**1. Barthes as an Idiosyncratic Author:** - Barthes, despite his critical focus on concepts like the "death of the author," is himself a prominent and distinctive author whose works defy easy categorization. - His writings often blend genres and approaches, as seen in _L’Empire des signes_ (touristic commentary and reflection on signs), _Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes_ (detached autobiography), _Fragments d’un discours amoureux_ (specimens of lovers' talk), and _La Chambre claire_ (meditations on photographs). - Culler describes these works as "idiosyncratic," "peculiar yet compelling," and "imaginative products of an author, a master of French prose with a singular approach to experience." **2. A Shifting and Abandoned Pursuit of Method and Discipline:** - Barthes's intellectual career is characterized by a series of ambitious projects (science of literature, semiology, science of contemporary myths, narratology, etc.) that he often initiated but then swiftly abandoned or even disparaged. - Culler notes that "Each time Barthes urged the merits of some new, ambitious project... he swiftly passed on to something else." - He is a "seminal thinker, but he tries to uproot his seedlings as they sprout." This constant intellectual movement makes him difficult to pin down as a founder of disciplines. **3. The Importance of "Forgetting" and "Unlearning":** - In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes emphasized not the acquisition of knowledge but "forgetting" and "unlearning." - He proposed to incarnate "unlearning, yielding to the unforseeable modifications that forgetting imposes on the sedimented knowledge, culture and beliefs one has traversed." - He redefines _sapientia_ (wisdom) not as power or extensive knowledge but as "no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavour as possible." This highlights a personal, experiential approach over systematic academic pursuit. **4. The Question of How to Interpret Barthes's Ideas (Desire vs. Argument):** - A central challenge in reading Barthes is how to interpret his ideas, particularly given his tendency towards self-mockery and his description of his concepts as "perishable manias" or "figures of production" used to "make the text go." - Culler highlights the risk of "trivializing his works by making them the expressions of a desire rather than arguments to be pondered, developed, or contested." - Barthes's wry self-mockery, as seen in _Barthes par Barthes_, can be seductive but may also be a "remystification, a nimble and stylish evasion." This raises the question of whether his later dismissal of past ideas is genuine demystification or a form of intellectual posturing ("Look, Ma! No Concepts!"). **5. Barthes as a "Public Experimenter" Constructing Intelligibility:** - A unifying perspective on Barthes's work is to see him as a "public experimenter" who tries out ideas and systems publicly. - His goal is not to discover hidden meanings but to "construct intelligibility for our own time." - His lifelong fascination is with "the way people make their world intelligible," and his writings aim to expose and modify these often unnoticed cultural frameworks. - Treating him as such helps account for the range and shifting nature of his projects, as he experiments with different ways of understanding the world. **6. Biographical Influences and Context:** - Key biographical factors mentioned include his middle-class, Protestant background, the early death of his father, his life with his mother and grandparents, and his half-brother (who Barthes never mentions in his writing). - Tuberculosis significantly impacted his life, twice preventing an academic career and leading to an "ordered existence based on perpetual awareness of the body" and "friendships made possible by continuing proximity," reminiscent of Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_. - A period of "instability in his profession" from 1946 to 1962, living by short-term measures, also shaped his path. - Culler, however, cautions against directly deriving his theoretical positions from these experiences, suggesting the primary influence for each writing is "the project in which it participates." Barthes is characterized by his "superb sense of what will surprise but entice" and his "mastery, suited to experimentation with the intelligibilities of our time." **7. _Le Degré Zéro de l'Écriture_ (Writing Degree Zero):** - This early work argues that writing is not transparent but contains "signs... that indicate a social mode, a relation to society." - Even seemingly simple or neutral language (_écriture blanche_) is a "deliberate engagement with the institution of literature" and a "social use of literary form," becoming a recognizable _écriture_. - Style is personal and subconscious, while _écriture_ is a conscious choice from historically available possibilities. - The book is also seen as a "mythology of literary language," defining writing as "the signifier of the literary myth, that is, a form already full of [linguistic] meaning which receives from the era’s concept of Literature