Page 84 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 77

quite properly be rendered in terms of modelling all the many sys­
tems of signification which surround us, but its more specific
realization for Barthes involves a qualified de mystification of the
naturalized, connotative meanings which are the essence of ideol­
ogy.
In this early stage of Barthes' work, then, he extends the struc­
turalist project in two (perhaps incompatible) directions, one of
which is founded in orthodox, semiological formalism, while the
other is concerned primarily with connotative semiotics. The first
is epitomized in his pre-S/ Z approach to narrative, with its deduc­
tive concern to model the langue of narrativity, identifying narrative
units, functions and actions along the way, all of which played a sig­
nificant part in establishing narrative as a key concern of cultural
studies. This project would be recognized by any reader of
Saussure as a straightforward extension of basic structuralism,
akin to, though by no means identical with, Levi-Strauss' desire to
model the structure of myth. It is also this formal emphasis on the
power of langue that leads to the displacement of the authorial sub­
ject - the rhetoric of 'the death of the author'. 'It is language which
speaks,' Barthes writes, 'not the author' (Barthes, 1977a: 143) , an
invocation which, for all its sacrifice of authorial agency to linguis­
tic structure, did at least serve to remind literary-based cultural
studies of the pervasive dangers of author-centred, intentionalist
analyses of texts.
The second thread of argument is less straightforward, but cer­
tainly more original and, in the end, probably more significant. In
attending so determinedly to connotative semiotics, whether under
that rubric itself or, as it was initially, in the myth analysis of
M y thologies, Barthes contributed to the formation of several sub­
sequent motifs in cultural studies. Though he was not solely
responsible for it, he played his part in yoking together the con­
cepts of signification, naturalization and ideology, and although the

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