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Mythologies
'Barthes' purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture' The Times
In this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as diverse as wrestling, films, plastic and cars, Barthes elegantly deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects of modern life, unmasking the hidden ideologies and meanings which implicitly affect our thought and behaviour. This early classic of semiotics from one of France's greatest thinkers may irrevocably change the way you view the world around you.
In this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as diverse as wrestling, films, plastic and cars, Barthes elegantly deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects of modern life, unmasking the hidden ideologies and meanings which implicitly affect our thought and behaviour. This early classic of semiotics from one of France's greatest thinkers may irrevocably change the way you view the world around you.
187 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
About the author
Roland Barthes
344 books2,339 followersRoland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
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October 24, 2024
When I was in my early teens up to in my junior year in high school, my family used to often take weekend-holidays in Montreal in the summer. What wonderful memories...
I, in my free time, when my Dad and Mom were separately, otherwise occupied - my mother and sister on shopping trips to the more posh haute-couture magasins, and my father and brother on walking, exploratory tours - became a frequenter of out-of-the-way libraires.
It’s hard to believe now for my bilingual GR friends who bemoan the high price of French translations, but back in those days expensively-bound French classics could be had for a song!
And because we kids were doled out extra pocket money on such expeditions, like all kids, we splurged.
What a library of French classics I was amassing back then. But the Real Prizes were the PostModernists. This great book was by one of ‘em.
Barthes was my introduction to a postwar generation of writers in France who told it like it was. The French, you see, didn’t have the bugaboo of McCarthyism hanging over their free heads, as we did here.
Nor did they have the Damoclean Sword of literal logic hanging over their heads, like pop positivists.
If a story had no ending, they didn’t tie it all up in a bow at the end.
This endlessly heuristic inner - not factual - logic had come into the literary world with the French Symbolistes and Existentialists, and had stuck. Even U2 has this postmodernist tinge: “don’t express - suggest.”
And you know what? These distant writers paved the way for Haight-Ashbury and 60’s students’ campus unrest!
Barthes especially, for me. I became alienated long before my more expertly-conditioned friends.
Except for Phil, and my old Grade One best pal, Bill Wright, the previous year...
Bill and Phil, you must know, were Lennie Cohen groupies.
Like everyone else?
Hold on just a sec - I’m talking 1964. We were High School juniors. They smuggled into our lunchroom a then-suspiciously-viewed piece of contraband: Cohen’s very early and unorthodox Spice Box of Earth.
Wow. And you know Lennie’s neighbourhood base back then was in Montreal?
Yikes! That City suddenly took on the golden glow for me of a Disney Fantasy Land.
And so when we made it our sometime home-away-from-home, I sought contentious new books like this - in French. And Barthes’ book was first.
Talking in that subdued and relaxed voice of his he - very, very quietly and deftly (oh, he knew what he was doing alright) - TURNED MY WORLD ON ITS HEAD.
I was being made free - but, almost monstrously, I discovered my own groundlessness. At first I wanted to expand that intuition.
But the Western World interprets that feeling as moral tepidity, which wasn’t my Schtick, and so it pushed me strongly to accept it.
No, I was looking for light, not darkness, and so I then bifurcated my little world along ethical grounds.
Now, I don’t notice if you’ve seen this in your reading, but I noticed at that time that this is what Dante tries to say in his Purgatorio.
That bifurcation of reality is the appearance of the Ethical Plane of Life. Later, the Paradiso is the assimilation of the Ethical into the Religious Plane.
When, recently, I finished Man and Superman, I was thrown for quite a loop by Shaw’s identification of the Divine with the Life Force. But of course, that really does make sense in a way.
For in Dante, as well as for the Postmodernists, we have to put off any notion of Being as a solid Thing, to enter into the Paradiso.
And just as I was unmoored by Barthes, and was later to be freed even more by Deleuze and Derrida, so T.S. Eliot had said that our real self is “here, there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.”
For we have to Undefine ourselves to Find ourselves. “We have to put off all sense and notion.”
In our beginning is our end. And this very beginning of my philosophical journey back then already contained its end:
The freedom of the living Spirit -
And not dull conformity.
I, in my free time, when my Dad and Mom were separately, otherwise occupied - my mother and sister on shopping trips to the more posh haute-couture magasins, and my father and brother on walking, exploratory tours - became a frequenter of out-of-the-way libraires.
It’s hard to believe now for my bilingual GR friends who bemoan the high price of French translations, but back in those days expensively-bound French classics could be had for a song!
And because we kids were doled out extra pocket money on such expeditions, like all kids, we splurged.
What a library of French classics I was amassing back then. But the Real Prizes were the PostModernists. This great book was by one of ‘em.
Barthes was my introduction to a postwar generation of writers in France who told it like it was. The French, you see, didn’t have the bugaboo of McCarthyism hanging over their free heads, as we did here.
Nor did they have the Damoclean Sword of literal logic hanging over their heads, like pop positivists.
If a story had no ending, they didn’t tie it all up in a bow at the end.
This endlessly heuristic inner - not factual - logic had come into the literary world with the French Symbolistes and Existentialists, and had stuck. Even U2 has this postmodernist tinge: “don’t express - suggest.”
And you know what? These distant writers paved the way for Haight-Ashbury and 60’s students’ campus unrest!
Barthes especially, for me. I became alienated long before my more expertly-conditioned friends.
Except for Phil, and my old Grade One best pal, Bill Wright, the previous year...
Bill and Phil, you must know, were Lennie Cohen groupies.
Like everyone else?
Hold on just a sec - I’m talking 1964. We were High School juniors. They smuggled into our lunchroom a then-suspiciously-viewed piece of contraband: Cohen’s very early and unorthodox Spice Box of Earth.
Wow. And you know Lennie’s neighbourhood base back then was in Montreal?
Yikes! That City suddenly took on the golden glow for me of a Disney Fantasy Land.
And so when we made it our sometime home-away-from-home, I sought contentious new books like this - in French. And Barthes’ book was first.
Talking in that subdued and relaxed voice of his he - very, very quietly and deftly (oh, he knew what he was doing alright) - TURNED MY WORLD ON ITS HEAD.
I was being made free - but, almost monstrously, I discovered my own groundlessness. At first I wanted to expand that intuition.
But the Western World interprets that feeling as moral tepidity, which wasn’t my Schtick, and so it pushed me strongly to accept it.
No, I was looking for light, not darkness, and so I then bifurcated my little world along ethical grounds.
Now, I don’t notice if you’ve seen this in your reading, but I noticed at that time that this is what Dante tries to say in his Purgatorio.
That bifurcation of reality is the appearance of the Ethical Plane of Life. Later, the Paradiso is the assimilation of the Ethical into the Religious Plane.
When, recently, I finished Man and Superman, I was thrown for quite a loop by Shaw’s identification of the Divine with the Life Force. But of course, that really does make sense in a way.
For in Dante, as well as for the Postmodernists, we have to put off any notion of Being as a solid Thing, to enter into the Paradiso.
And just as I was unmoored by Barthes, and was later to be freed even more by Deleuze and Derrida, so T.S. Eliot had said that our real self is “here, there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.”
For we have to Undefine ourselves to Find ourselves. “We have to put off all sense and notion.”
In our beginning is our end. And this very beginning of my philosophical journey back then already contained its end:
The freedom of the living Spirit -
And not dull conformity.
October 7, 2017
On Arranging My Library
Arranging a library is no easy task:
I think Tolkien will be happy to share his space
With Virgil and Homer,
In my Library.
While I can feel the glare in my back
as I stack
Nabokov next to that one copy of
Dan Brown I own.
Arranging a library is no easy task:
To do so this seriously is almost to practice
In an amateurish and private fashion,
The art of literary criticism.
And once that notion entered my library,
My authors took to their relative positions
With none of that dismissiveness
That they usually profess
for the critics!
Arranging a library is no easy task:
For instance,
Here are two patently great minds,
Placed together in a corner;
Each anxious and sensitive to
Human suffering, and quite lofty in thoughts.
