Roland Barthes

Michael Moriarty

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745604565
• eBook ISBN: 9780745680484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book provides a lively introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century's most important literary and cultural theorists. The book covers all aspects of Barthes's writings including his work on literary theory, mass communications, the theatre and politics. Moriarty argues that Barthes's writing must not be seen as an unchanging body of thought, and that we should study his ideas in the contexts within which they were formulated, debated and developed.

Part I

Sign and Ideology

1

Myths

A work entitled Mythologies by someone known as a literary critic might be expected to deal with many things, but probably not all-in wrestling, photographs of actors, a film of Julius Caesar, and the image of writers on holiday. These are the first four topics of Barthes’s book of that name. At first sight, they seem, moreover, to have little in common. They are, however, linked not by subject-matter, but by a common status as messages circulating within ‘mass culture’ (a label that I shall query but which is convenient for the moment). Barthes’s task is therefore twofold: to decode the messages, and to evaluate their links with mass culture. Analysis and judgement are thus coupled. In the concluding essay of Mythologies, ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’, Barthes assembles a set of tools for the analysis. But this is a retrospective systematization and rationalization of what is initially a more intuitive set of procedures, and I propose to leave ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’ for later consideration.

Mythologies is a compilation of a series of articles most of which were published in the magazine Les Lettres nouvelles between 1954 and 1956. Their concern is with the values and attitudes implicit in the variety of messages with which our culture bombards us: advertisements, newspaper and magazine reports, photographs, and even material objects like cars and children’s toys. (When high culture (Racine or Fauré) comes into question, it is because of the stock responses that govern its consumption.) Barthes calls these messages myths, partly in virtue of the etymology of ‘myth’ (the Greek muthos, speech, therefore ‘message’), and partly because many of these messages are myths in another sense, mystifications. The importance of Mythologies lies less in subject-matter (though many of the topics are still uncomfortably relevant), than in the procedures by which it is analysed, judged, and not least transformed by and into writing. Procedures of rhetoric are indeed inseparable from the process of argument and evaluation, and this gives the text a certain exemplary status, as a persuasive discourse on forms of persuasion.

To start with, the mere fact of treating some of the topics of Mythologies as messages is itself a paradoxical manoeuvre, giving rise to paradoxical utterances (‘paradoxical’ is to be understood in its etymological sense: that which is against doxa, common opinion). Common sense would say that wrestling is a sport: Barthes asserts it is not a sport, but a spectacle (MY, 13/15); again, strip-tease is not about sexuality, but about de-sexualizing women (MY, 147/91). Both these activities, then, emit a message that belies their apparent nature. In a sense, there are thus two messages. There is a manifest message, which can be rendered by a tautological or apparently self-evident statement (‘wrestling is a sport’, ‘strip-tease is sexy’). This message is, in short, that there is no message: common sense is impervious to signs. This primary message thus functions so as to conceal the secondary message, and so to facilitate its delivery.¹

The common-sense view of the world largely consists in asking what the use of something is. But to bracket out an object’s utilitarian function can enable one to ‘hear’ previously unsuspected messages. Wrestling, again: if one tries to understand it, commonsensewise, as a sport, it is unintelligible: in a real contest, a wrestler caught in a hold would struggle to conceal his agony, which could only encourage his opponent; in fact, he displays it. Or why is the foul play so blatant? Because the wrestler is not so much trying to win as fulfilling a role expected of him by the spectators: to suffer, visibly, is part of that role; and an invisible foul is useless because the function of a foul is to build up the perpetrator’s character as a ‘dirty bastard’, to be spectacularly chastised by the ‘good guy’. Physique is likewise dictated not by considerations of strength or fitness but by this need to establish a recognizable character, in the theatrical sense. The whole exercise is a play, or even a ritual confrontation between Good and Evil (MY, 13–24/15–26).

In other words, there is in wrestling a discrepancy between the primary common-sense message ‘This is a sport (not a message)’ and the secondary message ‘This is a spectacle’. This discrepancy, however, is ludic and aesthetic in function. Nobody is being fooled by a wrestling match: on the contrary, the duplicity of the event is part of the spectator’s pleasure. There is the pleasure of the spectacle itself, the conflict of hero and villain, Good and Evil, and the further pleasure in the fact of the spectacle’s masquerading as a sporting contest. But with other messages, the duplicity is not aesthetic but ideological.

