Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to cultural studies that assumes society and language are products of, and part of a large overarching system.  Under Structuralism, language and other cultural elements can only be understood as a part of this system.  For Marx, the structure was inherently economic; for Freud, it was psychological; Althusser – ideology.  While Structuralism has fallen out of favor in the last 50 years, its influence on contemporary philosophy and social science cannot be overstated.

Arabic: وَرْدَة (wardä)

Aramaic: rosi

Syriac: ܘܪܕܐ (wardā, wardo)  

Hebrew: ורדא (wardā, wardo)  

Bosnian: ruža (bs)  

Breton: roz collective noun rozenn singular

Catalan: rosa,  

Chinese: 薔薇 (qiángwéi)

Croatian: ruža (hr)  

Czech: růže (cs)  

Danish: rose (da)  

Dutch: roos (nl)  

Estonian: roos (et)

Faroese: rósa (fo)  

Finnish: ruusu (fi)

French: rose (fr)  

Galician: rosa (gl)  

German: Rose (de)  

Greek: τριαντάφυλλο [tria(n)ˈdafiˌlo̞]  , ρόδο [ˈro̞ðo̞]  

Hebrew: ורד (vered)  

Hindi: गुलाब (gulāb)

Hungarian: rózsa (hu)

Indonesian: bunga mawar

Italian: rosa (it)  

Japanese: 薔薇 (ばら, bara), バラの花 (bara no hana)

Latin: rosa (la)  

Lithuanian: rožė (lt)

Maltese: warda (mt)  

Marathi: गुलाब (gulāb)

Norwegian: rose (no)  

Persian: گل (gol)

Polish: róża (pl)  

Portuguese: rosa (pt)  

Romanian: trandafir (ro)  , roză (ro)  

Russian: роза (ru)  

Cyrillic: ружа  

Roman: ruža  

Slovene: vrtnica (sl)  

Spanish: rosa (es)  

Swedish: ros (sv)  

Telugu: గులాబి (gulaabi)

Turkish: gül (tr)

Urdu: گلاب (ur) (gulāb)

Yiddish: רויז (roiz)

(Source: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rose#Translations )

Whatever you call it, it still has thorns.  Maybe Shakespeare was a structuralist 300 years before Ferdinand de Saussure. 

What Bill and Ferd were both pointing out was the word “rose” has no real relationship to the thing we call a rose.  “Rose” is not a living thing; it does not smell; the spoken word does not sound like the flower and the written letters make no sound; it is not even shaped like the flower.  In fact, nothing about “rose” relates to the plant except that someone long ago decided “rose” would be linked to the flower in a specific way.  “Rose” the word is the signifier which conjures a mental conception (the signified) of a thing.  Furthermore, not only does the signifier (word: rose) have no real relationship to the thing, neither does the signified (whatever you think of when you hear or see the word “rose”).  Like the word, the thought does not look like, smell like, sound like or feel like the flower.  Together, the signifier and the signified form the sign for the usually fragrant, often red, generally attractive botanical thing that was distributed to millions earlier this week as a sign of love. (But why that is requires a whole long discussion by itself.)

(This is not a pipe)

The Treachery of Images, by painter René Magritte (1929)

Despite having no tangible connection to the things they represent, Saussure argued that signs (the combined signifier and signified) were not arbitrary. Language in all forms is part of a large meaningful system of culture.  This system has a form or structure and understanding language (or any element of culture) requires an understanding the larger structure and language’s place in that structure, hence the term Structuralism.

Structuralism seems a natural next step from the psychoanalytic theory of culture where signs are the product of the Symbolic, which is a product of, but distinct from the Real and the Imaginary.  Saussure believed that language could be opened up to reveal the hidden reality and ideology that produced the language.  His approach was to separate the use of language, which he termed parole, from the langue, which were the rules of language, or grammar.   Langue is the set of rules we learn about how to construct phrases, sentences, texts, and conversations.  Parole is the specific acts of language in use.  Separating these two concepts was central to Saussure’s argument.  As parole, specific texts contain elements with are sometimes unique to an individual and based personal experience.  Langue, on the other hand, is an impersonal social phenomenon, whose rules apply to everyone.  As such, the processes involved and the influential conditions that form its creation can be studied as generalities that apply to the whole culture.  

