WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.339 Welcome back to the deep dive. This is the place 00:00:02.339 --> 00:00:04.419 where we take the most complex, source -heavy, 00:00:04.480 --> 00:00:07.919 and influential ideas and really just distill 00:00:07.919 --> 00:00:09.669 them into the knowledge you need right now. And 00:00:09.669 --> 00:00:12.849 today we are cracking open a figure who, I mean, 00:00:12.869 --> 00:00:15.189 he didn't just analyze culture. He really gave 00:00:15.189 --> 00:00:18.149 us the fundamental toolkit to disassemble and 00:00:18.149 --> 00:00:20.789 understand the hidden rules of modern life. We're 00:00:20.789 --> 00:00:23.010 talking about Roland Barthes. Exactly. Barthes, 00:00:23.109 --> 00:00:26.609 who lived from 1915 to 1980, was just this towering 00:00:26.609 --> 00:00:30.070 figure in 20th century French thought. He's a 00:00:30.070 --> 00:00:32.729 philosopher, a literary theorist, a semiotician. 00:00:32.929 --> 00:00:35.329 He wore a lot of hats. He really did. And his 00:00:35.329 --> 00:00:37.450 work provides this incredible bridge between, 00:00:37.509 --> 00:00:40.039 you know, the very... very rigorous systems of 00:00:40.039 --> 00:00:42.420 structuralism and then the radical openness of 00:00:42.420 --> 00:00:44.619 what came after post -structuralism. He gave 00:00:44.619 --> 00:00:46.340 us the ability to look at something as simple 00:00:46.340 --> 00:00:49.679 as a magazine cover or a bowl of detergent and 00:00:49.679 --> 00:00:51.979 see the underlying ideology at play. The hidden 00:00:51.979 --> 00:00:54.060 messages. The hidden messages, exactly. And that 00:00:54.060 --> 00:00:56.299 is precisely our mission for you, the listener, 00:00:56.380 --> 00:00:58.799 today. We want to give you a clear chronological 00:00:58.799 --> 00:01:02.439 roadmap through Barth's really complex and... 00:01:03.159 --> 00:01:05.480 highly self -critical evolution. It's a fascinating 00:01:05.480 --> 00:01:07.900 journey. It is. We're going to trace his path 00:01:07.900 --> 00:01:11.120 from his early kind of defiant stance on literary 00:01:11.120 --> 00:01:14.000 convention all the way through his brilliant, 00:01:14.140 --> 00:01:16.680 sometimes playful critiques of modern myths. 00:01:16.879 --> 00:01:19.540 And then ultimately to his intensely personal 00:01:19.540 --> 00:01:23.019 and deeply moving final works, his meditations 00:01:23.019 --> 00:01:26.959 on photography and profound grief. It's a journey 00:01:26.959 --> 00:01:28.819 that really starts with dissecting the entire 00:01:28.819 --> 00:01:32.659 cultural system around us. And it ends by analyzing 00:01:32.659 --> 00:01:35.909 a single subjective tier. It's an incredible 00:01:35.909 --> 00:01:38.409 arc. And his reach is just immense. I mean, his 00:01:38.409 --> 00:01:42.049 ideas permeate fields so far beyond just literature. 00:01:42.129 --> 00:01:44.489 You see his influence in anthropology and visual 00:01:44.489 --> 00:01:46.790 theory, media studies. You can't escape him, 00:01:46.810 --> 00:01:48.769 really. You can't. And he was deeply embedded 00:01:48.769 --> 00:01:51.209 in that Parisian intellectual scene, primarily 00:01:51.209 --> 00:01:53.469 associated with institutions like the École des 00:01:53.469 --> 00:01:56.510 Outils d 'Ancien Social, the ISS, and then later 00:01:56.510 --> 00:01:58.849 the very prestigious Collège de France. He held 00:01:58.849 --> 00:02:00.769 the chair of literary semiology there. He did, 00:02:00.930 --> 00:02:03.150 which was a position created specifically for 00:02:03.150 --> 00:02:04.629 him. It shows you the kind of impact he had. 00:02:04.590 --> 00:02:07.189 had so to guide this deep dive we've flagged 00:02:07.189 --> 00:02:10.129 four essential intellectual milestones yeah if 00:02:10.129 --> 00:02:11.909 you want to understand barthes these are the 00:02:11.909 --> 00:02:14.650 concepts you need to anchor all right first we 00:02:14.650 --> 00:02:18.710 have writing degree zero from 1953 where he really 00:02:18.710 --> 00:02:21.789 challenges the nature of creativity itself Second, 00:02:22.050 --> 00:02:24.810 the famous collection Mythologies from 1957. 00:02:25.349 --> 00:02:27.969 That's the handbook for decoding cultural signs. 00:02:28.110 --> 00:02:30.069 The one everyone knows. That's the one. Third, 00:02:30.210 --> 00:02:32.430 the essay that truly shifted all the power in 00:02:32.430 --> 00:02:34.389 literature, The Death of the Author from 1967. 00:02:34.870 --> 00:02:38.849 And finally, his last masterful meditation, Camera 00:02:38.849 --> 00:02:41.669 Lucida from 1980. It's a perfect selection. It 00:02:41.669 --> 00:02:43.969 shows his entire intellectual trajectory. So 00:02:43.969 --> 00:02:46.210 let's dive in and see how a thinker could move 00:02:46.210 --> 00:02:48.409 from diagnosing the ills of an entire society 00:02:48.409 --> 00:02:51.960 to finding... Well, solace in a single photograph. 00:02:52.120 --> 00:02:54.400 Sounds good. Okay, so let's unpack the man before 00:02:54.400 --> 00:02:56.560 we get to the theory. I think with Barthas, you 00:02:56.560 --> 00:02:58.620 really can't separate the thinker from the person. 00:02:58.699 --> 00:03:00.659 His entire career, his whole perspective was 00:03:00.659 --> 00:03:04.159 so profoundly shaped by loss, by illness, and 00:03:04.159 --> 00:03:06.460 this incredibly powerful relationship he had 00:03:06.460 --> 00:03:08.750 with his mother. Absolutely. You have to start 00:03:08.750 --> 00:03:11.430 there. Roland Gerard Barthes was born in Cherbourg 00:03:11.430 --> 00:03:16.289 in 1915, and his very earliest years were defined 00:03:16.289 --> 00:03:19.409 by an immediate and profound absence. His father. 00:03:19.530 --> 00:03:21.870 His father, Louis Barthes. He was a naval officer, 00:03:21.990 --> 00:03:24.409 and he was killed in World War I before Roland 00:03:24.409 --> 00:03:27.229 even turned one year old. Wow. So this just established 00:03:27.229 --> 00:03:29.650 the foundational experience of his life, which 00:03:29.650 --> 00:03:31.909 was being raised solely by strong maternal figures, 00:03:32.189 --> 00:03:35.569 his mother, Henriette Barthes, his aunt, and 00:03:35.569 --> 00:03:38.210 his grandmother. That was his world. And he grew 00:03:38.210 --> 00:03:40.409 up in the French provinces, right? They only 00:03:40.409 --> 00:03:43.430 moved to Paris later in 1924. They did. But even 00:03:43.430 --> 00:03:45.669 when he was in Paris, you know, the intellectual 00:03:45.669 --> 00:03:48.629 center of the world, those provincial roots remained 00:03:48.629 --> 00:03:51.189 incredibly important to his identity. He always 00:03:51.189 --> 00:03:53.590 had a bit of an outsider's perspective. And that 00:03:53.590 --> 00:03:55.909 sense of being slightly outside the establishment. 00:03:56.030 --> 00:03:58.669 Yeah. That was only intensified by years of just. 00:03:59.299 --> 00:04:02.139 debilitating illness. Yes, tuberculosis. He was 00:04:02.139 --> 00:04:05.180 accepted to the Sorbonne in 1935 to study classical 00:04:05.180 --> 00:04:07.759 literature, but his academic path was just repeatedly 00:04:07.759 --> 00:04:10.319 and severely disrupted by the illness. And we're 00:04:10.319 --> 00:04:12.319 not talking about just, you know, a minor setback 00:04:12.319 --> 00:04:14.639 here. This was a nine -year period, wasn't it? 00:04:14.659 --> 00:04:18.910 Spanning from 1939 to 1948. A huge chunk of his 00:04:18.910 --> 00:04:21.689 young adult life. His life was punctuated by 00:04:21.689 --> 00:04:23.990 these repeated physical breakdowns and these 00:04:23.990 --> 00:04:26.990 very long periods of isolation and sanatoria. 00:04:27.050 --> 00:04:28.829 That has to change a person. It's a defining 00:04:28.829 --> 00:04:31.589 experience. I mean, this recurring health struggle 00:04:31.589 --> 00:04:33.889 meant he couldn't complete the necessary qualifying 00:04:33.889 --> 00:04:37.589 exams for a standard academic career path. OK. 00:04:37.790 --> 00:04:40.790 And significantly, it also exempted him from 00:04:40.790 --> 00:04:43.970 military service during World War Two. So while 00:04:43.970 --> 00:04:45.930 his peers are having this collective national 00:04:45.930 --> 00:04:48.470 experience. he's isolated. He's on the sidelines 00:04:48.470 --> 00:04:50.990 observing. He's always observing. He managed 00:04:50.990 --> 00:04:53.110 to publish early papers and he completed his 00:04:53.110 --> 00:04:55.990 MA equivalent thesis on Greek tragedy in 1941. 00:04:56.290 --> 00:04:58.089 But those years were just characterized by this 00:04:58.089 --> 00:05:01.089 necessary distance and introspection. That isolation, 00:05:01.129 --> 00:05:03.589 I think, surely contributed to his later ability 00:05:03.589 --> 00:05:05.569 to stand apart from convention and just critically 00:05:05.569 --> 00:05:08.129 observe the world. So his path to becoming this 00:05:08.129 --> 00:05:10.750 intellectual giant was anything but typical. 00:05:11.709 --> 00:05:14.269 After 1948, he's taking these temporary positions, 00:05:14.589 --> 00:05:17.810 teaching in places as diverse as, what, France, 00:05:17.910 --> 00:05:20.689 Romania, Egypt. Constantly moving, never quite 00:05:20.689 --> 00:05:23.250 settling. And it was his contributions to the 00:05:23.250 --> 00:05:26.170 leftist Parisian paper combat that really became 00:05:26.170 --> 00:05:28.310 the crucible for his first full -length work, 00:05:28.470 --> 00:05:31.819 writing Degree Zero. which dropped in 1953. And 00:05:31.819 --> 00:05:34.600 writing Degree Zero is his first major intellectual 00:05:34.600 --> 00:05:38.000 intervention. It's a direct response to the dominant 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.879 philosophical movement of the time, existentialism, 00:05:40.939 --> 00:05:43.839 and specifically to figures like Jean -Paul Sartre. 