Wrestling with Meaning

Welcome to the next arc (next chapter?) of Philosophy vs Work! From here, we start unpacking Semiotics, Myth, and Utopia - starting with an unpacking of what is semiotics? - and the role utopias and utopian thought play in thinking about work, in how these utopias and work have been mythologized, and how these mythologized words shape how we think and even what we’re potentially capable of thinking.

In this episode: Roland Barthes' Mythologies, semiotics, myth as speech, professional/amateur wrestling, Lincoln, and Republicans.

*Note* This episode was written and recorded before the recent Trump rally shooting, and in no way condones either the actions of the shooter or the ensuing rhetoric of the far right. The intent to use "Lincoln" as an example of myth-speech was timed to line up with the RNC.

Recommended links:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Kansas_Nebraska_Act.htm
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Democratic-Party
https://lincolnproject.us/
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Amit E, Hoeflin C, Hamzah N, Fedorenko E. “An Asymmetrical Relationship Between Verbal and Visual Thinking: Converging Evidence from Behavior and fMRI.” Neuroimage. 2017 May 15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5448978/
Barthes, Roland. 2012. Mythologies 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bolger, Eileen. “Naturalization Process in U.S.: Early History” https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/federal/naturalization-process-in-u-s-early-history
 The Barbary Treaties 1786-1816. “Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796” Translated Joel Barlow, 1797.
“Visual thinking” Wikipedia. Silverman, Linda Kreger (2005), Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, Maria J. Krabbe Foundation for Visual Thinking. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 7: Wrestling with Meaning

20th century French essayist, philosopher, and semiotician (and, really, that’s keeping it brief) Roland Barthes’ text Mythologies (1st edition 1957, reprinted and re-translated a few times now) is a collection of short essays, followed by one long one called “Myth “Today,” that examines the semiotics, the meanings of signs and symbols, of culture. The first essay, titled “In the Ring” (in my 2012 translation), is on Wrestling – specifically, ‘amateur’ Wrestling, which Barthes’ holds in higher regard than ‘Professional’ Wrestling (think the modern WWE) and he calls “true wrestling.” It’s the second-rate performance hall, B movie kind of wrestling. Now, it’s not “true” wrestling because professional wrestling is scripted or polished, they both are, but because of how the match is received by the audience. The amateur wrestling match is pure spectacle because the audience “couldn’t care less” about it being scripted or not, or who wins or loses, or even whether the audience believes in what’s happening, all that matters is what the audience sees. 

“The rational future of the combat does not interest the fan of wrestling, whereas on the contrary a boxing match always implies a science of the future. In other words,” Barthes goes on, “wrestling is a sum of spectacles, none of which is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which suddenly rises straight up on its own, without ever extending toward the consummation of an outcome. 

Hence the wrestler’s function is not to win but to perform exactly the gestures expected of him.”

But Michael, you may be wondering, I thought this was a podcast about work. Why are we talking about pro wrestling? And are you seriously trying to make wrestling high brow by applying critical theory and semiotics to the People’s Elbow? 

Well, in short, kinda… yeah. 

As opposed to other “professional” sports (baseball, hockey, boxing, etc.) or “amateur” sports (minor leagues, national Olympic teams, college sports, and so on), wrestling combines athleticism with theatrics. It’s a performance. And yes, it is an extraordinary feat of athletics to perform those moves without seriously injuring yourself or your scene partner. The suplex is not fake, but the performance of injury is theater. Usually. 

And it is work. Whether you’re a wrestler, a pro ball player or a screen or voice actor, or in any other highly competitive field where there are a thousand other talented individuals vying for your job every day, sports and entertainment are jobs. And a job that’s always one bad injury away, or one bomb performance from the audience turning on you, from suddenly ending. 

As for making this highbrow by applying theory?

I have, at this point, gotten into many conversations with people who weren’t exposed to philosophy in school and have asked me, “what is philosophy?” And this is actually not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, it is what the word means. Philos – love, specifically, fraternal love – and Sophia – wisdom; the love of wisdom in the sense of the love one has as for a brother. It’s also an academic discipline as is science (originally natural philosophy) or math (which was itself, also, originally a branch of philosophy), or sociology (social science) or art history (originally “art science”), in a way, it’s the root of all academic disciplines. 

Personally, I tend to lean on Deleuze and Guattari’s book, What is Philosophy?, as an answer, but trying to quote 200+ pages doesn’t really work for casual conversation. But, in summary, they explain Philosophy as one of three primary “modes of thought”: art, thinking through sensations;  science, thinking through functions; and philosophy, thinking through concepts. Philosophy is the mode of conceptualizing the world. If Science seeks to answer “how,” philosophy seeks to ask “why.” 

I also like the Nietzschean and Foucauldian ideas of philosophy as a toolbox – grab a hammer and get to work – and Marx’ criticism of philosophers as having for too long focused on merely interpreting the world, where the goal ought to be to change it. 

There are also the fields of philosophy: epistemology (how we think and what is knowledge), metaphysics (abstract concepts and first principles), phenomenology (the material world and sense experience), ontology (what is something in its Being?), ethics, aesthetics, logic, pragmatism, etc. 

So, yeah, it’s a complicated question. Anyone who says it’s not is selling you something. 

I can tell you what it’s not though. It’s not an individual’s worldview. The word often gets highjacked to mean something like ‘my personal philosophy about (x) is…yada yada’ but this statement is nonsensical. It’s like claiming to have a personal math, or a personal science. Unfortunately, in ‘ordinary language’ though, it often stands in as shorthand for a collection of personal thoughts and opinions, which is about as far from the point of philosophy-as-such as possible. 

Which leads me to the focus of this next arc of episodes. We’re going to be discussing utopia, specifically, the semiotics of utopias and the role utopias and utopian thought play in thinking about work, in how these utopias and work have been mythologized, and how these mythologized words shape how we think and even what we’re potentially capable of thinking. 

Before getting into utopias though, we need to take a bit to understand what semiotics and mythologized language means. 

So, whereas linguistics is the study of languages specifically, semiotics is the study of signs broadly, namely anything that conveys, communicates, meaning or feeling, including words. 

Let’s take for example, the sign of a yellow light at an intersection. The most obvious signification is “caution, stop,” but, as a sign, it carries further communicative weight. It also means ‘check your mirrors, check oncoming traffic, look both ways; yet, it can also mean I wonder if I can make it if I gun it, and oh shit there’s a cop across the street, and cool I can see if there’s a new episode of Philosophy vs Work now, and text my boss that I’m running late, and it means that time you screeched to a halt or that time you got rear-ended, because it is, at once, that yellow light and every experience you’ve had of yellow lights. And all of this is just one quick, largely superficial glance, at one possible sign. 

For our purposes here, I’m going to be leaning on one of my favorite authors, Roland Barthes, and his concept of myth in semiotics; who, he himself is following a theoretical tradition established by the 19th century French philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure regarding the semiotics of language, that Barthes applies to culture. 

So, let's start with the basics. 

Barthes opens up “Myth Today” with the following, “What is myth today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.*” To which he footnotes, “[innumerable] other meanings of the word myth can be cited against this. But I have tried to define things, not words.” Which is, itself, a critical (and I think fascinating) distinction. He continues, “… what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, … it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form.”

Referring to myth in semiotics is like a grammatical case (like genitive – the case of nouns and pronouns indicating possession: an hour’s labor, my neighbor’s house, this nutjob’s podcast) or dative (the indirect object of a sentence: as in the “my audience” in the sentence, I gave my audience a headache today.) We’re not talking about mythological symbology like a hammer to indicate Thor, a lightning bolt to indicate Zeus, or a shepherd boy or a fish to indicate Christ in early Christianity before the injunction against graven images was largely done away with (until it came back for some denominations), or the artistic tropes like capite velato (a cloth covering the head of a figure in classical art to indicate the person’s (or god’s) piousness) or memento mori (a skull or a preserved animal body or flies on a piece of meat in a still life to serve as a reminder of the inevitability of death). 

Myth is what Barthes calls a “second order semiological system.” To set this up, Barthes follows from Saussure, whom he notes developed a “methodologically exemplary semiological system” (Barthes also makes reference here to Freud and Jean Paul Sartre, but we’re going to leave these out for now; Sartre is too deep a rabbit hole to just take a passing glance at and doesn’t fit well into how I think the next few ‘chapters’ will evolve, and we’ll be tackling some Freud in a few weeks). Summarizing Saussure’s system of semiotics of language, Barthes states, “the signified is the concept, the signifier is the acoustic image (which is mental), and the relation between concept and image is the sign (the word, for instance), which is a concrete entity.”

