Peter Trifonas Barthes and the Empire of Signs 1997

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P O S T M O D E R N E N O U N T E R S

r thes

and the Em pire of Signs

PETER PERICLES TRIFON S


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P O S T M O D E R N E N C O U N T E R S

Barthes and theEmpire of Signs

Peter Pericles Trifonas

Series editor: Richard Appignanesi

I C O N B O O K S U K

T O T E M B O O K S U S A


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Semiology, Myth, Culture

Empire of Signs? Yes, if it is understood that these signs are empty and that the ritual iswithout a god. 1 Roland Barthes

Empire of Signs , originally published in 1970,is recognised to be part of Roland Barthespost-structuralist phase in which his concern

for explicating systems of signs is overtaken bya desire to disrupt and decentre their authority.As a text, it signals the shift away from the useof the elements of formal semiology or theguiding principles of structural linguistics to

study the real-world phenomena of culturalpractices as images and texts that can be read.Empire of Signs could therefore be consideredas a watershed in contemporary critical theory,given Barthes position as a leading figure of French structuralism. Because of this theoreti-cal and stylistic innovation, it is a key text of the period that ushers in and welcomes thepost-structural era of literary criticism.

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Barthes developed his semiological methodof reading the sign systems of culture afterthe work of linguists Ferdinand de Saussure,Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson and EmileBenveniste. The scope and depth of his workearned him a prestigious Chair in LiterarySemiotics at the Collge de France. LikeClaude Lvi-Strauss and Jean Piaget, Barthesinfluenced and was part of a generation of

French critics and theorists interested in semio-tics during the 1950s and 60s: Julia Kristeva,Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, TzvetanTodorov, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser,Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Ren

Girard and Jean Baudrillard. This period of high structuralism was marked by the fervourof great intellectual labour and intense publicexchanges between the major figures of themovement that incubated various theoreticaloff-shoots such as deconstruction, narratology,archetypal criticism and structural Marxism.The critical importance of semiology lies in thefact that it enables theorists to create a meta-

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language a critical language or discourse that is useful for analysing forms and struc-tures of representation as parts encoded withinthe logic of a system. It posits multiple levels of signification (e.g., a letter, a word, a sentence,a punctuation mark) working singularly andtogether in relation to a coded, whole text. Forthis reason, semiology is also called a formalist method of analysis, since it links the expression

of meaning or content within analysis to theelements of formal composition. Its theoreticalprecepts allow for the possibility of reading realand hypothetical levels of signification bothabove and below the sign, and of working

out the relationships between them within atext. 2 The quest is to find and make accessiblereserves of meaning within configurations of textual form. Consequently, signs, structuresand codes are the main concerns of semiologyin relation to the system of representation andits encoding of the elements of textuality.

What has been called Barthes structuralistphase encompasses texts such as Writing Degree

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Zero , Elements of Semiology and Mythologies .The last of these books provides a theoreticalexposition of his method of reading systems of signs in culture and their textual productionsin the media. Some of the subjects that aretaken up by Barthes during this period areadvertisements, travel guides, fashion, photo-graphy, striptease and wrestling. The point iscritically to interrogate the field of cultural

products and practices so as to conduct an ideo-logical critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture and to analyze semio-logically the mechanics of this language. 3 Forexample, in another study of the period, 4 Barthes

engages an advertisement for pasta to demon-strate the ideological interdependence of a sys-tem of lexical and visual signs and codes withinthe same text. We might call this type of analysisof image and text also undertaken in Empireof Signs a cross-medial approach. The objectsdepicted visually in the advertisement (spaghetti,tomato sauce, grated Parmesan cheese, onions,peppers and a string bag) can be grouped

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under the one lexical term used as the brandlabel for the product, /Panzini/. Not that theseproducts are exclusive to a particular ethnicity,but in culinary terms, according to the advert-isement, the ingredients for the completespaghetti dish are represented in the photo-graph as uniquely Italian and therefore of excellent quality. The echo of cultural authen-ticity is in the origin of the name itself and its

inflection of ethnic identity. Since the advertise-ment was designed for the French consumer,and not the Italian consumer, for Barthes theethnic connotation of the name is particularlyeffective as a marketing tool to create desire

and demand for the product by establishing athematically meaningful context for the intendedaudience. The quality of the product is linkedto the ethnicity of the name, thus evokingmythical images of an authentic Italianspaghetti dish that can be made right in onesown in this case, French home. The advert-isement seems to suggest that all one need do isbuy the product and relish the experience of

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cooking just like the Italians. It is rife withstereotypes latent within the form of represen-tation. The Italianicity of the products dependschiefly on a contiguous , or adjoined, relationbetween the word /Panzini/ and the productsdepicted, in order to achieve the transferenceof connotation from the lexical to the visualtext, thereby resulting in anchorage and relay .The concepts of anchorage and relay that

Barthes develops to analyse the interplay of word and image in the advertisement are usefulfor considering the way in which this com-bined code type of text may generate and guidemeaning-making semiotically. In anchorage, as

Barthes explains, the text directs the readerthrough the signifieds of the image, causing himto avoid some and receive others It remote-controls him [or her] toward meaning chosenin advance; whereas in relay, the text andimage stand in a complementary relationship;the words in the same way as the images, arefragments of a more general syntagm and theunity of the message is realized at a higher

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level.5 In order to facilitate meaning, the mes-sage of the advertisement as a whole involvesboth the lexicalvisual dependency of anchor-age and the complementarity of both textualconstituents found in relay.

Understanding MythSimilarly to Barthes analysis of the Panziniadvertisement, his Mythologies highlights the

critical task of the semiologist to demythifywhat is said and also unspoken in the representa -tions of popular culture. That is, to debunk thebias of myths that are created or reinforcedwhen the subject of culture itself takes the text-

ual form of sign systems and codes. Ideology isat the core of mythology. Barthes analysis of media in Mythologies reinforces the Marxisttenor of this theme.