00:05:43.920 --> 00:05:46.399 Right. Sartre had written What Is Literature? 00:05:46.459 --> 00:05:50.500 in 1947. He had. And in it, Sartre had expressed 00:05:50.500 --> 00:05:53.079 this kind of frustration, a disenchantment with 00:05:53.079 --> 00:05:55.040 both the traditional established forms of writing 00:05:55.040 --> 00:05:57.899 and the experimental avant -garde work. He felt 00:05:57.899 --> 00:06:00.459 both had become sort of alienated from any real 00:06:00.459 --> 00:06:03.220 political meaning. So Barthes jumps right into 00:06:03.220 --> 00:06:04.860 this debate and he asks this really fundamental 00:06:04.860 --> 00:06:08.899 question. Is true originality even possible when 00:06:08.899 --> 00:06:11.360 you sit down to write? And he establishes a very 00:06:11.360 --> 00:06:13.339 clear distinction to answer that question. It's 00:06:13.339 --> 00:06:15.610 a brilliant framework. Let's break it down. He 00:06:15.610 --> 00:06:18.089 argues that two components of writing are inherently 00:06:18.089 --> 00:06:21.490 unfree. You have no real choice over them. First, 00:06:21.670 --> 00:06:24.149 there's language. The system itself. The system 00:06:24.149 --> 00:06:28.230 itself. The grammar, the vocabulary. It's fixed. 00:06:28.350 --> 00:06:30.790 It's collective. You can't just invent a new 00:06:30.790 --> 00:06:32.670 language every time you write a book. You inherit 00:06:32.670 --> 00:06:35.350 it. Okay, that makes sense. And the second thing. 00:06:35.509 --> 00:06:38.329 The second is style. And for Barthez, style is 00:06:38.329 --> 00:06:41.829 also fixed. Style is the deeply personal, almost 00:06:41.829 --> 00:06:44.810 biological history of the writer. It's their 00:06:44.810 --> 00:06:47.089 personal unconscious, their idiosyncrasies, the 00:06:47.089 --> 00:06:49.050 rhythm of their body. So it's not something you 00:06:49.050 --> 00:06:51.410 choose. It's something that you are. Precisely. 00:06:51.410 --> 00:06:53.790 So neither of these can be purely creative or 00:06:53.790 --> 00:06:56.930 original. They are imposed on the writer by society 00:06:56.930 --> 00:06:59.310 on one hand and by their own personal history 00:06:59.310 --> 00:07:01.670 on the other. Okay, so if language is a fixed 00:07:01.670 --> 00:07:04.829 system and style is this fixed personal history, 00:07:05.029 --> 00:07:08.629 where on... earth does creativity manage to sneak 00:07:08.629 --> 00:07:11.410 in? What's left for the writer to actually do? 00:07:11.649 --> 00:07:14.250 For Barthes, creativity resides in the form, 00:07:14.350 --> 00:07:18.310 which he terms writing or literature. This writing 00:07:18.310 --> 00:07:21.389 is the conscious, specific, ethical choice an 00:07:21.389 --> 00:07:24.089 individual makes. So it's the how. It's the how. 00:07:24.290 --> 00:07:26.550 It's how they choose to manipulate the existing 00:07:26.550 --> 00:07:29.189 conventions of language and style to achieve 00:07:29.189 --> 00:07:31.750 a particular desired and often political effect. 00:07:32.009 --> 00:07:34.480 It's the writer's public commitment. their way 00:07:34.480 --> 00:07:36.180 of presenting themselves to the world through 00:07:36.180 --> 00:07:38.199 their work. This is fascinating to me because 00:07:38.199 --> 00:07:41.220 he immediately identifies the major vulnerability 00:07:41.220 --> 00:07:44.079 of this creative act. He says that unique act 00:07:44.079 --> 00:07:47.680 of writing, that specific form, it's constantly 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:50.170 threatened. It is, and this is the tragic cycle 00:07:50.170 --> 00:07:52.629 of it. Once a unique form is published and it 00:07:52.629 --> 00:07:55.329 enters the public sphere, it risks being absorbed, 00:07:55.670 --> 00:07:58.629 normalized, and eventually becoming a new convention 00:07:58.629 --> 00:08:01.730 itself. Right. What was once radical becomes 00:08:01.730 --> 00:08:04.189 the new cliche. Think of any literary movement. 00:08:04.589 --> 00:08:06.990 Modernism, for example. What started as this 00:08:06.990 --> 00:08:08.990 radical break eventually becomes just another 00:08:08.990 --> 00:08:11.769 style taught in universities. Barthos realized 00:08:11.769 --> 00:08:13.910 that this means creativity can't be a static 00:08:13.910 --> 00:08:16.670 achievement. It has to be an ongoing, active 00:08:16.670 --> 00:08:19.649 process of reaction and change against the normalization 00:08:19.649 --> 00:08:22.790 of the previous form. Writing must constantly 00:08:22.790 --> 00:08:26.079 destabilize itself to stay alive. This idea of 00:08:26.079 --> 00:08:28.759 maintaining critical distance, of learning to 00:08:28.759 --> 00:08:30.600 stand apart from the thing you're analyzing, 00:08:30.839 --> 00:08:34.340 is so crucial to his whole project. And we see 00:08:34.340 --> 00:08:36.419 it play out perfectly in his analysis of the 00:08:36.419 --> 00:08:39.580 19th century historian Jules Michelet. Yes, his 00:08:39.580 --> 00:08:41.840 work on Michelet is a great example of his method. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:44.899 He approached Michelet not as a source of historical 00:08:44.899 --> 00:08:47.820 truth, not as someone to learn from in the traditional 00:08:47.820 --> 00:08:50.480 sense. But as an artifact of history. As an artifact, 00:08:50.620 --> 00:08:53.750 exactly. He argued that the real lesson isn't 00:08:53.750 --> 00:08:56.129 in believing Michelet's claims, which Barthas 00:08:56.129 --> 00:08:59.250 often found flawed or ideologically skewed. The 00:08:59.250 --> 00:09:01.429 real lesson is in maintaining that critical distance 00:09:01.429 --> 00:09:04.309 and learning from his errors. That sounds completely 00:09:04.309 --> 00:09:06.129 counterintuitive to traditional scholarship, 00:09:06.250 --> 00:09:07.750 doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, usually you're looking 00:09:07.750 --> 00:09:10.269 for the truth within the source. Why would focusing 00:09:10.269 --> 00:09:13.120 on the flaws be more revealing? Because by understanding 00:09:13.120 --> 00:09:16.059 how and why Michelet's interpretations were flawed, 00:09:16.240 --> 00:09:19.379 you gain this profound insight into the unacknowledged 00:09:19.379 --> 00:09:22.379 cultural frameworks, the prevailing ideologies 00:09:22.379 --> 00:09:25.519 of his historical period. The error reviews the 00:09:25.519 --> 00:09:28.659 system that shaped the thinking. Ah, so the mistake 00:09:28.659 --> 00:09:31.320 is more valuable than the fact. In a way, yes. 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:34.139 The error tells you about the unseen assumptions 00:09:34.139 --> 00:09:36.539 of an era, which is a much more valuable piece 00:09:36.539 --> 00:09:39.120 of knowledge than just the objective facts alone. 00:09:39.480 --> 00:09:41.759 So this is really the foundational belief that 00:09:41.759 --> 00:09:45.659 defines Barthes' entire career. The role of art, 00:09:45.740 --> 00:09:48.519 the role of critical thought, is to interrogate 00:09:48.519 --> 00:09:51.200 the world, not just to explain it or justify 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:53.379 it, which is what he felt Michelet was doing. 00:09:53.779 --> 00:09:55.860 Interrogate is the perfect word. And that's why 00:09:55.860 --> 00:09:58.720 he praised avant -garde writing. Because its 00:09:58.720 --> 00:10:01.279 obvious artificiality, as he put it, forces the 00:10:01.279 --> 00:10:03.519 audience to maintain that objective distance. 00:10:03.879 --> 00:10:06.139 It prevents the reader from passively consuming 00:10:06.139 --> 00:10:08.559 the work as some kind of natural truth. It keeps 00:10:08.559 --> 00:10:10.639 you awake. It keeps you critical. Exactly. And 00:10:10.639 --> 00:10:13.019 this powerful intellectual tool of interrogation. 00:10:13.120 --> 00:10:16.100 Well, it soon found its ideal application in 00:10:16.100 --> 00:10:19.080 the booming consumer culture of the 1950s. That's 00:10:19.080 --> 00:10:21.519 a perfect transition. Because Barthes' intellectual 00:10:21.519 --> 00:10:23.960 evolution brought him to the Centre National 00:10:23.960 --> 00:10:28.320 de la Recherche Scientifique, the CNRS, in 1952. 00:10:28.700 --> 00:10:31.500 And there, studying lexicology and sociology, 00:10:31.879 --> 00:10:34.679 he really got the formalized methodology he needed 00:10:34.679 --> 00:10:37.179 to apply this critical distance to the mundane, 00:10:37.220 --> 00:10:39.860 everyday realities of the world. He was settling 00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:43.039 into semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. 