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Key Theories of Roland Barthes

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2018 • ( 2 )

Roland Barthes was born at Cherbourg in 1915. Barely a year later, his father died in naval combat in the North Sea, so that the son was brought up by the mother and, periodically, by his grandparents. Before completing his later primary and secondary schooling in Paris, Barthes spent his childhood at Bayonne in south-west France. Between 1934 and 1947, he suffered various bouts of tuberculosis. And it was during the periods of enforced convalescence that he read omnivorously and published his first articles on Andre´ Gide. After teaching in Romania and in Egypt, where he met A. J. Greimas , then at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Barthes was appointed to the Colle`ge de France in 1977. He died in Paris in 1980, the same year as Sartre, after having been struck by a van near the Sorbonne.

Such elementary facts of biography have often provided the psychocritic with material for explaining underlying (unconscious) aspects of the writer’s oeuvre. Barthes , however, takes them in hand and uses them as the raw material of his own writing, and even of his style. This is so in two books he wrote towards the end of his life: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Here, the status of raw material is the key; for Barthes in no sense becomes a conventional autobiographer. Instead, he fictionalises his life through using the third person when (conventionally) referring to himself, as he – like Joyce – reveals the profundities of life in the ‘bread’ of everyday experience. He writes, for example, of a photograph of his mother in the above-cited essay on photography, that he had found his mother’s face – that face he had loved – in the photograph: ‘The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded’ (Barthes 1993: 67). Eventually, he says, ‘I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother’ (Barthes 1993: 69). Godard’s disenchanting words then ring in his ears: ‘‘‘Not a just image, just an image’’’ (Barthes 1993: 70). In his grief, Barthes wants a just image.

This ‘personalised’ style, characteristic of the later Barthes, confirmed the semiotician and literary critic as a writer in his own right. Barthes writes ‘the novelistic without the novel’, as he himself put it. Indeed, this is arguably the true basis of his originality, over and above his theories of writing and signification. Thus in A Lover’s Discourse , Barthes says that ‘we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks that is all’ (Barthes 1978: 112). Today, a lover’s discourse can only be one of solitude; it has no specific subject but may be invoked by ‘thousands of subjects’. The lover’s discourse, as the equivalent of the novelistic, becomes the discourse of the construction of a lover’s discourse: a pure weaving of voices spelling out what one would say and could say were the narrative to be enacted.

Photography in Detail

Barthes’s writing on photography, as based on the last book he published in his lifetime, is now being seen as his culminating achievement. We shall take a moment to elaborate and interpret the more technical aspects of Camera Lucida, recalling that it is Sartre and phenomenology that were the basis of Barthes’s original inspiration.

The Orthographic Moment

Barthes’s writing on photography shows, says the noted philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, that the photograph is constitutive of the self because it is (part of) the self. It does not represent or express the self. This is an ‘orthographic’ moment (a moment of absolutely accurate reproduction), where part of the past is reconstituted (Stiegler 1996: 78). As analogical (and this is Barthes’s frame), the photograph coincides materially (i.e. chemically and luminously) with what is photographed, so that it can be simultaneously past and present. A photograph cannot be taken after the event; it is necessarily and essentially simultaneous with the event itself. In this way photographs give access to a past that ‘one has not lived’, the past as the ‘alreadythere’.

Not just death, but death as a virtual object, only accessible via the photo through intuition is at issue. That is, when we say: ‘he is dead and he is going to die’ (= effectively: he is living and he is dead), as Barthes says of Lewis Payne (Barthes 1993: 95), the image of death is a strictly virtual image, an image that is quite distinct, if not quite separate, from the physical, analogical, mechanism of photography. Although time as death cannot be denied, it can only ‘be’ virtually. So, while there is physical evidence of life, there is no such correlate for death. Indeed, this can be tested by asking an uninformed spectator whether the person in the photo is alive or dead. This spectator will be able confirm the life of the photographic subject but not the death, at least not immediately.

