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A review by sebseb
Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
4.0
What may seem outdated in our post-Said, Orientalism-savvy climate is in fact still relevant, though easily susceptible to fetishistic and (ironically) essentialist readings. Barthes's travel-book is personal; the hand-written language notes, photographs, poems, newspaper clippings, and sketch-like chapters create the impression that you are travelling through Japan with him, jotting down impressions rather than lingering on profound contemplations of difference. Nonetheless, the impressions all show angles of the same essay thesis, each fragment serves as an example of an imagined Japan that consists of a proliferation of "empty" signs - form without content. It would be easy, in fact, to accuse Barthes of showing anti-essentialism as an essential attribute of Japan, if he didn't elaborate on his reasons for writing as he does.
His method (which today I think we could call both structuralist and post-structuralist) is to articulate an elaborate system embodied in quotidian artefacts and impressions (chopsticks, food, train stations, landscapes, even the shape of East Asian eyes) in order to prise apart the idea of systems-as-representations, or the Empire of Meaning that he sees as dominating in the West. In fact, Barthes is writing about what it is like for the West (as a human body, a culture, a hegemony) to come into contact with Japan: the true object of the book is not Japan, but the experience of Japan within a Western framework – an experience that disrupts, unsettles, and even liberates that framework towards new forms. Importantly, Barthes achieves this without becoming didactic in any way: he is not interested in "other symbols" or "another wisdom", but "the possibility of a difference, a mutation".
His method (which today I think we could call both structuralist and post-structuralist) is to articulate an elaborate system embodied in quotidian artefacts and impressions (chopsticks, food, train stations, landscapes, even the shape of East Asian eyes) in order to prise apart the idea of systems-as-representations, or the Empire of Meaning that he sees as dominating in the West. In fact, Barthes is writing about what it is like for the West (as a human body, a culture, a hegemony) to come into contact with Japan: the true object of the book is not Japan, but the experience of Japan within a Western framework – an experience that disrupts, unsettles, and even liberates that framework towards new forms. Importantly, Barthes achieves this without becoming didactic in any way: he is not interested in "other symbols" or "another wisdom", but "the possibility of a difference, a mutation".