00:10:43.340 --> 00:10:45.379 And this is where the mythology's essays come 00:10:45.379 --> 00:10:48.480 from. which, for my money, is some of his most 00:10:48.480 --> 00:10:51.440 accessible and enjoyable work. For seven years, 00:10:51.519 --> 00:10:53.820 he was writing these acute, often very witty, 00:10:53.879 --> 00:10:58.269 bimonthly essays for a magazine. And they were 00:10:58.269 --> 00:11:00.950 later collected in 1957. The topics were just 00:11:00.950 --> 00:11:03.309 delightfully unexpected. Professional wrestling, 00:11:03.509 --> 00:11:05.870 soap powders, a specific model of car, a steak 00:11:05.870 --> 00:11:07.509 and chips dinner. Things people didn't think 00:11:07.509 --> 00:11:10.269 were worthy of serious analysis. At all. But 00:11:10.269 --> 00:11:12.570 the genius of mythologies is that artists took 00:11:12.570 --> 00:11:15.110 these specific, culturally saturated, yet seemingly 00:11:15.110 --> 00:11:18.190 trivial objects and he interrogated them. He 00:11:18.190 --> 00:11:21.029 wanted to expose how bourgeois society, the dominant, 00:11:21.129 --> 00:11:23.509 you know, self -satisfied middle class, asserted 00:11:23.509 --> 00:11:26.450 and, crucially, naturalized its own values through 00:11:26.450 --> 00:11:29.149 these things. He showed that cultural signs are 00:11:29.149 --> 00:11:33.250 never neutral. They are always, always performing 00:11:33.250 --> 00:11:36.049 an ideological function, reinforcing the dominant 00:11:36.049 --> 00:11:39.210 status quo. Always. So before we dive into his 00:11:39.210 --> 00:11:41.889 specific examples, which are fantastic, we need 00:11:41.889 --> 00:11:43.909 to spend a little time on the mechanism he developed, 00:11:44.090 --> 00:11:47.269 the two levels of signification. Because once 00:11:47.269 --> 00:11:49.929 you understand this semiotic layering, you can 00:11:49.929 --> 00:11:52.149 decode basically anything in your world. Absolutely. 00:11:52.210 --> 00:11:54.429 Think of this as a kind of linguistic sandwich. 00:11:54.990 --> 00:11:57.029 The first level is the foundation. He calls it 00:11:57.029 --> 00:11:59.889 the language object or the first order of signification. 00:11:59.909 --> 00:12:01.950 Okay. This is the classic sign that you might 00:12:01.950 --> 00:12:04.289 learn about in an intro class. It's the relationship 00:12:04.289 --> 00:12:07.679 between a signifier. the material image or word 00:12:07.679 --> 00:12:10.820 and a signified the concept it refers to and 00:12:10.820 --> 00:12:13.259 together they create the sign which is the literal 00:12:13.259 --> 00:12:16.139 meaning so the word rose is the signifier the 00:12:16.139 --> 00:12:18.399 concept of the actual flower is the signified 00:12:18.399 --> 00:12:21.480 exactly simple enough but barthas realized that 00:12:21.480 --> 00:12:23.759 in modern consumer culture that entire first 00:12:23.759 --> 00:12:27.399 order sign the rose itself then becomes the signifier 00:12:27.399 --> 00:12:29.740 for a whole new system it becomes the building 00:12:29.740 --> 00:12:32.620 block for something else precisely And that's 00:12:32.620 --> 00:12:35.639 the metal language, or the second order of signification. 00:12:35.720 --> 00:12:37.840 This is the language that we use to speak about 00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:39.580 the first order, and this is where the myth operates. 00:12:39.840 --> 00:12:42.240 The sign of the first order is taken, and it's 00:12:42.240 --> 00:12:45.580 used to transmit a second order sign, a connotation, 00:12:45.580 --> 00:12:48.320 which functions as a bourgeois cultural myth. 00:12:48.539 --> 00:12:50.860 And the purpose of the myth is to take something 00:12:50.860 --> 00:12:53.220 that is cultural, that's a choice, and make it 00:12:53.220 --> 00:12:56.100 appear natural, God -given, inevitable. You've 00:12:56.100 --> 00:12:58.279 nailed it. It makes ideology look like nature. 00:12:58.730 --> 00:13:00.889 Let's apply this immediately using his own famous 00:13:00.889 --> 00:13:03.649 examples. Let's start with wine. Okay, wine. 00:13:03.850 --> 00:13:06.289 The first order is simple. Wine is a fermented 00:13:06.289 --> 00:13:08.590 alcoholic beverage made from grapes. That is 00:13:08.590 --> 00:13:12.210 the literal sign. But in France in the 1950s, 00:13:12.210 --> 00:13:14.629 the bourgeoisie adopted this sign and related 00:13:14.629 --> 00:13:17.769 it to a new signified. The cultural myth. The 00:13:17.769 --> 00:13:20.570 myth promoted wine as this essential, robust, 00:13:20.929 --> 00:13:24.309 healthy, daily habit, something integral to the 00:13:24.309 --> 00:13:26.970 French identity and physical strength. A working 00:13:26.970 --> 00:13:30.009 man drinks his wine. Exactly. And the ideological 00:13:30.009 --> 00:13:32.429 function of that myth. Well, it conveniently 00:13:32.429 --> 00:13:34.769 glosses over the uncomfortable realities of wine. 00:13:35.309 --> 00:13:37.929 That it's a drug, that it can lead to ill health, 00:13:38.070 --> 00:13:40.970 alcoholism, social problems. It neutralizes all 00:13:40.970 --> 00:13:43.429 of that by turning it into a naturalistic truth. 00:13:43.509 --> 00:13:45.809 Of course, a working Frenchman drinks wine. The 00:13:45.809 --> 00:13:48.649 bourgeois value system asserts its control. It 00:13:48.649 --> 00:13:51.450 masks the reality and it diffuses any potential 00:13:51.450 --> 00:13:54.190 critique before it can even start. It's so powerful. 00:13:54.309 --> 00:13:56.850 And he connects these ideas directly to Marxist 00:13:56.850 --> 00:13:59.309 concepts, doesn't he? He sees these everyday 00:13:59.309 --> 00:14:02.090 objects as tools of ideological reproduction, 00:14:02.389 --> 00:14:05.179 of commodity fetishism. Absolutely. Think about 00:14:05.179 --> 00:14:08.039 his analysis of the Citroen car, which he saw 00:14:08.039 --> 00:14:10.539 as the ultimate expression of this in the 50s. 00:14:10.559 --> 00:14:13.600 The Citroen DS, specifically. A beautiful car. 00:14:13.740 --> 00:14:15.980 A beautiful, almost futuristic -looking car for 00:14:15.980 --> 00:14:18.360 the time. The first order sign is simple. It's 00:14:18.360 --> 00:14:20.759 a vehicle, a functional tool for transport. But 00:14:20.759 --> 00:14:22.639 Bartha saw that the myth transformed it into 00:14:22.639 --> 00:14:24.720 something else entirely, something much bigger. 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:27.360 He interpreted it not just as a car, but as a 00:14:27.360 --> 00:14:31.379 modern cathedral. Yes. It symbolized the fetishization 00:14:31.379 --> 00:14:34.159 of consumer goods. People weren't just buying 00:14:34.159 --> 00:14:36.299 transportation. They were buying a piece of technological 00:14:36.299 --> 00:14:39.200 perfection, a kind of sacred object that had 00:14:39.200 --> 00:14:41.419 replaced the spiritual in a consumer society. 00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:44.159 So the physical form of the car, the clean lines, 00:14:44.259 --> 00:14:46.879 the smooth surfaces, that was a signifier. Loaded 00:14:46.879 --> 00:14:49.440 with the signified of absolute modernity and 00:14:49.440 --> 00:14:52.419 almost divine engineering. And all of that was 00:14:52.419 --> 00:14:54.919 masking the reality that it was, at the end of 00:14:54.919 --> 00:14:57.759 the day, a commercial product designed to make 00:14:57.759 --> 00:15:00.759 money for a corporation. And sometimes the ideological 00:15:00.759 --> 00:15:04.230 message is far more subtle. Even sinister. Let's 00:15:04.230 --> 00:15:06.169 talk about the magazine cover example. A black 00:15:06.169 --> 00:15:08.769 soldier in a French military uniform saluting 00:15:08.769 --> 00:15:11.889 the French flag. A very famous example. The literal 00:15:11.889 --> 00:15:14.649 image is straightforward. A soldier performing 00:15:14.649 --> 00:15:17.250 a duty. That's the first order sign. But the 00:15:17.250 --> 00:15:19.429 metal language, the myth, takes hold instantly. 00:15:19.730 --> 00:15:21.990 What's the myth here? It becomes this subtle, 00:15:22.110 --> 00:15:25.110 powerful, yet non -explicit reinforcement of 00:15:25.110 --> 00:15:28.779 French colonial ideology. It silently asserts 00:15:28.779 --> 00:15:30.740 that the French empire is universally accepted, 00:15:31.039 --> 00:15:34.259 that colonial subjects are happy, willing participants, 00:15:34.600 --> 00:15:37.379 and that the national unity is organic and natural. 00:15:37.620 --> 00:15:39.980 It asserts the status quo without ever having 00:15:39.980 --> 00:15:42.639 to engage in an explicit political debate. It 00:15:42.639 --> 00:15:45.279 just is. It presents a picture of harmony that 00:15:45.279 --> 00:15:47.700 erases all the violence and oppression of colonialism. 00:15:48.059 --> 00:15:51.639 Exactly. Its ideology laundered through a seemingly 00:15:51.639 --> 00:15:54.179 innocent image. I have to pause here because... 00:15:54.519 --> 00:15:57.320 This level of dissection, it sounds like a huge 00:15:57.320 --> 00:15:59.860 amount of work. And he was applying this to everything, 00:16:00.100 --> 00:16:02.139 even professional wrestling. Oh, the wrestling 00:16:02.139 --> 00:16:04.480 essay is fantastic. It's a great example of his 00:16:04.480 --> 00:16:07.440 wit. He analyzed wrestling as a spectacle that 00:16:07.440 --> 00:16:09.639 openly performs the idea of good versus evil. 00:16:09.779 --> 00:16:12.379 Yes. He noted that unlike boxing, which is about 00:16:12.379 --> 00:16:14.559 trying to find a winner in a contest of skill, 00:16:14.879 --> 00:16:18.139 wrestling is about the spectacle of excess. It's 00:16:18.139 --> 00:16:20.340 an exercise in social justice where the villain 00:16:20.340 --> 00:16:22.840 is punished and the hero is validated. So it 00:16:22.840 --> 00:16:25.600 satisfies a moral need in the audience. Precisely. 