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.

Barthes and Semiotics

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. Another important theme is the importance in being careful how we use words and other signs.

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.

Another trait of his work is his constant systematisation. He draws up schemes for categorising the signs and codes with which he works, which can be applied to divide a text, a narrative or a myth into different parts with different functions. He draws up something like a blueprint of the areas of discourse he studies, showing how the different parts hold together.

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. There are many different ways a particular signified could be expressed in language, or different objects divided-up. None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others.

Barthes is an anti-essentialist. 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. (This might be taken to mean that everything ultimately exists in an immanent, extensive plane of being). The division into categories is always a process of social construction. People don�t start off with thoughts or perceptions of objects which they then express in language. The categories of language determine how people divide up objects into types.

Furthermore, all signs depend on the entire system of signs. None of them have meaning aside from the system.

Barthes is best-known for showing the social constructedness of language by reference to familiar, everyday experiences.

However, he does not mechanically apply Saussure�s theory. 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�. When they are used, they refer back to previous conventional uses.

For Barthes, most signs are mediated by language. Barthes usually reads non-linguistic signs (such as fashion) through linguistic signs (such as fashion journalism). He views non-linguistic signs as carrying linguistic meanings.

Indeed, in Barthes�s later work, even actions become mediated by language. Every act is at once an act (signified) and a sign of itself (signifier). It becomes hard to unpack the act from its meaning. For instance, in psychoanalysis, it�s argued that a person might kill or steal to confirm in the eyes of others her or his own sense of being a guilty person. The guilty act is a means to provide a sign of itself.

Barthes believes it is impossible to act (e.g. to dress) �innocently� (in the sense of not conveying anything in terms of meaning). Signs of deviance from dominant norms � punk dress for example, or an archaic religious look � are just as conventional as those of the mainstream. They signify rejection of dominant norms and attachment to particular alternatives.

Signs are often used to differentiate one person or group from others. Taboos, for instance, can create a freedom to reject dominant norms by breaking them. Barthes assumes that acts of signifying are usually �guilty�: the image they project is intended.

Furthermore, the way people use language bears little relationship to underlying intent, feelings or perceptions. Beneath each text (whether it�s a novel or a speech-act) is simply the immense structure of the language-system, from which each person borrows words in a ceaseless act of writing.

There are also, however, special cases where meanings are violently projected from outside, as in the Dominici case (see below).

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.

Barthes opposes the view of arts such as literature as operating in this way. He also opposes the view of language as primarily instrumental � as a way of rationally understanding experience. Instead, language exists to produce sensuality, or sensory responses.

Barthes also disagrees with the view that people first form integrated sense-perceptions or thoughts to which they then give names through language. In common with other structuralists, he sees linguistic categories as constituting the divisions of phenomena into groups.

Barthes�s work is marked by a certain recurring concern for the closure which results from linguistic ways of seeing. Language always implies a one-sided way of seeing, which selects certain characteristics as meaningful, and ignores or discards others. This �intellectual imperialism� or �fascism� is built into the nature of language. Every statement prevents something else from being said. This exclusion is unavoidable.

Furthermore, once said or written, something is unchangeable. It creates a system. It cannot be undone. It can only be questioned. This goes against the openness of language. Derrida is later to suggest it is a kind of violence against the multitude of possible meanings.

Human freedom can be asserted against the nature of language in two ways. Firstly, by calling language into question. This is done by literature and semiotics. Secondly, by opening texts to new readings, and preventing them from being finalised. This is done through �writerly reading�, and through forms of writing which escape its restriction to communication, using signs for their own sake.

The most explicitly political aspect of Barthes�s work is his �mythology�, or analysis of myths. Many of the myths he studies come from the fields of politics and journalism. Barthes�s work on myths prefigures discourse-analysis in media studies. He is discussing the type of discourse which is particularly typical of right-wing populism and of the tabloid press.

The main purpose of his work in �Mythologies� is to dissect the functioning of certain insidious myths. Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.

Barthes�s example is a magazine cover which shows a black soldier saluting the French flag. At the level of first-order language, this picture is a signifier (an image) which denotes an event (a soldier saluting a flag). But at the second-order mythological level, it signifies something else: the idea of France as a great multi-ethnic empire, the combination of Frenchness and militariness.