Indeed, Myth Today, the last essay of theEnglish version of Mythologies , which is anextended meditation on semiological method,uses the beliefs, desires and values expressed inthe grand narratives of petit-bourgeois culture

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as a vehicle for demonstrating how to unlockthe signifying structure of myth. Barthes showsthat myth naturalises the idiosyncrasies of culture, universalises them, and makes themsocial norms through its rhetorical flourishes.Mythologies as ideology critique exposes theethical dilemma of leaving myth unexaminedas a cultural substratum of what is natural andwhat is real in the life-world. The danger that

Barthes sees in myth is that it allows layers of meaning to accumulate within its representa-tions of culture, and encourages unreflectivepractices. Through myth, ideological abuse 6

takes place because there is unquestioning faith

in the message. The status quo of culturalnorms is fed by the imagination of mythology.As Barthes says, the truth of myth characteriseswhat-goes-without-saying. 7 The cultural logicthat is expounded through mythology attemptsto reduce differences of interpretation andlimit the excesses of meaning. Its ideologicaldimensions structure the terms of our responsesto signs, texts and media representations and,

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more importantly, to history. Myths generaliseexperience to bring about a consensus on howwe perceive reality, encounter the human con-dition, and act in respect to the difference of others as a community. The ethical, social andpolitical boundaries of society and culture areframed by mythology. Myths provide interpre-tative archetypes for deciphering the meaningof the life-world we inhabit with a view to the

present through the past. Mythology animatesreality, translates and naturalises it for us, byinfusing it with levels of ideological significance.

Wrestling with Myth

According to Barthes, myths give us criticalmodels of understanding that we can use to mapthe meaning of experience by staggering onesystem atop another, to create two levels of interpretation. Both levels work singularly andin tandem, first to highlight reality and then to

gloss reality. In Mythologies , Barthes showshow the primary level contains the factualsystem of representation in which objects are

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signified. Barthes calls this the signifying plane.It gives an alibi for keeping the form of repre-sentation separate from the content of repre-sentation. The secondary level promotes asymbolic system in which connections tomeaning are made. Barthes calls this symbolicrealm of associations le signifiant vide orempty signified. It generates another plane of meaning beyond the cultural object or practice

by giving representation the power of truth aspresence. Empirical facts buoyed with thissignifiant presence thus take on a metaphor-ical or symbolic lustre that seduces and thuscauses the reader to jump from simply repeat-

ing mundane interpretations to making valuejudgements that have ethical and moral impli-cations. That is why, Barthes explains, eventhough we know that the world of wrestling is astage-managed sport, 8 its excessive spectaclesof human experience e.g., its exhibitions of pain, suffering, betrayal, guilt, treachery, cruelty,desire and elation allow the viewer a pureridentification with the actors. Emotion takes

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over, raw but not without an ideological bent.The audience quickly has to take sides for thespectacle of wrestling to be effective. As inmythology, in wrestling matches imaginarysagas of life-and-death struggles, pitting goodagainst evil, are played out before an audienceready to identify within such a play the primor-dial ethical situations of the human condition.Wrestling exploits the mythological archetypes

that preoccupy consciousness. A darkly maskedfigure, a face of evil, squares off against acrowd favourite who displays and defends allthat is good in a culture. The mythical spectacleof wrestling relies on viewers unconscious

desire to work out the psychic and ethical ten-sions within the ideology of culture. It feeds onit. This symbolic element of identification orgloss demands the viewers attention andaccounts for the tremendous popularity of wrestling. For Barthes, myth distorts reality forideological effect. It turns bias and prejudiceinto history. It quietly suspends the need for aquestioning of representations in culture. Myth

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naturalises this distortion of reality and glossesover its rough-hewn text to make prevalent apoint of view that can be taken on as a ready-made truth regarding existence.

Needless to say, Barthes does not trust myth.He believes its imaginary rendering of history,society and culture to be a cause of human self-deception when it becomes the source fortruth. The contention is that mythology asserts

itself as History when meaning needs to befixed publicly, and reality demystified, for thesake of asserting claims to clarity and universaltruth. Myth functions to resist the fragmenta-tion of cultural memory by allowing us to take

for granted all that is happening around us ineveryday life. Reality is demystified for easyconsumption. Myth exudes ideology because,Barthes concludes, it transform[s] meaninginto form. 9

Post-structural BarthesWhereas the early work of Barthes aims tounlock the secrets of representational forms

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becomes for Barthes a way to resist the powerof a text over a reader, to question its motiva-tion, and, ultimately, to engage its meaning. Inother words, he wants to oppose the ideologyof representational forms imposed upon areader trapped within the semiological struc-tures of a text. During this period, Barthescame to the conclusion that the best the criticalreader could hope for were flashes that illu-

minated an image or text but revealed nothing.The linguistic elements of semiology as a

reading strategy are displaced in Barthes laterwork. Another set of critical preoccupationsfloods the vocabulary of his readings of cultural

forms and practices. Barthes refocuses thecritical lens of his theoretical arsenal on con-cepts related to the working-out of humandesire. Thus, the emphasis of reading is placedon representations of the body, pleasure, love,possession, alienation, intersubjectivity, culture,difference, memory and writing. Interestinglyenough, myth still occupies a central place inBarthes post-structuralist phase as a form of

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meaning-making that allows him to readagainst the grain of cultural representationsand the representation of culture.

The Empire of Empty SignsAs I stated earlier, Empire of Signs illustratesthe shift in Barthes later work. The text ismore poetic than analytical, more reflectivethan critical. Barthes takes pleasure in playing

with the narrative point of view by under-cutting its validity so as to decentre its authorityand disrupt its legitimacy. He wants to resistthe temptation to mythologise his subject,

Japan. That is, to idealise and naturalise an

image of an Oriental culture as opposed to anOccidental one. The foreword that Barthesprovides to Empire of Signs reads as follows:

The text does not gloss the images, which donot illustrate the text. For me, each has beenno more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning Zen calls a satori. Text and image,

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interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writ-ing; and in them to read the retreat of signs. 10

In Empire of Signs , theory is embedded orgrounded within the style of expression. Thereis no direct application of a method we couldcall semiological. By consciously refusing togloss the images of Japan that he presents,

Barthes avoids an appeal to the Western visualmotif of light and darkness and its ideology. Heforgoes its mythology and accepts the resultingloss of meaning, preferring not to attempt toenlighten the reader with the Truth about

Japanese culture. Culture, if anything, is a retreatinto signs for the sake of finding meaning withina system of signs whose reality is but a fictionof language that is, an arbitrary way of codingand making sense of the world. Barthes, I think,would have agreed with this statement, giventhat his view of myth and its correspondingdiscourse, history, was indeed a sceptical one.History, like myth, produces cultural narratives

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that confuse the paths to making meaning of present events in relation to past occurrences.That is why Barthes refuses intentionally togloss the text of Empire of Signs and its images:the effect would be to reproduce the ethno-centric myth of Japan that is its Western history.

