Like many other structuralist scholars, Barthes was influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics. To Saussure, the linguistic mechanism operates on two levels, the systematic system and the
variation by speaking actors. The former is called langue and the latter parole. Langue is the systematized set of conventions necessary to communication, indifferent to the
material of the signal which compose it; as opposed to it, speech (parole) is covers the purely individual part of language
(Barthes, 1967, p.13). Barthes interprets Saussure's linguistic
system within the social dimension. The structure level, langue, is the social convention or value shared through a society which is stabilized and standardized. On the contrary, parole is
flexible because it is the actual expression at the individual level. However, it is considered 'relatively' flexible due to the fact that speech by an individual cannot be free from the shared
convention, the structure.
A language is therefore, a social institution and a system of values. It is the social part of language, it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate. It is because a language is a system of contractual values that it resists the modifications coming from a single individual and is consequently a social institution. In contrast to language, which is both institution and system, speech is essentially an individual act of selection and actualization. The speaking subject can use the code of the language with a view to expressing his personal thought. It is because speech is essentially a combinative activity that it corresponds to and individual act and not to a pure creation. (Barthes, 1967, pp. 14-15)
Focusing on the systematic level, Sausurre distinguishes the language system into two parts, the signified and the signifier. The signified is a concept or meaning which is expressed through
the form. The form is called the signifier, which is the external part of language. For example, both the word 'dog' in English or 'gae' in Korean are the external forms expressing the actual
animal dog. Here, the actual animal, the concept in question, becomes the signified. I propose to retain the word sign (signe) to designate the whole and to replace concept and
sound-image respectively by signified (signifié) and signifier (significant); the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the
whole of which they are parts
(Saussure, 1959, in R. Innis (ed.), p. 37).
The correspondence of the concept/meaning to the external form is not in the destined relation, but rather, in the arbitrary relation. It is not the inevitable internal relation but the
difference between the signs that operates the signifying system. Saussure (1960) argues that language does not reflect a pre-existent and external reality of independent objects,
but constructs meaning from within itself through a series of conceptual and phonic differences
. 1
According to Saussure, meaning is produced through a process of selection and combination of signs along two axes, the syntagmatic (e.g. a sentence) and the paradigmatic (e.g.,
synonyms), organized into a signifying system
(Barker, 2002, p. 29). As a grammatical set of signs or the underlying systematic order, the syntagmatic comprises a sentence, and the
paradigmatic means a field of possible signs that can be replaced with one another. Despite various possibilities in selecting the signs within the same paradigmatic, the selection is also
regulated by the consensus of linguistic community members. For an example of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, let's consider the following sentence: I went to a theater with
my girlfriend.
This sentence is established through the linear combination of signs. The signs within the example, such as I theater, my, and girlfriend can be substituted for by other sign
s in the paradigmatic, such as She went to a restaurant with her mother.
Through the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, Saussure tells us that signs are operated only when they
are related to each other. Crucially, signs do not make sense by virtue of reference to entities in an independent object world; rather, they generate meaning by reference to each
other. Thus, meaning is understood as a social convention organized through the relations between signs
(Barker, C., 2002, p. 29).
It is central to Saussure's argument that red is meaningful in relation to the difference between red, green, amber, etc. These signs are then organized into a sequence which
generates meaning through the cultural conventions of their usage within a particular context. Thus, traffic lights deploy 'red' to signify 'stop,' and 'green' to signify 'go.' This is the
cultural code of traffic systems which temporally fixes the relationship between colours and meanings. Signs become naturalized codes. The apparent transparency of meaning (we know when to stop
or go) is an outcome of cultural habituation, the effect of which is to conceal the practices of cultural coding
. 2 As Barker
explains, even though there might be infinite possibilities to change the relation between the signified and the signifier due to its arbitrariness, this relationship is limited and stabilized
through consensus within the particular social and historical contexts. Even though Saussure's study itself is limited to linguistics, it suggests the possibility of the study of culture as
signs. Barthes is one of the most popular scholars who expanded Saussure's concepts to interpreting cultural phenomenon as "codes."
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