Okay, let’s break that down a little using our old friend the chair, and I think it makes more sense to put this in a slightly different order. First up is the sign, the word “chair.” As a sign, the word “chair” represents the relationship between the signified and the signifier. In this case, ‘the signified,’ as the signified is the concept, is the concept of a chair. The signifier is the mental image of a chair that is conjured (by anyone that has a concept of a chair) when encountering the sign, the word, “chair.” 

Now, yes, this does get kinda convoluted for those highly literal people that actually think in words rather than images. But, generally speaking, as a visually driven species we tend to think in either images or a combination of images and words, with a minority thinking predominantly, and an even smaller minority thinking only in words. Dr. Linda Kreger Silverman, clinical psychologist and Director of the Gifted Development Center (part of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, which goes by the, um, unfortunate, acronym of ISAD) noted that approximately 60-65% of people think in pictures, breaking that down further to approximately 45% of the population thinking in both words and visual/spatial, about 30% strongly visual/spatial, and only about 25% only in words. Another interesting footnote on this comes from a paper by Elinor Amit and others published in the Journal Neuroimage in 2015 on behavioral and fMRI evidence in verbal and visual thinking. The authors behavioral and fMRI studies on subjects asked to either “silently generate a sentence or create a visual image in their mind. They were then asked to judge the vividness of the resulting representation, and of the potentially accompanying representation in the other format.” Their results indicate that, “inner speech was engaged to a greater extent during verbal than visual thought, but visual imagery was engaged to a similar extent during both modes of thought. Thus, it appears that people generate more robust verbal representations during deliberate inner speech compared to when their intent is to visualize. However, they generate visual images regardless of whether their intent is to visualize or to think verbally. One possible interpretation of these results is that visual thinking is somehow primary, given the relatively late emergence of verbal abilities during human development and in the evolution of our species.” 

Back to myth. 

So, myth follows this same semiological chain of ‘signified, signifier, and sign’ but it goes further in that it is a second order system, it follows a chain that already existed. “That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier in the second.” Barthes notes that this requires two more names added to the system to avoid ambiguity with the first. “On the plane of language, that is, as the final term of the first system, I shall call the signifier meaning … on the plane of myth, I shall call it: form. In the case of the signified, no ambiguity is possible: we shall retain the name concept.”

So, in the first order (the plane of language), you have the signifier and signified come together to form the sign. Then, in the second order (the plane of myth), you have the prior sign stand as a new signifier, to be united with another signified, another concept, to form a new sign, a signification. 

Plane 1 (Language): Signifier (Meaning, purely mental) + Signified (Concept) = Sign

Plane 2 (Myth): Signifier (Form, has a sensory reality (the Sign (and or signs) of the prior plane)) + Signified (Concept, again) = Signification 

Now, keep in mind, this is not limited to words and pictures. Semiotics that goes beyond linguistics is concerned with the meanings of all forms of signs. Signs, images, billboards, posters, symbols, even a suntan, as Barthes points out in a footnote, can carry meaning. I mean, think about a suntan for a moment. That suntan, or lack thereof, can tell you a great deal about a person. Is it the kind of tan of someone that has the leisure to sunbathe, or the carefully even tan acquired for purely aesthetic purposes? Is it the kind of weathered tan of someone that works outdoors? Or the lack of a tan of a person that spends the bulk of their time indoors under the florescent lighting of offices or libraries, or works third shift and doesn’t often get to go out during the day since that’s when they’re typically asleep? 

Another important premise to keep in mind is that signs have no natural meaning (intrinsic, given by nature), meaning is determined by the speaker historically.

What we call a dog doesn’t change what a dog is, nor does the word dog come magically from the natural world, if we called it a cat it would still be the same thing; language works because at some point those that speak, utter the word, “dog” (or chien, or inu, or pero, etc.) agreed that was the word that would mean that particular kind of animal and that a dog was distinctly different from a wolf or a coyote, and that they were all canines. Likewise, calling a particular frequency of light blue or red changes nothing about that frequency of light; however, in the United States, calling a particular city or state blue or red does have a particular signification that has nothing to do with the color of the state, and everything to do with politics.  