Consider the following metaphor:  You may be able to tell a lot about a person by the clothes they wear: size, gender, personality, cultural associations, typical physical environment, and the list goes on...  You can also tell a lot about humans by looking at clothes generally.  We generally have two arm and two legs.  Humans seem to come in two basic shapes (male, female).  Humans grow over time and have changing physical needs.  Our bodies have limited resistance to environmental conditions.  The list goes on…

Saussure believed the commonalities of language, as part of a social structure, revealed things about people in that society like how they thought, how they organized information, what they valued.  The list goes on…  Furthermore, because language is how we connect to and express elements of reality, language influences our perception of reality.  People with fundamentally different languages may experience the same phenomenon in different ways.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

On Halloween, 2009 the “father of modern anthropology” died, just 28 days short of his 101^st birthday.  Claude Lévi-Strauss was a contemporary of Saussure and actually first used the term “structuralism” to describe this theoretical approach to linguistic and culture.  While his work has had significant influence on a number of disciplines, his primary contribution to media and cultural criticism may be his study of myth.  Lévi-Strauss pointed to the commonality of myths from divergent cultures to make statements about how human beings see themselves relative to both the experienced and idealized universe.  Myths and mythical thought provide a way to mediate or resolve contradictions and oppositional elements.  In Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked), Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data (the myths) to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty".

Later critics and theorist would build on Lévi-Strauss’ theories to examine films and other popular narratives.  Will Wright applied structural views of myth to examine Hollywood Westerns.  Wright identified 16 stages common to myths and Western movies specifically.  Likewise, Joseph Campbell received fairly wide recognition for his work on myths.  In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell argued for the existence of the “Monomyth”.  Pointing to similarities between Jesus Christ, Luke Skywalker, and Neo (The Matrix), he argued that all hero myths have the same structure.  Campbell collaborated with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth, which was first broadcast in 1988.  It is a six part series, of which, each part is available on Youtube.

Joseph Campbell--Myth As the Mirror for the Ego 

Roland Barthes

Jackass?

Roland Barthes sought to “make explicit what too often remains implicit in the texts and practices of popular culture” (Storey, 118). He elaborates on Saussure’s “signifier/signified” design by pointing out a “secondary signification” beyond the “primary signification.” To clarify by way of an animal, consider the word ‘jackass.’ At the primary level, the word signifies a male donkey. This is the “denotation” of the word. At the secondary level, the signified male donkey becomes the signifier to produce a new meaning: a stupid person, or a democrat. This is the “connotation” of the words. Barthes “claims that it is at the level of secondary signification or connotations that myth is produced for consumption” (Storey, 119).

Jackass?

Jackass?

Both Levi-Strauss and Barthes were interested in studying the nature of mythology and its ideological implications. Levi-Strauss focuses on the classic conception of myths as stories and finds it noteworthy that myths around the world share similarities. As shown earlier, Joseph Campbell shared this fascination. In considering language in terms of myth, Levi-Strauss wrote that “there is a very good reason why myth cannot simply be treated as language if its specific problems are to be solved; myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is part of human speech. In order to preserve its specificity we must be able to show that it is both the same things as language, and also something different from it” (Lemert, 314). Levi-Strauss seems to be suggesting the connotative creation of meaning. However, when Barthes speaks of myth, he “means ideology understood as a body of ideas and practices, which by actively promoting the values and interests of dominant groups of society, defend the prevailing structures of power” (Storey, 119). In suggesting the connotative quality of signs, Barthes seeks to reveal the myths we are sitting on top of and experiencing constantly. More importantly, Barthes wants to reveal how these myths are used to manipulate.

The classic display of Barthes’ connotation according to Storey’s text is the example from the French Magazine Paris Match that depicts a young black soldier looking upward and saluting something unseen. Storey details the significance of this image, though the relevance is linked to historical incidents from which we, living 55 years later, are detached.  As a more up to date example of how one might read a text, consider this Rolling Stone cover with Kanye West as Jesus.

