Episode #116 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I released two episodes today, and I know not everyone has the luxury to listen to them back to back. But, if you do, I highly recommend it. These two episodes go together. They need each other. They complete each other. They should be together. Help them. Either way, I hope you love the show today.

So, like we talked about last time, when structuralism bursts onto the scene in the early 20th century, there’s an immediate shift in the way many thinkers view the traditional assumptions we’ve made about subjectivity. The idea that what you are is a free-acting, independent subject sort of disinterestedly taking in the universe, exploring the infinite options at your disposal, I mean, all that starts to seem like an outdated, delusional way of viewing what it is to be a self. What it starts to look like is what you are, every preference, every habit, every belief that you hold is merely an expression of rituals and structures of a culture that you happen to be occupying during your time here. The self doesn’t shape the world. The world shapes the self, as it goes.

Now, this is usually easy for people to get on board with when it comes to the little things, for example, the gestures that we use, right? Like, you can point out to somebody that they wave at people when they greet them. And you can ask them, “Where’d you get that from? Where’d you get the idea to move your hand back and forth at someone when you see them?” I mean, you didn’t come out of the womb waving at everyone in the hospital. You’re certainly not the person that invented waving. No, what happened was, you were born into a culture that has a particular set of rituals. There was a time in your life when you didn’t know anything about waving, but after seeing people waving at you over and over again as a form of greeting, eventually, you added waving to your bag of tricks. And now it’s just part of you; it's part of who you are. If you were born into a different culture where waving wasn’t a thing, you wouldn’t have the slightest inclination at all to wave your hand in front of someone’s face when you’re greeting them.

Now, practically nobody sees that as a controversial statement to make. But people start getting a little weird when a structuralist says to them, “What if your taste in music is the same way? What if your favorite clothes and your favorite book and your favorite way to spend your evening are also just expressions of a culture that you happen to be born into? What about your political viewpoints, your moral code, your views on the nature of existence? What if they’re all the same way?” To most people, these things feel very different than the cultural custom of waving. And the idea that they’ve just sort of picked these things up along the way -- these things feel like the totality of what it is to be me. “See, I’ve always seen myself as a blank slate that’s an autonomous self. I came into this universe knowing nothing about it. And, slowly but surely, I’m figuring this universe out piece by piece. And, what? Now you’re telling me that every viewpoint and every preference I have is really just me choosing from the rituals and structures of an incredibly narrow set of cultural parameters, set up not to be able to understand the universe, necessarily, but for the sake of monkeys being able to work together better? How did this happen?”

Well, an early structuralist might respond by saying that it happened in many different ways -- still is happening, by the way. I mean, your particular expression of the culture you’re in has probably been reinforced to you already a hundred times today. And the interesting thing is you would never see it happening if you weren’t specifically looking for it because it lies underneath the world as you immediately perceive it at a surface level. But what happens when you look at things in the world around you through the lens of semiotics? Actually, let me slow down.

Real quick, just to prime this discussion we’re about to have, one of the crucial things to remember from last time is that early structuralists are going to be following up on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, de Saussure being the person credited with founding the field of semiotics, semiotics being the study of signs, signs being things like words or pictures or many other things that act as a stand in for something else for the sake of us being able to communicate effectively. What we also talked about was how Ferdinand de Saussure saw each sign as being comprised of two primary parts. There’s the signifier, which is the word or picture, the thing standing in for something else. And then there’s the signified, which is the concept of the thing the signifier’s referencing.

Well, building from there, when early structuralists started applying this semiotic approach towards deconstructing signs in their respective fields of study, what they start to realize is that communication is often not as simple as there just being a single signifier attached to a single signified. It’s not always as simple as our example from last time -- there’s the word “cow” and then there’s the neat, four-legged, bovine creature in the field -- that oftentimes, when we actually look at how signs are used in these complex fields of human study, a single signifier can be attached to multiple different signifieds. A single word or a single sentence may have a surface-level meaning that it’s trying to denote. But, as it’s often said, there’s a big different between denotation and connotation: that beneath a surface-level reading of what a particular sign is seeming to communicate, there’s often layers upon layers of different meanings; meanings that, on one hand, allow the complexity of the universe to appear intelligible to us but, on the other hand, drastically narrow and distort the way that we see reality.

