Barthes, Semiotics and the Revolt Against Structuralism

[Music] roland bart is one of the most important and influential of the contemporary french cultural critics he died in 1980 but before he had uh finished his final work he had broken decisively with the most important traditions in post-world war ii um western european thought particularly he made a decisive break with structuralism and with marxism and the result of his investigations which are organized around the theme of semiotics the theory of science served to drive the tendency of contemporary french culture and perhaps to some degree the tendency of contemporary high culture throughout the west towards post-structuralism and post-modernism so this is bart's great achievement which is bound up with his critical activities and we might be inclined to say that uh bart is offers us one possible reading of nietzsche in fact bart's reading of nietzsche which emphasizes aesthetics which emphasizes a critical stance which emphasizes the outsider status of the critic actually transforms the critic into a creative artist and in the process of expanding the domain of the critic and expanding the creativity of the critic creates a new sort of art form or if not a new sort of art form a new approach to human creativity which allows for the questioning of all previously established verities and allows for the undermining and interrogation of what postmodernists call foundational discourses now because barr was a french intellectual who was simultaneously protestant homosexual and without a terminal degree he had become ill when he was supposed to stand for his final examinations he was very much an outsider in the french in the french academy he was everything that most french intellectuals are not and for that reason i think that there were personal issues which tended to drive his demythologizing project which made him more sensitive to the hidden coercions to the hidden hypocrisies in the contemporary state of french intellectual culture but also particularly french mass culture bart is remarkable for his very sensitive and very intelligent readings of mass culture and the artifacts of mass culture what he does is use semiotics which i'll explain in a bit to try and decode the artifacts of mass culture to discern what hidden messages are being generated in these cultural artifacts and who it is that's generating these messages for what purposes usually coercive of course because he at least starts out in the marxist tradition and ultimately the point or at least initially his point of demythologizing of finding the hidden meanings caught within the artifacts of mass culture was to liberate us from the tyranny of mass-produced consciousness so he wants to free us to liberate us and perhaps individuate us he says in his in a piece called the lovers discourse which is a lovely book very half novelistic and half essayist it's quite a lovely piece he says that the reason why he wrote the book is because the discourse is a discourse of profound loneliness and in fact to continue bart is continuing a theme that was developed in the middle part of the 20th century in french culture the idea of the lonely ego existentially operating in a void of meaning in a void of coherence deciding arbitrarily how to arrange and fix the world in a way almost constructing the world so bart like many french intellectuals is retreating into interiority is retreating away from the external world and trying to suggest that the external world is constructed by us not given to us right if you can see this in some ways a derivation from the kantian project or showing that we actively construct the external world but it's much more radical than khan's project because what bart is going to argue is ultimately that we construct not just the world of signs the area of society the domain of history also ultimately nature is a social and linguistic construct so in a way you could say that he's formulating a sort of cartesian aesthetics in which the lonely ego confronts a completely indeterminate world and the project is then interesting creative pleasurable world making so what bart is doing is liberating the critic liberating the ego and liberating the self from preconceived identities and from arbitrary and spurious limitations on human activity we might want to say that bart created a poetic protest against human limitations and it's in the form of a demythologizing myth we will find ironically enough at the end of his project that bart goes so far in the process of semiotic demythologizing that not only does he conclude that he is able to demythologize the various artifacts of mass culture around him but he becomes reflexive and ironic and undertakes to inquire into structuralism and marxism and semiotics itself if it is not also a myth with a hidden agenda and so what we end up with is the demythologizer ends up demythologizing demythology and what you end up with then is a sort of meta myth an ironic assertion that instead of unmasking reality so that we can see the true face the substantial reality beneath we are going to unmask reality and find beneath that it's just another mask and then it turns out to be masks all the way down there's no face underneath it there is no substantial reality so what bart is doing is withdrawing into interiority to a very carefully and thoroughly cultivated self and bart is i would say the great philosophical exponent of pleasure and the pleasure principle in contemporary thought the sort of person that moves away from the external world tries to render it dubious contingent arbitrary and dependent upon construction by the