Myth is a metalanguage. It turns language into a means to speak about itself. However, it does this in a repressive way, concealing the construction of signs. The system of myths tends to reduce the raw material of signifying objects to similarity. For instance, it uses a photograph and a book in exactly the same way.

Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy which motivates them. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, myths don�t hide anything. Instead, myths inflect or distort particular images or signs to carry a particular meaning. Myth doesn�t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the sign.

Barthes�s main objection to myth is that it removes history from language. It makes particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen. It thus transforms history into nature. Its function is to freeze or arrest language. It usually does this by reducing a complex phenomenon to a few traits which are taken as definitive. Barthes uses the example of a Basque chalet in Paris, which ostentatiously displays certain signs of what is taken as Basque style, minus other aspects of Basque houses as they would be found in the countryside (it has a sloping roof, but not a barn).

It is crucial to emphasise that Barthes is not saying that all language-use is m

yth. He does not believe that myth is necessary. His social constructivism is also partial. He believes there are things, with specific attributes, separate from their mythical constructions (accessible, perhaps, through denotative language). But a semiotician can only study the signs or myths, not the things.

According to Barthes, he can tell us about the myth of the goodness of wine, or the way wine is signified as an essence it doesn�t really have. Wine may, in fact, for contingent reasons of sense-experience, be good. But a semiotician can�t tell us this.

In a sense, therefore, this is a negative approach to myth: it breaks down rather than replacing. One might speculate that eventually, language would need to be reconstructed in a non-mythical way, in order to move beyond myth � perhaps by talking directly of situated experiences, rather than essences. But this is outside the scope of Barthes�s project.

Crucially, myths remove any role for the reader in constructing meanings. Myths are received rather than read. A message which is received rather than read does not require an interpretation through a code. It only requires a certain cultural knowledge. (One might add that it also needs a certain form of life corresponding to the resonance of this knowledge).

The consumer of myth must here be differentiated from others who actually do read myths. To the semiotician, like Barthes, a myth is just an �alibi�, a way of covering up the lack of ground which essences really have. To a producer of myths, such as a newspaper editor choosing a cover photo, they are simply examples or symbols, consciously chosen. In either case, the myth is not �received� as such. Both the journalist and the semiotician knows very well that the myth is constructed.

According to Barthes, someone who consumes a myth � such as most tabloid readers � does not see its construction as a myth. They see the image simply as the presence of the essence it signifies. For instance, they see in the saluting black soldier the presence of French imperiality. They are then convinced that what they�ve seen is a fact, a reality, even an experience � as if they�d actually lived it. It is this kind of reader who reveals the ideological function of myth.

Myths are not read as statements of particular actors, but as outgrowths of nature. They are seen as providing a natural reason, rather than an explanation or a motivated statement. They are read as �innocent� speech � from which ideology and signification are absent. To consume a myth is not to consume signs, but images, goals and meanings. The signified of connotative myths is �hidden�, since it can�t be reconstructed through the language or images used to carry it. The utterance is structured enough to affect the reader, but this reception does not amount to a reading.

According to this reading of myth, a myth occurs only if someone is a true believer who consumes the myth innocently. This is why, for certain later writers, a postmodern �ironic� reading, which recognises and plays with the constructedness of myths, is deemed subversive. It is also why ironic uses of stereotypes are sometimes differentiated from their simple deployment. And why the �play� of signs in fields such as the Internet, or reader-response models of global culture, where each user is aware they are appropriating and redeploying signs, is sometimes seen as progressive even if the signs deployed are capitalist, conventional, racist, etc.

Barthes sees myth as functioning in a similar way to Althusserian interpellation. It calls out to the person who receives it, like a command or a statement of fact. The content of the injunction is to identify the sign with the essence.

In fact, mythical signs look as if they have been created on the spot, for the viewer. They look like they are simply there to perform their role in the myth. The history which causes or creates them is rendered invisible.