There could be no other choice. What Barthesknows about Japan is always already filteredthough an emptiness of language which con-

stitutes writing.11

Meaning is delayed, accessto truth prevented. On the one hand, the signsof Japan are empty for him, without naturalreferential meaning, so there can only be formsof representation that he does not fully under-

stand. Mythology is thus avoided. The signs of Japan are just the signs of an empire. Or anempire of signs. On the other hand, as an out-sider to Japanese culture, Barthes must locatehimself within the ethnocentrism and culturalblindness of a narrow range of meanings thatthe image of Japan stimulates in the Westernreader. Mythology is everywhere, but this timeit comes from within him. It colours Barthes

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responses to the signs he sees and experiences.Someday we must write the history of ourown obscurity, he says

manifest the density of our narcissism, tallydown through the centuries the several appealsto difference we may have occasionally heard,the ideological recuperations which have infal-libly followed and which consist in always

acclimating our incognizance of Asia by meansof certain known languages (the Orient of Voltaire, the Revue Asiatique , of Pierre Loti, orof Air France) .12

Barthes knowledge of Japan is limited to whathe has read of its history and seen of its images,either through experience or in the media. Thisexposure to a Western archive of texts andimages that are called Japan establishes themyth of Japan as part of an Oriental culture asopposed to an Occidental culture. It is given ahistorical legacy that we call the History of

Japan which makes the cultural differences of

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History as its grounding. Missing are the tran-scendental signs of Western culture that dependon a metaphysical foundation of meaning: e.g.,the Word, God, the Subject, the ego, presence,an immovable centre, and so on. Barthes canonly relate the dizzying heterogeneity of Japanin a montage of images and texts that are strik-ing in themselves. The experience of loss that hefeels during his contact with the emptiness of its

signs tempers his readings of cultural forms andpractices. And yet, a question remains to beanswered: Is it possible to write a history of

Japanese culture without succumbing to recon-stituting its Western mythology?

At first glance, it would seem not. But toattempt an answer to this question, we need toconsider what problems the writing of culturalhistory poses for Barthes.

Culture and HistoryThat all history can only be in the last analysis,the history of meaning, that is of Reason in

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To invoke the other of the sign of history isnot to welcome an instant of madness that iswithout reason. Chaos or anarchy will alwaysresult from a critical stance away from anappeal to reason. If we choose to believe

Jacques Derrida, even a history of madnesswould have its own idiosyncratic reasons, itsown governing logic, whether we can fathom itor not. Nothing is without its own reason: no

matter how misguided or unethical a thoughtor action might be. As Barthes has stated inThe Discourse of History, 15 the loss of mean-ing is immanent to any history or representa-tion of culture, because the signs of language

intervene. Thus, writing about cultural eventsor practices can no longer be perceived to be anobjective chronicling of details. History losesits facticity just by being written. History is atext. A glossy surface. A set of signs. Historyno longer documents the real, Barthes explains,but produces the intelligible. 16 It is temperedby the cultural perspective of the historian inthe process of interpreting and writing history.

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The texts and images of history, like those of myth, are thoroughly penetrated by ideologyand the rhetorical techniques of the historian.History is mediated by language and is there-fore a mode of discourse that produces a text,but does not facilitate a representation of fact.

In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt,the Work of Mourning, and the New Inter-national ,17 Derrida has taken a position similar

to that of Barthes regarding the writing of history and ideology. Derrida criticises recentclaims about the end of history made byliberal humanists such as Francis Fukuyamaafter the fall of Communism in Soviet Russia

as being nothing but an ideological confidencetrick. That is, an attempt to rewrite history andinfluence cultural memory according to thepolitical ideology of those who have a vestedinterest in eliminating differences of interpreta-tion from a certain vision of civil society. ForDerrida, reason is the ideology of history.History writes the emptiness of signs but glossesthe images to fill in the gaps of understanding

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and thus make myth or ideology possible.Nothing more, nothing less.

Like myth, the central problem of writing thehistory of a culture is the problem of ideology.Barthes often returns to this theme in Empireof Signs in fact, he never leaves it. His effortis to begin on a journey of learning about thedifference of Japanese culture. The delay of thisintellectual labour, he says, can only be the

result of an ideological occultation.18

Barthestakes very seriously this responsibility to guidethe reader through the images and texts of Japanas he sees it. One of the key ideas of Empire of Signs is how ideology is inextricably related to

the question of meaning the meaning of meaning. Barthes cannot escape his Westerneducation and heritage. He cannot un-learnwhat he has already learned. This realisationbrings semiotics into the picture, as the inter-pretation of meaning occurs in a field of articu-lation whose signs occupy what we can call thepublic sphere of culture. Barthes reminds usthat Japan as a signifier in the West involves

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the dissemination of signs and their mediation.The way in which these signs images andtexts are represented is not haphazard. Thereis a historical legacy at work, motivated byideology. This work comprises the translationof ideas, turns of mind, progression of thought, values and ideals of individuals,groups or societies embodied in various textual-ised forms across the diverse cultural milieus of

different historical epochs that we call theWest. According to Barthes, there is a distinc-tive ideological purpose informing the opera-tion of what he is doing by isolating certainfeatures forming a sign system called Japan:

that is, writing a form of cultural history. Itentails that the focus of interpretation be uponthe textualised products of culture and uponthe contexts and practices within which theirmeanings, when inculcated socially, are distrib-uted and consumed.

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Visualising CultureThat is why Barthes combines images withinthe text of Empire of Signs . The images con-textualise the analysis, place it in history, give ita framework, as being based in reality. Theresponsibility of representing the difference of

Japan as a system of relations whose featuresBarthes identifies is consequently generated fromthe act of reading and writing the living spaces

of these textcontext relations. For example,mapping the Tokyo cityscape, exhibiting formsof writing, and depicting people in the act of bowing provide the reader with vignettes of

Japanese cultural life. Visual representation

concretises meaning articulated by and withinthe image that is portrayed. The ideology islaid bare, some would say. Its meaning is nothidden because the visual language of the pic-ture anchors and relays the message. This pointof view considers the image as an icon of con-tent. It assumes one level of articulation, justlike the trite saying, a picture is worth a thou-sand words. This attitude is reminiscent of

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Marshall McLuhans famous dictum: Themedium is the message. In this case, we couldreplace medium with picture quite easilyand come to conclusions echoed in the originalneologism. The visual image does speak foritself, although not completely, since its totalcomposition is made up of much smaller partsthat articulate different levels of meaningdepending on where one focuses ones gaze. All

of the pictorial texts included in Empire of Signs supplement our general understanding of the narrative text, but there are multivalentlevels of unexplored meaning.