self is the sort of person that feels oppressed by the external world and would like to remove all those limitations i would be tempted to say that bart's word in some respects represents the triumph of the pleasure principle over the reality principle he withdraws into his mind the way the epicurean does into withdraw into his pleasure garden and that's the reason why one of his finest and latest works is called the pleasures of the text what he has done by liberating us from authority and from the author and from any preconceived predetermined meaning within a text is to mean that is to say that we as critics as careful readers of the text have completely free play their our domain is one of complete power and complete control by withdrawing any meaning by killing off the author and saying all we have is the text it makes the critic like a creative artist now the best book to start out with if you're going to read bart and i personally have really enjoyed reading bart because he's such a wit he has a very morbid sarcastic wit and he's very somewhat like oscar wilde in the sense that it's a kind of exercise and sarcasm which is very very arched and carefully drawn it's the strong point of french culture has always or high culture has always been its powerful connection between philosophy and poetry well their philosophical thinkers for the most part are closely allied to poetic expression poetic considerations aesthetic considerations and bart i think is one of the extreme examples of that tendency now in a book called mythologies which he wrote in 57 what we have here is a a combination a rather ironic combination of marxist culture critique something like that which we found in say the frankfurt school unmasking the media of mass communications things like advertising showing that they are a way of exercising social control performed in the interests of a certain small elite within society well bart is doing something like that in his mythologies it's a collection of short essays in which he examines various artifacts from french culture in the 1950s and demythologizes them he says this is what it appears to mean this is what it appears to signify and yet there is another hidden second level of meaning that goes beyond that and that's what he's searching for he calls the second level of meaning myth now at the end of it is at least in the english american edition is an essay that bart wrote 14 years after he wrote his book mythologies and that's called myth today and that's where he begins this project of ironic reconsideration of the demythologizing project where he says you know what it may have been that i was unable to pull off what i was trying to pull off because it may be masks all the way down if there is no substantial reality behind appearance then the possibility of de-mythologizing the world completely disappears just one myth after another let me give some examples of his activity and this may make it a little bit more sensible what he does is semiotics and symbiotics can be defined as the as the science of signs or the theory of science the general science of science is what decessor calls it it's a subset of structural linguistics which was founded and organized by diesel around the turn of the century and semiotics views the human domain as the domain of symbols as the domain of signs and what it does is try and read these symbols read these signs and look for their internal coherence semiotics is in turn is concerned primarily with the internal coherence of relations between signs the relation between science and the world is not memetic in the sense that it doesn't represent the world rather the relationship between signs and is semiotic in other words internal coherence of the system of symbols is what we're talking about not the correspondence between the content of the symbols and the world it corresponds to a shift in the in the conception of truth semiotics holds to the idea of a coherence conception of truth if the symbol said is coherent it's very much similar to what rorty believes if the symbol said is coherent well then there's nothing to judge it by we can judge it by whether it reflects the world because it is assumed at the outset that systems of symbols do not mimic the world that mimesis is impossible rather their truth is to be found in the internal coherence of the systems think about something like non-euclidean geometry we look around for an application of it and there aren't very many perhaps there are none well that maybe may mean that you non-euclidean geometry fails if we our standard is correspondence to the world but if our understanding of truth is coherence well then it's perfectly satisfactory it's just as true as something like euclidean geometry well bart is adopting a set of assumptions roughly like that now let me give some examples of this make a little more sensible examples of semiotic systems are something like psychoanalysis or marxism right linguistic systems that are separate and incommensurable right and in addition things like clothing the kind of clothes you wear that's a semiotic system all right uh mass culture things like advertising or mtv an extremely powerful semiotic system all right let me give you some examples of how something like this would work all right and you'll realize that you've been doing semiotic analysis all your life a sailor gets off a ship comes into port two women come up and say hi sailor one of them is wearing a long black dress and has a crucifix around her neck and she's a nun and she says to the sailor hello sailor hi and what she's doing is saying hello to the sailor another woman comes out