00:16:25.879 --> 00:16:28.820 The ideological myth being consumed is not about 00:16:28.820 --> 00:16:31.480 sport. It's about the performative clarity of 00:16:31.480 --> 00:16:34.840 morality. In a confusing world, here is good, 00:16:34.940 --> 00:16:37.860 here is evil, and evil gets its comeopance. It's 00:16:37.860 --> 00:16:40.200 a comforting narrative. So it's this constant 00:16:40.200 --> 00:16:43.279 work of demystification. But here is the deep 00:16:43.279 --> 00:16:45.600 irony that the critique eventually points to. 00:16:45.940 --> 00:16:49.139 If Barthas was so effective at decoding bourgeois 00:16:49.139 --> 00:16:53.019 culture, did he feel successful in this project? 00:16:53.559 --> 00:16:55.539 quite the opposite actually this is one of the 00:16:55.539 --> 00:16:57.620 most interesting parts of his intellectual journey 00:16:58.470 --> 00:17:01.090 Barthas noted, with a real touch of melancholy, 00:17:01.129 --> 00:17:03.330 that mythologies itself became absorbed into 00:17:03.330 --> 00:17:05.670 the very bourgeois culture it was critiquing. 00:17:05.670 --> 00:17:08.470 How so? He became a celebrity intellectual. He 00:17:08.470 --> 00:17:10.170 was the guy you'd get to comment on the latest 00:17:10.170 --> 00:17:12.650 cultural fad. He felt people were less interested 00:17:12.650 --> 00:17:15.490 in a genuine societal critique and more interested 00:17:15.490 --> 00:17:17.930 in his ability to control his readership, treating 00:17:17.930 --> 00:17:20.869 his demystification as just another cool intellectual 00:17:20.869 --> 00:17:23.470 consumer product. So his critique became a new 00:17:23.470 --> 00:17:26.450 myth, the myth of the brilliant critic. Exactly. 00:17:26.569 --> 00:17:29.170 And this crisis drove him deeper. It made him 00:17:29.170 --> 00:17:32.130 question the whole utility of demystifying culture. 00:17:32.390 --> 00:17:36.130 If the myths simply mutate to absorb the critique. 00:17:36.390 --> 00:17:39.190 He took this same semiotic methodology and applied 00:17:39.190 --> 00:17:41.509 it to other complex systems, famously in the 00:17:41.509 --> 00:17:44.630 fashion system. He showed how signs, even abstract 00:17:44.630 --> 00:17:47.309 concepts, could be adulterated and weaponized 00:17:47.309 --> 00:17:49.940 just by translating them into words. This is 00:17:49.940 --> 00:17:52.019 a really sophisticated point about linguistic 00:17:52.019 --> 00:17:54.480 corruption. He showed that fashion magazines 00:17:54.480 --> 00:17:57.079 don't just show you images of clothes, they tell 00:17:57.079 --> 00:17:59.400 you what the images mean, and that language is 00:17:59.400 --> 00:18:02.079 completely loaded. Give us an example. Okay, 00:18:02.119 --> 00:18:04.720 so if the fashion system dictates that a blouse 00:18:04.720 --> 00:18:07.420 is the ideal item for the spring season, that 00:18:07.420 --> 00:18:09.839 idea is immediately presented and naturalized 00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:12.329 as an objective truth. Even though the word blouse 00:18:12.329 --> 00:18:15.049 is totally interchangeable with vest or skirt 00:18:15.049 --> 00:18:17.809 in a purely linguistic sense, there's nothing 00:18:17.809 --> 00:18:20.769 inherently spring -like about the word itself. 00:18:21.029 --> 00:18:24.170 Nothing at all. But the linguistic sign, the 00:18:24.170 --> 00:18:26.869 word blouse, gets loaded with this idealistic 00:18:26.869 --> 00:18:29.750 bourgeois emphasis. The word becomes the vehicle 00:18:29.750 --> 00:18:32.549 for the myth, turning a simple article of clothing 00:18:32.549 --> 00:18:35.690 into an ideological statement about taste, class, 00:18:35.990 --> 00:18:39.240 and modernity. It's a system where signs are 00:18:39.240 --> 00:18:41.900 transformed into mandatory idealized language. 00:18:42.589 --> 00:18:45.789 So moving into the early 1960s, Barthes then 00:18:45.789 --> 00:18:48.390 started applying structuralism not just to objects 00:18:48.390 --> 00:18:50.349 but to the very structure of fiction itself. 00:18:50.730 --> 00:18:53.230 Yeah. He was looking to formalize the discourse 00:18:53.230 --> 00:18:55.930 of literature, viewing narrative almost along 00:18:55.930 --> 00:18:58.950 linguistic lines. Yes. He wanted to find a deep 00:18:58.950 --> 00:19:01.130 correspondence between the structure of a single 00:19:01.130 --> 00:19:03.930 sentence and the structure of a full story. He 00:19:03.930 --> 00:19:06.089 broke narrative down into three hierarchical 00:19:06.089 --> 00:19:08.109 levels, moving from the smallest possible unit 00:19:08.109 --> 00:19:10.200 of meaning. all the way up to the whole okay 00:19:10.200 --> 00:19:12.440 let's break down those three levels this sounds 00:19:12.440 --> 00:19:14.339 like it gets pretty technical but it's important 00:19:14.339 --> 00:19:17.099 for understanding his rigor it is the most fundamental 00:19:17.099 --> 00:19:19.640 level is what he called the functions these are 00:19:19.640 --> 00:19:22.079 the elementary indivisible descriptive pieces 00:19:22.079 --> 00:19:25.940 a single word a basic descriptive unit for example 00:19:25.940 --> 00:19:28.059 if we're reading a story a function might just 00:19:28.059 --> 00:19:31.619 be the word dark it's just dark okay so then 00:19:31.619 --> 00:19:33.440 those functions integrate to form the second 00:19:33.440 --> 00:19:37.240 level The actions. The actions are the characters 00:19:37.240 --> 00:19:39.339 or the structural elements that are formed by 00:19:39.339 --> 00:19:41.099 integrating those functions. So if you combine 00:19:41.099 --> 00:19:43.759 functions like dark plus mysterious plus cloaked 00:19:43.759 --> 00:19:47.220 plus uncommunicative, you create the action of, 00:19:47.259 --> 00:19:49.880 say, the mysterious stranger. I see. It's like 00:19:49.880 --> 00:19:52.400 building with Lego bricks. The functions are 00:19:52.400 --> 00:19:54.400 the individual bricks. The actions are the little 00:19:54.400 --> 00:19:56.440 models you build with them. That's a great analogy. 00:19:57.180 --> 00:19:59.880 And finally, those actions, those little models, 00:19:59.960 --> 00:20:02.819 combine to form the overarching narrative, the 00:20:02.819 --> 00:20:05.279 overall structure of the story. And what was 00:20:05.279 --> 00:20:07.920 the goal of all this? Why break it down so meticulously? 00:20:08.240 --> 00:20:11.200 His goal was purely analytical. By breaking the 00:20:11.200 --> 00:20:13.559 work down this way, he felt he could rigorously 00:20:13.559 --> 00:20:16.339 evaluate the degree of realism with which a narrative 00:20:16.339 --> 00:20:18.980 was constructed, how authentically the functions 00:20:18.980 --> 00:20:21.299 were combined to form the actions, and thus, 00:20:21.359 --> 00:20:23.859 how genuinely the narrative reflected reality. 00:20:24.640 --> 00:20:26.799 So it was another tool to dissect those misleading, 00:20:27.119 --> 00:20:29.740 naturalizing mechanisms of bourgeois culture, 00:20:29.880 --> 00:20:33.319 but this time embedded in the very DNA of storytelling 00:20:33.319 --> 00:20:35.920 itself. That's it. He was trying to build a perfect, 00:20:36.000 --> 00:20:39.019 scientifically objective microscope for cultural 00:20:39.019 --> 00:20:41.579 critique. That's a perfect metaphor for it. He 00:20:41.579 --> 00:20:44.160 wanted total objectivity, but that rigorous, 00:20:44.240 --> 00:20:48.039 almost clinical structuralist position. It inevitably 00:20:48.039 --> 00:20:50.680 led to friction with the literary establishment, 00:20:51.059 --> 00:20:53.859 particularly the old guard at the Sorbonne. A 00:20:53.859 --> 00:20:56.140 huge amount of friction. This sets up the famous 00:20:56.140 --> 00:20:59.259 intellectual confrontation with Raymond Picard, 00:20:59.319 --> 00:21:02.019 who was a very highly respected Sorbonne professor. 00:21:02.420 --> 00:21:05.359 Picard launched a very public, very pointed attack 00:21:05.359 --> 00:21:07.960 on Barthes and others, lumping them together 00:21:07.960 --> 00:21:11.440 and labeling them French New Criticism. And Picard's 00:21:11.440 --> 00:21:13.819 attack was what? That they were being too obscure? 00:21:14.019 --> 00:21:16.799 It was deeply conservative. He accused this new 00:21:16.799 --> 00:21:19.779 critical movement of being obscure, jargon -laden, 00:21:19.779 --> 00:21:21.960 and just disrespectful of the deep established 00:21:21.960 --> 00:21:25.019 roots of French literary tradition. He was essentially 00:21:25.019 --> 00:21:27.519 defending the authority of the traditional interpretation 00:21:27.519 --> 00:21:30.519 of literature, the one true meaning approach. 00:21:30.940 --> 00:21:32.480 And Bartha's response, which was a book called 00:21:32.480 --> 00:21:35.220 Criticism and Truth in 1966, was, well, it was 00:21:35.220 --> 00:21:36.720 scathing. He didn't just defend himself. He went 00:21:36.720 --> 00:21:39.880 on the offense. He absolutely did. He argued 00:21:39.880 --> 00:21:43.259 that the old bourgeois criticism the kind Picard 00:21:43.259 --> 00:21:46.220 championed was guilty of actively avoiding the 00:21:46.220 --> 00:21:48.819 finer points of language, of structure, of meaning. 00:21:49.039 --> 00:21:51.259 He basically said they were lazy. And he also 00:21:51.259 --> 00:21:54.420 accused them of deliberately ignoring challenging 00:21:54.420 --> 00:21:57.420 modern theories, right? Specifically, Marxism. 00:21:57.500 --> 00:22:00.019 Yes, because those theories made the comfortably 00:22:00.019 --> 00:22:03.279 entrenched establishment uncomfortable. Barthas 00:22:03.279 --> 00:22:05.700 saw traditional criticism as just another tool 00:22:05.700 --> 00:22:08.759 of the doxa, another way of protecting the established 00:22:08.759 --> 00:22:11.460 intellectual status quo. This conflict really 00:22:11.460 --> 00:22:13.619 highlights the key intellectual turn that was 00:22:13.619 --> 00:22:16.599 brewing in the late 1960s. Barthas and other 00:22:16.599 --> 00:22:18.359 structuralists were already starting to encounter 00:22:18.359 --> 00:22:21.259 the limits of their own closed scientific systems. 