4010 Spring08 Questions and Discussion 25
From Studyplace
This week's respondents: Debra and Annie
Contents |
[edit] Key Points
A quotation from Benjamin that may be instructive as we consider this text:
“Information…lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’…no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with meaning” (Illuminations 89).
Where Mythologies fits into the field of communication studies
Mythologies arises out of Barthes’ belief that any cultural product, not just written material, can and should be considered a text, and should, accordingly, be subjected to critical thought. In this respect, we can consider Barthes’ approach in Mythologies to be a precursor to the field of cultural studies, which had its heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s. Cultural studies was typified by examining cultural texts traditionally ignored by the academy – for example, Stuart Hall’s scholarship on television, or Janice Radway’s engagement with popular romance fiction – a rejection of traditional value judgments and the idea of a more inclusive approach to what warrants intellectual attention.
The centrality of denaturalization
One general point that we can acknowledge from the outset is that of Barthes’ concerted avoidance of considering culture ‘natural.’ His mission is one of denaturing, of ‘making strange’ aspects of human life normally blindly accepted and considered unremarkable. This practice of ‘denaturing’ is a familiar approach which we’ve observed in many of the thinkers we’ve read in Theories of Communication, and it is one that reflects Barthes’ roots in Marxist thought. Marx and his adherents discouraged precisely the kind of ahistoricism (or dismissal of historical contingency) that would result from simply accepting and internalizing existing structures as ‘natural’ ones.
The growing necessity of semiological analysis in a media-saturated age
Barthes cites the rise of communications technologies as an ever more compelling impetus to engage in semiological analysis. Reflecting John Dewey’s diagnosis of the rise of ‘signs and symbols’ as potent communication tools in the twentieth century, Barthes says: “The development of publicity, of a national press, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speak of the survival of a myriad rites of communication which rule social appearances makes the development of a semiological science more urgent than ever. In a single day, how many non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none.” (footnote, 112)
[edit] Myth Today
In Myth Today, Barthes describes myth as a type of speech chosen by history; it is a system of communication that cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things (p. 109). The elements of its form are related to place and proximity (p. 122). Myth belongs to the province of semiology; it is defined not by the object of its message but by the way in which it utters this message (p. 111). Semiology postulates a relation between two items—a signifier (image) and a signified (concept). The third item, the sign, is the associative total of the other two items.
Barthes compares the trilogy of semiology to that of Freud’s theory of dreams: a dream, to Freud, is the functional union of manifest meaning (signifier) and latent meaning (signified). In Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), he states:
What has been called the dream we shall describe as the text of the dream or the manifest dream, and what we are looking for, what we suspect, so to say, of lying behind the dream, we shall describe as the latent dream thoughts. Having done this, we can express our two tasks as follows: We have to transform the manifest dream into the latent one, and to explain how, in the dreamer’s mind, the latter has become the former [p. 8-9].
We ask the dreamer to free himself from the impression of the manifest dreams, to divert his attention from the dream as a whole on to the separate portions of its content and to report to us …what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each of them separately [pp. 9-10].
Freud goes on to state that associations are not the same as latent meaning. To discover the latent meaning, one has to uncover the fixed meaning of symbols within the dream. Likewise, Barthes speaks about the meanings we attach to certain symbols. For example, the image of a Black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris Match symbolizes the greatness of France as an empire where all men serve faithfully regardless of their race (p. 116).
According to Freud, in a dream, as in the formation of a neurotic symptom, there is a compromise between the unconscious wish and the prohibition of the unacceptable wish. The dream work creates a situation where the unacceptable wish gets expressed but in a disguised form. Behind every manifest content there is a latent content. Thus, the manifest content is always in the service of a defense against the underlying wish or affect. For example, a man develops paralysis of his arm without any physical evidence for it. Investigation reveals that the man intended to hurt someone. The paralysis is the compromise formation. The paralyzed arm shows the wish and the restraint.
Barthes notes that in mythology, unlike in psychoanalysis, signifier and signified are both manifest; one is not hidden behind the other. Myth hides nothing; there is no need of an unconscious to explain myth (p. 122). Barthes states that the function of myth is to distort: “Just as for Freud the manifest meaning of behavior is distorted by its latent meaning, in myth the meaning is distorted by the concept” (p. 122).