Now, let’s explain this further because it’s this insight that early structuralists stumble upon that makes many of them become interested in specifically using this new semiotic approach towards understanding mythology at a deeper level. And here’s where they’re coming from. What is the extent of the meaning we can get out of a mythological work? What I mean is, you can look at mythology in a number of different ways. There’s a sense in which somebody could read a story from mythology, and they could interpret that story entirely at a surface level. Take Orphism and the mythology of ancient Greece, for example. Somebody can read those stories, and it is entirely possible for them to read them in a very surface-level way. And they may interpret what they read as just a fun story about a dysfunctional pantheon of gods, almost like the story is sort of Wikipedia for these primitive people of Greece that needed some mythology like this to explain things for them. “Oh, you want to know about the weather? Great. We got a story about a guy named Zeus up in the clouds; he’s got a bag full of lightning bolts. Want to know about the ocean? Ah, we got Poseidon, god of the sea. Don’t want to make him mad.”

In other words, there’s a sense in which someone could read these stories and think that they’re just stories or some sort of outdated fairytale account of the way the universe is. But there’s another sense in which, if you were to read mythology in this way, you’d be entirely missing the point of mythology, that the true value and meaning of mythology is not in that surface-level story about Zeus and Poseidon. No, there’s a secondary message that’s being delivered beneath the surface of the text non-explicitly. And the onus is on the reader to interpret and understand that deeper message. Depending on the mythology you’re reading, this could be anything. It could be the origins of a particular group of people, the values of the culture in which the story’s being written.

Take the story of Noah’s Ark, for example. Somebody could read that story and interpret it entirely at a surface level. This is a story about a guy named Noah. God decides he’s going to shake the Etch A Sketch and start all over, and Noah needs to build an ark. But another way of looking at that story is that the primary meaning for someone to take away from it is not in that denotation. It’s in the secondary story beneath the text. Or, in the language of semiotics, there’s another layer of meaning that lies in an entirely different set of signifieds that connect to the original signifiers, and that this is not merely a story about some guy named Noah and an ark. No, there’s a deeper meaning to this story that, I mean, for example, provides Christians with valuable insights about their relationship with God and how to be a good Christian.

But it potentially goes even deeper than that, though. Maybe even deeper than the meaning it has for practicing Christians, there are messages written into this story that any human being alive can find value in. Some people might say, maybe this isn’t a story about a deity drowning everything on the planet at all, that the mythological archetype of the flood is something that’s not unique to this story. It spans across many different cultures and mythological works to symbolize, at a deeper level of those texts, the cycle of death and rebirth that nature inevitably throws our way as human beings; that anyone listening to this can come up with countless different ways that tomorrow nature could send some cataclysmic event our way that humanity would want to survive as we have in the past, and that maybe this story can inform that process; that maybe it’s not literally about a guy named Noah that sacrifices animals to God to earn his favor. Maybe that process of sacrifice at a deeper level of this story is depicting how personal sacrifice is the only thing that can temper you into being the kind of person that isn’t instantly ruined by events that test you and are out of your control. Maybe it’s not about building a boat. Maybe building the boat is just a metaphor for building the means by which you’re going to survive this cataclysmic event before it actually happens.

Now, even if this is a horrible take on Noah’s Ark, you can understand the point here. Oftentimes within mythology there are multiple signifieds attached to the original signifiers. There are the actual words that tell a very surface-level story, but to only read it at that level would be missing out on a lot of the intended meaning of the work that lies, in a sense, beneath the surface-level text. Now, this is an extremely obvious point to people when it comes to mythology and things that are clearly written with a deeper meaning in mind. But the really important thing that many structuralists would say we should all remember here is, consider the possibility that you can go every single day of your life reading mythology just at that very surface level, never realizing all the other layers there are. The reason this is so important to us in particular is because there’s this very modern idea that’s pretty popular that as a species, when it comes to mythology, we’re pretty much past all that. Mythology is this thing people used to do a long time ago to be able to make sense of things. But in today’s world we have much more advanced and sophisticated ways of talking about things and, quite frankly, we don’t have to resort to these archaic methods used in mythology that are obviously distorted, obviously oversimplified. We’re past that as a species.