But as I leave them together,
I can begin to hear them fidget:
The noble Seneca not so comfy,
With my postulation
Of his neighborliness, with a mere entertainer
such as Shakespeare.
Arranging a library is no easy task:
It takes much argument and much
Angry venting.
You can’t satisfy all these great minds.
We hardly ever part on good terms,
my books and I.
Arranging a library is no easy task:
I think Tolkien will be happy to share his space
With Virgil and Homer,
In my Library.
While I can feel the glare in my back
as I stack
Nabokov next to that one copy of
Dan Brown I own.
Arranging a library is no easy task:
To do so this seriously is almost to practice
In an amateurish and private fashion,
The art of literary criticism.
And once that notion entered my library,
My authors took to their relative positions
With none of that dismissiveness
That they usually profess
for the critics!
Arranging a library is no easy task:
For instance,
Here are two patently great minds,
Placed together in a corner;
Each anxious and sensitive to
Human suffering, and quite lofty in thoughts.
But as I leave them together,
I can begin to hear them fidget:
The noble Seneca not so comfy,
With my postulation
Of his neighborliness, with a mere entertainer
such as Shakespeare.
Arranging a library is no easy task:
It takes much argument and much
Angry venting.
You can’t satisfy all these great minds.
We hardly ever part on good terms,
my books and I.
April 25, 2011
This was much more interesting than I expected it to be – and I could even go as far as to say some of it was quite fun. I mean fun in a relative sense, of course, as this is a text with quite some ‘resistance’ and so some of it was also quite hard to read.
Most of the text is a series of short essays that discuss what the author refers to as ‘myths’. Now, these aren’t really the kinds of things that you might automatically associate with the word ‘myth’. There is a longish (longish for a book that isn’t even a couple of hundred pages) essay at the end of the book that works a bit like that old trick of philosophy where the definition is only provided at the end of an enquiry – Hegel says that is how things ought to be, no point defining the term your entire work is setting out to explain up front. The reader needs to make their way to the definition through the hard work of coming to understand.
The short essays are a joy. The first one, ‘The World of Wrestling’ is particularly good. This is the only one I am doing to discuss as I want to get onto his philosophical points and wallowing in the glow from these essays (something all too easy to do) would distract from that and only involve me in retelling half as well what he has already done so well here.
I’d never really thought about wrestling before – oddly, it has never really been something I’ve paid the least bit of attention to since I was about eight-years-old. As Barthes points out, you might consider betting on a boxing match, but no one would ever consider doing such a thing on the outcome of a wrestling match. The idea is not limited to the fact that wrestling matches are obviously ‘fixed’ – it is that the point of wrestling is a kind of drama, not really a sport. There is a nice line in this essay where Barthes compares the spectacle of suffering that wrestling always involves with the suffering of Christ. In the fight between good and evil, the good must invariably end up in some scissor-hold or half-Nelson or some such and then the crowd (also an essential part of the drama in a way that is no longer true in actual drama) are forced to witness the extremity of his suffering. It is this which makes the final victory of good over evil – the eventual ‘making him pay’ – redemptive.
But this book is much more than just a kind of high criticism slumming it amongst the fripperies and ephemera of low culture. For Barthes myth is a kind of speech, as he explains in his final essay. In fact, this whole book is an application of Saussure to cultural signs – and this makes for fascinating reading.
Saussure was a linguist and like all linguists he is not to be read in his original texts, but rather in commentaries and explanatory notes. It is, of course, one of the great unexplained mysteries of the universe that the greater the linguist the harder they are to read. The simple version of his ideas on language (about all I’ve ever been able to understand) is that there are three parts to language – there is the idea of whatever you are talking about, there is the word you use to talk about it and then there is those two things brought together. In Saussure’s language you have what is signified, what is use to signify it and finally the sign itself.
Let’s take the idea of apple. An apple is a particular kind of fruit. That fruit is something that can be pointed to, and so on. That is, it is rich in content and has a ‘real’ life of its own – it is the signified. Then there is the word we use to describe that fruit. Apple in English, or mela in Italian, or pomme in French – the word used to signify the thing is arbitrary. This signifier is empty of meaning, but becomes full of meaning when it becomes a sign – a bringing together of the word and the concept of the thing the word points to.
Barthes’ point is to do exactly the same thing with cultural signs. His most famous example is from the essay at the back where he describes the cover of a magazine with the photo of a young negro boy saluting. For Barthes this boy obviously has a rich and full life – spending a week living with this boy would give us quite a different view of what this photo ‘means’. However, it certainly does ‘mean’ something as it stands on its own, something much more than just ‘here’s some kid saluting’. The fact it is an Algerian child, that this was at a time when Algeria was seeking independence, that the child is ‘proudly’ performing a French salute all of these things mean and are the intended meanings of this sign. And this fits with Saussure’s view of the world too – with the boy becoming the signified and the image the signifier but the ideas this is to bring to mind the sign or what Barthes calls the signification.
Barthes makes it clear that virtually everything you can say just about anything about in our society has this three level meaning. We have already mentioned apples as an example of linguistic meaning, but what about the cultural meaning of apples? And here we could go on for days, apples as the ultimate cause of Christ’s death, as the epitome of ‘fruit’ (of nature), but actually not ‘natural’ at all, only being able to be grown on grafted trees – therefore, cultivated. Or what of sayings like, ‘she is the apple of my eye’? Or the computer company, or the Beatles, or ‘A is for apple’, or an apple a day keeps the doctor away, or Johnny Appleseed . . .
But even these are not the point that Barthes is making. His point is that bourgeois culture presents itself as if it is all culture and that in doing so it says no other culture exists. It makes itself eternal, but to do this it must first suck the life out of the objects it takes over. Bourgeois culture discusses things in metalanguage, and, ironically enough, this is how the mythologist must also discuss the products of bourgeois culture.
Barthes makes a wonderful point when he says that people don’t talk about capitalist culture – because in appropriating culture, capitalism subsumes itself as if all culture is inevitably capitalist. In seeking to understand this culture we also learn to defend ourselves from the automatic assumptions it presents us with.
I really enjoyed these essays – they were playful and intellectually challenging and had some remarkably insightful things to say about a huge range of subjects. Read the essays on ‘toys’ or ‘steak and chips’ or ‘The Great Family of Man’ to get an idea of the breadth of subjects covered. This is one of those books that makes you want to play with a concept in the same way that Barthes has, in the same way that reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets might make you want to write a sonnet of your own.
And given the game he is playing is one in which we are forced to look again at how we are being manipulated, to look again at what is being presented to us as if it was ‘eternally true’ – such playful reappraisals of these myths is not just fun, but the essence of self-defence.
Most of the text is a series of short essays that discuss what the author refers to as ‘myths’. Now, these aren’t really the kinds of things that you might automatically associate with the word ‘myth’. There is a longish (longish for a book that isn’t even a couple of hundred pages) essay at the end of the book that works a bit like that old trick of philosophy where the definition is only provided at the end of an enquiry – Hegel says that is how things ought to be, no point defining the term your entire work is setting out to explain up front. The reader needs to make their way to the definition through the hard work of coming to understand.
The short essays are a joy. The first one, ‘The World of Wrestling’ is particularly good. This is the only one I am doing to discuss as I want to get onto his philosophical points and wallowing in the glow from these essays (something all too easy to do) would distract from that and only involve me in retelling half as well what he has already done so well here.
I’d never really thought about wrestling before – oddly, it has never really been something I’ve paid the least bit of attention to since I was about eight-years-old. As Barthes points out, you might consider betting on a boxing match, but no one would ever consider doing such a thing on the outcome of a wrestling match. The idea is not limited to the fact that wrestling matches are obviously ‘fixed’ – it is that the point of wrestling is a kind of drama, not really a sport. There is a nice line in this essay where Barthes compares the spectacle of suffering that wrestling always involves with the suffering of Christ. In the fight between good and evil, the good must invariably end up in some scissor-hold or half-Nelson or some such and then the crowd (also an essential part of the drama in a way that is no longer true in actual drama) are forced to witness the extremity of his suffering. It is this which makes the final victory of good over evil – the eventual ‘making him pay’ – redemptive.