Myth is parasitical on language. It requires the meaning of the initial sign for its power, but at the same time it denies this specificity, making it seem indisputable and natural, rather than contingent. There is always a remainder of denotation without which the connotation could not exist.

It is only because of this remnant of denotation that the connotation can naturalise something. It is as if it needs the innocence of denotation to pose as innocent itself. Meaning is thus torn between nature and culture, denotation and connotation.

It also has a tendency to empty language. It removes signs from their context, hiding the process of attaching signifier to signified. It thus strips signs of their richness and specificity. The function of myth is to empty reality of the appearance of history and of social construction. The initial sign is �rich� in history. Myth functions by depriving it of history and turning it into an empty form to carry a different meaning.

If the �political� is taken to encompass all human relations in their actual structure, as power to transform the world, then myth is depoliticised speech � the active stripping of politics from speech. Usage (or doing) is mistakenly portrayed as nature (or being).

This draining of history strips represented phenomena of their content. What is actually a contextually specific action is taken to stand for something else: a timeless, eternal essence. This is termed the �concept� of the myth. Barthes expresses it by adding -ness or -ity onto ordinary words.

This emptying is also a kind of filling. The concept carried by a myth appears to be eternal and absolute. In fact, the concept carried by a myth implants into the sign an entire history and perspective. It speaks to a very specific group of readers. It corresponds closely to its function. For instance, it refers back to particular stereotypes embedded in gender, racial, or class hierarchies.

What is put into the myth as meaning is always in excess over what remains of the meaning of the sign itself. An entire history or perspective is put into the concept which the mythical sign signifies. On the other hand, the image or example itself is almost incidental. There is a constant rotation of mythical images and significations. Myth functions like a turnstyle which constantly offers up signs and their mythical meanings. The sign is emptied so that it can present a meaning (the concept) which is absent but full.

As a result of myth, people are constantly plunged into a false nature which is actually a constructed system. Semiotic analysis of myth is a political act, establishing the freedom of language from the present system and unveiling the constructedness of social realities. The contingent, historical, socially constructed capitalist system comes to seem as �life�, �the world�, �the way it is�.

One way to become aware of myths is to consider how they would seem, from the standpoint of whatever they represent. Myth is always clear when seen from the standpoint of the signifier which has been robbed. For instance, the mythical nature of the use of the image of the black soldier is apparent if the soldier�s actual narrative is known or considered.

Another aspect of the functioning of myth is that it refuses the explanatory or analytical level. It states facts and posits values, but it does not use theories to explain social phenomena. Facts are taken as self-present, not as mysteries

to be explained. The statement of facts or values without explaining them gives an illusory clarity, making it seem that they are obvious, they go without saying.

Barthes lists seven common techniques or figures of myth:

1) Inoculation � admitting a little bit of evil in an institution so as to ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. For instance, admitting the existence of �a few bad eggs� in the police so as to cover up the abusive nature of official police practices.

2) Removing history � making it seem like social phenomena simply �exist� or are there for the viewer�s gaze, eliminating both causality and agency. Neoliberalism, for instance, is often treated as �globalisation� or �modernisation�, as an abstract economic necessity rather than a political strategy.

3) Identification of the other with the self � projecting inner characteristics onto the other. For instance, in trials, treating a deviant person as a version of the self which has gone astray, based on a view of crime as rooted in human nature. The actual person, their motives and meanings are written out of such accounts.

4) Tautology � treating the failure of language as expressing the essence of a thing � �theatre is theatre�, �Racine is Racine�, or �just because, is all�. Barthes believes this device is an order not to think.

5) Neither-norism � refusing radical differences between phenomena by combining them in a kind of middle ground marked by immobility and permanence. The Third Way is a current example.

6) Quantification of quality � treating differences in kind as differences in degree.

7) Statements of fact without explanation � �that�s just the way it is�. The idea of �common sense� is used to command the pursuit of truth to stop at a certain point.

Death of the Author

Many of Barthes�s works focus on literature. However, Barthes denied being a literary critic, because he did not assess and provide verdicts on works. Instead, he interpreted their semiotic significance. Barthes�s structuralist style of literary analysis has influenced cultural studies, to the chagrin of adherents of traditional literary approaches.