she's dressed in red satin hot pants right and a see-through blast says hi sailor now clearly that person is a prostitute not a nun and clearly high sailor means something very different in that semiotic system the point being that the way she is dressed is a text that the sailor is reading which is why he knows how not to proposition the none doesn't that make sense and we're doing it all the time bart wrote a wonderful book called the system of fashion in which he analyzes ladies fashion and he treats it as a semiotic system and he's right it is a system of science it's a remarkable idea so one of the utilities of this is that it can be applied to the entire human domain all kinds of communicative activity or every kind of sign can be broken down and analyzed we can find its first order meeting and then perhaps we can also find a second order meaning and that second order meaning the myth that underlies it that hidden meaning that's bart's project it's a very interesting set of thoughts all right now let me give you some examples of this make a little more sensible bart has a wonderful sense of humor and he seems to be attracted to kind of the bizarre and odd in the world he finds things that approach the world obliquely and ironically and it's strange that a highly cultivated extremely co extremely a sensitive french intellectual should write an essay on professional wrestling on detergent on striptease on the brain of einstein remember that brian's brain was taken out and put in a jar and saved is an essay on that as a cultural icon in other words u.s what does that mean plastic he reads it what does plastic mean what's the myth hidden in it you wouldn't have thought perhaps there was any myth hidden in it in fact this is bart's project to go from surface structure to deep structure after he reconsiders it 10 15 years later perhaps he realizes there's only surface structure and just move from one surface to another let me give you some examples of what he tells us about wrestling that's worthwhile and why i think this guy is really deep and if not always deep and not always accurate always entertaining and very sharp he says wrestling is something that's laughed at by intellectuals all us professional smart guys with phds we look down upon professional wrestling and the people that go and really doesn't amount to very much because it's kind of well childish it's silly it's pseudo sport in fact bart has another reading it's a much deeper reading he says the reason why people working class people go to wrestling is because it's a spectacle not a sport they're not stupid they know full well this is entirely rigged entirely fixed so the question arises for bart which wouldn't perhaps arise in the minds of most intellectuals the hell do they get out of this what's the point of it why go to see this spectacle well bart has a real interesting way of looking at it he says this idea of a community spectacle where we already know the outcome and what we're cheering really is symbols or or the personified symbols of various kinds of cultural trends for example uh hulk hogan or someone like that comes out dressed as an american hero wearing the flag we're all rooting for america and he's the personification of that which is why we know in advance that he's got to win well here's what bart says about wrestling he says not only is this not what it appears to be but in fact if you look back you will find in the spectacle of wrestling the origin of addict drama uh when tragedy started out it was not high art it was popular art and everybody knew exactly what was going on and the end was foretold everybody knew it and what was going on in oedipus the same thing that's going on with hulk hogan in a way oedipus repres is a symbol not a person and we all know the outcome of the story we all know how this has to end we're just cheering on because it creates a sense of social solidarity among us you know he represents us so like it's a real put down or come down because it's characteristic of contemporary intellectuals to think of something like tragedy as the highest of high art what is a greater achievement of attic culture than oedipus well bart thinks that oedipus at least started out and we've transformed it but at least the way it started out was something like hulk hogan it was all the people the average man in the street or man in the agora would go in there and cheer away no one full well that oedipus has to get it in the end and the point is that it's a spectacle not a sport it is a for it is a tale which is foregone and it is a system of signs which is a very interesting thought you didn't think you could read professional wrestling in fact it's a text very interesting thought all right let me take it a little further detergent this is a very interesting thing and it's very funny because somehow i can't imagine bart covering something like he was being do something rather journalistic the world congress of detergents in 1954 so apparently all the detergent manufacturers got together in france in paris which seems like an unlikely place to hold a detergent convention and they had all kinds of advertisements for the various kinds of detergents and what he did was he actually looked at the advertisements as a text and read them and he said what is this telling us well for example when we find out that uh that lux deep cleans linen what does that tell us well first of all tells you that linen is deep who would have thought that what does it mean for linen to be deep very odd stuff and he elaborates the carefully constructed distinctions that are being that are being created between roughly