What's your sign?

Last semester I touched briefly on the literary theory of Structuralism in my Popular Culture class. We covered Roland Barthes’s book Mythologies and discussed the concept of semiotics. I learned about the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, but not at length. Participating in the Structuralism group for this class furthered my knowledge on the subject and allowed me get a better grasp on signs.

Our discussion is titled, "The Linguistic Turn.” I am happy to say that this experience was truly a group effort. Our group was in clear communication: each person brought creative ideas to the table and contributed just the same. In my opinion and experience, this is rare for a group assignment. Our project is one of structure, and I believe this will show in our presentation this evening.My contribution to the project was piecing together the power point presentation. My group members sent me appropriate information based on their own research about Structuralism and its theoretical movement, historical context, cultural import and the theory's practical uses. I intended to add a playful, yet structured slide-show in order to effectively lead a memorable and fun discussion. Our group ensured that this will indeed be a discussion, and not a lecture. Our intention is to provide a fun learning experience embedding Structuralism into the students’ brains.

“What’s your sign?” is a thought provoking card game that we collectively came up with. While the slide-show is intended for individual perception, our group wanted to create an interactive presentation as well. One inevitable goal for tonight is that students who may not have normally worked together will do so in order to participate in the game and ultimately understand the Structuralist concept. I cannot guarantee the shock value that footage of a raw childbirth may bring, but I feel that our assignment will be just as memorable – perhaps ending with laughter instead.

Expense of social reality

Drawing by Edward Gorey
from The Doubtful Guest

I knew at that moment adopting the creature was wrong. I could no longer control his thoughts and actions. I felt like Dr. Frankenstein – giving a life to a creature in a world he knew nothing of. All that I had accomplished was exposing the creature to an ideology that was not meant for him: one that by nature, he did not belong to.

Inclinations of my erroneous actions began the day I sent him to purchase cooking oil for our grilled brill dinner. The potential rejecting public reaction to my new circumstance of a furry being with currency in hand had not occurred to me until after his departure. My fear subsided an hour later when he returned to our igloo. However, he did not come home with oil in his hands, or anything for that matter. His currency seemed to be exchanged for something on his feet. He wore what appeared to be thin white shoes that cuffed his ankles and were held together with unsecure rubber bottoms - surely not made for icy grounds.

"What are those?" I had asked him, genuinely.
"Sneakers," he replied lightly.
"And where is the cooking oil?" I inquired.
"Still at the store."

He walked away into his bedroom. I sunk my head in my hands and rubbed my eyebrows to and fro. I wondered what sort of monster I was creating. He was proving himself as a being of material. I was determined to teach him the concept of value.

"This is my grandfather's stop watch." I put my hand out, palm open, with the rusted round pocket watch for him to take from me. He blankly stared at it. "It is an heirloom,” I continued in order to eradicate the discomforting pause, “passed down from my grandfather to my father to me. Now, I am giving it to you as a declaration of my gratitude and affinity."

He seized it from my hand and it raised it close to his face. His curiosity relieved me. That is until he suddenly stood without a word. He wobbled to our horseshoe-shaped door, and trucked his flapping white feet toward the pond. I followed him as quickly as I could, but the bad knee was getting the best of me again and I fell behind. Before I could catch him, the creature raised and released the chain of the pocket watch into a parabola formation, gravity forcing it downward, and I watched it splash into the broken ice of the pond. My hand raised just as his had, but it was too late. My last memory of my grandfather was lost and drowned forever.

- - - - - - -

The simplistic black and white drawing depicts a frozen moment in time. A middle-aged white man and a penguin-like dark-haired creature stand in the foreground. The man wears a fur coat suggesting the atmosphere is of a cold nature which is complimented by the entirely white ground he stands on. Perhaps the ground is covered with snow. The shadows near his feet would suggest the same as it provides a depth perception. The figures in the background seemed to be completely covered in baggy clothing as well. The creature has its natural fur coat, so him alone would not reveal the atmospheric conditions of the situation. The creature wears man-made sneakers that do not appear to be made for the snow, but for basketball.

The man and the creature stand parallel to one another in exactly the same position: their left hand is raised and their right arm sits down by its side. Though their gestures mirror one another, the meaning behind each differs. The man raises his hand in objection of what the creature is currently doing in that moment. The creature has tossed a pocket watch into the air with a body of water to catch its fall. The disapproval from the man suggests the pocket watch is of value to him. His bent eyebrows and stern look suggest he does not want the watch to be tossed into the water.