“As a total of linguistic signs,” Barthes states, “the meaning of the myth has its own value, it belongs to history… the meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. When it becomes form, [it] leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.” 

Now, when meaning becomes form, it isn’t eradicated or erased, it’s still there, just held at a distance, and kept in reserve for whenever that meaning, or any part of that meaning, is needed to be employed by the speaker to serve the speaker’s purposes. “The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history,” says Barthes, “a timed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation…” As opposed to the meaning of the language-sign, the form of the myth-sign must be able to hide in its history. “It is this constant game of hide and seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth.”

Barthes uses a couple of examples to illustrate how this system works; a child’s school text with the latin sentence quia ego nominor leo ‘I am called lion’, in which he digs into the biological and ecological significance of what a lion is as well as what it means to name oneself, and an analysis of a then-current cover of Paris-Match magazine depicting an Algerian boy in French uniform looking upward and saluting something, likely the French Tricolour Flag and all of the various implicit and explicit meanings it carries that French (i.e. domestic, white, French) audiences of the time would have recognized. 

Instead, to keep this culturally contemporaneous, let's look at two versions of an example in the current US political Right discourse. 

First, the image of Abraham Lincoln, whether you’re talking about the Republican Party’s use of the phrase ‘the Party of Lincoln’ or the name and logo of the Republican-but-Anti-Trump Lincoln Project. In both cases, you have a political discourse that holds up Lincoln as the image and embodiment of what it means to be a Republican as Lincoln was a founding leader of the Party, but, in neither case, is there an emphasis on the ideals that the party, or Lincoln for that matter, actually stood for at the time.  

The official Republican Platform of 1860 stood for the following; the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska act (which was supposed to fund rail infrastructure in order to expand the nation, but did so by negating the Missouri Compromise and thus, at least potentially, enabled the expansion of slavery); the abolishment of slavery in accordance with the ‘all men are created equal’ of the Declaration of Independence; a seemingly contradictory insistence that, 1. the nation is both insoluble and that it is only strong because of its unity, and unified material resources and wealth, and 2. that the individual states are sovereign, and 3. that no state nor the federal government have any right or authority to invade any other state; that duties on imports, tariffs, are necessary to fund the federal government and that the government’s economic role is to secure for workingmen “liberal wages, to agriculture remunerative prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence;” opposition to any changes in the process of naturalization for immigrants, which at the time meant, “any free, white, adult alien, male or female, who had resided within the limits and jurisdiction of the United States for a period of 2 years was eligible for citizenship” provided they renounce any foreign citizenship, titles, and/or fealties; the “full and efficient” protection of rights to all classes of citizens native or naturalized, at home or abroad; and an imperative obligation to invest in the expansion of the railroads to the Pacific. 

This new Republican party was essentially an abolitionist coalition of expansionist Whigs, northern anti-slavery Democrats, Liberty Party and Free Soil members – two smaller, single-issue abolitionist parties; founded, ostensibly, in Wisconsin, then a largely German immigrant territory that was also what would be now considered far left, Marxist, and especially after the Civil War, a center point of the Socialist movement in America, and home of the largest State affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. Imagine a new political party arising today from an intellectual hodge podge of Labor, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter movement activists, and you’d have something akin to this new Republican party from the dawn of the 20th century. Oh, how the times have changed. 

We also need to note that to the extent the Republican party was absolutely abolitionist, they were not nearly as in agreement with what ought to be done with the freed slaves. Many, including Lincoln, preferred either mass deportation to Africa or the Caribbean, or settler colonization. One specific plan called for the colonization of the southwestern corner of Panama, on the border with Costa Rica, to be called “Linconia.” And, yeah, the United States was to, ironically, possess a colony, wherein former slaves may have been nominally freed, but now they were to be settler-workers sending profits and natural resources back to the United States without any of the rights or protections of statehood or citizenship. Remember, naturalization was not to be changed, so that still meant white people only. 

Now, personally, given modern Republican and Conservative political discourse, I find it extraordinarily unlikely that when Republicans name drop Lincoln, that what they mean is they stand for the Equal Rights Amendment, the inclusion of Puerto Rico or Guam into the United States, an increase in the minimum wage to a legitimate living wage (let alone ‘liberal wages’ for working people), or efficient naturalization for all immigrants that have been in the US for more than 2 years.  