equivalent identical products one is green the other is blue chemically they may be completely identical we've changed the food coloring completely different advertising companion campaign connected to them one is appealing to i know the man of the house because it shows a guy lumberjacking and then washing his hands with the blue stuff blue is masculine if you got pink stuff and a woman is doing dishes pink is feminine chemically it may be completely identical but what we are doing here is constructing a contemporary myth and what bard is saying is that myth has become a commodity and commodities have become myths in a way it's a it's a change in the old marxist formula cmc from from capital volume one uh commodity money commodity what bart is thing that we have is is uh uh consumer goods and then mythology and then more consumer goods and that can consumer goods serve the purpose in this function in this culture that used to be served by the transcendence of religious objects in other words we fetishize consumer goods which is why we bow down and worship this year's new cadillac and this a drum roll before we bring it out why because it is a new kind of icon of mid of a contemporary life of ease of luxury i mean imagine a cadillac commercial what you see is cadillac style right what this means is cadillac style what is the myth implicit there rich people happy people people who have good lives have cadillacs to be a to have a cadillac is to have a good life cadillac means good life right there are myths being constructed and our new mythologizers are not homer are not shakespeare they are admin it's a real deep and caustic argument now he investigates striptease and he finds out or he comes he draws the inference that the process of striptease desexualizes woman why because it never goes the entire way it never turns into sex it's an elaborate ritual in which we get a sort of catharsis for men's sex drives who are the vast majority of the people who make up the audience and it is a sort of ritual it is entirely stereotyped you could almost construct a formula for it and what he says is this is just the construction of the myth of woman and in particular the idea that sexuality is incomplete in this sort of ritual he moves to the brain of einstein which is a wonderful little essay and what he says is what the myth underlying that is that knowledge is a formula we have knowledge in a box here einstein's brain somehow inside that knowledge is enclosed within space see we have einstein's brain some day we're going to know exactly what makes this knowledge and exactly what makes us such a great brain but for now we're just keeping it in a box knowledge is in a box it's the opposite of a postmodern icon einstein's brain destroy the brain and break the box that's post-modernism all right and finally plastic who'd have thought you could read plastic what a perverse idea well bart reads plastic and what he finds underneath the plastic image is the myth of infinite transformation you can turn plastic into anything you can change its color you can change its shape you can make it do all kinds of stuff plastic is the ultimate postmodern substance plastic has infinite freedom infinite transformation plastic in both its adjectival and noun senses okay now let's think about myth in particular that essay on myth today what happens in myth and the reason why myth is misleading is because myth dissolves the realm of history by making it appear as nature it makes the world appear natural and given it disguises the message that is being proposed and the most important of bart's examples of this which has been discussed ad infinitum ad nauseam and the criticism of bart is a the picture of the negro soldier here's the idea he's looking at some french magazine and what he sees in the mid 50s is the picture of a negro soldier saluting the french tri-color and apparently he's dressed in a military uniform and the idea is that on the first level on the first level of relation between the sign and the thing signified let's examine that photograph level one we have a sign which is this piece of paper which has a film of light and dark spots on it that's what a photograph is in a literal strict sense okay what that sign signifies is a picture it is the saluting negro soldier so that's level one that's the obvious surface level of what that photograph means but bart says you know what that photograph really means at level two in which we transform think of it this way think of the photograph relating to the uh idea or the image of the negro soldier as a sign relating to a thing signified so far so good because semiotics investigates the investigates science and their relationships to what they signify now let's take that image of the negro soldier and put it back in the first place and turn that into us into a sign itself and then have that signify some second order thing so we're bootstrapping ourselves up into a new level of meaning and what bart says is obvious about this photo is that it's an apology for french colonialism he's saying despite the fact that the french colonial empire is breaking down despite the fact that we have considerable move against colonialism and that there's a considerable racist element an imperialist element in french political life in fact there's no problem at all what us worry look look at the happy content loyal docile negro soldier that's why he's saluting the tri-color there and that's what that message is really all about he says that's really exactly in other words he thinks all the artifacts of modern culture are like that and we are all under influenced by a sort of disguised