"And the people bowed and prayed/
to the neon sign they made..."
- Paul Simon, The Sounds of Silence
The book sat unread on my shelf for decades, its shiny white cover in the elegant Gallimard edition
gathering dust for long periods until rescued and delicately inserted between other books so that only
the spine lay visible with its title and author prominently displayed in black characters on white
background: “L’Empire des Signes, Roland Barthes”. Like most bibliophiles, then as now, I gathered for
my library books far in excess of what I could feasibly read. Barthes’s was one I kept pushing to the
perimetre of my cerebrum and the periphery of my field of vision in part because I thought I could
divine its contents from the suggestive, having already perused other works by the Frenchman such
as “Mythologies” and “Le Degre’ Zero de l’Ecriture” and even the thin pocket-book, “Camera Lucida”.
Despite having come to fame as a “structuralist” in the wake of Claude Levy-Strauss, who was a
trained anthropologist, Barthes’s studies had little pretence of being “scientific” in any guise; they
exuded proficuously instead an unseizable idiosyncrasy (insaisissable idiosyncrasie) impossible to
categorize, let alone pin down. All human statements - judgements, opinions - are uniquely subjective
and tendentious, of course; but those of the French philosophes at least since Rousseau are
unmistakably…so.
Barthes was not immune to this malaise - an extremism, really - that is much less pronounced in the
much more methodical works of the great antagonists of French philosophy and culture tout court -
the German idealists and phenomenologists. Since Descartes’s Discours de Methode, the Greek word
has proliferated throughout the Hexagon, but in effect the Cartesian method proved to be both the
genesis and the apogee of methodical reasoning in France - waning steadily thereafter until it hit rock
bottom with the sheer delusional palaver of a Michel Foucault and his even more illustrious epigones,
known collectively as “post-structuralists”. If structuralism was not enough of a shadowy in-discipline,
despite its anthropological pretensions or camouflage, its philosophical aftermath quickly descended
into the nether realm of near-lunacy. Roland Barthes may be viewed, together with Louis Althusser,
as the avatar and initiator of this perilous downward spiral into hermeneutic obfuscation.
Barthes’s judgement and intellect were always suspect to me. But they became alarmingly so when I
read recently his infamous throwaway line about fascism demanding speech. What is bad about that
indelicate statement, tossed like a decaying bone to the starved masses of pseudo-intellectuals that
Western academies keep dishing out, is not that it is false: what dismays is the stark meaninglessness
of the statement. And the outrage at the levity of this gratuitous attack on speech, which Hannah
Arendt held highest in esteem, swells so rapidly and uncontrollably within me that I advert perversely
to the justice of Barthes dying after colliding with a very big sign, a Parisian tram bearing doubtless
many other advertising signs on its exterior. I had always figured that someone who, like Barthes,
made great effusive show of his execration of fascism would most forcefully eschew all approbation,
however remote, not just of “empires” but also of “signs”. Yet, there lies the stark, unpalatable truth -
whether consumed with chopsticks or fork and knife (more on that soon): the book on “the empire of
signs” is a lengthy paean to Oriental empires and their ubiquitous signs.
Western civilization has always opposed empires, not just for their association with “domination”
both extensive (empires are large if not vast) and intensive (empires are autocratic and imperial,
hence, imperative), but also, by implication with these, for their totalitarian absolutism. The West has
had also an ambivalent, and ambiguous, attitude to signs, for reasons at least metonymically related
to the absolutist and totalitarian nature of empires. A sign is that symbol, that unique human ability,
by which we seek to bridge that ineluctable “irrational hiatus” (Fichte), that Shadow (T.S. Eliot) that
lies between the Idea and the Reality. By its very imperious attempt to bridge that hiatus, to close
that gap, to fill that existential void, the sign points in a specific direction; it closes the universe of our
imagination, it narrows our choices. For that reason, perhaps, Barthes surmised that “fascism requires
speech” - in which case he ought really to have said “speech invites fascism”. To speak is, inevitably,
to legiferate, to lay down laws. Speech is inexorably political. But from this to the conclusion that
speech implies or debouches into fascism is to misunderstand fundamentally the political character of
fascism. Barthes was a mere philosopher: he understood next to nothing of history, let alone of
politics: yet, like most French philosophes, then as now, he simply presumed that he did. It would not
be excessive to state that presumption is nine tenths of French philosophy.
Starting with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the French philosophes - under their various guises
as anthropologists or historians, or all social sciences combined - seized on this very Kantianseparation of signifier and signified - the hiatus between idea and reality that signs are meant to
bridge. A sign is a signifier, but its role in the sphere of human signification is curtailed by its inability
to identify with the object it wishes to signify: therein lies the ambivalence and ambiguity of signs. But
it is in this “shadowy area”, in this gray zone, that human freedom is possible as free-dom, as a domain of choice not dictated or necessitated by coercion. The signified is the Kantian “thing-in-itself”; the
sign can be both a “thing-in-itself” as the physical symbol that signifies, and an idea or concept, as the
signifier. Signs are essential aspects of being human because they are the only way in which we can
ex-press, literally “push out (Aus-drucken, in German) our subjective thoughts and make them
“objective” - both as material signs or symbols and as “purposes” or “directions” for human action.
Signs are intrinsic to being human; and yet they are dangerous because their ex-pression or
objectification of thoughts entails and engenders a limitation, a restriction, a confinement and
condition of human freedom.
Hence, signs may well be essential to human being; but the content and use of signs is extraordinarily
important because central to and crucial for human action. Signs speak - and speech is intrinsically
political. Indeed, signs are most dangerous, most obfuscating, when they are used to elide, to occlude,
to curtail speech. The less a sign says, the more immediately it points to the signified, the more
thought-less it becomes. The sign mediates between thought and action: that is why im-mediate signs,
those that eliminate the imaginative space between thought or intention and object or objective are
dangerous in the extreme - because they restrict the time needed for re-flection (Latin, flectere, to
bend), for de-liberation, for critical ana-lysis (backward looking thought). Signs that eliminate speech
are the most dangerous signs of all!
This may seem counterintuitive or maybe even contradictory, but the chief use of speech is to make
literacy possible. Speech or parole is the most elementary and elemental form of human
communication - and therefore of human signification. A word is an oral and aural sign, one that is
capable of being assigned a symbol. And communication, in turn, is a form of symbolic manipulation
whereby we can combine spoken words in a complex manner to effect a response from our fellow
humans - to affect their behaviour, their conduct, hopefully in the direction intended by us. Spoken
communication is a way to manipulate sounds that have become symbols by way of their
combination into a language or langue. Leadership is ultimately the ability to manipulate sounds that
have become signs into a set of symbols whose manipulation allows communication as meaningful
instruction affecting and inducing conduct - as leadership.
But speech is obviously very limited so long as sounds cannot be stored or repeated. It is thus that
humans sought from the earliest times to turn words into tangible and visible signs. - Which is why we
say that, given the vastly superior efficacy of tangible and visible symbolic communication to the
spoken word, so hard to record and reproduce as sound, speech outdoes itself, overcomes itself
metaphysically and sociologically to become the conduit to literacy. In the course of human
civilisation as a universe of communication, as language and not simple confined parole, the chief use
of speech is to make literacy possible. Here the later complex developments, language and literacy,
explain the earlier elemental form, parole and speech. This is just another way of saying, with Karl
Marx, that the spinning Jenny “explains” the wind-mill - because evidently all the technical and
material progress of the wind-mill is implicit in the operation of the spinning-jenny, whereas the
opposite is clearly not true. In human history, taken as the story of civilisation, it is the later
development that explains and is superior to the earlier one, both in complexity and in effectiveness
for giving material expression to and enabling the fulfilment of human needs.
This is why, to repeat, the intrinsic scope and aim of speech is to enable literacy, the most widespread
form of human communication and cooperation. It is speech that enables literacy, which is why
literacy is the implicit, intrinsic realisation and fulfilment of speech. Any and every form of symbolic
signification or symbolic manipulation that hinders or severs the link between literacy and speech by
making speech more “illiterate” is a pernicious and vicious attack on speech as the most elemental
and elementary vehicle of human communication and intercourse, of coexistence and cooperation -
of civilised and fulfilled human existence. This is why I was taken aback when I realised that Barthes’s
irrepressible aim in The Empire of Signs was to praise all things Japanese and, by implication, Chinese, beginning with the language, with Chinese idiograms - something I premit I have come to dub as
“idiot-grams”. It bewildered me - much more than befuddled - that a self-anointed iconoclast such as
Barthes, the author of “Mythologies”, should fall for the most jejune, ill-conceived myths about
Orientalism, chief among them his puerile infatuation with Chinese idiot-grams - with “signs”! To be
sure, our alphabetic letters are “signs”, too. But they connote phonemes, speech sounds - which is
why even our non-phonetic Western languages such as English, are in reality just as “phonetic” as
Romance languages. By allowing the reader to connect - whence the “connotation” - individual letter
signs to distinct sounds or phonemes, our alphabetic system allows every individual to link or connect
sets of letters or words to distinct sounds or - sit venia verbo! - “words”! Indeed, we do not
distinguish between written words and spoken words or vocables (vocabulary, from the Latin vox or
“voice”). (Small wonder the economist Albert O. Hirschman hypothesized that the only alternatives to
domination were “exit”, meaning flight or exile, and “voice”, meaning revolutionary opposition.)
Yes, our Western languages offer this supreme advantage and proud distinction that the written signs
of “mandarins” in China and Japan do not: our letters give us “voice”, the power - oh, what a power it
is! - of speech through literacy! It is of fundamental importance to understand and appreciate fully
the bestial stupidity of Monsieur Roland Barthes - this execrable impostor, this “hypocrite lecteur” -
epitomised in his immortally immoral absurd rambling about “fascism requires speech”. Or was it the
other way round? “Speech requires fascism”? It matters not: both allocutions are the miserable
sordid musings of a worthless soul - contemptible in the highest just for this one levity, ah, but of the
most contemptible kind. To think! To think that Hannah Arendt championed speech, the power
emanating from our ability to utter words as the highest, most sublime expression - indeed, oral and
aural objectification - of our innermost and noblest being - of our power to think and to act in the
world! (In Latin, the word for thinking is “cogitare”, from co-agitare, moving together, shaking,
upsetting, altering the established order.)
Idiot-grams tear asunder the elemental, perhaps divine (Saint John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was
the Word [Logos, logic]. And the Word became Flesh”, not the other way round!) nexus between
words and objects by making these signs illegible to all but the most learned “mandarins”. Chinese
idiograms offer no clue whatsoever as to how we are supposed to read them. Consequently, each
“reader” has to be able to memorize every idiograms as it indicates each individual word and the
object that it “signifies”. Thus, Chinese idiograms are “illegible” to all but the most erudite Chinese -
to wit, the “mandarinate”, the exclusive and oppressive caste of Chinese imperial and imperious
clerks who worked incessantly and tirelessly to ensure that only they could decipher - ah, ciphers,
signs again! - the meaning of their ludicrously convoluted signs that supposedly stood for “words” but
not in legible (!) form - rather, only as “signs”, as symbols that relate directly, immediately (without
the mediation of thought, of speech) to objects. The Chinese dictionary - but there is no diction! (Latin,
dicere, to say, to speak) - or vocabulary - but again, no vocables! No voice! - is despicable and
autocratic in the extreme - good enough reason for us Westerners to seek to…ob-literate it, to
expurgate it from our collective memory as the supreme exaltation of human domination, subjection
and oppression that it truly is. “A boot stamped on a human face, forever”: George Orwell’s
description of the Nazi goose-step is an appropriate and adequate definition of Chinese idiograms, of
all they symbolize: - all the pernicious practices of Oriental autocracy; the hideous subjection and
enslavement of entire populations of humans that it most ignominiously represents.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you require proof, look around. The pompous Barthes, the
idiot brain and his idiot-grams; the French callow delusional philosophe with his flamboyant,
boisterously vile confabulations about speech and fascism. Like Marcel Proust in the very last
paragraph of “Un Amour de Swann”, I only had to start reading “L’Empire des Signes” to realize, with
consternation and disdain, that what I had long believed to be a repository of sociological wisdom,
was merely the meretricious ramblings of an idolatrous mind - Roland Barthes’s: Not an iconoclast,
but a genuflector before the hieratic empire of mindless, speechless signs.
No comments:
Post a Comment