Semiology

COMM 300 - Semiology - Roland Barthes - Theories
Course Instructor: Ron Wright
New Technologies Consultant: Mary Flores

Roland Barthes was a French philosopher, linguist, and educator. Born in 1915, he studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted his research efforts to sociology and lexicology. He wrote books about French culture, critical and literary theory. Until his death in 1980, he was a professor at the College de France.

In general, Barthes wanted to create a way for people to deepen their understanding of language, literature, and society. Specifically, he focused on nonverbal signs. His greatest concern was occidentalism - that the French bourgeoisie considered its culture and mores to be universal. He felt that society is a construction, perpetuated by signs of the dominant values within its culture.

Barthes began to study the subject of semiotics (the study of signification), not as a process, but as an attitude. He believed that the importance of semiology resides in it's functionality. Semiology provided Barthes with an opportunity to denunciate "the self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths... This means was semiology - the close analysis of process of meaning by which the bourgeoisie converts its historical class-culture into a universal nature" (Barthes, 1964).

According to modern semiology, the benefit of culture resides in the differences (mores, bases, and attitudes) of groups. Without these differences, choices would be limited. His feeling was that occidentalism was like a set of blinders, providing only one tool for understanding - namely, rhetoric.

Rhetoric was created in ancient Greece as a tool for persuasion. Truth is not a goal of rhetoric. Barthes writes that rhetoric is "a technique, an art in the classical sense of the word, the art of persuasion." Rhetoric operates as the truth, co-opting an existing denotative system and making it the signifier of a secondary system. "Only those with semiotic savvy can spot the hollowness of connotative signs" (Griffin, 118).

Here's what that means:

Roland Barthes Terms
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~comm300/mary/barthes.theory.html
This page was last updated on Saturday, August 29,1998.