But this book is much more than just a kind of high criticism slumming it amongst the fripperies and ephemera of low culture. For Barthes myth is a kind of speech, as he explains in his final essay. In fact, this whole book is an application of Saussure to cultural signs – and this makes for fascinating reading.
Saussure was a linguist and like all linguists he is not to be read in his original texts, but rather in commentaries and explanatory notes. It is, of course, one of the great unexplained mysteries of the universe that the greater the linguist the harder they are to read. The simple version of his ideas on language (about all I’ve ever been able to understand) is that there are three parts to language – there is the idea of whatever you are talking about, there is the word you use to talk about it and then there is those two things brought together. In Saussure’s language you have what is signified, what is use to signify it and finally the sign itself.
Let’s take the idea of apple. An apple is a particular kind of fruit. That fruit is something that can be pointed to, and so on. That is, it is rich in content and has a ‘real’ life of its own – it is the signified. Then there is the word we use to describe that fruit. Apple in English, or mela in Italian, or pomme in French – the word used to signify the thing is arbitrary. This signifier is empty of meaning, but becomes full of meaning when it becomes a sign – a bringing together of the word and the concept of the thing the word points to.
Barthes’ point is to do exactly the same thing with cultural signs. His most famous example is from the essay at the back where he describes the cover of a magazine with the photo of a young negro boy saluting. For Barthes this boy obviously has a rich and full life – spending a week living with this boy would give us quite a different view of what this photo ‘means’. However, it certainly does ‘mean’ something as it stands on its own, something much more than just ‘here’s some kid saluting’. The fact it is an Algerian child, that this was at a time when Algeria was seeking independence, that the child is ‘proudly’ performing a French salute all of these things mean and are the intended meanings of this sign. And this fits with Saussure’s view of the world too – with the boy becoming the signified and the image the signifier but the ideas this is to bring to mind the sign or what Barthes calls the signification.
Barthes makes it clear that virtually everything you can say just about anything about in our society has this three level meaning. We have already mentioned apples as an example of linguistic meaning, but what about the cultural meaning of apples? And here we could go on for days, apples as the ultimate cause of Christ’s death, as the epitome of ‘fruit’ (of nature), but actually not ‘natural’ at all, only being able to be grown on grafted trees – therefore, cultivated. Or what of sayings like, ‘she is the apple of my eye’? Or the computer company, or the Beatles, or ‘A is for apple’, or an apple a day keeps the doctor away, or Johnny Appleseed . . .
But even these are not the point that Barthes is making. His point is that bourgeois culture presents itself as if it is all culture and that in doing so it says no other culture exists. It makes itself eternal, but to do this it must first suck the life out of the objects it takes over. Bourgeois culture discusses things in metalanguage, and, ironically enough, this is how the mythologist must also discuss the products of bourgeois culture.
Barthes makes a wonderful point when he says that people don’t talk about capitalist culture – because in appropriating culture, capitalism subsumes itself as if all culture is inevitably capitalist. In seeking to understand this culture we also learn to defend ourselves from the automatic assumptions it presents us with.
I really enjoyed these essays – they were playful and intellectually challenging and had some remarkably insightful things to say about a huge range of subjects. Read the essays on ‘toys’ or ‘steak and chips’ or ‘The Great Family of Man’ to get an idea of the breadth of subjects covered. This is one of those books that makes you want to play with a concept in the same way that Barthes has, in the same way that reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets might make you want to write a sonnet of your own.
And given the game he is playing is one in which we are forced to look again at how we are being manipulated, to look again at what is being presented to us as if it was ‘eternally true’ – such playful reappraisals of these myths is not just fun, but the essence of self-defence.
May 26, 2022
The innovative essays covered in Mythologies by French semiotician and critic Barthes examines everything from mass culture, its ads and hidden or disguised messages, its icons and politics, its desperate speed in the mid-1950s, and even steak & chips! With some exceptions, these are delectable bite-sized pieces, that for the most part cover just a few pages each.
The style of Mythologies, which strikes one at first as being highly poetic and idiosyncratic, later reveals a quasi-technical use of certain terms. Though very much of their time, these essays tell us a lot about how we might intellectually navigate our own times. By framing the mythic in the quotidian, Barthes ponders over detergent, professional wrestling, Garbo’s face, the Tour de France, a French striptease, plastics, and so much more. What's great is that many of the topics he wrote about are as current today as they were all those years ago when he first penned Mythologies. For Barthes, common sense is the enemy, a bourgeois defense against critical theory. Common sense is simplistic; theory is rich and complex.
Some of my faves were - 'The Romans in Films', 'Soap-powders and Detergents', 'Toys', 'Steak and Chips', 'Ornamental Cookery', 'The Great Family of Man'.
The style of Mythologies, which strikes one at first as being highly poetic and idiosyncratic, later reveals a quasi-technical use of certain terms. Though very much of their time, these essays tell us a lot about how we might intellectually navigate our own times. By framing the mythic in the quotidian, Barthes ponders over detergent, professional wrestling, Garbo’s face, the Tour de France, a French striptease, plastics, and so much more. What's great is that many of the topics he wrote about are as current today as they were all those years ago when he first penned Mythologies. For Barthes, common sense is the enemy, a bourgeois defense against critical theory. Common sense is simplistic; theory is rich and complex.
Some of my faves were - 'The Romans in Films', 'Soap-powders and Detergents', 'Toys', 'Steak and Chips', 'Ornamental Cookery', 'The Great Family of Man'.
March 20, 2018
The second part of the book "Myth today", which is some kind of theory of myth, I think is one of the basic work for studying of the Culture.
July 1, 2008
Mythologies (1957) was recommended to me as a must-read for brand builders. Who better (or more fun) to read when boning up on brand strategy and semiotics than Roland Barthes? Each of Barthes’s very brief and highly entertaining essays demonstrates his point of view and method as a mythologist--a sarcastic bastard with the insight to look a hole right through you.
According to Barthes, a mythologist is (not just an irreverent, cultural jester, but) an individual who recognizes a cultural myth, separates its components, analyzes their workings and, thereby, reveals a myth’s distortions. In Mythologies Barthes spots myths in consumer culture--the presented meaning of a story in a newspaper, the manifest message of an ad. Barthes takes just a few pages to deconstruct the overt message of each of his myths by showing a deeper distortion: a latent meaning. The comparison between the overt and latent calls both out as distortions and illuminates the mechanism for making meaning.
Take “The Writer on Holiday” for example. Barthes spots a feature in Le Figaro (a French newspaper) on Andre Gide (a writer who, apparently, wrote on how to fully be oneself) reading Bossuet (a theologian and bishop under Louis XIV who, it seems, argued that God attributed divinity to kings). Gide reads Bossuet floating down the Congo on holiday. Barthes frames this instance as a representation of all writers on holiday. He asserts that Le Figaro intends this image to “surprise and delight” its proletarian readers. The overt myth is that writers are workers, too, workers who need a holiday—like “shop assistants and factory workers” (30). But then Barthes asks: why is this so delightfully surprising?
It’s because the latent message, its deeper meaning, is that a writer is so obviously not a wage worker who needs a holiday. Barthes says that the attempt that Le Figaro makes at mythologizing the writer as worker only points all the more to the cultural belief, the mystification, the myth, that the writer is not like the reader at all, but is, in fact, a godhead. The newspaper is not demystifying the writer’s divine qualities and bringing the writer down to the earthly plane as the overt message appears to be doing; the message is, in fact, performing the opposite task. Barthes writes, “By having holidays, [the writer] displays the sign of his being human; but the god remains, one is a writer as Louis XIV was king, even on the commode” (30).
