Project 16: Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida)

For this project there was no required reading concerning the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and the concept of ‘Deconstruction’; his seminal work being Of Grammatology (1967). I read a section, ‘The Engraving and the ambiguities of Formalism’ (included in the anthology Art in Theory).

For this project we had to find our own information on Deconstruction and then apply it to a text of our choice. As part of post-structuralism, the concept of Deconstruction continues from the last project – especially from the ideas expressed within Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of an Author’ (1974) – and the way we now view the text.

The statement ‘outside the text there is nothing’ (il n’ya pas de hors-text’) has been latched onto by Marxian’s and non-Marxian’s their own purposes:   (1) justifies the idea that there is no ‘real’ world outside of language, (2) language refers to nothing outside itself, (3) these is no ‘referent’. Many have claimed, however, that what Derrida is asserting is that there is no point outside the language, the text, the image, from which we can test its truth; its truth lies inside it. This accords well with the relativist tendencies in contemporary thinking:

“...in art it is ‘the represented and not the representer, the expressed and not the expression’ which matters; at the same time as this ‘represented’ can never achieve an unmediated presence.”

The word ‘unmediated’ is the key to understanding what is going on here. Even a formal portrait (a bad example really as the idea of a ‘postmodern’ portrait is problematic) may be thought of as representing itself rather than a sitter outside of the image and the representation of the sitter is mediated, that is manipulated or altered in some ways, through the agency of the artist.

Deconstruction explores how meaning and knowledge is constructed. Like the author, the structures within the text are not a deep truth waiting to be uncovered but they are themselves a cultural construct created through discourse. Cultural artefacts that were once unified now become texts that are fragmented.  There is no objective or universal way to claim truth in relation to the text. 

The concept of différance means that signifiers and signifieds are not identical as they differ from each other. Signs not only differ from one another as they also defer (Différer) to many other signs as part of an endless chain of signifiers; Signs only signify, or create meaning, via difference.

As it is a ready-made system, language supplements for reality and can simultaneously convey both the presence and absence of meaning.  Reading requires interpretation as we are not just reproducing what the writer expressed in the text. Critical reading must produce the text we are not trying to reconstruct a pre-existing non-textual reality as there is nothing beyond it to reconstruct; as Derrida said “there is nothing outside”. Reading thus uncovers the unconscious – the fissures and contradictions – dimensions of a text. A text then can contain a plurality of meaning by saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying.  Oppositional reading looks for the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of a text to highlight the disunity that underlies the apparent unity of a text.

Task: Deconstructing an Image

 

For the task I have chosen the poster for the film The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures/Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, USA, 1963). 

What is striking about this poster is the presence of Hitchcock within it; his name dominates the poster. Obviously this is a marketing ploy but it is interesting how he is prioritised. Usually a director would have his name above the title but in this case his presence is extended.  We have a direct quote, his signature and, most importantly, his image. He is not only authenticating the potential film experience but he is stating his role within the construction of it; first and foremost you are seeing an Alfred Hitchcock film. 

The central image of the poster can be seen as a distillation of the thematic and narrative content of the film giving a potential audience member an idea of what they are about to see. We have a duality of the female image within this image. Firstly, you have an illustration of Tippi Hedren’s character, Melanie Daniels, in mid-scream as she is being attacked by birds. The horror is created by the reversal of nature attacking civilisation. If the birds are seen as masculine it shows the female in a position of submission; weak as she is not able to protect herself. With Hitchcock’s dominance within the poster this concept could be aligned with his own authorial perspective.  Also its illustrative nature further separates it from reality and highlights its fictional construction compared to the photographs. Secondly, you have the publicity still of Tippi Hedren; “a fascinating new personality”. While this may be a way of introducing to a public who are unaware of her, this image is also introducing her as a star: a marketable commodity. We are also abstracting her persona from the potential experience of the film. 

As a poster of mixed media – text, illustration and photographic image – we are able to identify the contradiction that while both Hitchcock and Hedren are part of the film, they are also entities separate from the film. The submissive role of the female within this image is reinforced by the colour publicity still of Hedren as she is being projected by Hitchcock as a type; the fetishised ‘Hitchcock blonde’. 

Bibliography 

D’Alleva, Anne. 2005. Methods & Theories of Art History. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Barry, Peter. 2009. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Derrida, J. 1967. “‘The Exorbitant: Question of Method’ and ‘The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism’, from Of Grammatology’’ In: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (ed.) Art in Theory: 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing pp. 949-953.

Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts, 1999. Jacques Derrida [online] Available at: < http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/index.html> [Accessed 18 March 2011]

Project 15: Author? What Author? (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes)

Once again I have to apologise for the lateness of the post. I had done the works weeks ago but just hadn’t got round to typing. Sadly, I’m starting to get ill again and coupled with a bad exam result, I’ve had restructure my schedule.

This week’s project was to read Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author’ (pp. 949-953 in Art in Theory: 1900-2000) and Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ (pp. 142-148 in Image, Music, Text) and then consider in regards to the work of Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine.

These two articles were written at almost the same time in the late ‘60s.  They both look at the traditional Modernist view of the author as the privileged creator of meaning and authority in the work in question and in their different ways demolish it. Some have argued that this is the beginning of the democratising of meanings others as the slippery slope to meaninglessness and extreme relativism. 

Not only do they produce explanations as to how meaning varies from ‘reader’ to ‘reader’ but also ideas upon which a generation of artists have built much of their oeuvre.

The author is a cultural construct. As texts are embedded with a complex magnitude of cultural representations, it stresses the construction of meaning not with the author but with the reader: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author”.

The concept of the author takes precedence in capitalist ideology and while Foucault defines the ideological nature of the ‘author-function’, Barthes removes the author from the modern text. Traditionally criticism is centred on the individual.  Ultimately, it is the author who imposes limitations upon the text. 

Both Foucault and Bathes are moving away from rigid Structuralism; moving away from signifiers to autonomous signifieds with no fixed or pre-given meaning.   Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine can been seen to function as authors, though this perspective limits the signification with the discourse. As ideological figures they are principles which bound meaning. Despite assumptions several texts under the same name do not create a relationship of homogeneity, neither does the author endow organic unity upon the text; the text compiles many codes given in the author’s culture.

Barthes was radical as he asserted the independence of text; the work is not determined by intention or context. As the text is now free from textual authority, in the absence of the author it becomes futile to claim to decipher the text. Meaning in the text is shifted from being produced by an author to something that is produced by the reader. The new emphasis on the reader invalidates both the context and the creator’s intent at the time of constructing the artwork. The text is a multi-dimensional space where a variety writings, none of them original, cohere and juxtapose:  “The text is a tissue of quotations [signs] drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. A text is never original. The author becomes a scripter whose only power is mix writing. They can only translate their interior indefinitely through language. 

The artwork of both Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman are explained in light of these articles. There work has used a mixture of signs – which can be acknowledged or deferred by the reader – in which the reader can generate meaning from. For Example, Levine re-photographed Walker Evan’s 1936 photographs of a family of Sharecroppers in Depression era of Alabama. These re-productions call into the textual of authority of the images: Who is the author? Walker or Levine?

Left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, [Photograph] 1981, gelatin silver print.

Right: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer's Wife, [Photograph] 1936, gelatin silver print.

On the other hand Cindy Sherman does not directly reference the work of others. Indirectly Sherman, in The Untitled Film Stills, references various genres and movements of Cinema. The author becomes an actress, taking on the roles within her own her images.  Sherman, through intertextuality, allows the reader to resonate meaning from the image. 

Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #21. 1978 [Photograph].
Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Clearly the cultural shift following the two articles, with the birth of the reader being at the expense of the author, makes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ of an artwork less relevant. The sacredness of the original no longer matters.  Really, the idea of ‘aura’ becomes a cultural application which can be used or not depending on the intentions of the reader. This shift into Post-Structuralism, in regards to authorship, not only explains but validates the un-regulated nature of the internet. With no fixed or pre-given meanings  anything is possible.

Bibliography

Barry, Peter. 2009. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Barthes, R. 1974. ‘The Death of an Author?’  In: Image, Music, Text. 1977. London: Fontana Press, pp. 96-106, pp. 142-148.

D’Alleva, Anne. 2005. Methods & Theories of Art History. London: Laurence King Publishing. 

Foucault, M. 1969. ‘What is an Author?’ In: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (ed.) Art in Theory: 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing pp. 949-953.

Project 14: Myth is a Type of Speech (Roland Barthes)

The example from Paris Match that is used by Barthes to explain the concept of  'Myth'.

The required reading for this project was Roland Barthes’s ‘Myth Today’.

Barthes, especially in Mythologies, applies the methods of analysis once used by structuralists on the production of meaning in language to the study of ‘Myth’. This done through the examination of contemporary cultural practices thus allowing items, or images, to be contextualised within a wider structure of beliefs, values and symbols. The study of ‘Myth’.  This results in layers of signification that are central to our understanding of a single object.  This can be seen in ‘Project 12: The rhetoric of the image’.

