Welcome back to the deep dive. This is the place
where we take the most complex, source -heavy,
and influential ideas and really just distill
them into the knowledge you need right now. And
today we are cracking open a figure who, I mean,
he didn't just analyze culture. He really gave
us the fundamental toolkit to disassemble and
understand the hidden rules of modern life. We're
talking about Roland Barthes. Exactly. Barthes,
who lived from 1915 to 1980, was just this towering
figure in 20th century French thought. He's a
philosopher, a literary theorist, a semiotician.
He wore a lot of hats. He really did. And his
work provides this incredible bridge between,
you know, the very... very rigorous systems of
structuralism and then the radical openness of
what came after post -structuralism. He gave
us the ability to look at something as simple
as a magazine cover or a bowl of detergent and
see the underlying ideology at play. The hidden
messages. The hidden messages, exactly. And that
is precisely our mission for you, the listener,
today. We want to give you a clear chronological
roadmap through Barth's really complex and...
highly self -critical evolution. It's a fascinating
journey. It is. We're going to trace his path
from his early kind of defiant stance on literary
convention all the way through his brilliant,
sometimes playful critiques of modern myths.
And then ultimately to his intensely personal
and deeply moving final works, his meditations
on photography and profound grief. It's a journey
that really starts with dissecting the entire
cultural system around us. And it ends by analyzing
a single subjective tier. It's an incredible
arc. And his reach is just immense. I mean, his
ideas permeate fields so far beyond just literature.
You see his influence in anthropology and visual
theory, media studies. You can't escape him,
really. You can't. And he was deeply embedded
in that Parisian intellectual scene, primarily
associated with institutions like the École des
Outils d 'Ancien Social, the ISS, and then later
the very prestigious Collège de France. He held
the chair of literary semiology there. He did,
which was a position created specifically for
him. It shows you the kind of impact he had.
had so to guide this deep dive we've flagged
four essential intellectual milestones yeah if
you want to understand barthes these are the
concepts you need to anchor all right first we
have writing degree zero from 1953 where he really
challenges the nature of creativity itself Second,
the famous collection Mythologies from 1957.
That's the handbook for decoding cultural signs.
The one everyone knows. That's the one. Third,
the essay that truly shifted all the power in
literature, The Death of the Author from 1967.
And finally, his last masterful meditation, Camera
Lucida from 1980. It's a perfect selection. It
shows his entire intellectual trajectory. So
let's dive in and see how a thinker could move
from diagnosing the ills of an entire society
to finding... Well, solace in a single photograph.
Sounds good. Okay, so let's unpack the man before
we get to the theory. I think with Barthas, you
really can't separate the thinker from the person.
His entire career, his whole perspective was
so profoundly shaped by loss, by illness, and
this incredibly powerful relationship he had
with his mother. Absolutely. You have to start
there. Roland Gerard Barthes was born in Cherbourg
in 1915, and his very earliest years were defined
by an immediate and profound absence. His father.
His father, Louis Barthes. He was a naval officer,
and he was killed in World War I before Roland
even turned one year old. Wow. So this just established
the foundational experience of his life, which
was being raised solely by strong maternal figures,
his mother, Henriette Barthes, his aunt, and
his grandmother. That was his world. And he grew
up in the French provinces, right? They only
moved to Paris later in 1924. They did. But even
when he was in Paris, you know, the intellectual
center of the world, those provincial roots remained
incredibly important to his identity. He always
had a bit of an outsider's perspective. And that
sense of being slightly outside the establishment.
Yeah. That was only intensified by years of just.
debilitating illness. Yes, tuberculosis. He was
accepted to the Sorbonne in 1935 to study classical
literature, but his academic path was just repeatedly
and severely disrupted by the illness. And we're
not talking about just, you know, a minor setback
here. This was a nine -year period, wasn't it?
Spanning from 1939 to 1948. A huge chunk of his
young adult life. His life was punctuated by
these repeated physical breakdowns and these
very long periods of isolation and sanatoria.
That has to change a person. It's a defining
experience. I mean, this recurring health struggle
meant he couldn't complete the necessary qualifying
exams for a standard academic career path. OK.
And significantly, it also exempted him from
military service during World War Two. So while
his peers are having this collective national
experience. he's isolated. He's on the sidelines
observing. He's always observing. He managed
to publish early papers and he completed his
MA equivalent thesis on Greek tragedy in 1941.
But those years were just characterized by this
necessary distance and introspection. That isolation,
I think, surely contributed to his later ability
to stand apart from convention and just critically
observe the world. So his path to becoming this
intellectual giant was anything but typical.
After 1948, he's taking these temporary positions,
teaching in places as diverse as, what, France,
Romania, Egypt. Constantly moving, never quite
settling. And it was his contributions to the
leftist Parisian paper combat that really became
the crucible for his first full -length work,
writing Degree Zero. which dropped in 1953. And
writing Degree Zero is his first major intellectual
intervention. It's a direct response to the dominant
philosophical movement of the time, existentialism,
and specifically to figures like Jean -Paul Sartre.