To name a few of the connotations the image conjures: abuse, struggle, martyrdom, holiness, defiance, or blasphemy. Just like the Paris Match soldier, Kanye is looking upward, a visual decision that creates the impression of his subordination and control. Who he is looking at remains in question. Whether it is God, a music Producer, or his fans, the one he is hailing is left to the person viewing the image. The text sharing the cover with Kanye’s face “controls the production of connotations of the image”(Storey, 122). In this instance, the main guiding text is “The Passion of Kanye West.” This connects to the widely seen movie “The Passion of the Christ,” and supports the reading the Kanye has endured all manner of abuse. We are to glean suffering from this image, the blood on Kanye’s cheek. But his defiant eyes maintain his will and resolve. Should we ignore the other texts on the page: “Out of Control,” “Inside the War Room of the Religious Right,” “Wilson Pickett 1941-2006”? These words attach themselves to Kanye and suggest a loss of control, religious leanings, and death! This reading of texts is dependent upon our experience of culture. “What makes the move from denotation to connotation possible is the store of social knowledge (a cultural repertoire) upon which the reader is able to draw when he or she reads the image” (Storey, 124). In the end, we can only draw from what we have experienced.

Reflection Questions:

1. Structuralism argues that everything is language, what is meant by this? Give examples.

2. Cite and explain a “myth” that is part of our current culture.  How is it being used to shape public discourse or actions?

3. What do you make of the connotations in either or both of these baby-centric magazine covers?

              

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud thought humans were all repressed, which amounts to being closed off from our true urges in an effort to maintain a functional society. If this repression were not in place, we might be tackling one another without warning in an effort to sexually or violently satisfy ourselves.

Freud identifies the conscious and the unconscious in terms of how the mind, or “psyche” functions. The conscious is apparent and perceivable to ourselves and to those around us, while the unconscious is hidden in the deepest recesses of our brains and must be sought after by specialized techniques, namely psychoanalysis.

The unconscious is the home of the “id,” or the unabated animal passions that stir from within. “The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life.” (Lemert, 131) The id is made slave to the “ego,” or the rational and purposeful side of ourselves; the ego, “whose business it also is to discover the most favorable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account”(Lemert, 132). Storey mentions an analogy used by Freud where he compares the ego to a person and the id to a horse. The ego rides the id and helps to keep potentially unbridled energy in check.

If the ego were to let the id run wild, it might look like this:

Freud’s ego/id split makes sense for classifying the inner workings of an individual. The modern film example of a repressed individual letting his id run wild can be found in the movie Fight Club through the character of Tyler Durden.

“The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of super-ego.” (Lemert, 131) In other words, the super-ego is essentially an authority figure living in your head modeled after your parents. Jiminy Cricket acts as Pinocchio’s super-ego:

Freud does not limit the super-ego to the confines of an individual, but expands the notion to that of a collective: “It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds.” (Lemert, 149) The process “is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders - men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided expression.” (Lemert, 149) Freud goes on to say that these individuals are often abused during their lifetime, Jesus Christ being a prime example.

When we dream, Freud believes what occurs is “a compromise between wishes emanating from the id and censorship enacted by the ego…censorship occurs but wishes are expressed; that is, they are coded in an attempt to elude censorship” (Storey, 94). In considering and interpreting dreams, one must weigh “the latent dream thoughts (unconscious) and the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers dreaming)”(Storey, 94). From Frankenstein combinations of latent elements, to associative shape shifting of people into things, it becomes tricky to decipher meaning in dreams. As movie guys, we are fond of the opening sequence from the movie 8 ½ in which the main character, a movie director, finds himself trapped in a car and under the watchful gaze of those around him as he almost suffocates, barely escapes, only to become a kite flying in the air in the hands of his producer.

Freud’s all-famous “Oedipus Complex” is best understood once you know the premise of the play Oedipus Rex (or Oedipus the King) by Sophocles. “Oedipus kills his father (unaware that he is his father) and marries his mother (unaware that she is his mother)”(Storey, 97). Taking note of John Storey’s use of the word ‘unaware’ in his brief but effective retelling of the story shows how this complex happens unconsciously and unintentionally. With an Oedipus Complex, a male child desires his mother, sees his father as competition for her love, wants to kill the father as a result, can’t do it because a kid against a grown man just won’t work, sides with the father and realizes he’ll just have to find another woman down the road, and if he’s lucky, she’ll be just like his mom. Freud had an Oedipus complex worked out for girls where the situation stated above is repeated, except with the father in the place of the mother and vice versa (Storey, 97). This complex has always made sense to us. Then again, we are both men. Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex for women seems a little weak.

When analyzing texts using Freud’s psychoanalytical method, there are two approaches: “the first approach is author-centered, treating the text as the equivalent to an author’s dream”(Storey, 97). By this method, a reader can try to locate hidden meanings within a given text and essentially reveal the author’s secret desires and motivations. In watching movies and television shows, this technique is invaluable to both of us in our quest for meaning in everything we consume.

