The realm of signs

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The Empire of Signs ( L'empire des signs ) is an essay on literary theory by the French post-structuralist and semioticist Roland Barthes from 1970. A German translation was first published in 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag .

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Towards the end of the 1960s, Barthes focused on researching the conditions of the “possibilities of what can be said and thought”, that is, on the “ constitution of the structures of meaning. (...) Since you cannot take a stand outside of your own language, you first have to research the given structures, the language and the ways of speaking, in order to be able to rethink your own culture from there . ”As a semiologist, he turns to the critique of Sign to itself. In his notes after a trip to Japan , he creates a "counter-myth" with The Empire of Signs in order to "reshape and thereby disempower the myths of the West."

Pluralization and decentration

The procedure he uses is that of pluralization and decentration . For his counter-myth, he does not describe Japan as something objective or as an ideal , but rather as “what Japan has triggered in him”, and summarizes this narrative in a fiction : “I can depict or analyze a reality without any claim (This is exactly what the Western discourse does with preference), take up a certain number of features (a word with graphic and linguistic reference) somewhere in the world ( there ) and create a system from these features as desired. And I'll call this system Japan . "

The means of decentering can also be seen in the composition of The Realm of Signs itself: Barthes parodies "the beginnings of anthropological photography at the same time " by combining image and text through a "serial arrangement of different photo portraits (...) into a text-theoretical reading" crossed.

Sign theory

In S / Z Barthes criticizes the traditionally preferred position of the signified over the material bearer of meaning, the signifier . In The Realm of Signs , he turns even more vehemently against the “supposedly true, inner meaning”, against the instrumentalization of the signifiers. Using the example of haiku , he contrasts the meaningful reading of the West with “sensual reading”. It is not “Barthes' aim to oppose meaning with a non-meaning as a counterpoint , but rather he shows how the concentration of the West can be diverted from the supposedly“ meaningful ”core. So he does not directly oppose the Occidental ethic of meaning by simply pleading for the opposite, but rather aims to liquefy the concept of 'meaning' so that it becomes intangible. "

As he makes clear in his biography, sense can “certainly disappear into nothing”, but non-sense is the “worst of all meanings”. Against this non-sense he opposes the concept of decentration, as he explains it in the haiku: attempts at interpretation of the western kind, “whether deciphering , formalization or tautology ... which are intended for us to penetrate the meaning , i. H. to break into it "could therefore only miss the haiku, because the reading work associated with it is to keep the language in suspension and not to provoke it."

Western vs. eastern philosophy

In Western thinking , the observer aims to mirror himself in the foreign. With his book The Realm of Signs , Barthes is concerned with as good as emptying this mirror . This form of decentration is opposed to western narcissism : “En Occident, le miroir est un objet essentiellement narcissique: l'homme ne pense le miroir que pour s'y regarder; mais en Orient, semble-t-il, le miroir est vide; (...) le miroir ne capte que d'autres miroirs, et cette réflexion infinie est le vide meme. "

In the section “Without language” he records a different perception of the stranger, which is good for the traveler because he creates a “delicate shield” in the “rushing mass of an unknown language”: “What calm abroad ! There I am safe from stupidity, ordinaryness, vanity and urbane behavior, from nationality and normality . The unknown language (...) whose pure meaning I still perceive, (...) draws me into its artificial emptiness, (...) I live in an in-between space that is free of any full meaning. ”On the other hand, the bourgeois inquiries “ How are Did you get along with the language there? " As the myth and ideology (" ideological claim ") of Western thought, which is cloaked by" practical questions: communication only exists in language . "

Due to the 'expansion of the signifiers' in “abroad” / “Japan”, which for the traveler is “so much further than the language”, there is an “exchange of signs despite the opacity of the language and sometimes even because of it”, what Barthes describes as "" wealth "," enticing agility and subtlety ":" The reason is that the body there is free from hysteria and narcissism (...) the whole body (...) has a kind of childlike chat with you, the However, the perfect mastery of the codes takes everything regressive and infantile . "Barthes explains this using the example of an appointment:" Making an appointment (with signs, sketches and names) certainly takes a whole hour; but this hour (...) you have the whole Recognized, tasted and absorbed the body of the other, this one (with no real intention) spread his own narrative, his own text. "

See also

expenditure

  • The realm of signs . Frankfurt / M. 1981, Suhrkamp. ISBN 3-518-11077-2 [ L'empire des signes , 1970]

Web links

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  1. ↑ a b c Antje Landmann: Empty characters. Roland Barthes' intercultural dialogue in Japan. P. 67.
  2. ↑ Bettina Krüger: Longing for something completely different. Roland Barthes' 'The Realm of Signs' - a trip to Japan? , in: parapluie no. 2/1997 [1]
  3. ↑ Barthes: The realm of signs . Genoa: Skira 1970, German: In the realm of symbols . Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp 1981, p. 13.
  4. ↑ Kentaro Kawashima: … close to the smile. The photographed face in Roland Barthes' 'The Empire of Signs' , in: parapluie no. 23 [2] .
  5. ↑ Ibid., P. 68 f.
  6. ↑ Ibid., P. 69.
  7. ↑ Roland Barthes: Der Einbruch des Sinn , in: ders .: The realm of signs . Frankfurt a. M., 1981. p. 98.
  8. ↑ Barthes: L'Empire des signes , in: Œuvres complètes , p. 801.
  9. ↑ Roland Barthes: The realm of signs . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 22nd f .
  10. ↑ Barthes: Der Einbruch des Sinn , p. 22.
  11. ↑ It is an 'expansion' of the signifiers, because Barthes does not speak the Japanese language, which he points out elsewhere.
  12. ↑ Barthes: Der Einbruch des Sinn , p. 23.