Precis for The Jet-man by Roland Barthes
Roland
Barthes is calling out modernity for its derivativeness, its formation
of supposed abandonments that is still a
reification of an individual with many beads of Abrahamic values
precipitating. The speed of early modernism is gone and instead we have a
kind of saint, someone outstanding in their level of conformity,
surrendered to something greater. The Jet-man’s path
is a legendary pilgrimage, he’s chaste, honored for his lack of need
for treats and rewards, his mission and his solace are his. The Jet-man
is in uniform, his politics aren’t original either. He is fully
indoctrinated. Whatever the new technology, we will
still find a way to use it as a fastener, to cling to something we want
to be sure of. “The paradox of excess motion becoming repose”, WE WILL
temper it, hone it, tame it, make it something that speaks to our
spiritual maintenance rather than our day-to-day
physical lust and hunger.
The
new religion of the inertia of technological motion, fueled by our
infatuation with blind progress (the fiction of
the race), with implacability, getting so fast that the movement
becomes invisible, the momentum unquestioned, the realm forgotten, has
more parallels with ancient religion than its aesthetic lets on at
first. Only self-advancement is real, all else was thrown
to the intangible wind, a classical silence and temperament left alone,
unperturbable. The Jet-man is mastery of the self, ageless, shining,
omniscient. He is a hero although there is no one around to make it
known to him, he is still the summation of the
dreams that come from shared human incapacity.
We
couldn’t imagine him with furrows, pores or any organicity at all, he
would have to be faceless, sleek, forever the
same. Seeking no thrills, he is a kind of leader by example of never
losing one’s cool, he’s amongst the stars, the ancients, in touch with
his ancestry. Nothing that is instantanious, gratuitous or pleasurable
allures him, only one deeper, more lugubrious
quest, a wish to ascend, to transcend humanity.
1 comment:
The language here is gorgeous in places, and I can't help but alight on phrases like your opening "new religion of the inertia of technological motion": very elegant, very pointed. I found the transition from paragraph one to two, signaled by the pronoun and verb shift, especially dramatic and effective, really lovely. I agree with you that Jet-Man for Barthes is like a sacrifice on the altar of a progress understood as technological rather political, and both he and history lose much in the process, an evacuation of matter, sense, motion, care… an ascetic evacuation marketed, in a word, as "transcendence."
I must say I was intrigued that the word you used to describe Barthes' critique in this piece in your third and concluding paragraph was "derivativeness." It's not that I disagree with the idea, it's just that it feels like a bit of a turn, and as such not entirely earned, rather than a development of the ideas in the first two paragraphs. Also in this third paragraph I would love to hear more about your claim of Jet-Man: "He is fully indoctrinated. Whatever the new technology, we will still find a way to use it as a fastener, to cling to something we want to be sure of."
Again the language here is vivid, and intriguing, and feels like it is getting at something quite interesting, but I would want to pressure the formulation to get more of a sense of why and how that second sentence is speaking (presumably?) of "indoctrination." I can imagine the sentences that would get me from sentence one to sentence two there, but I would far prefer to see the sentences you would come up with to flesh out that connection.
There are so many crucial observations here, speed and stasis, progress and randomness, “The paradox of excess motion becoming repose,” advancement as abandonment, the technological "mastery of the self" as a facelessness, a chasteness, an effacement of self. Your piece is a bit more diffuse than the usual precis, but I think this is also very true of the piece you chose to recapitulate in it, and what is striking to me is that you manage to evoke in a writing style rather different from Barthes' (and our translation) much the same strangely disturbing elegiac tone he does in the piece itself. I think that tone is part of the rhetorical accomplishment of the Jet-Man -- definitely it is one of the mythlets students have consistently responded to the most in years and years of teaching the book -- and it is interesting to create a precis that manages to capture just that quality of Barthes' argument so well.
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