A bit of cultural theory
In my post last week, I told you about Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic innovation of the Sign. At the outset of the 20th century, this Swiss professor originated the science of semiology, which he defined as the study of the life of signs within society. And oh what a very rich social life the Sign enjoys. In this post, I’ll continue with my thumbnail sketch of some of the underpinning ideas animating our current array of cultural theories. Necessarily, a bit of historical account is involved.
By the middle of the 20th century, Saussure’s structuralist linguistics had very much caught on in western academic and intellectual life, particularly in France. (We’ll see lots of French thinkers popping up in our explorations of cultural theory. The French always have been an intellectually troublemaking lot. Liberty, equality, fraternity...the list goes on.) In the 1950s, a new approach to cultural analysis called Structuralism arose in that country. Using Saussurean theory, this school of thought sought to establish, scientifically, how meaning is made in every cultural act.
Structuralists assume that signs, rules, and codes can be found governing not just language, but all human activities and social practices. Written texts—literary, legal, religious, journalistic, and so on—came to be scrutinized in this way in order to understand their mechanisms of communication. Equally, things like customs, rituals, commerce, governance, education, entertainment, and the like were analyzed as sign systems organized around the link between Signifier and Signified.
Thus, fashion can be seen as a language, sports as a language, film as a language, architecture as a language—potentially anything humans do can be read as a kind of linguistic text to be decoded. Again, Structuralists were keen to track down the basic building blocks of all these cultural sign systems. The way meaning happened was more important than the substance of any individual communication act.
For example, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) famously studied the deep structure of mythology from around the world. He located what he termed “mythemes” (echoing the linguistic term “phonemes”) as the fundamental construction materials of myth. More often than not, he went into excruciating (if not confounding) detail to explain them. Lévi-Strauss has been hugely influential in the field, although a number of critics have pointed to Eurocentric assumptions coloring his formulations.
Another Structuralism big-hitter was Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye (1912-1991). He set out to establish a unified theory of literary criticism, one that could be used in a scientific examination of all literature. Frye came up with the “monomyth,” that is, a schema into which can fit any literary work. It’s a nifty concept assigning four prominent categories of literature (all western) to correspond with the four seasons of the year (obviously, you need to live in a temperate climate for this configuration to make sense). Romance is Summer (sunny and all things are possible), Tragedy is Fall (happiness withering), Satire is Winter (cold, dark, gloomy), Comedy is Spring (rebirth and a new movement toward happiness). The design is fun to play with and can be handy when describing different genres of literature. Frye’s theories made a big splash in English Departments up into the 1970s. However, when new thinking started to challenge the form-over-function emphasis of Structuralism, his influence faded.
A Structuralist whose impact has fared better over the decades is French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Using Saussure’s concept of the Sign, Barthes interrogated various social practices and phenomena of his day. His best-known work is Mythologies (1957), a collection of analyses of French popular culture that originally appeared as a series of short essays in the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles. By mythologies, Barthes does not mean the kind of mythical stories of gods and heroes studied by Lévi-Strauss (e.g. Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Indian mythology, Chinese mythology). Instead, Barthes studies contemporary cultural myths that arise within human social interaction, myths that can have a tremendous bearing on how people view the reality of the world around them.
The semiotic principle Barthes uses for his analysis is that of Signifier (Sr) + Signified (Sd) producing a Sign that bears meaning within a specific sign system and cultural context. What Barthes noticed, however, is how a Sign can be emptied of its meaning in a language system to become a Signifier in a myth system—that is, a Signifier then needing a new Signified (concept) to be poured into it, thus resulting in a new Sign—a new meaning—in that myth system. The process is simpler than it initially sounds. We experience it a thousand times a day, particularly in all the advertising thrown at us.
Examples always help. One Barthes uses is that of a rose. As you can see in the diagram below, in a language system (French for Barthes, English for us), the Sr (sound-image) of “rose” triggers in our minds a type of flower. That Sign or, as Barthes calls it, “language-object” of the rose, however, can undergo something of a linguistic presto chango. Our usual conception of rose can be drained of its everyday meaning (an entity that lives in dirt) to be used as a brand new Sr in a myth system, what Barthes terms a “metalanguage.” And, of course, any Sr needs a Sd—a generalized concept—to go with it. In the case of rose, that new concept is passion and love. That’s why bunches of roses fly off of shelves around Valentine’s Day.
Now, we all kind of know, deep down, that this dirt entity has absolutely nothing at all to do with human love relationships. Nada. Zip. It’s a dirt entity, for God’s sake. But, we all also have been kind of convinced, deep down, that it does. Such is the power of cultural myth.
When Shakespeare has Juliet philosophize about a rose by any other name smelling as sweet, he’s playing with the Signifier. (Take a whiff of a Bara in Japan and, yes indeed, that dirt entity will still smell mighty good.) In Barthes’ metalanguage system, what’s being played with is the Signified. The language-object rose and the myth-object rose have nothing to do with one another beyond, maybe, a superficial connotation. (Oh, my darling turtledove, just as a rose looks and smells divine, so dost thou!)
Barthes’ main point about cultural myths is that they are fundamentally deceptive. Motivations for these linguistic manipulations vary from the silly to the greedy to the oppressive. Some seem to arise innocently and more or less on their own. Some are highly engineered by someone with a goal to elicit a desired response. In all cases, what’s behind this substitution of the Signified is ideology—an agenda of some kind.
