Roland Barthes
Biography
Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist and semiologist, and one of the central figures of French structuralism and its aftermath. Tubercular for much of his youth, he spent long periods in sanatoria reading, and came to academic life late and obliquely, through journalism and teaching abroad. He held posts at the École pratique des hautes études and, from 1976, the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. He died in Paris a month after being struck by a laundry van while crossing the street.[1]
Key Ideas
- Myth. In Mythologies (1957) — short pieces on wrestling, soap powder, steak and chips, the new Citroën, a magazine photograph of a Black soldier saluting the French flag — Barthes analyses how a culture converts history into nature. Myth, in his usage, is a second-order sign system: it takes an existing sign and empties it of its history so that a contingent arrangement appears to be simply how things are. "Myth does not deny things... it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification."
- The death of the author. The 1967 essay argues that a text's meaning is not guaranteed by its writer's intentions, and that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." The claim is less about biography than about authority: once the author is no longer the terminus of interpretation, the text becomes a space of circulating quotation rather than a message with a sender.
- Writerly and readerly texts. From S/Z (1970). A readerly text positions the reader as a consumer of a fixed meaning; a writerly text makes the reader a producer of it. Barthes valued the second, and the distinction has been borrowed constantly by theorists of interactive and participatory media.
- Studium and punctum. From Camera Lucida (1980), his last book, written after his mother's death and organised around a photograph of her as a child that he declines to reproduce. The studium is the culturally legible interest of a photograph — what it documents, what one can discuss about it. The punctum is the accidental detail that pierces the viewer, that was not put there for them, and that cannot be argued about. Barthes also argues that photography's essential quality is the ça-a-été, the "that-has-been": the certification that the thing was really there.
Selected Works
- Writing Degree Zero (1953)
- Mythologies (1957)
- Elements of Semiology (1964)
- The Death of the Author (1967)
- S/Z (1970)
- The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
- A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977)
- Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980)
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Mythologies is the working method for reading any designed object as an argument — a phone, an interface, a product launch, an app icon — and asking what history it is concealing in order to look inevitable. The essay on the new Citroën would need almost no adjustment to be about a smartphone announcement.
Camera Lucida has aged into something else. Barthes rests photography's whole authority on the that-has-been: the chemical guarantee that light from a real object touched the film. Generative imaging removes exactly that guarantee, which makes his book, written at the end of the analogue era, an unusually precise account of what was lost. The punctum — the detail nobody chose — is also the thing a synthesised image is least able to supply.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Roland Barthes, biography and bibliography.