What is more important for us, reading

Barthes rendering of the signs of Japanese cul-ture, is the way in which the visual images e.g., a Sumo wrestler, the geisha, a hand writ-ing a Kanji character establish a spatial andtemporal record of the subjects depicted. Thephotograph becomes empirical proof of histor-ical existence and at the same time an artefactof a moment past and forever lost.

Barthes examines the maddening effect of

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this contradiction of meaning in CameraLucida , his last book. He is intrigued by theway in which photographic realism collapsesspace and time, wherein significance is accu-mulated through the emptiness of the represen-tation what is and is not there in the hereand now.

Empire of Signs forefronts the plenitude of meaning and the loss of meaning that is the

problem of history, whether it is representedthrough words or visual images. In many ways,Barthes still has to intervene for the reader.Photographs and other visual images contextu-alise and complicate the difference between the

Western myth of Japan and the Japan that is alandscape of empty signs. What Derrida callsundecidability is immanent to the space of interpretation. Culture influences the represen-tation of history as well as the other wayround. In other words, there is no recourse to afinal, indisputable meaning. So, Barthes musthighlight what he is explaining visually, to giveit a pragmatic index, and show how it is rooted

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in the reality of cultural figures, spaces, andpractices. But this does not provide a picture of truth. There is a world of difference betweenunderstanding examples and reproducing ideo-logy, as Barthes reminds us by appealing to thediscourse of history as a form of culturalmythology wherein truth can be found.Ultimately, however, the process of interpreta-tion or meaning-making is left up to the reader.

Ideology, like culture and subjectivity, is mal-leable. Its dimensions change with experience.Why can we say this?

Historical Method Before and After

IdeologyLike Barthes, Louis Althusser identified ideo-logy as an essential structure of cultural andhistorical life. It governs not only the meansand modes of textualisation, but also the distri-bution, consumption and legitimation of meanings within social contexts. Ideology as ahistorical force constructs subjectivity. Of thatthere is no doubt. Yet it has limits. There is a

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This is what permits them to imagine that their political activities are qualitatively different from those of their opponents or represent ahigher value than those of their enemies. Historical events differ from natural events inthat they are meaningful for their agents and variously meaningful to the different groupsthat carry them out. 19

We cannot assume and Barthes does not that ideology works its way into the conscious-ness of each member of a culture in the samefashion. It is articulated within you and methrough different means and ways. This

accounts for the diversity of readings and inter-pretations between us. Ideology cannot occurwithout a web of resistance to its homogenis-ing effects. Otherwise, we would all think andspeak alike and probably have nothing totalk or write about, since a total and tacitagreement would allow silence to prevail. As intelepathy, there would be nothing left to saythat we would not already know. The need for

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communication would wither. All human actionwould be surmised in advance of its occurrence.

The importance of Empire of Signs is not somuch in the detail of its analysis as in itsexpression of the Western anxiety that lan-guage means nothing, that meaning is notimportant. It is not surprising to Barthes norshould it be to us that the end of the nine-teenth century could only have resulted in the

extirpation of an ideologically-grounded inter-pretative framework from historical methodo-logy. The entrenchment of a purely scientificintention within the discipline was supportedby a correspondence theory of truth. The signs

of historical discourse were ultimately verifiablein their relation to reality. A logical language of propositions confirmed the truth of representa-tion. An example of such a statement would be:Snow is white because snow is white. Thereis no contradiction in the logic here, becauseit is based on empirical evidence which con-nects language to the external world causally.Three such perspectives for establishing the

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correspondence between the expression of con-cepts and their relation to reality have informedhistoriography since the nineteenth century.These are as follows. Language conceived as:1) an index of causal relations governed by themateriality of external world structures (e.g.,Marxist historical method); 2) an iconic, ormimetic , representation of external reality asreflected in the system of grammar and syntax,

as well as the lexicon used to represent reality(e.g., the archetypal history of Ernst Cassirer);and 3) a motivated symbol of external realitywhich presupposes the presence of an over-arching Zeitgeist (a Spirit of the Time) reflect-

ing all aspects of a culture and thus revealingthe essence of the whole (e.g., the Hegelian-influenced historians).

The privileging of a referential function with-in language displays the belief that the essenceof the past is to be found in the wealth of detailthat the historian documented, its undeniablefacticity and therefore its truthfulness. Thekernel of truth resides in the correspondence

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between the stories written and the storieslived. It is demonstrable only in the closelyargued, causally-based logic of a dissertativestyle of address aimed at revealing the truestory, a repeating of the actual events, and thereal story, the narrativised account of it. Theuse of a strictly narrative mode of historio-graphy as a style of presentation is thuscharged with endowing the representation of

people, things and events with an illusorycoherence. As Barthes shows, fundamentally,historical discourse becomes equivalent to thefictional discourse such as we might find in anepic, a novel or a play where the drama of

representation and the structuring of its expo-sition are more characteristic of an oneiric(dreamlike) reality than an actual one. That iswhy he has no qualms about writing of a fic-tional Japan he must give a logic and coher-ence to his experience of it out of disjointedresponses to the signs of its culture.

In The Discourse of History, Barthes hasdrawn attention to the principles of exposition

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governing the discipline of history and the cir-cumstance of its utterance as a discourse. Thedistinction between fact and fiction in his-toriography lies with long-standing rules of evidence. The validity of historical sourcesrelies on links that can be readily traced to ref-erents found in primary sources e.g., textualarchives (official documents, records of events,diaries, etc.) and relics (material artefacts).

Attempts at interpretation constitute the pre-sentism of non-objectively inclined historio-graphers, and are to be avoided at all costs. Themateriality of these primary sources is con-ceived to confirm and anchor the authenticity

of the contexts motivating their production,thereby attesting to the truth of the historicalreality referenced for the purpose of explainingthe past or reconstructing it. Secondary sources documentary or second-hand accounts if used at all, are to be carefully subjected tointernal criticism first, in order to check theaccuracy and worth of the statements con-tained according to laws of reason, probability,

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competence or bias. And then they are subjectedto external criticism so as to verify the genuine-ness of the authorship or the originating con-text of the testimony. It should be noted thatthese procedural checks may also be appliedto primary sources if necessary.