There are twenty-seven other little essays just as rich (and hilarious) in Mythologies, such as “Novels and Children,” in which he mocks the magazine Elle for asserting that women authors may produce one novel per child, and “Plastic,” in which he momentarily raises the ubiquitous substance up as a tangible and elegant trace of the movement of infinity.
Barthes’s closing essay, in which he explains his approach, is far less entertaining. But his reiteration of the Saussurean linguistic split between signifier and signified and his graduating that model into his own diagrammatical explanation for myth is so modest, clear and concise it had me wondering if Barthes’s hand had, in fact, been imbued with divinity. In a remarkably brief fifty pages, he empowers us to push aside the distortions of consumer culture and to create our own, with the absurd delight of knowing that those we create may be just as fictional--and just as powerful.
In the end, the joy, humor and enthusiasm of Barthes’s critical art fades, a myth pushed aside. He suddenly paints the mythologist in melancholy tones. His sign-off leaves the reader to envision Barthes himself in the role of the isolated and acerbic visionary, an alienated critic split off from the inhabitants of his social world who believe in the myths he cannot.
(The man probably just needed a vacation.)
According to Barthes, a mythologist is (not just an irreverent, cultural jester, but) an individual who recognizes a cultural myth, separates its components, analyzes their workings and, thereby, reveals a myth’s distortions. In Mythologies Barthes spots myths in consumer culture--the presented meaning of a story in a newspaper, the manifest message of an ad. Barthes takes just a few pages to deconstruct the overt message of each of his myths by showing a deeper distortion: a latent meaning. The comparison between the overt and latent calls both out as distortions and illuminates the mechanism for making meaning.
Take “The Writer on Holiday” for example. Barthes spots a feature in Le Figaro (a French newspaper) on Andre Gide (a writer who, apparently, wrote on how to fully be oneself) reading Bossuet (a theologian and bishop under Louis XIV who, it seems, argued that God attributed divinity to kings). Gide reads Bossuet floating down the Congo on holiday. Barthes frames this instance as a representation of all writers on holiday. He asserts that Le Figaro intends this image to “surprise and delight” its proletarian readers. The overt myth is that writers are workers, too, workers who need a holiday—like “shop assistants and factory workers” (30). But then Barthes asks: why is this so delightfully surprising?
It’s because the latent message, its deeper meaning, is that a writer is so obviously not a wage worker who needs a holiday. Barthes says that the attempt that Le Figaro makes at mythologizing the writer as worker only points all the more to the cultural belief, the mystification, the myth, that the writer is not like the reader at all, but is, in fact, a godhead. The newspaper is not demystifying the writer’s divine qualities and bringing the writer down to the earthly plane as the overt message appears to be doing; the message is, in fact, performing the opposite task. Barthes writes, “By having holidays, [the writer] displays the sign of his being human; but the god remains, one is a writer as Louis XIV was king, even on the commode” (30).
There are twenty-seven other little essays just as rich (and hilarious) in Mythologies, such as “Novels and Children,” in which he mocks the magazine Elle for asserting that women authors may produce one novel per child, and “Plastic,” in which he momentarily raises the ubiquitous substance up as a tangible and elegant trace of the movement of infinity.
Barthes’s closing essay, in which he explains his approach, is far less entertaining. But his reiteration of the Saussurean linguistic split between signifier and signified and his graduating that model into his own diagrammatical explanation for myth is so modest, clear and concise it had me wondering if Barthes’s hand had, in fact, been imbued with divinity. In a remarkably brief fifty pages, he empowers us to push aside the distortions of consumer culture and to create our own, with the absurd delight of knowing that those we create may be just as fictional--and just as powerful.
In the end, the joy, humor and enthusiasm of Barthes’s critical art fades, a myth pushed aside. He suddenly paints the mythologist in melancholy tones. His sign-off leaves the reader to envision Barthes himself in the role of the isolated and acerbic visionary, an alienated critic split off from the inhabitants of his social world who believe in the myths he cannot.
(The man probably just needed a vacation.)
May 31, 2008
I am not a huge critical lit reader but there is something so enjoyable about Barthes' books or essays. I like the way he writes about an everyday object or subject matter - and just tears into it like a very curious scientist. "Mythologies" is one of his more well-known titles and rightfully so. Good writer and I think he's a great reader as well.
February 14, 2010
In high school, I used to attend the wrestling meets. I'm not sure why. I hated spectator sports, having endured a brief period of sullen cheerleading where I found myself unable to whip up a frenzy over first downs or sis-boom-bah on command.
Among the high school wrestlers I watched, there were some who elicited greater and lesser degrees of sympathy or repugnance, while one--though otherwise an inarticulate hulk--was transformed on the mat into a figure of grace, performing pins swiftly and cleanly. Barthes' wrestlers comprise more explicit types, e.g., the bastard, the image of passivity, the image of conceit, the bitch, etc. Wrestling, in Barthes' view, becomes a starkly defined conflict, where virtues and vices as personified by the contestants, engage in a battle that is a virtual psychomachia.
Barthes' world of wrestling, then, emerges as allegory in its purest, most elemental sense. Wrestling's landscape, drained of entity save the combatants, emerges as the opposite of mimesis. Here, time and causality recede into the background. For Barthes, wrestling, like biblical narrative, occurs on a horizon so blank, every gesture becomes a clear act of signification. The rapidly changing positions of the wrestlers splinter the narrative into thematic junctures, like a slide show where each frame of action, perfectly fused with meaning, replaces another.
Our interpretation at these points of thematic juncture involves a movement into myth--as Barthes explains it--for we simultaneously generalize and impoverish the meaning of the action on the wrestling mat. Within the construct of myth we create for wrestling, there operates a coherent system of conduct, a sort of decorum of indecorum, where "foul play" becomes "legitimitized," but the "absence of punishment" (29), the rupture of the tit-for-tat balance, is taboo.
Wrestling, Barthes proposes, provides intense satisfaction for its audience, where for once there is "an ideal understanding of things; ...the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction" (29).
In this essay, like the others Barthes presents in this collection, he emerges for me as the sharpest and most provocative of those writing on semiotics and structuralism.
Among the high school wrestlers I watched, there were some who elicited greater and lesser degrees of sympathy or repugnance, while one--though otherwise an inarticulate hulk--was transformed on the mat into a figure of grace, performing pins swiftly and cleanly. Barthes' wrestlers comprise more explicit types, e.g., the bastard, the image of passivity, the image of conceit, the bitch, etc. Wrestling, in Barthes' view, becomes a starkly defined conflict, where virtues and vices as personified by the contestants, engage in a battle that is a virtual psychomachia.
Barthes' world of wrestling, then, emerges as allegory in its purest, most elemental sense. Wrestling's landscape, drained of entity save the combatants, emerges as the opposite of mimesis. Here, time and causality recede into the background. For Barthes, wrestling, like biblical narrative, occurs on a horizon so blank, every gesture becomes a clear act of signification. The rapidly changing positions of the wrestlers splinter the narrative into thematic junctures, like a slide show where each frame of action, perfectly fused with meaning, replaces another.
Our interpretation at these points of thematic juncture involves a movement into myth--as Barthes explains it--for we simultaneously generalize and impoverish the meaning of the action on the wrestling mat. Within the construct of myth we create for wrestling, there operates a coherent system of conduct, a sort of decorum of indecorum, where "foul play" becomes "legitimitized," but the "absence of punishment" (29), the rupture of the tit-for-tat balance, is taboo.
Wrestling, Barthes proposes, provides intense satisfaction for its audience, where for once there is "an ideal understanding of things; ...the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction" (29).
In this essay, like the others Barthes presents in this collection, he emerges for me as the sharpest and most provocative of those writing on semiotics and structuralism.
