Roland Barthes (Structuralism/ Post-) Flashcards
Who was Roland Barthes?
(1915-1980)
Leading figure of French Structuralism
2 of his important articles: Mythology – Death of the Author
Famous for contradictory reasons: on the one hand he’s famous for being
a scientifically minded person. On the other hand he’s famous for being a hedonist.
Contradictory: idiosyncratic –> very ant-garde, strange, different
Originality
Influenced by Saussure
How were people influenced by Suassure?
Through the methodology he used (Saussure: study of different
paroles, sentences, utterances, in order to discover the deep structure of each
parole & then comparing them together to get the hidden rules behind the
surface structures) so Saussure did this in the realm of linguistics but there were
other thinkers who used this method in other fields of study [Lacan:
psychoanalysis / Levi-Strauss: anthropology] – leading Barthes to write his first
research called Mythologies
Mythologies(1957) by Barthes.
This research was done in the realm of mass culture
& everyday life. He took into account different paroles, media, exhibitions,
ads and studied different examples in each of these fields to get the hidden
grammar of the mass culture.
what makes all these different cultural activities functional was the working of the
hidden ideology.
He was concerned with the working of
cultural propositions, ideological propositions, the way mass culture & everyday
life were saturated with ideological propositions.
deology worked in a way that these ideological
propositions seemed quite natural & self-evident as if this was the only way
possible & other ways would be irrelevant. And since we are all exposed to
ideologies since very young days, our being & subjectivity are being formed by the
ideology in a way that later in life we never realize that we think what we’ve
learnt to think
these ideological propositions are all fabricated &
constructed; and that’s why he has named this work Mythologies because they’re
not facts or real, but imaginative constructions. In this work he criticizes the
process of Naturalization which is at work in our lives
His view : Marxian (ideology) / Semiological (study of different paroles to get at the hidden grammar)
What is the process of Naturalization?
The process of Naturalization (Later used by Foucault) saturation of ideological propositions take place in patriarchal Bourgeoisie society.
What is the process of Naturalization?
The process of Naturalization (Later used by Foucault) saturation of ideological propositions take place in patriarchal Bourgeoisie society.
On Rácine
Racine: a French dramatist & classicist who lived in 17th C &
was celebrated for his classical tragedies.
In this work, Barthes tries to present a structuralist & semiological reading of
Racine’s dramatic works. Up to the time of Barthes, all pieces of criticism carried
out on Racine’s theatre were traditional, which means that they were in the habit
of contextualizing Racine’s drama withing the context of his biography &
historical, political, social context. But Barthes believed that this type of
traditional was too traditional & irrelevant. So he tried to have a study of Racine’s
work through the method introduced by Saussure; B studied the tragedies, made
a list of all the hidden rules existing in each work & took them as a parole, and
through a comparative study of these paroles he tried to get at the overall
structure of Racine’s theatre. → this lead to an argument between Barthes &
Picard
Barthes tried to provide us with the grammar that activated the texts of Racine’s
tragedies.
The conclusion that B gives is that the traditional methods of analysis not only do
not provide us with some reliable understanding of the text of the dramatist, but
also they act as a censor course that suppress other inherent critical possibilities.
The death of the author (1968)
Significance of the year 1968: the year of anti-establishment risings in Europe &
the U.S. regarding different issues.
Many thinkers in that period were concerned with the relationship between the
author & what he writes. By reading this work, we realize the way Barthes
discards the ideas of older generations & at the same time B’s ideas being
rejected by the younger generation.
Le Morte d’Arthur → a work written in 15th C : a compilation of articles
written on the subject of Arthurian legend; but we do not know the names
of the authors who have written this work → a pun between the names of
the 2 works
The article starts with a quotation that was taken from Balzac’s Sarrasine (name
of a novella by Balzac, which is about a sculptor who falls in love a woman singer
who towards the end of the novella turns out to be a castrato [a person who
supposedly is a woman but turns out to be a man but the issue is that he isn’t a
man either bc of being castrated = displacing the binary of man/woman] now
back to the quotation: withing this quote Balzac has written a series of
exclamations on femineity. Barthes suggest that productive engaged reading
starts exactly when the text becomes detached from the person who has written it (process of suspension). → so all aspects of external elements should be
detached, and then the only thing which exists is the process of signification of
language; when this detachment takes place, both the text & the reader can act
freely & productively.
Are works original?
there is no original writing or what a writer writes already
exists in the form of an immense dictionary => the author, the text, the reader,
the three of them are constructed of infinite number of quotations without origin
or end. So what the author does is that he re-assembles the quotations that
already exist & can’t create anything individually.
So as far as Barthes is concerned, in modern times, it is not the author who
should be taken as the source of the text, but the process of signification &
what happens in the mind of the reader who activates this process are to
be counted as the source. → نقطه اوجBarthes در مقام یکstructuralist
S/Z → Sarrasine → binary opposition
This work marks Barthes’ departure from structuralism. This is the crossroad
where structuralism & poststructuralism meet. In fact, when we study this work,
it seems as if Barthes has become tired of the structuralist project & wishes to try
s.th new.
He does the opposite of what he has done before. Dissects and divides the structures into hundreds of different narratives.
Looks for plurality, multiplicity, diversity
From Work to Text (1971) →
the work is the product but the text is the
process,
and Barthes believes that the process of reading the text might be
interpreted in 2 ways: sometimes it gets at a closure (the process of
signification is stopped) but sometimes what we witness is the deferring of
the process of signification & meaning.
According to Barthes, the nature of different texts are different.
Sometimes different readers read a text & become engaged in the process of
studying & almost all of them have the same understanding of the text. This type
of text is called Readerly or Closed. → you’re just a reader, it’s a closed system & there’s
no signification process.
Sometimes we have different readers, they become engaged in the process of
reading in different ways & they don’t get a definite layer of meaning. This type of
text is called Writerly or Open → what we see most in poststructuralist view
