Essays by Roland Barthes

Lindsey Ives

Essays by Roland Barthes

Central Arguments:

Striptease: The Parisian striptease is seductive not because of its sexual appeal but because it has sanitized sexuality by wrapping its rawness and vulnerability in a chain of cultural signifiers- the exotic persona, the music hall, the bourgeois profession, thereby making sex just another mass marketed simulacrum.

The Structuralist Activity: Structuralism is the act of taking apart an observed object, event, phenomenon, etc. and putting it back together in a work of art. During the process the thing being recreated as a simulacrum is endowed with new meaning connected to culture and the human experience. The simulacra are classified by and differ from each other according to the smallest (imaginary?) units of which they are made.

The Death of the Author: The writer of a text is not the ultimate Author of the text, meaning that he or she is not the sole authority over the text, nor is any critic claiming to know what the author meant. The text has an excess of meaning informed by the culture that the writer may not have been aware of, and is open for multiple interpretations.

From Work to Text: "The Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text," (879), resists any single meaning, has no Author with ultimate authority but is instead a space for social exchange, and is bound to pleasure and jouissance.

What's cool about this collection of essays to me is how well they relate to the conversation we had last Monday. One question we asked in response to the fairy tales was "How culture-specific are genres?" These articles indicate that genres are completely interconnected with culture. It seems like Barthes sees "the Text," as human thought imposed upon "reality," and views text and culture as one and the same. Genres such as the novel, the essay, the abstract painting, and the striptease, organize the signifiers that make up the culture, in order to show that culture in a new light. So genres are both shaped by and comment on a culture. For instance, the striptease organizes familiar cultural signifiers into a dance in order to comment on the typical French view of sexuality, consumerism, and probably a number of other cultural phenomena, and is specific to French culture. I wonder if Barthes would consider the American striptease to be a different genre than the French striptease.

Another good connection to our class discussion comes when, in "The Structuralist Activity," Barthes describes the function of structuralist units this way: "the American automobiles (in Butor's Mobile) must be constantly regarded in the same way, yet they must differ each time by both their make and color" (873). This immediately brought to mind Genesea's metaphor, "Genres relate to other genres like makes of cars relate to models of cars." In the context of this article it seems like Barthes is drawing a similar metaphor, basically "Genres relate to individual works within that genre like makes of cars relate to models of cars."