About the source texts: In realist art we are provided with a nebulae of seemingly natural details and conventions. Because these details are unremarkable they are lost until we give them names. In S/Z, Roland Barthes wants to analyze the artistic and cultural codifications shaping the hard-to-pin-down movement we call "realism." 
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the use and importance of the imitative arts, claiming they are destructive to the soul as well as the city. In Ferdinan de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, we are provided with a way of looking at language, which also becomes a way of looking at cultural and societal structures. Saussure challenges Plato by proposing language as the origin of concepts, or forms. In doing so, Saussure highlights the major flaw in Plato’s interpretation of art. I will argue that Plato was narrow-minded in his view of art as strictly mimetic. When Barthes comes along with his own revolutionary system of textual codification he is forced to make a decision. Either stick with the Platonic notion of art as three removes from the truth, or modify that view in order to accommodate Saussure’s postulations. As I will demonstrate, Barthes was able to do both. As a result, he manages to address the bigger topic of realism. Because he uses a system of codes to analyze texts-- much of it based on Saussure’s models of signification-- he is able to incorporate, but not entirely validate Plato’s claims.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the use and importance of the imitative arts, claiming they are destructive to the soul as well as the city. In Ferdinan de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, we are provided with a way of looking at language, which also becomes a way of looking at cultural and societal structures. Saussure challenges Plato by proposing language as the origin of concepts, or forms. In doing so, Saussure highlights the major flaw in Plato’s interpretation of art. I will argue that Plato was narrow-minded in his view of art as strictly mimetic. When Barthes comes along with his own revolutionary system of textual codification he is forced to make a decision. Either stick with the Platonic notion of art as three removes from the truth, or modify that view in order to accommodate Saussure’s postulations. As I will demonstrate, Barthes was able to do both. As a result, he manages to address the bigger topic of realism. Because he uses a system of codes to analyze texts-- much of it based on Saussure’s models of signification-- he is able to incorporate, but not entirely validate Plato’s claims.
Plato’s View on Art
For Plato, even the best sculpture or poem is always a bad representation of an idea. He puts so much emphasis upon the perfection of the form, it would seem to follow that he would approve of the most realistic art possible. Realism would, however, by nature, represent the good and the bad in man and in the gods. Plato doesn’t want to give young people a bad impression of the gods, lest bad characters should be cultivated among the public. By chapter X in the Republic he tries to argue for the elimination of almost all kinds of art from his ideal city; because “good rhythm follows fine words, while bad rhythm follows the opposite kind of words,” poetry and art should represent “good rhythms.” (77) For this reason, Socrates felt the creators of art should be carefully controlled and allowed to create only positive art consisting of good characters. Furthermore, the character of the artist is integrally compromised because a single person cannot possibly create or do many things as well as he can imitate one. If an artist spends all of his time learning about other people’s crafts, he will have no time to perfect his own. (71) Plato also valued the spoken word over the written word. This doesn’t mean he preferred tragedies and comedies to be played out on stage instead of read. In fact, the reading of such texts by the public was probably uncommon. No, he didn’t like live performance either, because it appealed to people’s emotional side either with extreme happiness or extreme sadness, and if people allow their emotional sides to be effected they are more likely to become overly emotional themselves and make bad, irrational decisions. (277) Even if realistic art does not appeal to the emotional side of a person, it surely must appeal to some kind of aesthetic, whether it be the impacts of the bright colors of a painting, or the sonic and metrical value of a poem. When a person views art and appreciates it with his senses, he is participating in, and falling victim to the deception of the artist, who cannot possibly be offering up a true representation. By not knowing much about the subject which he depicts, the artist plays to the ignorance of the people he displays his art to an, in fact, makes them even more ignorant. (271) In Plato’s overall view, he feels that what’s good for the soul is good for the city: “If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law or the thing that everyone has always believed to be best, namely, reason.” (278) Later he gives “lovers of poetry” a chance to defend their views on the value of art, but their arguments don’t stand up for Plato.Language & Realism
Because Plato has put all his emphasis on the importance of the original idea, he leaves little room to explore the importance of language not simply as a form of communication, but as a centerpiece of social and cultural milieu.Early in Chapter three of Ferdinan de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, he illustrates a major difference in belief between himself and Plato, regarding the significance of human speech versus the written word. Both belief systems have a huge impact on the way each of the two thinkers treats realism in literature and art in general. While Saussure believes language is separate from speech, and can be studied separately, Plato believes speech is more important than the written word, and has a less sophisticated explanation for language as a whole. For Plato, written accounts and images painted to resemble our realistic environment are three removes from the truth, while speech is only two removes, and thus, more reliable. He must have truly believed that spoken words could stand the test of time on their own, because he himself never wrote anything down. He put his faith in the content of what was said, which would remain alive in the memories and stories of others, and if it didn’t, it must not have been very important in the first place. It is ironic then that his thoughts and words did stand the test of time only after being written down.