Right. Sartre had written What Is Literature?
in 1947. He had. And in it, Sartre had expressed
this kind of frustration, a disenchantment with
both the traditional established forms of writing
and the experimental avant -garde work. He felt
both had become sort of alienated from any real
political meaning. So Barthes jumps right into
this debate and he asks this really fundamental
question. Is true originality even possible when
you sit down to write? And he establishes a very
clear distinction to answer that question. It's
a brilliant framework. Let's break it down. He
argues that two components of writing are inherently
unfree. You have no real choice over them. First,
there's language. The system itself. The system
itself. The grammar, the vocabulary. It's fixed.
It's collective. You can't just invent a new
language every time you write a book. You inherit
it. Okay, that makes sense. And the second thing.
The second is style. And for Barthez, style is
also fixed. Style is the deeply personal, almost
biological history of the writer. It's their
personal unconscious, their idiosyncrasies, the
rhythm of their body. So it's not something you
choose. It's something that you are. Precisely.
So neither of these can be purely creative or
original. They are imposed on the writer by society
on one hand and by their own personal history
on the other. Okay, so if language is a fixed
system and style is this fixed personal history,
where on... earth does creativity manage to sneak
in? What's left for the writer to actually do?
For Barthes, creativity resides in the form,
which he terms writing or literature. This writing
is the conscious, specific, ethical choice an
individual makes. So it's the how. It's the how.
It's how they choose to manipulate the existing
conventions of language and style to achieve
a particular desired and often political effect.
It's the writer's public commitment. their way
of presenting themselves to the world through
their work. This is fascinating to me because
he immediately identifies the major vulnerability
of this creative act. He says that unique act
of writing, that specific form, it's constantly
threatened. It is, and this is the tragic cycle
of it. Once a unique form is published and it
enters the public sphere, it risks being absorbed,
normalized, and eventually becoming a new convention
itself. Right. What was once radical becomes
the new cliche. Think of any literary movement.
Modernism, for example. What started as this
radical break eventually becomes just another
style taught in universities. Barthos realized
that this means creativity can't be a static
achievement. It has to be an ongoing, active
process of reaction and change against the normalization
of the previous form. Writing must constantly
destabilize itself to stay alive. This idea of
maintaining critical distance, of learning to
stand apart from the thing you're analyzing,
is so crucial to his whole project. And we see
it play out perfectly in his analysis of the
19th century historian Jules Michelet. Yes, his
work on Michelet is a great example of his method.
He approached Michelet not as a source of historical
truth, not as someone to learn from in the traditional
sense. But as an artifact of history. As an artifact,
exactly. He argued that the real lesson isn't
in believing Michelet's claims, which Barthas
often found flawed or ideologically skewed. The
real lesson is in maintaining that critical distance
and learning from his errors. That sounds completely
counterintuitive to traditional scholarship,
doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, usually you're looking
for the truth within the source. Why would focusing
on the flaws be more revealing? Because by understanding
how and why Michelet's interpretations were flawed,
you gain this profound insight into the unacknowledged
cultural frameworks, the prevailing ideologies
of his historical period. The error reviews the
system that shaped the thinking. Ah, so the mistake
is more valuable than the fact. In a way, yes.
The error tells you about the unseen assumptions
of an era, which is a much more valuable piece
of knowledge than just the objective facts alone.
So this is really the foundational belief that
defines Barthes' entire career. The role of art,
the role of critical thought, is to interrogate
the world, not just to explain it or justify
it, which is what he felt Michelet was doing.
Interrogate is the perfect word. And that's why
he praised avant -garde writing. Because its
obvious artificiality, as he put it, forces the
audience to maintain that objective distance.
It prevents the reader from passively consuming
the work as some kind of natural truth. It keeps
you awake. It keeps you critical. Exactly. And
this powerful intellectual tool of interrogation.
Well, it soon found its ideal application in
the booming consumer culture of the 1950s. That's
a perfect transition. Because Barthes' intellectual
evolution brought him to the Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique, the CNRS, in 1952.
And there, studying lexicology and sociology,
he really got the formalized methodology he needed
to apply this critical distance to the mundane,
everyday realities of the world. He was settling
into semiotics, the study of signs and symbols.