Then there’s the conservative rhetoric regarding Democrats as the ‘racist party,’ and, yes, it’s true, the so-called Solid South of racism and segregationism dominated Democratic politics in the South from its 18th century founding to a break over the Civil War, and then again until the Civil Rights movement. But just as these post-Civil War southerners joined the Democrat party in reaction to Lincoln, Reconstruction, and abolitionist Republicans, they changed parties again in reaction to Kennedy and Johnson. These people were, first and foremost, racists, and for them political Party was a secondary matter of expedience. On top of all of that, political re-alignments happen. The Republicans were once Progressives, Expansionists, and even Imperialists (or Progressives and Imperialists, as with Teddy Roosevelt), then they became Conservatives and Isolationists – until some Conservative and Republican-allied groups, like the Christian Front, that had allied themselves with Hitler found their ideological mentor literally at war with the US – and again found themselves more in line with economic and military Globalism. Likewise the big-tent Democrats have counted Isolationists, anti-Federalists (the party was the original Republican party, dubbed Democratic-Republicans, by Federalists, to conjure thoughts of French Revolutionaries beheading people in the streets in order to turn people against them, and later adopted simply Democrats under Trump favorite, Andrew Jackson), anti-bank and finance (the original “special”) interest groups, municipal scale Agro-communists (little “c” communists, this is over a century before Marx and Engles) like founding member Thomas Jefferson, slavery expansionists and opponents alike, as well as reactionary segregationists, and anti-globalists among many other constituents. It wasn’t until after the initials guys, FDR, JFK, and LBJ that the party settled more or less into where it is now. 

We could go on and on here about Republicans and Democrats and African Americans and Globalism, but I think you get the point, and we have more to go over regarding semiotics. Point is, the signification of “the Party of Lincoln” does not merely mean, is not the sign, “the Party of Lincoln.” Barthes sums this up as such, but, know that where I reference Lincoln or America in keeping with our examples here, Barthes is referring to France, French Imperialism, and the young Algerian boy on the Paris-Match cover, I’ve just changed the named examples. 

“The form of myth is not a symbol” [Lincoln] is not the symbol of the [United States]: he has too much presence, he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image. But at the same time [his] presence is tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent; it recedes a little, it becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed, [American Exceptionalism]: once made use of, it becomes artificial.”

Alright, now we need to address the signified, the unambiguous concept. Reminder, signified + signifier = sign, and since we’re on myth, form + signified = signification. Barthes notes that in the signified of myth the “history which drains out of the form will be wholly absorbed by the concept.” The concept, the signified, contains simultaneously history and intention, “it is the motivation which causes… myth to be uttered.” 

For something like the utterance, “Lincoln,” the drive is American, and often specifically Republican, Exceptionalism. There’s nothing abstract about the form, the original sign, say… Lincoln, or FDR, or any of the Founding Fathers; wherein Washington often becomes a stand-in for America itself, Franklin as stand-in for hard work and industriousness (despite the fact that, as he notes in his own writings, he was fortunate to retire from “work” at 42 in order to pursue politics and diplomacy thanks to the success of his newspaper – which he did not actually run, he bought it, and it was worked by his slaves (side note, a this is common theme going back to, at least, ancient Greece and Rome, essentially, wherever in human history you find individuals with surplus material wealth you will find slaves, or in modern history, some other exploited labor, at the origin of that wealth); or Jefferson as the ‘author’ of American ‘freedom’ (despite essentially plagiarizing John Locke) and often held up as a hero figure by Conservatives for the Declaration of Independence and his anti-Federalism, while they simultaneously erase his staunch advocacy for the separation of church and state from school history books. 

As myth the histories of the founding fathers are emptied out and refilled, with motive, by the speaker; as Barthes states, “the fundamental character of the mythical concept is appropriated…” Sticking with our examples of American Exceptionalism, or Lincoln, or the Founding Fathers, they, when spoken as myth, “must appeal to such and such group of readers, and not another.” To again be a little contemporary, myth is essentially a dog whistle.

When Christian Nationalists and the American National Socialist Movement (critically important note, this is a Fascist movement that is ideologically and morally diametrically opposed to Democratic Socialism or Socialism as an economic model - they are referring specifically to the German Nazi party - which, to be historically accurate, was, albeit very briefly, a labor party, before being taken over by Hitler and his supporters), when they fly the angular, black and white ‘Christian fish’ symbol, they know for a fact that they are referencing the Nazi swastika, and that they are hiding the history of the swastika behind the history of Christian imagery. 