00:22:21.500 --> 00:22:23.920 And that was largely thanks to the emerging post 00:22:23.920 --> 00:22:26.279 -structuralist critiques. especially from thinkers 00:22:26.279 --> 00:22:28.599 like Jacques Derrida. This is what we now call 00:22:28.599 --> 00:22:31.039 the crisis of the transcendental signifier. It's 00:22:31.039 --> 00:22:33.400 a mouthful, but it's a crucial concept. Let's 00:22:33.400 --> 00:22:35.960 unpack it. Structuralism relies on the idea of 00:22:35.960 --> 00:22:38.559 a stable, self -contained system, right? Yes. 00:22:38.779 --> 00:22:42.180 But Derrida argued that every structuralist system, 00:22:42.220 --> 00:22:44.180 whether it's analyzing language or narrative 00:22:44.180 --> 00:22:47.200 or culture, implicitly relies on a transcendental 00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:49.990 signifier. This is a mythical symbol of constant 00:22:49.990 --> 00:22:53.309 universal meaning that acts as an orienting outside 00:22:53.309 --> 00:22:55.670 point of reference. So it's the universal truth, 00:22:55.829 --> 00:22:57.970 the permanent anchor that grounds the entire 00:22:57.970 --> 00:23:01.640 system of meaning, God, truth. Justice. Something 00:23:01.640 --> 00:23:03.940 outside the system that gives the system its 00:23:03.940 --> 00:23:06.559 meaning. Exactly. And the poststructuralists, 00:23:06.579 --> 00:23:09.359 led by Derrida, said that anchor doesn't exist. 00:23:09.759 --> 00:23:12.559 Since there are no symbols of constant universal 00:23:12.559 --> 00:23:15.279 significance outside the system itself, the entire 00:23:15.279 --> 00:23:17.740 premise of structuralism as a closed system for 00:23:17.740 --> 00:23:20.220 objective evaluation is inherently flawed. It's 00:23:20.220 --> 00:23:22.359 hollow. That sounds like a philosophical earthquake 00:23:22.359 --> 00:23:24.440 for someone like Barthas, who just spent the 00:23:24.440 --> 00:23:27.079 last decade trying to build that perfect objective 00:23:27.079 --> 00:23:30.069 system of analysis. It was a huge earthquake. 00:23:30.309 --> 00:23:32.869 But Barthes was self -critical enough to recognize 00:23:32.869 --> 00:23:35.930 the truth in this critique. He realized his pursuit 00:23:35.930 --> 00:23:38.329 of rigor had led him into another kind of closed 00:23:38.329 --> 00:23:41.630 system, another trap. And this spurred his transitional 00:23:41.630 --> 00:23:44.250 thinking, a move away from the idea of closure 00:23:44.250 --> 00:23:47.170 and toward radical openness and decentralization. 00:23:47.509 --> 00:23:49.690 And a crucial catalyst for this transitional 00:23:49.690 --> 00:23:54.309 phase was his 1966 trip to Japan, which produced 00:23:54.309 --> 00:23:58.200 the book Empire of Signs in 1970. I find it so 00:23:58.200 --> 00:23:59.859 fascinating that the moment he starts seeing 00:23:59.859 --> 00:24:02.240 the limits of Western system building, he looks 00:24:02.240 --> 00:24:05.220 east. Was he searching for a cultural antidote 00:24:05.220 --> 00:24:07.740 to structuralism? In many ways, yes. Barthas 00:24:07.740 --> 00:24:09.960 saw Japanese culture as fundamentally comfortable 00:24:09.960 --> 00:24:12.680 existing without the Western metaphysical need 00:24:12.680 --> 00:24:15.220 for a universal reference point, without that 00:24:15.220 --> 00:24:17.799 elusive transcendental signifier. What did that 00:24:17.799 --> 00:24:20.279 look like in practice? He interpreted Japan as 00:24:20.279 --> 00:24:22.720 a culture that embraced signifiers without feeling 00:24:22.720 --> 00:24:25.180 this constant overwhelming obligation to load 00:24:25.180 --> 00:24:27.880 them with immense hidden ideological signifies. 00:24:27.900 --> 00:24:30.160 The signs could just be signs. And he used a 00:24:30.160 --> 00:24:32.720 powerful geographical observation to encapsulate 00:24:32.720 --> 00:24:35.609 this feeling, didn't he? He did. He noted that 00:24:35.609 --> 00:24:38.130 the center of Tokyo, the location of the emperor's 00:24:38.130 --> 00:24:41.470 palace, is not this overbearing monumental entity 00:24:41.470 --> 00:24:43.670 that dictates the meaning of everything around 00:24:43.670 --> 00:24:45.990 it, like, say, the Vatican in Rome. Right. It 00:24:45.990 --> 00:24:49.450 is, by contrast, a silent and nondescript presence 00:24:49.450 --> 00:24:53.009 avoided and unconsidered. It's an empty center. 00:24:53.130 --> 00:24:55.609 It holds no ultimate meaning for the rest of 00:24:55.609 --> 00:24:57.490 the city. And the resulting insight from that 00:24:57.490 --> 00:25:00.230 observation? The insight was that signs in Japan, 00:25:00.630 --> 00:25:03.089 Barthes felt, could exist simply for their own 00:25:03.089 --> 00:25:05.990 merit. They retained only the significance naturally 00:25:05.990 --> 00:25:09.369 imbued by their signifiers. This stood in direct, 00:25:09.509 --> 00:25:12.650 radical contrast to the highly layered, myth 00:25:12.650 --> 00:25:15.269 -saturated Western world he had devoted mythologies 00:25:15.269 --> 00:25:18.190 to dissecting a world obsessed with forcing meaning 00:25:18.190 --> 00:25:21.309 onto every empty space. This intellectual freedom 00:25:21.309 --> 00:25:24.309 of the sign, this empty center, it pointed Barthas 00:25:24.309 --> 00:25:26.450 toward his most influential and radical conclusion 00:25:26.450 --> 00:25:28.750 back home. It absolutely did. And here is where 00:25:28.750 --> 00:25:30.910 it gets really interesting, culminating in his 00:25:30.910 --> 00:25:33.170 best known, most controversial and paradigm shifting 00:25:33.170 --> 00:25:35.750 essay, The Death of the Author, which he published 00:25:35.750 --> 00:25:38.890 in 1967. This essay is the logical consequence 00:25:38.890 --> 00:25:41.470 of everything we've just talked about. The crisis 00:25:41.470 --> 00:25:43.950 of the transcendental signifier, the observation 00:25:43.950 --> 00:25:47.539 of the empty center, it all leads here. Barthes 00:25:47.539 --> 00:25:49.740 launched a direct assault on the traditional 00:25:49.740 --> 00:25:52.279 concept of the author. Meaning the author with 00:25:52.279 --> 00:25:54.779 a capital A? The author with a capital A. That 00:25:54.779 --> 00:25:57.900 isolated, brilliant genius whose intentions, 00:25:58.299 --> 00:26:01.380 whose biography, whose personal psychology supposedly 00:26:01.380 --> 00:26:05.000 dictates the one true, ultimate meaning of a 00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:07.880 text. And why did he find this concept so problematic? 00:26:08.720 --> 00:26:12.420 So bourgeois. He argued that traditional authorial 00:26:12.420 --> 00:26:15.180 authority is a forced projection of ultimate 00:26:15.180 --> 00:26:18.420 finalized meaning. If you assume the author is 00:26:18.420 --> 00:26:21.119 the final arbiter of what a text means, then 00:26:21.119 --> 00:26:23.779 you can infer an ultimate, contained, consumable 00:26:23.779 --> 00:26:25.759 explanation for the work. So it's about closure. 00:26:25.859 --> 00:26:27.900 Yeah. About finding the right answer. It's all 00:26:27.900 --> 00:26:30.500 about closure. And Barthas argues that this concept 00:26:30.500 --> 00:26:32.759 of the knowable text is a delusion of Western 00:26:32.759 --> 00:26:34.859 bourgeois culture. And what's the function of 00:26:34.859 --> 00:26:37.180 that delusion? Why do we cling to it? It makes 00:26:37.180 --> 00:26:39.799 literature standardized. It allows a text to 00:26:39.799 --> 00:26:42.700 be studied, summarized, standardized, and ultimately 00:26:42.700 --> 00:26:45.599 made consumable in a capitalist market. Once 00:26:45.599 --> 00:26:47.660 you've known the author's intent, the text can 00:26:47.660 --> 00:26:50.160 be shelved, its meaning fixed, and it can be 00:26:50.160 --> 00:26:53.079 replaced and sold again. It turns a living text 00:26:53.079 --> 00:26:55.720 into a sealed commodity. But wait a minute. I 00:26:55.720 --> 00:26:57.940 mean, the obvious pushback here is if you remove 00:26:57.940 --> 00:27:01.059 the author's intent, doesn't that risk turning 00:27:01.059 --> 00:27:04.380 great literature or any text into just arbitrary 00:27:04.380 --> 00:27:07.299 noise? Surely, if the reader creates all the 00:27:07.299 --> 00:27:10.140 meaning, then anything goes. That's the common 00:27:10.140 --> 00:27:12.579 critique, and it's a fair question. But Barthas 00:27:12.579 --> 00:27:15.240 addresses it by shifting the focus entirely from 00:27:15.240 --> 00:27:18.200 creation to combination. His radical conclusion 00:27:18.200 --> 00:27:21.380 is built on two facts. First, that language itself 00:27:21.380 --> 00:27:24.000 is a vast, uncontrollable proliferation of meaning. 00:27:24.099 --> 00:27:26.680 And second, that the author's mind is fundamentally 00:27:26.680 --> 00:27:29.500 unknowable. So any ultimate fixed realization 00:27:29.500 --> 00:27:32.230 of meaning is impossible anyway. So the author, 00:27:32.289 --> 00:27:34.329 that figure of ultimate genius, is just an obsolete 00:27:34.329 --> 00:27:37.109 concept. Obsolete. And in its place, he gives 00:27:37.109 --> 00:27:39.069 us what he called the scripter. What's the difference? 00:27:39.250 --> 00:27:41.769 The scripter is not a genius creating from nothing. 00:27:42.269 --> 00:27:44.650 The scripter is a contemporary figure who merely 00:27:44.650 --> 00:27:47.569 combines pre -existing elements, other texts. 