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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.
in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil. As I follow the traces of age-old stagnation despite all obstacles - sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub and cultivated land - and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . 
I do not demand either unity or narrative from art. I am aware that beginning with Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the mid-50s, the art world gleefully abandoned its high-modernist pretensions to stylistic unity, and turned to experimentation with hybrids. Artists began to mix and match, juxtapose and provoke, promote direct political action as well as communal interaction. Gone were the good old days of abstract expressionism. Gone were Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko - artists who sought to produce godlike presences, icons of themselves. Instead, postmodern artists pandered spectacle and theatricality. This new wave of artists cashed in their stock in the genuinely rare and came instead to value the rarity, the novelty, the curiosity, whatever was simply quirky and hip. Where the unique and original once was, now there is the popular and the copy.
Now, let me turn to the show up for discussion: New Narratives. In looking at the Warhol prints in his Ten Famous Jews from the 20th Century series, I can't help but notice their close resemblance to Picasso's portraits and neo-classical drawings from the 20s and 30s. Then I turn specifically to the portrait of Gertrude Stein, which had it not been conveniently labeled I might well have taken for a portrait of Julius Caesar. Stein was one of Picasso's closest friends and the subject of one of his most famous paintings. Warhol is obviously quoting Picasso, but not in subject matter alone. The bold patches of color unmistakably recall Picasso's use of real scraps of wallpaper in his drawings to signify texture, depth, and shadow and light. More important however, is Warhol's use of rapidly drawn outlines. These mark out only the most essential features of his subjects, and give the drawings the look of the ancient Greek or Etruscan vases, which Picasso admired. Warhol, in swiftly tracing over photographic images, is glibly quoting Picasso's neo-classical style.
As for Frank Stella's contribution to the show, his 11 illustrations of Had Gadya, the shows brochure informs us, are based on an earlier series of prints by Russian artist El Lissitzky. Now, Had Gayda is a traditional Passover song, usually sung to help keep children awake and amused during the nighttime vigil. The song, which is literally about a baby goat, operates on the same principle as "I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly." Originally, the patently absurd lyric had no particular significance. Soon enough however, clever scholars, searching for interpretive fodder, insisted the story must mean something more. Thus began the effort to interpret a nonsense rhyme symbolically, allegorically: "the goat clearly represent the chosen people, and so obviously the hungry cat that eats the goat represents.. yiddle-diddle-dee, yiddle--diddle-dum (acknowlegements and apologies to Susan Sontag and Sarah Silverman). 
immediately show, allegory is instead completely emptied and flattened. Allegory, for Stella, means simply an image, which cannot be seen and understood (as Fried would have wanted) in a single instant. Allegories are those images, which, by virtue of there of excessive busyness, glitter, splash and hybridity, require the viewer to perceive them in pieces and over time. The goat in Had Gadya, according to Stella's view of things, is neither more meaningful or less literal than the salvaged goat in Robert Rauschenberg's notorious Monogram. Stella's allegory is depleted of all allegoricity, which is to say emptied of all spirituality and meaning, and emptied of all narrative.
Once this set of expectations, or codes of viewing, has been established in the first prints, Marden then proceeds, in the following images, to frustrate the viewer's ability to play with these effects, by multiplying the number of horizontals and exchanging them for verticals. The viewer is left, then, with a series of visual utterances employing the basic vocabulary of landscape, though no longer adhering to the conventions of landscape's visual grammar. To view the later prints in Marden's series is feel the window, or perhaps door, the artist had opened for us in an initial gesture of welcome, and which he had allowed us freely to adjust, to begin, with an ever-increasing amount of pressure, gradually to close. They shut us out and shut vision down.
It would be almost impossible to look at Fitzpatrick’s prints without having images of old school flash-art come to mind. What distinguishes Fitzpatrick’s images drastically from real tattoos, and simultaneously lessens their impact, is the obvious fact that they are not pricked into skin but instead pressed onto paper. In the same way that their iconography can not be taken literally but instead displays a sense of ironic detachment (for clearly the artist’s interest in games of chance reflects not a belief in metaphysical Fate but rather in simple accident and coincidence), the intense pressure indicated by the printing mark refers not to any painful bodily ordeal but simply a physical process undergone by an inanimate substance. Paper may indeed be a kind of tissue, but it is certainly not a sensitive living membrane. At the same time Fitzpatrick offers us superstition emptied of all belief, he simultaneously offers us images of experience emptied of all ordeal, which is to say “experience” emptied of all experience – either in terms of a painful event commemorated with a tattoo, or the actual pain produced by repeated jabs from a needle.
How are the Museum and the University changed if we begin to think of them not in common-sense terms as a containers holding contents, but rather as spaces created out of dis-contents, which is to say ideological orders composed out of an array of signs? Museums, and the Historical-Survey courses and the specialized disciplines and objective sciences we are trained in at college, and especially the signs and labels within them; all exist for our pacificatory reassurance. And yet, from a more brutal perspective, or perhaps simply that of the cultural outsider, what if we were to consider the Museum and the University as kinds of murder weapons. This startling view opens before us the moment we begin to see that signs and labels veritably constitute the Museum and cientific Truth themselves. Science is nothing but an order of signs. And signs always mitigate, mediate our fear of the unknown. As Hegel said, the name is the murder of the actual thing. Thus the importance of naming, labelling and functionalizing all contents within museums, canonical literature and university courses. Labels in museums and textbooks never scream. But they gently put their arm around us and whisper softly in our ears, This is really that.
and shattered before his eyes. The moral of the story is not that we shouldn't fall in love with dolls, but rather that we should admit and accept that loving a doll is as close to true Love as we're ever going to get. At least as far as Nathaniel is concerned, at first we can say that he made a mistake by preferring Olympia to Clara. But when we go back and read the narrator's description of Clara (her deep swimmingpool eyes and empty sense of silent detachment, as well as her immediate lack of other more apparent charms) we begin to realize what love actually is, and perhaps also why Kant chose to remain a bachelor. To fall in love, at least for Kant, is never to fall in love with the person immediately before you, but rather with the lack and emptiness deep within them, one which reflects your own inner sense of primordial loss.
What the Uncanny, and Kant's philosophy as well, allows us to see, is that we are always strangers in this world, that our true identity and home lies somewhere we can not go and can not even remember. Our only access to our true selves is through the pure force of Reason, which is no longer simply a set of operations which can be used in order to distinguish right from wrong, and true from false. Rather, Reason, in the Kantian sense, is an active and seemingly alien force (or conscience) operating from somewhere deep within us always reminding us that the world of appearance is not our true home, and that the only way to make the world into an home for ourselves is by paying strict attention to an alien and contentless Voice and sense of Duty which seems inexplicably to come to us from somewhere completely outside of know reality. This is a completely anti-hedonistic philosophy. We have no reason to believe that doing the Good will make life any sweeter, either for ourselves or others. In starkest contrast with the epicurian Diderot who warned us against the dangers of Theatre, which would seduce away from reality; for Kant "Reality" itself is nothing but a theatre of dreams of our own making. The goal of true philosophy here would be always to acknowledge that the world is our own creation, and to strive to think and act in such a way that the sum of our actions will produce a narrative with the most coherent and inclusive possible plot.