And this is where the mythology's essays come
from. which, for my money, is some of his most
accessible and enjoyable work. For seven years,
he was writing these acute, often very witty,
bimonthly essays for a magazine. And they were
later collected in 1957. The topics were just
delightfully unexpected. Professional wrestling,
soap powders, a specific model of car, a steak
and chips dinner. Things people didn't think
were worthy of serious analysis. At all. But
the genius of mythologies is that artists took
these specific, culturally saturated, yet seemingly
trivial objects and he interrogated them. He
wanted to expose how bourgeois society, the dominant,
you know, self -satisfied middle class, asserted
and, crucially, naturalized its own values through
these things. He showed that cultural signs are
never neutral. They are always, always performing
an ideological function, reinforcing the dominant
status quo. Always. So before we dive into his
specific examples, which are fantastic, we need
to spend a little time on the mechanism he developed,
the two levels of signification. Because once
you understand this semiotic layering, you can
decode basically anything in your world. Absolutely.
Think of this as a kind of linguistic sandwich.
The first level is the foundation. He calls it
the language object or the first order of signification.
Okay. This is the classic sign that you might
learn about in an intro class. It's the relationship
between a signifier. the material image or word
and a signified the concept it refers to and
together they create the sign which is the literal
meaning so the word rose is the signifier the
concept of the actual flower is the signified
exactly simple enough but barthas realized that
in modern consumer culture that entire first
order sign the rose itself then becomes the signifier
for a whole new system it becomes the building
block for something else precisely And that's
the metal language, or the second order of signification.
This is the language that we use to speak about
the first order, and this is where the myth operates.
The sign of the first order is taken, and it's
used to transmit a second order sign, a connotation,
which functions as a bourgeois cultural myth.
And the purpose of the myth is to take something
that is cultural, that's a choice, and make it
appear natural, God -given, inevitable. You've
nailed it. It makes ideology look like nature.
Let's apply this immediately using his own famous
examples. Let's start with wine. Okay, wine.
The first order is simple. Wine is a fermented
alcoholic beverage made from grapes. That is
the literal sign. But in France in the 1950s,
the bourgeoisie adopted this sign and related
it to a new signified. The cultural myth. The
myth promoted wine as this essential, robust,
healthy, daily habit, something integral to the
French identity and physical strength. A working
man drinks his wine. Exactly. And the ideological
function of that myth. Well, it conveniently
glosses over the uncomfortable realities of wine.
That it's a drug, that it can lead to ill health,
alcoholism, social problems. It neutralizes all
of that by turning it into a naturalistic truth.
Of course, a working Frenchman drinks wine. The
bourgeois value system asserts its control. It
masks the reality and it diffuses any potential
critique before it can even start. It's so powerful.
And he connects these ideas directly to Marxist
concepts, doesn't he? He sees these everyday
objects as tools of ideological reproduction,
of commodity fetishism. Absolutely. Think about
his analysis of the Citroen car, which he saw
as the ultimate expression of this in the 50s.
The Citroen DS, specifically. A beautiful car.
A beautiful, almost futuristic -looking car for
the time. The first order sign is simple. It's
a vehicle, a functional tool for transport. But
Bartha saw that the myth transformed it into
something else entirely, something much bigger.
He interpreted it not just as a car, but as a
modern cathedral. Yes. It symbolized the fetishization
of consumer goods. People weren't just buying
transportation. They were buying a piece of technological
perfection, a kind of sacred object that had
replaced the spiritual in a consumer society.
So the physical form of the car, the clean lines,
the smooth surfaces, that was a signifier. Loaded
with the signified of absolute modernity and
almost divine engineering. And all of that was
masking the reality that it was, at the end of
the day, a commercial product designed to make
money for a corporation. And sometimes the ideological
message is far more subtle. Even sinister. Let's
talk about the magazine cover example. A black
soldier in a French military uniform saluting
the French flag. A very famous example. The literal
image is straightforward. A soldier performing
a duty. That's the first order sign. But the
metal language, the myth, takes hold instantly.
What's the myth here? It becomes this subtle,
powerful, yet non -explicit reinforcement of
French colonial ideology. It silently asserts
that the French empire is universally accepted,
that colonial subjects are happy, willing participants,
and that the national unity is organic and natural.
It asserts the status quo without ever having
to engage in an explicit political debate. It
just is. It presents a picture of harmony that
erases all the violence and oppression of colonialism.
Exactly. Its ideology laundered through a seemingly
innocent image. I have to pause here because...
This level of dissection, it sounds like a huge
amount of work. And he was applying this to everything,
even professional wrestling. Oh, the wrestling
essay is fantastic. It's a great example of his
wit. He analyzed wrestling as a spectacle that
openly performs the idea of good versus evil.
Yes. He noted that unlike boxing, which is about
trying to find a winner in a contest of skill,
wrestling is about the spectacle of excess. It's
an exercise in social justice where the villain
is punished and the hero is validated. So it
satisfies a moral need in the audience. Precisely.
The ideological myth being consumed is not about
sport. It's about the performative clarity of
morality. In a confusing world, here is good,
here is evil, and evil gets its comeopance. It's
a comforting narrative. So it's this constant
work of demystification. But here is the deep
irony that the critique eventually points to.
If Barthas was so effective at decoding bourgeois
culture, did he feel successful in this project?
quite the opposite actually this is one of the
most interesting parts of his intellectual journey
Barthas noted, with a real touch of melancholy,
that mythologies itself became absorbed into
the very bourgeois culture it was critiquing.
How so? He became a celebrity intellectual. He
was the guy you'd get to comment on the latest
cultural fad. He felt people were less interested
in a genuine societal critique and more interested
in his ability to control his readership, treating
his demystification as just another cool intellectual
consumer product. So his critique became a new
myth, the myth of the brilliant critic. Exactly.
And this crisis drove him deeper. It made him
question the whole utility of demystifying culture.
If the myths simply mutate to absorb the critique.
He took this same semiotic methodology and applied
it to other complex systems, famously in the
fashion system. He showed how signs, even abstract
concepts, could be adulterated and weaponized
just by translating them into words. This is
a really sophisticated point about linguistic
corruption. He showed that fashion magazines
don't just show you images of clothes, they tell
you what the images mean, and that language is
completely loaded. Give us an example. Okay,
so if the fashion system dictates that a blouse
is the ideal item for the spring season, that
idea is immediately presented and naturalized
as an objective truth. Even though the word blouse
is totally interchangeable with vest or skirt
in a purely linguistic sense, there's nothing
inherently spring -like about the word itself.
Nothing at all. But the linguistic sign, the
word blouse, gets loaded with this idealistic
bourgeois emphasis. The word becomes the vehicle
for the myth, turning a simple article of clothing
into an ideological statement about taste, class,
and modernity. It's a system where signs are
transformed into mandatory idealized language.
So moving into the early 1960s, Barthes then
started applying structuralism not just to objects
but to the very structure of fiction itself.
Yeah. He was looking to formalize the discourse
of literature, viewing narrative almost along
linguistic lines. Yes. He wanted to find a deep
correspondence between the structure of a single
sentence and the structure of a full story. He
broke narrative down into three hierarchical
levels, moving from the smallest possible unit
of meaning. all the way up to the whole okay
let's break down those three levels this sounds
like it gets pretty technical but it's important
for understanding his rigor it is the most fundamental
level is what he called the functions these are
the elementary indivisible descriptive pieces
a single word a basic descriptive unit for example
if we're reading a story a function might just
be the word dark it's just dark okay so then
those functions integrate to form the second
level The actions. The actions are the characters
or the structural elements that are formed by
integrating those functions. So if you combine
functions like dark plus mysterious plus cloaked
plus uncommunicative, you create the action of,
say, the mysterious stranger. I see. It's like
building with Lego bricks. The functions are
the individual bricks. The actions are the little
models you build with them. That's a great analogy.
And finally, those actions, those little models,
combine to form the overarching narrative, the
overall structure of the story. And what was
the goal of all this? Why break it down so meticulously?
His goal was purely analytical. By breaking the
work down this way, he felt he could rigorously
evaluate the degree of realism with which a narrative
was constructed, how authentically the functions
were combined to form the actions, and thus,
how genuinely the narrative reflected reality.
So it was another tool to dissect those misleading,
naturalizing mechanisms of bourgeois culture,
but this time embedded in the very DNA of storytelling
itself. That's it. He was trying to build a perfect,
scientifically objective microscope for cultural
critique. That's a perfect metaphor for it. He
wanted total objectivity, but that rigorous,
almost clinical structuralist position. It inevitably
led to friction with the literary establishment,
particularly the old guard at the Sorbonne. A
huge amount of friction. This sets up the famous
intellectual confrontation with Raymond Picard,
who was a very highly respected Sorbonne professor.
Picard launched a very public, very pointed attack
on Barthes and others, lumping them together
and labeling them French New Criticism. And Picard's
attack was what? That they were being too obscure?
It was deeply conservative. He accused this new
critical movement of being obscure, jargon -laden,
and just disrespectful of the deep established
roots of French literary tradition. He was essentially
defending the authority of the traditional interpretation
of literature, the one true meaning approach.
And Bartha's response, which was a book called
Criticism and Truth in 1966, was, well, it was
scathing. He didn't just defend himself. He went
on the offense. He absolutely did. He argued
that the old bourgeois criticism the kind Picard
championed was guilty of actively avoiding the
finer points of language, of structure, of meaning.
He basically said they were lazy. And he also
accused them of deliberately ignoring challenging
modern theories, right? Specifically, Marxism.
Yes, because those theories made the comfortably
entrenched establishment uncomfortable. Barthas
saw traditional criticism as just another tool
of the doxa, another way of protecting the established
intellectual status quo. This conflict really
highlights the key intellectual turn that was
brewing in the late 1960s. Barthas and other
structuralists were already starting to encounter
the limits of their own closed scientific systems.
And that was largely thanks to the emerging post
-structuralist critiques. especially from thinkers
like Jacques Derrida. This is what we now call
the crisis of the transcendental signifier. It's
a mouthful, but it's a crucial concept. Let's
unpack it. Structuralism relies on the idea of
a stable, self -contained system, right? Yes.
But Derrida argued that every structuralist system,
whether it's analyzing language or narrative
or culture, implicitly relies on a transcendental
signifier. This is a mythical symbol of constant
universal meaning that acts as an orienting outside
point of reference. So it's the universal truth,
the permanent anchor that grounds the entire
system of meaning, God, truth. Justice. Something
outside the system that gives the system its
meaning. Exactly. And the poststructuralists,
led by Derrida, said that anchor doesn't exist.
Since there are no symbols of constant universal
significance outside the system itself, the entire
premise of structuralism as a closed system for
objective evaluation is inherently flawed. It's
hollow. That sounds like a philosophical earthquake
for someone like Barthas, who just spent the
last decade trying to build that perfect objective
system of analysis. It was a huge earthquake.
But Barthes was self -critical enough to recognize
the truth in this critique. He realized his pursuit
of rigor had led him into another kind of closed
system, another trap. And this spurred his transitional
thinking, a move away from the idea of closure
and toward radical openness and decentralization.
And a crucial catalyst for this transitional
phase was his 1966 trip to Japan, which produced
the book Empire of Signs in 1970. I find it so
fascinating that the moment he starts seeing
the limits of Western system building, he looks
east. Was he searching for a cultural antidote
to structuralism? In many ways, yes. Barthas
saw Japanese culture as fundamentally comfortable
existing without the Western metaphysical need
for a universal reference point, without that
elusive transcendental signifier. What did that
look like in practice? He interpreted Japan as
a culture that embraced signifiers without feeling
this constant overwhelming obligation to load
them with immense hidden ideological signifies.
The signs could just be signs. And he used a
powerful geographical observation to encapsulate
this feeling, didn't he? He did. He noted that
the center of Tokyo, the location of the emperor's
palace, is not this overbearing monumental entity
that dictates the meaning of everything around
it, like, say, the Vatican in Rome. Right. It
is, by contrast, a silent and nondescript presence
avoided and unconsidered. It's an empty center.
It holds no ultimate meaning for the rest of
the city. And the resulting insight from that
observation? The insight was that signs in Japan,
Barthes felt, could exist simply for their own
merit. They retained only the significance naturally
imbued by their signifiers. This stood in direct,
radical contrast to the highly layered, myth
-saturated Western world he had devoted mythologies
to dissecting a world obsessed with forcing meaning
onto every empty space. This intellectual freedom
of the sign, this empty center, it pointed Barthas
toward his most influential and radical conclusion
back home. It absolutely did. And here is where
it gets really interesting, culminating in his
best known, most controversial and paradigm shifting
essay, The Death of the Author, which he published
in 1967. This essay is the logical consequence
of everything we've just talked about. The crisis
of the transcendental signifier, the observation
of the empty center, it all leads here. Barthes
launched a direct assault on the traditional
concept of the author. Meaning the author with
a capital A? The author with a capital A. That
isolated, brilliant genius whose intentions,
whose biography, whose personal psychology supposedly
dictates the one true, ultimate meaning of a
text. And why did he find this concept so problematic?
So bourgeois. He argued that traditional authorial
authority is a forced projection of ultimate
finalized meaning. If you assume the author is
the final arbiter of what a text means, then
you can infer an ultimate, contained, consumable
explanation for the work. So it's about closure.
Yeah. About finding the right answer. It's all
about closure. And Barthas argues that this concept
of the knowable text is a delusion of Western
bourgeois culture. And what's the function of
that delusion? Why do we cling to it? It makes
literature standardized. It allows a text to
be studied, summarized, standardized, and ultimately
made consumable in a capitalist market. Once
you've known the author's intent, the text can
be shelved, its meaning fixed, and it can be
replaced and sold again. It turns a living text
into a sealed commodity. But wait a minute. I
mean, the obvious pushback here is if you remove
the author's intent, doesn't that risk turning
great literature or any text into just arbitrary
noise? Surely, if the reader creates all the
meaning, then anything goes. That's the common
critique, and it's a fair question. But Barthas
addresses it by shifting the focus entirely from
creation to combination. His radical conclusion
is built on two facts. First, that language itself
is a vast, uncontrollable proliferation of meaning.
And second, that the author's mind is fundamentally
unknowable. So any ultimate fixed realization
of meaning is impossible anyway. So the author,
that figure of ultimate genius, is just an obsolete
concept. Obsolete. And in its place, he gives
us what he called the scripter. What's the difference?
The scripter is not a genius creating from nothing.
The scripter is a contemporary figure who merely
combines pre -existing elements, other texts.
cultural norms conventions previous signs in
new and interesting ways so they aren't creating
ex nihilo not at all they are assembling think
of it less as a painter inventing a new color
and more like a dj mixing existing tracks the
scripter is simply the place where language culture
and history pass through and are reconfigured
so the author is dead the scripter is just a
facilitator which means the ultimate power shifts
completely it becomes resident not in the person
who put the words down but in the person who
picks them up. Precisely. And this is Barthas'
most famous line, the one that crystallizes this
entire intellectual revolution. The death of
the author is the birth of the reader. The power
to realize or to create meaning seeks entirely
to you, the consumer of the text. The birth of
the reader. That means we, as readers, are now
actively engaged in production, not just passive
consumption. Barthes immediately set out to prove
this theoretically, didn't he? He wanted to demonstrate
how the reader could actively create meaning
through textual analysis. He did. He did this
in his incredibly dense, methodical, almost overwhelming
work, S .Z., published in 1970. This book was
an exhaustive, critical reading of a novella
by Honoré de Balzac called Saracene. And he put
his old structuralist rigor to work one last
time. But this time... with a post -structuralist
goal. Exactly. He used this intense methodology
involving five major codes for determining significance.
Things like the proeretic code, which tracks
the sequence of actions, or the hermeneutic code,
which follows the riddles and puzzles in the
story. But what made it so unique was the concept
of thelexia. Thelexia, yes. Alexia is an arbitrarily
chosen unit of text. It could be a sentence or
even just a fragment of a sentence. He chose
them specifically to remain methodologically
unbiased, and he broke Balzac's novella down
into 561. of these units. 561. That is thorough.
It's unbelievably thorough. And then he applied
his five codes to each and every one of them.
So what was the grand revelation after this exhaustive
microscopic analysis? What did he find? He found
that even in a highly celebrated text like Saracen,
there were significant restrictions. particularly
in sequential elements like a rigid timeline
and a very clear narrative causality. And these
restrictions, he argued, limited the reader's
freedom of interpretation. They closed down the
possibilities for meaning. They did. And this
finding led him to define the ideal text not
by its success in accurately reflecting reality,
but by its reversibility, its openness to the
greatest variety of independent, productive interpretations
by the reader. And this is where we need to nail
down the two. two terms that became Barthes'
most enduring legacy for literary studies, the
readerly text and the writerly text. These are
essential tools for understanding the intellectual
freedom a text allows you. Absolutely essential.
So the readerly text, or text lisible, is the
text that requires the reader to be passive.
You merely locate a ready -made meaning that's
been planted there for you. It's a consumption
model. It is. Barthes noted that these texts
are controlled by the principle of non -contradiction.
They're neat, they're resolved, they're predictable.
And crucially, they do not disturb the doxa.
Okay, let's pause on the doxa again. This is
that Barthesian term for the collective, unacknowledged
system of cultural meaning. The common sense
or received wisdom that everyone just accepts
without question. Exactly. And readerly texts
reinforce the doxa. They're safe. They're comfortable.
Barth has described these as making up the enormous
mass of our literature. They are commodities,
like a cupboard where meanings are neatly shelved
and safeguarded. So a formulaic blockbuster movie
script or a conventional detective novel where
the solution is known and fixed from the start.
Perfect examples. They're easily consumed and
then put away. Conversely, then, the writerly
text or text scriptable is the ideal. How does
reading a writerly text feel different? It feels
like work in the best possible way. It demands
that the reader become a producer of the text.
It's an act of creative engagement. So if a readerly
text is a pre -cut jigsaw puzzle with only one
correct solution. A raterly text is a set of
Lego blocks that can be built in infinite ways.
It's resistant to classification. It avoids being
plasticized by some singular system, whether
that's a specific ideology, a genre, or even
a system of criticism. It's open to the infinite
play of the world. So we're talking about complex
poetry, fragmented fiction, texts that actively
defy any sense of narrative closure. Exactly.
The act of reading itself becomes a form of intellectual
work, a form of writing. But Barth has realized
that even his most rigorous critique in Ezi had
limitations. And the way mythologies was absorbed
into the bourgeois mainstream showed him how
difficult it was to generate lasting political
change through critique. This drove him to ask
a very profound question. Which was? If systemic
critique always fails, and if all language eventually
gets trapped by the doxa, where can true intellectual
freedom, a space of genuine non -alignment, actually
be found? That is the perfect philosophical bridge
to his next and perhaps most personal phase.
Barthes became intensely concerned with this
conflict between the doxa, that restrictive pigeonholing
language of popular culture and received truth,
and what he called the paradoxa, which open,
noncommittal and challenging language, language
that refuses to be pinned down. And he made a
surprising pivot looking at political discourse.