Contingency and Phenomenology

Moreover, although inspired by phenomenology, Barthes also manifests an ambivalence for the phenomenological method and terminology. Thus, he refers to a paradox regarding his approach: on the one hand, he seeks, with phenomenology, the essence of photography – an essence established, of course, by way of the epoche´,1 or bracketing of the contingent, natural attitude – while, on the other hand what, for him, is essential in photography is its contingency. The latter, were it to be absolutely true, would make photography difficult, if not impossible for phenomenology of a Husserl ian kind, to deal with. We need to ask, then: How contingent is photography for Barthes? Although contingency is said to be primary in photography (Barthes 1993: 40), when it comes to defining the most precious element of the photograph, he invokes the uniquely Husserlian terminology of noema . Given the idiosyncratic nature of this term, it could hardly have been chosen by accident. Its technical aspect and its significance should therefore be noted as follows: correlate of a noesis , or thought act, the noema is a thought object. And in both cases, we are dealing with virtual objects, not real objects. The noema may or may not be linked to a real object. The purpose of the noema is to make it possible to avoid being ensnared in the natural attitude or the contingent world. Simply put: the object of thought, or of consciousness, is not the object of the natural world. Now, it is as the latter that Stiegler has defined the object of photography. Orthography means that there is a physical relation between object and inscription, object and representation.

The Punctum

In the case of Barthes, the noema of photography is, as we know, the ‘it has been’. The question Camera Lucida raises is whether the noema can, strictly speaking, be a contingent object, or whether it is not rather the case that the ‘it has been’ is the object as experienced in thought and consciousness by Roland Barthes himself. There is a tension here, acknowledged by Barthes himself. There is also the difference between actual and virtual, where the virtual opens out onto subjectivity as the punctum (the subjective ‘sting’ of the image). Ultimately, the punctum is the ‘it has been’ – it is time – and is most intensely experienced in relation to death as the play between actual image as stadium (the narrative aspect of the image) and virtual image as punctum. Thus with the image of Lewis Payne, Barthes discovers something new in the punctum. The latter has ceased to be reducible to a detail and has become Time itself: the ‘it has been’ as noeme becomes the punctum as time: ‘This new punctum, which no longer has a form but an intensity, is Time, it is the fractured force of the noeme (‘‘it has been’’), its pure representation’ (Barthes 1993: 148).

A Diverse Oeuvre Myth

Roland Barthes’s work embodies a significant diversity. It ranges between semiotic theory, critical literary essays, the presentation of Jules Michelet’s historical writing in terms of its obsessions, a psychobiographical study of Racine, which outraged certain sectors of the French literary establishment, as well as the more ‘personalised’ works on the pleasure of the text, love and photography.

The early Barthes aimed, in 1957, to analyse and criticise bourgeois culture and society. Mythologies (1973) is the clearest statement of this. There, the everyday images and messages of advertising, entertainment, literary and popular culture and consumer goods, are subjected to a reflexive scrutiny quite unique in its application and results. Sometimes Barthes’s prose in Mythologies is, in its capacity to combine a sense of delicacy and carefulness with critical acuity, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin ’s. Unlike Benjamin, though, Barthes is neither essentially a Marxist philosopher nor a religiously-inspired cultural critic. He is, in the 1950s and 1960s, a semiotician: one who views language modelled on Saussure’s theory of the sign as the basis for understanding the structure of social and cultural life.

Despite this clarification of the status of myth, the difficulties in appreciating its profundity derive from the ambitiousness of the project of distinguishing myth from both ideology and a system of signs calling for interpretation. While, on the one hand, the subtlety of giving myth a sui generis status of naturalised speech has often been missed by Barthes’s commentators, the issue is still to know what the import of this might be, other than the insight that the successful working of myth entails its being unanalysable as myth.

The analysis and practice of writing which begins in Writing Degree Zero (1953) gives a further clue about the concerns implicit in Mythologies . These centre on the recognition that language is a relatively autonomous system, and that the literary text, instead of being the transmitter of an ideology, or the sign of a political commitment, or again, the expression of social values, or, finally, a vehicle of communication, is opaque, and not natural. For Barthes, what defines the bourgeois era, culturally speaking, is its denial of the opacity of language and the installation of an ideology centred on the notion that true art is verisimilitude. By contrast, the zero degree of writing is that form which, in its (stylistic) neutrality, ends up by drawing attention to itself. Certainly, Nouveau Roman writing (originally inspired by Camus) exemplifies this form; however, this neutrality of style quickly reveals itself, Barthes suggests, as a style of neutrality. That is, it serves, at a given historical moment (post-Second World War Europe), as a means of showing the dominance of style in all writing; style proves that writing is not natural, that naturalism is an ideology. Thus if myth is the mode of naturalisation par excellence, as Mythologies proposes, myth, in the end, does hide something: its ultimately ideological basis.

