My name is Marielle Segarra and I am a second-year concentrating in English and heavily involved in journalism. It seems the majority of the students looking to get into the class are seniors concentrating in International Relations, many of whom need a seminar to graduate. Though I won’t need this class to fulfill one of my English requirements, I view a background in political science and international relations as almost indispensable for a journalist. I have been able to learn a great deal about journalism in fairly classic ways – I took an intro journalism class last spring, I write for the Brown Daily Herald, work for WBRU News and interned at a newspaper in Manhattan last summer. In my experience, though what I learned through actual reporting was tremendously valuable in a discipline that is so hands-on, I am lacking a solid understanding of why and how language and media have taken such a position of power in our world. Although I have begun to grasp the practice of news writing, though admittedly at an amateur level, I seem to be missing some of the substance and theory behind the study and practice of media, in all its various forms. With that in mind, I have taken a few political science classes and this fall I audited Global Security After the Cold War, which further piqued my interest in learning more about how world issues, particularly regarding international security, are affected by the media and the internet.
In “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” Roland Barthes poses many obscure arguments, such as his idea that speech smells, while writing remains odorless, and that the teacher-student relationship implies that the student “let himself be seduced” into a “loving relationship” with his teacher. As I cannot quite grasp the smell of speech, and I imagine that although the teacher-student relationship in this class will be collaborative and contractual, there will be little seduction involved, I will focus on Barthes’ more universal and relatable concepts of language as a form of power and the audience backlash against this power.
Barthes discusses the teacher’s choice to be either a “conscientious functionary,” essentially a well-organized, rehearsed lecturer, or a more relatable “free artist” who loses the respect of his students by speaking imperfectly. He goes on to say there is “no help for it: language is always on the side of power; to speak is to exercise a will to power: in the space of speech, no innocence, no safety.” A teacher, or any person for that matter, who is eloquent, informed and unhesitant leaves himself open to attack just as a poorly-versed speaker can be criticized for his lack of knowledge or his inability to express himself. In this sense, as a writer, teacher, or human being, producing language leaves all of us vulnerable.
Barthes later expresses what seems to be a personal experience with such an attack on page 319, discussing the process of question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students. As “to question is to interpellate,” Barthes says questioning becomes a form of aggression against the speaker. When a student asks a professor “‘What’s the use of linguistics?,’” a question that clearly implies dissatisfaction with the subject, the professor must pretend not to notice the insinuation, or as Barthes puts it, the attack. Again, the audience’s criticism of the speaker is one-way – it seems no matter what a producer of language says, he leaves himself open to the critical whim of the listener.
Barthes’ discussion of the power and vulnerability of speech and language relates to the media, specifically in the way this class produces and presents language in a public setting. In other classes, my work is subject to only the professor’s and my own criticisms. Writing on this blog, however, leaves each of us vulnerable to the opinions and judgments of our classmates. In a similar sense, writing for a newspaper, or performing the even more daunting task of interviewing or being interviewed on live television or radio, for instance, creates a speaker-listener relationship similar to that of the teacher and the student. Though the media seemingly has the power in the relationship, reporters, politicians, and those in the public eye, including celebrities such as (there it is) Heath Ledger must essentially perform for the masses, with the understanding that their words will be dissected and criticized endlessly.