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170 LANGUAGE

the ‘myth’ of French imperialism, the subservience of the colonized races,
operates as a second-order signifying system on the basis of the recognized
image.
As Barthes defines it in Elements of Semiology, this distinction between the
levels of signification refers to two related levels of ‘denotation’ (we see a black
soldier) and ‘connotation’ (the implied reading of his act at an ideological level):
the first system is then the plane of denotation and the second system
(wider than the first), the plane of connotation. We shall therefore say that
a connoted system is a signifying system whose plane of expression is itself
constituted by a signifying system. 7

It is, of course, the case that connotations are linguistic (as metalanguage they
are constituted through language), but Barthes’s theory of the language system is
confined to the denotative level: ‘the common cases of connotation will of course
consist of complex systems of which language forms the first system (this is, for
8
instance, the case with literature)’. In other words, this form of semiology tends
to reduce the functions of language as a system to the plane of denotation, either
in its function as a first-order signifying system or, as we have seen with news
photographs, providing the ‘linguistic anchorage’ which defines and ‘closes’ the
connotative visual sign. The denotative quality of the linguistic sign implies its
having a given, fixed meaning within the closed order of language, which does
not, however, rely for its meaning on the external referent in the ‘real’. The
denotative model of language is subsequently modified by Barthes in his later
work, where language becomes chains of connotation.
The kinds of criticisms which have been made of Barthes’s work fall into two
general categories. First, there have been criticisms of the linguistic model itself.
Is the Saussurean concept of the linguistic sign—the relation between signifier
and signified—theoretically viable? Does semiology warrant a formal distinction
between two orders of signification (denotation and connotation)? Is it indeed
useful to analyse language at the level of the system (langue) rather than within
actual speech acts (parole)? These are questions which will be taken up in the
final section of this chapter. However, Barthes’s analysis was not initially
criticized within the Centre on these theoretical grounds. Rather, a second type
of criticism was directed at the semiological project as such; that is, at the attempt
to construct and define the social function of myths on the basis of a purely
formal analysis of their internal systems.
Barthes’s principal aim in Mythologies was to provide a basis for a critique of
the ‘naturalizing effect’ of ideology, its quality of vraisemblance. For example,
even though she or he may be critical of its connotations, the reader of Paris-
Match nevertheless believes its denoted ‘truth’: this event took place, it has a
real history and so, in a sense, the soldier’s behaviour is ‘only natural’. Barthes
locates this ‘very principle of myth’ in the relations between his two orders of