Semiotics Narrative and Fashion

Barthes’s influential study of narrative in 1966 (Barthes 1966: 1–27) continues the semiotician’s mission of unmasking the codes of the natural, evident between the lines in the works of the 1950s. Taking a James Bond story as the tutor text, Barthes analyses the elements which are structurally necessary (the language, function, actions, narration, of narrative) if narrative is to unfold as though it were not the result of codes of convention. Characteristically, bourgeois society denies the presence of the code; it wants ‘signs which do not look like signs’. A structural analysis of texts, however, implies a degree of formalisation that Barthes began to reject. Unlike theorists such as Greimas , the reader is nearly always struck by the degree of freedom and informality in his writing. Although linguistic notation, diagrams and figures appear in works like The Fashion System (1983), Barthes was unhappy with this foray into ‘scientificity’ and only published his book on fashion (originally intended as a doctoral thesis) at the behest of friends and colleagues. It is in The Fashion System , however, that Barthes clarifies a number of aspects of the structural, or semiotic, approach to the analysis of social phenomena. Semiology, it turns out, examines collective representations rather than the reality to which these might refer, as sociology does. A structural approach, for its part, attempts to reduce the diversity of phenomena to a general function. Semiology – inspired by Saussure – is always alive to the signifying aspect of things. Indeed, it is often charged with revealing the language (langue) of a field such as fashion. Barthes therefore mobilises all the resources of linguistic theory – especially language as a system of differences – in order to identify the language (langue) of fashion in his study of fashion.

Much of The Fashion System , however, is a discourse on method because fashion is not equivalent to any real object which can be described and spoken about independently. Rather, fashion is implicit in objects, or in the way that these objects are described. To facilitate the analysis, Barthes narrows the field: his corpus will consist of the written signs of women’s clothing fashion as these appear in two fashion magazines between June 1958 and June 1959. The complication is that there, fashion is never directly written about, only connoted. For the fashion system always implies that things (clothing) are naturally, or functionally, given: thus some shoes are ‘ideal for walking’, whereas others are made ‘for that special occasion . . .’. Fashion writing, then, refers to items of clothing, and not to fashion. If fashion writing has a signified (the item), it is now clear that this is not fashion. In fact, the language of fashion only becomes evident when the relationship between signifier and signifier is taken into account, and not the (arbitrary) relationship between signifier and signified. The signifier–signified relation constitutes the clothing sign. Barthes orients his study along a number of different axes all of which have to do with the nature of signification. After methodological considerations, he looks at the structure of the clothing code in terms of: the fashion signifier – where meaning derives from the relationship between object (e.g. cardigan), support (e.g. collar), and variant (open-necked) – and the fashion signified: the external context of the fashion object (e.g. ‘tusser = summer’). The fashion sign, however, is not the simple combination of signifier and signified because fashion is always connoted and never denoted. The sign of fashion is the fashion writing itself, which, as Barthes says, ‘is ‘‘tautological’’, since fashion is only ever the fashionable garment’ (Barthes 1993: 220n.16).

In the third section of The Fashion System , Barthes examines the rhetorical system of fashion. This system captures ‘the entirety of the clothing code’. As with the clothing code, so with the rhetorical system, the nature of the signifier, signified and sign are examined. The rhetoric of the signifier of the clothing code opens up a poetic dimension, since a garment described has no demonstrably productive value. The rhetoric of the signified concerns the world of fashion – a kind of imaginary ‘novelistic’ world. Finally, the rhetoric of the sign is equivalent to the rationalisations of fashion: the transformation of the description of the fashion garment into something necessary because it naturally fulfils its purpose (e.g. evening wear), and naturally fulfils its purpose because it is necessary.

Codes and Languages

Barthes’s S/Z , analyses Balzac’s short story ‘ Sarrasine ’, and is an attempt to make explicit the narrative codes at work in a realist text. ‘Sarrasine’, Barthes argues, is woven of codes of naturalisation, a process similar to that seen in the rhetoric of the fashion sign. The five codes Barthes works with here are the hermeneutic code (presentation of an enigma); the semic code (connotative meaning); the symbolic code; the proairetic code (the logic of actions); and the gnomic, or cultural code which evokes a particular body of knowledge. Barthes’s reading aims less to construct a highly formal system of classification of the narrative elements, than to show that the most plausible actions, the most convincing details or the most intriguing enigmas, are the products of artifice, rather than an imitation of reality.

