Someone I was talking with brought up Mirror Neurons, which, according to the NIH “respond to actions that we observe in others. The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves.”  This is quite similar to what Lacan writes of in the mirror stage, particularly the notion that human knowledge is based upon human interactions or paranoiac (1114). Continuing in that section Lacan writes “I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality— or as they say, between the Innenwelt and Umwelt (Inner and Outer World) (1114).”  Imago being, as I understand it, the effect during the moment when a subject assumes an image, so a moment of “identification” as Lacan identifies it (1112).  Thus inferred the idea that there is the asymptotic relationship with the ideal self in the imago, at that moment in the mirror stage when the child looks at the mirror and sees himself in a stable, ideal way. What seems so interesting with Mirror Neurons is that it shows how that form of identification and knowledge through others even oneself is in fact activated by neurons, or at least thought to be. So if there is a natural response to seeing ourselves and/or another, then it follows that cultural productions are how we gain an identity, through painting, film, advertising and just images. There is obviously not a singular way of seeing others and having a singular emotional response through art, or a mirror, or just walking around. In this idea I found myself thinking about Ways of Seeing by John Berger in relation to this identity formation. In the first chapter, or section, he writes that through the camera and mass production of images “today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way (16).”  All of a sudden art is cut and copied and reproduced (Berger cites Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a major source) and words added on and around art to signify a plethora of ideas.  So how we learn and identify becomes all the more influenced by the amount of images we see now than we would have observed in the past.  We touched on this in class, both with Mulvey in the profusion of more film that does not challenge what she has found in narrative and in social media as an example of the mirror stage and that asymptotic relationship to the ideal self. Thinking more about the consumption of art now, particularly film, is that it becomes reduced to clips, partials of the original. We are able to watch a film for a few minutes, pause it, fast forward, return to it or disregard it, in ways that were once not even available modes of consumption. I think Berger was making the similar case for painting, that what once required going to the museum, or another place, to see a Da Vinci or a Petroglyph can now (and then) be substituted or cropped or edited to show a part of whole piece and experience. This creates a jarring or disharmonious way of identifying, as a part is missing.  I wonder what Lacan might write about how we identify now with this profusion of images and videos?  This is not to say this is negative or positive, but just that our formation of an identity and how we see ourselves must be changed in the contemporary moment. Or perhaps Lacan would make the claim that our selves are always fragmented and never resolved and that has historically been the case and will continue to be so? Or perhaps in some coming moment our mirror neurons will be overloaded as we watch people laugh, cry, scream and feel other emotions within such close proximity and time on our screens?

Reading Foucault’s writing on Franco in “Society Must be Defended” I found myself thinking of the opening of The Autumn of the Patriarch by Marquez (a novel I haven’t finished) and the story of Solomon as two other representations of this form of power which Foucault writes of.  On Franco and in regards to the relationship between power over and around life and death Foucault writes “Now that power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live, or once power begins to intervene mainly at this level in order to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random element, and deficiencies, death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too (1445).”  So power needs its subjects and citizens to be alive and continue to live, but how does this play out with Franco, Solomon, or the Patriarch?  Foucault writes “And so the man (Franco) who exercised the absolute power of life and death over hundreds of thousands of people fell under the influence of a power that managed life so well, that took so little heed of death, and he didn’t even realize that he was dead and was being kept alive after his death (1446).”  In Foucault’s analysis has Franco fallen victim to the same power that he once wielded? As in his death is where his power ceases, so his power keeps him alive?   It seems that is where Foucault’s analysis has taken him. Therefore in the transition, or addition, to biopolitics even those wielding power to take life and control death can become subject to the power they wielded. In Marquez a similar scenario occurs, the Patriarch dies, yet the subjects do not know or enter the Palace for years until vultures fly through the windows and cows enter the palace and the subjects finally do see the rotting Patriarch. Similarly with King Solomon, who held power over the demons and could summon the winds, and after he died people thought he was still alive as he was held erect in his throne by his cane. It was not until a worm ate through the cane that his body collapsed and the Jinn realized they were free. So, it was power transmitted through them in life, that kept power centralized around them even in death or while dying, in regards to Franco. Foucault even writes “Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death (1446).”

These three scenarios offer one example of power centralized around the sovereign. But Foucault goes on to work through the regulatory forms of power in sexuality, in urban planning and into the home layout itself it seems as though there is this tension as there is a move away from the sovereign to a more totalizing form of biopolitical power that becomes inescapable (1448).  However, in this shift it seems that perhaps an argument is to be made that we have more individual freedom, in the West, within the structures of that second form of power, than under Sovereign power that reaches down and can kill anyone at any time and causes fear long after that ruler has died. We may be stuck under ideologies and biopolitcal power, but at least we can still say what we wish and read what we wish and so forth. This feels akin, slightly, to the idea mentioned in the Denning interview in The Dig in which he discusses a political theory of democracy as the replacement, through elections, of elites in that under forms of hegemony there is still the illusion of some individual autonomy, although perhaps manipulated through ideology.  Foucault continues argues through the state and sub-state levels of power, that there is the form of power occurring at the macro level influencing the individual; however, it feels as though at the individual level one has a choice and say in the outcome of how this power is wielded.  I am not even sure I have a side or stake in this questioning or know where exactly I am going with this, but I do find it curious that at the individual level there is that illusion of being free to make decisions, even if they are already dictated or there are only a finite number of choices to go with. So are these the options? One having the illusion of freedom and choice, while being guided by some form of ideology a, or to be under threat of death by a sovereign like Franco, the Patriarch or Solomon? Is this the concession that must be given to live in a country with a large population and globalized world with billions of people?   