The shadowing of the drawing shows that the light is cast from above and it is as if the man is the creature's shadow and vise versa. The watch may have meaning, but it is also representative of time. The creature is throwing time away, or stopping it, by drowning it.

Defamiliarize the technique

In his essay "Art as a Technique," Viktor Shklovsky writes, "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar'" (Rivkin 18).

Sounds a bit like William Wordsworth's in the Preface of his 1878 book Lyrical Ballads: defamiliarize the familiar.

Shklovsky, however, uses Leo Tolstoy as an example with his character Kholstomer: a talking horse. Though it is unlikely that a human being will come across a mare with an English (or Russian for that matter) vocabulary, Tolstoy's creates and tells a story from a horse's point of view. For example, the horse narrates, "In life people are guided by words, not by deeds" (Rivkin 17). What a striking sentence to come from a horse’s mouth. The horse understands his identity and position in his world (the horse literally is guided by words), and in this mere phrase he points out that so are human beings.

I could not get away with writing a blog post on formalism without using Daft Punk as an example. Daft Punk is the French Electronic duo Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. The music, or art, that they create consistently uses the technique of "defamiliarization" (Rivkin 16). The French musicians dress only in space-like costumes with face covering helmets. Their persona are out of this world which is reflective of their intentionally unusual music.

The music video for Da Funk depicts an ironic story about a talking dog (dressed in clothing and standing on two legs) walking amongst human beings in New York City. While the dog partakes in normal human activities, the people around him are un-accepting. For example, in loud and roaring New York City, the dog walks around with a boom-box blasting Da Funk and is told to turn it off. Another example is a (typically obnoxious) street solicitor rejects his the dog’s offer to indulge in her survey. None of the people around him react to the fact that a Dog is walking and talking, but they seem to mind him doing things of the norm. The way in which Daft Punk (and director Spike Jones) portray the creature, it is hard enough not to fixate on the fact that a dog is walking and talking let alone his unlawful rejections amongst the crowd!

Daft Punk thrives on the abnormal byway of depicting quests for identity. The group typically creates a social commentary using abnormal constructs to highlight society's limited points of view.

Tortures for the Eyes

In his treatise, “On the Sublime,” Longinus rhetorically wonders how his predecessors might comment and respond to his writings were they to read them present day (132).

In the year 2010, I propose the same question to the philosopher himself: How would Longinus respond to the “art” that contemporary Americans consider a form of expression, and how would it have affected him? I will use the video text of Britney Spears’s four minute music video, “Give Me More” as an example of such art.



“Give Me More” is what Longinus calls “pseudo tragic” in his chapter on “Defects That Militate Against Sublimity” (116). The viewer is thrown into a sublime of a dimmed bar/ dance club with flashing lights and attractive people provoking “wonder” and awe (114). The next location depicted takes place in a similarly darkened atmosphere with only the singer in view. Spears observantly sings, “Feels like no one else in the room.” Spears, wearing a top hat, a leather vest, leather underwear and fishnet stockings, walks in circles around a metal pole singing, “Gimme more Gimme more/ Gimme Gimme more.” After a minute and forty-five seconds passes, her wish is granted and the attractive people from the bar scene join her to dance alongside the pole.

It is at approximately two minutes of repetition that it is safe to call Spears the “frivolous fellow” that blows “on tiny little pipes without control of breath” (116). Spears holds onto the pole and walks around it, but does not have control over her environment and does not imitate properly or use the pole for what it was intended for: dancing.

Spears slanders the sublime through “tawdriness,” or through behaving “of the nature of cheap finery; showy or gaudy without real value” (116). Spears lacks grandeur and falsely glamorizes her body, song and video to enhance the emotional response of viewers.

It is worthy to note that Spears’s dancing scenes are filmed mostly from her chest up. This contrasts her earlier music videos that not only expose her entire torso, but have four minutes of actual synchronized dancing. For example, Spears’s debut music video, “Hit Me Baby One More Time” includes varieties of movements. “Give Me More” is the first music video released after the birth of her first son. Perhaps we can contribute the changes in her videos to age and experience, paralleling Longinus’s comparison of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: “writing the Iliad in the prime of his life, he made the whole body of the work dramatic and vivid, whereas the greater part of the Odyssey is narrative, as is characteristic of old age” (125). Though the size of her clothing stayed the same, the sense of age and experience dominated her latter video.

It is safe to say that Longinus would classify this particular piece of “art” as an attempt at persuasion and therefore not a true form of sublime. According to Longinus, “For the effect of elevated language is not to persuade the hearers, but to amaze them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us” (114).

Works Cited

Longinus. "On the Sublime." Classical Literary Criticsm. The Penguin Group: London 2000.