The semiological adventure

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The semiological adventure ( L'aventure sémiologique ) is a literary theoretical work by the French poststructuralist and semioticist Roland Barthes from 1985. In 1988 the German translation by Dieter Hornig was published by Suhrkamp Verlag .

content

classification

In The Semiological Adventure , Roland Barthes laid the foundations of his structuralist description of literature, of which he is often named as the most popular representative. The book tries to bring linguistic science into literature. In particular, the section Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives , which develops an analysis model for narratives, is considered to be the basis of a structurally oriented narratology .

The story

In his book, Barthes assumes a universalistic concept of “ narration ”: “Narration” does not aim here either at oral or written texts or at the special design of literary works. For Barthes, the term “narrative” generally means the mediation of the event that follows, as it is implemented in various media and - more specifically - in various types of text . For Barthes, narrations are omnipresent and verifiable in all ethnicities , classes and groups: "The narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural." Although there are an infinite number of concrete narratives, Barthes tries to use structuralism to describe the basic structure of the narrative, "to get a grip on the infinity of ways of speaking". He uses a deductive approach, the draft of a "hypothetical model of description" of narratives, whose methodological and terminological reference point is linguistics.

The language of the story

Based on the hypothesis that there is a homological relationship between the sentence, the object of investigation in linguistics, and the “ discourse (as the entirety of sentences)” , Barthes also understands the narrative as a sentence-like organization: “In terms of structure, the narrative coincides with the sentence without ever being reducible to a mere sum of sentences: the narrative is a large sentence, just as every constative sentence is, so to speak, the draft of a small narrative. ”This analogous organization of language and narrative makes it possible for the linguistic principle to be different To distinguish between levels of description and transfer them to narrative analysis . How the sentence is examined in linguistics on different levels - phonetic , phonological , grammatical , contextual - which do not give the full meaning of the sentence, but interlock to constitute meaning, the narrative analysis must also differentiate between levels and divide them into a "hierarchical (integratorial ) Bring perspective ".

Barthes writes: "Reading (listening to) a narration does not just mean going from one word to another, but also from one level to another." He therefore suggests the 'provisional' distinction between three levels of description:

  1. Functions
  2. Actions
  3. Narration

The functions

The "functions" represent the smallest units that constitute meaning as links in a correlation : The narrative consists exclusively of functions, i. That is, everything is meaningful, albeit to different degrees, and even that which “may inevitably seem meaningless” is functionally relevant in the “meaning of the absurd or the useless”. The function is a content unit, i. H. what is meant in the linguistic form of the story, not the formulation itself.

Features and clues

Barthes distinguishes two broad classes of narrative units: distributional and integrative . The distributional units, which are defined by the fact that they are correlated or refer to upcoming events in the narrative, are called functions . The integrative units that do not refer to subsequent acts, but rather reveal the meaning of the story through additional information - character of a protagonist, description of an atmosphere, etc. - are called clues . While the functions operate syntagmatic , i. H. Establishing references on one level, the level of the sequence of events, the indicators create paradigmatic relations between the level of the events and an additional level of meaning, which is optional because it does not functionally constitute the sequence of events. Barthes writes: “Functions and indicators thus fall under another classic distinction: the functions imply metonymic relata, the indicators metaphorical relata; some correspond to a functionality of doing, the other to a functionality of being. "

Cardinal function and catalysis

Each of the two classes mentioned has two subclasses: The functions are divided into cardinal functions (or kernels ) and catalysis . The cardinal function is characterized by the fact that "the action to which it relates opens up (maintains or resolves) an alternative with consequences for the progress of the story, in short, that it establishes or eliminates an uncertainty". Cardinal functions have a logical functionality in the sense that they require subsequent actions. In contrast, the catalysis is information about a sequence of events in time that is consecutive but not consequential . Cardinal functions form alternative points of action, the “risky moments of the narrative”, while catalysis is the “safety zones, breaks”. The tension economy of the story is determined by the relationship between the two functions.

Clues and informants

The clues are divided into two subclasses, the (actual) clues and the informants . According to Barthes, the clues refer, for example, to a character, a feeling, an atmosphere, which are indicative of an upcoming action without necessarily clearly indicating or even demanding. However, the reader is required to decipher their “implicit signifieds”. Informants, on the other hand, provide information "which is used to identify and find one's way in space and time". As a “realistic operator”, you make the narrated reality credible through details. The subclasses of catalysis, clues and informants have in common that they attach themselves as - in principle unlimited - " expansions " to the finite number of nuclei that have been added to sequences .

