Overview
From Kung Fu to Jiujitsu and from Bruce Lee to The Karate Kid, Mythologies of Martial Arts explores the key myths and ideologies in martial arts in contemporary popular culture. The book combines the author’s practical, professional and academic experience of martial arts to offer new insights into this complex, contradictory world. Inspired by the work of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, the book focusses on the signs, signifiers and practices of martial arts globally. Bringing together cultural studies, film studies, media studies, postcolonial studies with the emerging field of martial arts studies the book explores the broader significance of martial arts in global culture. Using an accessible yet theoretically sophisticated style the book is ideal for students, scholars and anyone interested in any type of martial art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786601933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2016 |
| Series: | Martial Arts Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 210 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
He has edited multiple issues of the journal Parallax, plus issues of the journals Postcolonial Studies, Social Semiotics and Educational Philosophy and Theory, as well as regular issues of JOMEC Journal. In addition, he has edited several books: Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), The Truth of Žižek (2006), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2011) and Rancière and Film (2013). He has also authored many academic monographs: Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Culture and the Media (2012), Beyond Bruce Lee (2013) and Reading Rey Chow (2013). His work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. He is on the editorial board of Culture Machine, Global Discourse, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, The Poster, and Ctrl-Z: New/Media/Philosophy.
Read an Excerpt
Mythologies of Martial Arts
By Paul Bowman
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Paul BowmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78660-193-3
CHAPTER 1
Wrestling Myth
Roland Barthes (1993) begins his groundbreaking 1957 book, Mythologies, with an essay called 'The World of Wrestling'. In this essay, Barthes does not discuss 'college wrestling', Olympic Wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling, or indeed any other kind of sport, competitive, self-defence, or martial art style of grappling. Rather, he focuses on the spectacular, dramatised, and ultimately choreographed type of 'show wrestling' that was hugely popular in Paris and other cities in the mid-twentieth century – a type of 'wrestling' that was in fact more of a simulation than an actual contest. In the United Kingdom, this simulation of wrestling actually came to be televised during the following decades, but was taken off air in the 1980s, because it was deemed too problematic to schedule appropriately: wrestling had long been screened as 'sport', but its obvious fakery and excessive showiness frustrated sports fans and viewers who wanted to see true competition.
However, even the apparent spectacular excess of this form of dramatic entertainment was subsequently dwarfed by the emergence of what many outside the United States referred to as 'American Wrestling' – WWE wrestling. This enormous entertainment institution is essentially an exaggerated version of the type of wrestling that Barthes discussed in his 1957 essay. Despite the obvious difference in scale between a Parisian hall in the 1950s and a televised show in a mega arena in the United States in the 1980s, in essence both are instances of the same phenomenon.
Barthes begins Mythologies with a study of this type of wrestling for a number of reasons. One reason that is rarely remarked upon, but one that I have long believed to be prime, relates to a kind of deliberate and principled mischief on Barthes' part. For, the essay seems calculated to challenge a number of entrenched and elitist cultural assumptions and values; values that apply not only to show wrestling, but also to the determination of both high and low culture. This is to say that, in the essay, Barthes sets out the relatively iconoclastic argument that the spectacle of wrestling offers not only the same pleasures but also the same lessons as Greek tragedy and other genres of morality play. In other words, Barthes argues that this spectacular, low-brow, simulated wrestling can be regarded as being on a cultural and educational par with a range of other, often culturally revered, sources of moral and civic education. (Another famous semiotician, Umberto Eco, went on to make a similarly iconoclastic argument about the high intellectual, moral and cultural value of the cartoon comic strip, Peanuts, featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy (Eco and Lumley 1994).) In making such a comparison and such a claim, Barthes raises 'lowly' popular culture up to the same level as 'high' culture, and dignifies it with serious intellectual attention.
If this is a mischief, it is a principled mischief because it is consistent with a range of other iconoclastic arguments that Barthes went on to make later in his career – arguments about the way that many hierarchies of value are only actually necessary or useful to those who institute them and whose interests and values they serve (Barthes 1977; Mowitt 1992). Arguably, this mischievous gesture – and others like those Barthes made throughout his work – effectively provided the warrant that opened the floodgates for the type of media and cultural studies analyses that exploded in his wake – that is, studies that took seriously all of the facets of everyday life, not just the supposedly 'proper' or 'high' part of it.