Despite its fundamentally anti -ideological stance,
Barthes felt that even Marxist theory could fall
into the doxitrap. He did. He argued that political
critique, regardless of its alignment left or
right, often uses violent language with assertive
meanings. By asserting a new definitive framework
of truth, it risked just replacing one closed
system with another. So it became culturally
assimilating, just swapping out one form of common
sense for a new, equally restrictive one. Precisely.
So his reaction to this realization that even
radical anti -ideology can become ideological
was to turn away from political systems entirely
and to focus on... something completely outside
the realm of both conservative society and militant
leftist thinking. Hedonism. Pleasure. The physical
experience of reading. Right, which resulted
in the pleasure of the text in 1975. This shift
represents a move toward the body and toward
subjectivity. The core concept here is jouissance,
which is more than just pleasure. He translated
it as bliss in reading, the ultimate cathartic
climax of the reading experience. And how is
this bliss achieved? What does it feel like?
It's that moment of profound textual immersion
where you become utterly lost within the text.
It's a sudden, unexpected rupture of your cultural
boundaries, the moment when the text strips away
your social identity, your history, your ideology.
So it's a loss of self. It's a complete loss
of self. And Barthas argued that this pure feeling
signifies an impact of reading that is experienced
outside the limiting social realm. It's free
from culturally associative language, and thus,
theoretically, it's neutral with regard to social
progress. It's an escape from the doxa through
pure, non -classifiable feeling. But the pursuit
of neutrality, of writing that avoids imposing
meaning or identity, was still very difficult
for him. He felt even his own past critical works
suffered from an incidental use of loaded associative
language. He was his own harshest critic. And
to solve this, he attempted to create a novelistic
rhetoric structured specifically to avoid asserting
definitive meaning. This resulted in a lover's
discourse. Fragments in 1977. The structure of
that book is so telling it's not a novel. It's
a collection of fictionalized reflections, fragments
of an unrequited lover who is seeking signs of
affection from their beloved. And the book exposes
the illusory myths that are inherent in that
pursuit of love. The lover is constantly projecting
an ideal, trying to assert his own false reality
onto the relationship. The fragmented form challenges
the reader's own views of the social constructs
of love, but it never asserts a definitive universal
theory of what love is. It maintains neutrality
by being purely descriptive of the search for
meaning, not the meaning itself. That's a beautiful
way to put it. And while he was exploring these
elusive, fragmented subjects, Barth has also
attempted to address the ancient philosophical
problem of the mind -body dualism, influenced
by his studies of Eastern thought. He specifically
critiqued European culture, arguing it was infected
by Western metaphysics, which always prioritizes
the mind and the spirit over the physical reality
of the self. His body theory emphasized the formation
of identity and the self through conscious bodily
cultivation rather than purely mental or spiritual
pursuits. It's a constant effort to question
the cultural scaffolding upon which we build
meaning. even the concept of the body itself.
Yes, he even felt the body was often treated
as a fashion word, providing the illusion of
a grounded philosophical discourse while remaining
ideologically loaded. His work was always a process
of peeling back layers. And that focus on the
physical self, the ultimate subject, leads us
directly to his final and most emotionally resonant
work. The complexity of Barthes' career moving
from the systems of the entire world to the fragments
of the individual self, all of it culminated
in Camera Lucida. published in 1980. This essay
is a profound shift. He narrows his analytical
lens from the vast cultural system to the highly
specific, subjective event of personal memory
and loss. The impetus for the book was absolutely
devastating. It was written in the aftermath
of the 1977 death of his mother, Henriette Barthes,
the woman with whom he had lived for 60 years.
It was a colossal blow. And the book is simultaneously
a rigorous essay on the metaphysics of photography
and a deeply personal meditation on photographs
of his mother. Though, tellingly, none of those
personal photographs are actually reproduced
in the published work. They remain private. They
remain his. Barthes had long been interested
in photography. He'd even critiqued its use back
in mythologies for how it could be used by bourgeois
culture to infer naturalistic truths, to make
ideology look like fact. But he retained this
belief that photography held a unique... almost
terrifying potential for presenting a completely
real existential representation of the world.
And in Camera Lucida, he develops his last great
conceptual dichotomy, studium and punctum. Okay,
let's delineate these clearly because they explain
so well why some images stick with us and others
just fade away. Okay, the studium is the first
layer of meaning. It is the obvious, symbolic,
cultural or general meaning of a photograph.
It's what the photographer intends to communicate.
It's the conscious cultural appreciation. It's
what you look at and intellectually understand.
So you look at an old family photo and the studium
is the clothing, the time period, the general
setting, the fact that it's a family. Right.