In the two Mythologies we read by Roland Barthes, what stood out, after the class discussion, was the difference between the Structuralist approach in “ The World of Wrestling” and the Post-Structuralist approach he takes in “The Eiffel Tower” and in the differences there arises the temporal nature of signs that Culler writes of in regards to Saussure.  In class, it was noted that in “The World of Wrestling” one is left with a sense of Barthes’s ability to “exhaust” wrestling, analyze it to a form of completion and show how as a sign system it is complete as well. The analysis then is not temporal, but only of the spectacle itself as Barthes writes of it. He writes that of the audience in wrestling “what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees (13).”  There is the theatrical element in wrestling, each wrestler conforms to an expectation through their signification. “The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight (16).”  Then, as in the real world, suffering, defeat, and justice are contained and shown to the audience through a match (17). And what Barthes concludes is that wrestling makes reality intelligible, writing “What is portrayed in wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before a panoramic view of the univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction (23).”  Thus Wrestling is a way of giving the viewer a sign system that is completely intelligible, and not muddled, so the structure of wrestling is a truth, or I think this is what Barthes is getting at, and that there is a notion that there are sign systems that are completely understandable and reveal an idyllic, simplified version of “reality” for which the viewer can then use to understand an external reality that is not wrestling.

So in the later Mythology of the Eiffel Tower, Barthes moves away from the concreteness of the structuralist sign toward the emptiness of the post-structuralist one, I think.  Barthes writes, “This pure—virtually empty—sign—is ineluctable, because it means everything.”  This moves away from the concreteness which he posited for wrestling. In the vagueness of the Eiffel Tower then, as a sign, it can come to inhabit so much in the minds of those who think of it, who see it, who think of Paris and who visit the Tower. Similarly, it encompasses both ideas of “seeing” and “being seen” as one can view it from Paris and view Paris from it as it recedes from view. This then allows Barthes to argue that:

“This radiant position in the order of perception gives it a prodigious propensity to meaning: the Tower attracts meaning, the way a lighting rod attracts thunderbolts; for all lovers of signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of pure signifier, i.e., of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed: who can say what the tower will be for humanity tomorrow? But there can be no doubt it will always be something, and something of humanity itself (5).”   

In this turn from the signs and signified in wrestling, which told the spectator how to read reality through wrestling into tidy conclusions, we get the post structural sign, a sign in which the viewer then assigns meaning to the sign and over time those meanings will and can shift, for example the signification of modernity. It is harder to see the tower now, I would argue, as a sign of modernity when we have reached the moon and built buildings like the Burj Khalifa, yet the tower still means something today to those who see it and think of Paris, as Barthes notes. I think this is the main difference between these two mythologies. The shift from concreteness to arbitrariness of signs.

The idea of signs in language over time was also mentioned in the Culler piece on de Saussure in reference to Synchronic and Diachronic perspectives (45-47).  Synchronic being the study of language at a singular moment and Diachronic being the study “of its evolution over time (45).”  Saussure opted for the synchronic study “because language is a wholly historical entity, always open to change, [so] one must focus on the relations that exist in a particular synchronic state if one is to define its elements (47).”  As Barthes uses the methodology of Saussure the Eiffel Tower mythology becomes more complex when one asks how to approach a sign over time.  I would argue that the Post-Structuralist sign, since arbitrary and meaningless, allows for the sign to shift in so many ways, that it becomes unstable, just as the Eiffel Tower is. So my question then is was part of the shift from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism in how to see a sign? Or a combination of seeing with the mass influx of signs in the then modern world? Perhaps in the modern world, the signs worth “mythologizing” are ones that somehow have persevered that transition from more concrete to arbitrary. In my head I am thinking something like a color, from Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.  They expand over time, just as Barthes claims the Eiffel Tower will as well.  Also there is an essayist Eliot Weinberger who has an essay on “The Vortex” whose image and meaning he traces over time and cultures weaving from India to the Aztecs to Ezra Pound.  What then complicates the sign in this sense, in my head at least, is how to write and study one in a realm where there is this sense of “pure signifiers” that then can branch off in any which way as any person assigns some meaning to these “pure signifiers?”  Or perhaps Barthes achieves such a intelligible study of the Tower by looking at what gives it this ability to be a pure signifier as opposed to what all of its significations are. In this case, it would be interesting to see what would happen to wrestling when viewed in this way. Perhaps the viewers don’t leave necessarily with a sense of understanding, but wrestling signifies something else culturally, and viewers can apply what they want to the theatrics they witness?    