So, Barthes graces a lowly and often disdained form of entertainment with serious attention, arguing that although wrestling is spectacular, dramatic and simulated, it is nonetheless not only pleasurable but also – and by the same token, thanks to its pleasurableness – highly educational, social, communicative, and full of meaning. Wrestling is about Good versus Evil, Barthes argues. It is about justice and injustice. Every moment is fully legible in moral terms. There are crimes and punishments, treacheries, and atonements. And through all of this, values are proposed, established, and reinforced. Each event is saturated with meaning.
This is one of the most direct ways to grasp a large part of what Barthes means by 'myth'. Each character in wrestling has a value. Each performer signifies much more than merely himself. One character will represent Good, and the other will represent Evil.
Thus, in Mythologies, this opening analysis of the world of wrestling introduces the essence of what will come to be known as 'semiotics', an approach to media, culture, and society that has been variously defined as everything from the 'study of meaning' to the 'science of signs'. Elsewhere in the book, Barthes explores different aspects of myth and mythology, but the essential thrust of his argument is that 'things' in the world 'become' something else when they enter into certain kinds of representation practices. Thus, a diamond becomes a signifier of love when it is placed in a ring; a warm woollen sweater becomes a signifier of a certain fantasy of 'the good life' when it appears in an advert, worn by a man who is shown to be out for a walk in autumnal woods, with his smiling, loving partner and children. The diamond ring is presented as a kind of pinnacle – something to be aspired to, something pure and perfect, as if reflecting the purity and perfection of the relationship. But it also draws its admirers not only into a discourse which places romantic love on a pedestal but which obliges them to become ensnared by both consumerism and class longing. For, if we all admire and desire diamond rings, then we are all desiring and aspiring to something only the most well off can actually afford. So diamond rings are 'mythological', not only in that they signify (and reinforce) abstract values that we 'buy into', but also in that they lock us into value systems that place what the rich can afford and what the rich wear as the ultimate ideal to be aspired to. In this sense, myth is not merely representational – it is also orientating. It makes us want not only a particular version of romance but also the visual trappings of wealth.
The jumper in the other kind of advert, on the other hand, works similarly but slightly differently. Rather than coaxing viewers into a class longing and consumerist desire (for diamonds, or the lifestyles of the rich and famous), the woollen jumper works to conjure up the desire for or identification with a different sort of idyll: what semioticians would deem to be the key 'bourgeois', conservative, middle-class values and virtues of heterosexual domesticity – or what later cultural theorists would come to call 'heteronormativity' (heterosexual monogamy, family, conservative cultural practices, and so on).
But all of this was to come later. Barthes begins with wrestling. And if he compares the moral spectacle of wrestling favourably with Greek tragedy and morality plays, he contrasts it explicitly with judo and other forms of combat such as boxing. In so doing, Barthes sets out some key issues of myth and mythology. Key among these are set out in three remarkable paragraphs, which I will focus on to conclude this opening foray into myth and martial arts. They raise numerous issues that are still pertinent today. I will quote each at length and then pull out issues that I feel to be key, and that will keep returning in different ways throughout this book. The first paragraph to note is this:
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. (Barthes 1993: 13)
The opening of this paragraph relates to our earlier points: wrestling is a simulation of sport, one that is actually morally didactic. Next comes a remarkable definition of and distinction between false wrestling and true wrestling: false wrestling tries to look real. There is much food for thought in this inversion of the normal order of things or, that is, more usual ways of thinking about dramatised combat. Some of these will return in the later chapters and pages, particularly in terms of considerations of 'reality' in martial arts. However, almost before drawing another breath, Barthes transports the discussion into a new dimension, by turning to the matter of the effects that true wrestling has on the audience: 'the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema'. In other words, the spectacle has effects in reality – effects on the viewers, the public, who becomes 'spontaneously attune[d]' to it all.
This is a significant claim in itself, and some readers may suspect that Barthes is thinking in terms of a 'hypodermic needle' theory of ideology – in which 'false consciousness' is 'injected' into the minds of the public (not unlike the situation in the 1999 film Matrix; Wachowski, 1999). Many influential Marxist and Marxian thinkers, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1986), held similar views about the power of media like cinema and radio to manipulate the public. But Barthes' theory of myth is more sophisticated than that. As he immediately adds: 'Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy)'.
