Page 92 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

HIGH STRUCTURALISM

texts as parole is to langue, a singular element within a system of
arbitrary conventions, the meaning of which is explicable neither
referentially nor historically, but only synchronically. In yet another,
much more explicitly Saussurean, version of literariness, Jakobson
proposed a six factor model of the speech event in which the poetic
function of language is defined as attached to the linguistic message
itself, as distinct from the addresser, addressee, context, contact and
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code, to each of which is attached a different linguistic function. In
short, language fulfils a poetic, or literary, function to the extent that
it becomes self-conscious of itself as language. Both variants of
literariness, it should be noted, provide an implicit theoretical
legitimation for literary modernism, as no doubt they were so intended
to do.

High Structuralism

Roland Barthes, we have said, is the single most important,
representative figure of French high structuralism, an immensely prolific
writer, literary critic, sociologist and semiologist, structuralist and
post-structuralist, whose bizarre death—he was run over by a laundry
truck—was as untimely as it was improbable. Barthes’s most famous
work, Mythologies, was first published in 1957. Strongly influenced
by Saussure, it sought to analyse semiologically a whole range of
contemporary myths, from wrestling to advertising, from striptease
to Romans in the cinema. Here Barthes aspires to “read” washing
powder advertisements, for example, as languages, that is, as signifying
systems with their own distinctive grammars. The book includes a
long essay, entitled “Myth Today”, which attempts to sketch out the
theoretical corollaries of the often very entertaining, almost journalistic,
and invariably insightful, particular analyses which occupy the bulk
of the text.
In “Myth Today”, Barthes defines myth as a second order
semiological system, in which the signs of language, that is, both
signifiers and signifieds, function as the signifiers of myth, signifying
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other mythical signifieds. By myth, Barthes means something very
close to a Weberian legitimation. In bourgeois society, he argues, myth
is “depoliticized speech”, which “has the task of giving an historical
intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear

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