November 30, 2018
Published as magazine articles/essays between 1956 and 1957, these essays are a slice of life in mid-century French culture, ideaology, and politics. Barthes topics range from popular material culture, wrestling, advertising, wine, tourism, astrology and many other things in these 56 essays. Some topics may be lost on modern readers (they certainly were on me as I don't know much about this era) but at three or four pages in length, the reader can easily marvel at his writing and the translation, even if not fully aware of what he is discussing or criticizing.
Considering the historical context of what was happening in France in the 1950s, Barthes is capturing a moment in critical theory and political discourse surrounding the crumbling empire and the rise of mass media. And doing all of this in a very entertaining way.
I didn't get it all, but what I did "catch", I liked, and I am intrigued to read more.
Considering the historical context of what was happening in France in the 1950s, Barthes is capturing a moment in critical theory and political discourse surrounding the crumbling empire and the rise of mass media. And doing all of this in a very entertaining way.
I didn't get it all, but what I did "catch", I liked, and I am intrigued to read more.
February 9, 2024
Myths, for Barthes, have the particularity of being historical objects that pass themselves off as natural. Reading the Mythologies today, we first strike by their dated side. The certainties and habits of half a century ago have become relics, oddities, vague memories, or illustrious unknowns. Who still talks about Minou Drouet, the Blue Guide, and Poujade? The myths have evaporated. What about their foundation, this petty-bourgeois world denounced by Barthes? There, too, it feels like it's time. The bourgeois against the proletarians sounds like the Cold War, left-wing intellectual of yesteryear, locked in a thought that is itself mythological. What no longer passes in these texts is their certainty of being objective, describing the oppressing class and unmasking it as if the class struggle was not a myth. Perhaps this feeling that all this has disappeared comes from the victory of bourgeois myths at the fall of communism. What would a mythology be today? Minou Drouet has transformed into Justin Biber, and the riders of the Tour de France, these grandiloquent epic heroes, these Coppi, these Geminiani, these Kubler, and these Bobet, have become bobets without capital letters and honor. They would be disillusioned, grating, and futile, the mythologies of today.
January 14, 2024
Arnaque, mythes et mystifications
À travers une série d'études sur des sujets du quotidien — un match de catch, des péplums, une rencontre de têtes couronnées d'Europe, des mariages de célébrités du monde du spectacle, la publicité pour le savon, la javel et le détergent, des inondations à Paris, le bifteck-frites, le populisme poujadiste, l'Abbé Pierre, le Tour de France, la Citroën DS,... — Roland Barthes cherche le fil rouge, le plus petit dénominateur commun de tous ces lieux communs et morceaux de paysage culturel... Il en arrive à cette trouvaille :
'Le mythe ne cache rien et il n'affiche rien : il déforme. [...] chargé de faire passer un concept intentionnel, le mythe ne rencontre dans le langage que trahison, car le langage ne peut qu'effacer le concept s'il le cache ou le démasquer s'il le dit. L'élaboration d'un second système sémiologique va permettre au mythe d'échapper au dilemme : acculé à dévoiler ou à liquider le concept, il va le naturaliser. En fait, ce qui permet au lecteur de consommer le mythe innocemment, c'est qu'il ne voit pas en lui un système sémiologique mais un système inductif : là où il n'y a qu'une équivalence, il voit une sorte de procès causal : le signifiant et le signifié ont, à ses yeux, des rapports de nature.
On peut exprimer cette confusion autrement : tout système sémiologique est un système de valeurs ; or le consommateur du mythe prend la signification pour un système de fait : le mythe est lu comme un système factuel alors qu'il n'est qu'un système sémiologique.'
'[Le mythe] organise un monde sans contradictions parce que sans profondeur, un monde étalé dans l'évidence, il fonde une clarté heureuse ; les choses ont l'air de signifier toutes seules.'
------
Pour ma part, j'ai trouvé la dernière partie de l'essai, « Le mythe, aujourd'hui », de loin plus substantiel que l'ensemble des petites analyses individuelles qui la précède. Ce chapitre formalise l'ensemble des menues observations du reste du livre, sous une forme moins gratuite et moins programmatique, dans le même temps.
See also/voir aussi:
La Guerre du faux
Le Brave Soldat Chvéïk
Dictionnaire des idées reçues
Par les champs et par les grèves
The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Histoires désobligeantes
La rebelión de las masas
Mes idées politiques
L'Homme révolté
The End of History and the Last Man
-------
Proposition musicale
À travers une série d'études sur des sujets du quotidien — un match de catch, des péplums, une rencontre de têtes couronnées d'Europe, des mariages de célébrités du monde du spectacle, la publicité pour le savon, la javel et le détergent, des inondations à Paris, le bifteck-frites, le populisme poujadiste, l'Abbé Pierre, le Tour de France, la Citroën DS,... — Roland Barthes cherche le fil rouge, le plus petit dénominateur commun de tous ces lieux communs et morceaux de paysage culturel... Il en arrive à cette trouvaille :
'Le mythe ne cache rien et il n'affiche rien : il déforme. [...] chargé de faire passer un concept intentionnel, le mythe ne rencontre dans le langage que trahison, car le langage ne peut qu'effacer le concept s'il le cache ou le démasquer s'il le dit. L'élaboration d'un second système sémiologique va permettre au mythe d'échapper au dilemme : acculé à dévoiler ou à liquider le concept, il va le naturaliser. En fait, ce qui permet au lecteur de consommer le mythe innocemment, c'est qu'il ne voit pas en lui un système sémiologique mais un système inductif : là où il n'y a qu'une équivalence, il voit une sorte de procès causal : le signifiant et le signifié ont, à ses yeux, des rapports de nature.
On peut exprimer cette confusion autrement : tout système sémiologique est un système de valeurs ; or le consommateur du mythe prend la signification pour un système de fait : le mythe est lu comme un système factuel alors qu'il n'est qu'un système sémiologique.'
'[Le mythe] organise un monde sans contradictions parce que sans profondeur, un monde étalé dans l'évidence, il fonde une clarté heureuse ; les choses ont l'air de signifier toutes seules.'
------
Pour ma part, j'ai trouvé la dernière partie de l'essai, « Le mythe, aujourd'hui », de loin plus substantiel que l'ensemble des petites analyses individuelles qui la précède. Ce chapitre formalise l'ensemble des menues observations du reste du livre, sous une forme moins gratuite et moins programmatique, dans le même temps.
See also/voir aussi:
La Guerre du faux
Le Brave Soldat Chvéïk
Dictionnaire des idées reçues
Par les champs et par les grèves
The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Histoires désobligeantes
La rebelión de las masas
Mes idées politiques
L'Homme révolté
The End of History and the Last Man
-------
Proposition musicale
June 20, 2018
There are times when I realize that I can be very lazy in my reading, and this book is the slap that reminded me.
I wish I had started with the second section first, Myth Today because it was an excellent review of semiotics, which I have minimal understanding of and what I knew was dusty and the terminology did not come easily or quickly. By the end of the essays I was skating along, but it is not speedy reading per se.
I feel like this book hasn't aged well. The ideas are still valid, but because Barthes utilized contemporaneous cultural phenomena of 1950s, which was a strength of his work and now a weak link because not all of them are immediately graspable. The examples are so pinned to precise moments in time that the arguments are no longer relevant for most individuals. Post modernism isn't my forte, and frankly, I feel like the brief exposure to Saussure that I've had did Mythologies a disservice since good arguments are like structures, you build them.
Even with all these drawbacks, the value in Barthes' theories is clear, some easier to extrapolate than others. Some thoughts to tickle:
Where would be without the male gaze?
"Such is the world of Elle: here women are always a homogenous species, a constituted body jealous of its privileges, even more enamored of its servitudes; here men are never on the inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful' but men are everywhere outside, exerting pressure on all sides, making everything exist; they are eternally the creative absence, that of the Racinian god: a world without men but entirely constituted be the male gaze, the feminine world of Elle is precisely that of the gynoeceum."
Yes, this is boats.
"To possess an absolutely finite space: to love a ship is first of all to love a superlative house, one that is unremittingly enclosed, and certainly not loving great vague departures: a ship is a habitat phenomenon before being a means of transport."