coercion it's a deep argument let me make it a different analogy and make it a little more sensible and bring it home in contemporary america rambo what is rambo well on one level it's a series of dots on a movie screen right and what it shows is uh sylvester stallone killing 500 people being the toughest guy around and being invincible he's something like the modern achilles now that's the first level that's the obvious surface meaning what's the second level the mythological meaning the mythological meaning is that america didn't lose the vietnam war we won the vietnam war was a strategic retreat and we're still strategically retreating from it by constructing works of art which say it wasn't really a problem one american can kill 500 of anybody we're the toughest people in the world we never die we never bleed we never worry we always get the job done in other words the myth of american invincibility is built into the rambo movies i mean it's impossible to miss it is obviously has an ideological mythic content to it now there may turn out to be a method i'm pretty sure they will turn out to be a plurality perhaps an infinite plurality of possible mythic readings remember once the text becomes completely open that means you can do whatever you want with it and you can treat it and read it as being whatever you like because there is no authority behind it so bart in some ways gives with one hand and takes away with the other right offers us one reading but then points out that this reading is not closed that there are an infinite number of other possible readings um we might be i might be tempted to say that semiotics is what i would call an open system rather than a closed system in that respect it's like vikingstonian language games right and that means that there are an infinite number of overlapping games that don't necessarily conflict with each other consider the proposition for example that uh we do a marxist analysis of the american civil war and we find out that abraham lincoln freed the slaves because of his feelings about authority towards his father or something or we do it we do a freudian analysis we also might want to do a marxist analysis saying that the reason lincoln freed the slaves is because he was the agent of advanced capitalism the point that is made by bart is that semiotics tells us these systems are not mutually exclusive that you could what you're doing is just describing the same thing under the aegis of two different semiotic systems in other words psychoanalysis does not refute the marxist interpretation of history the marxist interpretation does not refute psychoanalysis they are two incommensurate and mutually exclusive semiotic systems and there is an infinite possible proliferation of semiotic systems so we get an infinitude of criticism and infinititude of interpretation right in some ways you might say that bart's project is v is the inverse of that of gotomer gotomer says we should strive for clarity of interpretation strive to appropriate and renew our connection to a cultural tradition because it's a necessity for us but also what we should strive for is the clarity of our interpretation transparency of interpretation bart goes exactly the opposite way he says there is no clarity of interpretation that's one of the most dangerous myths of all in fact once you think that you have clarified to the one final and only interpretation that is the most ideological kind of self-delusion self-deception so what he's done then with by with his semiotic breakthrough is undermine the presuppositions of marxist and structuralist culture critique remember that structuralism thinks that it's discerning the ultimate algebra inside whatever it investigates and marxism believes that it is truly unmasking bourgeois ideology to get to the reality of class conflict and exploitation bart's point is that none of these activities are real they're just substituting one myth for another you can't get beyond it all right now let's look at the way he handles myth and what he does with semiotics in this final essay uh myth today he calls myth the theft of language because it depoliticizes language you don't see or at least initially on first observation one does not notice that rambo is an apology for american interventionism it's an apology for american foreign policy which has been for the most part a failure you know at least with regard to vietnam well his point is that what we want to move to is politicized speech where it is obvious that there is some agenda behind that sort of a construction and once we re-politicize it earlier in his career he thought that we could get to the real substantial truth later on what it turns out is that this mythic demythologizing is in fact the construction of a left wing myth in fact the demythologizer turns out to be the remythologizer and that means that the critic is in fact the poet he's a creative artist and the critic relates to the work of art the way the artist relates to nature in the sense that think about the plato's example from the feeders where or play this example from the public where he says uh an artist looks at a bed and draws a picture of it and then a poet will we'll look at that and take it a little bit further we have three levels of reality we have the ultimate bed in the sky form of the bed we have the bed down here and then we have the artist statistic reconstruction of it well bart wants to add a new level to that we have the critical reconstruction of the artist text it can be a painting it can be a literary work it'd be anything but he is just as free in how he interprets it so now we have a new domain