Form and meaning for a piece of artwork

Having read the article by Barthes, the project is to annotate an artwork illustrating my thoughts on the following passage taken from Myth Today:

"The meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning"

Firstly we need to contextualise the statement The extract is from the part of Myth Today where Barthes contends that "myth is a double system" - the point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning; there is a 'turnstile' between the meaning of a signifier and its form. Myth is a form of alibi.

To demonstrate this, I have selected a satirical 1930s montage by the Dadaist John Heartfield, Hurrah, the Butter's Finished. 

The photomontage was published in the leftist weekly Worker's Illustrated Newspaper [Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung], a publication aimed at advancing the political education of workers (GHDI, undated). The title is a parody of a speech made by Hermann Göring, an excerpt of which is included at the foot of the photomontage and translates as:

 “Ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a country fat at most.”

Göring wished to increase the productive capacity of the German war machine and used the comparison to exhort his fellow countrymen to eschew home comforts in favour of the country's rearmament process. The montage is of a 'typical' German family and is annotated here.

John Heartfield - Hurrah, the Butter's Finished, 1935

References:

GDHI (undated) Anti-Fascist Imagery: "Hurrah, the Butter is Gone!" (December 19, 1935)Available from http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1929 Accessed on 26 April 2014

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson 3: Mythologies: Naturalisation, Politics and everyday life

An A to Z of Theory | Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: Naturalisation, Politics and everyday life

Mythology and Naturalisation

Barthes claims that dominant institutions lull us into the belief that the current system is natural. It portrays the way things are as natural and eternal. It also portrays conventional, ‘common sense’ ways of viewing things as natural and obvious.

For instance, old reactionaries in Barthes’s day (and some today) would maintain that it is natural that men and women are attracted to each other, that certain ‘races’ are superior to others, and that a woman’s place is in the home. People who think in ‘bourgeois’ ways assume that everyone has to ‘pay their way’ and that life is a transaction.

For Barthes, all such arrangements and ways of seeing are never natural. They are socially constructed. The way they are constructed is through the use of signs. Furthermore, the appearance that they are natural is also created with signs. People misuse the word ‘natural’ when they mean socially conventional, moral, or beautiful. What seems ‘natural’ or conventional varies with social settings and time-periods.

This is not to say that everything is semiotic. Barthes believes that there is a certain residue to such phenomena as birth, death, sex, sleep and eating which is natural. However, the way people do these things is far more significant than the fact of doing them. Even when dealing with ‘natural’ acts, it is far more important to understand how they are turned into signs.

The problem for Barthes is that most people need 'absolute truths'; they cannot indulge in the high-thinking and probing analysis of semiotic structuralist writers. Barthes is a sort of intellectual flâneur, other people have duties, responsibilities, and a need for order and are thus responsive to myths.

In order to make sense of their lives, to add order and structure, it is necessary to have some 'simple truths'. You cannot have everything moving and relative. Myths, on this basis are necessary in order for social constructs to operate. The alternative is anarchy. 

Myth in Politics and Everyday Life 

Myth opens up in a space where active relations to others or to objects are closed down.
 

Take for instance the phenomenon of moral regulation in tabloid discourse. A particular incident in everyday life – a child breaking a window, a Muslim youth arrested for terrorism, an asylum seeker being convicted of reckless driving – is stripped out of its context and taken to signify something else. It stands for moral collapse, and ‘what’s wrong with this country’.

Look more closely at the examples and something else might appear. Perhaps the Muslim youth is an innocent victim of repressive policies. Perhaps the child is a bullying or abuse survivor, working through frustration. Perhaps the asylum seeker drove too fast because of the pressures of the underground economy s/he was forced to work in due to a lack of legal work and benefits. All of these things are possible, and would come to mind in a suspension of judgement.

But mythologies are geared towards instant judgements: ‘this means that’. They produce equally instant responses: cracking down, punishing, restoring ‘order’.

People who consume myths believe that they are acting on what they see, hear or experience. They’re talking ‘clearly’ and ‘directly’ about ‘life’. In fact they’re not seeing what really happened at all, because their myths are getting between themselves and the events they interpret.

Mythology and Capitalism

According to Barthes, capitalist society is especially prone to mythical signification. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to be named, especially at the level of ideology and everyday life. This is a fundamental part of capitalist functioning. In particular, it is the way a particular arrangement of the world is turned into an image of the world.