Like Plato, Roland Barthes argues that realistic description is three removes from the truth. “To describe is thus to place the empty frame which the realistic author always carries with him before a collection or continuum of objects which cannot be put into words without this obsessive operation... In order to speak about it, the writer... first transforms the ‘real’ into a depicted (framed) object. Thus, realism consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy of the real.” (54-55) Here we are talking about art and writing, but the copies are not identical to those of the Platonic model of mimesis. Plato’s original form or idea is the starting point for him, followed by the product of the craftsman, followed by the depiction of the product. The difference in Barthes' three removes, is that the second copy is not the product of the craftsman’s attempt at the form, but the frame through which the artists views reality. The third copy is the artist’s rendering of that image, not the image the craftsman has created, as Plato suggests.
Saussure offers us an analogy that is useful in our own perception of language, and prepares us for the method by which Roland Barthes would have us look at realism. Saussure compares language “with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; once cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, once can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound;” (113) While this is a way of mining language for meaning, Barthes says the artist can physically and figuratively examine works for their individual truth. “The Sarrasinean artist tries to undress appearance, tries always to get beyond, behind, according to the idealistic principle which defines secrecy with truth: one must go into the model, beneath the statue, behind the canvas.” (122) The shadowy figures of Plato’s cave immediately come to mind. The viewer of realistic art strives to know what the object represents. Often, Barthes tell us, this examination leads to failure. He then goes a step farther to a fourth remove from truth, when Sarrasine turns to writing. “As for the final avatar, the passage of the canvas to written ‘representation,’ it recuperates all the preceding copies, but writing extenuates still further the hallucination of the inside, for it has no other substance than the interstice.” (208) Here, Barthes examines the failure of see behind the appearance of a text or painting, reaffirming his faith in language as a system of codes. He continues on to say of truth: “This famous reality... is set farther away, postponed, or at least captured through the pictorial matrix in which it has been steeped before being put into words: code upon code, known as realism.” (208) The “pictorial matrix” Barthes speaks of is reminiscent of Saussure’s concept of Langue, in which language exists in a community and is manifested unconsciously in the minds of everyone in that community.
For Saussure, speaking is part of a language held together by signifiers. Where Plato might argue that language is born out of a concept, Saussure says without language, there is no need for a concept. “Without language,” he says, “thought is a vague uncharted nebula. There are no preexisting ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” (112) Every word, morpheme or thing is composed of a signifier and a signified. A concept and a sound sound-image. A tree is imagined or seen, and the the word tree comes to mind. Or the word tree is mentioned, and an image of a tree appears in the mind. While Plato might agree with this part, he would surely take issue with he statement “There are no preexisting ideas.” If Plato were to argue the point and say ‘Yes, there are ideas floating outside of the realm of man,’ then he is going astray of the metaphysical definition of Platonic forms or ideas, as they occur in the mind. Obviously, Saussure is concerned with language on a much broader scale, and goes several steps farther than Plato in his view of language as “a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts.” (14) In addition, Saussure distinguishes between three speech acts (Parole, Langage and Langue) and even lays the groundwork for and predicts the evolution of semiotics and structuralism as a field.
