Mythologies Revisited: Roland Barthes and the Left

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MYTHOLOGIES REVISITED:ROLAND BARTHES AND THELEFTCharles J. StivalePublished online: 09 Nov 2010.

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Abstract

This essay arises from the author’s scepticism about the received notion,prevalent both in literary and cultural studies, that Roland Barthes’s workof the 1960s constituted an abandonment of the previous decade’s socialcritique. The paper develops the argument that, to the contrary, under-standing Barthes’s socio-cultural development following World War II andin the French cultural context helps to situate the political engagement ofhis writings in the 1950s and to clarify the continued political commitmentof this work from the 1960s onward. This essay addresses a series of ques-tions: what was Barthes’s relationship to the 1950s French intelligentsiathat prepared his active participation in the heterodoxical Marxist journal,Arguments, a forum for many of the urgent intellectual debates between1956–62? What is the relationship of this activity to his writings of the early1950s, developed into Mythologies in 1957, as well as to the shift towardsemiology and structuralism and to the purported abandonment of socialcritique betokened by this shift? How do these phases inform the differentreadings of Barthes’s work developed in more recent interpretations of hiswriting? It is argued that we would do better to view the structuralist phaseand especially the ‘later’ Barthes (from the late 1960s onward) more fullyand deliberately in relation to the early, explicitly political period. Thisrevised perspective, one not limiting Barthes to works such as Mythologies,will help us better comprehend Barthes’s continuing legacy for socio-semiotic critique both in literary criticism and in cultural studies and tocreate new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue that is very much neededin an era of questioning the limits and borders of this � eld.

Charles J. Stivale

MYTHOLOGIES REVISITED: ROLAND

BARTHES AND THE LEFT

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 1 6 ( 3 ) 2 0 0 2 , 4 5 7 – 4 8 4

Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502380210128333

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Keywords

Roland Barthes; structuralism; post-structuralism; mythologies; Frenchintellectual history; French criticism

DE S P I T E T H E WA N I N G of critical interest in structuralism and even inmany facets of post-structuralism, the texts of Roland Barthes appear to

have maintained considerable critical currency since his death in 1980. In thissense, Umberto Eco was right to have questioned in the early 1980s the asser-tion that Barthes was ‘unjustly forgotten’ (1993: 41).1 Indeed, available evidencesuggests that the currency of Barthes’s prominence has � uctuated, but has notsigni� cantly diminished. To judge on the basis of one prominent gauge, the MLAInternational Bibliography, the number of texts listed as classi� ed entries devotedto Barthes’s works – books, journal articles, special journal issues and volumes– has varied somewhat over the past twenty years, but nonetheless has remainedfairly steady (approximately 20 listed entries each year).2 Furthermore, initiatedin 1981 to indicate the application of theories and of works by critical theorists,the Bibliography’s separate list of Subject Entries shows that Barthes’s critical in� u-ence continues to grow in a broad range of �elds, with approximately 16 subjectentries listed annually since 1981.3 And I should qualify these statistics by indi-cating that texts from Barthes’s entire oeuvre – from the 1953 Writing Degree Zero(1968a) to his � nal essay in 1980, Camera Lucida (1981) – provide the foci for thisresearch on what we might call the ‘literary Barthes’.

In another domain of research, cultural studies, scholars have maintainedconsistent interest in the ‘cultural Barthes’, a term I use to refer heuristically tothe author of the seminal 1957 Mythologies (1972a). This work constitutes asigni� cant milestone in cultural critique, not just as a proto-structuralist analysis,but also as a mode of practicing cultural studies before its more recent forms ofactualization. I draw several indices from this research �eld along a broadspectrum of sources in order to suggest the relative impact of Barthes’s work:

� In the � rst book on French cultural studies (Forbes and Kelly, 1995), Barthesis described as ‘culturally, the prophet of this modern age’ of the circulationof images in the media, through his Mythologies which ‘inaugurated the seriousanalysis of popular culture in France’ (1995: 147). This assertion is no doubtquite debatable since, for example, Edgar Morin’s work on cinema andculture preceded, or at least coincided, with Barthes’s development of his‘mythologies’ (Morin, 1956, 1957). In any case, the different authors inForbes and Kelly’s volume draw upon a number of Barthes’s works – mostnotably, The Empire of Signs (1982), S/Z (1975a) and Camera Lucida – todescribe the development of French thought since World War II, withMythologies standing out as a focal reference for this � eld of study.

� The listings for studies on Barthes in Sociological Abstracts (in June 2000)

C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S4 5 8

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M Y T H O L O G I E S R E V I S I T E D 4 5 9

provide the raw numbers of 39 entries for 1963–85 and 96 entries for1986–2000. Without ancillary entries (e.g. book reviews, anthologies, textsby Barthes, doubles), there are 20 studies on Barthes’s work in the earlierperiod and 72 in the period up to the present. Although it is dif�cult to assessfully the foci of these studies from the abstracts, at least half of the articles ineach period are on the social semiology derived from Barthes, among otherFrench theorists.

� In different key publications, the number and mode of references to Barthesvary considerably. For example, in the seminal volume, Cultural Studies(Grossberg et al., 1992), and the journal of the same title, the number of refer-ences to Barthes is apparently negligible: of the seven references in the CulturalStudies volume, most are to Mythologies, which explicitly constitutes a guidingtext for Haraway (1992: 334). In the journal, Cultural Studies, approximatelya dozen references to an array of Barthes’s texts appear over the same numberof years. While this might seem to detract from my emphasis on his impact inthis research domain, I would argue that Barthes’s work, particularly his socio-semiotics, is quite simply a basic building block, a given for advanced culturalstudies. One need refer only to Stuart Hall’s opening essay on ‘The Work ofRepresentation’ (Hall, 1997) to attest to this fundamental place of Barthes’swork.4 On the other hand, in the trade book obviously devoted entirely toBarthes, Introducing Barthes (Thody and Course, 1997), the opening section(30 pages) consists of a general introduction to cultural semiotics from theperspective of Mythologies, followed by another 30 pages on the structuralistBarthes, focusing on Elements of Semiology and The Fashion System.5

My own encounter with Barthes’s name in the cultural context was throughhis role as a founding member on the editorial committee of the in� uential late1950s leftist journal, Arguments. Given the received notions of Barthes as apioneer of structuralism, then of a form of post-structuralism, I wondered – nodoubt, naively – what Barthes was doing in such politically savvy and committedcompany.6 I had, of course, long been familiar with Writing Degree Zero with itsMarxist-existentialist spin on Littérature (emphasis on the capital L), and hadunderstood the proto-Marxism (at least in terms of the de-mythifying method-ology) of Mythologies.7 I had also encountered the commonplace view of Barthes’swork – that he had abandoned this politically committed perspective as a zealousproponent of semiology (e.g. Barthes, 1968b), the culmination of which was hisanalysis of Balzac’s short story, ‘Sarrasine’, in the 1970 S/Z.8

However, I remained sceptical about the extent to which Barthes’s work ofthe 1960s constituted an abandonment of the previous decade’s social critique.In light of the explicitly leftist Barthes of Arguments, I formulated a series of ques-tions: what was his relationship to the 1950s French intelligentsia that wouldcause him, even permit him, to participate actively in a heterodoxical Marxistjournal like Arguments that served as a forum for many of the urgent intellectualdebates between 1956 – 1962?9 Furthermore, what is the relationship of this

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activity to his writings of the early 1950s, developed into Mythologies in 1957, aswell as to the shift toward semiology and structuralism and to the purportedabandonment of social critique betokened by this shift? Finally, how do thesephases inform the different readings of Barthes’s work developed in more recentinterpretations of his writing?10

To answer these questions, I seek to contrast received notions of the ‘literaryBarthes’ in his different manifestations – formalist, structuralism, or post-structuralist – with other perspectives on his writings. These perspectives reveala writer who explored the cultural terrain in rather rhizomatic manner, that is,shooting off laterally in various literary, theatrical and political �elds during the� rst decade of his career. I conceive of this initial period as having prepared himfor the equally, though differently committed critical practice of the followingdecades. I believe that understanding this early period of Barthes’s career,especially the role played by Mythologies in his critical project, may help us situateand nuance more fully an understanding of Barthes’s evolution, away from therather simplistic view of the ‘merely’ formalist Barthes in the 1960s and of thehedonist Barthes in the 1970s. In turn, a careful examination of the early periodwill help us better understand Barthes’s relationship to more recent critical workon Barthes, particularly as regards the distinction I have drawn provisionallybetween the ‘literary’ and ‘cultural’ Barthes.

