Roland Barthes: A double grasp on reality
Andy Stafford considers Barthes’s analysis of how we create a world of meaning, and how it creates us
Towards the end
of Mythologies (1957), Roland
Barthes’s study of contemporary myths, he claimed: “I have tried to define
things, not words” – surprising perhaps, given the philosopher’s popular
association with language, communication and meaning. It is not that words are
not also things; but the comment suggests an important corrective to the
understanding of his work. Barthes was not (simply) an aesthete interested in
forms, but a theorist who tried to understand how these forms constructed our
imagination.
As an early theorist and user of semiology, the science of signs
and meanings, he offered analyses that attempted to find the intelligible in
almost all human activities. Barthes was a Houdini, using the essay form to
wriggle his way out of (but not necessarily, away from) the tight constrictions
of post-war Hegelian thought. The essay, by being both literary and scientific,
allowed Barthes to apply and, at the same time, to question Hegel’s philosophy
of history as well as the tight master–slave dialectic that informed it. Thus
existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, Brechtian theatre, all
slowly gave way in Barthes’s work to semiology, structuralism and semiotics.
Barthes was born in
1915 in Cherbourg into a middle-class family, beset by tragedy when his father
was killed the following year in a naval battle off France’s northern coast.
Brought up by his mother in Bayonne and then in Paris, the young Barthes
experienced further personal difficulty: his career was delayed by
tuberculosis, which began in his late teens. This resulted in a lengthy stay in
a sanatorium in the Alps in his mid-twenties, thanks to which he missed the
Second World War. But his closeness to his mother and what he called his
“Alpine Oxford”, where he spent the war (alongside Elias Canetti’s brother,
Georges, for example), allowed him to develop a wide range of interests,
including Ancient History (during these years he read the work of the
nineteenth-century romantic historian Jules Michelet avidly), existentialist
philosophy and the literary modernism of André Gide.
Barthes emerged from the
Second World War believing that we can explain everything in our human world –
except, perhaps, the mysteries of human interaction which, involving the
inter-subjectivity of at least two human beings, opened out onto a world of
infinite (and thereby, unknowable) possibilities… read more:
