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Barthes and Doxa

Anne Herschberg Pierrot
Paris-8

What I write about myself is never the last word.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1977 [1975]

This essay studies the uses and valuation of doxa in the work of Roland
Barthes. Omnipresent and multiform, doxa appears there as a power informed by
metaphors. The essay then focuses on the analysis of doxa in Barthess S/Z, on its relation to the Flaubertian problematics of received ideas, and on the impact of this
problematics on literary story since the 1970s.

Abstract

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Barthes certainly did not invent doxa. It might be said that doxa has always
begun, that it is always there already and, as the Roland Barthes (1977 [1975])
points out, that it improperly confuses truth and origin. The Greek term in
fact refers to an ancient philosophical tradition mentioned by Barthes. But
the notion, in his work, becomes a power bound up with the obsessive presence of mass discourse from the Mythologies (1972 [1957]) to the Inaugural
Lecture (1982 [1978]), reaching its strongest form in Roland Barthes by Roland
Barthes (abbreviated hereafter as Roland Barthes or RB). Barthess work imparts to words a value that today it is dicult to forget and on which there
has been scanty comment only, as if the idea of doxa were itself an obvious
fact. It is important to present the attributes, the relation, and the place in
literary theory of this gure of doxa.
Let us say at the outset that Barthesian discourse (in any case, that of
the period of the Roland Barthes) does not readily lend itself to a clarifyPoetics Today 23:3 (Fall 2002). Copyright 2002 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

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ing process insofar as it presents itself as an exploded system that eludes

didactic exposition. This immediately poses the oft-raised question of consistency. Posing the question of doxa in Barthes runs the risk of freezing a
word that seeks and manages to sidestep by means of fragmentation, enunciative distance (that of the character of the novel), but still occurs with
an insistence that makes sense (through thematic groupings of fragments,
long-distance repetition of discourse themes). In this way semantic constellations emerge, relationships of association and equivalence, metaphorical
predications around doxa, whose textual conguration imitates through its
form the complexity of the object.
Doxa straightway demonstrates its power through the presence of the
untranslated Greek term, used in its capitalized form. The notion refers
mainly to its use in Aristotle in the form of endoxa, those probable opinions that support the argumentation and that, according to Aristotle (Topics
1.1), are shared by the great majority but also are recognized as indisputable among the philosophers.1 Michael Moriarty (1997: especially 17072)
has closely studied the way in which Aristotelian thinking about endoxa is
reread by Barthes in a slightly simplifying fashion, unied around the inclusion of the notion of probable in that of general opinion, public opinion.
Above all, Barthes associates doxa with the invasive power of mass discourse
in modernitywith opinion in the statistical meaning of the term. In his
article on classical rhetoric, The Old Rhetoric, Barthes (1988b [1970]:
22), who does not at this stage use the word doxa, refers in connection with
the Aristotelian notion of verisimilitude to a deliberately diminished logic,
one adapted to the level of the public, i.e., of common sense, of ordinary
opinion. This logic, he adds, would be well suited to the products of our
so-called mass culture, in which an Aristotelian probability [vraisemblance]
prevails, i.e., what the public believes possible (ibid.). He then comes
back to the collective censorship of public opinion, and at the end of the
article he notes:

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Next, this notion that there is a kind of stubborn agreement between Aristotle
(from whom rhetoric proceeded) and our mass culture, as if Aristotelianism,
dead since the Renaissance as a philosophy and as logic, dead as an esthetic
since Romanticism, survived in a corrupt, diused, inarticulate state in the cultural practice of Western societiesa practice based, through democracy, on
an ideology of the greatest number, of the majority-as-norm, of current opinion: everything suggests that a kind of Aristotelian Vulgate still denes a type
of trans-historical Occident, a civilization (our own) which is that of the endoxa.
(Ibid.: 92)
1. Anne Cauquelin (1999: 36.) highlights the importance in Aristotle of the doxa as a social
bond in the city.

