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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 105

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

In ‘Myth Today’, Barthes defined ‘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, signi-
fying other mythical signifieds (Barthes, 1973, pp. 114–5). By
‘myth’, he meant something very close to a Weberian legitima-
tion. In bourgeois society, he argued, myth is ‘depoliticized
speech’, which ‘has the task of giving an historical intention
a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal’
(p. 142). By so naturalising the historically contingent, myth
proves fundamentally supportive of the social status quo. Hence
Barthes’ famous observation that: ‘Statistically, myth is on the
right’ (p. 148). At this point in his intellectual career Barthes was
still clearly on the left (cf. Jameson, 1998a, p. 172). Indeed, the
essay provides an excellent example of the way structuralism as
demystification can be linked to an adversarial intellectual stance.
In Mythologies, as in the later Elements of Semiology and The Fashion
System, first published in 1964 and 1967 respectively (Barthes
1968; Barthes 1983), Barthes’ semiology strayed furthest from the
realm of the literary, and into fashion, food, furniture and cars.
His central theoretical preoccupation, however, remained writing.
At his most structuralist, and at his most influential, during
the late 1960s and early 1970s, Barthes was concerned to
develop a set of highly formal analyses of the structures of narra-
tive; to develop and redefine the Formalist conception of
literariness; and to describe and celebrate ‘the death of the
author’. His narratology is striking both for its manifest scientism
and for its clear indebtedness to themes originally initiated by
Shklovsky and Jakobson. His treatment of literariness is similarly
inspired. Writing and language are not instrumental, Barthes
maintained, but function in their own right and for themselves:
the verb ‘to write’ is thus an apparently intransitive verb; the
writer doesn’t write something, but rather just writes (Barthes,
1970, pp. 141–2). Despite the originality of the formulation, there
is an obvious parallel between this stress on the near-intransitivity
of writing and Jakobson’s on the self-consciousness of the poetic
function. And, as with Jakobson, so with Barthes, this under-
standing of literariness is necessarily aligned to an endorsement
of modernist aesthetics. Hence Barthes’ enthusiasm for the

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