The Mouth before The Voice: Food, Fantasies, the Mother

"Those who go below the surface do so at their own peril." - Oscar Wilde:

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It is wearisome to hear once more that Roland Barthes' "Empire of Signs" is an example of hypocritical cultural imperialism. It's been said too many times; and, further, it's an inaccurate assessment of the actual text to begin with. I don't see the need to apologize for this book before recommending it - simply a need to introduce it in terms of what it actually pretends to accomplish as well as what it never imagined it could do. In a word, it's hardly as though Barthes was a Heidegger.


As a previous reviewer mentions, Barthes' shows his hand from the very beginning and does not attempt in the least to produce an objective or scholarly account of Japan. Who could be foolish enough to imagine that Barthes, who though he wrote none of his own was certainly no stranger to genuine historical and anthropological analysis; who could be foolish enough to imagine that Barthes would ever have considered himself here to have produced, spontaneously, a passable work of scholarship in a slim volume containing no documentation or critical notes whatsoever?

Barthes' writings, for all their diversity, began with a concentration on the sign as a unit of discourse, and the way signs become bundled into larger meaningful wholes. This a model, which though directed toward the analysis of the novel, nevertheless had it's basis in the concept of speech - which he saw in very abstract diagrammatical terms. Over time however Barthes began to pay increasingly greater attention to the materiality, the maternality, of the sign, in particular the written sign. Barthes' reading of Japan offers a vision of culture which is compelling insofar as it appears wholly different from that of the West, one which entails viewing all cultural activities as various forms of inscription as opposed to speaking. Barthes oppose Western logo-centricism (Word- and Voice-centered reality), then, to Japanese grapho-, or grammo-centrism (Writing-centered reality). Such a fundamentally inscriptive culture, highly ec-centric from the West's perspective, locates thought and action on the outside rather than the inside of the subject. It never assumes that action and communication (if those words apply here at all) take place in an natural and unmediated fashion, or in terms of a living and present Voice. Rather writing, speech and action are always intimately bound up with some technological or instrumental variant (sword, stick or banner) of the Pen.


If Barthes is working within any genre at all here, it's not that of scholarship but rather of the essay as first established by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's writings on indigenous Brazilians were in no way expected to provide an objective picture, much less construction, of the "rawness" of life amongst cannibals. Montaigne rather finds in the accounts he has heard of the Caribbeans an occasion to reflect on the concerns of his own culture, in particular epistemology, history and the value of the values of his own "over-cooked" civilization. Montaigne was well aware of what he was about, as was Barthes.

There is clearly no need to question the merit of thorough anthropological and historical research. However, those disciplines do not exhaust the possibilities of writing on other cultures. That we possess the methods necessary for the production of objective accounts of cultures, does not mean we no longer have a need for more subjective (or perhaps more non- or pre-objective) forms of investigation. Reason and the understanding, as Kant might have said, cannot take from the imagination what is its proper due.


It strikes me that the kind of phenomenological reverie evinced in Barthes' encounter with Japan (his "love affair" with chopsticks, which is openly fetishistic and evokes a dual, maternal phallus, an anti-Platonic phallus which is "not-One", which does not slice but rather unswaddles or snuggles a dumpling) is highly indebted not only to Montaigne's writings but also to Bachelard's later critiques of objective science. This sort of literary entry into a "paradis artificiel" does not come without a price. And certainly the cost of entry to, or residence in, this world of maternal jouissance was one which not only Baudelaire himself, but also numerous other writers, as antique as Augustine or as recent as Barthes himself, were perfectly willing to admit, and indeed to make the problematical focus of entire books and careers.

Barthes' "The Empire of Signs" is not only a welcome complement to more conventional scholarly writing, but is in fact conditioned and called for by it - as Barthes says elsewhere, the only proper response to writing is more writing. If Barthes had not written this book, someone else would have had to write it instead.

More Kant Troubles

Student:

I want to post a passage from Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), one dealing with the character of non-European races.

"If we examine the relation of the sexes in these parts of the world, we find that the European alone has found the secret of decorating with so many flowers the sensual charm of a mighty inclination and of interlacing it with so much morality that he has not only extremely elevated its agreeableness but also made it very decorous. The inhabitant of the Orient is of a very false taste in this respect. Since he has no concept of the morally beautiful which can be united with this impulse, he loses even the worth of the sensuous enjoyment, and his harem is a constant source of unrest. He thrives on all sorts of amorous grotesqueries, among which the imaginary jewel is only the foremost, which he seeks to safeguard above all else, whose whole worth consists only in smashing it, and of which one in our part of the world generally entertains much malicious doubt -- and yet to whose preservation he makes use of very unjust and often loathsome means. Hence there a woman is always in a prison, whether she may be a maid, or have a barbaric, good-for-nothing and always suspicious husband. In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery? A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker, just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face. Of course, Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whome he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: "You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad." And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid."