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In Mythologies, Barthes had emphasized how history is transformed into nature by myth. Returning to this text several years later, in La Mythologie
aujourdhui, he connects myth with Endoxa (used in the singular, following the paradigm of doxa): under the inuence of mythical inversion, the
highly contingent foundations of the utterance become Common Sense,
Good Law, the Norm, Standard Opinion, in a word, Endoxa (originally a
lay term) (Barthes 1994b [1971]: 1183).
In fact, opinion, whether everyday or public, 2 is an expression that
very often goes together with doxa in Barthes. However, there is a distance
between this translation and the way that the Greek term is used in the
Roland Barthes. There Doxa appears as a force, which eludes the concept:
On the other hand, he never makes explicit (never denes) the notions
which seem most necessary to him and which he constantly makes use of
(constantly subsumed under a word). The Doxa is invariably allegated but is
not dened: no piece on the Doxa (RB: 73). It is a product both of the limpness of important words (vague, insistent, they serve to take the place of
several signieds) (ibid.: 125) and of words, like style or writing, which are
words with an idiolectal meaning. Philippe Roger (1986: 67) shows that, in
Barthes, the big word is appointed [nomm] by Barthes, as one says of a public ocial, to some discourse position or other; but never without having
been re-appointed or renamed [renomm], even if only in petto: i.e., cleansed
of its theoretical past by the writing which, like a godfather, presents it at
the baptismal font. This reappointing or renaming has certain similarities
to the work of neologism, which, according to Barthes (1984 [1972]: 203),
constitutes a base for the great critical fancy. It is interesting, as suggested
by Roger, to compare these thoughts on the name with the piece on intellectual objects:
Dierent from the concept and from the notion, which are purely ideal, the
intellectual object is created by a kind of leverage upon the signier: once I take seriously such forms as an etymology, a derivation, a metaphor, I can create a kind
of word-thought for myself which will ferret through all my language. This wordobject is both vested (desired) and supercial (employed, not explored); it has a
ritual existence; as if, at a certain moment, I had baptized it with my sign. (RB:
13435)

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Doxa is denitely this word-thought, which runs like an intellectual object produced by the imagination. The ctional character, the imaginary
2. See in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1977 [1975]) (hereafter referred to as RB)
for the paraphrases of the word doxa: The Doxa (a word which will often recur) is Public
Opinion (RB: 47); popular opinion and its contrary, Doxa and its paradox (RB: 68); Doxa
(public Opinion) (RB: 70); a Doxa (a popular opinion) (RB: 71); public opinion has a reduced conception of the body (RB: 80); Curious that in public opinion, precisely, there
should be a version of this dream; Doxa, too, has no love for meaning (RB: 87); etc.

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presence of doxa, are revealed in its presentation as a gura, as a symbolic gure of the arts of memory,3 as a personied force that acts, an animated force, oppressive for the individual (Doxa speaks, does not like
meaning, circulates, does not wish to understand, crushes, is inexorable, etc.)
In a self-pastiche published in La Quinzaine littraire, referring to the Roland
Barthes, Barthes denes the meaning of a book as: Not that which it discusses, but that with which it discusses. That with which it discusses particularly includes stupidity and the two types of delusion in the representation of the self and the other, namely, the Lacanian Imaginary and
Ideological. As an individual, corporeal subject, Barthes is visibly grappling with two Figures (two Allegories, in the medieval sense): Value (which
divides everything into likes and dislikes) and Stupidity. As a historical subject, he is grappling with two contemporary notions: the Imaginary and the
Ideological (Barthes 1995b [1975]: 253).
Another gure of doxa dominates the Barthesian imagination, this time a
Figure out of mythological memory, the castrating gure of Medusa: The
Doxa is current opinion, meaning repeated as if nothing had happened.4 It is
Medusa, who petries those who look at her. This means that doxa is evident. Is it seen? Not even that: a gelatinous mass which sticks onto the retina
(RB: 122).
Yet Medusa, before Minerva made her horrible, was of a rare beauty
due to the luster of her hair. Similarly, it is true that in the Doxas discourse
there are former beauties sleeping, the memory of a once sumptuous and
fresh wisdom; and it is indeed Athena, the wise deity, who takes her revenge
by making the Doxa into a caricature of wisdom (RB: 123).
For Barthes, however, doxa appears to be not so much visual as auditory in nature: a Medusa who petries those who hear her. Asked about
the dierence between his and the Freudian interpretation of the Medusa,
Barthes (1995d [1977]: 766) replied: It is the same Medusa: the stereotype
is castrating, stupidity is revealed as dierence, and this is what is so fascinating. But, quite simply, as you say, there is a translation of the Medusa as
something which is seen into the Medusa as something which is heard; she
is then called the Siren. Stupidity is a Siren calling you: were I to rejoin it,
she is telling me, I would nd . . . comfort, I would no longer be afraid, I
would no longer be alone, hidden away in dierence. An echo is found in
the Roland Barthes, which refers to
3. See the observations by Michel Beaujour (1980: 1920).
4. On doxa in Barthes and the obsessive fear of the stereotype, see Amossy 1991 (especially
chapter 3).

