Inexact Science: Complexity and Contradiction in Roland Barthes's "Classic Semiology"

In an early short text from 1955, Roland Barthes addresses the question "Suis-je marxiste?" ("Am I Marxist?") in response to a conservative critic's challenge to him to announce his political allegiances. Barthes's reaction to the question is virulent: "What business is it of his [Jean Guerin's]? Ordinarily, this sort of question only interests McCarthyists. . . . Yes, I know, it would be more reassuring if one could catalog writers according to their 'simple' declaration of faith . . . more reassuring but less rigorous." ¹

I cite these comments from the early Barthes as a cautionary introduction to the topic of his place in the development of the semiotic enterprise. We need to be aware of the dangers in wanting to assign a writer such as Barthes, too emphatically or univocally, to specific critical camps--camps sharply delineated by methods, or separated off from each other by rigorous and inviolate disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, if one of the legacies of cultural studies has been to examine how politics is negotiated at the level of reception, we need to recognize that there are struggles to be waged around the reception of Barthes himself and over the ways different readings can constrain his work. For example, the publication of Barthes's Oeuvres complètes in the 1990s was obviously a valuable and important enterprise. However, we must recognize how the very material presentation of his corpus--a boxed set of three beautifully printed tomes ornamented successively by high art images of hands reading, writing, and touching fine fabric--frames Barthes as an aesthete, as a dandyish figure of distinctive refinement. One can easily prefer the more austere, scientistic look of the books from Barthes's semiotic period. For instance, it is surely part of the original impact of Système de la mode that it appeared as it did in a cold, seemingly foreboding format, its stark letters etched sharply against plain background. And certainly, the first edition of S/Z derives some of its effect from the shock its simple title creates as it stands out from the blankness of its cover. Like, say, Derrida's Glas or Attali's Bruits, S/Z's impact begins with the punctual bluntness of its telegraphic titling. In contrast, dispersed within the covers of the elegant three volumes of collected writings--all the pages identical in typography and luscious paper quality--Barthes's writings undergo a transformation. They are subsumed an overall project of aestheticization. (Revealingly, one of the participants at the "Back to Barthes" conference told me he had refused to buy the Oeuvres complètes precisely because they seemed to violate the impact that the original books had had and that remains, for him, integral to their meaning and effect.)

These issues of visual appearance are not epiphenomenal but relate directly to the ways we can interpret and use Barthes. If cultural studies encourages us to look at acts of reception, it does so from within a political perspective governed by the assumption that not all acts of reception are equal--not at all equal in productivity, in effect, in intent. Even as one doesn't want to reify moments in Barthes as inviolate expressions of unitary positions--as does the McCarthyist Jean Guerin--there are distinctions to be made in the career and in its political allegiances. Thus, to take just one example, Stanley Aronowitz, in a quite polemical review of Susan Sontag's Barthes Reader, criticizes her selections for turning Barthes into a modernist devoted to apolitical interiority. He declares that, in contrast, Barthes was a "Marxist"; and one can feel that his emphasis is overstated (Barthes was Marxist--and then in only complicated ways--for only some part of his career), and that it fulfills Barthes's suspicions about naming in the "Suis-je Marxiste?" rejoinder. But one can also understand Aronowitz's gesture as a tactical, combative foray designed...