In other words, Barthes is suggesting that people flip into and out of belief systems. People are not 'one dimensional', as Herbert Marcuse (1964) (who was one of Adorno and Horkheimer's intellectual colleagues) feared. This is another key feature of Barthes' notion of myth, and also of his understanding of the complexity of people (as audiences, readers, viewers and complex thinking agents) and indeed the world. For, Barthes argues that mythical images and spectacles can and do pull us in, but we can and often do snap out of them a moment later. The twist in the tail of Barthes' understanding of this process is that, although we are not simply duped by ideology (as certain of his Marxist peers would have had it), nor are we simply free thinking and independent (as certain strands of liberal thinking would have it). Rather, argues Barthes, when we are arrested by a spectacle or powerful mythic image, scene, or scenario – such as, a tabloid newspaper headline – myth is at work on us and in us, even if we almost immediately 'snap out of it' and see the false, febrile, or ideological character of the spectacle. This is a core dimension of the notion of myth that he develops in Mythologies.
This is why, although 'the public' is multiple, varied, and heterogeneous, there is a strong sense in which, in more contexts than wrestling alone, 'the public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees'. The next paragraph follows on immediately from this:
This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it knows that boxing is a jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence. One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it would make no sense. A boxing match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.
With this Barthes sets out two entirely different modes of watching and interpreting. Wrestling is mythic in that it is based entirely in the spectacular moment, or short bursts of narrative, in which each short 'bite' represents a complete story. On the other hand, no single one of the many moments in a boxing match is in and of itself legible in the same way. Even a knockout punch that is subsequently made into a poster is not legible as the kind of social and moral allegory that is made present in wrestling.
Boxing is not free from myth, of course. A large part of Barthes' argument as it is developed through the pages of Mythologies is that anything can be mythologised. Images can be transformed into allegories of all sorts of things, from individual genius to nationalism to consumerism and so on and so forth. But the difference between the wrestler and any other competitor is that
the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness. (14)
On first reading, this third paragraph seems to smile more favourably on judo than on wrestling. But if we look again, it turns out that Barthes is not contrasting wrestling and judo on the basis of 'myth versus no myth'. Rather, he is pointing to two different sorts of symbolism. Judo is not free from myth. It just has a different logic to it. Moreover, myth is not framed as simply negative in Barthes' thinking. Barthes evidently appreciates wrestling, at least to the extent that he can discern the logic of its social appeal and pleasurable functions. Yet, he does seem to want to hold off from referring to everything as 'myth' in the theoretical sense that he is developing within Mythologies. This is because Barthes is exploring the subtle power of a new kind of media system or media society. We must remember that although Barthes is not explicitly discussing media culture in his consideration of wrestling, much of the rest of his book is concerned with media objects and processes, such as the signifying logic of newspaper and magazine page layouts, glossy holiday brochures, and TV adverts, a great deal of which was new in the 1950s. In large part, then, Barthes was examining an emergent media system that has only expanded, intensified, and proliferated exponentially since the time of his writing.
There is much to be remarked upon here. I will mention only two intertwined dimensions. First, of course, we can note that the kinds of media logic that Barthes explores in Mythologies were in a sense relatively new and remarkable in the 1950s. Yet, the same cannot be said for our current world. The mediatised character of modern life is not my principal concern here, even though it is integrally important to all that follows. But this is not a book about modern media society per se. It is not even a book that is exclusively 'about' mediatised martial arts. There are a growing number of valuable studies of media and martial arts, of course (see, for instance, Bolelli 2014; Bowman 2014; Downey 2014; Eperjesi 2004; Hiramoto 2014; Hunt 2014; Judkins and Nielson 2015; Spencer 2014; Su 2010). But my intention at this stage is primarily to put all of this on the table, and move on into different terrain.
Specifically, what I want to emphasise here is something that I believe is especially noteworthy for martial arts studies that arises from Barthes' discussion of wrestling and mythology. This is the sense of the normality of judo that comes across in his account. Judo is introduced as a comparison or foil for wrestling without any comment or explanation of 'what judo is'. This can only be because Barthes assumes his readers already know what judo is.
(Continues...)
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