Well, one of the early structuralists by the name of Roland Barthes is going to say that the idea that we’re in some sort of post-mythological age is complete and utter nonsense. See, to Barthes, mythology is an extremely human thing to create and be engaged in. We do it all the time whether we realize it or not. And it’s not that mythology no longer exists in our modern world, it’s that the average person is so immersed within the mythology, the culture in our daily lives so saturated with a hidden, secondary story telling us the way the world is, that, much like an average citizen of ancient Greece that might see a lightning bolt and confidently attribute that to Zeus, we do the very same sort of thing with our world and our mythology. And, just like it’s possible to go your whole life reading the mythology of ancient Greece at a very basic, surface level, you can go your entire life in our modern world interpreting everything around you at a surface level, never realizing the deeper, secondary-level story that you’re blindly accepting as “just the way the world is.”

See, Roland Barthes would say, again, it’s not that mythology doesn’t exist in our modern world, it’s that the delivery method of it has changed. Most people aren’t going to some giant book filled with epic poetry about a pantheon of gods to get their mythology in this day and age. No, to Roland Barthes, the mythology of our world is typically delivered to people through mass media. Because really consider the similarities between the two mediums when you look at them through the lens of semiotics like these early structuralists did. A dusty old tome that contains mythology is really just a vast collection of signs, hundreds of pages of signifiers that denote a surface-level meaning but that also have multiple layers of signifieds attached to them that it’s the reader’s job to interpret.

Well, the same thing is the case with the media we consume. For example, take your average TV news broadcast in today’s world. Actually, for the sake of the example, I mean, if this is possible within your own personal political beliefs, picture the news broadcast that you most disagree with, whether that’s CNN, Fox News, doesn’t matter. Well, what is that news broadcast really when you look at it using semiotics? Well, it’s just a vast collection of signs, signs that on one level deliver a surface message of reporting the news of the day. But, as you can see when you really analyze the specific signs and the calculated ways that CNN or Fox News are using them, there’s often layers of mythology not being explicitly stated. And this mythology spans from things that are seemingly innocent like messages that reinforce their credibility as a news source to messages that make value judgments about whose opinion should be taken seriously. This goes all the way to mythology that makes brazen assumptions about what it even is to exist, all of these messages shaping, distorting, and narrowing people’s views on the way the world is.

Picture the typical signs presented to people in a news broadcast. “And, now, the five o’clock news.” Sweeping camera shot. There’s music playing with a lot of beeping or a sense of urgency about it. Roland Barthes would really want us to ask ourselves, why is it that music in particular? What deeper story is being delivered to people there through that music? More signs are delivered to us. The camera brings into view a big room with two people sitting behind a desk, dressed up in respectable clothes. Well, why the desk? Why those clothes in particular? Why do they have incredible posture? Why is that giant picture behind them? Why are they looking directly into the camera lens as though they’re looking you in the eye when they give you the news? Why do they talk in a very specific articulation and diction that’s the way somebody talks to you when they deliver to you the news?

See, everything about the five o’clock news that’s being presented to you is a vast collection of signs. And, just like classic mythology, this combination of signs can be taken at a surface level and just glossed over. But to look at the news in that way would be missing out on a lot of deeper stories that are being told to viewers non-explicitly. Roland Barthes would say that peppered throughout this entire broadcast is a mythology that’s being communicated to you that what these people on the television screen are telling you is total, unmediated reality. Barthes would want to break it down even further though, even down to details that may seem completely insignificant at a surface level.

For example, what’s with all the scrolling text? I mean, really, why is scrolling text so popular on programs that deliver the news? Is it just a really efficient way of delivering a message to people, or does the scrolling of that text add a little something to the way we perceive the information? For example, does the scrolling text make it look a little more like an official bulletin that we should all pay attention to? Does it add to the viewer a feeling that this information’s hot off the press? Because, look! It just came into existence on the left side of my screen a few seconds ago, and I better read it fast because it’s not going to be around for long.

Roland Barthes would say that we often look at the font of a message as sort of just a disinterested vehicle for delivering that message. But in reality, he would say, the font that something is written in adjusts and changes the meaning of what it’s conveying. There’s a very good reason the newspaper isn’t written in Comic Sans. And understanding why that is, understanding the deeper mythology that’s brought to bear even when it comes to something as seemingly insignificant as the font that’s being used, can help us understand the goal of Roland Barthes during this portion of his career when he’s analyzing mass media, that is, to demystify culture for the average viewer.

We have been collectively mystified by this mythology that exists in media. And it’s mystified us by doing what Barthes says it’s so effective at doing: mythology transforms history into nature. And what he means by that is -- look, Barthes is an anti-essentialist. To him, there’s no such thing as some essential way the world is that we’re accessing through media, or at least no validity when people say essentialist things like, “That’s just the way people are,” or “That’s just the way Americans are,” or any number of countless examples you could bring up. What mythology does so well is turn history into nature. It takes these cultural constructions, like, for example, the idea of how Americans are, a construction that is ultimately arbitrary and completely contingent upon history. And mythology gets people to look at that construction as though it’s a fixed, unchanging part of nature, as though the way you look at the world and make sense of it is just the way the world is.

Because here’s the thing. Back to CNN and Fox News for a second, Barthes would say there’s a lot of people out there that are really good at spotting the mythology of people they disagree with, but when you ask them about their own worldview, “Oh, well, the way I look at things is just the way the world is, goes without saying.” Barthes says it’s right there that you’re always going to find mythology. Whenever someone says something like, “It goes without saying,” or “It’s just the way the world is,” that’s always an area someone’s loaded up with mythological baggage that they don’t realize they’re carrying around with them.

This is the crucial point to understand about this mythology. The goal is not to do away with mythology or to become a person that sees the world in a way devoid of mythology. No, to many structuralists, you can’t escape mythology. To have an understanding of this universe at all is to have a mythology that you subscribe to that gives you, yes, a narrow but at least comprehensible picture that, if you never thought about it, may just seem to you like the way the world is. The goal isn’t to get rid of the mythology but to demystify your own personal mythology so that you can see it for what it actually is.

Now, what he also wants people to realize through this is that, when you look at mass media through the lens of semiotics, what becomes immediately obvious to you is how quickly we move, as he says, from semiology to ideology. Semiology is the original name Ferdinand de Saussure wanted to use, but it’s more commonly known today as semiotics. What Barthes is saying is that, when you use semiotics to uncover these second and third-level meanings hidden in media, what you find is almost always mythology that promotes a particular political ideology. And by political ideology he’s not just talking about liberal versus conservative. His scope’s much broader. By political, he means any message that aims to change something about the world in some way. So, this is not just CNN or Fox News doing this stuff, but advertisements, books, YouTube channels, podcasts, practically every input we receive from the media landscape. To Barthes, the entire world around you is a mythological work that needs to be interpreted. And, when you can spot the mythology that underlies even the most seemingly innocent things in media, you can start to see all the assumptions we bring to the table that have massive effects on the way the average person thinks, behaves, votes, the way they structure their viewpoint of reality.

Now, I want to repeat this because I want to make sure this is entirely clear. What Barthes is not doing here is telling people, “Hey! When you’re watching TV, if you pay close attention, you can spot people on the news that’ll tell you things that are politically biased. Be careful for that mythology they’re going to throw your way.” No. He’s actually saying something much more fundamental and extraordinary than that. What he’s saying is, when you use semiotics to look at this mythology hidden within media, if you dig deep enough, this mythology is an entry point towards exhuming the deep-rooted, underlying structures that make up our culture, the structures that allow our culture to function at all. Let me say that another way. What Barthes is uncovering here is the very structure of our culture and what makes it work. He’s uncovering the oversimplified stories we tell ourselves every day that act as the fabric that holds society together.

Remember last episode when we were talking about how language and words only work when they’re arranged in a very specific structure? Well, many structuralists believed that culture worked the same way, that as human beings we formulate cultures using the exact same patterns we use to formulate languages that, like every language, every culture has a complex arrangement of social structures that allow society to function. Barthes, by using semiotics to dissect the media we consume and get to the mythology that’s being implied but not said, what he’s actually uncovering there are the various structures of culture that most people never notice are there. Barthes would say, the same way you can easily talk to people all day long and make sentences and you don’t necessarily need to understand semiotics or the complexities of grammar to be able to do that, you can be engaged in this mythology with every viewpoint that you have, and you can be completely unaware of the narrow cultural structures that lie underneath the stuff that you’re watching. This is what Barthes means when he says he wants to demystify culture for people. He wants to show people culture for what it truly is.