What is different from Project 12 is that in ‘Myth Today’ Barthes expands upon the concepts of denotation and conception.  If ideology is a set of values of beliefs of a given society then Myth allows it to underlie fixed societal structures i.e. language.  The Ideological meaning, expressed through hidden conventions, of a sign that is expressed through connotation is in reality specific to a group is rendered universal for that given society. Myth thus allows the connotative meaning of an object denotative (i.e. ‘natural’) thus it is conductive to the dominant ideology.

Myth is a principle of secondary signification and while being both historically and culturally dependent it is the underlying societal meaning encoded into artefacts, practices and images. Myth, either primitive or sophisticated, allows a culture to explain, think and understand some aspect of reality through conceptualisation.  Myth, as a form of communication within a culture, thus exists before the image is constructed and is constituted by a chain of related concepts which is activated via analysis. The Paradigmatic selection within an image metonymically is the extension of something else. Through language, or in our case the image, Myth is able to transform reality into an ideological statement. Ultimately, Barthes wanted to investigate how ideology actually works than rather just reducing culture to the status of reflecting a particular society.

Visual representation of the layers of signification (From: Pandora’s Box by Thomas A. Sebeok).

I further considered and kept in mind these questions while researching both Barthes and appropriate images:

• If, as it is argued, that the underlying structure is not immutable, what if or when the structure changes?

• Does meaning cause language (visual as well as literal), as structuralism seems to imply, or is meaning the result of language?

• Is language a means of conveying the underlying and the overarching truth, or do we understand it to be truth that which language tells us is true?

Obviously what differs from Project 12 and now from this point within the course, which are reflected in the above questions, is that we are now considering the critical movement of Post-structuralism. Post-structuralism argues that structuralism tends to create sameness. Despite Saussure’s insistence on difference being the origin of words, Structural analysis tends to create a metanarrative that reduces everything into a simple structure. 

Supplementary Task

• Barthes’s cites Minou Drouet – her expression of ‘tree’ would add to the pure matter a type of social usage – was a controversial, in regards to authorship, French poet. I believe Barthes cites her because of the style of her written expression, especially in the poem ‘Tree that I love’. Barthes further examines Drouet in ‘Literature According to Minou Drouet’ in The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies (1979).

Primary Task

• Think carefully about the passage on meaning and form: “The meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning”. Annotate an artwork to illustrate your thoughts on this passage. 

To expand on the last project (‘Mini-project on structuralist analysis’) I have again chosen the propaganda poster ‘Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live Forever!’ (1967) by Ivanov, Victor Semenovich.

I came to the conclusion to reanalyse this image because Leonid Kotilarov’s ‘Portrait of Stakanhov’ (1938) was used as an example of how Myth works. Through Socialist Realism, the reality represented by image of the miner becomes an ideological statement; the freedom and heroism of the worker in the Soviet Union.

Portrait of Stakanhov, 1938; Leonid Kotilarov.

 

“The meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning”

 

"Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live Forever!" [text by Mayakovsky], 1967 (Poster); V.S. Ivanov (1909-1968).

Here the image of Lenin represents the ideology of the Soviet Union itself. For example, if you then look at the form of the poster, the red of flag merges with red highlighting on the opposite side of the figure. The colour not only signifies the national colour but, especially with the figure bathed in glow of the red light, the passion behind the ideology is extolled. His stance is solid, defiant in what he represents. This spirit of the revolution is clearly reinforced by the inclusion of the date ‘1917’. 

Anchorage becomes relay through the Mayakovsky quotation “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live Forever!” is anchorage. This is not just an image of Lenin or the visual embodiment of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The presence of Lenin represents the spirit of the Soviet Union.  The appropriation of Lenin’s image is intertextual.  

Sadly, as piece of propaganda the form of this artwork fails to outdistance the meaning. The stylised form, which in itself is not re-presentation of reality, reinforces the ideological meaning behind the image; this is not an example of Socialist Realism. 

The image of Lenin is not photographic; it is part image constructed by an artist.  It is easier for artist is able to manipulate the image of Lenin to express a certain ideological statement.  The reality of Lenin, the anti-physis, is not only shaped by but becomes to represent an ideology, the pseudo-physis.

Bibliography

Barry, Peter. (2009) Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. 1972. London: Jonathan Cape.

Cartwright, Lisa., Sturken, Marita. 2001. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Evans, J. and Hall, S. ed. 1999 Visual culture: a reader. London: Sage Publications.

Gleb Prokhorov, ed.: Art Under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting 1930-1950. Roseville East, Australia: Craftsman House. 1995.

Harrison, C  & Wood P. (eds) Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Semenovich, I.V. (1967). "Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live Forever!" [Poster]. Private Collection.