Barthes, Roland

Roland Barthes (1915–80) was a French literary theorist whose work has profoundly influenced the fields of literary criticism, film and media studies, discourse studies, and photography. He contributed to intellectual debates on Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism in France and abroad. His essays collected in Mythologies have shaped the British school of cultural studies. Although he did not specifically write on issues related to women and gender in the media, feminists have adopted his ideas to critique gender ideology (the most notable study is Angela McRobbie's reading of teenage girls' magazines). Barthes was a prolific writer. Twenty-six of his books have been translated into English. Among all, Camera Lucida, Elements of Semiology, Empire of Signs, The Fashion System, Image-Music-Text, Mythologies, and The Pleasure of the Text have been the most widely read and discussed among media scholars.

Barthes first advanced his theory of semiology in essays collected in Mythologies. The first part of the book is a collection of essays originally written for Les Lettres Nouvelles. The second part, “Myth Today,” is a theoretical essay on the semiotics of contemporary culture. Barthes started to write about the “myths” of 1950s French society because of his impatience at seeing how ideology has been naturalized as the truth. One example that he gave was of a black soldier in French military uniform saluting the (unshown) French flag on a cover of Paris Match. While the literal image was nothing more than “a black soldier saluting the French flag,” the reader may have understood the image as “France, as a great nation, is saluted by its citizens, regardless of their races.” The ideology embedded in the cover image effectively hid French violence in North Africa and French colonialism worldwide.

In order to understand how myth works, Barthes updated Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology. According to Saussure, there are many sign systems, and the linguistic system is only one of them. There are two components to a sign: the signifier (a sound, a word, a picture, or an image) and the signified (a concept). The word tree and a picture of a tree both evoke the concept of tree in one's mind. Barthes called this the first level of signification (or denotation). The concept of tree may evoke other meanings, such as “environmental protection,” “forest,” and “Vermont.” Barthes called these the second level of signification (or connotation)—the “what goes without saying” meaning. Before the widespread concern about global warming, people did not associate the concept of tree with the concept of environmental protection. Once the ideology of environmental protection gained popularity, people assigned a new meaning to the concept of tree. Similarly, people who live in the U.S. state of Vermont may associate the concept of tree with their home state; people who live in other states may not make the association, because the relationship between the first and the second levels of signification is not natural (arbitrary using Barthes' term) but ideological.

After Mythologies, Barthes continued to work on the theory of semiology in Elements of Semiology and The Fashion System. In the latter, Barthes saw fashion as a meaning-making system. A woman can choose a blouse or a T-shirt to wear as a top and skirt or a pair of jeans for the bottom. The combination of T-shirt and jeans connotes a different meaning from that of blouse and skirt. Similarly, in a linguistic system, the subjects “woman” and “lady” connote different meanings. After his travel to Japan, Barthes wrote Empire of Signs. In this book, he “read” Japanese culture as a system of signs. This system is different from that in Western/French culture. Barthes used the elaborate gift-wrapping practice in Japan to illustrate how meanings are made in Japanese culture; in this instance, the gift needs to be wrapped in multiple layers, and the unwrapping of each layer elicits a new meaning.

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