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Roland
Gérard Barthes
(12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) (French pronunciation: [ʁɔlɑ̃
baʁt]) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a
diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory
including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and post-structuralism.
av. The
portrait of Roland Barthes
rv. The hand
holding the book and the commemorative motive
diameter - 68 mm (2⅝ “)
weight – 163.00 gr , (5.75 oz)
metal – bronze, old patina
Roland
Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval
officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, where he earned a license in classical letters. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. It also kept him out of military service during World War II and, while being kept out of the major French universities meant that he had to travel a great deal for teaching positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance of major degree-awarding universities, and did so throughout his career.
His
life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first
papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his
health. In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous
short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to
the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first
full-length work, Writing
Degree Zero
(1953). In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year
period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the
magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths of popular
culture
(gathered in the Mythologies collection that was
published in 1957).
Barthes
spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty
positions around
By
the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He travelled
to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns
Hopkins University.
During this time, he wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay "The
Death of the Author,"
which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a
transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued
to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was developing
similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes' writings. In
1970, Barthes produced what many] consider to be his most
prodigious work, the dense, critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s,
Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of
textuality and novelistic neutrality.
In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University
of Geneva.
In
1977, he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège
de France.
In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted,
died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who
had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major
work, Camera
Lucida,
is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on
photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs,
though none of them are of Henriette.
On
25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by Francois Mitterrand,
Roland Barthes was knocked down by a laundry van while walking home through the
streets of Paris. He got up unaided, laughed heartily, treated the accident as
a joke in the jolly way that was peculiarly his own and made his way home on
the tram. But, on the eve of 25 March, after Barthes had smoked six after
dinner pipes, he went to ascend the stairs, and finally succumbed to the
injuries sustained in said accident, he dropped dead, under painful
circumstances, on the landing. {TH}
Barthes's
earliest ideas reacted to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was
prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically to the figurehead of
existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's What
Is Literature?
(1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established forms of writing and
more experimental, avant-garde forms, which he feels
alienate readers. Barthes’ response was to try to discover that which may be
considered unique and original in writing. In Writing Degree Zero
(1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both language and style,
rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form, or what Barthes calls
"writing" (the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate
conventions of style for a desired effect), is the unique and creative act. A
writer's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention, however, once it has been
made available to the public. This means that creativity is an on-going process
of continual change and reaction. Barthes regarded Albert Camus’s The
Stranger
as an ideal of this notion, thanks to its lack of embellishment or flair.
In
Michelet, a critical analysis of the French historian Jules
Michelet,
Barthes developed these notions, applying them to a broader range of fields. He
argued that Michelet’s views of history and society are obviously flawed. In
studying his writings, he continued, one should not seek to learn from
Michelet’s claims; rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn
from his errors, since understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will
show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly,
Barthes felt that avant-garde writing should be praised
for its maintenance of just such a distance between its audience and itself. In
presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great
subjective truths, Barthes argued, avant-garde writers ensure that their
audiences maintain an objective perspective. In this sense, Barthes believed
that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek
to explain it, as Michelet had done.
Barthes's
many monthly contributions that were collected in his Mythologies (1957) frequently
interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values
through them. For example, the portrayal of wine in French society as a robust
and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is 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 "connotations." A picture of a full,
dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific
signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, the bourgeoisie relate it
to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience.
Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a
simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought
Barthes 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's 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's "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 signifier; 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.
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.
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.
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 creates a falseness in the illusion of ‘what is’, where ‘what was’
would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through
Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of ‘what has
ceased to be’. Instead of making reality solid, it reminds us of the world’s
ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal
contained in the photograph of Barthes’s 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 collection of essays was published in 1987 by François Wahl, Incidents.
It contains fragments from
his journals: his Soirées 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
published 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.
In
February 2009, Éditions
du Seuil
published Journal de deuil (Journal of Mourning), based on Barthes'
files written from 26 November 1977 (the day following his mother's death) up
to 15 September 1979, intimate notes on his terrible loss:
The (awesome but not painful) idea that
she had not been everything to me. Otherwise I would never have written a work.
Since my taking care of her for six months long, she actually had become
everything for me, and I totally forgot of ever have written anything at all. I
was nothing more than hopelessly hers. Before that she had made herself
transparent so that I could write.... Mixing-up of roles. For months long I had
been her mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter.
He
grieved his mother's death for the rest of his life: "Do not say mourning.
It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering." and "In
the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and
where I now sleep, in the wall where her headboard had stood against I hanged
an icon—not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on a table. I do not
wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from
withering away."
Roland
Barthes's incisive criticism contributed to the development of theoretical
schools such as structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism. While his influence is
mainly found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into
contact, it is also felt in every field concerned with the representation of
information and models of communication, including computers, photography,
music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes' breadth of focus is that his
legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after
him. The fact that Barthes’ work was ever adapting and refuting notions of
stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to
model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism". While this means
that his name and ideas lack the visibility of a Marx, Dewey, or Freud, Barthes was after all opposed to the notion of adopting
inferred ideologies, regardless of their source. In this sense, after his work
giving rise to the notion of individualist thought and adaptability over
conformity, any thinker or theorist who takes an oppositional stance to
inferred meanings within culture can be thought to be following Barthes’ example.
Indeed such an individual would have much to gain from the views of Barthes,
whose many works remain valuable sources of insight and tools for the analysis
of meaning in any given manmade representation.
Readerly and writerly are
terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and
to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the
modern reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms
are most explicitly fleshed out in S/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", from Image—Music—Text (1977) provides an analogous
parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of
interacting with a text.
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of text are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200).
A
text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to
make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4).
Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than
passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its
texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and
traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as
"product," the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the
infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by
some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality
of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5).
Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive
complement of a writing," but rather a "form of work" (10).
Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. "The author" is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of their original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents us with a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader."
In
1971, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer", the title of which
refers to Voltaire. In the essay he commented
on the problems of the modern thinker after discovering the relativism in
thought and philosophy, discrediting previous philosophers who avoided this
difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes' description of Voltaire, Daniel
Gordon, the translator and editor of Candide (The Bedford Series in
History and Culture), wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so
thoroughly misunderstood another."