The sequence

A sequence is a series of cores that are causally related to each other and that designate a unit of action , the beginning and end of which can be clearly determined. Barthes uses the action sequence from the kernels “order a drink, receive, drink, pay” as an example. Sequences can always be named metalinguistically ; as in the structuralist fairy tale analysis , which identifies the sequence types “fraud, betrayal, struggle, contract, seduction”. Barthes writes: “The closed logic that structures a sequence is inextricably linked with its name: every function that brings a seduction into play calls up the entire process of seduction in the awakening of this name immediately after its appearance, as we do have learned from all the narratives that have developed the language of the narrative within us. "

Sequence syntax

Barthes distinguishes a “syntax within the sequences” from a “(surrogate [n]) syntax of the sequences among themselves”, i.e. H. of a hierarchical reference context in which certain updated micro- sequences indicate higher-level sequences. Barthes provides an example of an analytical stemma : The micro-sequence “greeting”, consisting of the kernels “reach out”, “press hand”, “release hand”, functions as a member of the more comprehensive sequence “encounter”, which consists of the micro-sequences “coming closer”, “ Salutation ”,“ Greeting ”and“ Set ”. The sequence “encounter”, in turn, can form the superordinate sequence “request” as a micro-sequence in conjunction with “request” and “contract”. At the level of the sequences , the narrative is divided into hierarchical blocks that stand independently next to one another as episodes and are only held together on the next higher level, the level of the action.

The plot

The level of action is determined by a structural rather than psychological status of the protagonists. The protagonist is not seen as a “psychic essence”; H. as an entity that motivates the action out of itself, but - with reference to Algirdas Julien Greimas - as an actant . The protagonists of the story are, according to Barthes, “not to be described and classified according to what they are, but according to what they do [...] insofar as they participate in three major semantic axes, which, incidentally, are also included in the sentence finds again ( subject , object , attribute , adverbial determination), namely communication, desire (or search) and examination; As a result of the paired arrangement of these participations, the endless world of the protagonists is also subject to a paradigmatic structure projected onto the entire narrative (subject / object, giver / recipient, helper / adversary); and since the actant defines a class, it can be filled in with various actors who are mobilized according to the rules of multiplication, substitution or the blank. "

The problem of the subject

Barthes names the unsolved question of the subject in the actant matrix as a particular difficulty , a problem that structural narrative analysis deals with the analogy of narrative structure and sentence grammar, because every sentence requires a grammatical subject: who or which class of actors is the real one To define the “ hero ” of the narrative? Barthes states that many narratives focus on a conflicting “dual” of people in which the subject appears doubled and cannot be reduced.

The narrative communication

Above the level of action is the level of narration , on which the addressee of the story (the narrator) and the addressee of the story (the listener or reader) communicate. In “describing the code by means of which the narrator and reader are signified in the narrative itself”, Barthes neglects the signs of reception and concentrates on the signs of the narration. He thus distinguishes himself from models that see the addressee in a rigid alternative either (1.) as a real author who uses the story as an “expression of an I”, or (2.) as a supra-personal instance with god-like knowledge of his protagonists or (3.) as a narrator who only communicates what the protagonists know and experience.

Staff and apersonal

According to Barthes, the level of narration, like language, knows “only two systems of signs: personal and apersonal”, which cannot always be identified by the grammatical characteristics of the person (“I”) or non-person (“he”). Barthes uses examples from Ian Fleming's " Goldfinger " to demonstrate that it is possible to tell personal stories in the third person as well. That is, to set the first person as the instance of the narrative: If the narrative, so Barthes can be rewritten into a first-person narration without loss of grammatical correctness - Barthes uses the term "rewriting", it can be a personal narration act: "For example the sentence: 'He noticed a man about fifty years old who still looked youthful, etc.' is completely personal in spite of the he ('I, James Bond, remarked, etc.'), but the narrative utterance 'when the ice cube clinked in the glass seemed to suddenly enlighten Bond' may be due to the verb 'seem' which is a sign of Apersonalen (and not of He) will not be personal. "

The Apersonale

The apersonal is "the usual mode of narrative", but the modes of the personal and the apersonal change from time to time and - as Barthes shows with an example - often within the sentence boundary. The “psychological novel” in particular is characterized by a change between the modes, because the pure presence of the figure as a speaker ( personal narrative ) does not unlock the psychological “content of the person”, their “dispositions, contents or characteristics”. On the other hand, some of the - in Barthes' time - contemporary literature endeavors to “transfer the narrative from the purely constative area (which it has filled up to now) to the performative area” d. H. not first to locate the meaning of speaking beyond the speaking process. Such writing is no longer “telling, but saying that one is telling”. The referent , the what of the narrative, is functionally subordinated to the literary “speech act”.

