Archive for February, 2010

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Barthes’ father was killed in WWI when he was only a year old. Raised by his mother, he dealt with repeated illness issues his whole life, including Tuberculosis. These problems kept him out of WWII. They also meant that he often had difficulty procurring teaching positions throughout his career.

He was also gay, and much of his work is often read in light of this fact. His resistance to bourgeois cultural values is often interpreted as a function of his sexual identity.

Barthes published extensively, solidfying his reputation as a scholar and theorist. “The Death of the Author,” his famous 1967 essay, argued that text created by the author supplanted the author’s authority within culture. Ironically, it also led to Barthes’ great critical reception by other literary theorists. Wikipedia has long bibliography of Barthes’ work.

“Mythologies” and “The Eiffel Tower”

Barthes saw myth as a set of semiotic relationships. And though, as any reader can see, he offers a meticulous and complex analysis of the semiotic operations at work, I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple for my own benefit. He calls myth an example of “speech” primarily because he sees it as a semiotic system. The easiest place to start are his assertions about myth’s function and character — that it commits “language robbery” (p. 131) by aiming for “immediate impression” rather than allowing thoughtful analysis (p. 130). Myth can do this because, through an elaborate semiological system, it “distorts” meaning by “distancing” history from the signifier. It doesn’t destroy this meaning, needing it as a vague and fuzzy base upon which to build. Instead, distance can be filled with whatever the bourgeois deem culturally or politically expedient by appropriating what they want from the meaning underneath. (Barthes sees myth as a distinctly bourgeois, right-wing phenomenon.)

His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth’s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.

In some sense, there is a connection to be made between Barthes and Benjamin’s concept of the aura. In effect, Benjamin is arguing this same distancing between the foundation of reality and the experience of stories about reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a myth that can be understood as a decontextualization of the hard reality of the artwork.

Barthes applies this method to the Eiffel Tower as a way of explicating its differing relationships to Parisians versus outsiders. The feeling imposed by an experience — that which evokes sentimental attachment to abstractions about time, place, or event — can serve as a way of distancing the observer from the history that might be found in the pre-mythic semiological system.

But Stephen Colbert can explain it better than I can:

DALLAS W SMYTHE (1907-1992)

Smythe was a Canadian-born scholar who worked as an economist in a number of government agencies in the United States in the early 2oth century. He was vocal about his socio-political stances, which often left him at odds with authorities, including difficulties getting published when he turned to teaching at the University of Illinois during the 1950s. See his Wikipedia page for more, or see this encyclopedia entry.

The International Association for Media and Communication Research gives an award named in honor of Smythe for quality scholarship dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and political economy.

Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (1981) is Smythe’s most widely known and excerpted work. He has a number of journal articles credited to him. An essay collection is also dedicated to him, and is, ironically enough, extremely expensive.

“On the Audience Commodity and Its Work”

Our excerpt, taken from Smythe’s 1981 book, seeks to recast critical Marxist theories about mass media, grounding them in a more “objective and realistic” theoretical framework (p. 231). In his estimation, previous efforts were, at best, incomplete because they did not consider “real life processes” (p. 231) that determined the relationship between media, advertisers, and audiences. He develops the concept of “audience power,” which he defines as an audience’s ability to “buy goods and spend their income accordingly” (p. 243) so as to perpetuate capitalism and therefore reify state-held power (p. 233). To accomplish this, Smythe argues that free- or leisure-time is really only an illusion that hides actual work and the commodification of virtually the entire life of any given individual who lives in a capitalistic society. By focusing conscious attention on the spectacle contained within media, “the real situation is mystified out of existence” (p. 241). Instead of viewing advertising as a necessity for creating and broadcasting media, Smythe views “non-advertising” content as a trojan horse really designed to sneak advertising into the homes, lives, and thought processes of audiences — what he terms a “free lunch” (p. 242-3). The effect, as he puts it, is to “reaffirm the status quo and retard change” (p. 243).

Questions and Connections

Several questions stick out to me:

• Is his approach any more realistically grounded than those he dismisses?
• How does his theory compare to other cultural materialist theories of media?
• How does the participatory internet alter or affirm his notion that industrialization destroys creativity (p. 233)?

Smythe is a determinist, but not in the same way as McLuhan. Whereas McLuhan sees all (or at least most) human agency as irrelevant in the face of technological form, Smythe sees technological form as an extension of market capitalist ideology, and as the site of a “social process” through which the relationship between people and commodities is formed. Instead of being the actor with the most agency, technology becomes the conduit through which agency is controlled. He’s similar to Williams in this point, yet the audience is just as unable to affect this process as they are in McLuhan’s scheme. The use of the “free lunch” is distracting enough to hide the areas in need of critical examination.

Thus, I find him oddly reminiscent of Gramsci, in spite of his insistence that he’s more “objectively” and “realistically” grounded than Gramsci and others. Really, he seems primarily intent on providing empirical evidence of media as a hegemonic process. Yet, he does seem just as guilty in over-generalizing his theories, particularly with respect to print journalism pre-WWI.

Thoughts?