Barthes, Semiotics and the Revolt Against Structuralism
Вставка
- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- You can find Barthes here amzn.to/3dunE74
This is the official UA-cam channel of Dr. Michael Sugrue.
Please consider subscribing to be notified of future videos, as we upload Dr. Sugrue's vast archive of lectures.
Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.
Sugrue has an amazing sense of humor. I’m addicted to these lectures.
You can tell Sugrue had fun with this one. His enthusiasm is infectious!
Yes, he is not a dry presenter.
Watching this was one of the closest things to tripping on mushrooms without eating mushrooms or seeing visuals. I'd recommend this to anyone who can understand any part of it; A++
I saw visuals while watching this. It is a moving image of a guy in a professorial tan jacket, striped tie, and eye glasses. He’s standing at a podium and giving a lecture. So I think you’re wrong that one can watch this without visuals, but maybe I dropped too much acid in the 80s and early 90s.
Acid is a lot better for Barthes. Mushrooms are suited to Levi-Strauss. Mescaline for Baudrillard, although some like the party psychedelics for him. Both mescaline and Baudrillard give me the sensation of momentum and velocity while standing still, racing toward a horizon that is ever receding. You’ve probably seen walls move or melt? It’s like that, but on the Z-axis.
It’s been almost thirty years since the last time I did mind altering chemicals or post modernism.
I know exactly what you mean!! It is like philosophy trying to understand that universal sensation which mushrooms help you tap into
The fuck did I just read 🦆
Mega eye roll to this stupid thread
Both psychedelics and philosophy: pearls before swine
So, there was someone who thought like me. Thank you, Mr. Sugrue. Wish you endless pleasure, if that means anything to you.
he died in January
"Every limitation on human freedom is ultimately a myth!"
As amusing as any of your lectures!
Barthes' work seems to sway a fine mood.
This saved my head from spinning in circles from reading too many research papers on this topic with a short and well versed presentation of what semiotics is. Timeless, thank you.
Outstanding presentation from the dynamic Dr Sugrue. Barthes was perhaps the hottest thing in the liberal arts departments when I finished my undergrad philosophy degree in 1979.
Where did you study?
@@JoseSanchez-zo5tb Emory University, Atlanta GA
0:27 Barthes
2:33 Sensitive reading of Mass Culture, De-Mythologizing
3:38 Lonely Ego
Liberation
5:25 Meta-Myth, Unmasking Masks all the way down
6:43 Free Play and Complete Control
Morbid Sarcastic Whit
7:48 _Mythologies_
8:34 _Myth Today_
9:16 Semiotics, Science of Signs
9:48 Internal Coherence
10:39 Non-Euclidean Geometry
11:24 Mass Culture
Dress - Form of Speech, Sign, Signals
12:51 Sense of Humor
13:56 Professional Wrestling; The Joy of The Community Spectacle
14:58 Drama started as Ancient/Classic Popular Art
16:17 Detergents
Consumer Goods are Fetishized/Iconized/Myth-Filled
18:48 De-Sexualization
19:26 Knowledge Formula in A Box
19:56 Plastic - Infinite Transformation, Infinite Freedom
20:29 Myth misleads, Disguises message
Deception steps in to mess with Signs
Level 1: Surface Level
22:10 Level 2: Primary Message
22:52 Rambo - American Invincibility in Battle
25:34 Clarity is Self-Delusion, Myth is Substituted for another Myth
26:47 Politicized Speech, De-Mythology is Re-Mythology
The Critic Is A Poet
30:45 "How can I maximize my pleasure with regards to the text?"
Will To Pleasure over Will To Power over Will To Truth
32:52
33:36
34:46 Secret Algebra is a Myth, We Negated What Made Criticism Possible
Criticism Destroys Itself over time
+ Free Play
- Hopeless attempt to Avoid The External World
36:30 Takes the project as far as it can possibly go
37:06 Breakdown of Reality, Self becomes Fragment, Delusion
We end up talking to ourselves
38:36 There is No Out
40:12 WE ARE ALL PROFOUNDLY LONELY, IN OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL WORLDS
40:54 Artist/Critic as Dilettante
42:07 Irony until the end, Indulge Pleasure through Full Freedom
43:03 Descartes
Love the nerds that do time stamps. Thank you for doing the lord’s work.
Hero
Thank you for your services, fellow knowledge enthusiast.