After analysing Sade, Fourier and Loyola as ‘Logothetes’ and founders of ‘languages’ in Sade, Fourier, Loyola – an exercise recalling the ‘language’ (langue) of fashion – Barthes writes about pleasure and reading in The Pleasure of the Text. The latter marks a foretaste of the more fragmentary, personalised and semi-fictional style of the writings to come. The pleasure of the text ‘is bound up with the consistencyof the self, of the subject which is confident in its values of comfort, of expansiveness, of satisfaction’ (Barthes 1985: 206. Translation modified). This pleasure, which is typical of the readable text, contrasts with the text of jouissance (the text of enjoyment, bliss, loss of self). The text of pleasure is often of a supreme delicacy and refinement, in contrast to the often unreadable, poetic text of jouissance. Barthes’s texts themselves, especially from 1973 onwards, can be accurately described in terms of this conception of pleasure. Thus after distilling the language (langue) of others, Barthes, as a writer of pleasure, then came to give vent to his own, singular language. From a point where he became a critic for fear of not being able to write (fictions in particular), Barthes not only became a great writer, he also blurred the distinction between criticism and (poetic) writing.

Note 1 On this, and other terms, such as noema, see the entry on Husserl.

Source Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers From Structuralism To Post-Humanismm  Second Edition  John Lechte Routledge 2008

References Barthes, Roland (1966), ‘Introduction a` l’analyse structurale des re´cits’, Communications 8. In English as ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives’ in Barthes (1979) Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins. —— (1973), Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1973, p. 129. —— (1978), A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. —— (1983), The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. —— (1985), The Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, New York: Hill & Wang. —— (1993), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage. Stiegler, Bernard (1996), La Technique et le temps 2: La De´sorientation Paris: Galile´e.

Barthes’s Major Writings (2005) The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France, 1977–1978, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, New York: Columbia University Press. (1987a [1966]) Criticism and Truth trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (1987b [1954]) Michelet, trans. Richard Howard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1986 [1970]) The Empire of Signs (1970), trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, fourth printing. (1985a [1982]) The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. (1985b [1981]) The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, New York: Hill & Wang. (1984 [1977]) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. (1983a [1980]) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage. (1983b [1967]) The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. (1979 [1966]) ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives‘ in Image- Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins. (1977a [1975]) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. (1977b [1964]) Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Collin Smith, New York: Hill & Wang. (1977c [1953]) Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill & Wang. (1976 [1971]) Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. (1975 [1973]) The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill & Wang. (1974 [1970]) S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill & Wang. (1973 [1957]) Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, St Albans, Herts: Paladin. (1972 [1964]) Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Further Reading Allen, Graham (2003), Roland Barthes, London and New York: Routledge. Gane, Mike and Gane, Nicholas, eds, (2004), Roland Bathes, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Knight, Diana (2000), Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, New York: G.K. Hall. Rabate´, Jean-Michel (1997), Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

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Tags: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments , barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , Criticism and Truth , Deconstruction , Elements of Semiology , Linguistics , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Michelet , Myth , Myth Criticism , mythologies , noema , noesis , punctum , Roland Barthes , Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , s/z , The Empire of Signs , The Fashion System , The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France , The Pleasure of the Text , The Responsibility of Forms , Writing Degree Zero

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Critical Essays

by Roland Barthes

Translated by Richard Howard

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

279 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 in

• 9780810105898
• Published: January 1972
• Description

ROLAND BARTHES  (1915–1980), one of the most celebrated French intellectuals to have emerged since Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote on a variety of topics including semiology, literature, fashion, and photography. His works include Writing Degree Zero, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Mythologies, A Lover's Discourse, and the autobiographical Roland Barthes.   RICHARD HOWARD won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Untitled Subjects. A noted critic, he has also translated works by many prominent French authors, including Andre Gide, Claude Simon, Michel Leiris, and Marguerite Yourcenar. 

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The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation Reprint Edition

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; Reprint edition (February 7, 1991)
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Roland barthes.