The narrative situation

Barthes understands the narrative situation as the “totality of rules according to which a narration is recorded”, i. H. Text type signals such as “Once upon a time in a fairy tale” or the reading regulations common in avant-garde literature by typographical means. The "bourgeois society and the resulting mass culture" are, however, characterized by a defense against the consciousness of signs and therefore need "signs that do not look like signs": For this purpose, the coding of the narrative situation can be obscured by narrative processes that "naturalize the story ", D. H. enable the recipient to experience authenticity, for example through letter novels or allegedly recovered manuscripts .

The system of narration

As in language, two interrelated processes can be distinguished in the narrative: the structure or segmentation of units (= form ) and the integration of these units "in higher-ranking units" (= meaning).

Distortion and expansion

The form of the narrative is based on two “abilities” that Barthes demonstrates with the terms distortion and expansion . The term distortion , which in medical terminology refers to a forceful twisting or pulling, means the process of "expanding the characters over the whole story". The distortions then become "unpredictable expansions". inserted. The narrative is - in linguistic terminology - "a highly synthetic language based mainly on a syntax of nesting and wrapping". Its procedure corresponds to dystaxia , i. H. the change from the usual syntax. The narrative is held together by the bracing function of the distortion (the expansion of the signs on the syntagmatic level) and the "radiating" of individual units of the narrative on different levels; What is meant are units that are anchored in the narrative structure as indicators as well as functional units (see above). If, for example, James Bond orders a whiskey before a flight, the drink forms a polysemic indicator that bundles various signatures such as modernity, wealth and leisure in a “symbolic knot”, and the order of the whiskey as a functional unit is part of a sequence (“Drink, waiting, leaving, etc.”), which only finds a “final meaning” as a whole.

The generalized distortion

The “generalized distortion” that characterizes the narrative is antimimetic. The expansion of the signs and the inclusion of insertions undermine a reporting mode that could attempt to reproduce the immediate sequence of actions familiar from everyday life. In the narrative, “a kind of logical time” is constituted “which has little to do with real time, since the visible pulverization of the units is always absorbed by the logic that connects the kernels of the sequence”. The intensification of the distortion causes the reader's “tension”, which is characterized in two ways: as “emphatic [s] procedures of postponement and resumption”; H. as an affective reader guidance, and as an intelligible game with the structure that challenges the reader through logical disturbances.

Mimesis and meaning

The complex sense of the narrative becomes understandable through the process of integration. The integration controls the understanding of the juxtaposed, discontinuous and heterogeneous elements, which can only be received successively on the syntagmatic level . "What separates on a certain level - a sequence, for example - is usually brought together again on a higher level (sequence of higher rank, overall significance of a dispersion of circumstantial evidence, action of a class of people)". If the unity of a narrative - as already described above - is significant on different levels, i. i.e. if they are e.g. B. serves simultaneously as a function of a sequence and as an indication with reference to an actant, a “structural nesting” of two readings arises; "The dystaxia controls a 'horizontal' reading, but the integration imposes a 'vertical' reading on it".

The method of narration - constituting a 'logical' time in contrast to the 'real', deep structural construction of meaning - does not aim at the representation of the ' reality ' or the copy of a 'natural' logic of action. The story is by no means mimetic, it “shows nothing, it does not imitate. The enthusiasm that can carry us away when reading a novel is not that of a 'vision' (basically we 'see' nothing), but that of the meaning, that is, a higher kind of relation [...]. In the narrative 'happens', from the referential, i.e. H. real point of view, literally: nothing; what 'happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the arrival of which is celebrated without ceasing ”.

See also

expenditure

  • Roland Barthes: L'aventure sémiologique. Édition du Seuil, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-02-012570-3 (EA Paris 1985).
    • German translation: The semiological adventure . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-11441-4 (EA Frankfurt am Main 1988).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 102-143
  2. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 102
  3. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 103
  4. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 105
  5. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 106
  6. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 107
  7. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 107 f.
  8. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 109.
  9. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 112
  10. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 112 f.
  11. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 113
  12. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 114
  13. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 115
  14. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 118
  15. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 119
  16. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 120
  17. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 121
  18. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 123
  19. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 124
  20. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 125
  21. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 126
  22. ↑ a b c d Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 127
  23. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 128
  24. ↑ a b c Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 129
  25. ↑ a b c d Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 130
  26. ↑ a b c d Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 131
  27. ↑ a b c d e f Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 132
  28. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 133
  29. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 134
  30. ↑ a b Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 135
  31. ↑ Roland Barthes: The semiological adventure. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 136