The myth is a double system—“a language-object and a metalanguage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness” [p. 123]. In myths there are two semiological systems, one embedded in the other. The system of language, or myth as a language-object, results in a sign, which serves as the signifier for the system of myth. (See p. 115.) The signifier can be looked at two ways, as (1) the final term of the linguistic (language) system, and (2) the first term of the mythical system. On the plane of language, Barthes calls the signifier “meaning”; on the plane of myth, he calls it “form.” Signifed means “concept” in both systems. In the mythological system, the “sign” or “signification” has two functions: to point out and notify us, and to make us understand something by imposing it on us.
Barthes states that, in myth, meaning and form coexist but will never be at the same place. He compares this situation to looking out a car window at the passing landscape. The viewer can focus either on the window or on the passing scenery, never on both at the same time. “At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once empty and present to me, and the landscape unreal and full” (pp. 123-124). It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which define myth (p. 118).
[edit] “The World of Wrestling”
Here, Barthes undertakes to discuss the popular ‘sport’ that he calls a “spectacle of excess” (15), exuding a “grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres” – he alludes to the spatial setup of the battle, saying that the flood of light suggests the “great solar spectacles” of Greek drama and bullfights.
To clarify what wrestling is, he defines it in opposition to boxing. While boxing is a sport requiring excellence, where, due to the necessity of skill, it would make sense to place bets on one winner or another, it would make no sense to fixate on the outcome in wrestling. This is attributable to the two combat styles’ differing treatments of temporality – boxing is linear, and the viewer anticipates the climax; with wrestling, the outcome is not as important as distinct moments, various fits and starts, throughout the fight. It generates less of a straightforward ‘narrative.’
Because it is a not a battle between two men but a visual spectacle intended for consumption, intelligibility is extremely important: the roles become extremely exaggerated, and denoted by the wrestlers’ physical appearances. “As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant” (17). For example, Thauvin – “a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body” who “displays in his flesh the characters of baseness” and “appears as organically repugnant” (17). Barthes’ word choice here (‘in his flesh’, ‘organically’) suggests that Thauvin is meant to appear to spectators as ‘naturally’ base or vile – “his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.” (17)
To questions of the veracity of the combat, Barthes responds: “There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.” (18) The result is a “real Human Comedy” (18): “What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks.” (19) However, the suffering has to be, in Barthes’ words, presented in a “conventional, therefore intelligible” (20) fashion – it has to lend itself to collective, immediate understanding.
Viewers’ suspension of disbelief is paramount: Barthes argues that the viewers themselves don’t want to witness genuine suffering; rather, they want to observe “the perfection of an iconography” (20). Yet despite this tacit understanding of wrestling’s artifice, the audience takes exception to it being taken too far – there is a complicated balance. Barthes speaks of the “forearm smash,” in which “the gesture appears as no more than a symbol” – a kind of empty signifier which violates the rule that “all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen” (20). This upsets the public, “because [the public] condemns artifice” (20).
As for the mythological significance of wrestling, he concludes: “But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of ‘paying’ is essential to wrestling…wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth)” (22). But while the two contenders are obligated to display the most surface signifiers of ‘fairness’, like handshakes, actual fairness is in fact discouraged – “fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport.” (23)
Ultimately, wrestling upholds the illusory idea of absolute moral imperatives. Wrestlers are well aware of the role the spectators expect them to fulfill: “In wrestling, nothing exists except the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively” (24-25). Concludes Barthes: “This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.” (25) Wrestling, then, offers comfort to spectators in that it gives them the temporary impression that ‘reality’ is something intelligible, something that they can thoroughly ‘master’, when in actual fact, things are far more complicated.
[edit] “The ‘Nautilus’ and the Drunken Boat”
Here, Barthes discusses the work of Jules Verne, an extremely popular French science-fiction writer in the 19th century. The Nautilus was a submarine-type boat that figured prominently in Verne’s most popular book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Barthes characterizes Verne’s work as tantamount to “a kind of self-sufficient cosmogony” (65).
Verne’s work is very modernist in its aim: it strives to name and quantify. As Barthes says, “His tendency is exactly that of an eighteenth-century encyclopaedist or of a Dutch painter: the world is finite, the world is full of numerable and contiguous objects” (65). Verne’s work rests on a rhetoric of human mastery of nature. Barthes says, “His work proclaims that nothing can escape man, that the world, even its most distant part, is like an object in his hand, and that, all told, property is but a dialectical moment in the general enslavement of Nature.” (65) He seeks to “reduce it to a known and enclosed space” (66). Verne’s innovation, which served as a mechanism for depicting this “appropriation of the world”: “to pledge space by means of time, constantly to unite these two categories” (66). We can see this tendency simply by considering the title of another of his famous books, Around the World in Eighty Days.