In this essay, I examine the import of Barthes’s early writings in terms of thesocio-political continuity of his critical project, particularly within the contextof his Parisian milieu and the array of Parisian journals in which he published.11

I � rst brie�y consider the nature of the power relations within the French intel-ligentsia during the 1950s, recalling the broad lines of these relations on theFrench left at this period, notably the division between the French CommunistParty (Parti communiste français, or PCF) and the group allied to Sartre and thereview, Les Temps Modernes. Then, I examine the particular role that Mythologiesplayed in Barthes’s development, both in his relations with the socio-culturalParisian context and in his own trajectory, through an explicitly leftist re� ectiontending toward the subsequent structuralist phase. I argue that we must view thissecond, structuralist phase and especially the ‘later’ Barthes (from the late 1960sonward) more fully and deliberately in relation to the early, more explicitlypolitical period. This revised perspective, one not limiting Barthes to works suchas Mythologies, will help us better comprehend Barthes’s continuing legacy forsocio-semiotic critique, whether in literary criticism or in cultural studies.12

The champ des revues (� eld of journals)

Following World War II, the pre-eminent journal on the Parisian intellectualscene was Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. In order to map the socio-cultural con-ditions of this success following the Liberation, Anna Boschetti examines the

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place of Les Temps Modernes within the ‘champ des revues’, i.e. broad � eld ofjournals, during the post-World War II period. The principal competition inother contemporary journals was the Christian, leftist and moderate intellectualwritings in Esprit,13 the iconoclastic literary and philosophical review, Critique,and the journal of the PCF, La Nouvelle critique. As Boschetti describes the latter,the Party had ‘returned to its political isolation as of 1947’, and it ‘brandished[La Nouvelle critique] against “bourgeois” culture’ (1985: 215).14 Of the threejournals, Critique is the most evident forerunner of the mode of 1960s criticism,and eventually post-structuralism, since the two intellectual poles at its foundingwere la science (i.e. knowledge, understood in broad terms to include les scienceshumaines, the human or social sciences) and ‘transgression’ (notably, the pre-occupations of Georges Bataille following Sade and Nietzsche). As Boschettiobserves,‘certain young collaborators in Critique, like Barthes and Foucault, weredestined to play a great role on the intellectual scene’ (1985: 214).

We should note, however, a particular alliance in the late 1940s: the relation-ship of Barthes to the leftist and existentialist camps through Camus’s journal,Combat. Let us recall that Combat was the publication of the French resistancetoward the end of World War II, and in the immediate aftermath of the Liber-ation, i.e. during the brief period of fraternization of Gaullists, Communists,Catholics and Marxists, Sartre himself wrote editorials for Combat (de Beauvoir,1963: 19–20; Boschetti, 1985: 138). In the post-war period, Camus was Combat’sdirector and remained allied to Sartre until their famous rupture in 1952. If weconsider Barthes’s early writing, many of his essays were published � rst inCombat, beginning in 1947, with texts that would form the main chapters ofWriting Degree Zero in 1953. In 1951, Barthes shifted and broadened his forum ofpublication with articles, eventually published in Mythologies, that appeared inEsprit, L’Observateur and, after 1953, in Maurice Nadeau’s Les Lettres nouvelles.15

To my mind, these alliances and developments suggest that Barthes wasuniquely positioned in the early 1950s as a contributor to journals representingan array of political positions: without being a hard line existentialist (i.e. notdirectly allied to the editorial line of Les Temps Modernes), he still had the bona � desof the Combat cachet, i.e. of a moralist existentialism in the manner of Camus.Barthes also published a number of essays on literary, theatrical and socio-culturaltopics in the Christian Esprit and in such left-leaning journals as L’Observateur andLes Lettres nouvelles. Indeed, it was in the latter of these that his ‘petites mytholo-gies du mois’ (little monthly mythologies, the initial versions of the chapter inMythologies) began to appear in December 1954.16 Finally, through many of hisearly articles, Barthes emerged as a leading proponent of current avant-garde art:on one hand, he published numerous essays and editorial statements on contem-porary theatre and theatrical productions in the journal, Théâtre populaire; on theother hand, in his contributions to Critique, he was outspoken in defending andexplicating the nouveau roman (the New Novel), prose works that appeared, notcoincidentally, at the same press (Éditions de Minuit) that published Critique.17


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Barthes thus played a key role in negotiating between leftist socio-culturalpositions, yet still retained a free hand in order to express his views in a varietyof forums. While Barthes was, of course, viewed as bourgeois by the PCF,however leftist his pretensions may have been, he was also singled out for bitingcriticism by the more centrist-conservative journal, La Nouvelle revue française, asbeing a Marxist fellow traveller for his ‘petites mythologies’.18 But the history ofrelations between the PCF and French intellectuals of this period reveals thetotalitarian grip that the party maintained on leftist political expression, apressure to which many readily succumbed (see Judt, 1992: 118–50). EdgarMorin’s 1958 Autocritique (1975) provides ample testimony to this terrorism onthe left, and the exclusions from the party as well as the resignations in the late1940s and early 1950s created veritable early- and mid-life crises for the leftistsinvolved. For, in leaving the party behind, they were abandoning (or being aban-doned by) an entire support structure that had nurtured them throughout thedif� cult years of oppression (World War II) and/or intellectual formation.

Barthes had only been on the edges of the PCF maelstrom, that is, of thoseformer members who withdrew voluntarily or were summarily expelled,without being directly drawn in. He spent the war years in sanitaria, � rst in theIsère region of France, then in Leysin, Switzerland, recovering from tuberculo-sis during much of the war, and thus precluding his participation in the Resist-ance. He also never joined the PCF, but while in Switzerland, he became familiarwith the Marxist dialectic thanks to contacts with the Trotskyist, GeorgesFournié (Barthes, 1998: 252; see Stafford, 1996: 57). Then, thanks to an intro-duction by Fournié to Maurice Nadeau (literary editor of Combat) following thewar, Barthes became implicitly allied to the general existentialist position, towhich he had already been attracted through his readings of Sartre and Camus(Barthes, 1998: 252). Thus, he was able to maintain a position allied to the leftistintelligentsia without having to bow to the strictures imposed by a dogmatic‘party line’. His separation from Combat in the early 1950s allowed him tomaintain a free hand vis-à-vis his literary, theoretical and socio-cultural writings,and then to publish in 1953 his initial post-war study of literature in WritingDegree Zero, of both Marxist and existentialist inspiration.

Finally, in the mid-1950s, as more and more writers on the left sought ameans to contribute to an interrogation of Marxism outside the constraintsimposed by a party line (whether Communist, anti-Communist or existential-ist), the Arguments collaboration, particularly with its basis in the Italian, non-sectarian model of Ragionamenti , provided a convenient, dare I say ‘natural’,recourse for Barthes in his own creative and professional positions and am-bitions. In a 1979 interview, de� ning his relations with Arguments as ‘essentiallypersonal relationships that were motivated by links of friendship’, Barthes alsodescribed the atmosphere of the period: ‘It was a time in which we had a “littlegroup” [“petit milieu”], we saw each other quite often at our homes, and con-sequently, I was very happy not to be on the margins of what [Edgar Morin, Jean


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Duvignaud, Pierre Fougeyrollas and others] were developing’ (Padova, 1981:47).19

However much Barthes tended to minimize his role in Arguments, his estab-lished position as a leftist cultural commentator shows Morin’s choice of Barthesas collaborator to have been a canny move. As Stafford notes, ‘in parallel andintersecting, [Morin’s and Barthes’s] body of work in this period now represents,broadly speaking, the � rst attempts to understand Western post-war massculture in France in its ideological, political, sociological, in short, totalanthropological sense’ (1996: 284). This overview of Barthes’s place in the champdes revues (� eld of journals) allows us to understand more fully both how Bartheswas positioned in the intelligentsia vis-à-vis the complex socio-cultural situationunder the Fourth Republic and how the re� ections published in Mythologies con-stitute a key socio-political contribution to the debates of that period.

