An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson 1: Semiotics

While reading Myth Today,  I came across a series of essays written by Andy Robinson in Ceasefire, asnd accessible from http://seansturm.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/six-essays-from-ceasefire-on-barthes-by-andrew-robinson/.

While is is necessary to read the original essays in the course reader, it is also useful to consider the analysis of other authors who have more experience and can highlight matters that might not be evident from reading the original.

Robinson's essays are written in clear and understandable style. It is not continuous prose so I have liberally copied and pasted parts of the essays here; it scarcely seems necessary to "summarize the summarizers". My comments are in italics. Particularly important phrases are in bold.

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes and Semiotics

Roland Barthes was one of the earliest structuralist or poststructuralist theorists of culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism. Barthes was always an outsider, and articulated a view of the critic as a voice from the margins. He was an outsider in three ways: he was gay, he was Protestant in a Catholic culture, and he was an outsider in relation to French academic establishment. By the end of his life, however, he was widely renowned both in France and beyond.

It is always useful to understand the background and standing of authors. The idea that Barthes was an outsider is critical.

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. He is often considered a structuralist, following the approach of Saussure, but sometimes as a poststructuralist.

A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth. As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation of social phenomena. 

One characteristic of Barthes’s style is that he frequently uses a lot of words to explain a few. He provides detailed analyses of short texts, passages and single images so as to explore how they work.

Barthes is indeed verbose; I would add that he has a tendency to define things but provide no explanation as to the definition, or to define things twice, such as literal = denoted, symbolic = connoted.

In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression). The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary.

He is strongly opposed to the view that there is anything contained in a particular signifier which makes it naturally correspond to a particular signified. There’s no essence of particular groups of people (humanity, Britishness) or objects (chairness, appleness) which unifies them into a category or separates them from others. For instance, there is no such thing as human nature ....The division into categories is always a process of social construction. 

This is a key part of Barthesian analysis - in effect there is no objectivity.

He largely replaces Saussure’s term ‘arbitrary’ with the term ‘motivated’. The relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary only from the point of view of language. From a social point of view, it channels particular interests or desires. It can be explained by reference to the society in which signs operate, and the place of the signs within them. 

Nothing is really meaningless. Signs are neither irrational nor natural. Signs are taken to operate on a continuum, from ‘iconic’ with one strong meaning to users, through ‘motivated’, to the truly ‘arbitrary’. They vary along this continuum as to how tightly defined they are. Most signs have strong enough connotations and associations to be at least partly ‘motivated’.

The main disagreement here is with the view of language as something akin to mathematical symbols designating particular objects. This kind of reference is one of the roles of language, known as denotation. However, language-use also tends to be affected by a second type of use, known as connotation. Mistaking connotations for denotations is one of the things which makes conventional uses seem natural.