So, let’s talk about several examples that Barthes gives. Now, we can immediately dive into the obviously coercive mythology, but I think one of the best places to start, just because it’s such a normal, everyday part of the way we navigate existence, is to talk about the mythology that pervades the way that the average person looks at soap. Yes, that’s right, soaps and detergents. Bear with me for this example. I promise it’s going to make sense. Here’s where he’s coming from. When you look at the denotation of soap, what is it really? Well, on a surface level it’s just a bunch of clean-smelling bubbles. But we don’t see it as just a bunch of clean-smelling bubbles, do we? Barthes says in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way, there’s a spirituality that comes along with soap, a mythology that we’ve added onto those clean-smelling bubbles that affect the way we think about how soap fits into our lives. And we can see all this extra meaning we tack onto soap when we look at the way advertisers try to sell it to us.

Think of the language that’s often used when describing soap. We almost see it as this sort of holy weapon that we’re using to fight against the demon of uncleanliness out there. And advertisers will talk about soap using language that makes it sound like it’s a weapon. This weapon cuts through dirt like a sword. This soap destroys grunge and grime at the source almost like it’s some sort of cleaning artillery. It tackles any mess with ease using our patented foaming cleanser. We actually talk about cleansing away filth the same way somebody from a different culture in time may talk about cleansing a house of an evil spirit. Think of the images on the TV screen of the dinner plate half dirty with food all over it, half glistening white or, on a deeper level, half tainted by this evil curse known as filth and dirtiness and half restored to the rightful, natural state of purity that it belongs in that this soap has delivered to you.

The idea that we accept there being, look, there are going to be times in your life when evil rears its ugly head. Filth and dirtiness are going to corrupt these things in your life that you care about. Maybe it’s your kitchen table. Maybe it’s your clothes. Maybe it’s your car. But eventually the time’s going to come you need to take this soap, this soap that kills 99.9% of bacteria, and you need to carry out a bacteria holocaust in your kitchen to cleanse your life and restore it to a state of purity. Soap will get you there. Forged in the crucible of the Pine Sol factory, your kitchen table’s deliverance from the corruption of filth awaits you down at the grocery store.

Now, this sounds completely ridiculous when we use these words and talk about it as though it’s some sort of religious cleansing. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t the way the utility of soap functions in our daily lives. Barthes would say, the fact we talk about soap in standard, everyday language all the time is a big part of the reason we’re capable of normalizing the way we use soap, never noticing all the mythology we attach to it and just accepting soap as, again, just the way the world is. But here’s the reality, he would say. The way we look at soap is not as just a bunch of clean-smelling bubbles. Things in my life that matter to me get dirty, and soap is the catalyst by which I return those things to their rightful, clean place where they belong. In other words, there seems to be a way that we structure our lives by looking at things in terms of whether they are clean or dirty. And most of us just gladly accept that that’s just the way the world is.

Remember that structure for next episode. But the point here is not to criticize soap or the people who use soap. The point is to show people how, even with something as simple as soap, there’s this entirely different level of signifieds, a deeper level of meaning that we attach to clean-smelling bubbles that certainly helps us navigate our lives, but that meaning doesn’t say anything necessarily true about those bubbles objectively.

Now, some of you out there might be saying, “Okay, who cares? It’s soap.” And I get it. It is just soap. The stakes aren’t exactly life threatening here. But they’re not supposed to be. That’s the whole strategy. Talking about something as benign and politically uncharged as soap is Barthes using an extremely obvious, uncontroversial example just to illustrate to anyone that this mythology exists. So, now that we know it does exist, let’s talk about examples of how this mythology can be either enormously helpful or horribly damaging to people, sometimes simultaneously.

