EMPIRE OF SIGNS Understanding Japan as a Graspable System of Forms with Roland Barthes

Alluding to the seemingly unsurmountable oppositions of “East” and “West,” Roland Barthes presented in “Empire of Signs” an approach for overcoming strangeness with the same quality that fuels it: difference. More than fifty years ago, in an essay that regains importance in our increasingly globalized world, Barthes moved beyond the language of words, revealing the unlimited possibilities of the language of signs for (trans)cultural awareness.

Image: Satoshi Hirayama.

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After visiting Japan between 1966 and 1968, the French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes explored in Empire of Signs (1970) some traits that caught his eye in the country, understanding them as forms of an extraordinary symbolic system. Rejecting the notion of otherness as a discriminatory differentiation between “them” and “us,” Barthes’ idea of Japan emerged from his desire of imagining a fictive nation detached from the opposition of East and West. For this purpose, Barthes employed a notion of difference beyond strangeness and categorization, recognizing something unperceived by Western eyes until then and that could be only discovered transcending language and ideology barriers. Barthes proposed a “reading” of the signs that in his opinion pervaded Japan, discovering them everywhere, just as they emerged and continued appearing, presenting them at last in the short chapters of Empire of Signs, each of them dedicated to a trait with signs he instinctively decodes. Without highlighting any of them as important, essential, or central, gathering them as a collage of snapshots he creates as a “reader, not a visitor,” Barthes distinctly names them “Faraway,” “The Unknown Language,” “Without Words,” “Water and Flake,” “Chopsticks,” “Food Decentered,” “The Interstice,” “Pachinko,” “Center-City, Empty Centre,” “No Address,” “The Station,” “Packages,” “The Three Writings,” “Animate/Inanimate,” “Inside/Outside,” “Bowing,” “The Breach of Meaning,” “Exemption from Meaning,” “The Incident,” “So,” “Stationery Store,” “The Written Face,” “Millions of Bodies,” “The Eyelid,” “The Writing of Violence,” and “The Cabinet of Signs.” Clearly, Barthes does not identify the signs as other symbols, a perception that would necessarily require a reference, a categorization by comparison, a biased meaning. He rather regards them as “the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems,” a long-due discovery that he considers hindered hitherto by Western “obscurity,” narcissism, and an ineptitude to know anything that escapes the ideology inherent to its own languages.

In Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes proposes therefore another way of understanding a foreign nation unclouded by strangeness. Aware both of the subjectivity of the task and the inevitability of differentiation, Barthes “reading” absolutely ignores words and meanings, being fully concerned with the discovery and disclosure of signs, thereby opening the door to a realm of a perception that, instead of relying on biased interpretation, pays attention to physicality, space, and every aspect that may appeal to the senses. Through them, Barthes unveils not the discovery of a new country, even less a new culture as “the other,” but of a new level of conscience, a different perspective of seeing the world. Opening the senses to the interplay of bodies, gestures, materials, textures, traces, sounds, and the empty spaces within or around them, Barthes initiates an appreciation of Japanese forms devoid of meaning but filled with perspective. By means of their accentuated palpability, the forms in Empire of Signs overcome the meanings the reader would be tempted to give them, which is recognizable for instance in Barthes’ reading of artful Japanese gift packages. More elaborated than their often insignificant or non-existing content, the gift packages become meaningless without fulfilling their purpose, while keeping their form intensely conspicuous, highlighting thereby the gesture of giving a gift. Barthes gives another example of this view in the way the Kabuki theatre actors “citate” femininity, neither imitating nor embodying it, distorting its meaning, but making the idea of the woman visible through the exposition of its codes, so that “The stereotype is baffled but the intelligible is preserved.” In their combination, furthermore, the intelligible signs would create a dialogue, such as the one Barthes identifies between Japanese cuisine and painting, in which touching, seeing, and feeling, are facilitated by devices, chopsticks and brushes, bringing out forms and colours in ritualised movements that obliterate the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the present and the absent, the active and the passive, without revolving around a centre, a main subject, a main object, an order, a hierarchy, a cause and effect. In such interactions, Barthes unveils as well the value of emptiness, silence, and distance, the gaps that enhance the richness of contrasts as active accomplices of the victory of the form, a principle that he detects in the gentle crispness of Tempura dishes, the unmistakable opposing shapes of the Ikebana flower arrangements, the flaunted invisibility of the Bunraku puppeteers, the richness of existence in the lack of meaning of Haiku poetry, or the fascinating dissonance of form, words, and sound in the Kabuki theatre.

Today, the “countless graphic gestures that mark Japanese life” that Roland Barthes decoded in Empire of Signs can be regarded as examples of a new way of seeing and “reading,” without categorizations and hierarchizations, finding a common level of conscience that acknowledges difference not as otherness but as an opportunity to comprehend the unknown. Not everything that cannot be understood straight away has to be given a meaning, a biased interpretation, in order to be allowed a right to exist. The unknown becomes fruitful through the recognition of its difference, inspiring through the appreciation of its genius, exuberant through its dialogue with contrasts; it invents itself and us every time anew, participating in the endless loop of human transformation. Barthes exemplifies this flow in Empire of Signs in the Bunraku theater as a movement that is started by an agent and continued by another without interruption. This perspective not only makes Japan accessible to Western eyes as an open system of forms to be grasped with the senses, it also emerges as ground-breaking, anticipating a mindset so necessary for developing the transcultural awareness so bitterly needed today: in a world in which differences are still being interpreted as obstacles, despite the increasing global connections across and beyond cultures.

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©Sofia Bartra de Loayza, LaNinfa.art, 2024.