Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary theorist, semiologist, and cultural critic. His career moved through structuralist semiology (the period of Mythologies and Elements of Semiology) into post-structuralism (S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text) and a final autobiographical-aphoristic mode (Camera Lucida, A Lover’s Discourse). He held a chair at the Collège de France from 1976 until his death in a traffic accident in 1980. His work transformed the modern study of advertising, photography, fashion, food, wrestling, and the semiotic substrate of bourgeois cultural production.

¶Core ideas

• Myth as second-order semiological system. A first-order sign (signifier + signified, in the Saussurean sense) becomes the signifier of a second-order signified — typically an ideological-cultural meaning. Barthes’s Mythologies analyzes everyday cultural artifacts (a soap ad, a wrestler’s match, a magazine cover) as myth in this technical sense, showing how mythologies naturalize particular ideological positions.
• Connotation and denotation. Denotation is the literal sign-relation; connotation is the cultural-mythical relation that takes the entire denotative sign as its signifier. Distinguishing them is the basic move of the cultural-critical analysis.
• The death of the author. Meaning is not produced by an authoring subject and recovered by readers; it is produced in the moment of reading, in the play of the text against its cultural-linguistic field. The author is a culturally-historically specific function, not the metaphysical ground of meaning.
• Writerly vs. readerly texts. Readerly texts position the reader as consumer; writerly texts position the reader as producer of meaning, requiring active participation. The distinction grounds Barthes’s later poststructuralist literary theory.
• The punctum. In Camera Lucida, the element of a photograph that wounds the viewer — the detail that exceeds the photograph’s coded meaning (the studium) and pierces through to a personal-existential register.

¶Key works

• Writing Degree Zero (1953)
• Mythologies (1957)
• Elements of Semiology (1964)
• The Fashion System (1967)
• S/Z (1970)
• The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
• A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977)
• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Barthes is foundational for denotation, connotation, and the semiotics subdomain’s account of cultural-mythical signs. His analysis is upstream of the socially-ontogenic-media account of how media artifacts distribute being-templates.