Roland Barthes Quotes on Knowledge
Roland Barthes (1915–1980), the French theorist whose Mythologies (1957), S/Z (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and the late Camera Lucida (1980) gave twentieth-century semiotic and literary theory several of its most discussed positions, defended an evolving programme that moved from the structuralist semiotics of the early period through the post-structuralist playfulness of the middle works to the late phenomenology of the photographic punctum. The framework consistently treats cultural knowledge as the analysis of the systems of signs through which a society naturalizes its historical particularity into apparent universality, with the corresponding ideological-critical task of denaturalizing the categories under which everyday cognition operates.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“The death of the author is the birth of the reader.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”
-
“La forme bâtarde de la culture de masse est la répétition honteuse: on répète les contenus, les schèmes idéologiques, le gommage des contradictions, mais on varie les formes superficielles: toujours des livres, des émissions, des films nouveaux, des faits divers, mais toujours le même sens.”
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions—these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. | Modern," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) -
“The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!”
Sentence," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) -
“The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named .”
p. 138