Ideas
Semiotics and myth
Barthes' many monthly contributions that made up Mythologies
(1957) would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how
bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance,
portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a
bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine
can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics, the study of signs,
useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural
myths were second-order signs, or significations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier
relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage - wine. However, the
bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’
a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy,
robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to
sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights
brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
In The Fashion System Barthes showed how this
adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he
explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic
bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a ‘blouse’ is ideal for
a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and
accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be
interchangeable with ‘skirt’, ‘vest’ or any number of combinations. In the end
Barthes' Mythologies became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found
many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon,
being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused
him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses,
thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search
for individualistic meaning in art.
As Barthes' work with structuralism began to flourish
around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure
focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was
overlooked by old criticism. Barthes' “Introduction to the Structural Analysis
of Narratives” is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure
of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be
viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical
levels: ‘functions’, ‘actions’ and ‘narrative’. ‘Functions’ are the elementary
pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to
identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’, and consequently one
of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these
distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions’ work in forming
characters. For example key words like ‘dark’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘odd’, when
integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action’. By
breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to
judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and
consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on
reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became
another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading
mechanisms of bourgeois culture.
While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool
and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not
believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour.
In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism.
The post-structuralist movement and the
deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist
theory that Barthes' work exemplified. Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance
on a transcendental signified; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be
essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say
that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that
references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful.
But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the
entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything)
is hollow.
Such groundbreaking thought led Barthes to consider
the limitations not just of signs and symbols, but also of Western culture’s
dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He travelled to
Japan in 1966 where he wrote Empire of Signs (published in 1970), a
meditation on Japanese culture’s contentment in the absence of a search for a
transcendental signified. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a
great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the centre
of Tokyo, the Emperor’s Palace, as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent
and non-descript presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects
on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only
the significance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts
greatly to the one he dissected in Mythologies, which was revealed to be
always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural
one.
In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely
considered to be his best-known work, the essay “The Death of the Author”
(1968). Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the
criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of
the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature
one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the
great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the
author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the
whole notion of the ‘knowable text’ acts as little more than another delusion
of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed the idea of giving a book or poem an
ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that
can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. “The Death of the Author”
is sometimes considered to be a post-structuralist
work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but
others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing
effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms[citation needed]. Indeed the
notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking.
Since there can be no originating anchor of meaning in
the possible intentions of the author, Barthes considers what other sources of
meaning or significance can be found in literature. He concludes that since
meaning can’t come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader
through a process of textual analysis. In his ambitious S/Z (1970),
Barthes applies this notion in a massive analysis of a short story by Balzac
called Sarrasine. The end result was a reading
that established five major codes for determining various kinds of
significance, with numerous lexias (a term created by
Barthes to describe elements that can take on various meanings for various
readers) throughout the text. The codes led him to define the story as having a
capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly
sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the
reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project Barthes
concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest
variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text
can be reversible by avoiding the restrictive devices that Sarrasine
suffered from such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He
describes this as the difference between the writerly
text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading.
The project helped Barthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation.
Neutral and novelistic writing
In the late 1970s Barthes was increasingly concerned
with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he
saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral,
which he saw as open and noncommittal. He called these two conflicting modes
the Doxa and the Para-doxa.
While Barthes had shared sympathies with Marxist thought in the past (or at least parallel
criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language
with assertive meanings, as was bourgeois literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to
this he wrote The Pleasure of the Text (1975), a study that focused on a
subject matter he felt was equally outside of the realm of both conservative
society and militant leftist thinking: hedonism. By writing about a subject
that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could
avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa.
The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that while reading for
pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself
to the ideas of the writer, the final cathartic climax of this pleasurable
reading, which he termed the bliss in reading or jouissance,
is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within
the text or immersion within the text, signifies a
final impact of reading that is experienced outside of the social realm and
free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral.
Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes
remained concerned with the difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing,
which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning
or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing
could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word
with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, like Mythologies,
had suffered from this. He became interested in finding the best method for
creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of
rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product
of this endeavor was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments in 1977, in which he
presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be
identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover’s search for
signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved
in such a pursuit. The lover’s attempts to assert himself
into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the
contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the
novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to
criticism but also understanding from the reader. The end result is one that
challenges the reader’s views of social constructs of love, without trying to
assert any definitive theory of meaning.
Photography and Henriette
Barthes
Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in
photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly
myth articles in the 50s had attempted to show how a photographic image could
represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer
‘naturalistic truths’. But he still considered the photograph to have a unique
potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When
his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began
writing Camera Lucida as an attempt to explain the unique significance a
picture of her as a child carried for him. Reflecting on the relationship
between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on
the individual, that which ‘pierces the viewer’ (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such
distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and
can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this
fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother’s picture. Barthes
explained that a picture is not so much a solid representation of ‘what is’ as
‘what was’ and therefore ‘what has ceased to be’. It does not make reality
solid but serves as a reminder of the world’s inconstant and ever changing
state. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the
photograph of Barthes’ mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state:
the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death, Camera
Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the
complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as
well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his
grief.
A posthumous book came out in 1987 in English, Incidents,
which contained fragments from his journals: his Soires
de Paris (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier
diary he kept (his erotic encounters with boys in Morocco); and Light of the Sud Ouest (his childhood memories
of rural French life). In November 2007, Yale University Press will publish a
new translation into English (by Richard Howard) of Barthes's little known work
What is sport. This work bears a considerable
resemblance to Mythologies and was
originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text
for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin.
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