By the same author:

On Racine ROLAND BAR THES

Writing Degree Zero
Elements of Semiology
S/Z
Mythologies

CJRJrlr~CAJLJESSA
YS
Translated fraID the French
by Richard Haward

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

EVANSTON 1972

~
 Literature and
" .1

Metalanguage

11 j

i
¡I
it ;1

,1
giCteachesus to distinguishthe languageobject fram meta-
\1
language. The language object is the very matter subject
H IC to logical investigation; metalanguage is the necessarily
J, artificial language in which we conduct this investigation.
f Thus-and this is the rale of logical reflection-I can express
tJ:
,l' in a symbolic language (metalanguage) the relations, the struc-
i
¡ ture of a reallanguage (language object) .
¡"
i! For centuries, our writers did not imagine it was possible to
11 consider literature (the word itself is recent) as a language,
subject, like any other, to logical distinction: literature never
reflected upan itself (sometimes upon its figures, but never
upon its being), it never divided itself into an object at once
scrutinizing and scrutinized; in short, it spoke but did not speak
itself. And then, prabably with the first shocks to the good con-
science of the bourgeoisie, literature began to regard itself as
double: at once object and scrutiny of that object, utterance
and utterance of that utterance, literature object and metalitera-
ture. These have been, grosso modo, the phases of the develop-
ment: first an artisanal consciousness of literary fabrication,
refined to the point of painful scruple, of the impossible (Flau-
bert); then, the heraic will to identify, in one and the same
 100
BAR THES: CRITICAL E S SA YS
writing under Trajan the history of the Julio-Claudian tyranny,
Tacitus is in the situation of a liberal living the atrocities of
sans-culottism: for him the past is an ha11ucination, an obses-
1;
" sional theater, a scene even more than a lesson: death is a pro-
tocol.
And first of a11,in order to destroy number starting from
number, what must be paradoxica11yestablished is the unit.
I In Tacitus the great anonymous slaughters scarcely rank as
facts, they are not values: such things are always slave massa-
cres: co11ectivedeath is not human, death begins only with
I
¡ the individual, in other words, with the patrician. Tacitean
death always discloses a civil status; the victim holds officc,
he is a unit, one, enc10singhis history, his character, his func-
f
hon, his name. Death itself is not algebraic: death is always a
11,
dying; it is almost never an effect; however rapidly evoked,
I
death appears as a duration, a process to be relished; we can
J te11from certain vibrations of the sentence that each victim
~¡!
knew he was dying; Tacitus always givesthis ultimate cOllscious-
\¡ ness to the victims of torture, which is probably how he estab.
J lishes these deaths in terrorism: because he cites man at the
1I purest moment of his end; it is the contradiction between ob-
ject and subject, between thing and consciousness, it is this
¡j
final stoic suspense which makes dying a strictly human act:
:í we killlike animals, we die like men: a11the deaths in Tacitus
14
bt are instants, both immobility and catastrophe, both silence and
vision.
1t
The act outshines its cause: there is no distinction between
i:t
:11:
murder and suicide, it is the same dying, sometimes adminis.
il tered, sometimes prescribed: the presentation of death estab.
'l11
"
l'
lishes death; whether the centurion delivers a blow or an order,
1
I!I
it suffices that he appear, like an angel, for the irreversible to
occur: the instant is there, the outcome accedes to the present.
I!t
A11these murders have scarcely any causes: delation is enough
-a kind of death ray which works by remote control: crime is
H
immediately absorbed into its magical denomination: once
'! 1:1
you are called guilty, by anyone, you are aIready doomed; in-
1 nocence raises no problem, once you are branded. Moreover, it
! same chamber, with the same weapon, they sundered their veins
is because death is a raw fact, and not the element of a reason,
that it is contagious: the wife fo11owsher husband into suicide
101
Tacitus and fue Funerary Baroque
without being obliged to do so, relatives die in clusters as soon
as one of them is condemned.2 For those who fling themselves
into it-like Gribouille who leaps into the river to avoid the
rain-death is life because it puts an end to the ambiguity of
signs, it shifts us from the unnamed to the named. The act
yields to its name: if the law forbids killing a virgin, then it
suffices to rape her before strangling her: it is the name which
is rigid, it is the name which is the order of the world. To ac-
cede to the security of the fatal name, the reprieved or par.
doned person commits suicide. Not to die is not only an acci-
dent but a negative, almost a ridiculous state: it occurs only by
inadvertence. Supreme reason of this absurd structure, Coceius
Nerva enumerates a11his reasons for living (he is neither poor,
nor i11,nor under suspicion), and despite the emperor's ob-
jurgations, he kills himself. And as a crowning confusion, the
Ratio, eliminated at the moment of the irreparable, is restored
after the fact: dead, the victim is paradoxically extracted from
the funereal universe, introduced into a trial where death is not
certain: Nero would have pardoned him, he says, if he had
lived; or again, the victim is given a choice of demise; or yet
again, the suicide's corpse is strangled so that his estate may be
confiscated.
Since dying is a protocol, the victim is always shown in the
decor of life: one dreaming on a promontory, another at table,
another in his garden, another in his bath. Once death is pre-
sented, it is suspended a moment: we perform our toilet, we
visit our pyre, we recite verses, we add a codicil to our will:
this is the complimentary interval of last words, the interval in
which death utters itself. When the act occurs, it is always
absorbed into an object: it is death's object which is there,
death is praxis, techne, its mode is instrumental: dagger, sword,
cudgel, noose, razor for opening veins, poisoned feather for
tickling the throat, wadding chewed by the man dying of
hunger, blankets for smothering, c1ifffrom which the victim is
thrown, ceiling which fa11sin (Agrippina), garbage cart in
2. Vetus, his mother-in.law, and his daughter: "Then, in the
and hurried into a bath, coveredeach, as delicacyrequired, with a
single garment . . ." (XVI.ll).
 The Structuralist
Activity

