Roland Barthes and the Development of Semiology

Roland Barthes developed semiology, a critical approach initiated by Saussure, into a practice useful for analyzing a wide variety of texts. Most of his writings are short applications of his semiological method, with extensions of the notion of text to objects that we might not consider texts at all and an overall disruptive effect that is accessible to younger composition students. In this post, I will focus on an essay in a popular anthology called Mythologies, which has as a final section an outline of Barthes’ explication of semiology in theory and practice–an essay called Myth Today.

Barthes defines semiology as “a science of forms” that “studies significations apart from their content” (111); the forms under study have a direct relation to mythology, initially defined as “a type of speech” (109). This science, he claims, “has not yet come into being” (111), even though the term had been coined decades earlier by Saussure. The types of speech, are “by no means confined to normal speech” (110), confirming what I have also observed over the decades–all cultural objects are potential texts with mythical power. Mythology itself is a type of communication where meaning seems to be stripped from its object, in a scientific manner that considers just three ostensibly simple elements, “the signifier, the signified and the sign” (114) and the mechanisms by which a sign becomes a new signifier. However, these elements are a bit complicated to explain.

What Barthes’ seems to have done is correlate Saussure’s langue paradigm, where the signified is a concept, the signifier is an acoustic image, and the relation between the two is a sign (113), with Freud’s manifest and latent meanings of behavior, and the correlation of the two, as well as Sartre’s discourse as a signifier, “the original crisis in the subject” as the signified, and “the relation between crisis and discourse” as the sign (114). Despite this seeming complexity, however, “it knows only one operation: reading, or deciphering” (114).

This deciphering of texts requires visualizing two overlapping systems, a language system (language-object), which I will code in small-case as signified-signifier-sign, and a mythical system (metalanguage), which I will code in all-capitals as SIGNIFIED-SIGNIFIER-SIGN. In Barthes’ scheme, one of these is a simultaneous sign-SIGNIFIER, serving a language purpose as a sign and a mythologizing purpose as a SIGNIFIER. With this dual purpose “the signifier of myth [SIGNIFIER] presents itself in an ambiguous way” in that it starts out with a complete meaning from the language system but also voids itself of that meaning to represent something else–a myth (117). This dual sign-SIGNIFIER is connected, as “its point of departure [SIGNIFIER] is constituted by the arrival of a meaning [sign]” (123), which makes deciphering somewhat straightforward, although three possible readings can be derived, depending on whether the mythical SIGNIFIER is literal, distorted, or ambiguous (128); these first two types are analytical but the third type may be disruptive in connecting “a mythical schema to a general history,” moving semiology to questions of ideology and society (128).

In sum, myth is a type of “stolen language” that transforms meaning into form (131), possibly over and over again, with disruptive implications for interpreters of texts. While his theory is complex, his posthumous legacy of literary criticism, usually of the third type, helps simplify understanding of this approach to what was then, in his mind anyway, an emerging field of semiology.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang, 1972.

Dialogue Journals: Biting Off More Than One Can Chew

Ah, the beginning of a new academic year, and a chance not to repeat the mistakes of yesteryear. This one was not a bad mistake, as it was beneficial for all of my students, but it was devastating to an already-exhausted writing teacher swamped with papers to mark and lessons to plan.

My wise idea last year was to include dialogue journals as part of my assessment for freshmen. Each student had two small notebooks that they would use to write each week. They would exchange them with me once a week, after which I would read and make comments.

Now, at first I clearly instructed my students to focus on writing about writing. (Some pedagogues call this metacognition, though my high school critical thinking teacher has convinced me that’s a silly term as that would suggest the end of cognition.). But these were freshers, with new university experiences every day that they just had to share with their new teacher. Keeping these young students focused in their writing turned out to be impossible.

To make matters worse, my students had to show off their individualism by buying notebooks of every concievable size, color, and binding. Some even chose heavy leather covers! So once a week, I got to roll 98 journals around in my airplane luggage, just to go to class.

In the end, I’m glad this batch of nearly 100 students got to have dialogues with me. But I would never, ever, implement dialogue journals again. Never, ever! Too much work is bad for teacher.

Pornstar Names for Students

This morning I convinced one of my Chinese students to drop his conservative English name of Davidl Apologies to my colleague Dave Davies, but there’s nothing wrong with his old name; he just has more marketing potential with his new name. This is a Business English class after all!

David is now Mr. Happy. Mr. Happy has two classmates named Swallow and Fannie. That was a pre-existing condition, not my doing. But I do have two other gals considering the monikers Microphone and Doublemint.

Looking forward to the role-playing scenarios later this semester!

Blackmail, Chinese University Style

So I get a text message from a clerk flunky early this week, saying they have enough teachers at my university so they won’t be hiring me again this fall. Reminds me of the breaking-up-by-text-phenomenae explored in the film Up in the Air (with George Clooney). Lame, lame, lame. Considering they only have three foreign teachers here, and one of my colleagues has announced he is leaving, I started smelling something rotten after this text message.

Moon’em I thought, and sent out a few letters of interest that night. My prospects are bright away from this place. Only thing is I love it here, and hoped to guide my 2nd-year students through their 3rd-year literature curricula.

Tonight I heard from a 3rd-year student, that the administration is actually asking students to comment on whether I should be retained. So if I could kindly refrain from assigning homework, hint hint, maybe I could stay here.

Now that’s just bollocks. Blackmailing a teacher to not give homework, so that he can return next year only to teach another class where he ought not to ever prescribe homework ever again. No wonder China has never won a Nobel Prize; they are discouraging students from actually learning anything in their universities.

I’m supportive of student-centered learning, but student-directed slacking is for pussy teachers. So, while I will miss guiding my hard-working younger students next year, I will not let the hardly-working older students blackmail me.

Homework is necessary for cognition. The classroom is where guidance and exposure to information take place, but the real intellectual heavy lifting is with reading, re-reading, writing, and thinking that come with homework tasks.

I’m Sleepy

So I’m going to bed now.

Death of the Salesmen

From Saul Alinsky’s Rules for radicals: A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals (1971):
“There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.”

The Summer ’09 health care debate in the USA has the blue collar and hard hats prevailing over the liberal elites. Had the Democratic senators studied Saul Alinsky as their leader B. Hussein Obama has, they would accept that their defeat is because they failed to communicate with the middle class. The party-of-the-jackass’s tendency to talk down to, rather than seek buy-in from, the middle class ensures the movement to the right that pollsters are noticing in the States. This same rightward shift was predicted from the quote above.

In the world of salesmanship, prospects are buttered up. Their fears are validated, not necessarily agreed to, and empathy is shown. Then the salesman demonstrates how his goods or services match the needs of the potential customer. Saul Alinsky thought like a salesman. Congress didn’t. That’s why the ignorant middle class is moving to the right.

Health care reform is being killed by the condescension of liberalism, not by the ignorance of the mainstream. It is a sublime case of bad salesmanship.

When will those on the left stop letting liberals run the show?