Understanding Structuralism Part 2: Roland Barthes and a touch of Claude Levi-Strauss

Structuralism and Myth

Forty years after the publication of Course in General Linguistics came Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1956). Like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes also worked to understand myth in culture. However, they understood myth in two very different ways. Lévi-Strauss worked to develop a set of rules through which all myths could be understood. He took myths to be a kind of language that could be broken into individual units called mythemes, which acquired meaning in relation to other mythemes. There were rules allowing the combinations of certain mythemes, similar to grammar, and beneath the surface of the narrative created by these combinations was the true meaning of the myth. These “relations…were inherent in the human mind itself, so that in studying a body of myth we are looking less at its narrative contents than at the universal mental operations which structure it. These mental operations, such as the making of binary oppositions, are in a way what myths are about: they are devices to think with, ways of classifying and organizing reality, and this, rather than recounting any particular tale, is their point” (Eagleton 1996:104). Therefore, myths can essentially disregard human thought since they operate with their own logic, and as such we can see the general decentering of the individual subject that has come to be one of the hallmarks of structuralism.

Barthes on the other hand understood the creation of myth to be a “radically semiotic act” (Gunster 2004:190), where “myth is a system of communication…a message… [not] possibly an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (Barthes 1957:93). Interestingly, and against much of semiology and structuralism, for Barthes mythology can only have a historical foundation. In much the same way that the sign is the associative total of the signifier and signified, the myth is also a sign constructed of a signifier and signified, only it is a second-order semiological system – it is made up of the semiological chain that came before it. This means that the sign from the first-order system becomes the signified in the second. In the first semiological order we have an equation similar to: (signified¹) + (signifier¹) = sign¹; in the second order we have sign¹ equal to signifier² thus the second order looks something like (signifier^{2(this is the same as sign1)}) + (signfied²) = signification (the equivalent of sign²), where in the first order sign¹  is the language-object in a language system, the sign as we usually think of it, and sign² is the myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage “because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes 1957:100). Importantly, in myth the signifier has two aspects: “one full, which is the meaning (history of signifier¹), one empty, which is the form (signifier¹ as it is usually consumed, a word or image). For example: the letters in ink spelling c-l-o-v-e-r is signifier¹, the concept of the clover is signfied¹, and the word “clover” is sign¹. This is the first order – the language system. In the mythical system signifier² is “clover”, signified² is “good luck”, and signification (or sign²) is the myth that clovers bring good luck. Barthes’ examples are more complicated in content (Black soldier saluting French flag, pp. 101-110), but the content is not important since it is the structure that is to be understood. Once the structure is understood anything can be substituted for content (e.g. “horseshoe” – good luck – myth of horseshoes being lucky, Black man saluting French flag – glory of France and allegiance of all its sons – myth of France’s equality, power, unity, etc.).

Myth can be received in three general ways, according to the mythic signified (signifier²). First, if we focus on the empty signifier as form the signification becomes literal. For Barthes (1957) the Black man who salutes is an example of French imperiality, he is a symbol for it. This type of focusing is “that of the producer of myths, of the journalist who starts with a concept and seeks a form for it” (115). Second, if we focus on the mythical signifier’s meaning, or the full signifier, it is possible to see the distorting effect that the form and meaning have on one another, such that the Black man saluting the flag is no longer a symbol of French imperiality, but an alibi of it. “This type of focusing is that of the mythologist: he deciphers the myth, he understands a distortion” (115). Third, if we focus on the mythical signifier as a whole, constructed of both the meaning and the form, we receive an ambiguous signification: “I respond to the constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics, I become a reader of myths” (115). Here the Black man is the very presence of French imperiality (115). It is this third type that is most familiar to us, as it is the way that we usually consume myths. The first two are able to unmask the myth, but in the third type of reception “the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (115). This third type of reception is also what allows the myth to transcend from semiology to ideology – through the transformation of history into nature. Everything that happens in the myth, when received in this third way, appears natural. To receive the myth of the luck of clovers in this way makes it appear that there is some natural bond between luck and clovers – history becomes nature. As Barthes writes, “the myth exists from the precise moment [it] achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess” (117). It is this naturalness of the myth that makes it so efficacious. It does not appear as anything other than innocent speech.