- Immanuel Kant, "Of National Characteristics, so far as they Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"

The gentleman in class who threw out the notion that Kant might have had a hint of racism probably experienced some shock while reading the last line of this passage. I certainly did. It's tough to twist that line and come out with something positive.

Teacher:

I know what you're saying about that last line. My response, though I don't know it to be correct, is this:

Was the shock deliberate? Is that line meant to be taken entirely literally or was it written for rhetorical effect? Was the shock not in fact something which was calculated in advance, intended to provide us with an initial jolt and then a subsequent opportunity to overcome the disturbance through rereading the passage ironically? In other words, is this sentence perhaps a miniature restaging of the Kantian dynamical sublime?

Honestly, it's hard to say. Not that Kant, when it came to race, held nothing but opinions which would be considered perfectly acceptable by today's political standards. But doesn't that final statement seem to come too unexpectedly out of left field? And doesn't it seem especially odd coming from a man who, above almost all things, prided himself on his lack of prejudice. The surprise appearance of the sentence, the effect of "parenthyrsis" (a term the 18th-century German art critic J. J. Winkelmann appropriates from Longinus' On The Sublime) might oblige us to suspend our judgment. Again, we must wonder whether Kant wasn't in fact asking if the reader, after considering all the manifold conditions which go into determining racial and regional character, would nevertheless be hasty enough to dismiss a man's opinion exclusively because of the color of his skin. Everything about the sentence would seem to suggest it is meant by the writer to stand out to us as a schoolbook example of faulty deduction.

Let me repeat, I don't know what the answer to this conundrum is. But the passage of Kant's which you raise for consideration comes from a man who was astoundingly well read, especially when it came to geography and ethnography of his day. The passage in question at once brings to my mind Montaigne's very famous essay about the newly discovered natives of Brazil, called "On The Cannibals." In it Montaigne ventures to argue that when the European and Brazilian cultures are freely compared without bias, it is in fact the Europeans who emerge as the more barbaric. Note how Montaigne clinches his point by ending his essay on a ironic note:

I had a very long talk with one of them; but I had an interpreter who followed my meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas, that I could get hardly any satisfaction from the man. When I asked him what profit he gained from his superior position among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to march foremost in war. How many men followed him? He pointed to a piece of ground, to signify as many as such a space could hold; it might have been four or five thousand men. Did all his authority expire with the war? He said that this much remained, that when he visited the villages dependent on him, they made paths for him through the underbrush by which he might pass quite comfortably. All this appears to make good enough sense. But what's the use in? These people don't wear breeches.

Which is to say, "This supposed savage seems to speak reasonably enough. Still, who would be foolish enough to lend credence to a man who doesn't wear pants?

How much depends on the kind and degree of inflection we lend to the last line. I will freely admit that here we run into even further trouble, because in fact there is a scholarly debate over the proper translation of these last few sentences. (You can google various translations to see what I mean.) So, if Kant did indeed read Montaigne (and I would be very surprised if didn't) we still don't know how Kant's edition of the Cannibal essay read, (here's where you apply for grant money to fly to Königsberg to search Kant's library), much less how Kant himself read it.

In any case, this vexatious passage only confirms my point: before we hasten to pass judgment on such important issues, and especially when we're dealing with a declared free-thinker and a master stylist of astonishing intellect, we need to examine the evidence very closely. As it stands, the issue is not yet decidable for us.

And for what it's worth, it's just such a highly problematic and deeply disturbing detail which would make an ideal starting place for an essay in the style of Derrida.

From The Library Journal: "Following the death of Paul DeMan and the controversies surrounding the ensuing revelations of his personal life and wartime politics, Derrida delivered a lengthy seminar on the ethics and emotions of friendship. Each session began with the same plaintive refrain from Montaigne's essay on friendship: 'O my friends, there is no friend.'"

Hybridity, Monstrosity and Outrage in Late-Modernist Art

Click the image below and have a look at all the reverential and pandering nonsense PBS has to offer with regard the life and work of Robert Rauschenberg, a true American "master". Then conduct a Google search and have a look at Rauschenberg's actual art. This brief exercise will give you a wonderful lesson in what textual scholars call "redaction": retrospectively revising a text, or framing it, in order disguise its internal inconsistencies, as well as its inconsistencies with regard to its own historical context or our own contemporary values and expectations. Another way to refer to this smoothing and softening process might be "intellectual cowardice," a phrase which comes from the critic Susan Sontag.