Mythologies

I now address a second question concerning the status of Barthes’s writings ofthe 1950s, particularly of Mythologies, in relation to the intellectual power struc-ture within which he developed his thought.20 It is tempting to see Mythologiesas a proto-structuralist text, and Barthes himself calls the 1956 ‘postface’ ofMythologies, i.e.‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’ (Myth Today), his � rst semiological text(1991: 129). In several interviews, Barthes characterized the semiologicalperspective – subsequently revised in the late 1960s–early 1970s – as ‘pursu[ing]a general and systematic enterprise, polyvalent, multidimensional, the � ssurationof the symbolic and its discourse in the West’ (1991: 129). Yet, Barthes insistedthat the change of emphasis from one period to the next was ‘an alteration, nota denial’ of the earlier project; as he states in 1970:

I could no longer be content with relating forms to ideological contents asI did in Mythologies. Not that I think that this is worthless, but nowadays thiskind of relation is second-nature: today everyone can denounce a form’spetit-bourgeois character.

(1991: 85)

This optimistic, even idealistic, conception of a generalized practice of ‘mytholo-gies’ announces what Barthes understood as the implicit post-structuralistengagement in ‘fracture’: ‘It is not signs that must be cracked wide open –signi� ers on one side, signi� eds on the other – but the very idea of the sign’(1991: 85).

Yet, to read ‘Myth Today’ solely in this way – that is, as a proto-structural-ist shift away from socio-critical analyses – is to miss the political and affectiveinvestment that Barthes brought to the project of the ‘petites mythologies’ in the


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mid-1950s. In another 1970 interview, with the Parisian weekly L’Express (com-parable to Time or Newsweek), Barthes explained:

Those pieces [in Mythologies] were the result of some very strong feelings.I was annoyed, at the time, by a certain tone in the press, in the publicityof what is called mass communication. Irritated and intrigued at the sametime. What I didn’t agree with was the presentation of an event in termsof a kind of implicit natural psychology. As if things said about the eventwere obvious, as if the event and its meaning coincided naturally.

(1991: 94–5)

Many writers have assessed Mythologies in relation to Barthes’s overall produc-tion, but in doing so, most have emphasized this project primarily in terms of itsproto-structuralist and/or semiological values, of déplacement (displacement),the sense of constant movement and shifting elsewhere in Barthes’s writings.21

While I have no wish to freeze Barthes in time, what interests me is to considerthe essay ‘Myth Today’ – and especially the section entitled ‘Myth on the Left’ –as a deliberate intervention within a particular set of socio-political powerrelations, that is, the intellectual debates, alliances and constraints prevalent inthe mid-1950s.22

Whereas in most of the texts of Mythologies and in ‘Myth Today’, Barthesaddresses the centrist and conservative bourgeois naturalization of mass culture,he intervenes with the section ‘Myth on the Left’ directly into the politicaldebates at the crucial time of the European conjuncture of 1956–7. This con-juncture relates especially to Barthes’s own activities as contributor to and co-founder of Arguments and to his writings on literature. Preceding the section of‘Myth Today’ in question, Barthes de�nes myth as ‘a depoliticized speech’, i.e.the restitution of ‘a natural image of this reality’,‘the loss of the historical qualityof things’ (Barthes, 1972a: 142–3).23 But, if such is the case, asks Barthes in ‘Mython the Left’, what is the status of ‘speech that remains political’? Barthes answersby asserting that political language is one of action, ‘operational, transitivelylinked to its object’, in contrast and opposition to a second-order meta-languagewhich is not necessarily mythical, but ‘is the very locus where myth settles’(1972a: 145–6). Thus, to emphasize a strong position against language that couldspawn myths, and thereby to prepare the reader for the long, penultimatesection, ‘Myth on the Right’, Barthes maintains that revolutionary languagecannot be mythical since it is a language of action, i.e. spoken to transform realityand not to preserve it as an image.

This assertion leads him to make the distinction between ‘bourgeois ex-nomination’ and ‘revolutionary denomination’: ‘The bourgeoisie hides the factthat it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itselfopenly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth’ (1972a: 146). But, of course,the Left does not equal the revolution, and thus ‘Left-wing myth supervenes


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precisely at the moment when revolution changes itself into “the Left”, that is,when it accepts to wear a mask, to hide its name, to generate an innocent meta-language and to distort itself into “Nature” ’ (1972a: 146–7). This wouldfunction, that is, something like a ‘revolutionary ex-nomination’, contrary torevolution, on the basis of which revolutionary history has de� ned ‘deviation-ism’. Applying the semiotic schema (albeit loosely) that he presented thirty pagesearlier in the same essay (1972a: 115), Barthes chooses the (then) very contem-porary example of the Stalinist myth, through which the totalitarianism of thePCF can be read as a meta-language:

A meaning, which was the real Stalin, that of history; a signi� er, which wasthe ritual invocation to Stalin, and the inevitable character of the ‘natural’epithets with which his name was surrounded; a signi� ed, which was theintention to respect orthodoxy, discipline and unity, appropriated by theCommunist parties to a de�nite situation; and a signi� cation, which was asancti� ed Stalin, whose historical determinants found themselvesgrounded in nature, sublimated under the name of Genius, that is, some-thing irrational and inexpressible: here, depoliticization is evident, it fullyreveals the presence of myth.

(1972a: 147)

This analysis by Barthes is an excellent semio-political intervention precisely inthe non-sectarian, or perhaps more accurately, heterodoxical spirit of Arguments.That is, he is able to show the use and abuse of this particular ‘Leftist myth’, bothas an explanation and a warning.

But, the � nal paragraphs of this section of ‘Myth Today’ are more dif� cult tosituate: by creating a typology of the Leftist myth – as ‘inessential’, ‘incidental’,‘poverty-stricken’ (1972a: 147–8) – does Barthes further his critique of this typeof myth and thus further his intervention? Or is this an apology for the Leftistmyth, justifying its existence in any event since it � nally is political given the very‘nature of the “Left” . . . [which] always de� nes itself in relation to the oppressed,whether proletarian or colonized’ (1972a: 148)? Barthes here essentializes the‘speech of the oppressed’ as ‘poor, monotonous, immediate, . . . real . . . transi-tive: it is quasi-unable to lie [since] lying is a richness, a lie presupposes property,truths and forms to spare’ (1972a: 148). It is clear that Barthes needs to excul-pate to some extent the Leftist myth given the culminating political interventionthat will follow in ‘Myth Today’ against the bourgeois power structure of theright, i.e. the expression of myth properly designated, via the various strategiesof cultural and mass communications.

However, while Barthes speaks of the dryness and awkwardness of the Leftistmyth, his own awkwardness in regards to the ‘speech of the oppressed’ in someways proves the poverty or indiscretion of the Left in talking about its own myths.That is, while Barthes is, to a great extent, on the mark in discussing the power


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relations that the Communist (read Stalinist) myth inherently imposes, hestumbles as did the Left in trying to exculpate himself/itself vis-à-vis ‘speech ofthe oppressed’. I attribute this awkwardness to Barthes’s own equivocal position(shared also by many of his colleagues) as bourgeois, leftist intellectuals, however‘deviant’. That is, he/they try to explain the nature of a kind of speech withwhich he/they ostensibly are in solidarity, but which he/they can describe onlyin the most essentialized manner. Barthes thus creates a meta-language of the‘speech of the oppressed’, itself a myth created by leftist bourgeois intellectualswhose only relationship to ‘the oppressed’, with a few rare exceptions, is throughlanguage and representation. Yet, in attributing to ‘the oppressed’ a positioncharacterized by lack of power – ‘it is powerless [impuissant] to empty out thereal meaning of things’ (1972a: 148) – the intellectual simultaneously attributesto himself a necessary function of mediator in relation to this so-called ‘power-less speech’. That the self-serving nature of this attribution of the power positionto the intellectual escaped Barthes may well surprise us in an era of post-colonialand subaltern studies (cf. Spivak, 1988, and texts in Landry and MacLean, 1996).As we shall see, Barthes genuinely sought a means of articulating a discourse thatmight somehow avoid the mythological traps he had so rigorously described.