Likewise, Fox news and other conservative pundits don’t need to say the quiet part out loud, they know their audience knows what they really mean. Myth and ambiguity are two of their strongest rhetorical strategies. I’d poo poo on MSNBC for this too, but they seem to have the opposite problem, at times making it difficult to figure out the rhetorical point by being hyper-specific, drowning their audience in their lack of ambiguity. In a crisis, Fox can always hide behind ‘that’s not what we actually said or really meant,’ MSNBC has no such cover. Their problem is more, ‘we told you about this, why weren’t you listening?’ But, I digress. 

As form is historical, it can also be suppressed by history. At this point in American history, it’s just common knowledge that most of the founding fathers were slave holders – John Adams being an exception and there being contradictory evidence regarding Alexander Hamilton in financial dealings, as well as legal and diplomatic writings. So, it’s unlikely anyone can wield the myth of the founding fathers as saint-like figures in some way free of America’s ‘original sin.’ Though, this could of course swing the other way someday and be suppressed again. One needs look no further than the school textbooks in Texas where Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation between church and state’ was removed from American History or papers out of the Conservative Heritage Foundation such as “The Mythical "Wall of Separation": How a Misused Metaphor Changed Church–State Law, Policy, and Discourse” by Daniel Dreisbach, a senior research fellow there, that argues what Jefferson really meant was that the wall only exists between the federal government and churches, and locates instead state and local governments on the same side of the wall as the church and protected from the federal government – and conservatives upholding this idea as normative for all the founding fathers. To wit, and I’ll move on after this, all I have to say is a quote from the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by David Humphreys, who was appointed by George Washington, it was later approved by President John Adams and unanimously ratified as law governing the United States by the US Senate, whose membership included Vice President and Senate President Thomas Jefferson, in 1797. 

“ARTICLE 11. As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, [Muslims] -and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

The last thing we need to touch on is the final term, Signification, as Barthes states, “nothing but the association of the first two… the only one which is allowed to be seen in a full and satisfactory way, the only one which is consumed in actual fact.” 

The signification is the myth itself, much as, in linguistics, the sign is the word. 

Barthes notes two forms of myth, linear and multidimensional. In the case of oral myth (the utterance), in keeping with our earlier examples, ‘the party of Lincoln,’ whereas visual myth, the image of Lincoln in the logo of the Lincoln Project, is multidimensional. Investigating that linearity and multidimensionality is for Barthes necessary work and thinks it not unlike Freudian psychoanalysis applied to semiotics, though he is dissatisfied with the spatiality of the metaphor. 

Now, what’s particularly of note here, is that, following this earlier game of hide and seek with meaning and history, myth doesn’t, nor does it seek to, hide anything. Myth distorts. 

To paraphrase Barthes again, “[what] the concept distorts is of course what is full, the meaning: [the two Lincolns] are deprived of their history, changed into gestures…” and, like the amateur wrestlers, their task is only to perform the gestures expected of them. These concepts: National pride, American Exceptionalism, Martyrdom, Republican-as-Hero, obscure but are “also a primary language, a factual discourse which was telling me about [Lincoln]. But this distortion is not an obliteration: [Lincoln remains] here, the concept needs [him, he is] … deprived of memory, not of existence… at once stubborn, silently rooted there, and [yet verbose, chattering], a speech wholly at the service of the concept.”

Alright, we’re not quite done here, we have more to go over as far as Barthes’ conclusion regarding myth, but from here we need to pivot into myth and utopia, as well as myth regarding capitalism, socialism, and communism. 

The next, let’s call it content episode, we come back to Barthes – the Happy Hour is still in the works, so we’ll see how that shakes out – but from there we’ll be getting into Kathi Weeks, which will include a bit of Nietzsche and Ernst Bloch, regarding Teleological and Non-Teleological utopias; Mark fisher’s Capitalist Realism; a favorite topic of mine, the Violence of Hope (yeah, you heard that right), which of course means the so-called Masters of Suspicion: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche; then James Livingston; and finally we’ll wrap up this section with Lee Edelman’s No Future and the “child” as myth. 

I hope you’ll join me. 

‘til then. 

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