Ronald Barthe's analysis of terms like sign and signature and his take on how to determine the meaning of a work of art

“The book reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up composing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's harmony lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” Ronald Barthes.

Discussion

Roland Barthes was a gifted constituent of the Parisian intelligentsia, well known for his left-wing attacks on the bourgeoisie in which he combined Existentialism, semiotics and linguistic hedonism. Barthe's thesis that the scribe is dead — i.e. the composing is after the control of the one-by-one author — substantially overstates the case, but introduces a significant theme of Postmodernism.

Anti-bourgeois, standing apart from the French academic view, primarily an Existentialist and habitually anti-essentialist, Roland Barthes (1915-80) came to prominence with the 1957 publication of Mythologies, a fierce strike on French society. Barthes was a hedonist, and argued for fluidity and plurality, in outlook and social behavior. Contemporary criticism was historical, he complained, psychologically naive and deterministic, covertly ideological, bovine content with the one interpretation. In works which pursued, Barthes asserted to have unmasked the pretensions of Romanticism and Realism.

If the first overlooked the sheer labor of writing, aiming for an art that conceals art, literature in the second becomes a servant of reality and therefore anti-art. Barthes distinguished the clerkly cravat (who uses language to express what is already there, if only the contents of his thoughts) from the nobler ceriman (who is absorbed into the activity of writing, laboring away towards new elaborations and meanings). In practice a writer might express both aspects, but the more honest and important writer was the ceriman, whose incessant labors did not adopt the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, but bridged the gulf between intellectuals and the proletariat. Writers worked as everyone else worked, and their efforts should not be smoothed over as inspiration of a favored spiritual class.

Benjamin in a well known term paper, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," asserted that what was lost in a work of art when it was reproduced was its "aura," a uniqueness that provided it its mysterious power. But he was furthermore conceiving of images and marveling how we reply to them, though he accepted they don't have the aura that a traditional work of art supposedly. Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: Reflections on taking photos [trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981], provides a Prussian answer to Benjamin: photographs do have an aura, the aura of lost time and lost memories. Would add that this aura is sharply bigger when the look of those who "knew" the individual or view in the photograph graph appears lost.

The ceriman is a materialist, a worker with ...