A Fancy Way to Distinguish Between Pro Wrestling and MMA

In Barthes's "Wrestling" essay, he analyzes the sign system comprising wrestling. Some devotees get only minimum meaning from wrestling. They don't think about wrestling's constituents--the wrestlers, the referees, the personas, the imagery, the constructed themes, the symbolism, and so on--interrelated as part of a larger meaning-generating system. Evil, for instance, defeats good or vice versa. Justice gets represented in the ring.

Barthes identifies the spectacle of pro-wrestling as the modern equivalent of ancient Greek drama performed in the amphitheater:

"What is portrayed by wrestling is an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction"

Barthes shows how wrestlers take on tragic or comic "stock" personas for the benefit of their fans. He shows how their exaggerated gestures, drama, and Good vs. Evil conflicts perform a cathartic function for the audience. The matches form a venue in which, goes the argument, emotion can find release and complexity is boiled down to black and white simplicity. As a result, "what is displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice" and it can be said that "wrestlers [are] gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible."

So now comes the obvious distinction: pro wrestling is fixed, a spectacle in which the unfolding dramatic narrative takes meaning, as does all art, from its predetermination; MMA has no narrative as such, no predetermination as the source of its system of meaning and, really, no system of meaning either, no aggregation of interrelated signs in the way Barthes argues for. MMA unfolds over time. Indeterminacy, as with all unfixed contests, is of its essence. In these terms, it's not a system of meaning built out of signs reflecting good versus evil or the meaning of justice, or whateve archetypes are projected.

In a word, pro wrestling, sports entertainment as it calls itself, is rigged the way a text is rigged, its meanings inhering, in Barthes's sense, in the aggregation of its signs in its closed system. MMA is open ended. It defines itself as it proceeds. It's very nature eludes being seen as a system of meanings.

In a shorter word, MMA is reality. Pro wrestling is representation of reality.

That's why Barthes's analysis of pro wrestling has no application to MMA.