The bourgeois move of refusing to name oneself occurs by moving from an ‘anti-physis’ – the refusal of engagement with a real world of praxis – to a ‘pseudo-physis’ – an appearance of a real world which is actually a world of signs. ’Pseudo-physis’ denies to people their ability to remake the world by setting narrow limits on how people are to live so as not to upset the dominant order.
In everyday life, signifiers are nearly all dependent on bourgeois ideology, anonymised in the form of myth. They carry a particular perspective on humanity’s relationship to the world which comes from the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois norms are wrongly viewed as those of natural order. Bourgeois man seems to be eternal man. This is partly because these norms are practiced nationwide, and come to seem self-evident.

For example, today’s petty-bourgeoisie (think Daily Mail readers) are attached to bourgeois norms from sixty years ago, or over a century ago – ideas of self-abnegation, explicit authoritarianism, hatred of nonconformity and strict moral regulation.

Robinson unwittingly perpetrates a myth here: "think Daily Mail readers". He is reading the myth himself with us as the audience consuming the 'fact' that Daily Mail readers are all attached to bourgeoisie norms. It is a function of Barthes theory that it it is not specifically an anti capitalist theory but any form of dogma, including, for example, socialist dogma (the most explicit of all) and religion.

Today’s bourgeoisie are smarter – they’ve moved on to new forms of managerialism which seek to shape environments, produce compliance through micro-management and graded rewards and punishments, and command in a way which seems inclusive, while making their own framing role unconditional and invisible.




This is a really good point: the idea that our control mechanisms have morphed into something more subtle.

 

 

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson 2: Mythologies

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: A Critical Theory of Myths

In the second of his series on Roland Barthes, political theorist Andrew Robinson presents the French author's theory of myths.

Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.

Myth is a metalanguage. It turns language into a means to speak about itself. However, it does this in a repressive way, concealing the construction of signs. The system of myths tends to reduce the raw material of signifying objects to similarity.

Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy which motivates them. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, myths don’t hide anything. Instead, myths inflect or distort particular images or signs to carry a particular meaning. Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the sign.

Barthes’s main objection to myth is that it removes history from language. It makes particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen. It thus transforms history into nature. Its function is to freeze or arrest language. It usually does this by reducing a complex phenomenon to a few traits which are taken as definitive.

This is the key to Barthes' theory myth: it is a bad thing; it distorts and freezes, in effect making a connotation into a denotation, the "goes without saying" problem, the "truth" that is actually a convenient social construct.  

Crucially, myths remove any role for the reader in constructing meanings. Myths are received rather than read. A message which is received rather than read does not require an interpretation through a code. It only requires a certain cultural knowledge.

The consumer of myth must here be differentiated from others who actually do read myths. To the semiotician, like Barthes, a myth is just an ‘alibi’, a way of covering up the lack of ground which essences really have. To a producer of myths, such as a newspaper editor choosing a cover photo, they are simply examples or symbols, consciously chosen. In either case, the myth is not ‘received’ as such. Both the journalist and the semiotician knows very well that the myth is constructed.

According to Barthes, someone who consumes a myth – such as most tabloid readers – does not see its construction as a myth. They see the image simply as the presence of the essence it signifies. For instance, they see in the saluting black soldier the presence of French imperiality. They are then convinced that what they’ve seen is a fact, a reality, even an experience – as if they’d actually lived it. It is this kind of reader who reveals the ideological function of myth.

It might be easier to substitute 'producer' of myths here rather than 'reader'.

Barthes sees myth as functioning in a similar way to Althusserian interpellation. It calls out to the person who receives it, like a command or a statement of fact. The content of the injunction is to identify the sign with the essence.

A rare example of where there is some unification of theory.

As a result of myth, people are constantly plunged into a false nature which is actually a constructed system. Semiotic analysis of myth is a political act, establishing the freedom of language from the present system and unveiling the constructedness of social realities. The contingent, historical, socially constructed capitalist system comes to seem as ‘life’, ‘the world’, ‘the way it is’.

Myth is always clear when seen from the standpoint of the signifier which has been robbed. For instance, the mythical nature of the use of the image of the black soldier is apparent if the soldier’s actual narrative is known or considered.

