Distance

Roland Barthes:

It seems to me I learn more about France during a walk through the village than in whole weeks in Paris…. The distance makes everything signify. In Paris, in the street, I am bombarded with information, not signification.

What distinction, exactly, is Barthes making here? How is ‘information’ being used and doesn’t information also have ‘significance’?

The phrase ‘bombarded with information’ recalls many descriptions of the city (most obviously Benjamin on Baudelaire) as a place where the individual is over-crowded with data, assailed with petty shocks on every side. Everything, and from every direction, is ‘in your face’. ‘In your face’ is not ‘near’, because ‘nearness’ presupposes distance, differentiated space. The city, says Benjamin, relates to the mathematical sublime: Number, we might say, eclipses significance. Signification has no room in which to breathe.

I take ‘information’, in Barthes’ statement, to be a kind of instant & consumable significance. Information lives and dies in being consumed. Units of information, moreover, have a neutrality and equality. A computer can store these units without having to discriminate between ‘information’ about casualties in a war and information about soap powder sales. And Information arrives at where we are. It comes to our desktop.

‘Signification’ cannot be stored, nor is it instantaneous. Signification is an invitation to depart. The instant, rather than being the unit of meaning, at once opens up into a duration of interpretation. It is a clue not a fact. Signification, also, asks us to weigh importance, not simply to divide into ‘bites’/ units.

The eclipse of distance is, says Benjamin, one of the defining experiences of the city dweller:

To move in this crowd was natural.. no matter how great the distance the individual cared to keep from it, he was still coloured by it and, unlike Engels, unable to view it from without.

Engels can see the city because he is not one of its children:

The charm of his description [of London] lies in the intersecting of unshakeable critical integrity with an old fashioned attitude. The writer came from a Germany which was still provincial.

Thus Engels can make observations like this:

In London one can roam for hours without seeing the slightest indication that open countryside is nearby.

This is essentially a ‘provincial’ perception, i.e., it is made from the point of view of a place where open countryside is an everyday experience. From this point of view, London appears as a place of privation. Its streets have pathos. The Londoner, Benjamin implies, lacks the distance across which to see this lack. Signification is elsewhere.