In the end, history must render the contourof form or shape to a body of evidence. Thisinvolves reading and writing. Or an engage-

ment with the signs of culture, as Bartheswould say, where a shock of meaning is lacer-ated, extenuated to the point of its irreplace-able void. 20 Empire of Signs decentres responseand exposes the emptiness of the signs of writ-

ing in their relation to what Japan as a culturereally is. In this sense, for Barthes, his real-lifesubject is a novelistic object, 21 one that allowshim to situate the focus of inquiry directlywithin the semiotic process of reading andwriting Japanese culture. Empire of Signsproblematises the precepts of a correspondencetheory of history that posit the truth of thepast to be manifest in the relation between the

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representational surface of discourse and itsconceptual content. A critical practice such asBarthes cannot but deconstruct the genealogyof historical meaning like the earlier work of Michel Foucault, in which questions concern-ing cultural representation and ideology aretaken up via an examination of the Westernarchaeologies of knowledge and its orders of discourse. Empire of Signs reminds us that the

source of meaning-making potential in historio-graphy is actualised within the semiologicalfeatures of its production as the reading andwriting of culture. Barthes forces us to acceptDerridas exhortation to look for nothing out-

side the text. The representation of individualsand events in the discourse of history consti-tutes nothing but signs engaging a reader. Noclaims to facticity, objectivity or truth can bemade outside of the margins of the text. Thesigns of history are empty. We must accept thelogic that Barthes offers, given his admissionthat what is presented here does not appertain(or so it is hoped) to art, to Japanese urbanism,

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to Japanese cooking. The author has never, inany sense photographed Japan. 22

Scrutinising the writing of history requiresthe historiographers active intellectual engage-ment with the world as text as signs notfacts. Replacing the concepts word and rep-resentation with the concepts sign and signi-fication places the question of the production,distribution and consumption of meaning deci-

sively in a semiological realm of analysis. Thetendency to discern textcontext relations onthe basis of distinguishing the real from theimaginary is suspended because there are noclear distinctions. Language will always medi-

ate understanding. And fundamental questionsarise about the nature and possibility of access-ing meaning outside of discourse: What doesreality look like outside of discourse? Howwould we access it independently of language?How do we know when it has been accessedwithout its re-inscription in discourse? How dowe know whether our views of it are faithful toit? And so on. In semiological terms, such

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questions seek to determine the nature of anextra-discursive reality. But can we ever escapethe ideology that colours perspective? I thinknot. Historical discourse must then be, in someshape or form, a fictional mode of representa-tion. In The Discourse of History, Barthesasked:

Does the narration of past events, which, in

our culture from the time of the Greeksonwards, has generally been subject to thesanction of historical science, bound to theunderlying standard of the real, and justified by the principles of rational exposition does

this form of narration really differ, in somespecific trait, in some indubitably distinctivefeature, from the imaginary narration, as wefind it in the epic, the novel, and the drama? 23

He goes on to say that in objective history,the real is never more than an unformulatedsignified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent. This situation characterizes

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what might be called the realistic effect (effet du rel ).24 When analysing diverse modes of discourse production, there is a common semio-logical principle of reading that quicklybecomes evident. Meaning is created in rela-tion to the arbitrary differences between con-stituent signs removed from reality. Signs standfor something else other than themselves.Ideology is involved in their creation. Signs

supplement reality and interpret it arbitrarilythrough the effect of pointing to differences of form that allow us to make meaning of thosedifferences for the purposes of identifying andcomprehending what signs refer to in the exter-

nal world. Because ideology influences percep-tion and therefore the reading and writing of history, instability characterises the signifiedsignifier relations posed within its textual rep-resentations of culture. Access to the real isdeferred. The meaning of culture is decentred.Truth disperses and any trace of the possibilityfor the closure of interpretation is lost. If historyis fiction, can we call it a lie? This would reflect

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quite badly on Barthes and the representationof Japan that he puts forward in Empire of Signs.

Lies, Fiction, IdeologyIn Empire of Signs , Barthes brings to the criti-cal forefront the problem of analysing historyand therefore culture, or the cultural history of

Japan, from a seemingly objective point of view.

How does one write from the perspective of one who knows the Truth about Japanese cul-tural history? There can be no such unbiasedand omniscient point of view. The hope of aradical semiotic confrontation with History

and its uncritical representational apparatus isthe possibility that the basis for the authorityof Western culture and the truth of its dis-course can be deconstructed. So, can we stillcall Empire of Signs a cultural history? Weneed a little more background to answer thisquestion.

Barthes engages neither in a deconstructionnor a demystification of Japan or its culture,

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if such a thing were possible. But, like Derrida,through the act of writing he elicits the theoret-ical preconditions for rethinking cultural historyafter the semiotic turn of the 1950s and 60s.This critical move beckons us to acknowledgehistory and its representation of culture as aninterpretative act: an act of writing and thus of representation. Semiotics turns history intohistoriography the writing of history . There

is a difference. Barthes makes us aware of theway in which the authority of history in theWest is bound to the logic of the metaphysicallogos , as the ancient Greeks called it. The logosis the mystical power of the Word of God that

enfleshes meaning and reason in the Word.History is the Word. The reason of History isthe Reason of the Word. And this presupposi-tion enables a vision of culture recorded ashistory and history recorded as culture thatis, a writing of cultural history through whichthe meaning of culture is codified in a systemand represented as the Truth. Above all, wemust remember that history has an intellectual

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or cultural history. It has its own systems of signification and codes of meaning-making, towhich we must now turn before going any fur-ther in reading Barthes writing of the Empireof Signs.

Since its inception by the German philo-sopher Hegel under the rubric of Geistes-

geschichte , cultural history has traditionallyidentified a particular sub-genre of general

historiography. It has been faithful to themaster discipline in its adherence to the sametheoretical precepts, but has differed in the trans-disciplinary breadth of its sources. For example,philosophy, anthropology, sociology, linguis-

tics, psychology and even literary theory havecontributed to the analytical methodology of cultural history. This mixing of methods hasdefinitely contributed to the confusion aboutwhat the discipline of cultural history actuallyentails. The problem of the autonomy of cul-tural history in the field of historically orientedstudies of culture is compounded by the factthat it lacks a proper name. It is called intel-

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lectual history or the history of ideas, alsocultural history, in the United States. TheFrench term for it is lhistoire des mentalits . InRussia, it is referred to as the history of thought. There is great significance to the factthat cultural history lacks a proper name. Thisheterogeneity fails to mark clearly the bound-aries for its own identity within a well-defineddisciplinary space. Therefore it does not estab-

lish its unique sense of selfhood in such a wayas to legitimise both the difference of its scopeand of its method. In other words, there is noclear consolidation of origins or ends withincultural history. This dilemma has caused a

crisis of representation within the larger disci-pline of history, and more specifically, regard-ing the truth of the historical text.

