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INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 171

signification. The denoted signified establishes the reality of the ideology; it
allows myth to be innocently consumed:
If I read the negro saluting as a symbol pure and simple of imperiality, I
must renounce the reality of the picture, it discredits itself in my eyes when
it becomes an instrument. Conversely, if I decipher the negro’s salute as an
alibi of coloniality, I shatter the myth even more surely by the obviousness
of its motivation. But for the myth-reader, the outcome is quite different:
everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as
if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified: the myth exists from the
precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state: myth
is speech justified in excess. 9

Barthes’s method of analysis in Mythologies has been criticized for interpreting
the apparent ‘realness’ of ideology entirely in formal terms: in the internal
relation of language and metalanguage, signifier and signified. Although he is
concerned to distinguish between language and myth, there is a sense in which
Barthes reduces all signification to language, or at least to a formal system
derived from linguistic theory. This is the criticism put forward by Iain
Chambers in ‘Roland Barthes: structuralism semiotics’. Chambers argues not
only for a principled distinction between language and myth but, further, that
different signifying systems must be seen in terms of the social ptactices of their
production:

The point to note here is that Barthes equates all signs with language
objects. Even if all systems of signification are ‘languages’ (the ‘language’
of film, the ‘language’ of dance), there is still a reductionist argument at
work here. If pictures and writing are to be related without distinction,
equally as signs, constituting ‘one just as much as the other’, then the
specificity of the practices that produced them is lost. Associated with that
loss, the intentionality inscribed in those practices, as they exist within the
universe of practices, is bracketed out under the blanket phrase ‘bourgeois
ideology’. 10

Chambers criticizes what he sees as an ‘idealist’ and ‘ahistorical’ character of all
semiology and of Barthes’s work in particular. The idealist tendency is inherent
in the formalist linguistic model which fails to recognize the effectivity of social
practices in the structuring of different signifying practices. Chambers proposes
an analysis of the ideological sign, which recognizes its socially determined, not
wholly ‘arbitrary’, character and which argues for a historically specific study of
language. However, there is a tendency in Chambers’s analysis to reduce the
‘materiality’ of ideological signification to a simple dependence on the referent
in the real: