Language as Language; It's Birth as Death

          Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” is an intriguing piece that presents to us a powerful contradiction.  That paradox summed up as the author’s act of writing as his own death; birth of text begetting a death of the author.  He states that “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.  Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing”; that the first voice eradicated is that of the author.  He asserts that the attachment of narrative to the person who writes it and our idea of what an author is serves as a relatively new function born no more than a few hundred years ago and that meaning within a work is centered on the author’s life and experiences to a fault; that the author’s voice is lost in the voices their writings give rise to such as the voice the reader who reads adds to a text, the language, by writers who intentionally avoid writing characters they’ve experienced in their actual lives and so on.  Barthes speaks to make us aware of the implications that the existence of the author holds on our understanding and interpretation of literary works. 

By removing the author and the implications related to his existence we then can focus on other more numerous voices within the text.  Such implications that the author presents would be the author’s past and his life experience providing a context for the setting and characters within a narrative.  Another would be the belief that the author feeds his being into a narrative and acts as its God, suggesting again that the author’s life impacts the goings-on of a narrative.  However, when the author is removed we can focus on other ways to view a narrative.  One way would be to focus on the language without the implication of the author’s cadence behind the words; the way the reader speaks and reads the narrative may give rise to new interpretations and understandings of a work.  Removal of an author also assist in providing validity in many more interpretations of a literary work because the existence of a single author implies the existence of a single, correct, immovable intention and interpretation imposed by that author but without him that limit does not exist.  Ultimately, it is the death of our internalized concept of an author and all its implications that give birth to a much more vast array of readings and understandings for narratives; it breaths much more life to narrative than it kills off.

Freud: "Don't Castrate Me!"

Sigmund Freud had many interesting theories that are still studied and looked at today although the relevance of some of these them are heavily questioned or dismissed as ridiculous.  Many of those deals with his assertions about the latent fear of castration that young boys have growing up such as in the “Oedipus complex.”  He explains his perceived competition between a young boy and his father for his mother’s affections by saying that a young boy sees his mother’s privates for the first time thinking that everyone is supposed to have a phallus.  The boy thinks that it was the father that took it from her and from that point on he fears and tries to compete with his father in an attempt to avoid having his phallus taken away just like the mother’s was taken.  This competition occurs in the form of the son vying against his father for his mother’s affections and Freud goes so far as to suggest that the son wants to have sex with her.

                This theory is considered to be taboo within our current social context but as far as a competition over the mother’s affections between the father and son goes then the theory is valid and does exist within our media.  I just recently saw it in the Simpsons in the episode where Bart bests Homer in tennis and becomes Marge’s doubles partner for the tournament, thusly bringing about Homer’s jealousy of his own son.

                Part of the reason why Homer is seen as inadequate is seen in the above clip: he’s really bad and on top of that he embarrasses his wife.  However, towards the end of the clip we see that Bart is actually pretty decent at tennis which later leads to Marge picking her son over her husband and Bart being victorious in that Oedipal struggle for his mother’s affection.  That’s only a small instance in which that struggle occurs and the figurative castration of Bart would appear in the classic longest running gag in the show which is Homer choking Bart violently.

Analysis 2: Structuralism and Heavy Rain

                The previous blog explained the basics of Saussure’s take on semiotics and how the majority of the way we understand each other and the world is through this process of completing symbols.  Our language is understood as a system of symbols as well as the way we apply meaning and labels to what we see from a day to day basis.  The following is a piece of a video game I’ve been playing recently called Heavy Rain. 

                The game is an interactive narrative in which we unravel the secrets of this murder mystery and the kidnapping of the Ethan Mars’ (the man in the clip) son by going through the narrative and making decisions for the characters.  The end of the story is decided completely by the player and whether they decide to keep characters alive, allows them to access clues, choosing whether or not to let them interact with other characters at points in the game, etc.  To paraphrase, the man’s son will eventually drown as the rain continues to increase and his quest is to complete challenges sent to his phone from this serial killer who’s killed 8 other young boys through this slow drowning process.  Thusly we have the name of the game, Heavy Rain.

                Saussure’s view of semiotics explains the nature of the game and its story through breaking down the title.  The sign is literally a heavy rain.  Heavy rain is found on the game’s cover, it’s present throughout the entire story, and it’s central to the story’s progression.  The signifier is solely the rain itself but there are various signified concepts.  At a most basic level the rain signifies our sensations such as the wetness we feel, the dark clouds we see, the sounds of the rain on our roofs and so on.  However at a more intangible level the signified concepts are more emotional.  The rain stands for emotions such as the despair in Ethan Mars’ heart for his kidnapped son and the terror he feels as he’s told to drive on the wrong side of the highway.  The presence of heavy rain within the context of this story represents the overall gloomy nature of the game, the deaths, the despair people feel, the sadness of the victims’ families, etc.  Another signified concept would be that the rain represents the progression of time.  The rain is the killing agent that will eventually drown Shawn Mars and the characters are in a race against time to find the killer and the boy before 6 feet of rain falls over the course of 3 or 4 days.  With each passing scene the amount of rainfall during the story appears in the bottom right corner during the first few seconds of new scenes.  And finally to our knowledge there is lots of rain only in specific times of the year so the fall season (winter if you’re in California) serves as a signifying concept of rain.  Rain as a complete sign within the context of our everyday lives and the game serves to trigger many sensory, emotional, and time-based associations in our own mind and the heavy rain in this game is a perfect example of a modern day function of Saussure’s semiotics.

Semiotics; The World is Signs

                As Pase Rock said “We must read the signs.” Ferdinand De Saussure believed in semiotics which places emphasis on finding meaning in the symbolisms and signs in the world.  It is quoted to be “A science that studies the life of signs within society” and that from those signs we can derive meaning.  Image serves as one of the largest known practices in semiotics.  The linguistic sign is broken down as the signified which is what the drawing or spoken word is supposed to represent in real life (a cat, dog, etc.), and the signifier which is the concept that is represented by the signified which makes up the sign which is the relationship between the signifier and signified as a whole. 

                As you can see the above image is composed of feathers; the sign has feathers in it.  In the sign above there is the signifier which is the feathers and the signified concept which can be many things.  When we see feathers the signified concept can be birds, flights, the feathers themselves.  If you take the color into account we can get specific with the signified concept and assume that the concept can be parrots or peacocks or any other multi-colored bird.  The combination of the signified concept and the signifier in the picture combine to make a sign.  The signifier and the sign which are both the same thing (the picture and what is depicted in it) but the major difference is that the complete sign encompasses meaning (the signified concepts).  That is an example of the basic way we use semiotics in today.  We can strip it down even more and replace the image with the simple word “feather” to show how linguistics is a practice of semiotics.  If a sign on the street said “feather” on it then the signifier would be the word itself written down and the signified concepts would be things like birds, flight, wings, etc.  The concepts represented combined with the signifier or the word itself that made you think of those things fuse together to infuse meaning into our language and makes a complete sign.

Analysis 1: Aristotle's Influence on East Side High

 In the film Lean on Me, Morgan Freeman’s goal as the principle to the notoriously criminal and underperforming East Side High School is to make the students want to get an education and become something of themselves.  The above clip contains his motivational speech an hour before they take the state test that they’ve prepared for during the past two and a half months.  Almost as soon as he begins to speak he says that “they say you are inferior, you are just a bunch of niggas, and spics, and poor white trash.”  This type of language is pathos-based language that rides on the audience’s emotions as it did in the clip when the students expressed their disapproval towards such notions.  More pathos is used in the claim that the outside world believes that an education is wasted on them and that they cannot learn.

 Using such language may seem counterproductive at the surface but as the principle of the school he channels Eunoia which is the culmination of his qualities that make him trustworthy.  In this case Eunoia comes from his professional attire, his posture, and his position as the principle.  It is in this way that he rallies the students against the outside world and for their own success and the principle’s message when he finally says “you are not inferior.  Your grades may be, your school might have been, but you can turn that around and you can make liars out of those bastards in exactly one hour when you take that test, pass it, and win.”  Through his use of Eunoia, he is granted the agency to use strong pathos-based language in order to make the students believe in his good will and thusly rally behind it as a motivational tool.

Aristotle; O'Neill Lecture

              Artistotle put his main emphasis on logic and the way language can be used to persuade.  He made a science out of being an orator and a wordsmith.  A major facet of his assertions has to do with his dissection of persuasion into ethos, logos, and pathos.  Ethos has to do with credibility of the speaker and his license to speak on the subject at hand.  A mechanic would have more credibility from the audience to speak about cars then an astronaut. Logos is the appeal to reason and just the general us of logic to convince people.  People just like common sense, people generally agree and it keeps everyone on the same page.  And then there’s pathos which has to do with manipulating emotions in the audience as a way to almost undermine contradictory logos to your own persuasive use of logos.  If a murderer is having a public debate with you and is making really good points you can strategically use pathos to direct anger from the audience towards said murderer by reiterating his crimes and slinging mud his way even if it’s off-topic. 

                However on another level there are aspects of persuasion and rhetoric that are outside of the way words are used.  There’s a presentation aspect which Dr. Kevin O’Neill discussed in his lecture.  Eunoia for example would be the need to look like you have good will and good intentions.  The audience will not be moved by someone they do not trust.  To burrow further into this, Aristotle believed that you had to understand what people desire, what brings them joy, and what makes them angry in order to effectively use Eunoia.  There is style which is the tone of voice and dressing appropriately to your topic.  Other things discussed were techniques such as syllogisms and enthymeme.

Plato; Another Old Man

Plato is dated.  He just is.  He was a man that sought the truth and the true goodness in the world but his definitions of goodness and his process of going about the systemic uplifting of society can be held in stark contrast to our American ways.  We value individuality and freedom of speech yet the entire Book II of his Republic is completely about how he will censor what is written and what may be read for children and adults.  He feels that anybody, especially children, shouldn’t be exposed to untrue, distorted images of nature and of Gods and how they behave, what they do, what form they take, and so on.  However, his own ideal of what is acceptable or not isn’t the end-all-be-all and even he uses rhetoric and manipulates the language by nature of the book.  He presents logic, he leads the conversation, the one he is conversing with always agrees.  He attempted his own sophistry but in the context of today’s world, people question everything, we’re told to question everything.  Even now this blog is devoted to a critical theories class that promotes critical thinking and questioning and interpretation of theories.  It all boils down to Plato’s ideals being simply theory and that his assertions only stand on the basis that we believe him to be the absolute authority on goodness and truth which of course, many of us don’t.  He wants us to censor lust but America sells sex, he wants us to be stoic but movies and drama are major sources of our entertainment, he wants to censor the greed and violence in heros yet we have the egoists in Superman and Thor, alcoholics in Antman and Ironman, the rage of The Hulk, and many various figures praised for the beatings they give the villain.  Plato wants a lot of things and society has eventually grown to counter it.  The kicker is that in spite of our society being unparalleled with his utopia the way we live today is satisfying despite our fair share of troubles.  He is just dated.