for the artist to work in previously artists have been describing the physical world the social world well now it is possible for a new sort of critical art to choose as its domain the world of artistic creation itself it's a sort of the criticism then becomes a meta art right and then we get the completely free play of the text now here's the idea behind this what he's looking to do is undermine the authority of the author he describes this as the death of the author the author has been abolished and the reason why he wants to abolish the author and abolish authority is because that's what gives the critic completely free play within the domain of the text if for example a critic offers a reading of a of a poem or a play and the author happens to be around and he says to the critic well that's not what i meant bart and that sort of critic this quarter sort of post-structuralist critic the semiotic critic will say so what the text is completely free what you think it means has nothing to do with what it means as far as i'm concerned and there's no way you can legislate this for me the the mere historical contingent fact that you didn't mean that it's just not my problem i got the text and that's all that matters so we eliminate intentionality and authority from the text we impose whatever we want on it you might want to say that what he's done is liberate the connection between the signifier and the thing signified he says you can have it signify whatever you want you take a text you take a sign and whatever signification you want to attach to it that's perfectly satisfactory do not be constrained by any externalities retreat back into your own aesthetic judgment to your own aesthetic experience and the world is completely yours it's the completely the domain of pleasure and your own freedom now what bart says is something like this or the conclusion he ultimately comes to is that every limitation on human freedom is ultimately a myth and in fact clarity which apparently makes the mises possible is one of the most dangerous myths because in fact signs discourse communication is neither clear nor obscure do not create a myth of obscurity either that's not going to work right so he doesn't want to go either way he says you can't generalize about it he doesn't have any satisfactory resolution he's caught between a rock and a hard place um towards the end of his essay on myth today he goes to great length to try and convince us that right-wing politics is more essentially and closely caught up with myths than left-wing politics but of course it's so evidently done in bad faith he's so evidently trying to soft-pedal the mythic element of left-wing politics that when you step back and look at it what's clearly going on here is the ironic critical construction of a new meta myth which supports the projects he happens to like he this has decided it has decided to read the domain of mythology as if it particularly pertained to people and things that and tendencies that he disapproves of of course when you go back and read between the lines what he is is trashing the entire proposition that we can de-mythologize the world there is no substantial reality he's retreated back into subjectivity can you see why i call this a sort of cartesian aesthetics it's me me me but instead of trying to find out say the mathematical structure of the world he's trying to find out how can i maximize my feelings of pleasure with regard to the text he says this in so many words where he comes pretty close to saying it in so many words uh the second to last page of mythologies myth today he says even here in these mythologies i have used trickery finding it painful constantly to work on the evaporation of reality i have started to make it excessively dense and to discover in it a surprising compactness which i savored with delight so the justification for this critical activity is not the fact that it truly represents the world because you can't truly represent the world the justification for it is that he really savors it with delight in other words this is the triumph of the pleasure principle over the reality principle right we can choose two ways to go in this domain of postmodern post-structuralist weightlessness we can move towards the will to power or we can move towards the will to pleasure foucault chooses the the first road he moves towards the will to power and towards political activity bart moves away from political power towards pleasure and in moving towards pleasure he withdraws into a sort of aesthetic quietism in which you can have political activity as a sort of hobby but you can't quite take it with the grim and determined seriousness that bart does he's involved too much in absorbing the pleasures of the text he's become an intellectual aesthete all right and pleasure is the only justification for any intellectual activity because it can't mimic the world so all of human life is potentially the domain of freedom creativity which is to say art and the transformation of life into art is one of the most powerful and worthwhile readings of nietzsche you can see how this is all homage to nietzsche in a way and the idea that there's no distinction between appearance and reality that ultimately all we have is an infinite series of masks and an infinite series of illusions what could be more niche and perspectival what could be more ironic and at the same time gratify one's will to power particularly if the will to power has been transformed into me me me simple internality the will to power becomes the will to pleasure it's worth comparing bart's work to the work of some of the other structuralists