One notable point of controversy is Barthes�s proclamation of the �death of the author�. This �death� is directed, not at the idea of writing, but at the specifically French image of the auteur as a creative genius expressing an inner vision. He is opposing a view of texts as expressing a distinct personality of the author.

Barthes vehemently opposes the view that authors consciously create masterpieces. He maintains that authors such as Racine and Balzac often reproduce emotional patterns about which they have no conscious knowledge. He opposes the view that authors should be interpreted in terms of what they think they�re doing. Their biographies have no more relevance to what they write than do those of scientists.

In �The Death of the Author�, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is t

he practice of signification itself. Its real origin is language. A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled in using a particular code. All writers are like copywriters or scribes, inscribing a particular zone of language.

The real origin of a text is not the author, but language. If the writer expresses something �inner�, it is only the dictionary s/he holds ready-formed. There is a special art of the storyteller to translate linguistic structures or codes into particular narratives or messages. Each text is composed of multiple writings brought into dialogue, with each code it refers to being extracted from a previous culture.

Barthes�s argument is directed against schools of literary criticism that seek to uncover the author�s meaning as a hidden referent which is the final meaning of the text. By refusing the �author� (in the sense of a great writer expressing an inner brilliance), one refuses to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, and hence, one refuses to fix its meaning.

It becomes open to different readings. According to Barthes, the unity of a text lies in its destination not its origin. Its multiplicity is focused on the reader, as an absent point within the text, to whom it speaks. The writer and reader are linguistic persons, not psychological persons. Their role in the story is defined by their coded place in discourse, not their specific traits.

A text cannot have a single meaning, but rather, is composed of multiple systems through which it is constructed. In Barthes�s case, this means reading texts through the signs they use, both in their structure in the text, and in their wider meanings.

Literature does not represent something real, since what it refers to is not really there. For Barthes, it works by playing on the multiple systems of language-use and their infinite transcribability � their ability to be written in different ways.

The death of the author creates freedom for the reader to interpret the text. The reader can recreate the text through connecting to its meanings as they appear in different contexts.

In practice, Barthes�s literary works emphasise the practice of the craft of writing. For instance, Barthes�s structuralist analysis of Sade, Fourier and Loyola emphasises the structural characteristics of their work, such as their emphasis on counting and their locations in self-contained worlds. He views the three authors as founders of languages (logothetes).

The Structure of Narrative

In �Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives�, Barthes explores the structure of narrative, or storytelling, from a structuralist perspective. Narrative consists of a wide variety of genres applied to a wide variety of substances � for example, theatre, film, novels, news stories, mimes, and even some paintings. We can see what Barthes terms �narrative� whenever something is used to tell a story. People using this theory will often refer to the way people live their lives as narratives, and some will talk about a right to tell our own story.

Narrative is taken to be humanly universal � every social group has its own narratives. Barthes models the analysis of narrative on structuralist linguistics. The structure or organisation is what is most essential in any system of meaning.

The construction of a narrative from different statements is similar to the construction of a sentence from phonemes. Barthes argues that there are three levels

of narrative: functions, actions, and narration. Each has meaning only in relation to the next level.

Functions refer to statements in narratives. Every statement or sentence in a novel, for example, has at least one function. Barthes gives examples like: �James Bond saw a man of about fifty� and �Bond picked up one of the four receivers�.

For Barthes, every statement has a particular role in the narrative � there are no useless statements, no �noise� in the information-theory sense.

But statements vary in their importance to the narrative, in how closely or loosely it is tied to the story. Some are functions in the full sense, playing a direct role in the story. For instance, a character buys a gun so s/he can use it later in the story. The phone rings, and Bond picks it up � this will give him information or orders which will move the action forward.

Others are �indices� � they index something which establishes the context of the story. They might, for instance, convey a certain atmosphere. Or they might say something about the psychology or �character� of an actor in the story. The �four receivers� show that Bond is in a big, bureaucratic organisation, which shows that he is on the side of order. The �man of about fifty� indicates an atmosphere of suspicion: Bond needs to establish who he is and which side he is on.

