Page 79 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
transcription of facts, and the ecrivain, the writer concerned with
the act of writing and with language themselves and inclined to
view the text as an autonomous object of interest independent of
any external referents. The ecrivant writes transitively (s/he writes
a record of reality) while the ecrivain writes intransitively: s/he
writes - full stop (Barthes 1967a).
In Mythologies (1957), Barthes extends his analysis of cultural
encoding to non-verbal texts and posits a double order of meaning
based on the distinction between denotation (the literal level) and
connotation (the mythical level). By bringing out a text's latent
connotations, it can be shown that even the ostensibly most literal
and innocent images are implicated in ideological processes and in
the consolidation of a culture's myths (Barthes 1972a). Critical
Essays (1964) corroborates this idea by outlining what Barthes
sees as the principal function of criticism. While it has often been
assumed that criticism must aim at expressing and elucidating a
text's meaning, for Barthes the critic's task actually lies in unex-
pressing the text: unravelling its superficial denotational dimension
and exposing its mythical character (Barthes 1972b). The investi-
gation of non-verbal sign systems is also the objective of Elements
of Semiology (1964). Here, Barthes applies Saussure's distinction
between the paradigm and the syntagm 4 to disparate languages,
such as the discourses of food, architecture, furniture and
clothing, and shows that any specific menu, building, interior
arrangement or outfit can be treated as a syntagmatic combination
of elements selected from the whole paradigm of the language to
which it belongs (Barthes 1967b).
Vestimentary and sartorial conventions are further investigated
in The Fashion System (1967), where Barthes decodes clothes both
in terms of their material and formal qualities and in terms of
their representation in fashion photography. On both levels,
clothes are treated and analysed as texts. Indeed, the tools avail-
able to literary criticism can also be used to explore fashion's
stylistic features:

Fashion has three styles at its disposal. One is objective, literal;
travel is a woman bending over a road map ... motherhood is

4 tv These terms are described in detail in Part I, Chapter 2, 'The Sign'

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