And in this corner...

During my first stint in graduate school, at Miami of Ohio, I laid the groundwork for shifting my interests from (Irish) literature to rhetoric. A big part of that transition for me was the overlap that I perceived between literary and rhetorical theories. (Another part of it was getting really good advice from a faculty mentor in literature, who saw the disciplinary writing on the wall in terms of job prospects. But that’s a whole other story.) My undergraduate education in English had leaned pretty heavily into literary theory, and while I’d struggled with it initially, I was all-in by the time I arrived in graduate school. That I could do the same type of work in rhetoric (and with a much better chance at making it a career)? It made sense to me at the time, and still does, honestly.

One of the writers whose work straddled that divide for me was the French critic Roland Barthes. The writing sample I submitted for my graduate school applications was an analysis of Sherlock Holmes based upon a method (semiotics) that Barthes had deployed to look at stories by Poe and Balzac. And I would later, during my PhD, translate Barthes as part of the exam to demonstrate competency in French for my language requirement (a competency that did not persist). I even fantasized for a long time about writing a book about Barthes and rhetoric—there are some really good ones that make use of his work, but I flirted with the idea of doing something definitive.

What appealed to me about Barthes (and still does) was the way that he never stopped interrogating his assumptions. He was not an intricate writer the way that Derrida, Foucault, and others were, but there’s a chance that, if you’ve ever heard someone wax about the “death of the author,” you’ve encountered his ideas. More to the point, his ideas shifted over the years, so it’s difficult to pin down particular notions as "Barthesian.” In addition to underwriting my own career transition, Barthes wrote at a time when French philosophy/theory was transitioning from Sartre, Saussure, and systems, to what would later be understood (sometimes poorly) as postmodern thought, including the aforementioned Derrida, Foucault, and many others.

Today, though, I was thinking about his first book, Mythologies. He wrote it in the 1950s, at a time when he was doing semiotic, cultural studies. The book is composed of a series of short essays on a broad range of topics (toys, museum exhibits, advertisements, detergent, margarine, etc.), followed by a 50-page essay that attempts to distill some method and theory from the essays themselves. Barthes was especially interested in critiquing what he called the “bourgeois norm” of French culture, and the ways that it took contingent, historical notions and presented them as natural.

Photo by Michał Bożek on Unsplash

His essay on “Toys” is one that I used with students for many years as a way of introducing them to semiotics. Put briefly, semiotics is a descriptive method where one breaks down a text or an object into its component features to understand how it means the way it does. In his essay, Barthes decries the (then) new wave of toys that are made out of plastic (“a graceless material”) and provide “a microcosm of the adult world,” functioning to reduce childhood and imagination to training children to become adults. These toys are “chemical in substance and color; their very material introduces one to a coenaethesis of use, not pleasure.” The essay itself is only a couple of pages, but it’s a worthy introduction to Barthes’ discussion of “myths,” the ways that even small choices can condition us to accept certain ideas as natural rather than contingent.

One of the longer essays in the book, and the reason I was thinking about Barthes today is called “The World of Wrestling,” and addresses (well before Guy Debord) the extent to which “professional wrestling” should be understood as spectacle rather than sport. While this isn’t exactly a hot take in the era of WCW, WWE, and now AEW, Barthes was writing at a time when wrestling wouldn’t have been considered an appropriate topic for cultural analysis, so it’s an unusual piece for the time. I don’t really want to rehash the essay itself, but I did want to make note of one of the things he says: “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre.”

I was thinking about Barthes’ piece in the context of an interview that Judd Legum published a few days ago with Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America (which came out earlier this year):

In her book, Riesman makes the case that Trump's political strategy is shaped directly and indirectly by McMahon. “For more than three decades, Trump has watched and admired Vince’s product," Riesman writes. "He has been both host and performer at many of Vince’s wrestling extravaganzas, honing his abilities as a rabble-rouser. Through Trump, Vince’s wrestling-infused mentality has reached the highest levels of the American system.”

Riesman is not the first to make this argument, but the interview prompted me to think more about it, especially considering that Presidential campaigning is about to ramp up again. It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been eight years now, and we still haven’t figured out the attention economy that TFG continues to exploit. You might remember when the Huffington Post made this ill-fated decision:

“we have decided we won't report on Trump's campaign as part of The Huffington Post's political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump's campaign is a sideshow. We won't take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you'll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”

I describe it as ill-fated only because it ultimately proved futile. In many ways, HuffPost understood better than the rest of the media exactly what Trump’s campaign was doing to/with the media, the degree to which they were complicit in helping him get elected the first time.

CNN breaks news

Riesman references the line about wrestling (and TFG) that we’re meant to “"take it seriously, but not literally,” and she’s clear about the problems with that attitude:

you operate from the assumption that everything you're seeing in the ring is fake, or at least most of it. And that's dangerous, because once you're assuming everything's fake, except for the things you want to believe are true, then you're just having a grab bag, personalized reality.

I’ll be writing more about this in upcoming entries (and in my book project), but this is a particularly corrosive sort of irony, one that forecloses on any kind of good-faith debate or interaction. That in turn makes it pretty difficult to have any sort of political system that resembles democracy.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that’s slowing me down is my own inability to see a path forward. One of the invisible corollaries of “seriously, not literally” is that it’s an effect of wealth and power in this country—most of us don’t have the luxury to reject literality. And those who might do the most to close the gap between them have the most reason to refuse doing so. Most of us are held accountable when we lie; at the very least, we are expected to behave consistently and responsibly. And that, I think, belies a desire that Barthes, Riesman, and others note when it comes to wrestling: we love to see “assholes” in the ring (and increasingly in politics) not because we genuinely like them or even want to be them. There’s a cathartic pleasure in rooting for an anti-hero, a heel, from an ironic distance. Riesman explains, “Even if you wouldn't break the rule, there's something titillating about seeing somebody who has no regard for the rules,” and that goes some distance in understanding our current political moment. The spectacle of politics now is an exteriorization of the powerlessness that most voters feel at one level or another. The kind of spectacle offered by wrestling, according to Barthes, “raise[s us] above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations.” Of course, the problem with this is that, unlike the ring, there are everyday consequences for political spectacles, and we are particularly poor these days at seeing those consequences, even as we’re surrounded by them.

One of the things that Barthes argues, in the lengthy essay that concludes Mythologies, is that we must become “readers of myths,” treating them neither as truths to be simply accepted, nor as falsehoods to be debunked. We have to understand both mythic appeal and the seams that hold them together. Myth isn’t something that we can somehow banish—it’s part of how language and culture work—but we can begin to understand on whose behalf certain myths operate, and perhaps we can subvert some of the more pernicious ones.

Maybe I’m just feeling optimistic today, but if there’s something that I’ve learned from wrestling, it’s that heels do eventually get what’s coming to them.