It is as if Barthes sees wrestling as a genuine manifestation of popular culture, resting on a set of values shared by performers and audience, as one might suppose Greek or Elizabethan drama to have been. The common-sense view (wrestling is a sport, but a bad one because not honestly competitive) is thus not the popular one: it would be glossed by Barthes as more of a (petty-) bourgeois reaction. Yet there are other messages that relate differently to society. Take the case of wine, which has an obvious symbolic status, as a sign of Frenchness and of virility. Here the vehicle of the myth, or message, the wine, is valued as a ‘good and fine substance’. But the myth has to be questioned because spontaneously to participate in it is also to endorse what the myth conceals: the fact that wine is a commodity like any other, produced under a capitalist regime, which has turned into vineyards parts of North Africa that could have been used to produce food, and set the native Muslim population working there, when their religion holds wine in abhorrence (MY, 77/68).² The myth of wine is thus doubly alienating: it palliates the exclusion of the North African population from its own environment and culture and debars the intellectual from a wholehearted uncomplicated relationship with what is after all a ‘belle et bonne substance’.

This example shows the two-stage logic of much of Mythologies: a message is read into some substance, custom, attitude that seemed to carry its own justification in terms purely of practical use; and the message thus revealed turns out to be concealing the operation of socio-economic structures that require to be denounced – both because they are concealing their identity and because that identity is inherently exploitative. Thus soap-powder advertising produces powerful symbolic contrasts between two brands, so that the choice between them takes on a quasi-poetic seriousness: which tends to obscure the fact that they are produced by the same multinational company (MY, 38–40/40–2). This is the mystifying function of which I spoke above.

‘What is “natural” must have the force of what is startling’, said Brecht of the aims of his epic theatre.³ The whole project of Mythologies is in line with this: it aims to make the natural, the taken-for-granted, appear strange and remote, to establish unsuspected connections, to subvert cultural hierarchies – wrestling is compared to Greek tragedy, boxing to Jansenist theology, the riders in the Tour de France to characters from Homer. Such ‘defamiliarization’ was held by the Russian Formalists to be essential to the aesthetic effect, and there is no doubt that in Mythologies it serves an aesthetic effect for which the Bakhtinian term ‘carnivalesque’ seems appropriate.⁴ But as in Brecht, its ideological function is crucial: to change the world it is necessary to convince people that its ways are not self-evident: to show that what is presented to them as ‘natural’ is in fact what conforms to a particular ideological world-view, serving particular social interests. To drink wine and take an interest in the Tour de France seems simply part of being French, but the forms in which both of these things are presented in daily life reflect the structures and priorities of capitalist production. The myths of wine and the epic representation of the Tour de France are thus elements of capitalist ideology. Further ideological targets are racism (MY, 64–7), colonialism (MY, 137–44), gender stereotyping (MY, 56–8/56–8), the judicial system (MY, 50–3/48–52), and Cold War propaganda (MY, 130–3).⁵ This is, then, committed analysis, from a broadly left-wing position. Indeed one of Barthes’s points is that neutrality is never anything other than taking sides by appearing not to (MY, 144–6/88–90). As I have hinted, the content of the analysis is not as dated as some might think, and others wish. One example among many (and their relevance is not confined to France): Mythologies bitterly attacks the politics of the right-wing populist Poujade, mentioning by name one of his followers, Le Pen, now the leader of the racist Front National (MY, 85–7, 182–90).

The critical study of myth is not just the denunciation of particular ideological positions, but the analysis of how their messages are constituted, how they come to persuade. Form is essential to myth; and the Front National gives a powerful illustration of this. Its slogan ‘Two million immigrants = two million unemployed’ exemplifies the arithmetical logic that Barthes shows as governing a whole class of mythical utterances. ‘Two million = two million’ is a tautology, a self-evident proposition, which lends a false credibility to the equation of unemployment and immigration, an equation that contrives to obscure the complexities of the national and global economic structures in which the two are by no means complementary (since jobs would be being lost in traditional industries whether or not there were immigration, and under pressures quite distinct from the specific legacy of colonialism and underdevelopment that impels North Africans to leave their homes for France). Tautological discourse is thus the language of social myopia. But obviously some more general theory of the role of form in producing mythical discourse is required. This Barthes attempts to provide in ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’.

A myth, says Barthes, is ‘a system of communication . . . a message’ (MY, 193/117). This is superficially contradictory, but in practice perfectly clear: a myth is not just any message, but a message produced by a certain signifying mechanism. It is this formal aspect that characterizes myth, not its content – there are myths of soap powder and myths of human nature – or a particular medium – there are photographic myths, as well as verbal ones, and, as we have seen, even material objects, cars, or toys, can have the status of myths. Two media can of course be combined, as in television advertisements.

Barthes’s discussion of the relationships between signs that constitute a myth is indebted to the Swiss linguist Saussure. Saussure postulated a science, of which he saw linguistics as eventually forming a part, that would study ‘the life of signs within society’, and he baptized it ‘semiology’ (from the Greek semeion, sign).⁶ Semiology is not concerned with content as such but with the forms that enable sounds, images, gestures, etc. to function as signs. Although the content of a myth is ideological (for reasons we shall see) and therefore determined by history, the myth is something more than its content, and this something more requires formal, semiological, analysis: moreover, there is a history of forms as well as of contents.