The need to legitimise the diversity of methodswithin cultural history, as a sub-genre of history,reveals a latent anxiety of influence concerningthe autonomy of its disciplinary identity. Thereis a nagging perception of a splintered corps .Barthes reiterates this when he says that the

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perspective of history merges with the concernsof the humanities in its turn to culture as asubject. The sense of disciplinary dislocationamong those who write cultural history, andwrite about it, has necessitated a rethinking of its guiding principles. Empire of Signs is anexample of Barthes working-out of the practiceof writing history and representing culture orwriting cultural history with a post-structural

twist. His aim is not to secure a disciplinaryidentity for cultural historiography, nor is thetext a model for historical writing. It merelyindulges Barthes fantasy as a writer. It testshis power to create an empire of signs: a text;

his own aesthetic vision of Japan; a semio-logical utopia where representation is not over-fed by the Western imperative for meaning.

Japan as an empire of empty signs speaks to hisown experience of the culture. That is whyBarthes is fascinated with Japan. It is a chanceto upset the careful metaphysics of the West, anopportunity to immerse himself as a theoristand a writer in an empire of signs where all

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around him he sees the innocence of representa-tion. Above all, it is a chance for Barthes tolearn something he does not already know. Forexample, in Japanese culture, sexuality is insex, not elsewhere; in the United States, it is thecontrary; sex is everywhere, except in sexual-ity, he observes. 25 Elsewhere, Barthes statesthat, contrary to what the tourist guide bookssay, Japanese flower arrangement is not con-

cerned with the rigorous constructions of symbolism, but simply with the aesthetic pro-duction of liveable space the beauty of naturalcolour and form admired for its own sake.Referring to the logic of giving a gift, Barthes

observes that in Japanese culture the point isnot what it contains: the triviality of the thingis put off by being wrapped with as muchsumptuousness as a jewel. 26 Western culturaltopoi are upset in these examples.

Barthes describes Empire of Signs as contain-ing happy mythologies. No ethical interven-tion into the cultural logic of representationalforms and practices is required. Barthes could

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not do that from his vantage point, given thathe is an outsider looking at, and into, signs thatboth signify and negate the possibility of anempirical Japan. The situation facilitates writ-ing without a pretext. The text facilitates theexpression of Barthes semiological adventurewith the signs of Japan, an empire of signs

Japan as an empire of signs. More than once,Barthes comments on the emptiness of the signs

around him. He cannot penetrate the reality thatthey represent. He just reacts to the signs. Thejourney of writing is a descen[t] into theuntranslatable, to experience its shock withoutever muffling it, until everything Occidental in

us totters and the rights of the father tonguevacillate. 27 Empire of Signs reflects Barthesattempt to transgress the cultural boundaries of historical writing and semiology. As a studentimmersed in the empire of signs, he wants toescape that tongue which comes to us from ourfathers and proprietors of a culture which, pre-cisely, history transforms into nature 28 andwhich forges myth when we want to appeal to a

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generalisable human experience. Barthes claimsas a right the power of invention in representing

Japanese culture, if for no other reason than towork out his own understanding of the cultureand its signs. He wants to resist the temptationto idealise and mythify Japan. To Barthes, Japanis an empire of signs that allows [him] toentertain the idea of an unheard-of symbolicsystem, one altogether detached from our own. 29

Specifically nationalistic conceptualisations of culture and history are rejected by him. Bartheswants to incite the possibility of difference, of mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems. 30 Such a critical move would

suspend the need to locate Japan in oppositionto Western culture and therefore naturalise itas part of a mythological Orient. Barthes islooking to put forward a representation of dif-ference that yields a plurality of definitions andconceptual tools, and that avoids creating cul-tural stereotypes. Empire of Signs pushes backthe traditional disciplinary boundaries of cul-tural history by showing its limitations.

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However, Barthes is not totally successful inavoiding nave or idealised representations of

Japanese culture. And that is the risk he musttake, knowing that its implications are immea-surable to the ethics of reading. What would beworse for Barthes would be to reinforce themythology of Japan that is premised on thebiased representations of the Orient prevalentin Western cultural ideology. The following are

illustrations of the lapses that Barthes suc-cumbs to. Cooked rice is the only element of weight in all of Japanese alimentation it iswhat sinks in opposition to what floats. 31

During preparation, its substantial destination

is the fragment, the clump, the volatile conglom-erate. 32 Even more puzzling is the remark that[t]he Japanese face is without moral hier-archy. 33 Barthes makes this declaration after along anatomical meditation on what he callsthe Japanese eye as compared to the Westerneye. This conceptual opposition repeats whatDerrida has called the binary logic of Westernmetaphysics, in which two items are set in

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opposition so as to enable their conceptualisa-tion, and thus to gauge their value, through theidentification of differences between them.Barthes characterisation of the Japanese faceas lacking a moral hierarchy is no doubt pre-cipitated by an ethical reaction to a compari-son between physiologies. The conclusion is sosteeped in Western representations of theOrient that it borders on nave racism.

Ironically, it is only in the opposition of the Japanese face and its otherness to Occidentalideology that Barthes finds value.

And yet, despite its inability to defy totallythe Western representation of Japan, Barthes

text is well beyond what we might call thestandard practices of reading culture and writ-ing its history. This is because Barthesacknowledges the limitations of his own per-spective. Empire of Signs thereby leaves openthe possibility for a reassessment of historicalmethodology in relation to questions of cultureand its representation after semiotics. Can weask for more?

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Signing OffAs we have seen, in the foreword to Empire of Signs Barthes alludes to the breaking of newdisciplinary ground regarding what constitutesthe truth of the texts and images comprisingthe writing of history and culture. History isredefined as a culturally arbitrary narrative; oran ideologically determined discourse of expe-rience conceived within a narrow interpreta-

tive frame of reading and writing, and all thatthat entails in terms of the subjective act of making of meaning from texts and images.Japan as a historical place-marker in Empireof Signs is an empty sign. Its essence is elu-

sive. The narrative that Barthes produces istherefore more fictitious than an accuratedepiction of Japanese cultural history. Theimages presented are not designed to make lifestand still for easy observation of the differencebetween the Occident and the Orient.