Roland Gérard Barthes (/bɑːrt/; French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

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Overcoming the thereness of things

By Edward W. Said

• July 30, 1972

Roland Barthes is one of the very few literary critics in any language of whom it can be said that he has never written a bad or uninteresting page. He has produced twelve books (and these two excellent translations now give him a total of five avail able in English) and well over a hun dred articles, and though I can't claim to have read everything he has written, I have eagerly read much of his work. He is now almost 57, and almost no one will dispute his place now as the major figure in criticism in France, having for a time been the center of a fairly loud literary quar rel between the Old and the New Critics.

Barthes is neither an academic critic, nor a reviewer, but strictly an occasional writer: he produces writing for prefaces, commemora tives, conferences, events, seminars, commissions from publishers, cap tions for pictures, descriptions of striking objects. Although his “Crit ical Essays” and “Mythologies” col lect relatively early work—roughly from 1954 to the early sixties—they illustrate the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is “signification”) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paint ings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life. How enjoyable it is for Barthes's readers to be able to choose as their favorite among his books perhaps the anal ysis of a Balzac story or a dazzling characterization of the Eiffel Tower.

The clue to Barthes's genius is that he employs the method of a system, but never makes an unques tioning commitment to it. At least four of his books do little more than articulate sets of analytic rules for the study of verbal objects, yet I am convinced that no matter how useful these are to Barthes and to other critics, the rules are more valuable for the fact of their articu lation than for what they enable one to do with them. The overcoming of a senseless “thereness” in things by a method that shows what put them there, and how and why they are there: this matters more than whether the method's rules are uni versally applicable. For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say some thing; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear nat ural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, neces sary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent.

“Mythologies” finds Barthes re vealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for ex ample, for “Einstein's brain” to stand for, be the myth of, “a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about‐ his thought as of a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.” Each of the little essays in the book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the ob ject speak its hidden, but ever‐so present, reservoir of manufactured sense. The epitome of bad faith is plastic, a shaped and “disgraced” thing, which in toys has replaced wood, a substance for which Barthes seems to have the greatest love: “Wood is a familiar and poetic sub stance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand.”

In bourgeois society, “whose dis ease is to think in essences,” things are made to stand for values, much as words can be distorted into neologisms that stand for objects. In films a Roman always wears a fringe—hence, his Roman‐ness; as for foam, which appears to lack use fulness, “its abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation” in advertise ments signifies the “luxurious” power of a detergent.

In instances of this sort Barthes's intelligent combativeness deciphers the numerous myths that arrest his tory and give it the appearance of an unchanging Nature. Because he is himself so exacting, and his admira tion for the theater of Brecht so thorough, Barthes's tools in his dis course are the italic and the telling epithet, startling emphasis where a disguise had been intended, giving a name to things where what Barthes calls myth's “exnomanation,” its habit of identifying everything but itself, prevents a name. According to Barthes, myth is an alibi, it celebrates but does not act, it is a sort of de politicized speech, it is always right wing, it tends towards proverbs; a mythologist like Barthes is con nected with the world by sarcasm, he is condemned to metalanguage, to semioclasm (the destruction, by ex plicit study, of myths‐as‐signs).

In “Critical Essays” Barthes's subject‐matter is almost exclusively literary, yet his mariner is no less semioclastic than it was in “Myth ologies.” He gets hold of writers and books in brilliantly clever ways: Voltaire is treated as the last happy writer, Baudelaire and Balzac are discussed in terms of their plays, Tacitus as the writer who made death into a protocol, Kafka as a technique but not as Kafka‐ism.

Since our world is organized like a language, It follows for Barthes that literature is a particular type of language, but by no means a natural one. In nothing is Barthes's quiet aggressiveness so evident as in his attack upon the myths of humanism, of bourgeois high culture and aca demic literary criticism, with their reliance upon biography, taste and dogma in the misapprehension of lit erature as a sort of second‐rate life. For him written language is made either by desacralized “authors,” whose intention begins and ends in language, or by “writers,” who use language to transact another bit of business (to give evidence, to ex plain, to instruct). Everything writers and authors say, however, involves a dislocation of language, a signification, which cannot be ex plained by sending us off to an elsewhere — the writer's biography, his “age” or a phoney history—that is comfortably static. Barthes's own program of criticism comes there fore to be based upon an understand ing of how it is that the poetic imagination systematically deforms, rather than forms, images.