Among the former � the true functions � these can be central aspects of the narrative, on which it hinges (�cardinal points� or �nuclei�), or they can be complementary (catalysers). To be cardinal, a function needs to open or close a choice on which the development of the story depends. The phone ringing and Bond answering are cardinal, because the story would go differently if the phone didn�t ring or Bond didn�t answer.

But if Bond �moved towards the desk and answered the phone�, the phrase �moved towards the desk� is a catalyser, because it does not affect the story whether he did this or not. Stories often contain catalysers to provide moments of rest from the risky decision-points.

Barthes sees true functions as forming pairs: one initiates a choice and the other closes it. These pairs can be close together, or spread out across a story. The choice is opened by the phone ringing, and closed by Bond answering it.

Indices are also divided into true indices, which index things like an actor�s character or an atmosphere, and informants, which simply identify something or situate it in time and space. A character�s age is an example of an informant. True indices are more important to the story than informants.

All moments of a narrative are functional, but some more so than others. Functions and indices are functional in different ways. Cardinal functions and true indices have greater functionality than catalysers and informants. At root, however, a narrative is structured through its nuclei. The other functional elements are always expansions on the nuclei. It is possible, as in folk-tales, to create a narrative consisting almost entirely of nuclei.

Functions are arranged into narratives by being attached to agents � characters in the story who engage in actions. Every narrative necessarily has agents. The actions of an agent connect the nuclei of the narrative to particular �articulations of praxis� � desire, communication and struggle.

The third level, narration, occurs between the narrator (or writer) and the reader. The narrator compiles the narrative in a way which is addressed to the reader, and �produces� the reader as a particular position in the narrative. The positions of narrator and reader are clearest when a writer addresses a factual statemen

t directly to the reader: �Leo was the owner of the joint�. Narrator and reader are largely empty positions within the narrative.

Narratives also have a kind of logical time which is interior to them and is barely connected to real time. This logical time is constructed by the series of nuclei (which open and close choices), and their separation by other nuclei and by subsidiary elements. It is held together by the integration of the pairs of nuclei.

Narratives implicitly receive their meaning, however, from a wider social world. Barthes maintains that narratives obtain their meaning from the world beyond them � from social, economic and ideological systems.

Barthes criticises the narratives of his day for trying to disguise the process of coding involved in constructing a narrative. As in Mythologies, he again argues that this naturalisation of signs, and denial of the process of social construction of meaning, is specifically bourgeois. Both bourgeois society and its mass culture �demand signs which do not look like signs�. They are reluctant to declare their codes.

Narrative also contains other potentials. Like dreaming, it alters the familiar in ways which show different possibilities. Although what is �known� or �experienced� is constantly re-run through narratives, the narratives do not simply repeat what is re-run through them. They open a �process of becoming�. In other words, things can run differently when run through narrative. Narrative shows that other meanings are possible. Familiar things can be given different meanings.

What happens in narrative has no referent. It doesn�t refer to something in the real world. Rather, what happens in narrative is language itself � the celebration of its many possibilities. However, it is also closely connected to monologue (which follows in personal development from dialogue).

Barthes is highly critical of realist and naturalist views of writing. For Barthes, literature is built on emptiness: it represents something which is not really there. All the arts of fiction, including theatre, cinema and literature, are constructed based on signs. They function by the suspension of disbelief. They function by calling certain desires or structures into play, causing people to feel various emotions. They are not representations of reality, but rather, a way to induce feelings in the audience.

The attempt to convince the audience that the story is real is a way of reproducing the naturalisation of signs. A supposedly realistic or naturalistic art or literature never really �tells it like it is�. It represents through a set of conventional signs which stand for �reality�.

Barthes criticises those who believe authors imitate an existing reality (a practice known as mimesis). He is in favour of an emphasis on the creation of a discursive world (semiosis) rather than mimesis. Hence his interest in Sade, Fourier and Loyola. Instead of conventional views of the world, alternative presentations can denaturalise the present and provide utopian alternatives.