And this tidbit--La! Substitute US or any nation state for France.
"When things become serious, abandon Politics for the Nation. For men of the Right, Politics is the Left: they are France."
I had already experienced much of Barthes peripherally, but sitting down and reading his work was good and I probably should have carved out time earlier. C'est la vie.
It might be an Old Fashioned, still good.
<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>
Conversation while reading:
Me: There is nothing intuitive about French philosophy to me.
DH: How so?
Me: German philosophy I just get, this *waves book* this... just no. It's always a struggle.
DH: German philosophy is rational and assumes the reader will be rational; French philosophy does no such thing, makes no such assumptions.
Me: I don't like that about it.
(\_/)
(O.o) ==<<>>== So, is it nonintuitive or am I subconsciously fighting it tooth and nail the entire time? Who knows. But like Russian authors, it improves with alcohol. Just for different reasons.
The journey continues... 33% done and trekking.
I wish I had started with the second section first, Myth Today because it was an excellent review of semiotics, which I have minimal understanding of and what I knew was dusty and the terminology did not come easily or quickly. By the end of the essays I was skating along, but it is not speedy reading per se.
I feel like this book hasn't aged well. The ideas are still valid, but because Barthes utilized contemporaneous cultural phenomena of 1950s, which was a strength of his work and now a weak link because not all of them are immediately graspable. The examples are so pinned to precise moments in time that the arguments are no longer relevant for most individuals. Post modernism isn't my forte, and frankly, I feel like the brief exposure to Saussure that I've had did Mythologies a disservice since good arguments are like structures, you build them.
Even with all these drawbacks, the value in Barthes' theories is clear, some easier to extrapolate than others. Some thoughts to tickle:
Where would be without the male gaze?
"Such is the world of Elle: here women are always a homogenous species, a constituted body jealous of its privileges, even more enamored of its servitudes; here men are never on the inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful' but men are everywhere outside, exerting pressure on all sides, making everything exist; they are eternally the creative absence, that of the Racinian god: a world without men but entirely constituted be the male gaze, the feminine world of Elle is precisely that of the gynoeceum."
Yes, this is boats.
"To possess an absolutely finite space: to love a ship is first of all to love a superlative house, one that is unremittingly enclosed, and certainly not loving great vague departures: a ship is a habitat phenomenon before being a means of transport."
And this tidbit--La! Substitute US or any nation state for France.
"When things become serious, abandon Politics for the Nation. For men of the Right, Politics is the Left: they are France."
I had already experienced much of Barthes peripherally, but sitting down and reading his work was good and I probably should have carved out time earlier. C'est la vie.
It might be an Old Fashioned, still good.
<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>==<<>>
Conversation while reading:
Me: There is nothing intuitive about French philosophy to me.
DH: How so?
Me: German philosophy I just get, this *waves book* this... just no. It's always a struggle.
DH: German philosophy is rational and assumes the reader will be rational; French philosophy does no such thing, makes no such assumptions.
Me: I don't like that about it.
(\_/)
(O.o) ==<<>>== So, is it nonintuitive or am I subconsciously fighting it tooth and nail the entire time? Who knows. But like Russian authors, it improves with alcohol. Just for different reasons.
The journey continues... 33% done and trekking.
August 21, 2013
Barthes' most famous contribution to the semiotics school of structuralism, post-structuralism: though not his most-read according to GoodReads (an accolade reserved for Camera Lucida). While I love all of the Barthes that I have read, I think this should be required reading somewhere (the first part, anyway). Barthes is brilliant; his eyes seem always turned to the world as it is, and yet remain mindful of the world as it seems: that is the premise of Mythologies. Intentionally or unintentionally, everything we observe has a meaning and a counter-meaning, which change and reverse roles based on the society which views them. The actor's casual headshot: symbolic of his 'everyman'-ness, or rather his apotheosis above every man? The Tour de France: a meritorious battle of bikes, or rather the stock-puppet sitcom-drama of bikers' personalities? Toys: innocuous playthings, or instruments of class-shackling and occupational pre-fitting? Drinking wine: a symbol of French national, equalizing pride, or an instrument of expropriation from French capitalists over the Algerian farmers? These are the kinds of dualities which Barthes discusses in his Mythologies (so well written and well argued you may not even remember you bought it hoping for a sultry summation of Leda and her cygnus-seducer. No grey-eyed goddesses or illustrious Joves here, save the moonfaced Greta Garbo or the Romanesque Marlon Brando)
I have not viewed the world with the same naive glaze since reading Barthes' Mythologies, and whether it has caused me to overthink is debatable, but it has forced me to think more critically about the world of messages around me. Not just the message-laden world of advertisements, of which I was already dubious, but also of objects, cult-classics movie posters, favorite-books, cover-art, newspaper articles from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker to Home & Garden and Men's Fitness, Food Network Magazine and so forth. For example, from Los Angeles Times, today:
Now, I'm not as brilliant as Barthes, and I am not well-informed in the culture of Los Angeles, but that is the kind of though-process which Barthes utilizes in dissecting French culture. Mythologies is about digging in to every sign, asking what is this supposed to signify to me? what does it actually signify? It is a thought process which does not require genius, for as Barthes proclaims: "myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth." The world is populated with distorted messages, it is our responsibility as readers, thinkers, participants in our cultures to reconstitute the messages which reach us in distortion, not to let it lead us into complacency.
I have not viewed the world with the same naive glaze since reading Barthes' Mythologies, and whether it has caused me to overthink is debatable, but it has forced me to think more critically about the world of messages around me. Not just the message-laden world of advertisements, of which I was already dubious, but also of objects, cult-classics movie posters, favorite-books, cover-art, newspaper articles from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker to Home & Garden and Men's Fitness, Food Network Magazine and so forth. For example, from Los Angeles Times, today:
A city's unrealized ambitions in 'Never Built Los Angeles'
The article describes a new, permanent exhibition of the passed-over projects of Los Angeles: the phantom freeways, the might-have-been monorails and suggested subways, the sky-scrapers of could-have-been and the plush potential parks. While the the exhibition and the article offer this alternative-history on display as a wistful reminder of the many potential Los Angeles-es that could have existed, there is a more sinister criticism of the mayoral governance that the city has had, which aborted the many better projects. The exhibition comes in stride with a new mayor, Eric Garcetti, and makes the political statement that the unhappy denizens of Los Angeles want more of these projects to be brought to fruition, not left unrealized on scraps of stock-paper.
The exhibition is a sign. The signifier is the "never built Los Angeles" though the intended message is "should have been Los Angeles" - perhaps not wholly should have been, but at least in part. This signified message is in turn the signifier to the latent message of a sort of Marxist equalizer: that capitalism in cahoots with bureaucracy has bastardized the Los Angeles skyline, stunted its greatness, handicapped its potential. The signal is not of a great city, but of a Lost Paradise. While the message is that the past should educate the future, the ultimate message is that Los Angeles is a future foregone. Tossed tramways and abbreviated bikeways overshadow the ill-concieved and rightfully miscarried monstrosities averted. The remote past, and more significantly the unchosen past has simultaneously the luring life of the future and the death of the past. Instead of being a pivot for the city's projection, the exhibition serves instead as a tombstone.
Now, I'm not as brilliant as Barthes, and I am not well-informed in the culture of Los Angeles, but that is the kind of though-process which Barthes utilizes in dissecting French culture. Mythologies is about digging in to every sign, asking what is this supposed to signify to me? what does it actually signify? It is a thought process which does not require genius, for as Barthes proclaims: "myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth." The world is populated with distorted messages, it is our responsibility as readers, thinkers, participants in our cultures to reconstitute the messages which reach us in distortion, not to let it lead us into complacency.
tautology dispenses us from having ideas, but at the same time prides itself on making this license into a stern morality; whence its success: laziness is promoted to the rank of rigor.We must not be slaves to our own laziness, but rather discover the truth about us: we must uncover with a vigor. For myth is a sly mischief-maker, it masquerades as truth, as the obvious and the assumed. Myths are like puns: they have different meanings to the casual auditory observer and the close reader:
No, syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language blindly seek one another without ever meeting, but no one pays the slightest attention: Etes-vous allé au pont? --Allée? Il n'y a pas d'allée, je le sais, j'y suis été.