It is impossible in a short space to do any sort of justice to the enor mously graceful complexity of Barthes's work in the second half of “Critical Essays.” His use of structural linguistics and of Marxism, for example, deforms these methods in ways that pay them a very high compliment, even as Barthes himself turns up illuminating readings of classic texts from La Bruyere to Proust. His criticism openly declares its alliance not with the cult of art, but with “the science of writing” —that is, the science of using verbal, spatial or aural objects to signify— represented by Robbe‐Grillet, Mon drian and Boulez. Unlike most Anglo American critics Barthes is not shy of abstractions, and theory for him is a matter of ideological honesty, never of philosophical cant.

Above all, Barthes represents a unique even ascetic, seriousness. Since literature is language, all lan guage is worthy of study as language (for instance, Proust's use of pro nouns), all literary language can be interpreted and described and illus trated. Since quite apart from its origins, with which Barthes is not concerned, language takes place in history, then literary art “can and must intervene in history . . . it must contribute to the same goal as the sciences.” Whether novelist or critic, every author is also a writer whose work “is not an ‘homage’ to the truth of the past or to the truth of ‘others’ —it is a construction of the in telligibility of our own time.” That last phrase perfectly char acterizes Barthes's work — its invigoration and its order. ■

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The responsibility of forms : critical essays on music, art, and representation

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Uploaded by station17.cebu on June 1, 2023

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On Theater by Roland Barthes

• Language Russian
• Edition 3000
• Binding Paperback
• Price 270 RUB

This collection of essays and criticism by the French philosopher and semiotician documents the weird and wonderful theater scene in France during the 1950s.

On Theater is a collection of critical essays by the famous French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes. The 28 articles selected for the book represent his earliest works, published in Théâtre Populaire , Lettres Nouvelles , and France Observateur in 1953-60, when theater criticism was his primary occupation. The diverse theatrical life in Paris during that period, featuring traditionalist Comédie Française, innovative Théâtre National Populaire, and Berthold Brecht's Berliner Ensemble tours, provided Barthes with ample opportunity to exercise his polemical, leftist responses to Parisian theatrical life. However, the anthology's significance goes beyond this. Barthes comes up with profoundly inventive and unexpected interpretations of theatrical images, both visual and sound-based, finds and deciphers symbols in theater, and pioneers the study of theatrical semiotics.

Esteeming relevant historical, political, and social thinking in theatrical productions, Barthes considered Brecht's works as a paragon, and thus primarily focuses on the Berliner Ensemble. In his interpretation, the overtly political Brechtian theater aimed to achieve interaction between stage action and spectators, to reveal social scourges; but, at the same time, it spared spectators from despair. In the 1954 article Actor without a Paradox , discussing the Berliner Ensemble‘s recent Paris tour, he describes the theater's peculiar acting technique as its major secret weapon in conveying a message to the audience, making his actors "step away" from their characters instead of "becoming" them.

Barthes unfavorably compares the majority of 1950s French theater both to Brecht's aesthetics and to ancient Greek tragedy. A convinced Marxist, he emphasizes the ability of Greek drama to pose big moral and political issues provoking collective spectator experiences, while audiences of post-war psychological French theater could only cry over petty personal problems or marital dramas. He defines theatricality as "theater-minus-text ... a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice - gesture, tone, distance, substance, light - which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language." His articles contemplate the semiotics of theater space, the significance of an actor's corporeality for the audience, "good" and "bad" costumes, the role of theater critics, changes in the French acting school, and some individual talents (Jean Vilar, Maria Casarès).

Barthes started editing and selecting his early articles for the anthology during the late 1970s. His demise in 1980 cut the project short, and the book only saw its first French release in 2002. The 26 articles culled from the 62-strong collection for the Russian publication are complemented by Racine (the second part of On Racine, previously unreleased in Russian) and a review of Ubu Roi directed by Jean Vilar, which was left out of the original French anthology (both additions are translated by journalist and theater critic Maria Zerchaninova).

Roland Barthes  (1915-1980) A French literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician, whose ideas influenced the development of structuralism. Barthes explored diverse cultural spheres as semiotic systems and studied the relationship between language and authority. His seminal early works include Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), The Fashion System (1967), and S/Z (1970).