Thank God for Barthes

Pierce gives us three progressive (I want to use the word “reactions” here, although it’s similarities to the correct word decrease its value, so I need to use a word whose differences reflect the actual meaning that I am intending) responses to “things”: Feeling, Reaction and Thinking. These are the requirements for a sign to be a sign. Further, there are three types of signs: likenesses or icons, indices, and symbols. Pierce then goes into a systematic discussion of what each of these signs is and how we can identify them.
And then there is Saussure, who further describes for us what exists between a thought and a word by way of the sound of a word. The best description as far as I am concerned is that the thought lives on one side of a piece of paper while the sound lives on the other side, and one can not slice them apart. Or the relationship lies in the nebulous area in between the two sides of the paper. Therefore, when one changes so does the other. He also discusses the relationships between sounds, in particular the negative relationship between them – or rather that their differences are what gives them meaning (and also how arbitrary the assigned sounds are to each word.
For me, one of the most interesting aspects of all of this is this sentence of Saussure’s, “The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.” How intriguing that we all do this together in some way – either by choosing or conforming or something else! But, also it is related to Barthes discussion. Saussure says “If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true.” Thus, each community comes up with its own set of values. Barthes asks a couple of times for us to imagine what different communities might think about The Family of Man Exhibition. Within the exhibition the language used by one community only works to serve that community by way of telling its story or myth. It ends up working against other communities (the family of Emmet Till and the North African workers of the Goutte d’Or district in Paris) by way of ignoring them. I think it is here that Barthes is saying that photography and language (or the community that has chosen them) has failed to communicate a truth in this particular instance.


Tid Bit:
If you printed your Saussure / Barthes reading from the course website, please note the funny symbols at the top of the first page. This is where Dr. B hand wrote F. Saussure and R. Barthes. However, the scanning program in the VRL chose to interpret the letter signs in a completely different way – or how it understood the signs.