Signs and Codes in Realism
Saussure rests the bulk of his linguistic argument on two main principles. First, the arbitrary nature of the sign. By this he simply means that we have no reason to name a cow a “cow,” instead of a “lamp.” Second, is the linear nature of the signifier, which emphasizes the fact that auditory and written signifiers take place over a span of time, rather than upon a plane of space. This opposes a signified sound-image, as it opposes the Platonic original “idea.” While Plato might be content (as much as he can be with art) to view art as the embodiment of essential ideas, both Barthes and Saussure believe the meaning of signs exists in whatever they are not. Saussure tells us “The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.” (120) That is to say we only recognize signs based on their oppositions i.e. a mother is a mother because she is not a father. All of this explains how Plato can tell us a bed is a bed because is it created based on the idea of a bed, but he cannot explain why it is a bed because it is not a table. To the extent that Plato believes artistic expression projects itself to the weakest, most irrational part of the spectator, Saussure believes that such emotional impact is not the fault of the spectator or the codes which bring about the emotion, because both agents function under the realm of Langue. In other words, we cannot control the signifieds produced by a given set of signifiers. “For the distinguishing characteristic of the sign--is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will.” (17)Because signs exist independently of language, and realistic art consists of endless signs, art is open to interpretation. In Barthes analysis of “readerly,” and “writerly” texts, the writerly “text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning, it is reversible, we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one, the codes it mobilizes extend as far as they can reach.” (5) What he is describing here is a metonymic chain by which no true “signified,” or meaning can be arrived at. Each signifier leads to another signifier. Saussure describes something related when he mentions “the psychologist, who studies the sign-mechanism in the individual; this is the easiest method, but it does not lead beyond individual execution and does not reach the sign, which is social.” (17) Saussure’s sign is half of what Barthes calls a code. For both men, codes are social things that function within Langue. Psychology can never quite provide each signifier with a signified for Saussure, nor can realism provide a complete coupling of the two for Barthes. “... The real body is the replication of a model set forth by that code of the arts, so that the most ‘natural’ of bodies, that of Balzac’s crayfish-gatherer is always only the promise of the artistic code from which it has previously issued. Thus, even within realism, the codes never stop: bodily replication cannot be interrupted save by leaving nature.” (54-55) This suggests that nature cannot provide an adequate representation of a form, because language precedes even nature. Language is natural, the demands of which must be met before those of a natural, or realistic idea.
Conclusion
Plato’s idea that art is only mimetic was too simplistic to describe the huge role that art plays in society. When viewed as a language of codes, art can function with an independent grammar, like any other system of signifier/signifieds.Saussure and Plato are at odds in there beliefs regarding not only the significance of language, but the role of language in the representation of ideas. Plato believes concepts or ideas are the origin of everything, while Saussure does his best to demonstrate that ideas cannot exist without the language to identify them, however arbitrary that language may be. Wile Plato believes language or “speech” is more effective and important in communication, because it is closer to the truth than writing, Saussure maintains that the written word has a better chance of standing the test of time, even if a language changes or dies altogether.
With regard to Barthes, he has expanded upon the Saussurian signifier/signified relationships by identifying the codes with which texts are written, and by which other cultural and social norms are maintained. The main difference between his take on realism and that of Plato, is his belief that the second stage of mimesis in art is not the physical production of an object, but the figurative framing of realistic objects by the artist. This distinction allows for something Plato makes little comment on-- the interpretive function of the artist. While the artistic interpretation is still mimesis in the strictest Platonic sense, it provides the possibility that the codes employed in the artwork can and do have multiple meanings and connotations. It is these multiple meanings Barthes helps us tease out of a text through careful analysis of the codes.