or marxists to see the uniqueness of his sort of position and also to see how in some respects it all simultaneously expresses a general collective tendency in particularly french intellectual high culture one of his contemporaries altaser tried to unify marxism in structuralism and that in some ways is the last of the modernist paradigms we get these giant deterministic systems and then try and show that they both operate simultaneously and are both part of some larger meta system well bart knew altaser and just and his reaction to this was saying look this is the worst thing you can possibly do the reason we are giving up structuralism the reason we are giving up marxism is because these large deterministic systems first of all inhibit and as a matter of fact prohibit human freedom right freedom turns out to be an illusion you get these giant deterministic systems and in addition to that they all entail totalizing discourses huge meta narratives big picture stories which no one believes in anymore no one takes seriously at least bart says that the people who are on the cutting edge of high culture at the time that he is writing can no longer take seriously the idea that everything has a secret algebra hidden inside it and it's the job of structuralists to find the secret algebra hidden in mathematics hidden in crystals hidden in biological life forms hidden in literacy constructs and also hidden in anthropology he says no there's no secret algebra hidden in everything that's a myth that you people made up so that you could legitimize structuralist discourse he says the party's over for that we got so good at being critical we got so good at being negative and negating we negated the sort of structures which made this criticism and negation possible in some respects uh i think it was a one of the the the artists involved in the data movement who constructed a machine that the first time you plugged it in it destroyed itself well that is very much this conception of culture you plug the machine in it criticizes everything around it and then when it gets kind of antsy it starts to criticize itself and that process of destruction that niche philosophizing with a hammer becomes a sort of intellectual vandalism and nothing is left except the ego but there isn't even a complete self because when we break down the structures of communication the structures of knowledge and the structures of linguistic interaction which give us some real hold to the external world it ultimately means that we're moving in the direction of solipsism remember why i call this cartesian aesthetics and that means that it's just me and my world and whatever i might happen to wish to do with it the advantage of this is it allows us completely free play within the domain of our experience and within the domain of our mental activity the disadvantage of it is that it is a hopeless attempt to avoid the external world and the problem is that the external world is still there whether you like it or not as dr johnson said i refuted thus there it is bart thinks that this is another ideological construct and that the external world is socially constructed linguistically constructed and we could simply unconstruct it if it gets in our way it's amazing the degree of egoism and wishful thinking that you need to engage in before you can argue a project like this it is a it takes one set of presuppositions and radicalizes them take them as far as you can possibly go the problem is that the snake ultimately ends up eating its own tail and the whole project disappears this is what we get when we get to the end of towards the end of bart's life the last seven or eight years his work becomes intensely personal and it's not clear at some times whether he's writing a novel or whether he's writing a piece of literary criticism or whether he's writing a series of essays whether he's writing one essay or whether he's writing a book formally like that of nietzsche or say the gay science where it's just a series of vignettes that don't really hold together he completely gives up on the idea of structure or form it all begins to break down and this breakdown of literary structure this breakdown of communicative or communicative form is analogous to the breakdown of external reality and when we lose that direct mooring to the external world what happens is that the self begins to become contingent and dubious and fragmentary may i suggest that as wittgenstein pointed out the self like language is socially constructed and that when we try and remove ourselves from this from the external world the result is that we end up talking to ourselves right now i'm not certain that's a problem for bart i think that he finds this a sort of how can i put it um a sort of uh transcendence a sort of way of getting beyond the mere contingency the mere limitations of human life towards some new external other realm in a way i'd almost be saying i'd almost be tempted to say that he's reinventing metaphysics and instead of putting it somewhere else outside of space and time he's putting it within the domain of his own consciousness and then he's shooing away the rest of the world saying i'll allow you to exist if i decide to invent you linguistically but elsewise do not interfere with my activity i wish to be totally free so if shakespeare were to come to him and say i think you're misinterpreting one of my plays he would say well what does your opinion have to do with my freedom get away from my face right i have totally free play and what that amounts to is the idea that bart is a sort of anti-deadliest if you know the deadliest myth from greek mythology he's