Response: Barthes and Foucault

This week I will be responding to Mythologies by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author” and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault..

This week’s prompt is the following:
“[…]So, in some sense, both Barthes and Foucault argue (Barthes rather more directly), we get our sense of self through media consumption. In what sense do you think that who you are--your desires, your fears, your most fundamental beliefs about yourself and the world--could plausibly be attributed to the signs and meanings that you consume through our consumption of modern media messages?”

This semester I am taking a class about British Romanticism, so after a few weeks of studying the Romantics and their extreme emphasis on the individual, I was struck by the difference in this week’s readings concerning the individual. For Foucault and Barthes, the self seems to be the sum of the signifiers a person chooses to denote him-/herself, the signified, or, in Foucault’s case, the signifiers used to signify an author, whether the author chooses them or not. Barthes’s writing on semiotics may be applied to any medium we use to interact with the world and the people around us: the clothes we wear, the labels we give ourselves, that which we claim to like and to dislike. All these signifiers add up to create the mythology of self. This idea of self then becomes naturalized, and we perceive it as something that is (“That’s just how I function”) as opposed to something we construct. Foucault takes it a step further concerning authors, and how we retroactively construct their “selves.” In our conception of an author, it is the body of his or her published work to which we refer when we say his or her name. As Foucault points out, there are some pieces of information which learning will not alter our conception of that author, and some that vastly will—for instance, my conception of James Joyce was exceedingly altered when I learned of his erotic love letters to Nora Barnacle (the following comic quite appropriately expresses my reaction to said letters: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32). However, whatever my conception of James Joyce, it is a construction made from a variety of signifiers I have learned to associate with him. How many of t hose signifiers, though, would he actually have chosen? Probably, poor James would not have chosen to have his letters to Nora made public. For Foucault, then, the way one’s “self” is constructed is not even within one’s power to choose.

The prompt seems to be asking for our personal opinions, so I will give mine. I hesitate to call myself a structuralist, having only minimal exposure to the theory, but it makes a lot of sense to me that the way we conceptualize the world is formed by the structure of the language we speak. I find that whenever I really learn a new word, in the sense that I fully absorb and understand its meaning, I’m able to think about things with a liberating sense of greater clarity (one of my most recent lexical discoveries was “apotheosis”). Although I (and, therefore, I extrapolate many others, even if said extrapolation is somewhat hubristic) don’t necessarily think in words, but rather in abstract ideas or emotions, I find that I cannot fully process these ideas until I put them into words. That’s why talking something out with someone when I am upset is helpful, because it forces me to crystallize my random feelings into words. Further, as I explained in my blog last week, I think it makes a lot of sense that a culture’s language, or, on a smaller scale, a person’s language, could have a profoundly formative effect on that culture’s expression and development. Thus, a person’s or a culture’s contact with media messages, which are made up of signifiers such as words, must greatly influence that person or culture’s self-identity, because it provides a framework on which to build said identity. However, that said, I think there are some elements to human “selfness” that cannot be reduced to contact with media messages—primarily biological elements like hormones or basic necessities. Although how we confront these biological elements may be largely a construction built on the framework given to us by our culture and its mythologies (for instance, how one thinks about and responds to the drive for sex), I do think there is a sub-language or sub-semiological level to these biological elements which, though it may be expressed through the filer of semiology, exists outside of a semiological construction of self.

And now, for a bit of a tangent. This does not completely have to do with Foucault and Barthes, but I feel that it’s somewhat related. I took a class on the history of literary theory in the fall of 2009, and one of the first things we read about was the “The Intentional Fallacy,” by Wimsatt and Beardsley. This is an idea of New Criticism or Formalism that states that what the author intended to do with a text is irrelevant. We neither can know for sure what the author intended, nor does the author’s intent matter to the meaning of the text, even if the author has explicitly expressed his/her intent. Like Foucault’s idea of the author, the intentional fallacy divorces a text from any personal elements. I am unsure as to how much structuralism and formalism are related, but it seems to me that they at least share that impersonal element. What matters is the structure of the language or the structure of the text, not some sort of abstract idea of self and self-expression.