Barthes is very conscious of the fact that hiscultural history of Japan is a situation of writ-ing.34 Empire of Signs is a record of personal

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experience, a journal of the short trip thatBarthes took to a country called Japan. Its sig-nificance is in the process of writing as amoment of reflection on the substance of experi-ence, rather than in the truth of the message.Barthes writes his cultural history of Japanfrom a Western point of view which he cannotsimply put aside or step back from. He isalways already inside this situation of writing

from the location of one to whom the experi-ence of being a foreigner is ever present here.Its effects already filter his perception of thecountry he visited, its people and traditions.Empire of Signs is a way for Barthes to come to

grips with the otherness of Japan and the exoticideal of its cultural history as seen from aWestern viewpoint. Reflection must begin fromthe relative isolation of this position which heexemplifies as a visitor to Japan. The anxietyof this situation of writing that Barthes identi-fies is the sense of being far away, lost in theemptiness of the signs whose essence he cannothope to understand but must idealise to make

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history the point of cultural difference. Historyin Empire of Signs is therefore historiography,or the writing of history. Barthes does not rep-resent empirical truth if for no other reason,because he cannot hope to do it in Empire of Signs. According to Barthes, its discourseappeals to empirical truth, but its monuments texts and images are the products of anemptiness within language. Japan exemplifies

the lack of this signifying potential that Barthesattempts to understand, or complicate his notionof. There is an essential difference between thediscipline of history and its practice of histori-cising reality, a difference that is accentuated

and magnified by the semiological perspectivethat Barthes uses to read and write the texts of

Japanese culture in Empire of Signs . Becausehistory cannot write itself to record the archiveof itself without the necessity of human inter-vention, there is a loss of absolute meaning atthe origin of writing, whereby the truth of his-tory is supplanted by the veil of language.Viewing history as the writing of history is tan-

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tamount to ushering in the semiotic turn of history, thus opening up history to the prob-lems of reading its texts and the influences onits texts.

In the foreword to Empire of Signs , Barthesalludes to the inevitability of this epistemologi-cal rupture or break that his text causes withthe discipline of history, and the gradual erosionof the discourses of authority that authenticate

and mythify the grounds of its truth value.History is a text written to be read by others. Itmediates for our understanding of real or per-ceived events and their effects by providing anorganising point of view to an empirical body

of source information. As a text that reads andrepresents the occurrences of the life-world,history is the subjective nature and culturalarbitrariness of the forms of its representationsthat gloss its truth because of the impossibilityof objective representation or direct access toreality. The ground of history is a field of con-tested texts and images to be read and writtenabout like a fiction or a dream in which there is

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an experiencing of the uncanny or a feeling of estrangement when one is in contact with another . Barthes reads and writes the differenceof Japanese history and its culture in Empire of Signs. But he cautions us against reading histext as a Master Text that allows Western read-ers to experience the essential differences of

Japanese culture. Empire of Signs is rather asubjective rendering of his travels in, and expo-

sure to, the texts and images of Japan. No rep-resentation either in visual images or inwords can retrieve the essence of a cultureand the meaning of its history, because the lossof meaning is always already there at the origin

of the experience. Empire of Signs can benothing but a product of Barthes imaginationdealing with the excesses of meaning producedby the trauma of cultural dislocation andestrangement. Japan is a fictive nation 35 inthis sense, an empire of signs from whichBarthes produces meaning. Access to truth isalways already lost to the semiological and ideo-logical forces influencing and filtering our

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perceptions of the world and therefore con-structing the dimensions of our realities. Barthesin no way claim[s] to represent or analyzereality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse). 36 Instead, he will isolate acertain number of features 37 from which a sys-tem will be formed. As Barthes explains, [i]t isthis system which I shall call: Japan. 38 That iswhy Barthes is resigned to producing a textual

circulation and exchange of signifiers con-nected to the body, the face, and writing. Eachof these entities marks the concatenation of avisible language to be read by an other. All aretexts tissues of experience produced by and

producing layers of signifying possibilities. Thebody, the face and writing are the domains of an other and metaphors for the presence andabsence of meaning or its progressive losswithin a symbolic system of difference. In theforeword, Barthes fixates upon a mode of reading suitable to his text and its interlacingof words and images. It tells us how to predis-pose ourselves to its writing. How, then, do we

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read Barthes and the Empire of Signs ? Theanswer lies in reading the retreat of the signs of history as the writing of culture for flashes of insight into the complexity of representing theexperience of reality, the reality of experience.Nothing more, nothing less.

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Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs , trans. RichardHoward, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 108.2. Barthes explains the semiotic imperative towards

identifying various levels of analysis in Elements of Semiology , trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith,New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies , select. and trans.Annette Lavers, London: Paladin, 1973, p. 9.4. Roland Barthes, ImageMusicText , ed. and trans.Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.5. Ibid., pp. 401.6. Barthes, Mythologies , p. 11.7. Ibid., p. 11.8. Ibid., p. 15.

9. Ibid., p. 142.10. Barthes, Empire of Signs , p. xi.11. Ibid., p. 4.12. Ibid., p. 4.13. Ibid., p. 70.14. Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, in Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 308.15. Roland Barthes, The Discourse of History, inE.S. Schaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism: Vol. 3. A

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Year Book , trans. S. Bann, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981, pp. 320.16. Ibid., p. 18.17. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the NewInternational , trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York andLondon: Routledge, 1994.18. Barthes, Empire of Signs , p. 4.19. Hayden White, The Content of the Form:Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation ,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987,

p. 210.20. Barthes, Empire of Signs , p. 4.21. Ibid., p. 3.22. Ibid., p. 4.23. Barthes, The Discourse of History, p. 7.

24. Ibid., p. 17.25. Ibid., p. 29.26. Ibid., p. 46.27. Ibid., p. 6.28. Ibid., p. 6.29. Ibid., p. 3.30. Ibid., pp. 34.31. Ibid., p. 12.32. Ibid., p. 12.33. Ibid., p. 102.

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34. Ibid., p. 4.35. Ibid., p. 3.36. Ibid., p. 3.37. Ibid., p. 3.38. Ibid., p. 3.

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Select Bibliography

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero , trans.Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hilland Wang, 1967.

Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology , trans.Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hilland Wang, 1981.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies , select. and trans.Annette Lavers, London: Paladin, 1973.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections onPhotography , trans. Richard Howard, New York:Hill and Wang, 1977.

Roland Barthes, ImageMusicText , ed. and trans.Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Roland Barthes, The Fashion System , trans.Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, New York:Hill and Wang, 1983.

Roland Barthes, Michelet , New York: Hill andWang, 1987.

Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, inBarthes: Selected Writings , trans. Stephen Heath,Glasgow: Fontana, 1989, pp. 194210.