I had to stop the video at 3:19 cuz my heart was pounding like I was at a rock concert. This man is amazing. He exudes balanced intelligence but also personal warmth, a rare combination. I stopped it also so I can go get paper and pencil to take notes. Wow.
Feeling appreciative!! Thanks for uploading.
New Sugrue drop. Now...my day just got better!
Great lecture. Also, it's fun to listen to this lecture, and every time he says "Barthes", to imagine that he's talking about Bart Simpson.
It's just brilliant, for both the thoughts of Barthes and the presentation by Sugrue.
This just put the final touch on my day as Senica would suggest. Thank you Prof Sugrue.
Have been reading and actually quite fascinated by Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Professor Sugrue’s explanation and interpretation is a great supplement to the reading.
Listen sir, what a presenter and orator you are! Thank you for the lesson.
לגמרי!
Thank you so much dr sugrue and the team
I’m obsessed with these lectures! Watching one a day !
Very glad to have discovered this channel. Excellent.
Thanks again Michael! These are very inspiring
You make us really enjoy Philosophy. Thanks
Very interesting - always enjoy his insightful lectures - powerful energy
thanks for posting this - one of my fav sugrue lectures
At times, the main point being come to feels almost like a punchline grounded in truth. I can laugh at the epiphanies. Damn I love these lectures. Thanks again, Dr. Sugrue.
Oh..my..my. this guy keep slepping with my mind without a condom, mennn!!!. Specially the harmony of the flow of his points
He is truly a brilliant teacher. One of the specific aspects of his talks that I love is his frequent allusions to the influence of Kant.
The mastery... you've done it again Sugrue, thank you!
Brilliant Lecture !
Amazing lecture so much intelligent sustenance
This reading is a description of a true artist-one that is beyond cultural constructions, commodifications and myths and focuses on a radical personal aesthetic.
This man is doing the lord's work 🙏🏾 thank you for this video, thank you Barthes, and THANK you Dr. Sugrue
Hey Michael, been listening on TTC for years. Glad it's up on UA-cam.
I am a fellow lecturer and I have always been impressed at how tight all of your lectures are.
Anyways the point....... I am a philosophical historian, maybe I dunno.........
I also studied a lot of aikido, zen, tai chi, Taoism, western mysticism to the extent that I know that guys used to sit on poles for years at a time ,blah, blah, blah.
Anything I have experienced since Nietzsche always sounds like an echo.
Modernism, structuralism, post modernism, meta modernism...... It all reminds me of 500BC when their was a Hindu fundamentalist they came along an said identical stuff about the internal and external experience, the nature of reality and gave us our first intellectual mind map for quantum physics.
Every hundred years, someone comes along and takes big shots at the old structures and we have to clap and pretend we hadn't heard it before.
Who was Buddha ripping off, there was someone
What an interesting lecture! 😮 TY
Brilliant. This puts a lot of Postmodernism in perspective for me.
If the pleasure principle replaces the reality principle, then we are ultimately talking about narcissistic personality disorder (me, me, me, and my freedom to pleasure myself with all the activities that I find pleasurable).
And whenever a narcissist withdraws from the external world, he quickly learns that there is no "me, myself, and I", that without the external and the social, the human being is empty, fragmented.
And right after that, he is reminded that you can't wish reality away, no matter how good you are at criticizing it.
Narcissism indicates someone that has found a way to make the world serve them and appeal to their pleasures, so a narcissist cannot be reminded that reality cannot be wished away, because they have bended reality to their desires and to make it function according to their will. This is the beautiful discovery of postmodern: reality is what you make of it. There is no Reality with a capital R, there is no Truth with a capital T, because reality and truth are equally plastic as our imagination.
Sure, there is science, there are hard facts in life, a narcissist won't deny that, but they will find a way to make those work to their advantage. Look at the people who created high risers and have thousands of people working under them so they can get rich doing nothing. You think they are in denial? In my opinion, they're smarter, because they are performing some kind of magic. They know how to make the world bend to please them, not the other way around.
You should pay more attention to what you're watching instead of trying to counter it with your ideology.
Do you know this experientially or did you reason to reach this conclusion?
I think you are wrong that the pleasure principle is linked to narcissistic personality disorder. First of all, you’ve mischaracterized or misunderstood the disorder. Second of all, I think you are confusing the reality principle with reality. Embracing the reality principle doesn’t automatically lead to knowledge of reality. In fact, “embracing the reality principle” can be a form of delusion itself that is called “the will to power”.