00:27:48.140 --> 00:27:51.500 cultural norms conventions previous signs in 00:27:51.500 --> 00:27:53.480 new and interesting ways so they aren't creating 00:27:53.480 --> 00:27:56.299 ex nihilo not at all they are assembling think 00:27:56.299 --> 00:27:58.220 of it less as a painter inventing a new color 00:27:58.220 --> 00:28:01.500 and more like a dj mixing existing tracks the 00:28:01.500 --> 00:28:03.799 scripter is simply the place where language culture 00:28:03.799 --> 00:28:06.460 and history pass through and are reconfigured 00:28:06.460 --> 00:28:09.460 so the author is dead the scripter is just a 00:28:09.460 --> 00:28:12.980 facilitator which means the ultimate power shifts 00:28:12.980 --> 00:28:16.200 completely it becomes resident not in the person 00:28:16.200 --> 00:28:18.619 who put the words down but in the person who 00:28:18.619 --> 00:28:20.559 picks them up. Precisely. And this is Barthas' 00:28:20.640 --> 00:28:22.660 most famous line, the one that crystallizes this 00:28:22.660 --> 00:28:25.279 entire intellectual revolution. The death of 00:28:25.279 --> 00:28:28.039 the author is the birth of the reader. The power 00:28:28.039 --> 00:28:31.019 to realize or to create meaning seeks entirely 00:28:31.019 --> 00:28:33.900 to you, the consumer of the text. The birth of 00:28:33.900 --> 00:28:36.480 the reader. That means we, as readers, are now 00:28:36.480 --> 00:28:39.380 actively engaged in production, not just passive 00:28:39.380 --> 00:28:43.039 consumption. Barthes immediately set out to prove 00:28:43.039 --> 00:28:45.480 this theoretically, didn't he? He wanted to demonstrate 00:28:45.480 --> 00:28:47.720 how the reader could actively create meaning 00:28:47.720 --> 00:28:50.940 through textual analysis. He did. He did this 00:28:50.940 --> 00:28:54.240 in his incredibly dense, methodical, almost overwhelming 00:28:54.240 --> 00:28:58.240 work, S .Z., published in 1970. This book was 00:28:58.240 --> 00:29:01.200 an exhaustive, critical reading of a novella 00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:04.299 by Honoré de Balzac called Saracene. And he put 00:29:04.299 --> 00:29:06.599 his old structuralist rigor to work one last 00:29:06.599 --> 00:29:09.339 time. But this time... with a post -structuralist 00:29:09.339 --> 00:29:11.960 goal. Exactly. He used this intense methodology 00:29:11.960 --> 00:29:14.940 involving five major codes for determining significance. 00:29:15.339 --> 00:29:17.359 Things like the proeretic code, which tracks 00:29:17.359 --> 00:29:19.720 the sequence of actions, or the hermeneutic code, 00:29:19.819 --> 00:29:21.460 which follows the riddles and puzzles in the 00:29:21.460 --> 00:29:23.859 story. But what made it so unique was the concept 00:29:23.859 --> 00:29:27.200 of thelexia. Thelexia, yes. Alexia is an arbitrarily 00:29:27.200 --> 00:29:29.579 chosen unit of text. It could be a sentence or 00:29:29.579 --> 00:29:31.640 even just a fragment of a sentence. He chose 00:29:31.640 --> 00:29:33.460 them specifically to remain methodologically 00:29:33.460 --> 00:29:36.200 unbiased, and he broke Balzac's novella down 00:29:36.200 --> 00:29:40.400 into 561. of these units. 561. That is thorough. 00:29:40.619 --> 00:29:43.819 It's unbelievably thorough. And then he applied 00:29:43.819 --> 00:29:45.859 his five codes to each and every one of them. 00:29:45.980 --> 00:29:49.339 So what was the grand revelation after this exhaustive 00:29:49.339 --> 00:29:52.460 microscopic analysis? What did he find? He found 00:29:52.460 --> 00:29:55.279 that even in a highly celebrated text like Saracen, 00:29:55.339 --> 00:29:58.380 there were significant restrictions. particularly 00:29:58.380 --> 00:30:01.119 in sequential elements like a rigid timeline 00:30:01.119 --> 00:30:04.660 and a very clear narrative causality. And these 00:30:04.660 --> 00:30:06.740 restrictions, he argued, limited the reader's 00:30:06.740 --> 00:30:09.480 freedom of interpretation. They closed down the 00:30:09.480 --> 00:30:12.220 possibilities for meaning. They did. And this 00:30:12.220 --> 00:30:15.279 finding led him to define the ideal text not 00:30:15.279 --> 00:30:18.000 by its success in accurately reflecting reality, 00:30:18.359 --> 00:30:21.279 but by its reversibility, its openness to the 00:30:21.279 --> 00:30:24.339 greatest variety of independent, productive interpretations 00:30:24.339 --> 00:30:26.599 by the reader. And this is where we need to nail 00:30:26.599 --> 00:30:28.500 down the two. two terms that became Barthes' 00:30:28.559 --> 00:30:31.640 most enduring legacy for literary studies, the 00:30:31.640 --> 00:30:34.440 readerly text and the writerly text. These are 00:30:34.440 --> 00:30:36.259 essential tools for understanding the intellectual 00:30:36.259 --> 00:30:38.539 freedom a text allows you. Absolutely essential. 00:30:38.799 --> 00:30:41.380 So the readerly text, or text lisible, is the 00:30:41.380 --> 00:30:43.119 text that requires the reader to be passive. 00:30:43.259 --> 00:30:45.500 You merely locate a ready -made meaning that's 00:30:45.500 --> 00:30:47.500 been planted there for you. It's a consumption 00:30:47.500 --> 00:30:50.680 model. It is. Barthes noted that these texts 00:30:50.680 --> 00:30:53.339 are controlled by the principle of non -contradiction. 00:30:53.539 --> 00:30:55.740 They're neat, they're resolved, they're predictable. 00:30:56.490 --> 00:30:59.210 And crucially, they do not disturb the doxa. 00:30:59.369 --> 00:31:01.910 Okay, let's pause on the doxa again. This is 00:31:01.910 --> 00:31:04.809 that Barthesian term for the collective, unacknowledged 00:31:04.809 --> 00:31:07.690 system of cultural meaning. The common sense 00:31:07.690 --> 00:31:10.890 or received wisdom that everyone just accepts 00:31:10.890 --> 00:31:14.049 without question. Exactly. And readerly texts 00:31:14.049 --> 00:31:16.509 reinforce the doxa. They're safe. They're comfortable. 00:31:16.970 --> 00:31:19.210 Barth has described these as making up the enormous 00:31:19.210 --> 00:31:21.490 mass of our literature. They are commodities, 00:31:21.670 --> 00:31:24.089 like a cupboard where meanings are neatly shelved 00:31:24.089 --> 00:31:27.289 and safeguarded. So a formulaic blockbuster movie 00:31:27.289 --> 00:31:30.049 script or a conventional detective novel where 00:31:30.049 --> 00:31:32.210 the solution is known and fixed from the start. 00:31:32.309 --> 00:31:34.329 Perfect examples. They're easily consumed and 00:31:34.329 --> 00:31:36.750 then put away. Conversely, then, the writerly 00:31:36.750 --> 00:31:40.230 text or text scriptable is the ideal. How does 00:31:40.230 --> 00:31:42.609 reading a writerly text feel different? It feels 00:31:42.609 --> 00:31:45.250 like work in the best possible way. It demands 00:31:45.250 --> 00:31:47.549 that the reader become a producer of the text. 00:31:47.670 --> 00:31:50.789 It's an act of creative engagement. So if a readerly 00:31:50.789 --> 00:31:54.109 text is a pre -cut jigsaw puzzle with only one 00:31:54.109 --> 00:31:57.180 correct solution. A raterly text is a set of 00:31:57.180 --> 00:31:59.339 Lego blocks that can be built in infinite ways. 00:31:59.599 --> 00:32:02.380 It's resistant to classification. It avoids being 00:32:02.380 --> 00:32:05.319 plasticized by some singular system, whether 00:32:05.319 --> 00:32:07.980 that's a specific ideology, a genre, or even 00:32:07.980 --> 00:32:10.220 a system of criticism. It's open to the infinite 00:32:10.220 --> 00:32:12.680 play of the world. So we're talking about complex 00:32:12.680 --> 00:32:16.200 poetry, fragmented fiction, texts that actively 00:32:16.200 --> 00:32:19.000 defy any sense of narrative closure. Exactly. 00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:21.599 The act of reading itself becomes a form of intellectual 00:32:21.599 --> 00:32:24.529 work, a form of writing. But Barth has realized 00:32:24.529 --> 00:32:27.329 that even his most rigorous critique in Ezi had 00:32:27.329 --> 00:32:30.369 limitations. And the way mythologies was absorbed 00:32:30.369 --> 00:32:32.829 into the bourgeois mainstream showed him how 00:32:32.829 --> 00:32:35.069 difficult it was to generate lasting political 00:32:35.069 --> 00:32:38.430 change through critique. This drove him to ask 00:32:38.430 --> 00:32:41.210 a very profound question. Which was? If systemic 00:32:41.210 --> 00:32:44.069 critique always fails, and if all language eventually 00:32:44.069 --> 00:32:47.589 gets trapped by the doxa, where can true intellectual 00:32:47.589 --> 00:32:51.109 freedom, a space of genuine non -alignment, actually 00:32:51.109 --> 00:32:53.809 be found? That is the perfect philosophical bridge 00:32:53.809 --> 00:32:56.349 to his next and perhaps most personal phase. 00:32:56.910 --> 00:32:59.309 Barthes became intensely concerned with this 00:32:59.309 --> 00:33:02.089 conflict between the doxa, that restrictive pigeonholing 00:33:02.089 --> 00:33:04.089 language of popular culture and received truth, 00:33:04.309 --> 00:33:06.750 and what he called the paradoxa, which open, 00:33:06.950 --> 00:33:09.670 noncommittal and challenging language, language 00:33:09.670 --> 00:33:12.390 that refuses to be pinned down. And he made a 00:33:12.390 --> 00:33:14.769 surprising pivot looking at political discourse. 