Speaking the Left (parler la gauche)

Despite the limits of Barthes’s analysis in ‘Myth on the Left’, I cannot followJackson in devaluing Barthes’s collection of essays as ‘lightweight magazineskits’.24 On the contrary, the awkwardness that I have pointed out is constitutiveof the dif� culties in the mid-1950s for leftist intellectuals to act, i.e. followingBarthes’s own distinctions, ‘to speak the Left’ (parler la gauche), and not ‘speakabout it’ (parler sur (elle)). This would mean to act (speak, write) in a way thatitself does not create new masks, myths or meta-languages, but rather that canfurnish tools for concrete action on the left by the left (see Barthes, 1972a:145–6). This is precisely the dif� culty of the Arguments project throughout its six-year existence, i.e. to employ Marxist critique while constantly reinventing themeans by which and topics on which this critique might be deployed.25 Barthes’sown intervention in the �rst issue of Arguments, entitled ‘The Tasks of BrechtianCriticism’, later included in Critical Essays (1972b: 71–6), was written at the samemoment as ‘Myth Today’. Besides summarizing much of Barthes’s recent expli-cation and defence of Brecht in Théâtre populaire, this essay functions in many waysas a concrete example of Barthes’s, and Arguments’s, efforts to ‘speak the Left’.

After discussing the reception of Brecht along the political spectrum fromfar right to the Communist left, Barthes proposes a dual reading of this avant-garde theatre, at once following Brecht’s own ideological bases – ‘a dynamic ofevents which combines observation and explanation, ethics and politics’ (1972b:74) – and also following the semiological model described in ‘Myth Today’. By


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looking at Brecht’s semiology of the alienation-effect, Barthes argues that whilebourgeois critics view art as ‘a pseudo-Physis’ (false Nature), Brecht views art assituated at the heart of an historical con� ict whose stakes are human ‘disalien-ation’. Thus art must be ‘an anti-Physis’, says Barthes, and in Mythologies, Barthesclaimed he feels nauseous ‘before the arts which refuse to choose between physisand anti-physis’ (1972a: 126; cf. 142). That is, art must counter the ‘naturalizing’and de-historicizing effect of ‘the confusions of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeoisfalse Nature’ perpetrated by myth (1972b: 75). The ‘morality’ of Brecht’sdramaturgy, Barthes concludes, is precisely the contrary of bourgeois mytholo-gizing, a reversal achieved by asking the spectator: ‘what is to be done in such asituation?’, that is, precisely the transitive, political question that Barthes extolsfor the left. Barthes sees this morality as a means to promote individual conducttoward revolutionary action, yet within bourgeois institutional contexts (1972b:75–6).

This essay functioned as a socio-cultural intervention that helps us betterunderstand the con� uence of intellectual positions not only in Barthes’s careerat the moment of his collaboration with Arguments, but also in the struggle andalliance of power relations within the French intelligentsia: on one hand, themoral existentialism of “situations” and the ideological imperatives of hetero-doxical Marxism (as in the early Arguments project), and on the other hand, thenew ‘discipline’ (the would-be “science”) of semiology that will constituteBarthes’s theoretical orientation in the 1960s. The Brecht essay – as well asBarthes’s contributions to Théâtre populaire – thus emphasize the particular socio-political conjuncture in which ‘Myth Today’ functions. That is, not merely aproto-structuralist treatise, this essay is a Marxist-inspired manifesto in whichBarthes attempts to counter the hegemonic constraints impinging upon intellec-tuals and on their creative expression from the left as well as from the right.

Criticism and truth

That Barthes would apparently opt in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the ‘disci-plinary’, ‘systemic’ discourse of the burgeoning structuralist enterprise shouldnot entirely obscure for us the continued political import of his interventionswithin the socio-cultural context. Yet, to conceptualize this structuralist phasein terms of socio-cultural politics, one must again situate Barthes’s work withinthe French conjuncture of the period. First, although Barthes only contributedfour essays in all to Arguments’s 28 issues and ceased to serve on the editorial com-mittee after issue 5 in December 1957, this apparent withdrawal actually pointsto Barthes’s prodigious literary and socio-political writing activity from 1957onward. For, between 1957 and 1963, he published in 36 different periodicalsincluding Annales, Théâtre populaire, L’Arc, Critique, Esprit, MLN, The Times LiterarySupplement and Tel Quel, produced a new series of ‘petites mythologies’ in 1959


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for Les Lettres nouvelles, and helped launch a new review of semio-sociologicalcritique, Communications, in 1961. Calling this period one of ‘a certain pro-fessional instability’ due to different changes of institutional af� liations, Barthesnonetheless considered these years to be quite rich intellectually (1998: 257).

Another perspective on Barthes’s shift towards structuralism, proposed byAndy Stafford, lies in the contradictory attitude toward popular culture thatBarthes had expressed about the ideal of developing a popular theatre movement.In his stance of the early to middle 1950s, says Stafford, Barthes ‘conceded thatthe function of a people’s culture was that of maintaining the social status quo. . . but he also conceded that a truly popular theatre in France could act as an“incendie des consciences” [stimulus to raising awareness] – and it was in Brecht’stheatre, above all, that he was to � nd this “incendie” ’ (1996: 47). Yet, by the endof the 1950s, the failure of French theatres – particularly, of the Théâtre Nationalde Paris under Jean Vilar – to realize this ideal caused Barthes to reject any possi-bility of a radical popular theatre. Hence, concludes Stafford, ‘Barthes’s “struc-turalist” phase seemed to develop out of his jaundiced attitude towards massculture from the late � fties into the sixties’ (1996: 48), i.e. a phase that pre-sumably emphasized systemic and linguistic analysis of texts over socio-criticalengagement with them.

However, let us recall that this shift and subsequent critical work occurredat the same time as the French left was � ghting a harsh political battle with theFrench government over Algeria. I draw attention to this political conjuncturein order to emphasize the parallel battle waged by Barthes on the cultural frontwith state-sanctioned scholarly representatives. In the early years of the FifthRepublic (1958–1962), Barthes published a number of essays in support ofpositions and works that contradicted canonical and established intellectualpositions – on Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro, on Yves Velan’s Je, on MarthesRobert’s study of Kafka, on Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, on Michel Butor’snovel, Mobile (1972b: 125–42, 167–87).26 Then, in a 1963 essay,‘The Two Criti-cisms’, Barthes contrasts the established, positivist critical perspective, inheritedfrom the 19th century, to ‘interpretive’ criticism, also synonymous with an ‘ideo-logical [criticism], in opposition to the � rst kind, which rejects every ideologyand claims to derive only from an objective method’ (1972b: 250).

This literary critical work constituted the development of nothing less thana set of new ground rules for criticism. Barthes’s 1963 collection of essays, OnRacine (1964), was a distinctly political attempt to negotiate new power relationsby liberating literary analysis of the ‘classics’ (e.g. Racine) as well as the ‘moderns’from the positivist strictures imposed by what Barthes called ‘academic criti-cism’. Indeed, we must view the � ve � nal texts in Critical Essays – published indi-vidually in 1963, then together in the 1964 volume – and On Racine as a deliberateintervention against the established literary critical orthodoxy. The stakes ofBarthes’s reconstitution of and challenge to ‘academic criticism’ became mostevident in the polemic initiated by the Sorbonne professor and Racine scholar,


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Raymond Picard, in his 1965 essay against Barthes’s On Racine, entitled New Criti-cism or New Fraud? (1969). Barthes’s response the following year, Criticism andTruth (1987), was a two-pronged assault on the conservative and positivist criticalstance espoused by Picard. As such, his response also constituted a leftist practiceof ‘speaking the left’ within the socio-cultural and political conjuncture ofGaullist France.

