Meaning-Centrism in Roland Barthes’ Structuralism

1 Discussions on the relationship between meaning and form

Meaning and form are two important concepts in both Western and Chinese culture. They depend on each other, and each of them presupposes the existence of the other. Form is the support of meaning while meaning is the gist or spirit that commands the organization of the form. Does form prevail over meaning or vice versa? This is a knotty problem that puzzles scholars from one generation to the next. In fact, the history of discussion on the relationship between form and meaning can be traced back to 2,000 years ago, when Aristotle advocated that form reflected meaning, and that the law of meaning development determined the appearance of form (Zhu 1983: 77), while Confucius claimed that the result would be harmful no matter whether form prevailed over meaning or vice versa, and that the best state was form and meaning being in an equivalent and harmonious state.

In the later ages, the beauty of form was always mingled with meaning, in fields such as ethics, morality, politics, and philosophy. In China, the proclamation of Confucius on the relationship between form and meaning was agreed to by his counterparts of that age, who included Taoists, Mohists, Legalists, and was also carried on by his followers, such as Mencius, Xun Zi, and Zhu Xi. In fact, these figures went beyond Confucius’ point of view that form and meaning were in the same important position and replenished each other. They stressed meaning more and more by advocating the simplification of form and initiating that form was in the service of the moral principles of the society, and that the ideal state of form and meaning was simple form and style imbuing profound moral instructions. The dominant position of meaning over form reached the extreme in the Song dynasty, when Zhu Xi became the leading figure of Confucianism. Though this tendency gradually became weak, its great influence over Chinese culture has lingered until our times.

Compared with Chinese culture, Western culture paid much more attention to form rather than meaning. Pythagoras (Yao 2003) cherished form, and he defined form as a unit that was composed with the elements that were arranged according to a particular mathematical logic. Form in Pythagoras’ viewpoint was similar to the modern concept of structure, which constructed the order of the world. Although form has been preferred in Western culture since Pythagoras, it was Kant who definitely put form in a lofty position for the first time and he appreciated that form imbued subjective emotions as the unique origin of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment (cited in Yao 2003), in which he distinguished aesthetics from ethics and politics, and advocated pure aesthetics without any interference from science or knowledge. Kant’s standpoint on form/meaning and his preference for form established the theoretical foundation for the aesthetic movement and formalism (Yao 2003).

Aestheticism developed Kant’s opinion and proclaimed “art for art’s sake,” advocating that pure form without any involvement of subjective emotion was real aesthetics. Oscar Wilde, a key English representative of aestheticism, stated that “form is the origin of all creatures… form is all… form not only creates the disposition of critics, but also the instinct of aesthetics… adoring form guides you to the mysteries of art” (cited in Zhao 1988: 174–175). Though aestheticism stressed the dominant position of form, there was still the existence of the opposing categories of form and meaning, while formalism argued that form extinguished meaning or content and there was no necessity for meaning to exist because formalism regarded meaning as the component element of form, and form and meaning mixed together or meaning was contained in form: “Form was a concrete unit and it had meaning in it” (Liu 2006: 194). Russian formalist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky (Liu 2006: 170) even claimed that “literature works are pure form.” Thus, formalism put form in a sacred position that overwhelmed meaning completely.

Structuralism was born from formalism, but it was also deeply influenced by Saussure’s linguistics. It paid much attention to the structure of the text, and refused to distinguish form and meaning. Levi-Strauss claimed, “Structure itself is the meaning… form and meaning have the same nature and should be analyzed equally. Meaning realizes its substantiality in the structure while form is the ‘structure formation’ of the structure framework. Meanwhile, meaning is implied in the framework of the structure” (Lu 1989: 130). It was clear that “structuralism was essentially a more thorough formalism than formalism itself from this standpoint” (Liu 2006: 187).

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explored the relationship between form and meaning from the concept of the sign in his studies on human languages. He held, “A language is a system of signs expressing ideas” (Saussure 2001: 15). He argued that the linguistic sign was composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word or the form which the sign takes) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). A sign must have both a signifier and a signified just like the two sides of a piece of paper that can at no time be separated. There is not a totally meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified (Saussure 2001: 101). Saussure’s binary division of signifier/ signified united the concepts of form and meaning (Silverman et al. 1983: 15), which indicated that form and meaning were inseparable and should be assigned equal importance.

