"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive"
About this Quote
Barthes turns a mundane medium into a courtroom drama: language isn’t a neutral tool we wield, it’s the legal system we’re born into. The first clause is a provocation with teeth. “Language is legislation” frames grammar, vocabulary, and idiom as rules that precede us and outlast us; “speech is its code” suggests that every time we talk, we’re running those rules like software. The shock isn’t that power exists in rhetoric - it’s that power is baked into the very categories that make meaning possible.
The subtext is structuralist and, more sharply, anti-innocence. We “forget” speech’s power because it feels natural, like air. But for Barthes, every noun is a filing cabinet: to name is to sort, to sort is to decide what counts, what doesn’t, and where each thing belongs. “Classification” sounds like library science until you hear the coercion in it: classifications set norms, make deviations legible as deviance, and turn messy human experience into administrable boxes. That’s why he calls them “oppressive” - not necessarily because speakers intend harm, but because order itself enforces exclusions.
Context matters: Barthes is writing in postwar France, amid a surge of semiotics, Marx-inflected critiques of ideology, and growing suspicion that “common sense” is just culture’s propaganda wearing sweatpants. It’s also a prelude to later fights over who gets to define terms - gender, nation, “terrorism,” “family.” Barthes isn’t arguing for silence; he’s warning that speaking always means governing, even when we think we’re simply expressing ourselves.
The subtext is structuralist and, more sharply, anti-innocence. We “forget” speech’s power because it feels natural, like air. But for Barthes, every noun is a filing cabinet: to name is to sort, to sort is to decide what counts, what doesn’t, and where each thing belongs. “Classification” sounds like library science until you hear the coercion in it: classifications set norms, make deviations legible as deviance, and turn messy human experience into administrable boxes. That’s why he calls them “oppressive” - not necessarily because speakers intend harm, but because order itself enforces exclusions.
Context matters: Barthes is writing in postwar France, amid a surge of semiotics, Marx-inflected critiques of ideology, and growing suspicion that “common sense” is just culture’s propaganda wearing sweatpants. It’s also a prelude to later fights over who gets to define terms - gender, nation, “terrorism,” “family.” Barthes isn’t arguing for silence; he’s warning that speaking always means governing, even when we think we’re simply expressing ourselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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