Combining the line of critique that he pursued in ‘The Two Criticisms’ withthe analysis accomplished in Mythologies, Barthes devoted Part I to demytholo-gizing the journalistic reception of Picard’s attack and to underscoring the issuesat stake – ‘critical verisimilitude’, ‘objectivity’, ‘good taste’, ‘clarity’, and rejec-tion of ‘symbols’ and their multiple signi� cations (1987: 29–59). Then, in PartII, Barthes expanded and reoriented other earlier texts – notably, ‘The Struc-turalist Activity’, ‘What is Criticism?’ and ‘Literature and Signi� cation’ (1972b:213–20, 255–79) – to develop themes that would emerge in his essays of the late1960s: the plurality of discourses as text, the death of the author, criticism asproduction of meanings, and reading as a desiring relationship with writing. Thesecond part of the response in Criticism and Truth actually shows the extent towhich Barthes had moved beyond On Racine in laying the ground for a numberof his major essays and books of the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably S/Z andThe Pleasure of the Text (1975b). As Antoine Compagnon points out:‘Between OnRacine and Criticism and Truth, the text [and] Textuality thrust themselves on himand then on everyone’ (1993: 26). Just as signi� cantly, however, Barthes’sresponse to Picard served the strategic function of foregrounding the debates andstruggles that would soon engulf the French university system in May 1968 andthereafter precisely over issues of curriculum and pedagogy.27

Hence, the importance of Barthes’s socio-critical project of the 1960s tendsto be obscured by the perception of these writings as belonging exclusively to astrictly formalist, structuralist enterprise. In fact, some texts which do fall underthis category, like Elements of Semiology and The Fashion System, while path-breakingin the mid-1960s, were � nally and rather quickly of only limited importance toBarthes himself.28 Indeed, Barthes carried into the 1960s, but with different ter-minology and nuances, the image which he presented in the concluding sectionof ‘Myth Today’, that of the mythologist as outsider, ‘excluded from this historyin the name of which he professes to act’ (1972a: 157). Three years later, in the1960 Arguments essay, ‘Authors and Writers’ (‘Écrivains et écrivants’), Barthescogently discerned the socially paradoxical relationship between the two polesof written expression, the ‘author’ (the écrivain, producing for society) and the‘writer’ (the écrivant, producing language despite society). Yet, he moved beyondthe previous description of the mythologist’s polarized dilemma by admittingthat ‘everyone today moves more or less openly between the two postulations’,that ‘today, each member of the intelligentsia harbors both roles in himself’(1972b: 149). In contrast to the mythologist entirely and deliberately cut offfrom myth-consumers, Barthes pointed to a contemporary form, a hybrid


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‘bastard type’, the author–writer [écrivain–écrivant] who is useful so that societymight ‘experience the dream of a communication without system (without insti-tution): to write without “style”, to communicate “pure thought” without suchcommunication developing any parasitical message – that is the model which theauthor–writer creates for society’ (1972b: 149). While acknowledging thisbastard type minimally,‘buying his books (however few), recognizing their publiccharacter’, society also keeps a wary distance, ‘obliging him to support himselfby means of the subsidiary institutions it controls (the university, for instance),constantly accusing him of intellectualism’ (1972b: 149–50).

Alan O’Shea has argued, with speci� c reference to Barthes, that cultivationof the stance of ‘cultural bandit’ – for example, the mythologist – tends to mis-represent the position of the cultural theorist and to distort the task of culturalstudies since the cultural critic’s relations with the culture under scrutiny ‘arenot as simple as the inside/outside logic, or even the centre/margin model’(O’Shea, 1998: 517). And however unstable Barthes’s work af� liations may havebeen in the early 1960s, ‘Barthes, in fact, had his institutional base and his � eldof academic engagement’ – speci� cally, as of 1962, at the École pratique des hautesétudes – allowing him to forge ‘an interdisciplinary debate across the �elds ofcultural anthropology, structural linguistics and Marxism’ (O’Shea, 1998: 518).While O’Shea is right to point out Barthes’s indulgence in Mythologies with themyth of the ‘cultural bandit’, I would argue that Barthes quickly moved towarda different position, that of the hybrid ‘author–writer’, ‘an excluded � gure inte-grated by his very exclusion, a remote descendent of the Accursed’ (1972b: 150).However �ne the distinction may appear between mythologist andauthor–writer, the shift is crucial since the latter constitutes an ‘in-between’status due precisely to the paradoxical and ambiguous position that ‘ “insti-tutionalized” codes and practices’ impose on the critic (O’Shea, 1998: 518). Infact, yet another index of this ‘in-between’ status lies in the very de� nition thatO’Shea attributes to the interdisciplinary � eld of Barthes’s socio-critical inter-vention, his working ‘across the � elds of cultural anthropology, structural lin-guistics and Marxism’ (O’Shea, 1998: 518). It is this ‘in-between’ position thatmay best help us understand the import of Barthes’s writings for the conjoinedliterary and cultural � elds.

Barthes, between literary and cultural studies

The preceding examination of Barthes’s critical positions in the 1960s may seemmore relevant for students and critics of the ‘literary Barthes’ than for thoseinterested in his place in cultural studies. However if, as Lawrence Grossberginsists, cultural studies is nothing if not radically contextual and if indeed ‘itmatters how cultural studies is de� ned contextually’ (1997: 344), then the situ-ation of Barthes’s socio-cultural evolution and political engagement is as equally


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important in both domains of study. Emphasizing the transformative effects ofthe movement of reading within and through textual production (Barthes,1975a: 160), Barthes lays the ground, I would argue, for a rhizomatic analysisavant la lettre, a method that traces the heterogeneous cultural strains that con-tribute to contemporary practices of cultural studies.

One perspicacious reader of Barthes, Edmund White, commented a yearbefore Barthes’s death how (then) contemporary practitioners in North Americaof the semiology inspired by Barthes had betrayed his thought:

By ignoring his early collections of Mythologies and his late autobiographicalnotes (Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse, and concentrating solely on hismiddle texts (Elements of Semiology, S/Z, Sade/Fourier/Loyola and The Empireof Signs), American structuralists have robbed Barthes of his suspiciousnesstoward bourgeois culture . . . To be sure, Barthes’s early leftism has beenmodi� ed by his encounters with linguistics, structural anthropology, andpsychoanalysis itself. . . . He is less a sleuth and more an analyst, less inter-ested in meaning than in discourse. But as Michel Foucault has shown, dis-course is never innocent.

(1979: 40–1)29

From White’s perspective, even Barthes’s presumably most ambitious semio-logical book, S/Z, ‘is his most penetrating (or rather devastating) politicalachievement’ (1979: 40). For, in ‘re-writing’ while also analysing Balzac’s shortstory, ‘Sarrasine’, Barthes developed a complex, multi-voiced and destabilizingmode of reading that ‘implicates the text as an event within a context of power,desire, and truth-effects’ (Grossberg, 1987: 92). This particular reading encom-passed several domains: the pedagogical domain through the self-professed‘transferential’ process of the seminar in which S/Z was elaborated over a two-year period; the creative and inter-textual domain through which Barthes elabor-ated the original text as polyvocal set of citations and readings; and thesocio-cultural domain through an ideological critique that followed Barthes’sbelief in ‘resist[ing] the temptation to reply brutally [to the demand of ideologicalcriticism], with declarations on ideology’ (1998: 267). As Barthes asserts in theTel Quel interview: ‘The stronger the demand, the more subtle the response:otherwise it would run the risk [of] being merely opportunistic, or just func-tionally descriptive: we would declare ourselves to be outside of ideologywithout � rst asking where ideology is – and where it is not’ (1998: 261).30

I believe that by negotiating these diverse strategic domains, Barthescon� rms how deliberately he pursued the development of his status ‘in-between’, a position that holds out considerable promise for cultural as well asliterary critique. At the same time, though, one must remain prudent in makingtoo sweeping a claim for Barthes’s pluralism either as cultural critic or literarytheorist. On one hand, in a seminal study of Barthes’s semiotics, Iain Chambers


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emphasized the limitations for cultural studies of the semiotic model proposedin ‘Myth Today’ and Elements of Semiology. According to Chambers, the decodingof symbols, or ‘myths’, through language therein fails adequately ‘to respect boththe extra-systemic referent of the symbol and the mediation of language’, thatis, ‘the social material conditions in which these representations (“mythologies”)emerge and exist’ (Chambers, I., 1974: 56). On the other hand, referring toBarthes’s later concept of ‘jouissance’ (pleasure), Umberto Eco insisted that thiswas not an anarchic concept, and that in his reading practices, Barthes ‘sought tocreate plural meanings, not to celebrate the ungraspability and perpetual slippageof meaning’. Thus, in his reading of Balzac’s tale in S/Z, ‘Barthes divides it intolexias because pleasure [jouissance] must be controlled by [the lexias’s] reciprocalreference, and the articulation of the lexias regulates and veri�es the dialectic ofpleasure, the excitation of divination’ (Eco, 1993: 45).