Another aspect of the functioning of myth is that it refuses the explanatory or analytical level. It states facts and posits values, but it does not use theories to explain social phenomena. Facts are taken as self-present, not as mysteries to be explained. The statement of facts or values without explaining them gives an illusory clarity, making it seem that they are obvious, they go without saying.

The goes without saying point is one of Barthes' strongest arguments in my view.

Barthes lists seven common techniques or figures of myth:

1) Inoculation – admitting a little bit of evil in an institution so as to ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. For instance, admitting the existence of ‘a few bad eggs’ in the police so as to cover up the abusive nature of official police practices.

2) Removing history – making it seem like social phenomena simply ‘exist’ or are there for the viewer’s gaze, eliminating both causality and agency. Neoliberalism, for instance, is often treated as ‘globalisation’ or ‘modernisation’, as an abstract economic necessity rather than a political strategy.

3) Identification of the other with the self – projecting inner characteristics onto the other. For instance, in trials, treating a deviant person as a version of the self which has gone astray, based on a view of crime as rooted in human nature. The actual person, their motives and meanings are written out of such accounts.

4) Tautology – treating the failure of language as expressing the essence of a thing – “theatre is theatre”, “Racine is Racine”, or “just because, is all”. Barthes believes this device is an order not to think.

5) Neither-norism – refusing radical differences between phenomena by combining them in a kind of middle ground marked by immobility and permanence. The Third Way is a current example.

6) Quantification of quality – treating differences in kind as differences in degree.

7) Statements of fact without explanation – ‘that’s just the way it is’. The idea of ‘common sense’ is used to command the pursuit of truth to stop at a certain point.

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson 1: Semiotics

While reading Myth Today,  I came across a series of essays written by Andy Robinson in Ceasefire, asnd accessible from http://seansturm.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/six-essays-from-ceasefire-on-barthes-by-andrew-robinson/.

While is is necessary to read the original essays in the course reader, it is also useful to consider the analysis of other authors who have more experience and can highlight matters that might not be evident from reading the original.

Robinson's essays are written in clear and understandable style. It is not continuous prose so I have liberally copied and pasted parts of the essays here; it scarcely seems necessary to "summarize the summarizers". My comments are in italics. Particularly important phrases are in bold.

An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes and Semiotics

Roland Barthes was one of the earliest structuralist or poststructuralist theorists of culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism. Barthes was always an outsider, and articulated a view of the critic as a voice from the margins. He was an outsider in three ways: he was gay, he was Protestant in a Catholic culture, and he was an outsider in relation to French academic establishment. By the end of his life, however, he was widely renowned both in France and beyond.

It is always useful to understand the background and standing of authors. The idea that Barthes was an outsider is critical.

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. He is often considered a structuralist, following the approach of Saussure, but sometimes as a poststructuralist.

A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth. As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation of social phenomena. 

One characteristic of Barthes’s style is that he frequently uses a lot of words to explain a few. He provides detailed analyses of short texts, passages and single images so as to explore how they work.

Barthes is indeed verbose; I would add that he has a tendency to define things but provide no explanation as to the definition, or to define things twice, such as literal = denoted, symbolic = connoted.

In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression). The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary.

He is strongly opposed to the view that there is anything contained in a particular signifier which makes it naturally correspond to a particular signified. There’s no essence of particular groups of people (humanity, Britishness) or objects (chairness, appleness) which unifies them into a category or separates them from others. For instance, there is no such thing as human nature ....The division into categories is always a process of social construction. 

This is a key part of Barthesian analysis - in effect there is no objectivity.

He largely replaces Saussure’s term ‘arbitrary’ with the term ‘motivated’. The relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary only from the point of view of language. From a social point of view, it channels particular interests or desires. It can be explained by reference to the society in which signs operate, and the place of the signs within them. 

Nothing is really meaningless. Signs are neither irrational nor natural. Signs are taken to operate on a continuum, from ‘iconic’ with one strong meaning to users, through ‘motivated’, to the truly ‘arbitrary’. They vary along this continuum as to how tightly defined they are. Most signs have strong enough connotations and associations to be at least partly ‘motivated’.

The main disagreement here is with the view of language as something akin to mathematical symbols designating particular objects. This kind of reference is one of the roles of language, known as denotation. However, language-use also tends to be affected by a second type of use, known as connotation. Mistaking connotations for denotations is one of the things which makes conventional uses seem natural.