Guide to Week 12: Thursday
Read Barthes' essays on "The World of Studio Wrestling" and "Ornamental Cookery," and scan the table of contents for Mythologies (1957, rpt. 1970). Each essay is an example of Cultural Criticism's theory applied to a type of "cultural production," a kind of commodity which the culture is selling to some segment of itself and which does important cultural work, even though it may seem trivial or unpurposeful. Barthes took it as his job to detect the hidden cultural codes operating within each cultural product, and to discover the rules articulating those codes (lit., "speaking them into existence"). Having done that, he generated theses about what cultural work the products were doing for their intended audiences. Keep in mind that Cultural Criticism is not, itself, a culture-neutral activity, but rather it resembles Marxist or Psychoanalytic methods in its desire to detect hidden motives for behaviors that participants consider "normal" or "unmotivated." Click here for some points to review regarding Barthes' analysis of "Ornamental Cookery." Click here for some points to review regarding Barthes' analysis of "The World of Wrestling." When you believe you understand what Barthes is saying in his essays, click here for some passages from Tyson's chapter which relate to the theory underpinning Barthes' activities as an interpreter of culture.
Of all the Cultural Critics, Barthes is the oldest and uses a method which is easiest to apply. He wrote for popular French magazines rather than for scholarly journals, and his audience was composed of a mixture of university trained intellectuals and ordinary citizens looking for insights into their culture's operations. "Ornamental Cookery" shows how to apply Barthes' methods to non-animate cultural products. "The World of Wrestling" is a somewhat more complete demonstration of how to apply his methods to a fully dramatized cultural product. In both, you will notice that the readership of the magazines and the audience of the wrestling matches both have fully scripted roles to play, roles whose rules Barthes discovers and mines for clues to the political agendas motivating these two semiotic systems.
If we can complete our discussion of Barthes' analyses in time, we can try out possible subjects for your "Working With Cultural Criticism" papers. Choice of a mythic system to analyze is very important, as is a vigorous search for its secret socio-political motives.