Both Nietzsche and Saussure discuss the inadequacy of language at getting at reality, albeit in slightly dissimilar ways. First I will discuss each theory independently and then go on to Nietzsche’s discussion of art and intuition at the end of “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral sense.”  Firstly, in Culler’s “Saussure’s Theory of Language,” Culler explains that by “the arbitrary nature of the sign” Saussure means “that there is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified (29).” He goes on to use the example of dog as a signifier, which alone does not mean “dog,” one could substitute any sound sequence to denote “dog.” However, Culler goes on, this is not the only problem that arrises with in linguistics, because if so, each language could just be mapped onto another, replacing each signifier with the signifier in the corresponding language one is looking at. However, this is also clearly not the case, so therefore “Each language articulates or organizes the world differently. Languages do not simply name existing categories; they articulate their own (31).” I think the next step Saussure takes in his Course is where he comes into contact with Nietzsches theory. This is that signifieds “ are arbitrary divisions of a continuum that are not autonomous entities,  each of which is defined by some kind of essence. They are member of a system and are defined by their relations to other members of that system (34).”  To showcase this point Culler uses the example of river and stream in English with fleuve and rivière in French. In English “river” is not a stream based on size; however, to define one, one must know the other. “While in French “fleuve” flows into the sea and “rivière” does not. They represent a different articulation of the conceptual plane (33-34).” Similarly in teaching someone what the color Brown is, one must express its differences from Green, Blue, Red and so on. In this system we need the system as a whole to create a way of communicating.

Nietzsche then asks “Is there a perfect match between things and their designations? Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities (754)?” To Nietzsche the answer is no. Using the example of ‘hard’ in reference to a stone. He calls the concept a “merely entirely subjective stimulus (754).” So language does not get to ‘thing-in-itself,’ or reality.  This is because, according to Nietzsche, humanity only seeks to “designate only the relations of things to human beings (755).”  This point agrees with Saussure’s, that signifieds exist in a system of relations, and then Nietzsche builds on this by claiming that man then uses metaphors to express these relations. The first metaphor is when the signified is translated into an image (not his use of signified) and second when the image becomes a sound, assuming the sound of “tree” or “snake” or any signifier, as, of course, a “snake” is independent of its human designated sound that connotes the image of a “snake”. This then leaves us, in Nietzsche, with a feeling that “we believe that when we speak of tress, colors, snow and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities (755).”  After this strong exclamation, where then does this leave us? Entirely hopeless beings with no chance of ever getting to reality, the ‘thing-in-itself?’ Stuck in a dreadful cycle of using metaphors to speak of the world, yet never actually being able to do and deciding ourselves? Here, I think, Nietzsche turns to art as a possibility of moving beyond these limitations.

Resting on this notion, Nietzsche explains that truth, then, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms(756).”  This is where I become uncertain, but I think Nietzsche makes the claim in this turn that what would be needed to escape this linguistic limitation, or at least push it to its outermost point, is “an aesthetic way of relating, by which I (Nietzsche) mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into quite a different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry (758).”  This then involves the use of another metaphor usage, which is freeing, and different than simply “lying” by only being mistaken and taking reality for its weak substitute in normal (i.e. non poetic) speech. Here Nietzsche seems to hold up myth for the Greeks, as a way of existing in more dream like world, where a god can come to Earth and “a tree may speak like a nymph,” therefore achieving some other way of being.

Then this would be, perhaps, articulated by Picasso’s statement that art is “a lie that makes us realize truth.”  Taking, for example, the Surrealists fascination with the language in Comte de Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldodor as mode of expression that does not attempt to be misguided and deceive the real for a metaphor. Instead Lautréamont composed the famous line “as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table” which Soupault and Breton came to idealize, using as an example of the potential of Surrealism. This type of art does not attempt to get closer to the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but instead by moving so far from it, reveals a very different truth of the world. Although here Nietzsche might still call this the anthropomorphic world.  But this line of Lautréamont’s could align with what Nietzsche writes of intuition and its ability to break down and reassemble and play with the structure that humanity has created, and in doing so “he will speak only in forbidden metaphors and unheard of combinations of concepts so that, by at least demolishing and deriding old conceptual barriers, he may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present intuition (761).”  So artistic creation can create a mode of expression that can reveal new truths, that moves beyond linguistic limits. Similarly when Nietzsche claims that “A painter who has no hands and who wished to express in song the image hovering before him will still reveal more through his substation of one sphere for another than the empirical world betrays of the essence of things (758).”  So there is some hope for communication, for moving beyond simply “lying” with language or fooling ourselves in discourse. I think the poetic expression would create a new set of problems, though, in interpretation of what the disparate imagery creates. What exactly does Lautréamont mean? Or perhaps in the elusiveness of the image is where new truth is revealed?  There does arise more problems with this mode of expression, using the plasticity of language and what it can denote. Saussure references the problem with idioms, which connects with the way a language shapes its world view, and Poetry and art does the same. I think it creates a new language, not one that has solved the problems Nietzsche and Saussure have brought up, but perhaps that provides a way of thinking and seeing that does get perhaps closer to some essential quality or texture of being human, without trying to objectively portray a reality we will never arrive at.