Signs carry cultural myths that pass as natural. A work’s meaning is made by its readers, not fixed by its author.
- +Fits Post-structuralism, Social Constructionism, Critical Theory
- –Tension with Positivism, Hermeneutics
The longer story
Roland Barthes gives arts researchers two tools that are used constantly. In Mythologies (1957) he read everyday images, such as a magazine cover, an advertisement or a wrestling match, as signs carrying a second layer of meaning that presents history and ideology as simply natural. That is the basis of most semiotic analysis of images.
In "The Death of the Author" (1967) he argued that a text's meaning is not fixed by what its author intended; it is made in the reading. His later Camera Lucida supplied photography theory with the studium and the punctum. Early Barthes is a structuralist, late Barthes a post-structuralist, so say which one you are citing.