hat is structuralism? Not a school, nor even a move-

\X I\.V ment (at labeled

ordinarily least, not
withyet), for most
this word of the of
are unaware authors
being
united by any solidarity of doctrine or commitment. Nor is it a
vocabulary. Structure is already an old word (of anatomical and
grammatical provenance), today quite overworked: all the social
sciences resort to it abundantly, and its use can distinguish no
one, except to polemicize about the content assigned to it;
functíons, forms, sígns, and sígníficatíons are scarcely more
pertinent: they are, today, words in common use from which
one asks (and obtains) whatever one wants, notably the
camouflage of the old determinist schema of cause and product;
we must doubtless resort to pairings like those of sígnífierj
signífied and synchronicjdíachroníc in order to approach what
distinguishes structuralism from other modes of thought: the
first because it refers to the linguistic model as originated by
Saussure and because, along with economics, linguistics is, in
the present state of affairs, the true science of structure; the
second, more decisively, because it seems to imply a certain
revision of the notion of history, insofar as the idea of synchrony
(although in Saussure this is a pre-eminentIy operational con-
 216
BARTHES: CRITICAL ESSA YS
the structural analysis made of a constituted language or society
or work) or is stil1dispersed (in the case of the structural "com-
position"); whether this initial object is drawn from a social
rea1ityor an imaginary reality. It is not the nature of the copied
object which defines an art (though this is a tenacious prejudice
in a11realism), it is the fact that man adds to it in reconstruct-
ing it: technique is the very being of al1creation. It is therefore
to the degree that the goals of structuralist activity are indis-
solubly linked to a certain technique that structuralism exists in
a distinctive fashion in relation to other modes of analysis or
creation: we recompose the object in order to make certain
functions appear, and it is, so to speak, the way that makes the
work; this is why we must speak of the structuralist activity
rather than the structuralist work.
The structura1ist activity involves two typical operations:
dissection and articulation. To dissect the first object, the one
which is given to the simulacrum-activity, is to find in it certain
mobile fragments whose differential situation engenders a cer-
tain meaning; the fragment has no meaning in ItseH, but it is
nonetheless such that the slightest variation wrought in its
configurationproduces a change in the whole; a square by
Mondrian, a seriesby Pousseur, a versicle of Butor's Mobile, the
"mytheme" in Lévi-Strauss, the phoneme in the work of the
phonologists, the "theme" in certain literary criticism-a11 these
units (whatever their inner structure and their extent, quite
different according to cases) have no significant existence
except by their frontiers: those which separate them fram other
actual units of the discourse (but this is a prablem of articula-
tion) and also those which distinguish them fram other virtual
units, with which they form a certain c1ass (which linguistics
cal1s a paradigm); this notion of a paradigm is essential, ap-
parently, if we are to understand the structuralist vision: the
paradigm is a group, a reservoir-as limited as possible-of
objects (of units) from which we summon, by an act of citation,
the object or unit we wish to endow with an actual meaning;
what characterizes the paradigmatic object is that it is, vis-a-vis
other objects of its c1ass,in a certain relation of aflinity and of
dissimi1arity: two units of the same paradigm must resemble
217
The Structuralist Activity
each other somewhat in order that the differencewhich sepa-
rates them be indeed evident: s and z must have both a com-
