Roland Barthes’s “The Eiffel Tower”, is an essay commenting on the duality of meaning behind the famed landmark. This universal symbol of Paris and travel, he states, is in actuality quite useless; it is a structure comprised of beams and metal, giving off an essence of exteriority. Although he agrees that there was a stated “purpose”, almost an excuse, for building the tower, which is its scientific usage and significance, he states that ultimately, “the Tower is nothing, it achieves a kind of zero degree of the monument; it participates in no rite, no cult, not even in Art; you cannot visit the Tower as a museum: there is nothing to see inside the Tower”(7). In fact, it is true; when we enter the Tower, we see everything in Paris but itself, because the landmark becomes the point from which we observe.

His argument about its duality comes later in the essay, in which he conceives this supposedly meaningless monument as a sign representing a multitude of conflicting ideals. While most signs, as in Saussure’s philosophy, function in the sense that “Dog” refers us to an image of a furry creature which pants and barks, the Tower, in Barthes’s mind, does something completely different. The writer considers the landmark “a pure signifier, of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning[…]without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed”(5). Signs are usually defined by a specific, narrow signified, and the vastness of what that signified is not. The Tower is a sign in the sense that it signifies something, but because it signifies a great deal of ideas, it does not function in the way that signs typically do.

Barthes’s idea of what the tower allows us to do contributes to its duality. When we go to the top, we enter into an experience where we can see everything. We are so far away from Paris, and yet have a better understanding of it as a whole because the entirety of its landscape is laid out for us. This distance also affects our understanding of humanity as well. We can see the residential areas, the commercial areas, the business areas: all aspects of human life. Yet, the height functions as a barrier, keeping us from it. The landscape of Paris also evokes a sense of history and modernity at the same time. Being up high in this metal structure, which represents the modern experience, allows us to think about how Paris must have changed over the years. We can see its historic buildings, for example the Notre-Dame and the Pantheon. However, we also can consider the modern Paris, with the Radio-Television building or the UNESCO building.

The author says that “the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there[…]one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of the world”(17). While I agree that our commercialization of and familiarization with the tower allows us to make ourselves comfortable with it, I think that the landmark’s transformation into what I’d like to call a “super-sign”, does not allow us to “own” it. The Tower, as Barthes describes, is full of duality. It contains and represents history and modernity, connection and disconnection, humanity and lack thereof. If signs are supposed to allow us to define and categorize, the Tower’s lack of specificity in meaning makes it indefinable. The monument therefore shows us that experience is not rigid, that meaning is fluid and comes at us from unexpected places. The fact that it means so many things to us gives it a kind of ambiguity; the Tower is not controllable, just like the human experience itself.