It's the context. The punctum, however, is what
penetrates that conscious understanding. It pierces
you. It pierces you. The punctum is that element
which is purely personal, subjective, and which
pierces the viewer. It's often a small, non -obvious
detail, a piece of jewelry, a smudge on the background,
an accidental gesture that jumps out and creates
an emotional response that is unique to you,
the individual viewer. It is entirely outside
the photographer's intention or the photo's general
message. It's the detail you can't rationalize
or explain away. Exactly. And Barthas was initially
troubled by this because he realized that when
he tried to communicate... the personal significance
of his mother's photographs to other people,
the punctum could be rationalized or simply removed
by the listener. It was too subjective to share.
So how did he solve that dilemma? The solution
he found, and the reason he focused on one specific
picture of his mother as a child, the famous
Winter Garden photo. was profound. He argued
that a picture creates this false illusion of
what is meaning, what is present right now, fixed
in time. But he said what was is a much more
accurate description of a photograph. And because
his mother, Henriette, had died, her childhood
photograph became stark, unbearable evidence
of what has ceased to be. It ceased to be an
objective anchor. It became a potent reminder
of the world's constant flux and the finality
of absence. That photograph wasn't a universal
truth for him. It was a uniquely subjective object
of grief. The recurrent feeling of loss he experienced
whenever he looked at it could not be removed
or rationalized by any cultural system or critical
framework. The punctum was the raw, unadulterated
pain of memory. It's truly a moving final work.
It brings his entire career's reflection on subjectivity,
science, and cultural society to bear on a single,
personal, profound expression of grief. It's
the ultimate counterpoint to the cultural analysis
of mythologies. It is. Sadly, his life was cut
short very shortly after his publication. On
February 25, 1980, while walking home near the
Collège de France, Barthes was knocked down by
a laundry van driver. He died a month later,
on March 26, from the resulting pulmonary complications.
And the depth of his personal loss, the devastating
effect of his mother's death was revealed even
further in a posthumous publication, the Journal
de Doi, or Mourning Diary, which came out in
2009. These were intimate notes he wrote from
the day after his mother's death until September
of 1979. The entries are intensely raw. They
reveal the profound, almost role reversal nature
of his grief. There's one quote that's just heartbreaking.
He wrote, quote, For months long I had been her
mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter. And
then, reflecting on the decades she dedicated
to supporting his difficult, demanding work,
he wrote, Before that, she had made herself transparent
so that I could write. The suffering was so immediate
and constant, he wrote, insisting, Do not say
mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in
mourning. I'm suffering. Which is such a Parthesian
statement. It's a refusal to let the doxa, even
the doxa of psychology, define his most personal
experience. His posthumous works also revealed
other facets of his highly private life. Incidents
from 1987 includes fragments from his erotic
diary, Soiree de Paris, and an earlier diary
detailing aspects of his sex life in Morocco.
And finally, his notes from a three -week trip
he took to China in 1974 with the literary journal
Tel Kual were published as Travels in China in
2012. And his observation there, after all these
years of dissecting Western myth, was the ultimate
Barthesian anti -mythological statement. He found
China not at all exotic, not at all disorienting.
Just a refusal of the Western expectation of
Oriental mystery. A total refusal. So what does
this extraordinary, restless intellectual journey
mean for us today? Roland Barthes' contribution
to structuralism, semiotics, post -structuralism.
It fundamentally redefined every field concerned
with representation and communication. Literature,
media analysis, photography, even computer science.
But I think his most unique and enduring legacy
is that he taught us how to constantly question
the system. Because of that continual adaptability
and self -critique, the very process of killing
off his own ideas when they became restrictive,
there is no canon of thought for others to rigidly
model themselves after. There is truly... No
Barthasism. He leaves us with tools, not dogma.
So to quickly recap the critical tools you've
gained today, remember the readerly text? The
text lisible. It's passive, forcing you to accept
ready -made meaning. It reinforces the doxa.
While the writerly text, the text scriptable,
is active. It makes you the producer of meaning.
It demands creative effort and resists closure.
And the old concept of the author, that ultimate
defining source of meaning, is obsolete. It's
replaced by the scripter, who simply combines
pre -existing texts, norms, and conventions.
The death of the author is your birth as the
reader. Barthas spent his entire life showing
us that every seemingly objective, harmless observation
about our culture, from the purity of laundry
soap to the structure of a novel, is in fact
an ideological narrative just waiting to be decoded.
He showed us the inherent danger of systems becoming
closed, whether they are cultural myths or academic
theories. He demonstrated that even the most
radical, scholarly, critical writing can eventually
be absorbed and neutralized by the doxo. And
that raises a final provocative thought for you
to chew on. If all of Barth's incredible work
could eventually be neutralized by the common
sense of the culture, how vigilant must you be
in questioning the hidden ideological messages
and the naturalistic truths that are being built
right now in your social media feed, in your
corporate training, or in the latest trend you
consume? The work of demystification is never
done. It is an active, ongoing, daily effort.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the extraordinary, courageous mind of Roland
Barthas. We'll see you next time.