a new meaning." **8. _Mythologies_ and the Demystification of Everyday Life:** - _Mythologies_ extends the concept of _écriture_ to everyday culture, where "everything in everyday life, is dependent upon the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world." - Bourgeois norms are presented as "the self-evident laws of a natural order." - Myth is not just delusion but a "form of communication, a ‘language,’ a system of second-order meaning." The first-order meaning of a linguistic sign or image is less important than its mythical, second-order meaning (e.g., a black soldier in French uniform signifies the greatness of the French empire and a denial of colonialism). - Myth always has an "alibi" – its practitioners can deny the second-order meaning, claiming actions are for practical reasons (comfort, durability) rather than for signification. Barthes finds this "bad faith" objectionable. - The "novelistic," for Barthes, is the ability to see details of the world as "bearers of second-order meaning," as seen in _Mythologies_, _Fragments d’un discours amoureux_, and _Barthes par Barthes_ (e.g., the mythical meaning of talking about the weather). **9. Structuralism, Semiology, and the Study of Systems:** - Barthes was an early advocate of semiology, the general science of signs, inspired by Saussurean linguistics. - He initially aimed to establish a science of signs, but later defined his semiology as an "undoing" of linguistics, focusing on the "impurity of language" and the aspects of signification ignored by scientific linguistics. - _Éléments de sémiologie_ (1964) outlines basic semiological concepts (langue/parole, signifier/signified) and applies them to non-linguistic phenomena, treating them as systems with underlying rules and conventions (e.g., the "food system" of a culture). - The _langue_ is the underlying system, and _parole_ is the manifestation or event (e.g., a meal is a _parole_ of the food _langue_). - Barthes's large-scale semiological study, _Système de la mode_, analyzes fashion captions, identifying levels of signification: the "vestimentary code" (what is fashionable), the "rhetorical system" (appropriateness in a milieu), and the mythical level (fashion presenting conventions as natural facts). - Despite later rejecting the idea of a "science" of signs, Culler argues that his persistent view of meaning "emerged from and is substantiated by the systematic perspective he now denigrates." Showing something is a system is key to demonstrating the priority of signifying over the signified. - Structuralist study of literature involves describing literary language in linguistic terms, analyzing narrative structures (even when disrupted), showing how literary meaning depends on cultural codes (_S/Z_), and analyzing the reader's role. **10. _S/Z_ and the Disentangling of Meaning/Codes:** - _S/Z_ is Barthes's "most ambitious and sustained structural analysis," a line-by-line discussion of Balzac's novella _Sarrasine_. - He breaks the text into "lexias" and identifies the cultural "codes" they rely on (proairetic, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, referential/cultural). These codes represent the accumulated cultural knowledge that allows readers to make sense of a text. - The referential codes in _S/Z_ are seen as providing the "cultural information on which texts rely," drawn from common beliefs and stereotypes, and are rooted in bourgeois ideology which turns culture into nature. - The text is viewed as an "intertextual construct, the product of various cultural discourses," a "tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable sources of culture." - Barthes is interested in the "plural" qualities of the work and refuses to seek a single unifying structure, focusing on how each detail functions and relates to codes. - Apparent gratuitous details produce a "reality effect" by resisting meaning, signifying "this is the real." - _S/Z_ is seen as both an example of structuralism and poststructuralism, as Barthes explores the text's "difference from itself, its unmasterable evasiveness." **11. The "Death of the Author" and the Birth of the Reader:** - Related to the intertextual nature of the text is the idea that the "birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author," who is no longer the sole source of meaning. - The reader is crucial in producing meaning and is seen as a "plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost." Subjectivity is a "faked plenitude" resulting from these codes. - Interesting literature challenges and highlights the reader's structuring activity, making the reader a "producer of the text" rather than a consumer. **12. The Turn to Pleasure and the Body:** - A significant shift in Barthes's later work is his move towards hedonism and the concept of textual pleasure (_le plaisir du texte_). - He introduces the idea of the "enjoying body" (_corps de jouissance_) as the site of this pleasure, distinct from subjectivity. - This appeal to the body allows him to speak of individual experience without relying on traditional notions of the subject, which