Returning to the dichotomy that I proposed at the start – between a culturalBarthes and literary Barthes – this distinction clearly needs to be reformulatedto allow us more fully to animate Barthes’s position intermezzo, the ‘in-between’of Barthes’s socio-écriture. This reconceptualization would recognize at once thesocio-cultural elements of Barthes’s literary readings and later essays (e.g. RolandBarthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse) and the engagement with thecombined processes of reading/writing, i.e. with the formal, stylistic, andlinguistic elements that never cease to inform the ‘cultural texts’ from Mytholo-gies to Camera Lucida. This orientation would also consider how Barthes’s politicalcommitment manifested itself in the classroom and in his different writings onand directed to students.31 Moreover, besides helping to expand and enrich ourre� ection on the scope of Barthes’s texts, such a commitment to reconceptual-ize Barthes’s work would open cultural studies more deliberately toward whatRoss Chambers has called the ‘language-culture nexus’, i.e. a (French) culturalstudies oriented ‘toward a pragmatics of language use, as the culturally mediatedvehicle of social interactions’ (2000: 66). This mode of reconceptualizationwould create new ground for an interdisciplinary dialogue that is very muchneeded in an era of questioning the limits and borders of this � eld.

To offer but one example of this intersection and intervention of Barthes’ssocio-écriture from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, I am repeatedly struck by theways in which his re� ections shuttle delicately between subtle social critique andthe pleasures of writing, and in fact, layer one upon the other in a hybrid modeof reading. In the ‘Lettre de Jilali/A letter from Jilali’, Barthes’s tender re� ec-tion on the style of his Moroccan correspondent – ‘sumptuous, brilliant, literaland nonetheless immediately literary, literary without culture, every sentenceemphasizing the pleasures of language’ – notes the letter’s poignantly ideologicaldimension, how ‘the letter speaks [dit] at the same time truth and desire: all ofJilali’s desire (the guitar, love), all of the political truth of Morocco’ (1977: 111).Later, in the � nal pages, Barthes’s commentary on the ‘originality’ and ‘truth’ ofthe Tel Quel group also distinguishes the group members’ practice and ardent


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political commitment from his own in terms of desire, implicitly de� ned as the‘alive, pulsing, pleasure-seeking’ uniqueness of the body (1977: 175).32 Thisoverlap of truth and desire, writing and politics, recalls ‘Brecht’s criticism ofR.B.’ earlier in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, an entry that well de� nesBarthes’s situation intermezzo:

His place (his milieu) is language: that is where he accepts or rejects, thatis where his body can or cannot. To sacri� ce his life-as-language to politicaldiscourse? He is quite willing to be a political subject but not a politicalspeaker (the speaker: someone who delivers his discourse, recounts it, and atthe same time noti� es it, signs it). And it is because he fails to separate[décoller, unglue] political reality [le réel politique] from its general, repeateddiscourse that politics is barred to him. Yet out of this preclusion he can atleast make political meaning of what he writes: it is as if he were thehistorical witness of a contradiction: that of a sensitive, avid, and silentpolitical subject (these adjectives must not be separated).

(1977: 53, original emphasis)

Yet again, Barthes situates himself in the in-between site that he had alreadybegun to articulate 18 years earlier in the � nal pages of ‘Myth Today’, but nowin terms of the body and (implicitly) desire. This glissement, at once a temporaland conceptual shift or slide, helps us grasp more fully the fundamentally politicalmovement of Barthes’s trajectory. Leaving behind the polarized despair (howeverironic) of the mythologist, the paradoxical stance of the ‘author–writer’ now isa contradictory symptom of the scriptor’s location (place, milieu) in society. Yetthe use of ‘silent’ within the triple quali� cation by adjectives ‘that must not beseparated’ in no way diminishes Barthes’s feeling and desire for his vie langagière(life-as-language): his ‘failure’ (which is not one) comes precisely from fully andeagerly sensing (as much making sense as feeling) the extent to which the‘political real’ is stuck to its repetition in discourse.

The constant and repeated examination of this sticky intersection of thepolitical in and of writing constitutes the very de� nition of Barthes’s criticalproject and also recalls the work of another 20th century writer. Under the title‘The Other Barthes’, Eric Marty cleverly, yet also perceptively, comparesBarthes’s oeuvre to Proust’s, at the origin of which, says Marty, is a shared‘desecrating violence’ toward literature:‘Just as “lost time” is constructed arounda nearly untenable ambivalence between fascination for “Society” [le “Monde”] andits corrosive critique, so too in Mythologies, alongside the ‘demysti� cation’ of theworld’s mythological complicity, one � nds a pleasure [jouissance] not only of con-templating this world, but equally of touching and caressing it through writing’(1993: 24). This fundamental ambivalence regarding ‘myth’ – a practice that isat once critical and yet also pleasurable, in search of pleasure – may help usunderstand why, despite its inconsistencies, contradictions and even occasional


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lack of currency, Barthes’s Mythologies returns as a work that incessantly opensthe reader, like Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, toward the scrutiny andpleasure of reading the world as text and texture. This conjunction of writingwith and within society through diverse, yet intersecting modes of representationde� nes Barthes’s practice of socio-écriture and thus animates a dynamic nexus ofhis writing and re� ection at the crossroads between the literary and culturalstudies.

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude for assistance, critical comments and inspiration to RossChambers, Michael Giordano, Gil Rodman, Greg Seigworth, Lisa Vollendorf andGreg Wise.

Notes

1 Eco’s essay is the text of a talk given by him in April 1984, at a conference inItaly on Barthes entitled ‘Mitologie di Roland Barthes’. I provide a list ofBarthes’s books in the chronological order of their publication (excludingposthumous collections) in the appendix. All of Barthes’s major works andmany interviews and seminars have been published in the three-volume Oeuvrescomplètes (Barthes, 1993–5).

2 My scan of Barthes criticism in the MLA International Bibliography covers 1979to 1998. During that time, 17 book titles are listed, works entirely or partiallydevoted to Barthes. The years with highest classi� ed entries are those withspecial journal issues and/or edited volumes devoted to Barthes: 1981 (29entries), 1982 (23 entries, two journal issues – Poétique, 1981; L’Esprit Créateur,1982), 1983 (45 entries, two journal issues – Studies in Twentieth Century Litera-ture, 1981; Critique, 1982), 1994 (43 entries, due largely to the 29 essays inCoquio and Salado, 1993), and 1997 (68 entries, with two journal issuesarchived – Magazine littéraire, 1993; Nottingham French Studies 1997 – and oneedited volume, Rabaté, 1997). This list does not include the 18 presentationsand two concluding comments (by Antoine Compagnon and Roland Barthes)collected in the proceedings of the 1977 Cerisy Colloquium on Barthes(Compagnon, 1979). The statistical low point for Barthes studies was 1989(three classi� ed entries, 12 subject entries). Please note that these results areskewed by the occasional discrepancy between date of publication and date ofannotation in the Bibliography. For another, even more thorough perusal ofBarthes works, see Philippe (1996).

3 The Subject Entries indicate not only the particular works by Barthes that havebeen important for scholars, but also the range of � elds, particularly nationalliteratures, in which Barthes’s works have been applied. Thus, besides


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generating critical works in the French literary � eld, Barthes’s writings havedone so in twenty-four national literary � elds as well as in the areas of literary,folk, and genre criticism.