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an eect produced by a scene I hear but do not see: my hearing is frustrated of its
vision: I remain behind the door. The Doxa speaks, I hear it, but I am not within its
space. A man of paradox, like any writer, I am indeed behind the door; certainly I
should like to pass through, certainly I should like to see what is being said, I too
participate in the communal scene; I am constantly listening to what I am excluded
from; I am in a stunned state, dazed, cut o from the popularity of language.
(RB: 123)

The dual relationship of fascination and repulsion with regard to majority

discourse, emphasized by this image of being struck dumb before Medusa,
thus refers back to the question, in each of us, of our own stupidity. The relationship with stupidity is cast in similar terms: Perhaps we want to put
ourselves into the picture? Its lovely, it takes your breath away, its strange;
and about stupidity, I am entitled to say no more than this: that it fascinates
me. Fascination is the correct feeling stupidity must inspire me with (if we
reach the point of speaking the name) (RB: 51). Again: It is curious that an
author, having to speak about himself, should be so obsessed by Stupidity,
as if it were something internal of which he were afraid: threatening, always
ready to burst out, to demand its right to speak (why should I not have the
right to be stupid?); in short, the Thing (Barthes 1995b [1975]: 253).
From the Mythologies to the Roland Barthes, what has changed, in fact, as
has been noted and as the author himself has underscored, is the latters
attitude toward stupidity:
In a sense the whole of this little book, in a sly and naive fashion, plays with stupiditynot that of others (that would be over-facile), but that of the subject who
is going to write: what comes to mind is rst of all stupid (all tangled up with the
Other, who is whispering my rst speech to me). . . . Ideology is not given here
as an external object of study or of denunciation, but as a contaminating power,
a worm gnawing away at each enunciation. (Ibid.)

The advantage of this thought lies in considering doxa not as an inert subject, but as an active force with which the subject struggles without managing to free itself:

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Frequently he starts from the stereotype, from the banal opinion which is in him.
And it is because he does not want that stereotype (by some aesthetic or individualist reex) that he looks for something else: habitually, being soon wearied,
he halts at the mere contrary opinion, at paradox, at what mechanically denies the prejudice (for example: there is no science except of the particular).
He sustains, in short, counter-relations with the stereotypefamilial relations.
(RB: 162)

Like mythological representation, metaphorical discourse develops a

point of view on doxa, which implies the link with a statement and a body,

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in addition weaving ties with related components, such as paradox or triteness. Thus the glutinous metaphor expresses both dislike and attachment
for doxa and its satellites:
The Doxa is not triumphalist; it is content to reign; it diuses, blurs.
54)

(RB: 153

The somewhat glutinous language of the Doxa, of the natural, of the obvious fact,
of common sense, of the goes without saying. (Barthes 1995e [1975]: 325)
I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion,
itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek further for a new paradox. (RB: 71)
An apparently expletive expression (as we know, it is well known that . . .) is
put at the start of certain developments: he ascribes to current opinion, to common knowledge, the proposition from which he will start out: his endeavor is
to react against a banality. And often what he must oppose is not the banality
of common opinion but his own; the discourse which comes to him initially is
banal, and it is only by struggling against that original banality that, gradually,
he writes. . . . He then attempts to get rid of this importuning banality. (RB: 137)

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes (1975 [1973]: 29) describes the pressure of
capitalist language as an implacable stickiness, a doxa, a kind of unconscious: in short, the essence of ideology.
The metaphor of the glutinous discloses the importance of the issue of
utterance in doxa. If doxa speaks in us, the question is, how should we speak
afresh. In this sense, it is not Science that is brought into conict with doxa
(both of them lay claim to an arrogance and a discourse of truth) but paradox, the very possibility of expressing an uncommon opinion against that
of the majority, which in turn runs the risk of becoming a truism, a new
concretion, new doxa:
Everything seems to suggest that his [Barthess] discourse proceeds according
to a two-term dialectic: popular opinion and its contrary, Doxa and its paradox,
the stereotype and the novation, fatigue and freshness, relish and disgust, I like/I
dont like. . . .
In him, another dialectic appears, trying to nd expression: the contradiction
of the terms yields in his eyes by the discovery of a third term, which is not a
synthesis but a translation: everything comes back, but it comes back as Fiction,
i.e. at another turn of the spiral. (RB: 6869)

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The solution is then, at the vanishing point, to break down the infatuation of our statements, the arrogance of our science (RB: 66), that of misalignment, of drift, of the spiral or the gradation of degrees,5 of ction or
5. See also the comparison with the games of prisoners base and hot cockles and, from this
point of view, the link with childrens games.

