Roland Barthes--Twenty Years After

Roland Barthes (born 1915) and Jean-Paul Sartre (born 1905) died within a few days of each other, in 1980. Each is emblematic of a certain French intellectual generation--Sartre's famously that of political commitment and combat, Barthes's dedicated to the analysis and practice of signs, and the reading of cultures as sign-systems. The contrast in sensibility is striking. Barthes did not assert political and moral goals, he never offered a philosophy or a total system. Working largely in the essay and the fragment, Barthes's lesson was ever oblique, cool. He sought to achieve a certain askesis, clearing out the vestiges of our belief in natural meanings hidden deep within "the Romantic heart of things," making us think instead in terms of formal systems, codes and messages, focusing always on a definition of humans as makers of meaning through sign-systems.

Twenty years after his death, Barthes continues to claim our attention as the leading literary intellectual of a generation that came to prominence in the 1960s with the large movement called "structuralism." His legacy in literary and cultural theory still exercises great though disputed and by no means univocal influence. From the literary and cultural analysis of Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies and Critical Essays through the semiotics of Elements of Semiology, The Fashion System, and Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, passing by the "scandal" of On Racine and Criticism and Truth, then the "poststructuralist" turn, to textuality and the theory of reading, in S/Z and Pleasure of the Text, and then the seminal work on photography in Camera Lucida, and the "autobiographical" Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse and the posthumous Incidents, Barthes still stands as a master figure to critical discourse in a wide range of fields. Yet his "lesson" remains elusive. At the present time, when many fields of the humanities are dedicated to some form of "cultural studies," what he taught us often appears muted or unrecognized by a resistance to theory--by the "post-theory" or "anti-theory" which he could no doubt have shown to contain its own unrecognized theory, or ideology.

Barthes in his lifetime was sometimes accused of having sacrificed to the latest mode, moving on too swiftly from one approach to another, abandoning analytic hypotheses before they were fully tested. Yet it may be precisely this restlessness of his thought that makes him--more than ever, in retrospect--the most nourishing French literary intellectual of his time. He moved from structuralism and semiotics to theories of textuality and of reading while maintaining a sense of the discipline brought by a rigorous attention to linguistics, to the literary and cultural work of the sign-systems that construct a human, signifying world that must not be confused with the natural world. Nature to Barthes is "the last outrage," in that it allows us to hide from our own responsibilities as creators of culture--to hide in myths that need to be exposed for what they are and do.

The showing up of stereotypes provides a constant source of energy in Barthes's work. One of his favorite words is the Greek doxa: the received idea, the prejudice, the cultural commonplace. Opposed to it is the para-doxa: that which contradicts, exceeds, outrages the received opinion. Barthes's arguments often proceed by way of paradox: not dialectics precisely, but a provocative challenging of the commonplace, laying bare its appeal to common sense, its status as a "false nature." His writing is often aphoristic: aphorism is the tool of the paradoxicalist intent to denounce the illusions of complacency and bad faith. It's a kind of writing that suggests Barthes's connection to the long French moraliste tradition, illustrated by some of his favorite authors--La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Gide--who all participate in a linguistic and ethical housecleaning, of the self-deceptions and linguistic illusions practiced by humans as...