Roland Barthes
Throughout class Dr. Alexis had us read a lot of Roland Barthes. One of our required books for this semester was his Camera Lucida which explained "studium" and "punctum," a major theme in our research and projects (read more on those terms with definitions from his book in my blog here). Later, we read twp excerpts from Mythologies: "Toys" and "In The Ring." Before we jumped into those, we read the preface to the book. The very few paragraphs of that really sparked the idea behind this project.
Barthes reflected, "The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience with the 'naturalness' which common sense, the press, and the arts continually invoke to dress up a reality which, though the one we live in, is nonetheless quite historical: in a word, I resented seeing Nature and History repeatedly confused in the description of our reality, and I wanted to expose in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying the ideological abuse I believed was hidden there" (XI).
Barthes reflected, "The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience with the 'naturalness' which common sense, the press, and the arts continually invoke to dress up a reality which, though the one we live in, is nonetheless quite historical: in a word, I resented seeing Nature and History repeatedly confused in the description of our reality, and I wanted to expose in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying the ideological abuse I believed was hidden there" (XI).
Nature happens. We can't control it. It is something that we are born with. That nature is molded by social construction of conventions. That becomes history. History isn't natural. History is written by people. Those people write what they want based on the circumstances and what they believe. There's that saying that everyone knows, history is written by the victors. However people use Nature and History as synonyms. It is not "natural" to believe that the arts are a highbrow culture, however "history" has made us to think that it is.
Barthes concludes the "Preface" with "I don't share the traditional belief that there's a divorce in nature between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation,' both of them likely to spirit away or sublimate the true limits of their situation" (XII). I believe that what he means is that there is no break between nature and history in the sense of we make rules, conditions, and explanations based on what we see in nature. There is a reason why the spider can make a web from its body. We can study this and come up how and why. However our reasons influence social construction and thought, while a spider is just doing what it was born to do.
Barthes concludes the "Preface" with "I don't share the traditional belief that there's a divorce in nature between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation,' both of them likely to spirit away or sublimate the true limits of their situation" (XII). I believe that what he means is that there is no break between nature and history in the sense of we make rules, conditions, and explanations based on what we see in nature. There is a reason why the spider can make a web from its body. We can study this and come up how and why. However our reasons influence social construction and thought, while a spider is just doing what it was born to do.