boredom, makes
the ultimate yield of such methods clearer than any theoretical disquisition (1988: 21).
Gaillard, on the other hand, has recently written how much the contemporary world
misses Roland Barthes' ascerbic critical mind, not least because [h]e never stopped
fighting against evidence and here we come upon his faithfulness not because of
a singular disposition that would have pushed him to a paradox, but because he saw in
evidence the underhanded and therefore, paradoxically, most violent form of intellectual
and moral servitude (in Lotringer and Cohen, 2001: 56).
Barthes' Major Works
(1964) On Racine . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1967a) Writing Degree Zero . London: Cape.
(1967b) Elements of Semiology . London: Cape.
(1972a) Mythologies . London: Cape.
(1972b) Critical Essays . Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
(1975a) The Pleasure of the Text . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1975b) S/Z . London: Cape.
(1976) Sade/Fourier/Loyola London: Cape.
(1977a) Image, Text, Music . London: Fontana.
(1977b) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes . London: Macmillan.
(1979) The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1980) New Critical Essays . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1981) Camera Lucida: Reflexions on Photography . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1982a) A Barthes Reader . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1982b) The Empire of Signs . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1983) The Fashion System . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1985a) The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 19621980 . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1985b) The Responsibility of Forms . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1986) The Rustle of Language . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1987a) Criticism and Truth . University of Minnesota Press.
(1987b) Michelet . Oxford: Blackwell.
(1987c) Sollers Writer . London: Athlone.
(1988) The Semiotic Challenge . New York: Hill and Wang.
(1990) A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . London: Penguin.
(1992) Incidents . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Further Reading on Roland Barthes
(i) Collections
Knight, D. (ed.) (2000) Critical Essays on Roland Barthes , New York: Hall.
Rabate, J.-M. (ed.) (1997) Writing the Image After Roland Barthes . Philadelphia
University Press.
Ungar, S., ed. and McGraw, B. R., (eds) (1989) Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes
Today . Iowa: University of Iowa Press.
Special Issues of Journals Devoted to
Roland Barthes
(1977) Visible Language , vol. 11, no. 4.
(1981) Studies in Twentieth Century Literature , vol. 5, no. 2.
(1988) Paragraph , vol. 8, no. 2.
(1997) Nottingham French Studies , vol. 36, no. 1.
(2001) The Yale Journal of Criticism . Fall 2001.
(ii) Studies
Bannet, E.T. (1989) Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan .
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Bensmaia, R. (1987) The Barthes Effect . University of Minnesota Press.
Brown, A. (1992) Barthes, The Figures of Writing . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Calvet, J.-L. (1995) Roland Barthes: A Biography . Bloomington, IN: University of
Indiana Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3683953
Champagne, R. (1984) Literary History in the Wake of Roland Barthes . Birmingham,
AL: Sumina Publications.
Culler, J. (1983) Barthes . London: Fontana.
Culler, J. (2002) Barthes: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jameson, F. (1988) The Ideologies of Theory. Vol I. XXXX of Theory . London:
Routledge.
Knight, D. (1997) Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing . Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lavers, A. (1982) Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After . London: Methuen. http://
dx.doi.org/10.2307/1772335
Leak, A. (1994) Mythologies . London: Grant and Cutler. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1086/479946
Lombardo, P. (1998) The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes . Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press.
Miller, R. (1992) Bringing Out Barthes . Bekeley, CA: University of California Press.
Moriarty, M. (1991) Roland Barthes . Cambridge: Polity Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/
fs/41.4.480
Mortimer, A.K. (1989) The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text .
New York: Lang.
Pearce, L. (1997) Feminism and the Politics of Reading . London: Arnold. http://
dx.doi.org/10.2307/358533
Rylance, R. (1994) Roland Barthes . Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Runyan, R. (1981) Fowles/Irving/Barthes: Canonical Variations on an Apocryphal
Theme . Columbus: Ohio State University Press for Miami University.
Shawcross, N. (1997) Roland Barthes on Photography . Gainesville, FL: University
Press of Florida.
StaffordA. (1998) Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography .
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639489308456147
Ribiere, M. (2002) Barthes: A Beginner's Guide . London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Thody, P. (1977) Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate . Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Trifonas, P. (2001) Barthes and the Empire of Signs . London: Icon.
Ungar, S. (1983) Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire . London: University of
Nebraska Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3684154
Waserman, G.R. (1981) Roland Barthes . Boston: Twayne.
Wiseman, M.B. (1989) The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes . London: Routledge.
(iii) Bibliographical works
Freedman, S. and Taylor, C.A., (1983) Roland Barthes: A Bibliographical Reader's
Guide . New York: Garland.
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