Ultimately, Barthes decides, the fundamental activity in Verne’s works is one of “appropriation” (66) – the ship becomes a symbol of the ultimate, hermetic enclosure; a totally finite and sealable space that does not interact with that which is outside. In this submarine-like vessel, Barthes notes, it’s possible to look at the waters outside and define oneself in opposition to them, as that which is not the outside vagueness of the waters. This brings to mind Barthes’ earlier point in “The World of Wrestling,” where he characterizes wrestling in opposition to the divergent practice of boxing. In both cases, Barthes seems to be employing a model introduced by the pioneering linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who was a strong influence on Barthes. Saussure proposed a ‘differential model’ of the sign, saying that the only reliable means we have of defining signs is by placing them in opposition to other signs: we come to understand what things are by considering what they’re not.
Of course, the idea of enclosure has implications of ownership or an almost godlike mastery: one becomes the ruler of one’s own domain, rejecting all that which is outside. Barthes concludes by contrasting this hermetic, fiercely individualistic ownership of Verne’s Nautilus with the Drunken Boat of Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poem of the same name. Unlike Verne’s creation, the Drunken Boat narrates his lengthy poem in the first person, and he does so as, fittingly enough, he fills up with water. He lacks the tight seal of the Nautilus, and so he is less finite and more complicated, much as Rimbaud’s poetry is more complex, and messier, than Verne’s prose.
[edit] “The Brain of Einstein”
Here, Barthes discusses the incongruous treatment of Einstein’s brain – “paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the man who is too powerful is removed from psychology, and introduced into a world of robots.” (68)
Incongruously, because of his extreme, iconic intellect, Einstein is subject to a kind of contradiction where his brainpower is held up as purely ‘mechanical’ rather than inestimably esoteric – the best a human mind can be, the reception to Einstein’s brain seems to suggest, is machine-like. “The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages…he used to produce thought, continuously, as a mill makes flour, and death was above all, for him, the cessation of a localized function: ‘the most powerful brain of all has stopped thinking’” (68-9). Barthes attributes this at least in part to the mathematical nature of Einstein thought, and this seems accurate – it seems unlikely, for instance, that the brain of a brilliant novelist would ever be addressed in these terms.
Barthes concludes that Einstein offered the world the chance to view genius as something ‘intelligible’ – “Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula” (69).
[edit] "Striptease"
With striptease, “Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.” (84) For Barthes, this represents an instance where “evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcise it” (84): striptease is posited as a kind of inoculation to actual eroticism.
Central to the professional striptease are an array of accoutrements on the woman’s body which she must remove. Striptease thus aims at “establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise” – these garments serve to signify a kind of artifice, relieved of which the woman seems natural in her nakedness, and thus chaste. The dancing that accompanies the removal of clothes is another ‘distancing mechanism’ – it offers the whole affair the “alibi of Art” and it “smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures, for the act of becoming bare is here relegated to the rank of parasitical operations carried out in an improbable background” (86) – it also solidifies their status as ‘professionals’.
The entire affair is, in Barthes’ view, a “meticulous exorcism of sex”: the professional striptease desexualizes the erotic act by transforming it into a vocation. Barthes notes that when we compare conventional striptease to that involving amateurs it becomes abundantly clear that the ‘professional’ practice desexualizes, because when ‘beginners’ strip, their awkwardness restores the eroticism to the act. This distinction might be construed as a bit problematic, though – Barthes argues that the amateur’s ineptitude, in “imprisoning her in a condition of weakness and timorousness” (86), is what restores her erotic appeal.
Finally, Barthes details the striptease’s absorption into the petit-bourgeois lifestyle. At the Moulin Rouge, striptease becomes a sport, with “healthy contests whose winners come out crowned and rewarded with edifying prizes” (86) and eventually a career – “one can even give them the magical alibi of work” (86). In this way, striptease becomes a normal, sanctioned part of public life, loosed from its subversive connotations and thoroughly absorbed into bourgeois capitalism.