I shall deal with Saussurean theory more fully in connection with Barthes’s ‘Eléments de sémiologie’. Barthes’s reading of Saussure (in 1956) post-dates the composition of most of Mythologies, and he did not systematically attempt to reconcile his embryonic semiological practice with the fully-fledged theory (PRB, 409).⁷

A sign for Saussure is the union of a signified, a concept, and a signifier, through which that concept is manifested. A bunch of roses is a sign when the flowers stand as signifiers of the signified ‘passion’. A linguistic sign – say, the word ‘tree’ – unites a sound, or, more precisely, a sound-image/tree/ and the concept ((tree)).⁸ Now the mythical sign is a sign to the second power: it is constituted by the superimposition of a second tripartite schema on the one just analysed. In this, the original sign becomes the signifier of a new sign by being attached to a new concept, or signified (MY, 197–200/121–4). Take the now famous example Barthes gives, of a magazine photograph. The photograph is an assemblage of lines and colours on a sheet of paper. But (since in our culture we are familiar with photographs) we can see these lines and colours as forming the image of a man, and indeed further as representing a Black soldier in the French army saluting – which we know only because we are already familiar with codes of costume (uniform) and gesture. So the picture conveys a message, and is thus a sign on this very literal level; but that is clearly not the be-all and the end-all of the image: it is clearly intended to show (given that it comes from Paris-Match) that, whatever malicious and unpatriotic people may claim, France is a great empire faithfully served by black and white alike (and not an oppressive colonial regime). So the photographic sign has become the signifier of a new signified, and we have to distinguish between the first-order system of meaning, the literal one, and the second-order system within which the myth comes into being (MY, 201/125–6).⁹

The first-order messages belong to a self-sufficient but contingent order – the particular Black man in the photograph must have joined the French army as a result of some particular concatenation of circumstances. In that sense, the image relates to a history. Or, to take Barthes’s other example, the Latin sentence quia ego nominor leo (because my name is Lion), is initially part of a fable, in which it serves as one of the spurious arguments by which the lion seeks to defraud his partners from their share in the collective prey. But these messages are transformed into myths by abstraction from their particular context; the Black soldier’s personal history would interfere with his serving as a living manifestation and vindication of the French Empire; when you meet quia ego nominor leo used as a grammatical example, you are not supposed to ask why someone might say that, simply to learn the rule it illustrates. Yet the abstraction from history must not be total: the Black soldier in the photograph is not just a conventional coded symbol of Empire (as a statue might be); it is as if his individual history is just enough present to suggest that ‘French imperiality’ is more than an idea – a destiny, naturally unfolding in the individual life; as if the fact that a lion did once say quia ego nominor leo proves the grammatical rule of the agreement of the attribute. Paradoxically, the history drained away from the signifier flows into the signified: for the concepts of ‘French imperiality’ or ‘grammatical exemplarity’ receive their content from a historical situation: which confronts people in France with the threat of their country’s loss of its colonial possessions; which sets some children (and not others) learning Latin (and not computer science).¹⁰ The concepts are reactions to the history, rather than accurate reflections of it; ironically, one of the effects of history is to conceal its own workings. ‘French imperiality’ is asserted as a timeless value at the very moment when its historical crisis is most cryingly obvious (MY, 202–4/126–9).

In the mythical message, then, a certain concept, social and historical in origin, seizes on a certain sign for its own ends, while sheltering behind the initial literal significance of the sign. The image of the Black soldier saluting the flag communicates its factual nature to the non-factual concept of ‘French imperiality’. Thus the French Empire, as an idea or value, comes to impose itself with the straightforwardness of an empirical fact; and thus the message is enabled to conceal its identity as such. It is this appropriation of a sign as an alibi for another message that Barthes finds ethically objectionable: myth is a ‘theft of language’ (MY, 217–18/142–3). And it is ethically objectionable in another way: it turns an arbitrary or conventional sign into a supposedly natural one.

According to Saussure, the linguistic sign is arbitrary: no intrinsic link connects a particular sound-image (signifier) and a particular concept (signified). Yet other types of sign (photographs, for instance) admit a degree of motivation, or analogy, between signifier and signified. What the myth tries to do is to pass off an arbitrary sign as a natural, analogical, one. There is no reason in the nature of things why the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• A Note on References
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I : Sign and Ideology
• Part II : The Structuralist Activity
• Part III : Beyond the Sign
• Part IV : Late Barthes
• Biographical Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index