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WebsitesThe Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities

Research: http://vos.ucsb.edu/ Cultural Studies Center: www.popcultures.com

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argue that humanity and all its trappings exist with-in nature, however different surface impressionsseem. At times, there is an assumption that culturerefers to human productions that are not mediatedby economic or ideological interests, but this repre-

sentation of culture quickly breaks down when cul-tural productions are seen to serve means and endsother than the sole act of creation itself. For exam-ple, a painting acquires a certain monetary valuebecause it was painted by a specific individual.Rather than being given away, it is auctioned off orsold. The act of painting as an act of cultural pro-duction is permeated by the conditions of economicexchange that determine the value of the culturalobject.

IdeologyOriginally coined by the philosopher Destutt deTracy in the early nineteenth century, ideology wasused to describe a science of ideas that could revealunconscious tendencies of the psyche that influence

human behaviour, like prejudice and class con-sciousness. Later on, Karl Marx and KarlMannheim introduced the word into the discourseof modern sociology. It has now come to signify arange of conceptions related to the social produc-

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tion of consciousness, though usually without thesubjective awareness of its operation. Fredric

Jameson has called it the foundation of the politicalunconscious, while for Louis Althusser it is whatcreates subjectivity through the interpellation of

consciousness by the State Ideological Apparatus. Itsignals any of the following preoccupations of mind: values, beliefs, expectations, ideals, a worldview and horizons of understanding. Ideology is aninterpretative device a filter of perception usedby subjectivity to make sense of the world aroundit. Ideology can be shared when it becomes articu-lated as social action via human agency. ForMarxist thought, ideology is a distortion of realitybecause it creates a false consciousness. In LiteraryTheory: An Introduction , Terry Eagleton definesideology as those modes of feeling, valuing, per-ceiving and believing which have some kind of rela-tion to the maintenance and reproduction of socialpower. Ideology functions to naturalise everythingthat is economic, political and social, and historical-

ly so as to make its contingency appear apoliticaland timeless. The process of ideological interpella-tion is unconscious, and creates myths like com-mon sense. This appearance of the naturalness of an idea is called the ideological effect.

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Meta-historyMeta-history is, generally, the philosophy of historythat considers the principles giving rise to thenotion of historical progression and that refers tothe narratives that describe this. More specifically,

it is a book by Hayden White describing historicalwriting (or historiography) in terms analogous tothose of meta-fiction and meta-narrative: that is, awriting of history which is self-conscious of its ownrhetorical styles and forms of writing. White con-tends that an objective history is impossible. Helikens the discourse of history to a narration of events not unlike that found in a fictional text.Meta-history as such raises questions about thepower of representation, the influence of ideologyon narration, and the act of writing.

Meta-languageMeta-language is essentially language about otherlanguage. In semiotic analysis, the language underinvestigation is called the object language, while

the language created or used to perform the investi-gation is identified as the meta-language. For post-structuralists, the very notion of a meta-language isanathema to the possibility of interpretative open-ness, possibly because it seems to be a means of

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universalising experience: the implication is thatmeta-languages can be used to explain how a modelreader/viewer responds to a model text. There isno accounting for differences of interpretation.Semiotics calls these aberrant readings in other

words, readings that are not in keeping with thecodic thrust of the text and its structures. UmbertoEco maintains that a text produces its own modelreader. The point of reading is therefore somewhatdetermined by the structures and codes that a readerengages. To achieve a state of objectivity, a meta-language would have to stand outside history andtherefore be immune to ideological effects. Thenotion of a meta-language contradicts the premisesof semiotics if we consider Ecos observation.How could language divest itself of its contextualmotivation?

MythIn addition to the usual connotations of fable, folk-lore, legends, superstitions, etc., myth has taken

on several implications in contemporary theory. Aswe have seen while engaging with the work of Roland Barthes, myth is the result of ideology.Cultural products and practices are dehistoricisedso as to universalise their significance and make

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them seem natural to human experience. The mean-ings of what mythologies imply are, however, notnatural. They serve the particular interests of a con-trolling culture which uses myth to promote culturalreproduction. There are innumerable examples, but

arguably the most basic one in the field of literarystudies in English is the canon of master texts thatdefine the characteristics of what good literature is.The plays of Shakespeare have taken on this func-tion in English studies, to the point where HaroldBloom has stated that the Bard has taught us allwe need to know about Western culture. In fact, heinvented it and showed us in the West how to readand represent it.

RepresentationAt a basic level, a representation is merely a thingwhich is represented through the assistance of something else e.g., the colour black representsdeath, while the colour green represents life.Representation is a vehicle by which two unrelated

things are brought together to signify a concept.This view of representation has it as a sort of corre-spondence in essence to the thing represented. Mostcontemporary forms of critical thought wouldreject this assumption, albeit on different grounds.

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Critiques have therefore arisen to challenge the con-ventional assumptions of communication as a naveform of representation. For example, JacquesDerrida has complicated the idea of representationby coining the term diffrance to explain how inter-

pretation takes place by both the difference anddeferral of meaning. Diffrance enables us torethink representation as not just the placingtogether of two different things a concept withsignifier but as the deferral of meaning that hap-pens when signs intervene, be it through speakingor writing. For Derrida, representation cannot bere -presentation because there can be no motivational,contiguous, analogical or relational connectionbetween what a sign is and what it represents. Eventhough meaning is made by distinguishing the dif-ferences among signs, it is always deferred from itsoriginal sources.

SignFerdinand de Saussure identified the sign to be an

element of language composed of the relationshipbetween a signifier (a sound-image, e.g., a phonemeor morpheme) and a signified (a concept expressedor an object referred to). Although the Saussureanmodel was more influential in the development of

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French structuralism, the American philosopherCharles Sanders Peirce had a fully developed con-ceptualisation of the sign. For Peirce, a sign is anelement of language or an image composed of therelationship between the sign itself, a referent (the

object to which the sign refers), the ground of rep-resentation (the nature of the relationship to thereferent), and the interpretant (the experientialrelationship between the interpreter and the mean-ing). The sign refers to a referent within a field of representations that ground the sign according to itsfunction what it refers to and how, for what pur-pose. Meaning is made when the reader of the signdecodes the ground of representation so as to inter-pret the difference between signs from experience.Despite the differences between Saussurean andPeircean semiotics, as alluded to above, a sign canhave no motivational, contiguous, analogical orrelational connection to what it represents. A sign isalways arbitrary, otherwise it would represent itself,which in turn determines whether the sign is what

Peirce called an icon, an index, or a symbol.

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Peter Trifonas Barthes and the Empire of Signs 1997

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