Please, don't get me wrong; it's not at all that I think Rauschenberg was an insignificant figure in the least. It's rather that everything I have seen (in books and in person) and read (from genuinely critical sources) leads me to believe that Rauschenberg's actual project was not to contribute to but rather to destroy high culture, and in particular the institution of the Museum. His aim was always to replace reverence with loud laughter. Rauschenberg, like his associate the maverick musician John Cage, is almost always pictured smiling broadly and laughing heartily. But are these expression indicative of good-natured joy and human warmth? Or do they rather evince hostility and mockery, or perhaps simply an unashamed and unapologetic acknowledgment of the absurdity of most all we've been taught to respect?

Famed art historian Peter Berger summed up the issue in these terms:

In the begining was a smile, an irritating smile. . . . In vain, I seek a similarly apropos phrase to define the smile in question here that always appears on the lips of the advocates of poststructuralism when one intends to propose an argument. So arrives the thought that to understand poststructuralism means nothing other than to understand this smile.

Religious piety aside, are these artist laughing with, or are they laughing at Humanity? I propose this to you, as I have to all my classes in the past, as a serious question.


In any case, well-meaning idiots, like PBS, apparently never stop to ask themselves this question. Most likely because more often than not there's no immediate reward for being critical. And because they are two deeply mired in the self-congratulatory "Intellectual Traditions" ideology of which I have tried to remain skeptical throughout the semester - and in all my classes, not just this one.

This process of recension is one I want you to consider as we watch how the Christian Fathers gradually assembled a set of canonical books and orthodox teachings which, over time, functioned effectively to turn Jesus from a radical trouble-maker (of one sort or another) into a full-fledged conservative, something which by any responsible scholarly account he simply wasn't. And this, of course, is what the Museum mentality does to all lives and works of art and literature. Because these texts made an impact in their day, and because we feel a need to explain how our own current thoughts and practices derive from these pure sources, or simply because we like to congratulate ourselves for being cultured; we "interpolate" significant (and therefore potentially dangerous and unsettling) events from the past, until they become "Great Men", "Great Ideas" and "Great Books". Quite bluntly, I don't buy it. This mentality, no matter what you're been told and no matter how obvious and natural may seem, is the effect of an ideological system of which I am a renegade product. I will freely admit that I gained familiarity with intriguing texts through this sort of intellectual baby-sitting (precisely what Kant attacks as 'infantile' in "What is Enlightenment?"). But at a certain moment in my life I found it imperative to break away from what other people (some of them my institutional superiors) told me think. It became necessary to stand back from my education and ask myself, not how it ultimately made me "a better person" (zzzzzzzzz!), but rather what had it turned me into in the first place?


Some of you will wonder why I ask you to read not just great books but also minor ones. Some of you will wonder why we move so slowly. Some of you will wonder why I ask such pointless questions, or don't seem to present clear and definitive answers. Some of you will question what the whole point of the whole class is. Some of you, at the end of the semester, will write poor evaluations of the course; for a host of reasons, a quite frequently because it didn't look organized and professional along the lines of what you get in your science classes. But I would ask you to consider this: What does scientific research really look like? Does scientific research begin by assuming everything you feel to conform to common sense is actually the case? Or does not science actually begin by interrogating common-sense assumptions. Any scientific research proceeds according to method. The scientist works like an archaeologist; or a crime-scene investigator, who must not jump to conclusions or take anything from granted. Critical and methodical researchers must uncover not just what looks immediately interesting, but rather they must map out an entire site. Showing how two objects which look like they belong together were actually deposited thousands of years apart. Such researchers must get behind all the assumptions that have been handed us, until we see that reality (or at least the rational explanation of it) in fact works far differently from what common sense first tells us.

If you can begin to adopt this attitude with regard to our readings, you will have a enlightening and enjoyable experience in this course. If you simply want me to tell you what the "great writers" had to say so that you can say that you have studied "Intellectual Traditions" and therefore deserve to be awarded special "Honors" which distinguish you from the average student, then this class, though not necessarily intentionally so, is pretty much designed to make you utterly miserable. Oops! Whereas, if you want to begin to explore not just what we have been told to believe, but also how and why we have been told to believe at all, as well as what other alternatives to orthodox belief and behavior have arisen and are currently out there; then this class should be a fun and exciting adventure for you. At least that's my intention.



Robert Rauschenberg
Monogram. 1955-1959.
Moderna Museet
Stockholm, Sweeden