the one who found the way out of the labyrinth bart's reply is labyrinth what labyrinth i live here we're not trying to get out there is no out this is it you happen to be locked in your subjectivity and the domain of your universe ends with your fingertips and the idea that there is a way out of this problem that will allow us to find the way the world really is as opposed to the way the world is within the domain of our semiotic system is just the hopeless platonic dream of modernist meta of metaphysics from the time of the ancient greeks to the time of the moderns up to say levy strauss so what he's saying is this is it i live here get used to the absolute contingency of subjectivity and get used to replacing all your other standards things like logical coherence or correspondence to the external world move away from all that reality principle stuff just towards pleasure because that's the only thing that could ever justify any of your intellectual activity and even that doesn't justify there is no justification for intellectual activity what could we gesture at besides our own semiotic system and we're locked into that semiotic systems are incommensurable and untranslatable and because they're incremental and untranslatable there's no necessarily conflict between freudianism and marxism it's just there's no privileged position from which we can decide that freudianism as opposed to marxism is the true semiotic system which discloses ultimate reality there's just no such thing there's an infinite number of perspectives all right and that means that we break down into a work into a world in which we're all profoundly lonely and we have whole societies composed of atomized and available and culture together and can you see then why this is a a negative critique which finds certain tactical uses in asserting that demythologizing is at least possible or at least occasionally useful in advancing left-wing politics what we have here then is the artist or critic as political dilettante in other words bart likes to pursue politics once in a while because he finds it pleasurable and the sort of politics he likes to pursue is the politics which increases and extends his own pleasure and the reason why he does it well at the fundamental level is because he finds it pleasurable pleasure is the only thing that one can refer to but for tactical reasons it may be useful not to suggest that it may be worthwhile to write a book suggesting that left-wing myths are very different from right-wing myths and they're not nearly so mythological somehow and what he's doing is just creating a meta-myth a new myth and that means that we have a new order of poetry called literary criticism we have a new order of critic who is now the ultimate poet because where the poets had to accept accept contingency and had to accept the simple determination of the external world the critic is not bound by nature the critic is trying to undermine nature the critic flees from nature into the realm of the text and that's why i would be i think it's correct to describe bart as anti-deadliest the guy who says stop asking the question of how to get out of the labyrinth stop asking the question of how to find substantial reality independent of your semiotic mythologizing in fact it's masks all the way down and for that reason he adopts a sort of ironic stance because what is there left for the critic to do certainly he can't communicate any substance any reality about a text to anybody else because it won't be any more real than whatever they already believe whatever they already think the only thing he can do is indulge himself is gratify his desire for pleasure by increasing the domain of his freedom so that it covers all communicative behavior so it covers the whole set of signs nature for example is one of our signs for external coercion the externality of things well we can treat that as a myth as well the whole world then becomes a human domain constructed by human beings in society and constructed by human beings in language it is cartesianism raised to a social collective level based not upon physics but upon aesthetics for some reasons that i think are clear they caught such a great thinker french culture has never been able to get out from under the shadow of descartes they all have a problem with either accepting their own selfhood or demonstrating the reality of the external world it easily slips off into solidism if you start your philosophical investigations from the inside it's gonna be so hard to make that jump to outside stuff it may be there but then again it may not summing up then let's think about what this amounts to first of all it's very clear that the demystifier in this case bart is also a remystifier that the critic is an artist this is a position of extreme solitude a sort of epicurean withdrawal into the safety and sanctity and security of the soul and the result is that we have an ironic meta myth he intends to communicate us to us the the fact that there's really nothing to communicate about these texts except the fact that they are totally free and open and there's no authority which you can refer to as coercing or limiting your interpretation what i would say goes on here then is that in constructing this cartesian aesthetics bart makes readers little gods and gives them omnipotence over an infinite domain called the literary text

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 104,267

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Barthes, Semiotics, Revolt Against Structuralism

Id: _RLhq0jsnbM

Length: 44min 16sec (2656 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021