00:33:15.369 --> 00:33:18.470 Despite its fundamentally anti -ideological stance, 00:33:18.809 --> 00:33:21.769 Barthes felt that even Marxist theory could fall 00:33:21.769 --> 00:33:24.960 into the doxitrap. He did. He argued that political 00:33:24.960 --> 00:33:27.400 critique, regardless of its alignment left or 00:33:27.400 --> 00:33:30.099 right, often uses violent language with assertive 00:33:30.099 --> 00:33:33.119 meanings. By asserting a new definitive framework 00:33:33.119 --> 00:33:35.819 of truth, it risked just replacing one closed 00:33:35.819 --> 00:33:37.819 system with another. So it became culturally 00:33:37.819 --> 00:33:40.059 assimilating, just swapping out one form of common 00:33:40.059 --> 00:33:43.359 sense for a new, equally restrictive one. Precisely. 00:33:43.359 --> 00:33:45.740 So his reaction to this realization that even 00:33:45.740 --> 00:33:48.180 radical anti -ideology can become ideological 00:33:48.180 --> 00:33:51.220 was to turn away from political systems entirely 00:33:51.220 --> 00:33:53.559 and to focus on... something completely outside 00:33:53.559 --> 00:33:57.000 the realm of both conservative society and militant 00:33:57.000 --> 00:34:00.680 leftist thinking. Hedonism. Pleasure. The physical 00:34:00.680 --> 00:34:02.900 experience of reading. Right, which resulted 00:34:02.900 --> 00:34:05.480 in the pleasure of the text in 1975. This shift 00:34:05.480 --> 00:34:07.640 represents a move toward the body and toward 00:34:07.640 --> 00:34:10.659 subjectivity. The core concept here is jouissance, 00:34:10.880 --> 00:34:13.460 which is more than just pleasure. He translated 00:34:13.460 --> 00:34:16.579 it as bliss in reading, the ultimate cathartic 00:34:16.579 --> 00:34:19.219 climax of the reading experience. And how is 00:34:19.219 --> 00:34:21.059 this bliss achieved? What does it feel like? 00:34:21.340 --> 00:34:24.179 It's that moment of profound textual immersion 00:34:24.179 --> 00:34:27.000 where you become utterly lost within the text. 00:34:27.179 --> 00:34:29.539 It's a sudden, unexpected rupture of your cultural 00:34:29.539 --> 00:34:32.159 boundaries, the moment when the text strips away 00:34:32.159 --> 00:34:35.340 your social identity, your history, your ideology. 00:34:35.739 --> 00:34:37.619 So it's a loss of self. It's a complete loss 00:34:37.619 --> 00:34:40.900 of self. And Barthas argued that this pure feeling 00:34:40.900 --> 00:34:43.179 signifies an impact of reading that is experienced 00:34:43.179 --> 00:34:46.239 outside the limiting social realm. It's free 00:34:46.239 --> 00:34:48.820 from culturally associative language, and thus, 00:34:48.840 --> 00:34:51.119 theoretically, it's neutral with regard to social 00:34:51.119 --> 00:34:53.119 progress. It's an escape from the doxa through 00:34:53.119 --> 00:34:56.119 pure, non -classifiable feeling. But the pursuit 00:34:56.119 --> 00:34:58.760 of neutrality, of writing that avoids imposing 00:34:58.760 --> 00:35:01.599 meaning or identity, was still very difficult 00:35:01.599 --> 00:35:04.780 for him. He felt even his own past critical works 00:35:04.780 --> 00:35:07.719 suffered from an incidental use of loaded associative 00:35:07.719 --> 00:35:10.500 language. He was his own harshest critic. And 00:35:10.500 --> 00:35:13.179 to solve this, he attempted to create a novelistic 00:35:13.179 --> 00:35:16.119 rhetoric structured specifically to avoid asserting 00:35:16.119 --> 00:35:19.150 definitive meaning. This resulted in a lover's 00:35:19.150 --> 00:35:22.510 discourse. Fragments in 1977. The structure of 00:35:22.510 --> 00:35:24.929 that book is so telling it's not a novel. It's 00:35:24.929 --> 00:35:27.349 a collection of fictionalized reflections, fragments 00:35:27.349 --> 00:35:30.289 of an unrequited lover who is seeking signs of 00:35:30.289 --> 00:35:33.050 affection from their beloved. And the book exposes 00:35:33.050 --> 00:35:35.909 the illusory myths that are inherent in that 00:35:35.909 --> 00:35:38.650 pursuit of love. The lover is constantly projecting 00:35:38.650 --> 00:35:41.510 an ideal, trying to assert his own false reality 00:35:41.510 --> 00:35:44.630 onto the relationship. The fragmented form challenges 00:35:44.630 --> 00:35:47.030 the reader's own views of the social constructs 00:35:47.030 --> 00:35:49.690 of love, but it never asserts a definitive universal 00:35:49.690 --> 00:35:52.309 theory of what love is. It maintains neutrality 00:35:52.309 --> 00:35:54.469 by being purely descriptive of the search for 00:35:54.469 --> 00:35:56.610 meaning, not the meaning itself. That's a beautiful 00:35:56.610 --> 00:35:58.989 way to put it. And while he was exploring these 00:35:58.989 --> 00:36:01.909 elusive, fragmented subjects, Barth has also 00:36:01.909 --> 00:36:03.909 attempted to address the ancient philosophical 00:36:03.909 --> 00:36:07.210 problem of the mind -body dualism, influenced 00:36:07.210 --> 00:36:09.769 by his studies of Eastern thought. He specifically 00:36:09.769 --> 00:36:12.989 critiqued European culture, arguing it was infected 00:36:12.989 --> 00:36:15.809 by Western metaphysics, which always prioritizes 00:36:15.809 --> 00:36:18.110 the mind and the spirit over the physical reality 00:36:18.110 --> 00:36:21.530 of the self. His body theory emphasized the formation 00:36:21.530 --> 00:36:24.429 of identity and the self through conscious bodily 00:36:24.429 --> 00:36:27.730 cultivation rather than purely mental or spiritual 00:36:27.730 --> 00:36:30.610 pursuits. It's a constant effort to question 00:36:30.610 --> 00:36:33.010 the cultural scaffolding upon which we build 00:36:33.010 --> 00:36:35.590 meaning. even the concept of the body itself. 00:36:35.929 --> 00:36:37.829 Yes, he even felt the body was often treated 00:36:37.829 --> 00:36:40.090 as a fashion word, providing the illusion of 00:36:40.090 --> 00:36:42.250 a grounded philosophical discourse while remaining 00:36:42.250 --> 00:36:45.250 ideologically loaded. His work was always a process 00:36:45.250 --> 00:36:47.889 of peeling back layers. And that focus on the 00:36:47.889 --> 00:36:50.409 physical self, the ultimate subject, leads us 00:36:50.409 --> 00:36:53.090 directly to his final and most emotionally resonant 00:36:53.090 --> 00:36:56.030 work. The complexity of Barthes' career moving 00:36:56.030 --> 00:36:59.010 from the systems of the entire world to the fragments 00:36:59.010 --> 00:37:01.909 of the individual self, all of it culminated 00:37:01.909 --> 00:37:05.880 in Camera Lucida. published in 1980. This essay 00:37:05.880 --> 00:37:09.139 is a profound shift. He narrows his analytical 00:37:09.139 --> 00:37:11.960 lens from the vast cultural system to the highly 00:37:11.960 --> 00:37:14.980 specific, subjective event of personal memory 00:37:14.980 --> 00:37:17.880 and loss. The impetus for the book was absolutely 00:37:17.880 --> 00:37:20.260 devastating. It was written in the aftermath 00:37:20.260 --> 00:37:23.800 of the 1977 death of his mother, Henriette Barthes, 00:37:23.900 --> 00:37:26.199 the woman with whom he had lived for 60 years. 00:37:26.300 --> 00:37:29.019 It was a colossal blow. And the book is simultaneously 00:37:29.019 --> 00:37:32.059 a rigorous essay on the metaphysics of photography 00:37:32.059 --> 00:37:34.980 and a deeply personal meditation on photographs 00:37:34.980 --> 00:37:37.880 of his mother. Though, tellingly, none of those 00:37:37.880 --> 00:37:39.639 personal photographs are actually reproduced 00:37:39.639 --> 00:37:41.360 in the published work. They remain private. They 00:37:41.360 --> 00:37:43.800 remain his. Barthes had long been interested 00:37:43.800 --> 00:37:46.239 in photography. He'd even critiqued its use back 00:37:46.239 --> 00:37:48.460 in mythologies for how it could be used by bourgeois 00:37:48.460 --> 00:37:51.900 culture to infer naturalistic truths, to make 00:37:51.900 --> 00:37:54.699 ideology look like fact. But he retained this 00:37:54.699 --> 00:37:57.480 belief that photography held a unique... almost 00:37:57.480 --> 00:38:00.139 terrifying potential for presenting a completely 00:38:00.139 --> 00:38:02.940 real existential representation of the world. 00:38:03.260 --> 00:38:06.420 And in Camera Lucida, he develops his last great 00:38:06.420 --> 00:38:10.480 conceptual dichotomy, studium and punctum. Okay, 00:38:10.559 --> 00:38:12.380 let's delineate these clearly because they explain 00:38:12.380 --> 00:38:15.400 so well why some images stick with us and others 00:38:15.400 --> 00:38:18.719 just fade away. Okay, the studium is the first 00:38:18.719 --> 00:38:21.909 layer of meaning. It is the obvious, symbolic, 00:38:22.210 --> 00:38:24.429 cultural or general meaning of a photograph. 00:38:24.730 --> 00:38:26.630 It's what the photographer intends to communicate. 00:38:26.909 --> 00:38:29.329 It's the conscious cultural appreciation. It's 00:38:29.329 --> 00:38:31.210 what you look at and intellectually understand. 00:38:31.489 --> 00:38:33.610 So you look at an old family photo and the studium 00:38:33.610 --> 00:38:36.389 is the clothing, the time period, the general 00:38:36.389 --> 00:38:38.409 setting, the fact that it's a family. Right. 