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literature, such as this evasion, this grand imposture which allows us to

understand speech outside the bounds of power (Barthes 1982 [1978]: 462). But
it also allows one, unlike Flaubert, to accept in oneself free cantons of
stupidity: A classical view (based on the unity of the human person): stupidity is an hysteria: it would be enough to see oneself as stupid in order
to be less so. A dialectical view: I agree to pluralize myself, to permit free
cantons of stupidity to live within me (RB: 110).
Another metaphor reappears, linking doxa to the utterance of the stereotype, as a form of doxa, of the ideological. This is the metaphor of consistency (above we encountered in passing that of concretion):
The truth is in the consistency, Poe says in Eureka. Hence, if we nd consistency insupportable we cut ourselves o from an ethics of truth; we abandon the
word, the proposition, the idea, once they set and assume the solid state, stereotyped
(in Greek, stereos means solid ). (RB: 58 6)
Ideology: what is repeated and consistent (by this last adjective, it is excluded from
the order of the signier). So ideological analysis (or counter-ideology) need
merely be repeated and consistent (by proclaiming on the spot its validity, by a
gesture of pure clearance) in order to become, itself, an ideological object. How
escape this? One solution is possible: the esthetic one. (RB: 104)
What is the Ideological? It is in what the idea consists. And the Imaginary? In
what the Image consists. Once again this has to do with a discussion about meaning, as something that consists, as it takes. (Barthes 1995b [1975]: 254)

Thus, in La Mythologie aujourdhui, Barthes (1994b [1971]: 1185) invited the reader to move from a critical reading to evaluating levels of
reication, degrees of phraseological density:
Will it be possible to specify a notion which seems to me to be essential: that of a
languages compactness? Languages are of varying density: some, the more social, the more mythical, have an unshakable homogeneity (there is a strength of
meaning, there is a war of meanings): woven out of habits, repetitions, stereotypes, obligatory clausulae and keywords, each one constitutes an ideolect (a
notion which twenty years ago I called writing).7

The metaphor of consistency acquires a culinary precision.

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It is a kind of intellectual sport: he systematically goes where there is solidication of language, a consistency, a stereotypy. Like a watchful cook, he makes
sure that language does not thicken, that it doesnt stick. (RB: 162)
6. Everything, rather than the rule (the majority, the stereotype, the ideolect: consistent
language) (Barthes 1975 [1973]: 47).
7. Barthes (1994b [1971]: 1185) was then suggesting replacing mythologies with an ideolectology, whose operative concepts would no longer be the sign, the signier, the signied, and
the connotation, but the citation, the reference, the stereotype.

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Set against the solidity of meaning in doxa is the quivering, the simmering of meaning, a happy and impossible theme, for this ideally thrilling
meaning is pitilessly recuperated by a solid meaning (that of the Doxa) or by
a null meaning (that of the mystiques of liberation) (RB: 98). In this connection note the qualiers of doxa (pitilessly, inexorable), which turn
it into a terrifying gure, like one of the Fates spinning the destiny of the
language.
The metaphors highlight doxas repercussions on a subject and the movement from utterance to utterance, from text to text. Like arrogance, doxa
circulates, like a strong wine among the guests of the text (RB: 47). It is
bound up with a general interdiscursiveness, a circulating intertextuality,
in the widest sense of the term. In this respect, Barthess strength is that he
does not specify doxa through a specic content.8 Doxa is a bad object 9:
never dened by its content, only by its form, and that invariably wrong
form is doubtless: repetition. . . . Doxa is the wrong object because it is a
dead repetition (RB: 7071). As a repetitive form and force, doxa states
that which has already been said, and it is in this that it intersects with the
stereotype.
While the voice of doxa is imperious and arrogant, like that of the militant or of Science, its mode of diusion is insidious. Thus Barthes sets the
dominion of doxa against the triumph of militant speech:
The Doxa is not triumphalist; it is content to reign; it diuses, blurs; it is a legal,
a natural dominance; a general layer, spread with the blessing of Power; a universal Discourse, a mode of jactancy which is already lurking in the mere fact
of holding a discourse (upon something): whence the natural anity between
endoxal discourse and radiophony. (RB: 15354)

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The metaphor of layer, accordant with the metaphor of consistency,

indicates the encircling power of the generalizing discourse of doxa and its
link with the discourse of power.10 Natural Dominance, Universal Discoursethe
8. From this viewpoint, a distinction should be made between the discursive uses of the
Doxa and those in which the indenite article precedes the noun, a doxa. In this latter
case ( just as a received idea contrasts with received ideas), the noun is associated with
a particular content: However, the private changes according to the doxa to which one is
addressing oneself. If it is a right-wing doxa (bourgeois or petty bourgeois: institutions, laws,
press), it is the sexual private aspect which puts most on display. However, if it is a left-wing
doxa, the exposure of the sexual aspect contravenes nothing . . . in terms of this doxa (RB:
82; translated by Ruth MorrisRichard Howards translation is inaccurate at this point).
9. On the relationship in Barthess work between ethics and doxa, see Vron 1982.
10. Barthes (1975 [1973]: 28) suggests a related formulation in The Pleasure of the Text: For
each jargon (each ction) ghts for hegemony; if power is on its side, it spreads everywhere in
the general and daily occurrences of social life, it becomes doxa, nature: this is the supposedly
apolitical jargon of politicians, of agents of the State, of the media, of conversation.

