Palmer, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Beginners: Saussere”
- Plato argued that it was impossible to name everything, only the essences which are “real” for Plato, not just abstractions
- Words name ideas not things
- Saussere: what defines a word is the relation which it stands in to other words in the system
- Different languages produce different concepts
- Ready-made ideas do not exist before words
- Signified (concept) | Signifier (sound image)
- Signs are arbitrary, there is no natural connection between the signifier and the signified
- Onomatapoeia: words that imitate sounds in Nature
- Plato felt that all words emulated reality
- Saussere: the conventions between signifier and signified are arbitrary also
- Language is the whole system, Speech is the actual act of sounds
- Things are defined by what they are not
- 2 studies of language: 1) Synchronic: the study of all relations among the different parts of a linguistic system at any given moment in time and 2) Diachronic: the study of the evolution of a language and its history’s impact on linguistic events
- Associative Relations (Paradigms) and Syntagms
- The mind is a system of operations that generate structures of similarity and differentiation in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships
- Language cannot be interfered with by individuals
Palmer, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Beginners: Barthes”
- Essentialism is a belief in the priority of essences, of Platonic form
- Sartre: existence precedes essence
- Barthes: Essentialism is a bourgeoisie ideology attempting to form reality
- There are no unities, only pluralities
- The tendency of dominant forces to define reality in such a way that their way is the “natural way”
- The world of fashion as a system of signs
- The food industry as a semiological system
- Myth is a form of discourse that tries to make cultural norms appear as facts of nature
- Only revolutionary language escapes myth
- Text as a “linguistic spectacle”
- No text can have only one meaning, the more meanings the better
- Literature is the critique of meaning
Barthes, “Myth Today”
- Myth is a type of speech, a system of communication, a form
- Everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed in discourse
- Social usage added to pure matter
- Objects are not inevitably a source of suggestiveness for myth
- Human history converts reality to speech
- Message through odes of representation
- Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material
- Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication
- Myth is a semiological system
- Semiology deals with meaning and value, forms, significations apart from their content
- All criticism must consent to the ascesis, to the artifice of analysis
- The more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism
- Semiology postulates a relation between three terms: a signifier, the signified and the sign
- Myth as a 2nd order semiological system
- Myth has 2 semiological systems: 1) a linguistic system and 2) myth as a meta-language
Barthes, “Empire of Signs”
- The dinner tray as a definition of a painting, but subject to recomposition due to eating
- By composing your choices you make what you eat
- Rice as a clump of a whole yet made up of much smaller constituent pieces
- Soup as aquatic, an elixir
- Japanese food as a “written” food
- Writing as the act which unites the same labor what could not be apprehended together in the mere flat space of representation
- The smallness of the food as emblematic of clarity of purpose
- The chopsticks as metaphor for purpose
- Subiyaki stew as an event, a minor odyssey, the Twilight of the Raw
- Japanese cooking as tutelage of Rawness