structuralism had critiqued. - However, Culler questions whether this appeal to the body avoids the mystification Barthes had previously exposed, suggesting it can function as a new name for Nature, providing a sense of authenticity or a "natural substratum" beyond cultural codes. - In _La Chambre claire_, Barthes asks, "What does my body know of Photography?" but ultimately relies on a "structural rule" of contrast (studium vs. punctum) rather than pure bodily knowledge. - Pleasure is often found in the "gap between" culture and its destruction, in disruptions of traditional expectations rather than pure avant-garde techniques. **13. Barthes as a Writer:** - In _Barthes par Barthes_, Barthes views himself primarily as a writer, not a critic or semiologist. His concepts are seen as "tactics of writing" to "make the text go." - He presents his work as a manifestation of his vocation for writing, an intransitive verb ("one simply writes"). - He treats concepts from other disciplines with a "writerly relation," using them as "emblems" or "philosophical ideography" without necessarily following the system to its conclusion. This creates an "intertext" that is "literally superficial." - His writing style is described as "unusually loose, appositional syntax," giving "sensuous concreteness to abstract concepts." His imagination is "homological," comparing systems rather than objects. - _L’Empire des signes_ is seen as his first work driven by a writerly impulse, using Japan as a "writing situation" to sketch a utopia of artifice and surface. - _Barthes par Barthes_ is a "remarkable performance," a collection of fragments resisting his own ideas and "staging an image-system" of himself. It is often reticent on personal matters despite its apparent intimacy. **14. _Fragments d'un discours amoureux_ (A Lover's Discourse):** - This work presents the "discourse of love" as a "novelistic" exploration of fragments, figures, and reflections of the lover. - It draws on literary works (Goethe's _Werther_) and theoretical writings to simulate the internal discourse of a lover, capturing what is "acceptable, recognizable, according to the codes and stereotypes of our culture, as a lover’s complaint." - The lover is portrayed as an "obsessive interpreter and clear-sighted analyst of his interpretive predicament," constantly seeking meaning in the "subtle and clandestine signs" of the beloved's behavior. - The "sentimentality" of this discourse, often seen as unfashionable or even "obscene," distinguishes the lover from the semiologist. The lover mistakes conventional signs for inherent meaning. **15. The Trajectory of Barthes's Intellectual Development (Reactive Formations):** - Barthes describes his intellectual movement as a series of "reactive formations." He starts by demystifying a "Doxa" (popular opinion/false Nature) (_Mythologies_), then seeks to systematize this gesture with semiological science, then reacts against the rigidity of this science by introducing "desire, the claims of the body" (theory of the Text), and then potentially reacts against the "prattle" of the Text itself. - He moves from seeking to "reform signs" through a science of signs to an "unwriting" of science, loosening theoretical terms and focusing on the "unmasterable object" of the text and the reader. - His later work is seen by some as a return to traditional literary values, but Barthes frames this as a "transgression," reintroducing sentimentality into contemporary discourse. **16. The Idea of "The Neutral" (_le Neutre_):** - The quest for "le Neutre" (the neutral) is proposed as a potential unifying strand in Barthes's career, representing "the attempt to escape the obligations and constraints of the logos, of Discourse." - It signifies a "radically Other regime of meaning," an attempt to move beyond binary oppositions and the demands of meaning-making. - In the outlines for his final, unwritten book, _Vita Nova_, "le Neutre" is linked to philosophical quietude, idleness, and an acceptance of what is (drawing on Heidegger and Tolstoy). - This idea is open to critique as escapism, as seen in the parody by Philippe Lejeune. **17. Barthes's Legacy and Authority:** - After his death, the publication of texts like _Incidents_ and _Soirées de Paris_ revealed aspects of his personal life (homosexuality) that he had previously kept private, sparking controversy. - _Soirées de Paris_ highlights his struggles with boredom and aimlessness, offering a poignant glimpse into his later life. - Barthes's authority has shifted since his death. He is no longer an uncontested reference point but someone readers need to justify citing. - Culler argues that Barthes's genius lies not in his later, more sentimental work but in his earlier "euphoric dream of scientificity" and his "public experimenter" approach. - The "heuristic function of systematicity" was crucial for Barthes, leading him to explore problems and elements of discourse that might otherwise be overlooked. - Examples like the "reality effect" illustrate the value of his systematic approach in analyzing seemingly insignificant details.