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words echo each other and refer to the only formal denition of doxa that
Barthes gives in Roland Barthes: The Doxa (a word which will often recur) is
Public Opinion, the mind of the majority, petit bourgeois Consensus, the
Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice (RB: 47).
This denition subsumes all those elements that are present in the texts
from the Mythologies to the Roland Barthes: the criticism of Public Opinion
and the discourse of the (petit bourgeois) majority,11 of what one says, the
denunciation of deceptive nature (at the center of the Mythologies), of the
self-evident and the emphasis placed on the violence of doxa, in the assurance of common sense, in its imperious statement, its way of imposing
biased judgments and false opinions (prejudices in both meanings of the
term).12 The bracketing of truth and origin is also denounced from this viewpoint: By an abusive interest, the Doxa crushes Origin and Truth together,
in order to make them into a single proof, each reinating the other, according to a convenient swivel (RB: 139). In the Inaugural Lecture, Barthes
(1982 [1978]: 461) goes on to denounce the fascism of languagean expression that has caused a stir:
On the one hand, speech is immediately assertive. . . . On the other hand, the
signs composing speech exist only insofar as they are recognized, i.e., insofar as
they are repeated.The sign is a follower, gregarious; in each sign sleeps that monster: a stereotype. I can speak only by picking up what loiters around in speech.
Once I speak, these two categories unite in me; I am both master and slave. I am
not content to repeat what has been said, to settle comfortably in the servitude
of signs: I speak, I arm, I assert tellingly what I repeat.

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As a counterforce, Barthes asserts the Irreductible of literature, that which

resists and survives the typied discourses, the philosophies, sciences, psychologies which surround it (ibid.: 467).
11. It is trueI have used this word a great deal. . . . In any case, it is undeniable: among
the petty bourgeoisie there is a kind of ethical and/or aesthetic element which fascinates and
displeases me. But is it actually original? It is already present in Flaubert. . . . The bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become abstractions: the petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand,
is everywhere, it can be seen everywhere, all the way to the middle classes and the working
classes, when any of them is left (Barthes 1995c [1977]: 75152). On the other hand, Barthes
(1995e [1975]: 325) has commented on a number of occasions on the shift from the arrogance
of right-wing discourse to that of the left, and in 1975, faced by the triumph of leftist discourse, he raises the possibility of the doxic sway of Communist discourse: There is more
discursive arrogance today in leftism than in Communism. But I would venture to point out
that this does not make things better. Because it means that Communist language is entering
the somewhat glutinous language of the doxa, of the natural, of the self-evident, of common
sense, of what goes without saying.
12. The link between the self-evident and violence is further highlighted in this extract: He
could not get away from that grim notion that true violence is that of the self-evident: what
is evident is violent, even if this evidence is gently, liberally, democratically represented
(RB: 85).

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Behind this denition of doxa, combining opinion with the eect of selfevidence and assertive violence, there is an intertext that I think provides an
interpretative key: Flaubertian discourse on received ideas,13 with its opposition to the power of public opinion, to the discourse of the majority, to
petit bourgeois consensus, to the value ascribed to extreme expressions of
the self-evident, to the authoritarian statement of what people say, and
hence to the relationship of the discourse of doxa with the powers that be:
It would be the historical glorication of everything which is approved
of. I would show there that the majorities are always right, the minorities
always wrong. By denition, received ideas are prevailing ideas. Flaubert,
and more especially the Flaubert of Bouvard et Pcuchet, is present throughout
Barthess work, from the Mythologies to S/Z. In a conversation with Barthes,
Shiguehiko Hasumi emphasized how greatly Bouvard et Pcuchet constituted
an invisible center of the book on Sarrasine.14 For Barthes, Flauberts work
provides an example for reecting on literature, while in turn Barthess
thinking about Bouvard et Pcuchet opened up new critical perspectives for
Flaubert studies by emphasizing the utterance of the text:
The writers only control over stereotypic vertigo (this vertigo is also that of stupidity, vulgarity) is to participate in it without quotation marks, producing a
text, not a parody.This is what Flaubert did in Bouvard et Pcuchet: the two copyists
are copiers of codes (they are, one may say, stupid ), but since they too confront the
class stupidity which surrounds them, the text presenting them sets up a circularity in which no one (not even the author) has an advantage over anyone else;
and this is in fact the function of writing: to make ridiculous, to annul the power
(the intimidation) of one language over another, to dissolve any metalanguage
as soon as it is constituted. (Barthes 1974 [1970]: 98)

