I remember the moment as an undergraduate when I first came across Saussure and the theory that rocked my world. I am, he told me, constructed by language. No - more than this, reality is structured by language. If language was a science full of codes and rules, what had I been saying all those years? And what would I talk about now?
30 years on, I bumped into him again this morning and realised that the process of naturalisation his interpreter, Roland Barthes calls mythology, had worked. Since he blew my mind all those years ago, I've come to terms with the fact that we're fed a line, and in turn feed our own to keep everything just as it is. I know as much as my 15 year old does that beauty is a myth constructed not just for the beauty industry but for our sense of self, and what that really means. I pondered this as I sipped my Thai soup over a spot of MTV at lunchtime, and still I marvelled at Shakira's wiggle .
Barthes said that it is our complicity in this 'knowing' that makes the difference, and as we reach the last four weeks of this module in Critical and Cultural Theory, I wonder if that isn't the point of this semester's work. From Racism to Feminism and Post Colonialism to Structuralism, all these isms were oppositional at birth, and grew up to raise our awareness. All those movements were domesticized and incorporated into our world as progressive and hegemonic. Civil rights might have started on the streets but ended up around the dinner table. I showed my students the John Pilger documentary 'The War You Don't See' yesterday, and although they were pretty disturbed by the horrific images of the 'reality' of war, they had a fair idea that we're not fed the whole truth. They hadn't quite got as far as working out who writes the press releases of war or who told the cameramen where to stand when Sadaam's statue was felled, but they've got a pretty strong sense that there's a puppet master who's calling the shots
So, if we're aware now, is that enough? Now we know that Race is a construct, how can we be racist? Society's relationship with women was based on a constructed truth of our place in the home, but when we took the aprons off and showed that we have more uses as multi-taskers, would anyone - including ourselves - treat us the same way again? Did the kids leave home as a result? Why would they? They still got fed. They still had their lullabies. Once the Wizard of Oz was revealed to be a conman, it didn't take much to dismantle the myth, but did the people of Oz file out of the Emerald City in disgust when they realised their leader was a charlatan? Why would they if things were so good? Isn't that what Gramsci meant by hegemony? They knew what they'd got and had signed up with both eyes open. That the wizard turned out to be living a myth of his own was so not the point.
The people of Oz lived in a political system based on benign dictatorship, but their political act was in consenting to be ruled by him. Meanwhile, they got on with building a world in which their own everyday realities had very little to do with the fact that he didn't really exist. Did they need to be told this by all those philosophers from Gramsci to Adorno, Althusser and Barthes who, back in the 'real world' were reacting to a real revolution in Western Europe? Whipping away the bedrocks - from language to the culture industry - may have exposed the alienation between the means of production and the consumer, the pig and the bacon roll, the soldier and the war, but there was a hell of a lot to become conscious about then.
If we put it altogether in a nice neat chronological narrative, does one theory build on the next until we emerge, 'knowing' in to the sunlight. In short, are we there yet? Bizarrely, the academic elite probably is, in that we now have as much access to understanding what's really going on as we ever will, but will they tell anyone who hasn't paid up for an MA? As long as it's wrapped up in academic language designed to obscure ideas from those not given the key to the ivory towers, what use is it really? Surely democratisation of these ideas is essential if the isms are to be exposed as the myths they really are.
Barthes talked about innoculating us by exposing the myths, but was it about giving us a shot of chemicals to avoid us getting anywhere near the truth, or stopping nature from dealing with it like any disease would? Demystifying, said Barthes, was a political act, and was part of his job on the left wing French newspaper he wrote for. I love his article on ornamental cooking; even in France where people eat every part of the animal, haute cuisine sets about changing the colour, shape and taste of the raw ingredients until they have been so removed from peasant food that the final dish represents the myth itself. And how hilarious - what genius - it was to turn that back on the Brits who would then pay a fortune for French peasant food like cassoulet, buying into the double myth of the classiness of French cuisine.What a hoot it must be to work in Advertising. I have a vision of a Machiavellian version of the Wizard of Oz lording it in Saatchis, reading Barthes and writing myths to be pumped out to a salivating crowd. How come Kate Middleton and Prince William just popped into my head?
Barthes said that myth is neither false or true, but about the compromise that we make in absorbing it. Not as individuals, of course, but as society. We haven't started with Derrida yet, but it looks like chaos theory ahead. While my poor old seminar chum wrings her hands and begs us to prove that essentialism has a place in all this, it was Sassure, the scientist, who said that his codes and structures offered us a way of seeing through those myths, that there was light at the end of the Structuralist tunnel. Perhaps there is something outside the box of constructs. I doubt it though.
No comments:
Post a Comment