10 January 2021

On Signs

In college, one of my favourite books was a slim volume “Mythologies” by Roland Barthes, one of France’s seminal literary theorists. Barthes was, above all else, a lover of signs. He experienced the world around him, and the emerging proliferation of multi-media (text, photography, film) as a labyrinth of signs, as riddles to be dissected, their inner logic revealed. 

From steak and chips to Charlie Chaplin, from the “Blue Guide” (one of the earliest precursors to Lonely Planet) to Romans in films, Barthes turned his incisive mind to these everyday signs. And his message was clear: we know not what we see. Many objects or facts, when represented — in a newspaper article, photograph or movie scene (all “signifiers”, in Barthes semiotics) — are laden with “mythology,” values or rules that are so entrenched we do not realise they are being reinforced constantly by the signs around us.

I could not help but think about Barthes this week, while looking at the devastating images of the U.S. Capitol Occupation. A man in a bulletproof vest marches past a portrait of Andrew Jackson, hoisting the Confederate Battle Flag on his left shoulder. A white-haired protestor with his foot defiantly up on the desk of a Congressperson’s (ransacked) office - a logo on the photograph reads “I AM THE DESCENDENT OF MEN / WHO WILL NOT BE RULED.” Swelling crowds, scaling the Capitol walls with makeshift ropes and bats.

There is no simple myth here. The most fundamental difference between our reality and Barthes’ 1957 France is that we now live in a world of signs and signifiers that have fragmented, if not entirely dissolved, any “single source of truth.” There is no longer one dominant myth to American society, but multiple strong, competing and contradictory myths, each shaped by its own historical undercurrents, and each expressed in its own silo of information, media, myth. 

To Trump supporters, the Capitol Occupation represents the genuine triumph of Good over Evil, the people’s insurrection against a fraudulent government. To non-Trump supporters, the event represents a desecration, the inexcusable violence of vagabonds and white supremacists against the very institution of democracy. To the world — it represents chaos, and a hearty, at times welcome, rebuke of American superiority. 

To Trump, the living incarnation of pure, unfiltered ego — the protests were a vindication, while betraying his ultimate egoism. Aides remarked on his frothing excitement while watching television coverage of the Occupation, an initial excitement dampened by “disgust over the low class appearance of the rioters.” 

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This week, I felt what many, though not all, Americans felt. Disbelief and bewilderment, followed by rage, and finally: the sobering realisation that this was the natural conclusion all along. 

Indeed, January 6th 2021 will be consecrated as a symbolic day — a culmination of all that we have chosen to ignore as Americans.

For decades now, rather than address exploding structural inequality, a broken education and health system, or the failure of public goods to provide more equal opportunity - we have all, in one way of another, allowed business and politics to continue as usual. Even more alarmingly - we have completely failed to channel a historic moment of multi-cultural, multi-class radicalisation into productive radical action. Instead, we have allowed America to descend into identity politics, competing virtual realities, and created the opportunity for a man representing nothing but pure ego to hijack a critical historical moment.

There is no innocent here. No easy demarcation of Good vs. Evil. No promise of justice. 

Myth “abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences…” Barthes wrote. Indeed - but what if you and your fellow American live with fundamentally different essential truths? What if you wake up, live and sleep in separate virtual realities of divergent myths? 

This is the dilemma that we must now confront, in full force, without evasion - if we are to have any hope of solidarity or fundamental change.