Probably the most famous example Barthes has is when he uses semiotics to analyze professional wrestling. Now, by professional wrestling, he’s not talking about Greco-Roman wrestling or Olympic wrestling. He’s talking about stuff like the WWE: big dudes in Speedos beating each other with chairs, screaming at each other, pretending to writhe in pain on the ground; the outcome’s planned before the start of the match. Somebody could look at professional wrestling and ask the question, unless if you’re into this stuff, who outside of a seven-year-old kid could possibly get any value out of this? But Barthes would say, if that’s really the way you’re looking at wrestling, you’re entirely missing the point of wrestling.

Once again, let’s all notice the pattern that’s emerging here. The people that look at the media landscape and, for that matter, the world around them at an entirely basic, surface level are always going to be missing out on a lot of deeper meaning that’s not obvious. Looking at wrestling this way is the equivalent of reading Greek mythology and just thinking it’s a story about Zeus and Poseidon. The true meaning people are connecting with when they’re watching professional wrestling has nothing to do with the surface level of guys beating each other with chairs. The mistake someone’s making if they see it that way is that they’re looking at wrestling as though the point of wrestling is for there to actually be a competition when, in reality, wrestling is a spectacle that’s goal is to deliver very specific messages to people about morality.

To show why this is the case, he compares boxing and wrestling. The purpose of a boxing match is to figure out who the best boxer is. So, because of that, you’d never writhe in pain on the ground if someone punched you. You’d never be losing a boxing match and decide you’re going to leave the ring, get a chair, beat your opponent senseless with it, get up on the high rope, take their lifeless body, and body slam it into a Buick that’s parked next to the stage. I mean, you just wouldn’t do that because a big part of a boxing match is that the rules dictate who wins the boxing match. When it comes to wrestling, Barthes says that the only reason why the rules are there at all is to serve as guidelines to be broken by whoever the bad guy is. I mean, really, the only reason the rules even exist is to inspire outrage in the crowd when they’re broken.

Wrestling is not a sport in this way; it’s a drama. The wrestlers are all characters, huge people, cartoonishly huge at times, characters thrown into playing moral roles that deliver a wide variety of messages to people, one of the major recurring ones being that justice is still being delivered in the world. The bad guy may win. He may get away with what he’s doing five time, ten times, but there’s always going to be that day when the bag guy gets his comeuppance. Barthes would say that a big part of what people are communicating with is the fact that, yes, bad people do exist out there, but here’s proof in some way that law and order and justice are still being delivered in this crazy world.

Now, this function within culture has been served by many other things all throughout history. Public executions -- did the human beings of the past hang people and chop off their heads in the public square because people are sadistic and just really like watching people die? Or does the cultural ritual of justice being carried out in public on criminals help keep people voluntarily participating in this chaotic game that involves us banding together for mutual benefit? So in that sense this mythology delivered to people by professional wrestling is part of the very fabric that holds culture together. You could say, if you were foreshadowing to next episode, that it’s a very small part of a much larger structure that holds society together. Barthes likes wrestling in particular because, I mean, yes, it’s fake. Yes, it’s delivering mythology to people. But at least it doesn’t masquerade around and pretend like it’s anything other than that like so many other programs out there do.

Now, at first glance it seems great that something as simple as professional wrestling is delivering messages to people that help hold society together. That definitely seems like a good thing. But Barthes would strongly suggest that we take a second to think about the potential downsides of something like that. Think about it. Hypothetically, you can use media to deliver to people a message that helps hold society together much to the detriment of society. Barthes would say, picture somebody in a place of enormous political power, some politician. Maybe they have a friend that owns a media company too. How easy would it be for that person to create a show that delivers to people this message that law and order and justice are being carried out in the world around them just as a cover so that the politician and their friends at the top levels of government can rake the citizenry over the coals, rob them blind, destroy the country, and never have to face any sort of meaningful outrage from people because most of the population have been sold this marketing campaign that they’re living in a just country? What if in reality the purpose of public executions was to terrify anyone into submission who might otherwise dare to rebel against the status quo? When you’re clever enough to deliver to people a mythology that gets people to confidently say something as reductionist as, “That’s just the way the world is, and it goes without saying,” imagine the conditions you could get them to live in.

We’ll continue this discussion next episode. I highly recommend you listen to now. These two go together.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.