The Seventh Function of Language

“Don’t touch him. We must wait for the ambulance.”

“Let me through! I’m a doctor.”

“Don’t turn him over!”

“I’m a doctor. He’s still alive.”

“Someone should inform his family.”

“Poor guy…”

“I know him!”

“Was it suicide?”

“We have to find out his blood group.”

“He’s a customer of mine. He comes to my bar for a drink every morning.”

“He won’t be coming anymore…”

“Is he drunk?”

“He smells of alcohol.”

“A glass of white, sitting at the bar. Same thing every morning, for years.”

“That doesn’t help us with his blood group…”

“He crrrossed the rrroad without looking!”

“The driver must remain in control of his vehicle at all times. That’s the law here.”

“Don’t worry, man, you’ll be fine. As long as you’ve got good insurance…”

“Yeah, there goes his no-claims bonus, though.”

“Don’t touch him!”

“I’m a doctor!”

“So am I.”

“Look after him, then. I’ll go and call an ambulance.”

“I have to deliverrr my merrrchandise…”

Most of the world’s languages use an apico-alveolar r, known as the rolled r, in contrast to French, which adopted the dorso-velar R about three hundred years ago. There is no rolled r in German or English. Nor in Italian or Spanish. Portuguese, maybe? True, it does sound a little guttural, but the man’s intonation is not nasal or singsong enough; it’s quite monotonous, in fact, so much so that it’s hard to make out the notes of panic.

So he’s probably a Russian.

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Born of linguistics and almost doomed to be the runt of the litter, used only for the study of the most rudimentary, limited languages, how at the last possible moment was semiology able to turn itself into a neutron bomb?

By means Barthes was familiar with.

To begin with, semiology was devoted to the study of nonlinguistic systems of communication. Saussure himself told his students: “Language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and in this way is comparable to writing, the sign language alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, et cetera. It is simply the most important of these systems.” This is more or less true, but only if we limit the definition of systems of signs to those designed to communicate explicitly and intentionally. The Belgian linguist Eric Buyssens defines semiology as “the study of communication processes; in other words, means used to influence others and recognized as such by the others in question.”

Barthes’s stroke of genius is to not content himself with communication systems but to extend his field of inquiry to systems of meaning. Once you have tasted that freedom, you quickly become bored with anything less: studying road signs or military codes is about as fascinating for a linguist as playing gin rummy would be for a poker player, or checkers for a chess player. As Umberto Eco might say: for communicating, language is perfect; there could be nothing better. And yet, language doesn’t say everything. The body speaks, objects speak, history speaks, individual or collective destinies speak, life and death speak to us constantly in a thousand different ways. Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere: in the color of his wife’s coat, in the stripe on the door of his car, in the eating habits of the people in the apartment next door, in France’s monthly unemployment figures, in the banana-like taste of Beaujolais nouveau (it always tastes either like banana or, less often, raspberry. Why? No one knows, but there must be an explanation, and it is semiological), in the proud, stately bearing of the black woman striding ahead of him through the corridors of the metro, in his colleague’s habit of leaving the top two buttons of his shirt undone, in some footballer’s goal celebration, in the way his partner screams when she has an orgasm, in the design of that piece of Scandinavian furniture, in the main sponsor’s logo at this tennis tournament, in the soundtrack to the credits of that film, in architecture, in painting, in cooking, in fashion, in advertising, in interior decor, in the West’s representation of women and men, love and death, heaven and earth, etc. With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere. From now on, semiology is ready to conquer the world.

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