December 27, 2020
To induce a collective content for the imagination is always an inhuman undertaking, not only because dreaming essentializes life into destiny, but also because dreams are impoverished, and the alibi of an absence.
Barthes and I have been familiar since whenever, but we've never been exactly intimate. I have read a few of works spaced out usually by decades. He's more of a placeholder between Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty and the post-structuralists. Mythologies is the one which seeped into the theoretical groundwater. Everyone grasps a loose idea of what the book is about even if they have never hefted a copy, much less read it. I found the Operation Margarine the most intriguing, if somewhat dated, the idea that the advertiser or government is quick to announce "the accidental evil of a class-bound institution in order to conceal its principal evil." Yet the arguments lose leverage when looking for the truth as opposed to the merely interesting. Barthes wants to distinguish that the signs and messages are deliberate means to establish condition as natural as opposed to historical. I find fault with that last possibility, but then I'm old and jaded. Much like Rorty's assessment of Derrida, I am ready to grant that the proposed methodology makes for revealing readings which are more interesting than not, they must inevitably reach an impasse when attempting to transcending the metaphysical. This was a fun tandem read with GR friend Basho. Thanks to a plague and sub-zero (Celsius) temperatures I read this on Christmas morning. During such I told my wife. She yawned.
Barthes and I have been familiar since whenever, but we've never been exactly intimate. I have read a few of works spaced out usually by decades. He's more of a placeholder between Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty and the post-structuralists. Mythologies is the one which seeped into the theoretical groundwater. Everyone grasps a loose idea of what the book is about even if they have never hefted a copy, much less read it. I found the Operation Margarine the most intriguing, if somewhat dated, the idea that the advertiser or government is quick to announce "the accidental evil of a class-bound institution in order to conceal its principal evil." Yet the arguments lose leverage when looking for the truth as opposed to the merely interesting. Barthes wants to distinguish that the signs and messages are deliberate means to establish condition as natural as opposed to historical. I find fault with that last possibility, but then I'm old and jaded. Much like Rorty's assessment of Derrida, I am ready to grant that the proposed methodology makes for revealing readings which are more interesting than not, they must inevitably reach an impasse when attempting to transcending the metaphysical. This was a fun tandem read with GR friend Basho. Thanks to a plague and sub-zero (Celsius) temperatures I read this on Christmas morning. During such I told my wife. She yawned.
June 29, 2021
Alternatively, this book could be called Why We Can Never Escape Petit Bourgeois Culture and the Stranglehold It Has On Us. However, that is less pithy and less, well, all-encompassing as a fun little word that Barthes can use to analyze 1950s France. Myth, Barthes writes, is depoliticized speech, a language that signifies and endlessly proliferates a sign until that sign has become naturalized into society. For example, France has made itself an authority on good wine. Wine is not only influential on French cuisine and an important aspect of French culture, but France has made it into an art (wine ceremonies, wine tasting, wine making). Of this, Barthes asserts that “knowing how to drink is a national technique which serves to qualify the Frenchman, to prove at once his performative power, his control, and his sociability. Wine thus provides a collective morality, within which everything is redeemed” (81). The mythology of wine, however, hides the fact that France exploits Algerian land—the two notorious C’s at work again in society (capitalism & colonialism). As a “mythologist,” Barthes decodes a vast array of myths, from Greta Garbo’s face to African grammar to the child genius, in a collection of short (and by short, I mean, very very short) essays in Part I. In Part II, he explains how the semiotics of myth functions, which is best understood through a graph he inserts.
Briefly:
1. Signifier 2. Signified
3. Sign
I. SIGNIFIER II. SIGNIFIED
III. SIGN
1, 2 and 3 function on the plane of language (or, they are the language-object). I, II and III work on the plane of myth (or, meta-language). However, the concept (3), the end result of the language signifier and signified, is only the signifier of the myth system. Though the sign in a language system is arbitrary, the sign in the myth system is always in part motivated. So who or what motivates? Barthes answers: the bourgeoisie. And because of this exnominating phenomenon, “[b]ourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in doing so lose its name without risk: no one here will throw this name of bourgeois back at it. It can without resistance subsume bourgeois theater, art, and humanity under their eternal analogues; in a word, it can exnominate itself without restraint when there is only one single human. Nature left: the defection from the name bourgeois is here complete” (251).
Can we ever escape myths? Yes and no. Barthes claims that the only language which is not mythical is “the language of man as a producer,” which is why “revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical” (259). Revolution does not seek to exnominate itself but to announce itself and transform reality without preserving an image. But, it is hard for revolution to stay at the level of revolution, so I suppose we cannot escape myths, whether they are right-wing myths, bourgeois myths or left-wing myths.
Which leaves me to leave you with this wonderful quote:
“This anonymity of the bourgeoisie becomes even more marked when one passes from bourgeois culture proper to its derived, vulgarized, and applied forms, to what one could call public philosophy, that which sustains everyday life, civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short the unwritten norms of interrelationships in a bourgeois society. It is an illusion to reduce the dominant culture to its inventive core: there is also a bourgeois culture which consists of consumption alone. The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theater, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world ” (252; bold mine).
Reading Mythologies compels one to turn to her own contemporary culture and decode the myths which structure it. I confess, I have tried to do so, but unfortunately realized that I am not Barthes and cannot decode these myths quite as succinctly and smartly as he does.
Briefly:
1. Signifier 2. Signified
3. Sign
I. SIGNIFIER II. SIGNIFIED
III. SIGN
1, 2 and 3 function on the plane of language (or, they are the language-object). I, II and III work on the plane of myth (or, meta-language). However, the concept (3), the end result of the language signifier and signified, is only the signifier of the myth system. Though the sign in a language system is arbitrary, the sign in the myth system is always in part motivated. So who or what motivates? Barthes answers: the bourgeoisie. And because of this exnominating phenomenon, “[b]ourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in doing so lose its name without risk: no one here will throw this name of bourgeois back at it. It can without resistance subsume bourgeois theater, art, and humanity under their eternal analogues; in a word, it can exnominate itself without restraint when there is only one single human. Nature left: the defection from the name bourgeois is here complete” (251).
Can we ever escape myths? Yes and no. Barthes claims that the only language which is not mythical is “the language of man as a producer,” which is why “revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical” (259). Revolution does not seek to exnominate itself but to announce itself and transform reality without preserving an image. But, it is hard for revolution to stay at the level of revolution, so I suppose we cannot escape myths, whether they are right-wing myths, bourgeois myths or left-wing myths.
Which leaves me to leave you with this wonderful quote:
“This anonymity of the bourgeoisie becomes even more marked when one passes from bourgeois culture proper to its derived, vulgarized, and applied forms, to what one could call public philosophy, that which sustains everyday life, civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short the unwritten norms of interrelationships in a bourgeois society. It is an illusion to reduce the dominant culture to its inventive core: there is also a bourgeois culture which consists of consumption alone. The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theater, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world ” (252; bold mine).
Reading Mythologies compels one to turn to her own contemporary culture and decode the myths which structure it. I confess, I have tried to do so, but unfortunately realized that I am not Barthes and cannot decode these myths quite as succinctly and smartly as he does.
Read
September 18, 2022Any author who launches a work with reflections on old-school professional wrestling, and especially reflections on old-school French professional wrestling from the 1950s is guaranteed praise. I’m reminded of those weekend mornings as a child watching the craft broadcast from the Hammond Civic Center, where Yukon Moose Cholak might take to the ring, with Sam Menacker ringside calling the action. The action was at times a bit fuzzy owing to the longshot camera angle from the rafters leaving more to the imagination, but the memories are magnificent.