Saussure did not discuss the meaning issue formally but involved himself in the meaning discussion when he theorized society, psychology, structure, sign, and value, etc. In his opinion, meaning or content was indefinite due to its close association with society, culture, and even the individual’s parole, whereas form was similar to langue in that it was definite and easy to manipulate (Wu 2004). In Course in General Linguistics (Saussure 2001), Saussure focused his attention on the study of langue instead of parole, so it is evident that he maintained the governing position of form over meaning. Nevertheless, Saussure’s binary distinction of signifier/signified stirred people’s interest in exploring meaning and triggered a tendency in structuralism to pursue meaning. Later, the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1961) enriched Saussure’s concept of signifier/signified by developing them into planes of expression and content respectively, which also made the birth of semantics possible. Hjelmslev declared, “The sign is a compound of a signifier and a signified. The plane of the signifiers constitutes the plane of expression and that of the signifieds the plane of content,” and “each plane comprises two strata: form and substance, i.e. a substance of expression, a form of expression, a substance of content, a form of content” (cited in Barthes 1990: 39). This “distinction may be important for the study of the semiological (and no longer only linguistics) sign” (Barthes 1990: 40). According to Hjelmslev, “there can be no content without an expression, or expressionless content; neither can there be an expression without a content, or content-less expression” (Hjelmslev 1961: 49).

2 Roland Barthes’ viewpoint on meaning and form

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French semiotician, literary critic, literary and social theorist, and philosopher. His productive career reached from the early days of structuralist linguistics up to the peak of post-structuralism. His works covered many fields and were considered key texts of both structuralism and post-structuralism and have exerted great influence until the present. In Barthes’ earlier academic career, i.e. his structuralist period, the binary distinction of signifier/signified of Saussure and expression/content of Hjelmslev (which, of course, influenced the systematic study of semantics too) sparked his interest in exploring hidden meaning as well as the relationship between meaning and form. He developed signifier/signified into three levels of signification: denotation, connotation, and myth, and then he extended the three levels of signification into mass media analysis in order to explore the mythic meaning that was hiding behind the surface meaning. He also tried to search for the way in which meaning is made from several aspects, such as syntagm and paradigm, denotation, connotation, and myth.

Henceforth, meaning became the central issue in Barthes’s semiotic studies. In lectures on mythologies of Barthes, Tony McNeill stated that “Barthes often claimed to be fascinated by the meanings of the things that surround us in our everyday lives, and he wanted to challenge the ‘innocence’ and ‘naturalness’ of cultural texts and practices which were capable of producing all sorts of supplementary meanings, or connotations” (McNeill 1996). Actually, Roland Barthes was meaning-oriented and he devoted all his life to searching for meaning. He was well known for his skill in finding and exploiting theories and concepts of how things try to mean. According to him, there was a definite meaning worthy to be pursued in his structuralist period, and his cultural semiotics works of this period commonly revealed the fact that form expressed meaning, though he disclosed this viewpoint sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. However, in his post-structuralist period, no final and definite meaning existed any more, but ambiguity and various interpretations were involved in his works.

According to Barthes’ analysis, meaning has several levels, and the first level is denotation. Denotation is obvious to the reader and refers to the literal meaning of a sign, which is similar to the definition given in a dictionary. While connotation indicates “the socio-cultural and ‘personal’ associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the sign, which are typically related to the interpreter’s class, age, gender, ethnicity and so on” (Chandler 2007), denotation is the surface meaning, and even people without the same cultural background can recognize it at first sight. For example, when people from different countries see the symbol of an apple, they recognize the meaning it conveys though they do not share the same culture. Conversely, connotation is implied in a particular culture and cannot be recognized easily by people from different places unless they share the same culture. Connotation is not simply personal meanings, but its framework is shaped in a particular culture so that certain connotations are taken for granted by all the members of this culture and may perhaps be unfathomable to people of other cultures.

Saussure focused on denotation at the expense of connotation while Barthes devoted himself to studying deep meaning in his cultural semiotics. The most remarkable thing that he did in seeking deep meaning was that he identified connotation and the way it is generated in photography because a photograph was commonly regarded as highly objective and was assumed to have the least deep meaning in it. What Barthes intended to do was to uncover the phenomenon that deep meaning was hidden in every corner of people’s daily life, including those seemingly most objective and innocent things. In “The Photographic Message” and “Rhetoric of the Image” (in Barthes 1977), he analyzed the denotative meaning and connotative meaning explicitly and declared that connotation can be distinguished from denotation in photography. At first glance, a photograph is denotative because of the identical nature of signifier and signified, which makes the photograph seem so objective and natural as if there were no connotation. In fact, connotation in photography is active, clear, and implicit though invisible, and although not graspable “at the level of the message itself, it can already be inferred from certain phenomena which occur at the levels of the production and reception of the message” (Barthes 1977: 19). In short, denotation is what is photographed, and connotation is how it is photographed and accepted. The process that connotative meaning is produced in photography depends on different levels of the production of the photograph, such as trick effects, pose, objects in which connotation is “produced by a modification of the reality itself, of, that is, the denoted message” (Fiske 1982: 91).

