Roland Barthes

Throughout the mid-1950's, Barthes wrote a series of brief articles for a French newspaper on the subject of myth. This collection was subsequently published under the title Mythologies in 1957. The approach which he adopted was quite different to that used by Varda Leymore (1975). Saussure suggested that signifiers (sounds) and signifieds (concepts) are connected together by the process of signification. Barthes suggested that this process does not necessarily end at this point, as a sign can take part in a new level of signification where it becomes the signifier to a new signified at another level. For example, at the most basic level of signification which Barthes refers to as denotation, a photograph or bodyshell may suggest the sign "car". The sign "car" can in turn become a signifier for a further signified. For example one type of bodyshell can conjure up the sign "Jaguar XJS", another the sign "LADA". To Barthes, this second level of meaning at the level of denotation is "mythical". He argues that we tend to see such associations as natural and given (XJS = "luxury", LADA = "basic") when in fact they are arbitrary constructions.

The notion that we "encode" our experience in the world so that we may experience it derives from structuralist thought. According to Hawkes, the greatest contribution made by Roland Barthes has been his attack on the presumption of innocence: something which Barthes sees as the characteristic corruption of modern bourgeois society. (107) In Le Degree Zero de l'Ecriture (published in the UK as Writing Degree Zero (1953)) he attacks the seeming "objective" transparency of the classical style of French writing, which portrays itself as an innocent reflection of reality. Barthes sees this process as a characteristic of all bourgeois appropriation, by which middle class bourgeois values cloak themselves with "naturalness" and inevitability. Bourgeois writing, however, is not innocent. Rather it shapes reality in its own image, acting as a carrier or transmitter of the bourgeois way of life and its values. With such literature, codes operate to modify determine and generate meaning in a far from natural manner.

The best known of Barthes' explanations in this area occurs in Mythologies (1957/1970). Despite the claim made by the press that they do not manipulate codes to suit themselves, that they present reality, Barthes reveals a different aim: the generation and reinforcement of a particular view of the world in which bourgeois values emerge as inevitable and right at all levels.

One of Barthes' major contributions was to shift the emphasis from the semiotics of language to the exploration of semiotics as language. In Elements of Semiotics (1967), one of the more readable books on the subject, Roland Barthes deals with the relationship between the linguistic and the semiological sign. He notes several points of difference between the two:

1. Whereas the elaboration of language systems is brought about as the result of the "speaking mass", that of semiological systems is more usually associated with a group who fabricate the language.
2. In semiological systems parole or "speech" is poor. Barthes gives the example of cars. The range of choice of difference of cars is very restricted by comparison to those offered by speech. Semiological signs are second order signs; they rely for much of their meaning on the linguistic signs within which they are framed.

Barthes concern with structure, with the self-referential character of literature. He distinguishes between two kinds of writer and of writer. S/Z (1970), an analysis of the "realist" Balzac's Sarrasine, which shows that it is "a heavily stained glass window", he argues that literature may be divided into that which gives the reader a role, a contribution to make, and that which renders the reader redundant, which reduces the reader to a mere consumer. Literature of the first kind, the writerly text, offers the joys of co-authorship. Two kinds of joy are experienced (he argues in La Plaisir Du Texte (1975)). These are plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss or ecstasy). There is plaisir, which comes from the more straightforward processes of reading; and jouissance, which comes from a sense of breakdown, of interruption.

Barthes References