Plagiarism

I've no idea if they're true, but as its exam and dissertation-handing-in season, some may be interested in these observations from Roland Barthes. He comments that the concept of plagarism was virtually unknown and hardly conceived of by the more collective medieval mind and is largely a product of modern, individualistic, monocular society.

Plagiarised from Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics p120 ish.

Of course, the good of medievals were much less concerned about consistency of spelling too: a way for them to express their individuality, perhaps?

Barthes Soundbites

Here are a few soundbites from Jonathan Culler’s Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2002):

In his inaugural lecture at College de France on forgetting and unlearning Barthes defined “Sapientia [wisdom]: no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavour as possible” (Lecon, p46/478)

In 1971 Barthes claimed his historical position was “in the rearguard of the avant-garde” (Responses, p102)

“any biography is a novel that dare not speak its name” (Responses, p89)

In Lecon Barthes jokes that he hopes to make his Chair of Literary Semiology into a wheelchair, always on the move, “the wildcard [joker] of contemporary knowledge” (p38 / 474)

Or more seriously:

“the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” (Le Bruissement de la langue, p69/55)

literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world-as-text), liberates an activity we may call counter-theological, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meanings is, the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. (Le Bruissement de la langue, p68/53f)

We now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a Single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable sources of culture (Le Bruissement de la langue, p67; pp52-3)

World / Text / Sign / Sacrament

Sorry if I’m boring you on this subject, but here goes (again, perhaps):

Roland Barthes speaks of the world as a text: a system of signs that we read as meaningful.

Eastern Orthodox theologians speak of the world as a sacrament or sacramental.

Reformed theologians have spoken of the sacraments as words. Semiotics tells us that words are signs. May we call the sacraments texts, signifying systems, meaningful discourses, sermons (rather than isolated words)?

Could we also call the sacraments a world, a system, a social space, a microcosm, an epitome or re-making of a world or a renewal of the world?

Please do let me know if this is either gobbledygook or dangerous heresy, wont you?

A taste of semiology

I’ve spent the last 2 days with Jonathan Culler’s introductions to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, with a view to thinking about how semiotics (the science of signs, born out of linguistics) might be applied to the Bible and the Lord’s Supper, considered as a (visible) sign.

Semiotics is now used to analyse the significations of any meaningful human activities or systems (codes, art, music, literature, fashion, etiquette etc), and so as a taste of it, here are a couple of its key ideas applied to food:

For a semiologist studying the food system of a culture… parole consists of all the events of eating and langue is the system of rules underlying these events, rules that define what is edible, what dishes go with or contrast with one another, how they are combined to form meals; in short, all the rules and prescriptions that enable meals to be culturally orthodox or unorthodox. A restaurant menu represents a sample of a society’s ‘food grammar’. There are ‘syntactic’ slots (soups, appetizers; entrees, salads, deserts) and paradigm classes of contrasting items that can fill the same slot (the soups among which one chooses). There are conventions governing the syntactic ordering of items within a meal (soup, main course, desert is orthodox, while desert, main course, soup is ungrammatical). And the contrasts between dishes within classes, such as main course or desert, bear meaning: hamburger and roast pheasant have different second-order meanings. Approaching such material with the linguistic model, the semiologist has a clear task: to reconstruct the system of distinctions and conventions that enable a group of phenomena to have the meaning they do for members of a culture.

Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 1983, 2002) p59

Reading this stuff makes me hungry!