4 This essay echoes Hall’s earlier designation of Barthes alongside Lévi-Straussas one of ‘four representative instances’ in the formative phase of culturalstudies. Says Hall, ‘Barthes offered a more informal “semiotics” [than Lévi-Strauss’s model], studying the systems of signs and representations in an arrayof languages, codes and everyday practices in contemporary societies’ (1980:29–30) As in� uential texts, Hall cites Elements of Semiology (1968b), The FashionSystem (1990) and Mythologies, as well as what he calls ‘an important but little-known essay’, ‘Sociology and socio-logic’ (Barthes, 1994: 160–72). See alsodifferent essays in Grossberg (1997, particularly 37, 92, 102, 159–60) onstrengths and limits of Barthes’s work.

5 For the sake of economy, Thody and Course implicitly divide Barthes’s workinto three categories – the semiotic, the literary (including the Barthes-Picardliterary debate) and the post-structuralist – with a � nal section (1997:145–71) in which they attempt to account for Barthes’s works that do not fallneatly into the explanations the authors give of these categories (e.g. Michelet,The Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida).

6 Among others, Edgar Morin and Jean Duvignaud were co-founders withBarthes. For a pro� le of the Arguments project, see Padova (1981), Stafford(1997) and Stivale (1990). On the journal’s individual writers, see Stivale(1985).

7 On the in� uence of existentialism on Writing Degree Zero, see among othersCalvet (1973: 25–35), Culler (1983: 24–32), Lavers (1982: 67–70) andO’Neill (1985). Barthes described his ideological orientation to Writing DegreeZero in the 1971 Tel Quel interview (Barthes, 1998: 251–4). On his relationshipto existentialism, see the 1980 interview in Magazine littéraire (Barthes, 1993).

8 Proponents of this view include Champagne (1984), Jackson (1991) andThody (1977).

9 See Poster (1975) for the context of existentialist Marxism.10 Although the phases in Barthes’s career proposed by Jackson are accurate at

least chronologically and bio-bibliographically – phase 1, ‘Roland Barthes inthe Age of Sartre’; phase 2,‘explicitly structuralist and semiological’; phase 3,‘post-structuralist’; phase 4, the � nal ‘highly personal form of belles-lettres-ism’ (1991: 124–9) – this delineation fails to situate Barthes’s evolution,particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, within the context of his relations withthe Parisian intelligentsia.

11 In this regard, see the cogent analysis by Andy Stafford (1996) of Barthes’ssocio-cultural and political engagement as theatre critic for the journal Théâtrepopulaire. See also Stafford (1998) for a broad intellectual biography.

12 For the reader not entirely familiar with the French institutional and politicallandscape in the post-World War II period, a brief overview may be in order:following the liberation of Paris in August 1944, nearly a year of militarystruggle to end the war prevented immediate government reforms. Success-


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ive political formations prepared a new government and constitution. The pro-visional government, headed by General Charles de Gaulle since summer 1944(ruling by decrees rather than laws in the absence of a parliament), submittedthe choice of a new regime to a popular vote. The referendum in October1945, accepted the election of a constitutional convention, and the followingmonth, De Gaulle was con� rmed in his powers as head of the government.However, early in the next phase, that of Tripartism (i.e. the alliance ofCommunist Party, Socialist Party and the leftist Catholic MRP), De Gaulle quitthe government in January 1946, with the installation (and opposition to hisviews on the constitution) of the party system. The Constitution was acceptedby a referendum in October 1946, establishing the Fourth Republic as a parlia-mentary dominated government (with a weak and inef� cient executivebranch) that favoured the proliferation of numerous political parties. Thisparliamentary system produced a series of weak governments that toppled oneafter another. Many factors, including the start of the Cold War with height-ened tensions between the Soviet Union and the USA, and the Communists’adherence to Stalinist dogma, contributed to the collapse of Tripartism in1947, with the growing partisan struggles for government power tending tolimit the possibility of any strong majority throughout the next decade. Withthe outbreak of the Algerian con� ict in 1954, the Fourth Republic govern-ments became unable to maintain control of the increasingly violent outbreaksof protest. The ministerial crisis in May 1958 created paralysis, and with theFrench Algerians in open revolt against the French government, Charles deGaulle accepted to return to government. Invested as president of the StateCouncil in June 1958, he gained full governmental control, and the new Con-stitution of the Fifth Republic, accepted by referendum in September, 1958assured a strong executive under de Gaulle’s leadership.

13 Michel Jamet cites the Esprit editors (in 1983), Paul Thibaud, to describe thisjournal: ‘For many people, Esprit was the home and the guide for a Christianand committed humanism, the name for which was “personalism” ’ foundedby the journal’s � rst editor, Emmanuel Mounier (Jamet, 1983: 201). All trans-lations are my own, except where otherwise indicated.

14 The various stances of French intellectuals vis-à-vis the PCF following WorldWar II were extremely complex and dif� cult for French leftists who hadexperienced the Occupation, during which the PCF members were hunted bythe Nazi occupants as well as by the collaborationists of the Vichy government.In a detailed examination of the post-War years, Judt (1992) outlines fourpossible responses to Stalinism in France between 1946 and 1954: simplerejection (e.g. Raymond Aron); simple acceptance (e.g. Aragon); the attitudeamong ‘a transient class of Communist intellectuals’ (e.g. Edgar Morin, DionysMascolo) whose inability to conform to Party strictures forced them to enter‘a limbo, peopled by Trotskyists, revolutionary syndicalists, and aging surre-alists, who sought somehow to maintain a radical position compatible withopposition to communism’ (1992: 118); and the most complex response forJudt, French intellectuals ‘unable to join the Communists and unwilling to part

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company from them, . . . [who] devoted themselves not to condemning ordefending the works of Stalin, but to explaining them’ (1992: 119; e.g.Mounier, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre).

15 L’Observateur was founded in 1950 by Roger Stéphane and Gilles Martinet as anon-partisan, leftist journal attempting to maintain a neutral position betweenthe dominant leftist blocs. Jamet points out that, ‘as a friend of both foundingmembers, Claude Bourdet published a call in Combat (now under HenrySmadja’s direction) supporting a future weekly review and, as a gift, offeredits 1500 daily subscribers. A certain number of journalists [e.g. Barthes]followed [Bourdet] when he joined . . . the newborn L’Observateur’ (Jamet,1983: 134). As for Les Lettres nouvelles, its founder, Maurice Nadeau, served asthe literary director at Combat between 1947 and 1951 (Jamet, 1983: 156),and started the new review in early 1953, devoted

to literature above all. Crushed under all sorts of ideologies andpartisan positions, a weapon of propaganda or evasions, most oftenassimilated . . . as a discourse for saying nothing, literature is in factsomething more than an aesthetic concern, more than a more or less dis-tinguished kind of amusement, more than a tool incompatible with goalsthat ruin it. To maintain literature in its dignity is altogether adequate forour plan.

(1953: 1)

On this early period, see Diana Knight’s introduction in Knight (2000).16 Only ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘The Writer on Holiday’ appeared in other

journals, respectively Esprit and France Observateur.17 For a lucid analysis of Barthes’s role and the role of the Éditions de Minuit in

the success of the ‘nouveau roman’, see Simonin (1996).18 The accusation,‘After all, perhaps Mr. Roland Barthes is simply Marxist. Why

doesn’t he just admit it?’ [‘Après tout, peut-être M. Roland Barthes est sim-plement marxiste. Que ne le dit-il?’], appeared in a ‘Note’ by Jean Guérin(1955: 1118–9). Barthes responded in the next issue of Les Lettres nouvelles, andthe following excerpts capture the polemical tone of his response:

Fundamentally, what difference does it make to Mr. Guérin? This kind ofquestion is usually of interest only to McCarthyites. Everyone else stillprefers to draw conclusions based on evidence. Let Mr. Guérin do as theydo. Let him read Marx, for example. In so doing, he will � nd – at least, Ihope so – that one does not become Marxist by immersion, initiation ordeclaration . . .; that this [Marxist] method requires a great deal from thosewho pretend to practice it; and that consequently, it takes more conceitthat simplicity to call oneself Marxist. . . . As far as Literature is con-cerned, reading is a more objective method than a prosecutorial inquiry is[enquête]: thus, I only need to read the New NRF to recognize its perfectlyreactionary character; I need no declaration on this subject.