mon feature (dentality) and a distinctive feature (presence or
absence of sonority) so that we cannot, in French, attribute the
same meaning to poisson and poison; Mondrian's squares must
have both certain aflinities by their shape as squares, and certain
dissimilarities by their proportion and color; the American auto-
mobiles (in Butor's Móbile) must be constantly regarded in the
same way, yet they must differ each time by both their make
and color; the episodes of the Oedipus rnyth (in Lévi-Strauss's
analysis) must be both identical and varied-in order that al1
these languages, these works may be intel1igible.The dissection-
operation thus produces an initial dispersed state of the simu-
lacrum, but the units of the structure are not at al1 anarchic:
before being distributed and fixed in the continuity of the com-
position, each one forms with its own virtual graup or reservoir
an intel1igent organism, subject to a sovereign motor principIe:
that of the least difference.
Once the units are posited, structural man must discover in
them or establish for them certain rules of association: this is
the activity of articulation, which succeeds the summoning
activity. The syntax of the arts and of discourse is, as we know,
extreme1yvaried; but what we discover in every work of struc-
tural enterprise is the submission to regular constraints whose
formalism, impraperIy indicted, is much less important than
their stability; for what is happening, at this second stage of the
simulacrum-activity, is a kind of battle against chance; this is
why the constraint of recurrence of the units has an almost
demiurgic value: it is by the regular return of the units and of
the associations of units that the work appears constructed, i.e.,
endowed with meaning; linguistics cal1sthese rules of combina-
tion forms, and it would be advantageous to retain this rigoraus
sense of an overtaxed word: form, it has been said, is what keeps
the contiguity of units fram appearing as apure effect of chance:
the work of art is what man wrests from chanceo This perhaps
al10wsus to understand on the one hand why so-cal1ed non-
figurative works are nonethe1ess to the highest degree works of
art, human thought being established not by the analogy of
 220

BAR THE S: CRITICAL ES SA YS

as he experiences his validity (but not his truth) in his power

to speak the old languages of the world in a new way, so he
knows that it will sufficethat a new language rise out of history, La Bruyere
a ne\\' language which speaks him in his turn, for his task to be
done.

1963

Bruyere occupies an ambiguous place in French culture: he

is taught as a "majar author"; his maxims, his art, his his-
][ torical role are assigned as dissertation subjects; his knowl-
edge of Man and his premonition of a more equitable society
[, are exto11ed:The notion of humanity, Brunetiere used to say,
I1

I¡ dawns with La Bruyere; he is made (O precious paradox!) at

tí once a classic and a democrat. Yet outside our schools, the La
11
Bruyere myth is a meager one: he has not yet been caught up in
l'
any of those great dialogues which French writers have always
,1
11 engaged in from one century to another (Pascal and Montaigne,
!:
i1
Voltaire and Racine, Valéry and La Fontaine); criticism itself
has scarcely bothered to rene\\' our entirely academic image of
him; his work has not lent itself to any of the new languages of
our age, has stimulated neither historians nor philosophers nor
sociologists nor psychoanalysts; in short, if we except the sym-
pathy of a Proust quoting some penetrating maxim ("Being
with the people one laves is enough; dreaming, talking to them
or not talking to them, thinking about them or about indiffer-
ent things in their presence, it is a11one." Du coeur, No. 23),
our modernity, though quite ready to appropriate classical
"
authors, seems to have great difficultyrecuperating him: though