Watch the video again (or however many times you need). It’s complex and subtle material, and you might miss a lot on your first pass with the material.
@@MarcosElMalo2Is this you, friend?
ua-cam.com/video/mjtd6Cs0PnY/v-deo.html
You should read Eros and civilization
insightful at it's core
I just cannot believe that he did this without notes. Rest in peace.
Thank You!
Thanks 👍 mucho. Lovely lecture....everytime I listen to this - I gain more - one more "mask" or myth dissolved - loved the idea of Pleasure Aesthete and the living in the labyrinth...THIS IS IT...stuggled for years to locate Barthes and this one hour - liberated my mind - thanks again...totally de-mythologised
Thank you.
Fascinating 🌹
I believe it was Daedalus that designed the Labyrinth & Theseus who found his way out of it guided by Ariadne's thread.
Yes, but it was Daedalus that told Ariadne the trick of using the thread. King Minos punished Daedalus for this by imprisoning him in the labyrinth, and Daedalus escaped with his son Icarus using wings formed from feathers and wax. So Daedalus did escape from the labyrinth by flying over the walls (and not by trying to figure out a path through the maze). This is an early example of what we today call “thinking out-of-the-box”.
Such a great lecture! Now I’ve got to read all of Roland Barthes’ books
save yourself the effort. If you've read one Barthes book you've read them all.
@@chicagofineart9546 I understand you mean as the process is the same, just applied to differing topics. As someone who had never read one at all, what one would you recommend?
I really enjoyed it. I will watch more of his.
When I stumble across some lectures.. I watch one i know a lot about (Roldand Baths) , see if they are on the money ..If they are, I watch more.
This guy is on the money
I can tell he really likes Barthes. It's great to see
Superbe as always.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
Have you seen the AMAZING lectures by Rick Roderick? They are all here in YT
I want to second Rick Roderick!
Julian James
"The Evolution of Coñev
Carl Schmitt
Is this an early incarnation of critical theory which honors the critic as equal to the artist or doer?
Teddy Roosevelt:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whos face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Roosevelt is talking about an entirely different critic than Barthes
Yes and no. Critical theory grew out of literary criticism and hermeneutics. That is to say, interpretation. I feel Teddy was talking about a difference kind of criticism. It’s not quite right to say that the critic is elevating himself to the same level as the writer of the work he is “criticizing” (that is, analyzing and interpreting). He is elevating the text and negating the author’s intention. But by doing so, he also negates himself and his intention, because he and his intention are superfluous to his own critical text. When a creator offers his creation, he doesn’t get any special privileges over us with regard to how we should understand his creation. The creation has to be engaged with on its own terms. No special pleadings.
This reminded me of my Bachelor Project as a student photographer. I made photographs of basically everything that interested me and made me point my camera to it: plastic, advertising, snapshots from being on the road, textures,... It became a visual diary without a clear narrative.
My teachers would ask me why I took a cropped picture of a tree trunk, or a facade, why they were all so greyish, and at the time I felt very nihilistic, depressed, and I answered I really didn't care because they would adhere their own meaning to them anyways, regardless of what I had to say. Even more, I had nothing to say. It was an acceptance of defeat that I couldn't understand the world through art, because art is merely a representation of my reflection upon the world. They didn't accept that, because nowadays (2010-...), art is romantic again. So I failed and never got a degree.
However, I was taught by those same teachers that Barthes was someone very important to art theory, so seeing this makes me wonder if they failed themselves, by failing me.
Love it - you were obviously way ahead of them.
@@offworldlive I dunno, I feel like I used to be very pretentious back then. If your comment is meant sarcastically, touché!
@@DarkAngelEU no sarcasm. Just found your story funny about tutors teaching Barthes but ignoring it in their critiques.
@@offworldlive Yeah, they were pretty stuck up their own asses themselves. Some of them never heard of Helmut Newton for example.
@@DarkAngelEU I think the issue you had that prevented your work’s acceptance is that you didn’t have the vocabulary to justify it (which is ironic in its own way, but thus is the way of academia). Put more cynically, if you had studied Barthes and other post-modernists, you could have spun out a good line of bullshit to convince your instructors that your project was valid.