Barthes also criticises the idea of clarity in literature, for similar reasons. Clarity is simply conventional. It is relative to a particular regime of signs. It amounts to a criterion of familiarity. Therefore, it has conservative effects. Barthes views clarity as a class attribute of the bourgeoisie, used to signify membership of this class (this contrasts sharply with the more common claim in activist circles that speech should be clear so as to be working-class or inclusive).

However, this is not strictly an expressive view either. The actor or author doe

sn�t necessarily induce sympathy for their own feelings. Such an effect can amount to confusing art with reality. Instead, the actor, author and audience all know it�s fiction.

In some contexts, such as theatre, wrestling, and (in Barthes�s view) Japanese culture, performance or artifice is recognised for what it is. It is not taken to be natural or real. In these contexts, signs have no content. Their operation serves to show the existence and functioning of signs. It also allows an expressive use of signs, to stand for particular emotions.

In �Rhetoric of the Image�, Barthes discusses the different levels of meaning in a Panzani advert. Firstly, there�s a linguistic message, which has the usual denoted and connoted levels. Secondly, there�s a connotation, established by juxtaposition, associating the brand with freshness and home cooking. Thirdly, there�s the use of colours and fruits to signify �Italianicity�, the mythical essence of Italy. Fourthly, the processed product is presented as if equivalent to the surrounding unprocessed items. These signifiers carry �euphoric values� connected to particular myths. According to Barthes, at least the third of these meanings is quasi-tautological.

The language of images is constructed in particular zones or �lexicons�. Each of the connoted meanings refers to a specific body of social practice which certain readers will receive, and others may not. For instance, it mobilises ideas from tourism (Italianicity) and art (the imitation of the style of a still life painting). Often the same signifieds are carried by text, images, acting and so on. These signifieds carry a particular dominant ideology. A rhetoric of the image deploys a number of connotative images to carry messages.

All images are �polysemous� � they can be read in a number of ways. In an image such as this, language is used both explicitly and implicitly to guide the selection of meanings. The text directs the reader as to which meanings of the image to receive. Barthes thus suggests that texts have a repressive value relative to images: they limit what can be seen. It is in this limitation that ideology and morality function. Ideology chooses among multiple meanings which ones can be seen, and limits the shifting flow of signification which would otherwise happen.

Euphoria and Affect

Euphoria has both positive and negative meanings in Barthes�s work. As a negative term, it refers to the enjoyment of a closed system or familiar meaning which is induced by mythical signifiers. For instance, the fashion system is euphoric because its persistence as a system defies death. People can partake in a system of meanings which seems eternal, and thereby experience some of its illusory universality as euphoria. Myth provides euphoria because it provides a sense that something is absolutely clear. It aims for a euphoric security which comes with enclosing everything in a closed system. Tautology, for instance, gives someone the minor satisfaction of opting for a truth-claim without the risk of being wrong (because nothing substantive has been said). This can be compared to Negri�s argument in Time for Revolution that systemic closure yields a certain type of enjoyment.

On the other hand, it can also signify an experience of fullness arising from actually escaping the regime of myths. In �The Third Meaning�, Barthes analyses Sergei Eisenstein�s films, suggesting the presence of what he terms an �obtuse� meaning alongside the explicit denotative and connotative meanings.

These images simply designate an emotion or disposition, setting in motion a drift in meaning. They don�t represent anything. They are momentary, without development or variants. They have a signifier without a signified. They thus escape the euphoria of closed systems, pointing to something beyond.

Indeed, an obtuse meaning is not necessarily visible to all readers. Its appearance is subjective. It is permanently empty or depleted (it remains unclear how this positive �empty signifier� relates either to the �mana-words� of Mythologies, or to Laclau�s rather different use of the same term). It can also serve as part of mythical schemes. For instance, ,moral indignation can function as a pleasant emotion.

The obtuse meaning is not present in the system of language, though it is present in speech. It almost sneaks into speech, on the back of language. It appears as a rare and new practice counterposed to the majority practice of signification. It seems like a luxury: expenditure without exchange. And it seems to belong, not to today�s politics, but to tomorrow�s. Barthes sees such facets as undermining the integration of characters, turning them into nubs of facets. In other words, the �molar self� of the character (who, in Mythologies, is connected to social decomposition and misrepresentation) is replaced by a different kind of connection which is, perhaps, directly lived and connected to the world, rather than projecting a literary figure onto it.