Understanding that there is more at play than just naturalness or innocence, Barthes points out that “what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system whereas it is but a semiological system” (118). Finally, myth gives intention a natural justification, while making contingency appear eternal and Barthes understands this process to be exactly the same as the process of bourgeois ideology. It is by “naturalizing the historically contingent, [that] myth proves fundamentally supportive of the social status quo” (Milner and Browitt 2002:105). Thus, what we should see from the work of Barthes is that his perspective is still wrapped up in the semiological, just as Saussure, however Barthes’ structuralism differs in that he was interested in the textual conventions of myth and the types of reception of myth that allowed the reader to access and interpret it. Still, Barthes maintains an antihumanism that is so common to structuralism. The myth reader (compared to the myth maker or the mythologist) has almost no agency when it comes to how the myth will be adapted or the influence that it will have on the individual or society at large. This is important because Barthes believes that “ideology consists of the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of expressing and surreptitiously justifying the dominant value of a given historical period” (Silverman 1983:27)

[1] Saussure: langue/parole, signifier/signified; Barthes: connotation/denotation, language system/mythical system, etc.

Understanding Structuralism Part 1: Ferdinand de Saussure

What is structuralism??

With the arrival of structuralism, the culturalist strand in cultural studies was interrupted (Hall 1980:40). Though it truly arrived in the early 1900s with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, it was the work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser that I will be focusing on in this series of posts. However, it is necessary to have some grounding in Saussurean semiotics as well as the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss before moving on, and that is the topic for Part 1 of this series.

Structuralism has been defined a number of ways, but the essence of the theoretical perspective is the attempt to study culture based on structures, understanding the meaning of a particular phenomenon to exist only in relation to other phenomena in that system. Or, as Terry Eagleton suggests, structuralism is “the belief that the individual units of any system have meaning only by virtue of their relations to one another… You become a card-carrying structuralist only when you claim that the meaning of each image is wholly a matter of its relation to the other. The images do not have a ‘substantial’ meaning, only a ‘relational’ one” (Eagleton 1996:94).

Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is often understood as the key work that contributed to the development of structuralism. In it he sought to understand langue (the systemic rules of language), rather than parole (the particular instances of speech.) Saussure hoped to partake in the scientific study of language by focusing his efforts on the rules of the system rather than the uses of speech. Saussure understood language to be a “system of signs that express ideas, a network of elements that signify only in relation to each other. Indeed, the sign itself is a relational entity, a composite of two parts that signify not only through those features that make them slightly different from any other two parts, but through their association with each other (Silverman 1983:6). In Saussurean linguistics the sign is the symbolic representation of a concept or idea. The signifier is what Saussure called the “sound-image” or is the word as spoken or written (t-r-e-e is a sound image). The signified is the concept that the signifier is tied to. That is, when we see the word ‘tree’ we understand what it is referring to, though it is not referring to any tree in particular but rather a general idea of what constitutes a tree. The signifier and the signified combine into the sign, which is distinct from the thing that is symbolized. Additionally, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, thus each sign, if it stood alone, would be meaningless. Signs get their meaning “by virtue of its difference from the others” (Eagleton 1996:97) in the system.

Structuralism is the attempt to apply this linguistic logic to things other than language. For Saussure, and structuralists in general, the system should be studied in its entirety at particular points in time. That is, structuralism emphasizes synchronic investigation of the system at a given point, rather than diachronic investigation of the changes in the system over time. Milner and Browitt (2002) suggest that “what is at issues is not the relation between culture and some other extra-cultural structure of social power, but the social power of discourse, the power of the system of signs itself” (96).