In Barthes's view, we are perpetually caught up, at every moment of our experience, by a mesh of words that prevents us from seeing what is really happening…. [We] perpetually see life in terms of the books we have read, and have quite lost the ability to see physical objects as they actually are. In so far as it ties us down to a predigested version of the way somebody else first saw the world and expressed it for us, this habit prevents us from realising our full potential as free human beings. It is consequently—though here I am extrapolating from Barthes's work, not referring to any formal statement which he has made—the task of the person who writes either about literature or about language to make people conscious of the distortions created by the way verbal communication works. The missionary role thus entrusted to the linguist or literary critic constitutes the most important conclusion which Barthes has drawn from Saussure's insistence on the arbitrary nature of signs, and provides both the central theme linking the whole of his work together and his most significant contribution to the intellectual life of the mid to late twentieth-century. (pp. 136-37)
Barthes is more a philosopher of language than a literary critic, and there is therefore some justification for his work being so difficult to understand. I would nevertheless maintain that to see him as a man determined to free people from preconceived ideas by pointing carefully at the individual strands in the mesh of language holding them captive is to look at his work from the most fruitful point of view. He described himself, in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes], as a man who sees language, and each one of his books can be read as an attempt to make people conscious of how completely the way we express ourselves conditions our vision of the world. Le degré zéro de l'écriture denounces the illusion that any form of literary language can be natural, and warns against the trap of assuming that because an account of experience is immediately comprehensible, it is therefore innocent of pre-conceived ideas. Mythologies is shot through with an insistence on the need to avoid 'la naturalité du signe' by constantly emphasising the artificial nature of all communication systems, while Système de la Mode is dominated by the realisation that we can be honest with our fellow human beings and ourselves only by seeing the clothes we wear as consciously expressing the deliberate choice which we make of how we would like other people to see us. Sade, Fourier, Loyola carries Barthes's position in Le degré zéro, Mythologies and S/Z to its logical conclusion by recognising that the role of language is to enable the writer to create his own autonomous world, while Le Plaisir du Texte uses the neologism signifiance to embody the notion that it is only when we have freed ourselves of the illusion that words reflect reality—or even, perhaps, that there is a reality to be reflected—that we shall begin to see language as creating our awareness of meaning by the physical impact which it makes upon our senses. (pp. 138-39)
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