In other words, a cultural myth is a Battle for the Signified waged by means of a Parlor Trick with the Signifier.
Applying this bit of cultural theory
How many countries around the world use an eagle as a national symbol? A lot. What do Kazakhstan and the Philippines and Romania and Sri Lanka and Russia and Montenegro and Indonesia and Germany and Iraqi Kurdistan and Poland and Mexico and Albania and the United States (to name some) share as eagle-like nation states? Who knows? But, wow, eagles sure are strong and imposing looking, aren’t they?
Does a car commercial try to sell you an assemblage of intricate mechanical parts? No. It tries to sell you happiness in various forms: luxury, prestige, freedom, individuality, adventure, sex appeal, friend of the earth, good-sense economy, jaunty youthfulness, rugged manliness, racecar driver derring-do (to name some). Anything but hard information about the complex mechanism itself. That would be boring.
Every commercial carries out some version of this same things=happiness formula—a huge Signified switcheroo, if you care to think about it. And does any advertiser want, actually, to provide you with happiness? No. They want to obtain happiness from you in the form of your giving them money. Again, big Duh. But we all just sail along with this arrangement. We’re used to putting up with it—even imagining that we are immune to it.
That’s what cultural myths are particularly adept at doing—making things seem inevitable, normal, even part of “human nature.”
What does the NFL and the U.S. Military have to do with one another? Nothing, that’s what. Yet why do we have gut-rumbling fighter jet fly-overs and over-the-top ceremonial color guards and field-sized American flags and gruelingly drawn-out renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and endless varieties of Honoring The Troops as the opening act for NFL games? With the hype doubled-down on Super Bowl Sunday?
Advertising. Of course. Duh.
For decades now, the Armed Forces have found it challenging—and expensive—to reach their recruiting goals. The switch to an all-volunteer force in 1973 meant there was no longer an automatic pool of draftees to bring into the military. Each Branch had to go find and convince young people to sign up. The Army in particular has had a rough go of things. The Department of Defense turned to using various forms of popular culture as a means to recruit. Straight-up TV advertising (e.g. “Be All You Can Be”), major Hollywood films (e.g. both Top Gun movies), video games and comic books (e.g. America’s Army), as well as trying to figure out how best to use social media to reach Gen Z (the DoD is still working on that one).
Major sporting events did not escape DoD notice as popular venues delivering big audiences.
During the Second World War, playing the national anthem before sports contests became, likely for patriotic reasons, a cultural institution in America. Football offers an especially rich medium for a timely word from a martial sponsor. As a sport, football conspicuously resembles the aggressive taking and vigorous defending of territory that is the crux of warfare. Thus the game serves as a perfect Sign to drain of its everyday meaning—a pastime played on a grassy field—and converted into an empty Signifier ready to be refilled with an ideologically driven Signified—a potent mixture of militarism, patriotism, and warrior masculinity.
Equating football hero with war hero is a really smart marketing move. That’s precisely how Pat Tillman was used at the opening ceremonies of the 2023 Super Bowl. The happiness on offer in this particular commercial transaction is noble service to one’s country.
In a 2015 Senate oversight report titled “Tackling Paid Patriotism,” John McCain and Jeff Flake objected to the fact that from 2012 to 2015 the DoD paid various sports franchises approximately $53 million to facilitate seemingly spontaneous displays of patriotism. The two senators considered such practices “a boondoggle.” McCain and Flake found that these millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent haphazardly. As is a chronic habit with the DoD, sincere oversight and reliable budgetary accountability had no part in this initiative. But what’s a few million dollars flying out the window if it’s for a good cause? In 2015, the DoD had an annual budget of around $560 billion to play with. In 2023, that budget will be just a tad under $817 billion.
And, yes, the DoD is still paying for patriotism. And, no, DoD accounting practices are no better now.
So what?
As far as we know, roses don’t mind being objects transformed by cultural myth. They just keep on smelling sweet. But how many other entities, dirt-dwelling or not, might mind being emptied of their biological and social actuality to be infused instead with altogether different ideas about what and who they are?
Off the top of my head, I can think of lots of entities who might mind: women and girls, minorities, the poor, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ folk, people with health conditions or impairments, the elderly...please feel free to keep adding to this list.
Very often, cultural myths are invented and spread to serve the purposes of groups or institutions that hold and seek to maintain power over their targets. This is when such fantasies abandon innocence to become pernicious.
This parlor trick with the Signifier works in reverse, as well. Perfectly loathsome people, policy, and lies can be spun, beguilingly, into shining Signifieds of Dear Leader, Legitimate Way Forward, and Truth. You can fill in who and what you think fits this bill.
Finally, with the internet, Big Data, and A.I., humans have never enjoyed better and more compelling instruments for creating and disseminating fairytales.
Readings of possible interest on Structuralism:
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, 1972 (originally published 1957).
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, 1957 (see in particular “THIRD ESSAY. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” pp. 131-242).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 68, no. 270, 1955, pp. 428-436.
Readings of possible interest on advertising:
Jhally, Sut. “Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse.” Critical Studies in Media Commercialism, edited by Robin Andersen and Lance Strate, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 27-39 (see also http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/).
Readings of possible interest on American militarism:
Boyle, Brenda M. American War Stories. Rutgers University Press, 2021 (see in particular Chapter 5, “The Soldier’s Creed: Stories of Warrior Patriotism in Visual Culture”).