(1955: 191)

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19 Padova presents Barthes’s re� ections on his participation in Arguments (1981:46–50). With typical modesty, Barthes insists that

I have always considered my role in relation to [my comrades] as second-ary, minor, but complementary; that is, I was there in order to representto a small extent the possibility of questioning forms, artistic forms,literary forms, of studying what is known as ‘writing’ [l’écriture], toquestion them from a macro-political perspective.

(Padova, 1981: 47–48)

For the sources of Barthes’s Marxist orientation, see his 1971 interview inTel Quel (Barthes, 1998), Morin’s introduction to a special issue of Communi-cations on Barthes (Morin, 1982), and also Dosse on Barthes as ‘the mother� gure of structuralism’ (1997: 71–7).

20 Barthes’s 1954 Michelet par lui-même (1988) � ts into the pre-Arguments period,not only chronologically, but also in terms of the critical orientation. As Cullerdescribes it, ‘Where Le Degré zéro stressed the ideological implications ofliterary form, Michelet turns away from such questions to describe a universeof contrasting qualities and substances. Barthes thus produced a work that wasclosely in touch with current developments in French criticism’, notablyGaston Bachelard’s ‘psychoanalysis’ of the elements, whom Barthes claimed hehad never read (Culler, 1983: 43). See also Stafford’s convincing evidence thatshows the in� uence of Edgar Morin’s 1951 L’Homme et la mort devant l’histoireon Barthes’s study of Michelet (1997: 289).

21 See, for example, Bensmaia (1987), Heath (1974), Moriarity (1991), Ungar(1983) and Wasserman (1981), as well as the brief treatment of Mythologies inCalvet (1973), Culler (1983) and Fages (1979). Insightful works that do notaddress Mythologies (or do so only quite generally) are Champagne (1984),Comment (1991), Lombardo (1989), Miller (1992) and Wiseman (1989).

22 For re-examinations of Mythologies, see chapters in Jackson (1991), Lavers(1982) and Thody (1977), and essays by Eco and Pezzini (1982), Fitting (1988)and Stafford (1996). See also Chow (1993: 77) for her re� ection on languageand politics in relation to Barthes’s discussion of ‘myth on the Left’.

23 In the case of the soldier-Negro, for instance [in the Paris-Match cover thatBarthes describes earlier], what is got rid of is certainly not French impe-riality . . .; it is the contingent, historical, in one word: fabricated, qualityof colonialism. Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function isto talk about them; . . . it gives them a clarity which is not that of an expla-nation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact of French imperial-ity without explaining it, I am very near to � nding that it is natural and goeswithout saying: I am reassured.

(1972a: 143)24 Although he pretends to offer an objective, yet critical analysis of Barthes’s

project, Jackson can barely contain his disdain for Barthes’s Mythologies. Heconcludes this overview with his misgivings, speci� cally, about Barthes being‘erotically excited by the cruelty of a wrestling match’ in ‘The World of

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Wrestling’ and, more generally, about the ‘erotic theme’ in Barthes’s laterwritings (1991: 141–2). It is readily apparent that these criticisms speak asmuch, if not more, about Jackson – who confesses to being ‘half afraid todevelop this point any further’ (1991: 142) – than about Barthes. For readingsof Barthes that are, at the least, less skittish than Jackson’s, see Ungar (1983),Wiseman (1989), Mortimer (1989) and Miller (1992).

25 Indeed, a major problem within the Arguments project, about which its con-tributors were acutely aware, was the ongoing effort to divest itself/them-selves of the totalitarian pretensions toward thought control that had beenexerted over many of its members by the PCF. The consequent danger inattempting to allow for a multiplicity of discourses was to produce a watereddown version of liberal pluralism with a cacophony of Leftist voices, a dangerwhich the theme-oriented issues of the review were meant somewhat to allay.

26 Simonin points out, however, that as of 1958, Barthes denounced the New Novelas ‘an “arbitrary grouping of novelists” ’ as well as Robbe-Grillet’s ‘phony positionof leadership’ (parrainage truqué) (Simonin, 1996: 64; Barthes, 1972b: 91–5).

27 Stafford suggests that, in 1959, Barthes had ‘almost predicted the events ofMay 1968’, in a warning to the Minister of Culture, André Malraux. Reactingto the latter’s reform of the national theatres, especially his advocacy of ‘moreRacine to be played in the theatre and the construction of Maisons de la culture’,Barthes sensed ‘the gap between the French youth and Government culturalpolicy’, and chided Malraux (in Les Lettres nouvelles, 2 April): ‘The youth thatyou are educating will perhaps be more contrary than you think’ [Les Jeunes quevous formez seront peut-être plus retors que vous ne pensez] (Stafford, 1996: 48).

28 In the 1971 interview with Tel Quel, Barthes explains that, in the period1956–63, ‘I could (or so I thought) de� ne ideology though the connotation-scheme of semantics, I � rmly believed I could become part of a semiologicalscience: I lived through a (euphoric) dream of scienti� city (of which The FashionSystem and Elements of Semiology are the residue)’ (1998: 257). Barthes goes onto describe in the same interview (259–60) the circumstances behind thepublication in 1967 of The Fashion System. See also Polan (2001) on Barthes’s‘Classic Semiology’.

29 See also Aronowitz’s critique (1994: 97–105) of Susan Sontag’s construction of an‘aesthetic Barthes’ through the selection of essays A Barthes Reader (Sontag, 1982).

30 See Barthes (1998: 260–2) for his conception of the seminar setting’s import-ance (in contrast to lecturing) and the inter-textual creative process in S/Z.

31 See Barthes’s essays ‘Research: The Young’ (1989: 69–75),‘Writers, Intellec-tuals, Teachers’ (1989: 309–32), and ‘To the Seminar’ (1989: 332–42).

32 Barthes’s relationship with the Tel Quel group deserves separate treatment. Seethe introduction to ffrench and Lack (1998), and also the opening essay ofThéorie d’ensemble, the 1968 collective Tel Quel volume (ffrench and Lack, 1998:21–4). For Barthes’s 1965 essay therein (on Philippe Sollers’s novel, Drame),see Barthes (1987b). Barthes’s essay was featured among the three openingtexts, with essays by Foucault (1963) and Derrida (1968) in Théorie d’ensemble.


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Appendix

Works by Roland Barthes (second date, following slash, indicates translations listedin references).


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Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953/1968a) Paris: Seuil, with Éléments de sémiologie (1965)Paris: Seuil, with Nouveaux essais critiques (1972) Paris: Seuil.

Michelet par lui-même (1954/1988) Paris: Seuil.Mythologies (1957/1972a) Paris: Seuil.Sur Racine (1962/1964) Paris: Seuil.Essais critiques (1964/1972b) Paris: Seuil.La Tour Eiffel (1964/1979) Paris: Delpire.Éléments de sémiologie (1965/1968b) With Le Degré zéro d l’écriture, Paris: Gonthier.Critique et vérité (1966/1987a) Paris: Seuil.Système de la mode (1967/1990) Paris: Seuil.S/Z (1970/1975a) Paris: Seuil.L’Empire des signes (1970/1982) Geneva: Skira.Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971/1976) Paris: Seuil.Erté (1971, 1973) Trans. William Weaver, Parma: F.M. Ricci.Le Plaisir du texte (1973/1975b) Paris: Seuil.Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975/1977) Paris: Seuil.Alors la Chine? (1975) Paris: Christian Bourgois.Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977/1978) Paris: Seuil.Leçon: Leçon inaugurale de la chaire de sémiologie littéraire du Collège de France, prononcée

le 7 janvier 1977 (1978/1980) Paris: Seuil.Sollers écrivain (1979/1987b) Paris: Seuil.La Chambre claire: note su la photographie (1980/1981) Paris: Gallimard and Seuil.Le Grain de la voix: Entretiens 1962–1980 (1981/1991) Paris: Seuil.Incidents (1987/1992) Paris: Seuil.


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Mythologies Revisited: Roland Barthes and the Left

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Transcript of Mythologies Revisited: Roland Barthes and the Left