In Barthes’ view, myth did not indicate the classical fables, but the dominant ideology of the current time, and it was the deepening of connotation, because the manipulating ways of the dominant ideology of the current time were similar to traditional myth, so Barthes addressed it in “Myth Today” (Barthes 1987). Hawkes illustrated Barthes concept of myth as a complex system of ideas and beliefs constructed in society, and meanwhile tried to maintain and prove the rationality of its existence (Hawkes 1977: 85). As to the nature of myth today, according to Barthes, myth is at once formal and historical, semiological and ideological. As one part of semiotics, it was a formal science, because semiotics is a science of forms, while it studies meaning or ideas-in-form when it is part of historical science (Barthes 1987). So mythology is a dialectical coordination of formalism and meaning-orientation.

Barthes engaged in studying mass media in order to demystify meaning assigned to costume, diet, car, furniture, and other sign systems of everyday life, and his minute analysis of the myth-making process in advertisements was very prominent. According to Barthes, ads make use of signs, codes, and social myth to persuade readers not only to buy the products that they are promoting, but also to participate in the ideological ways of judging the world, and to accept the consumption view and eventually even the ideological view of the dominant class. The aim of ads “is to engage us in their structure of meaning, to encourage us to participate by decoding their linguistic and visual signs and to enjoy this decoding activity” (Bignell 2002: 31). The notion can be generated from Barthes’ analysis of the saluting Negro soldier in “Myth Today” (Barthes 1987) and the Panzani ads in “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes 1977) in which not only the way of meaning-producing is presented but also the final meaning or myth. The myth of the saluting Negro soldier is:

That France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (Barthes 1987)

While the myth of the Panzani ad is:

That of the freshness of the products and that of the essentially domestic preparation for which they are destined… Italianicity based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes… there is no difficulty in discovering at least two other signs: in the first, the serried collection of different objects transmits the idea of a total culinary service, on the one hand as though Panzani furnished everything necessary for a carefully balanced dish and on the other as though the concentrate in the tin were equivalent to the natural produce surrounding it. (Barthes 1977: 34–35)

Barthes not only found out the existence of the final meaning or myth in ads, which reflected the middle-class ideology such as values, lifestyle, and philosophy of living that dominated the ideological life of the whole society, but also criticized that the seemingly innocent posters and ads actually contained rich and profound meaning or myth. This myth aims to shape and reshape recipients’ conviction that the advertised goods are up to date, and if people do not want to be behind the times, they should just buy the products. So it is evident that myth is the gist of ads as well as of mass media. Though forms are plentiful, even overflowing, mythic meaning is relatively simple, but it is the real and unique commander-in-chief though it manipulates forms in an implicit way. The process of manipulating obscurely makes it difficult for common readers to recognize the existence of myth and its powerful effect, and thus middle-class values and worldviews infiltrate unsuspecting readers’ minds and make them believe that middle-class ideology is the standard ideology for all people to follow without any doubt or exception.

3 Correcting a conventional misunderstanding of Roland Barthes

Traditionally, Barthes was regarded as a structuralist and he was believed to emphasize structure and form instead of content or meaning. In fact, he stressed structural analysis in his literary semiotics, and his main interest was in how things mean, not so much in what things mean. That is, he explored the way of meaning-producing in the course of structural analysis of literary texts. However, he valued meaning in his cultural semiotics, and he underlined both meaning and its production process. Meaning in his cultural semiotics indicates that myth spills over into the ideology of current society, permeating everything and every object, and tries to shape and reshape readers’ ideas and ways of thinking. In order to illustrate how meaning overwhelms form in cultural semiotics, Barthes said, “I can find a thousand Latin sentences to actualize for me the agreement of the predicate, I can find a thousand images which signify to me French imperiality” (Barthes 1987).

Barthes concentrated on the exploration of mythic meaning in all his cultural semiotic works and his valued viewpoints on mythic meaning and the way of mythic meaning-making in his cultural semiotics aroused a tide of seeking for meaning with the adoption of semiotic methodologies in mass media studies. It is evident that Barthes was more than a formalist and structuralist who stressed form and structure solely, as he cherished meaning in his cultural semiotics and attached importance to both meaning and the process of its production. His main interest lay in both how things come to mean and what things mean. This enabled him to go beyond his classification as a structuralist or a formalist in that period and become a meaning-ist or meaning-oriented. But he did not emphasize either form or meaning unidirectionally, and he based his meaning-oriented cultural semiotic thought on abundant form analysis. Undoubtedly, Barthes should be regarded as the first man to consider meaning and form rationally without any bias and give them equal importance.