Language and Images

       My selection is from A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (108), by Roland Barthes, “…we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading…our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages…descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations…”. I chose this passage because of all that was written in both readings assignments, this passage excited me the most of all. The intensity and the accuracy of how Barthes is describing the experience of reading text makes it easy to understand, as well as relate to. I also latched on to how he describes the two different kinds of readers; the one who reads excitedly and is hungry to get to the end of the text, and the reader that takes their time to read and think about every word. This says a great deal about how text is perceived and it also shows how text does not having meaning just because it is text. As Barthes pointed out, a text is only as exciting as you make it and if you chose to read a text and assume that it won’t be an exciting or pleasurable read, than it won’t be. This then connects to the idea of semiology that is discussed in Section 1 of A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 

The section on semiology discusses what signs are and how signs are interpreted, one example of these signs being the very words that we use to communicate. Words are a form of an image, and this image is associated with sound. These images are not formed until there is an ideology behind them to give them meaning, which also means that words can be interpreted differently across different cultures. Does this mean then, that as we read text, it can be experienced differently depending on what culture we learned our language skills in? As pointed out in Section 1, words that seem common among languages can have a very different image based on what linguistic tools surround the word in a sentence. For example, some past and present tenses exist in some languages and not others, which then allow for certain phrases or words to exist in some cultures but not in others. 

As a result of this, it must also be true then, that how we react to what we read is also dependent on our culture because our interpretation of the words we are reading is dependent on our culture. This could then potentially manipulate how we read text and what kind of reader we are, as discussed by Barthes. To take this idea further, the differences in interpretations across cultures of texts, or “images” could also affect how images in other forms are interpreted, whether they be in the forms such as societal ideologies or media which can been seen in some of the ideas and theory brought forward by those such as Appadurai and his “-isms”.