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In addition, Barthes comments on Flauberts irony, impregnated with uncertainty (ibid.: 140), and on the uncertain status of Bouvard et Pcuchet,
whereby the author uses no metalanguage (or a suspended metalanguage)
in regard to them, and he adds: The cultural code occupies the same position as stupidity: how can stupidity be pinned down without declaring oneself intelligent? (ibid.: 206).15 An eminently Flaubertian question that runs
through the problematics of the Roland Barthes.
13. On the diering attitudes of Flaubert and Barthes to stupidity, see Gaillard 1978.
14. Conversation between Shiguehiko Hasumi and Roland Barthes (Barthes 1994c [1973]:
1705). On Flaubert, Barthes (ibid.) states: For me this is a pluralized work and it comes to me
without me calling it, it is the direct and striking intertext. Barthess fascination with Bouvard
et Pcuchet is, inter alia, commented on by Roger 1986: 89. See also Leclerc 1988.
15. He also refers there to the Dictionnaire des ides reues, in connection with the connotation
related to Zambinellas capricious tyranny: the capricious nature of the stars is not listed
in any dictionary, other than a Dictionary of Accepted Ideaswhich would be a dictionary
of the standard connotations (Barthes 1974 [1970]: 98).

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This praise of Flaubert in S/Z provides a counterpoint to the analysis of

cultural codes in Honor de Balzacs Sarrasine. In lexia 174 (in one of those
works in which future talent struggles with the eervescence of youth),
Barthes identies the stereotypes governed by the code of ages and that of
art as follows: talent as discipline, youth as eervescence, and he denes
the space of codes as a kind of scientic vulgate which it will eventually
be valuable to describe: what do we know naturally about art?it is a
constraint; about youth?it is turbulent, etc. If we collect all such knowledge, all such vulgarisms, we create a monster, and this monster is ideology
(ibid.: 97). Cultural codes nurture this logic with the enthymeme, which
constitutes a foundation for behavior: Rsums of common knowledge, the
cultural codes provide the syllogisms in the narrative (there are many, as we
have seen) with their major premise, based always on public opinion (probable, as the old logic said), on an endoxal truth, in short, on the discourse
of others (ibid.: 184). Barthes links these codes to intertextual movement 16
and to the naturalization of these utterances by doxa, in a development that
resorts to the metaphor of the layer: In fact, these citations are extracted
from a body of knowledge, from an anonymous Book whose best model is
doubtless the School Manual. . . . Although entirely derived from books,
these codes, by a swivel characteristic of bourgeois ideology, which turns
culture into nature, appear to establish reality, Life. Life then, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering
layer of received ideas (ibid.: 2056).The turnstile between doxa and Life
is referred to once more in connection with lexia 326 (To see her thus was
to adore her), which appeals to the Code of Love: A commonplace truism (a completely literary endoxa which life constantly disproves) maintains
that there is an obligatory link between beauty and love (ibid.: 143).
How is this analysis of doxa established? It searches for implicit knowledge inscribed in the text. The model of the cultural code would appear to
be the gnomic code, which implies a proverbial knowledge underlying the
utterance. Barthes thus appeals to a transformational stylistics that could
place each code belly up: The utterances of the cultural code are implicit proverbs: they are written in that obligative mode by which the discourse states a general will, the law of a society, making the proposition
concerned ineluctable or indelible. Further still: it is because an utterance
can be transformed into a proverb, a maxim, a postulate, that the supporting cultural code is discoverable: stylistic transformation proves the code,
bares its structure, reveals its ideological perspective (ibid.: 100). For example, taking lexia 180 (However, gentleness was always the most power16. See during the same period the article Texte in Encyclopaedia universalis (1994d [1973]).