The irony is that the post structuralist word view says that your intentionality as creator is unimportant, and the work should be examined on its own terms. However, the loophole is that your “statement of purpose” becomes part of the text/project. Anyway, sorry you didn’t have the theoretical underpinnings to “support” your work. It kinda sucks. But the problem wasn’t that you were pretentious, it was that you weren’t pretentious enough. 😄🤷🏻♀️
Actually helped me figure out where Derrida was coming from
Oh, god yes. Derrida is impenetrable without Barthes. But you need de Saussure and Levi-Strauss, too, to figure out where Barthes is coming from. I think you need exposure to Barthes before you can engage with Baudrillard, as well.
Thank you
thank you. i love this lecture.
Is it weird that I totally hear Jeff Goldblum's voice sometimes while listening to these?
Barthes in brief- Everything has too many meanings to be interpreted with clarity. In fact clarity is non-existent. So, I choose to create my own meaning. If I wish to see black as white, so I will. That makes me happy! Therefore, to be happy, one must be free- free to define and interpret sadness as happiness, criminal as a victim, solid as liquid, science as myth, reason as superstition, love as hate, death as birth, end as beginning, anything. How does it matter so long as it makes oneself happy?
Thank you! Such an amazing lecture it really helped me understand deconstructionism
Incredible
Barthes who wrote about laundry detergent was hit by a laundry truck while walking home and later dying from his injuries.
One might with good cause refer the introductory phrase “The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition” to Dr. Sugrue.
“We are all under influence by a sort of disguised coercion.” 100% accurate
This concept it actually hilarious at surface level, yet very stimulating intellectually with a lot of truth at its core.
Talk about thinking outside of the box.. wait a minute 🤔 what does that *mean* ?
"No French intellectual would leave a clique except to join another clique" - Mary McCarthy
Barthes might be the exception-he formed his own clique and allowed no one else to join it. 😄
Is there a part two or do all the videos end abruptly?
Does Sugrue have any lectures on Derrida?
I would like to know, in which year was this lecture given?
“Time is the moving picture of reality “
I could watch a whole video of him saying “mmkay, *sips water*, alright, noww..” 😂
Thank you so much Mr.Sugrue, you ARE a great man, may you rest in peace. 🙏🏼
I understand Badiou better now, because it's clear what problem he's trying to solve. The author is dead, there are bodies and languages and texts, but still there is truth which erupts in the real world and determines the validity of interpretations
Clifford geertz, Lou's althusser, Stuart hall, Birmingham school...please
It’s crazy how un-revolutionary and familiar this whole lecture sounds today
I mean it is a laymans summary which is a few decades old, talking about a philosopher another few decades old
Barthes was perhaps attempting to bring into formal philosophy Godel's incompleteness theorem
@@benoplustee I don’t think that’s right. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tells us about how some arguments are just unprovable. What Barthes tries to do, is tell us more about notation in a way. As there are many ways to prove the pythagorean theorem, even with maths unrelated to classical geometry, there are uncountably many ways one can arrive at a sign from a myth and its signifiers.
@@pieterzegers7788 I took it more at am attempt to do away with the idea of platonic ideals, or some universal set/system of signs and signifiers that underly everything we experience. The connection to Godel for me is the similarity in which for Barthes, systems of ontology related to signs and signifiers will always end up being either incomplete or inconsistent, much like Godels incompleteness theorem predicts about logical mathematical systems. It might be a loose association but it's an aesthetically pleasing one to me.
Dr. Sugrue does a beautiful job, very smart, well organized, engaging. I will indulge myself here, nevertheless, and suggest that pretty much all these thinkers are triumphing over very stupid opponents, i.e, Organized Religion, The Patriotic State, Mass Ideologies, Status Hierarchies, Capitalism and Advertising, and so forth. Most intelligent and honest people can see the truth without the discourse of philosophy. And yet stupidity wins in the long run, doesn't it?
Any object, any idea, anything, can mean absolutely anything else. That sentence changed my life. That's all you to know about philosophy.
11:35 semiotic analysis
19:52 postmodernism
In the end, it's just Me and My Shadow.
“Plastic is infinite freedom, infinite transformation”.
17:39 this *
Wheres the lecture on Deleuze
13:37 "from surface structure to deep structure..." Golly, I would have never taken Barthes for a covert Chomskyan (esp. given Chomsky's hostility to structuralism and also semiotics)!
