Roland Barthes and the Development of Semiology

Roland Barthes developed semiology, a critical approach initiated by Saussure, into a practice useful for analyzing a wide variety of texts. Most of his writings are short applications of his semiological method, with extensions of the notion of text to objects that we might not consider texts at all and an overall disruptive effect that is accessible to younger composition students. In this post, I will focus on an essay in a popular anthology called Mythologies, which has as a final section an outline of Barthes’ explication of semiology in theory and practice–an essay called Myth Today.

Barthes defines semiology as “a science of forms” that “studies significations apart from their content” (111); the forms under study have a direct relation to mythology, initially defined as “a type of speech” (109). This science, he claims, “has not yet come into being” (111), even though the term had been coined decades earlier by Saussure. The types of speech, are “by no means confined to normal speech” (110), confirming what I have also observed over the decades–all cultural objects are potential texts with mythical power. Mythology itself is a type of communication where meaning seems to be stripped from its object, in a scientific manner that considers just three ostensibly simple elements, “the signifier, the signified and the sign” (114) and the mechanisms by which a sign becomes a new signifier. However, these elements are a bit complicated to explain.

What Barthes’ seems to have done is correlate Saussure’s langue paradigm, where the signified is a concept, the signifier is an acoustic image, and the relation between the two is a sign (113), with Freud’s manifest and latent meanings of behavior, and the correlation of the two, as well as Sartre’s discourse as a signifier, “the original crisis in the subject” as the signified, and “the relation between crisis and discourse” as the sign (114). Despite this seeming complexity, however, “it knows only one operation: reading, or deciphering” (114).

This deciphering of texts requires visualizing two overlapping systems, a language system (language-object), which I will code in small-case as signified-signifier-sign, and a mythical system (metalanguage), which I will code in all-capitals as SIGNIFIED-SIGNIFIER-SIGN. In Barthes’ scheme, one of these is a simultaneous sign-SIGNIFIER, serving a language purpose as a sign and a mythologizing purpose as a SIGNIFIER. With this dual purpose “the signifier of myth [SIGNIFIER] presents itself in an ambiguous way” in that it starts out with a complete meaning from the language system but also voids itself of that meaning to represent something else–a myth (117). This dual sign-SIGNIFIER is connected, as “its point of departure [SIGNIFIER] is constituted by the arrival of a meaning [sign]” (123), which makes deciphering somewhat straightforward, although three possible readings can be derived, depending on whether the mythical SIGNIFIER is literal, distorted, or ambiguous (128); these first two types are analytical but the third type may be disruptive in connecting “a mythical schema to a general history,” moving semiology to questions of ideology and society (128).

In sum, myth is a type of “stolen language” that transforms meaning into form (131), possibly over and over again, with disruptive implications for interpreters of texts. While his theory is complex, his posthumous legacy of literary criticism, usually of the third type, helps simplify understanding of this approach to what was then, in his mind anyway, an emerging field of semiology.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang, 1972.