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ful of weapons where this passionate soul was concerned . . .), Barthes
derives from it the proverb: A soft answer turneth away wrath (ibid.: 99).
Endoxal statements can be pinpointed in dierent types of gnomic utterances. Thus the use of generalizing phrases in the present, with the relative
clauses preceded by a demonstrative, opening up a possible world (lexia 96:
with that boldness women can summon up out of the strength of their desires), or determinative relative clauses (lexia 39: These stupidities, spoken in witty accents, with the mocking air characteristic of atheistic society
in our day) that lay down a prefabricated predicative relationship, or possessive phrases (lexia 353: Indeed, she had begun by pressing his foot and
teasing him with the irtatiousness of a woman in love and free to show it;
or lexia 354: but she suddenly wrapped herself in the modesty of a young
girl). At other moments, doxa is a product of the stereotype as a construction of reading,17 of the stereotyped image constructed by the reader on the
basis of the words in the text: as in lexia 288, which calls up a stereotype of
mysterious and romantic Italy. Doxa may also reside in the linkage of the
argument. Thus in lexia 284 (This glance was a total revelation. Sarrasine
was loved! . . .), the snare by Sarrasine, for himself, is based on a topos:
The snare involves not La Zambinellas feeling but her sex, since common
opinion (endoxa) holds that only a woman can look at a man eloquently
(ibid.: 133). The hermeneutics of the narrative is thus based on doxa, the
hermeneutic code intersecting with the cultural code.
But the eect of doxa is not tantamount to mentioning all the cultural
references. In fact, the notion of cultural codes in S/Z is very broad. It indicates a vast encyclopedic competence that includes all the eects of knowledgehistorical, literary, artisticand even chronology,18 which extends
beyond the question of doxa. However, we know that Sarrasine dies through
an excess of stereotypes but also because of a lack of encyclopedic knowledge: through a lack of familiarity with papal standards of behavior and the
presence of castrati on the Rome stage. Another problem raised by Claude
Bremond and Thomas Pavel (1998) is the question of the narrative voice
in Sarrasine. Barthes does not always make clear that certain endoxal judgments can be attributed to the character. Similarly, he considers as doxa
the generalizing eects of knowledge that were invented by Balzac, such
as having one leg which is icy and the other sweaty, an occurrence rather
frequent at balls (lexia 13).
It nevertheless remains a fact that S/Z implements a text-based study of
doxa that opens up new perspectives. This book lays the foundations for a
17. See Amossy 1991.
18. This is one of Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavels (1998) justied criticisms of S/Z. But
can one really speak of Barthess inquisitorial zeal (ibid.: 129)?

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discourse linguistics and for a stylistics sensitive to the forms of that which
has not been subjected to thought, to that which has already been said, to
cultural clichs and stereotypes, to intertextuality taken in the broad sense,
to interdiscursiveness.
Doxa is still implied as a logic of the probable, a cultural verisimilitude of
actions, in the proairetic code. The latter resorts to stereotyped scenarios
in which the the Empiric Voice speaks, to the work in the sequences of the
narrative: They can be assigned no logic other than that of the probable,
of empirics, of the already-done or already-written, for the number and
order of their terms vary, some deriving from a practical reservoir of trivial everyday acts (to knock at a door, to arrange a rendezvous), and others from a
written corpus of novelistic models (the Abduction, the Declaration of Love, the
Murder) (ibid.: 204).19 The essay on The Sequences of Actions already
referred to this general code of narrative actions, some of which appear important, endowed with a great novelistic density (to murder, to carry o a victim,
to make a declaration of love, etc.), while others seem quite trivial (to open a door,
to sit down, etc.) (Barthes 1988c [1969]: 139).What is interesting is the active
relationship with reading that is established on the basis of the recognition
of these codes: The Abduction which I constitute starting from snatches of
actions scattered in the text then coincides with all the abductions I have
read; the name is the exact, irrefutable trace, as solid as a scientic fact, of
a certain already-written, already-read, already-done; to nd the name is to nd
that already which constitutes the code, it is to assure the communication of
the text and of all the other narratives which make up the narrative language (ibid.: 141). Always fearing a pejorative meaning, doxa nevertheless
intervenes as a code of intellection in narrative, referring to a cultural memory that cannot produce anything other than stereotypes but nonetheless
creates a condition of intelligibility.This functional extension of accepted
codes opens up to a semiotics of reading 20 but also as a counterpoint to the
question of invention on the basis of drift of accepted codes.
Barthess thinking on doxa undoubtedly had an impact on literary theory.
It gave a new impetus to Flaubert studies, which became interested in the
writing of Bouvard et Pcuchet (Leclerc 1988), to the poetics of the clich and
19. It should be noted that this work on verisimilitude and the codes of narrative forms part of
the research on narrative theory at the end of the 1960s. Works published at this time include
Genettes article on Vraisemblance et motivation (1969), the issue of Communications 8 on
narrative (1966), that of Communications 16 on rhetoric (1970), followed by issue 16 of Potique
on realistic discourse (1973).
20. By contrast, Umberto Ecos work on stereotypes in narrative (the article on James Bond
[1966], then on foreseeable scenarios in Lector in Fabula [1979]) develops, together with other
references, the role played by doxa and by scenarios in the construction of narrative and of
its reading.