Chomsky is smart, but his grudge against postmodernism is an error which only goes to show how far up his own ass he is. Alot of American philosophy sounds like bla bla bla from a European perspective. Hardly interesting, nothing science can't do, so what's the point of even having a debate? There's no imagination whatsoever!
This is a common sentiment among those Chomsky fans that were introduced to Chomsky’s writings before having tackled structuralism/poststructuralism. If one approaches Chomsky without having been exposed to the waves of structuralism and post structuralism, one might think Chomsky came up with his ideas out of whole cloth. You need the references to understand his reaction, or you end up with merely “Chomsky thinks structuralism is bad” or (even worse) “structuralism is bad”.
I’m not saying you are one of those slavish students of Chomsky. Far from it. I’m just saying that some of his biggest fans have the most superficial grasp of his work-they’ve almost made him into a left wing Jordan Petersen.
This being a lecture on Semiotics with a Gryffindor prominently displayed, I really want to know what year this is from.
Professor Sugrues passing is a tragedy. I feel now that the world has become a lesser place.
This reminds me of the show Mad Men
Ties into Edward L Bernes book on propaganda
Are these back to back lectures or does Sugrue only have one outfit?
Why are you like this, Gary ?
35 minutes into this talk, when I realized I own that same jacket.
How embarrassing! Unless you wear it ironically. In that case, OK. 😉
I think a part of us always considers a deeper meaning but we’ve learned to ignore it and go with the advertising.
What does he mean when he says "Cartesian principle"?
DesCartes lecture
who is this "gotomer" referred to at 25:16 ??
Gadamer
@@dr.michaelsugrue thank you!
Technically, America did not "lose" the Vietnam War, in the sense of suffering decisive defeat in the field; rather, the intuition of Ho Chi Minh and his followers was vindicated: once enough blood had been exacted, the American will to fight was broken, and she gave up.
I both agree and disagree with your statement. There was no decision on the battlefield for either side that could be called victory. Indeed, the closest we have was the Tet Offensive, which the communists utterly lost militarily. Yet I don’t think Tet was decisive or the North would have collapsed.
What happened instead? The Communists/Nationalists achieved their goals. The U.S. did not. If we harken to Clausewitz, “War is diplomacy by other means”, the use lost, technically if not militarily.
An interesting footnote to Tet: it did have long term ramifications wrt to the balance of power between the Southern communists and the Northern ones. The VC were so depleted by Tet that they never really recovered, so by the time we left and the NVA began their campaign against SVN, it was by their own efforts with little contribution by VC irregulars. When the NVA swept into Saigon, it was the northern commies that took over the functions of government.
@@MarcosElMalo2 You are correct. The problem with U.S. strategy was its reliance upon deterrence: the goal was not the defeat of the Communist North, but only to turn back its aggression towards the South. Ho and his followers understood this, and gambled that once the U.S. saw that their will to conquest made simple deterrence impossible, she would abandon the effort - as did happen. Thus yes, the Communists won a Clausewitzian victory, in that they demonstrated the superior political willfulness.
These comments on Plastic are pretty much identical to Advaita Vedanta analogies like gold being able to be made in to anything but still being gold or a wave still being part of the ocean.
❤
The laundry van is the key.
Good lectures and very informative, but I'm guessing they were made no later than the early Nineties. His pop culture references are quite dated.
Yes, you can tell the video quality is a little poor. His references are a little dated, but most of what he says is still applicable today.
Prof. Sugrue is about 70 now (maybe a little more than 70). These lectures are probably from the early 90s.
Not to mention the aspect ratio. 😆 How’s that for a frame of reference?
18:36 big don drap energy here
42:00
37.51 , dr sugrue paused and looked for a word 😂
42:21
To be superficial, when were these videos made?
19:52 "Destroy the brain and break the box, that's postmodernism".. what a terrifying observation!
But fetishization of the brain like it’s the finger bone of saint (or some other holy relic) is not also terrifying? I suppose the destruction of either one could be terrifying if you believed these artifacts contain knowledge or God, but the underlying idea is to free oneself of superstition.
Reasoning
5:25
Way to explain semiotics so even an idiot punter such as myself can understand.
26:40
11:26 MTV is extremely powerful semiotics system
It was once, when it primarily played music videos. Currently, it is a signifier of a once powerful semiotics system that no longer really exists outside of pop culture history. MTV is no longer relevant outside its use as a signifier.