The work of Roland Barthes is apparently highly varied, both in its object (literature, clothes, cinema, painting, advertising, music, news items, etc.) and in its method and ideology. Le Degré zéro de l'Écriture (1953) seemed to extend into the domain of "form" the reflection begun by Sartre some years earlier on the social situation of literature and the responsibility of the writer before history—a reflection on the frontiers of existentialism and Marxism. His Michelet (1954), though offered as a simple, "precritical" reading, borrowed from Gaston Bachelard the idea of a substantial psychoanalysis and showed what a thematic study of the material imagination could bring to the understanding of a work regarded hitherto as essentially ideological. His work for the review Théâtre populaire and in the struggle waged around that review to introduce the work and theories of Bertolt Brecht into France brought him a reputation, in the next few years, of being an intransigent Marxist, although official Marxists never shared his interpretation of Brecht's theory; but, at the same time, and contradictorily, two articles on Les Gommes and Le Voyeur made him the official interpreter of Robbe-Grillet and the theoretician of the nouveau roman, which was widely regarded as a Formalist offensive and as an attempt to "disengage" literature. In 1956, Mythologies revealed a sarcastic observer of the petty-bourgeois ideology concealed in the most seemingly innocuous manifestations of contemporary social life; a new "critique of everyday life," clearly Marxist in inspiration, which marked an unequivocal political attitude. In 1960, there was a new metamorphosis, a commentary on Racine for the Club français du Livre (revised in 1963 as Sur Racine), which seemed to effect a return to psychoanalysis, but this time closer to Freud than to Bachelard, though to the Freud of Totem and Taboo, an anthropologist in his own way: Racine's tragedies are interpreted in terms of the prohibition of incest and Oedipal conflict, "at the level of this ancient fable (that of the 'primal horde'), situated far beyond history or the human psyche." Lastly, the latest texts collected in Essais critiques (1964) seem to express a decisive conversion to structuralism, understood in its strictest form, and the abandonment of any responsibility towards meaning; literature and social life are now merely languages, which should be studied as pure formal systems, not for their content, but for their structure.
This many-sided image is obviously a superficial and even, as we will see, a highly unfaithful one. Not that the scope of Barthes' reflection is actually circumscribed, open as it is in principle to the most varied tendencies of modern thought. He himself admits that he has often dreamed "of a peaceful coexistence of critical languages or, perhaps, of a 'parametric' criticism which would modify its language to suit the work proposed to it," and, speaking of the fundamental "ideological principles" of contemporary criticism (existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism), he declares: "For my part, in a certain sense I subscribe to each of them at the same time." But this apparent eclecticism conceals a constant in his thought that was already at work in Le Degré zéro, and which has become ever more marked, more conscious, and more systematic. If criticism can claim allegiance to several ideologies at once, it is, Barthes hastens to add, because "ideological choice does not constitute the being of criticism and because 'truth' is not its sanction": its task is not to uncover the secret truth of the works of which it speaks, but to cover their language "as completely as possible," with its own language, to adjust as closely as possible the language of our period to that of the works of the past, "that is to say, to the formal system of logical constraints worked out by the author in accordance with his own period." This friction between literary language and critical language has the effect not of bringing out the "meaning" of a work, but of "reconstituting the rules and constraints governing the elaboration of this meaning," in other words, its technique of signification. If the work is a language and criticism a metalanguage, their relation is essentially formal, and criticism no longer has to concern itself with a message, but with a code, that is to say, a system the structure of which it is its task to uncover, "just as the linguist is not responsible for deciphering the sentence's meaning but for establishing the formal structure which permits this meaning to be transmitted." In consideration of which, out of the varied languages that criticism can try on the literary works of the past (or of the present) "would appear a general form, which would be the very intelligibility our age gives to things and which critical activity helps, dialectically, both to decipher and to constitute." The exemplary value of critical activity, then, derives clearly from this double semiological character: as a metalanguage (a discourse on literary language), it studies a system from the viewpoint of that metacriticism, or "criticism of criticisms," which is simply semiology in its most general form. Thus criticism helps both "to decipher and to constitute" the intelligible, since it is at the same time semantics and semanteme, subject and object, of the semiological activity.
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