00:38:38.489 --> 00:38:40.710 It's the context. The punctum, however, is what 00:38:40.710 --> 00:38:42.949 penetrates that conscious understanding. It pierces 00:38:42.949 --> 00:38:45.699 you. It pierces you. The punctum is that element 00:38:45.699 --> 00:38:48.420 which is purely personal, subjective, and which 00:38:48.420 --> 00:38:51.400 pierces the viewer. It's often a small, non -obvious 00:38:51.400 --> 00:38:54.400 detail, a piece of jewelry, a smudge on the background, 00:38:54.659 --> 00:38:57.239 an accidental gesture that jumps out and creates 00:38:57.239 --> 00:38:59.340 an emotional response that is unique to you, 00:38:59.460 --> 00:39:01.920 the individual viewer. It is entirely outside 00:39:01.920 --> 00:39:04.280 the photographer's intention or the photo's general 00:39:04.280 --> 00:39:06.579 message. It's the detail you can't rationalize 00:39:06.579 --> 00:39:09.619 or explain away. Exactly. And Barthas was initially 00:39:09.619 --> 00:39:11.639 troubled by this because he realized that when 00:39:11.639 --> 00:39:13.710 he tried to communicate... the personal significance 00:39:13.710 --> 00:39:15.710 of his mother's photographs to other people, 00:39:16.090 --> 00:39:18.949 the punctum could be rationalized or simply removed 00:39:18.949 --> 00:39:21.809 by the listener. It was too subjective to share. 00:39:22.030 --> 00:39:24.130 So how did he solve that dilemma? The solution 00:39:24.130 --> 00:39:27.210 he found, and the reason he focused on one specific 00:39:27.210 --> 00:39:29.230 picture of his mother as a child, the famous 00:39:29.230 --> 00:39:33.150 Winter Garden photo. was profound. He argued 00:39:33.150 --> 00:39:35.230 that a picture creates this false illusion of 00:39:35.230 --> 00:39:37.829 what is meaning, what is present right now, fixed 00:39:37.829 --> 00:39:40.570 in time. But he said what was is a much more 00:39:40.570 --> 00:39:43.269 accurate description of a photograph. And because 00:39:43.269 --> 00:39:46.409 his mother, Henriette, had died, her childhood 00:39:46.409 --> 00:39:49.269 photograph became stark, unbearable evidence 00:39:49.269 --> 00:39:52.630 of what has ceased to be. It ceased to be an 00:39:52.630 --> 00:39:54.849 objective anchor. It became a potent reminder 00:39:54.849 --> 00:39:57.110 of the world's constant flux and the finality 00:39:57.110 --> 00:39:59.909 of absence. That photograph wasn't a universal 00:39:59.909 --> 00:40:02.610 truth for him. It was a uniquely subjective object 00:40:02.610 --> 00:40:05.929 of grief. The recurrent feeling of loss he experienced 00:40:05.929 --> 00:40:07.889 whenever he looked at it could not be removed 00:40:07.889 --> 00:40:10.489 or rationalized by any cultural system or critical 00:40:10.489 --> 00:40:14.190 framework. The punctum was the raw, unadulterated 00:40:14.190 --> 00:40:17.110 pain of memory. It's truly a moving final work. 00:40:17.550 --> 00:40:20.610 It brings his entire career's reflection on subjectivity, 00:40:20.710 --> 00:40:23.610 science, and cultural society to bear on a single, 00:40:23.750 --> 00:40:26.489 personal, profound expression of grief. It's 00:40:26.489 --> 00:40:28.409 the ultimate counterpoint to the cultural analysis 00:40:28.409 --> 00:40:31.230 of mythologies. It is. Sadly, his life was cut 00:40:31.230 --> 00:40:33.469 short very shortly after his publication. On 00:40:33.469 --> 00:40:36.190 February 25, 1980, while walking home near the 00:40:36.190 --> 00:40:38.610 Collège de France, Barthes was knocked down by 00:40:38.610 --> 00:40:40.670 a laundry van driver. He died a month later, 00:40:40.730 --> 00:40:43.210 on March 26, from the resulting pulmonary complications. 00:40:43.730 --> 00:40:46.750 And the depth of his personal loss, the devastating 00:40:46.960 --> 00:40:49.659 effect of his mother's death was revealed even 00:40:49.659 --> 00:40:52.519 further in a posthumous publication, the Journal 00:40:52.519 --> 00:40:55.719 de Doi, or Mourning Diary, which came out in 00:40:55.719 --> 00:40:58.880 2009. These were intimate notes he wrote from 00:40:58.880 --> 00:41:01.159 the day after his mother's death until September 00:41:01.159 --> 00:41:05.880 of 1979. The entries are intensely raw. They 00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:08.900 reveal the profound, almost role reversal nature 00:41:08.900 --> 00:41:11.780 of his grief. There's one quote that's just heartbreaking. 00:41:12.139 --> 00:41:14.739 He wrote, quote, For months long I had been her 00:41:14.739 --> 00:41:17.659 mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter. And 00:41:17.659 --> 00:41:19.619 then, reflecting on the decades she dedicated 00:41:19.619 --> 00:41:22.099 to supporting his difficult, demanding work, 00:41:22.179 --> 00:41:24.860 he wrote, Before that, she had made herself transparent 00:41:24.860 --> 00:41:27.719 so that I could write. The suffering was so immediate 00:41:27.719 --> 00:41:30.460 and constant, he wrote, insisting, Do not say 00:41:30.460 --> 00:41:32.920 mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in 00:41:32.920 --> 00:41:34.860 mourning. I'm suffering. Which is such a Parthesian 00:41:34.860 --> 00:41:37.320 statement. It's a refusal to let the doxa, even 00:41:37.320 --> 00:41:39.619 the doxa of psychology, define his most personal 00:41:39.619 --> 00:41:42.139 experience. His posthumous works also revealed 00:41:42.139 --> 00:41:45.139 other facets of his highly private life. Incidents 00:41:45.139 --> 00:41:47.800 from 1987 includes fragments from his erotic 00:41:47.800 --> 00:41:50.579 diary, Soiree de Paris, and an earlier diary 00:41:50.579 --> 00:41:52.679 detailing aspects of his sex life in Morocco. 00:41:53.070 --> 00:41:55.269 And finally, his notes from a three -week trip 00:41:55.269 --> 00:41:58.429 he took to China in 1974 with the literary journal 00:41:58.429 --> 00:42:01.510 Tel Kual were published as Travels in China in 00:42:01.510 --> 00:42:04.889 2012. And his observation there, after all these 00:42:04.889 --> 00:42:07.750 years of dissecting Western myth, was the ultimate 00:42:07.750 --> 00:42:10.849 Barthesian anti -mythological statement. He found 00:42:10.849 --> 00:42:13.389 China not at all exotic, not at all disorienting. 00:42:13.409 --> 00:42:15.829 Just a refusal of the Western expectation of 00:42:15.829 --> 00:42:18.510 Oriental mystery. A total refusal. So what does 00:42:18.510 --> 00:42:20.670 this extraordinary, restless intellectual journey 00:42:20.670 --> 00:42:23.309 mean for us today? Roland Barthes' contribution 00:42:23.309 --> 00:42:26.570 to structuralism, semiotics, post -structuralism. 00:42:26.610 --> 00:42:28.869 It fundamentally redefined every field concerned 00:42:28.869 --> 00:42:31.409 with representation and communication. Literature, 00:42:31.469 --> 00:42:33.969 media analysis, photography, even computer science. 00:42:34.230 --> 00:42:36.789 But I think his most unique and enduring legacy 00:42:36.789 --> 00:42:39.250 is that he taught us how to constantly question 00:42:39.250 --> 00:42:52.869 the system. Because of that continual adaptability 00:42:52.869 --> 00:42:55.510 and self -critique, the very process of killing 00:42:55.510 --> 00:42:57.469 off his own ideas when they became restrictive, 00:42:57.730 --> 00:43:01.070 there is no canon of thought for others to rigidly 00:43:01.070 --> 00:43:04.269 model themselves after. There is truly... No 00:43:04.269 --> 00:43:07.369 Barthasism. He leaves us with tools, not dogma. 00:43:07.429 --> 00:43:09.650 So to quickly recap the critical tools you've 00:43:09.650 --> 00:43:12.349 gained today, remember the readerly text? The 00:43:12.349 --> 00:43:15.309 text lisible. It's passive, forcing you to accept 00:43:15.309 --> 00:43:17.789 ready -made meaning. It reinforces the doxa. 00:43:17.909 --> 00:43:20.429 While the writerly text, the text scriptable, 00:43:20.570 --> 00:43:22.889 is active. It makes you the producer of meaning. 00:43:23.070 --> 00:43:25.449 It demands creative effort and resists closure. 00:43:25.809 --> 00:43:28.090 And the old concept of the author, that ultimate 00:43:28.090 --> 00:43:31.039 defining source of meaning, is obsolete. It's 00:43:31.039 --> 00:43:33.280 replaced by the scripter, who simply combines 00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:35.340 pre -existing texts, norms, and conventions. 00:43:35.639 --> 00:43:37.599 The death of the author is your birth as the 00:43:37.599 --> 00:43:40.079 reader. Barthas spent his entire life showing 00:43:40.079 --> 00:43:43.539 us that every seemingly objective, harmless observation 00:43:43.539 --> 00:43:46.099 about our culture, from the purity of laundry 00:43:46.099 --> 00:43:49.179 soap to the structure of a novel, is in fact 00:43:49.179 --> 00:43:52.320 an ideological narrative just waiting to be decoded. 00:43:52.480 --> 00:43:54.960 He showed us the inherent danger of systems becoming 00:43:54.960 --> 00:43:57.860 closed, whether they are cultural myths or academic 00:43:57.860 --> 00:44:00.920 theories. He demonstrated that even the most 00:44:00.920 --> 00:44:04.360 radical, scholarly, critical writing can eventually 00:44:04.360 --> 00:44:07.300 be absorbed and neutralized by the doxo. And 00:44:07.300 --> 00:44:09.519 that raises a final provocative thought for you 00:44:09.519 --> 00:44:12.989 to chew on. If all of Barth's incredible work 00:44:12.989 --> 00:44:14.909 could eventually be neutralized by the common 00:44:14.909 --> 00:44:17.349 sense of the culture, how vigilant must you be 00:44:17.349 --> 00:44:19.489 in questioning the hidden ideological messages 00:44:19.489 --> 00:44:21.949 and the naturalistic truths that are being built 00:44:21.949 --> 00:44:24.070 right now in your social media feed, in your 00:44:24.070 --> 00:44:26.250 corporate training, or in the latest trend you 00:44:26.250 --> 00:44:28.590 consume? The work of demystification is never 00:44:28.590 --> 00:44:31.469 done. It is an active, ongoing, daily effort. 00:44:31.650 --> 00:44:33.469 Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into 00:44:33.469 --> 00:44:36.289 the extraordinary, courageous mind of Roland 00:44:36.289 --> 00:44:37.849 Barthas. We'll see you next time.