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the stereotype in Flauberts novels and the Dictionnaire des ides reues (Herschberg Pierrot 1988; see also my edition of the Dictionnaire des ides reues,
Le Livre de Poche, 1997), and to the poetics of the commonplace from Flaubert to Nathalie Sarraute (Adert 1996). Throughout his writings, Barthess
thinking about Bouvard et Pcuchet played what has certainly been a decisive role in the value ascribed to this work, which, prior to the 1970s, had
been largely neglected. By presenting it as a key work in which nobody has
the last word and the utterance of accepted ideas becomes the model of
all speech, which is made uncertain, Barthes opened the way to Flaubert
studies based on utterance, on the problematizing of assertions and of truth
in novelistic discourse. It was from this perspective that I have developed an
approach to the textualization of clichs and stereotypes in Flauberts work,
to the utterance of received ideas in Bouvard et Pcuchet and the Dictionnaire
des ides reues (see Herschberg Pierrot 1980 and 1988).
On the other hand, doxa, in the Barthesian sense of an omnipresence
of accepted discourse in everyday speecha glutinous omnipresence, of
which one cannot rid oneself by means of a counterdiscourseis a reference point for work on clichs, stereotypes, and received ideas in literature
and the media. Such work nevertheless also envisages the constructive role
of doxa in the construction of reading (see Amossy and Rosen 1982; Amossy
1991; Dufays 1994; Amossy and Herschberg Pierrot 1997). More broadly, it
may be said that the problem underscored by Barthes concerns a variety
of research carried out since the 1970s, from linguistics 21 to sociocriticism.
The notion of doxa and that of a cultural code, which is certainly a wideranging one, intersect with the question of social discourse as developed
in sociocritical studies: these, beyond methodological dierences, pay attention to the sociality of the text, to interdiscursiveness, and to endoxal
discourses that shape all utterances.22
What is original in Barthess thinking about doxa, running through his
work on classical rhetoric, on the Mythologies, on literature in S/Z, and in
the Roland Barthes, is rst that he makes the connection between the Aristotelian meaning of the probable (somewhat modiedsee Moriarty 1997),
and the modern transformation of doxa in the new mass culture: he shows
doxa as an enunciative force with an insidious power, insinuating itself into
21. I am thinking of Michel Pcheuxs (1975) research on preconstructions, to which other
viewpoints can be added on the production of the self-evident, such as the work done on
presuppositions and the topoi by Ducrot and Anscombre (1983).
22. See the seminal work of Claude Duchet, Henri Mitterand, Marc Angenot, and Charles
Grivel. On doxa in Angenot and Grivel (as well as in Barthes), see in this volume the article
by Jean-Louis Dufays, Ides reues et rception littraire. For a more general survey, with
references, see Ruth Amossys Introduction to the Study of Doxa.

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everyday speech, exerting the imperious strength of well-established accepted ideas, like a fantasy that one cannot shake o. In this system, as we
have seen, the simultaneously visible and implicit intermediary is the Flaubertian poetics of accepted ideas, following especially Bouvard et Pcuchet, in
which the distinction between language and metalanguage becomes problematic, absorbed into the citational framework. Omnipresent, doxa looks
like a cross beam in Barthess work: from the Mythologies, in which narratives, behaviors, and social images are demystied, to the more linguistic
issues in S/Z, and to the Roland Barthes, in which the inalienable relationship
of the subject with doxaa relationship of familiarity and strangenessis
taken into account in the enunciative arrangement and the textual interactions. As a counterpoint there opens up the power of literature as a work
of language that puts adrift the question of the last word.
Beyond doxa, Barthess work contains a confrontation with the Absolute Particular constituted by photography in Camera Lucida (Barthes 1981
[1980]). In this book, the tension regarding the stereotype is attenuated,
and given photographys powerful presence, doxa recurs like a belief that
cannot be shaken o: It is precisely in this arrest of interpretation that the
Photographs certainty resides: I exhaust myself realizing that this has been;
for anyone who holds a photograph in his hand, here is a fundamental belief, an Ur-doxa nothing can undo, unless you prove to me that this image
is not a photograph (ibid.: 107).23
References

Tseng 2002.8.27 08:06

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1982 Les Discours du clich (Paris: CDU-SEDES).
Barthes, Roland
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23. On photography and stereotypes in Barthes, see the seminal study by Amossy (1991). On
stereotypes in Barthess work, see Marrone 1994.

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