It has been read in terms of a moment of emotion prior to thought. I think it might be better linked to Deleuze�s idea of the �time-image�: the obtuse image is a momentary image which expresses the contingency of becoming. Barthes suggests that the obtuse image is carnivalesque, and that it turns the film into a �permutational unfolding�, a flow of becoming in the system of signs.

Writerly Reading: S/Z

In S/Z, a text devoted primarily to the study of Balzac�s short story Sarrasine, Barthes proposes a distinction between two types of texts.

A text is �writerly� if it can be written or rewritten today. A �writerly� text is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to reuse and reapply it, bringing it into new combinations with their own meanings. It is celebrated because it makes the reader a producer, not a consumer, of a text. The �writerly� value restores to each person the �magic of the signifier�. The writerly text is inseparable from the process of writing, as an open-ended flow which has not yet been stopped by any system (such as ideology or criticism).

It is necessarily plural. This is a kind of plurality distinguished from liberalism: it does not acknowledge partial truths in different positions, but insists on difference as such. Difference constantly returns through texts, which re-open the network of language at a different point.

Barthes counterposes this view to an essentialist or Platonic view in which all texts approximate a model. For Barthes, texts instead offer entrances into the network of language. They do not offer a norm or law. Rather, it offers a particular perspective constructed of particular voices, fragments of texts, and semiotic codes. Texts have only a contingent unity which is constantly rewritten through its composition in terms of codes. A writerly text should have many networks which interact without any of them dominating the others.

The �readerly�, in contrast, reduces a text to something serious, without pleasure, which can only be accepted or rejected. A �readerly� text is so heavily attached to a particular system of meanings as to render the reader passive. It is a reactive distortion of the �writerly� through its ideological closure.

Readerly texts must, however, contain a �limited� or �modest plural� in order to function. This limited plurality of the text is created through its connotations. There are also writerly and readerly styles of reading texts, depending whether one seeks predetermined meanings in it, or seeks instead to inscribe it in new ways.

Instead of treating a text as a single phenomenon which represents something, Barthes proposes to examine a text through the plural signs it brings together. Instead of giving a unified image of a text, it decomposes it into component parts. Such a reading uses digressions to show that the structures of which the text is woven can be reversed and rearranged.

Barthes calls this style of reading �starring� of a text. It cuts the text up into blocks of signification, breaching its smooth surface and especially its appearance of naturalness. It interrupts the flow of the text so as to release the perspectives within it. Each block is treated as a zone, in which the movement of meanings can be traced. The goal of this exercise is to hear one of the voices of the text.

Readers should reconstitute texts as plural. Among other things, this means that forgetting meanings is a necessary part of reading. It ensures that multiple readings remain possible, and therefore, that signifiers are allowed to shift or move.

One can�t reduce all stories to a single structure, because each text carries a particular difference. This kind of difference is not an irreducible quality, but the constant flow of language into new combinations. Analysing the function of each text restores it to this flow of difference.

He also calls for re-reading, as a means to avoid repetition and to remove texts from linear time (before or after) and place them in mythical time. Re-reading is �no longer consumption, but play�, directed against both the disposability of texts and their distanced analysis, and towards the return of difference. It helps create an experience of plural texts.

In this text, Barthes criticises many of his earlier views. He now claims that connotation is ever-present in �readerly� texts (though not in some modern texts). There is no underlying denotative layer. Denotation is simply the most naturalised layer of connotation.

Further, connotation carries voice into the text, weaving a particular voice into the code. The writer, here, has more of a role than Barthes previously allowed. Writing brings in historical context through connotation.

The text as expression for the reader is also criticised. Readers are also products of prior texts, which compose subjectivity as subject-positions in narratives. Reading is itself a �form of work�. The content of this work is to move, to shift between different systems or flows which have no ending-point.

The work is shown to exist only by its functioning: it has no definite outcome. To read is to find meanings within the endless flow of language. We might think of it as creating particular, temporary points or territories by finding resonances within a field which is like an ocean or a desert.