“The second approach is reader-centered, and…is concerned with how texts allow readers to symbolically play out desires and fantasies in the texts they read”(Storey, 98). By this method, a reader becomes complicit and involved in the content of a work and can analyze the effect that the work has upon him or her.

Jacques Lacan “seeks to anchor psychoanalysis firmly in culture rather than biology”(Storey, 101). Lacan locates in every individual an “endless quest in search of an imagined moment of plenitude [abundance]”(Storey, 101). What is sought after is termed “l’objet petit a,” and will never be obtained.

Lacan is perhaps best known for his concept of the “mirror stage,” when a child first sees itself in a mirror and recognizes what it is and what it can be. “This form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone”(Lemert, 344). In other words, this event sets up the formation of the ego wherein the child begins to see itself as someone who looks and is looked upon. The image of itself that the child perceives in the mirror amounts to a “misrecognition” because of the division that occurs. Once the mirror stage has occurred, an individual enters the realm of the “Imaginary” and begins to identify with objects around it. “All our acts of identification are always acts of misidentification; it is never our selves that we recognize but only ever another potential image of our selves”(Lemert, 102). If you imagine the movie screen as a gigantic mirror in which we watch idealized versions of ourselves, you will begin to understand the impact Lacan’s thought has had on cinematic analysis.

Lacan’s conception of the “fort-da-game” surrounds the “alienating split between being and meaning; before language we had only being (a self-complete nature), after language we are both object and subject: this is made manifest every time I think (subject) about myself (object)”(Lemert, 103). Language becomes a symbolic way of representing the world and ourselves, and in turn, the way we lose and rediscover ourselves with every word we utter.

The Oedipus Complex, for Lacan, is a phase that solidifies the concept of otherness felt by an individual. Beginning with the separation from the mother and the impossibility of returning to her womb, we begin our endless search for something that is somehow equivalent to that ultimate desire, the closing of the gap between you and the other. And it will never be found. John Storey dashes the commonly held “ideology of romantic love – in which ‘love’ is the ultimate solution to all our problems”(Storey, 104). What a jerk.

Laura Mulvey is a seminal figure in the understanding of how women are portrayed and perceived in cinema. With her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she hones in on “the male gaze,” which occurs in three ways: from the gaze of male characters looking at the women within a given movie, from the gaze of the camera filming the women, and finally the gaze of the audience watching the movie. “The inscription of the image of woman in this system is twofold: she is the object of male desire and she is the signifier of the threat of castration”(Storey, 105).

By way of her famous article, Mulvey seeks to destroy particular pleasures in the cinematic experience. “First, there is scopophilia, the pleasure of looking”(Storey, 105). Scopophilia has an inherent controlling and objectifying aspect to cinema that Mulvey considers addictive and dangerous. Another pleasure that Mulvey believes must be destroyed is the promotion of narcissism in the cinema. “Just as a child recognizes and misrecognizes itself in the mirror, the spectator recognizes and misrecognizes itself on the screen”(Storey, 105). When we identify with the main character of a movie, we are engaging narcissism. This kind of identification becomes dangerous when we enforce behavior in our lives by looking to these idealized and potentially misogynistic characters on the movie screen.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian theorist who believes that “fantasy is not the same as illusion; rather, fantasy organizes how we see and understand reality. It works as a frame through which we see and make sense of the world”(Storey, 107). In his “Passions of the Real, Passions of the Semblence,” Zizek writes about the events of September 11^th, 2001 and how most people experienced the event through television news coverage. We had been accustomed to experiencing fictionalized Hollywood movie versions of such a catastrophic event until that point. In effect, we fantasized about the very real terror that the collapsing towers created, until the reality presented itself to us and everything else seemed false in comparison. “The authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect,’ sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur pornography, up to snuff movies”(Zizek, 12). In short, we prefer the fantasy and the desire that accompanies it. “Anxiety is the result of getting too close to what we desire, thus threatening to eliminate ‘lack’ itself and end desire”(Storey, 109).

Additional citation besides two textbooks:

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso. 2002.

Questions:

How does a cultural super-ego compare or contrast to an organic intellectual?

How does Althusser’s conception of ideology connect to Lacan’s theories?

How would you locate Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze in a movie you saw recently?

--from your pals, Steve and David

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