M. Barthes presents a collection of essays from the mid-1950s piercing the veneer of popular mythologies, followed with more in-depth thought on the topic. That last section, titled “Myth Today,” is a short, though dense, dive into semiotics dyed with Marxist, Freudian ruminations, with some eddying thoughts for Stalin, Zhdanov and others, making for a less enjoyable reading experience than the preceding pages. In total, though, the essays are something of an intellectual field guide, an enviable collection of sumptuous remarks.
Mythology of sport has recently been front of mind, a topic M. Barthes dwells on with his outstanding commentary for the Tour de France. Our media seem to have perfected a commercial perpetual motion machine, which has one prerequisite input: the hero. As a consequence, we have witnessed no shortage of manufactured sports gods through the decades, this being proven as extraordinarily good for business. That these gods are quite human and therefore quite susceptible at times to spectacular self-destruction is really no problem to the commercial engines; the fallen are easily airbrushed from popular consciousness, replaced with another candidate perhaps capable of even greater admiration. We need look no further than the Tour de France for a surfeit of the long forgotten, those who suffered sudden, forced retirements from their lofty, exalted perch.
I found M. Barthes’ essays ethereal and inspirational, sparking jealousy; if only I could write this well. The essays covered a wide range of current events, particularly those reported in Paris-Match like Marlon Brando’s engagement to Josanne Mariani – that they never made it to the alter is irrelevant. The essay on that thing of beauty, the Citroën DS 19, or Déesse, is worth a bookmark. “The Déesse is first of all a new Nautilus.” What a wonderful creation, that car. With its perfected conception aérodynamique, the future arrived. Like Icarus, though, this cultural apogee signifying la gloire de la France roughly coincided with Suez, Indochina, Algeria and the fall of la Quatrième République. La fin de la gloire.
The older I’ve become, the more conscious I am of myths. Today, a casual observer might note as contributors to our myths the internet, printed media and advertising, sports, architecture, industrialization generally, academics, and grandma and grandpa, in short nearly everything that enters our senses. Myths are powerful because they can propel a citizenry to war, fuel political ambitions, further economic objectives and inspire poor personal choices, without intruding too far into the individual conscious, if at all. Then what is not a myth? This may indicate why mindfulness is so important. About the only thing that doesn’t have a mythical quality these days is reflecting on a breath.
M. Barthes presents a collection of essays from the mid-1950s piercing the veneer of popular mythologies, followed with more in-depth thought on the topic. That last section, titled “Myth Today,” is a short, though dense, dive into semiotics dyed with Marxist, Freudian ruminations, with some eddying thoughts for Stalin, Zhdanov and others, making for a less enjoyable reading experience than the preceding pages. In total, though, the essays are something of an intellectual field guide, an enviable collection of sumptuous remarks.
Mythology of sport has recently been front of mind, a topic M. Barthes dwells on with his outstanding commentary for the Tour de France. Our media seem to have perfected a commercial perpetual motion machine, which has one prerequisite input: the hero. As a consequence, we have witnessed no shortage of manufactured sports gods through the decades, this being proven as extraordinarily good for business. That these gods are quite human and therefore quite susceptible at times to spectacular self-destruction is really no problem to the commercial engines; the fallen are easily airbrushed from popular consciousness, replaced with another candidate perhaps capable of even greater admiration. We need look no further than the Tour de France for a surfeit of the long forgotten, those who suffered sudden, forced retirements from their lofty, exalted perch.
I found M. Barthes’ essays ethereal and inspirational, sparking jealousy; if only I could write this well. The essays covered a wide range of current events, particularly those reported in Paris-Match like Marlon Brando’s engagement to Josanne Mariani – that they never made it to the alter is irrelevant. The essay on that thing of beauty, the Citroën DS 19, or Déesse, is worth a bookmark. “The Déesse is first of all a new Nautilus.” What a wonderful creation, that car. With its perfected conception aérodynamique, the future arrived. Like Icarus, though, this cultural apogee signifying la gloire de la France roughly coincided with Suez, Indochina, Algeria and the fall of la Quatrième République. La fin de la gloire.
The older I’ve become, the more conscious I am of myths. Today, a casual observer might note as contributors to our myths the internet, printed media and advertising, sports, architecture, industrialization generally, academics, and grandma and grandpa, in short nearly everything that enters our senses. Myths are powerful because they can propel a citizenry to war, fuel political ambitions, further economic objectives and inspire poor personal choices, without intruding too far into the individual conscious, if at all. Then what is not a myth? This may indicate why mindfulness is so important. About the only thing that doesn’t have a mythical quality these days is reflecting on a breath.
April 26, 2008
I only had to read half of Roland Barthes' Mythologies for my Critical Theory class, but I was so engrossed that I set aside George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones (you'll understand how impressive that is if I ever get to that review) and spent a day of my spring break reading the whole thing. In Mythologies, Barthes, a theorist I previously (and less amiably) met during my Media and Rhetoric class, does a semiotic reading of different aspects of society in order to identify the ideological beliefs that support them. Thus "mythology" is mode of communication that signifies what supposedly goes without saying in society, the language that makes unrealistic "truths" seem natural. It doesn't sound entertaining, but it is.
Barthes concludes his preface with the declaration, "What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." And boy is he sarcastic. And witty. And insightful. I found myself reading his little essays and scrawling "Yes!" in the margins (because "OMG! This guy is right on! Hahaha!" took too long to write).
The book's design make it a quick and lively read. Each month, between 1954 and 1956, Barthes wrote one essay about the myths of French society. The essays are rarely over three pages, but packed with analytical might, clever criticisms, and compelling calls to action. Even though the book is a study of French society in the fifties, it still is so pertinent today. My favorite chapters were "The World of Wrestling," "The Writer on Holiday," "Blind and Dumb Criticism," "Novels and Children," and "Striptease." Yes, this internationally acclaimed theorist wrote essays on strippers and WWF-style wrestling. So. Entertaining.
I highly recommend Barthes' Mythologies. Not only is it intelligent and entertaining, but it will affect how you view the world. Without realizing it, you'll be walking through the mall writing mythologies of your own. (I wrote one on Starbucks.)
Barthes concludes his preface with the declaration, "What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." And boy is he sarcastic. And witty. And insightful. I found myself reading his little essays and scrawling "Yes!" in the margins (because "OMG! This guy is right on! Hahaha!" took too long to write).
The book's design make it a quick and lively read. Each month, between 1954 and 1956, Barthes wrote one essay about the myths of French society. The essays are rarely over three pages, but packed with analytical might, clever criticisms, and compelling calls to action. Even though the book is a study of French society in the fifties, it still is so pertinent today. My favorite chapters were "The World of Wrestling," "The Writer on Holiday," "Blind and Dumb Criticism," "Novels and Children," and "Striptease." Yes, this internationally acclaimed theorist wrote essays on strippers and WWF-style wrestling. So. Entertaining.
I highly recommend Barthes' Mythologies. Not only is it intelligent and entertaining, but it will affect how you view the world. Without realizing it, you'll be walking through the mall writing mythologies of your own. (I wrote one on Starbucks.)
July 10, 2021
I don't get all that much out of reading these Frenchies anymore. I do have time for Barthes because he writes well, often says unexpected things, and, like his prodigal pupil Baudrillard, masters postmodern thought's most significant genre, incidental essayism: responding to and immortalizing mid-century French advertisements and court cases and cars within a sustained and engaging perspective.
What is that perspective? In this essay collection, Barthes attempts to critically unmask the hidden logic of a wide array of mass culture using the theoretical tools of semiotics, Marxism, sociology, and a pinch of psychoanalysis. He is particularly concerned with what he calls "myths" (a historically determined form of de-politicized communication that distorts other signs for devious purposes) and how things are presented as "Natural" when they are in fact historical. If that perspective sounds rote, dogmatic, and arbitrary, that is because it absolutely is and has been for decades. Indeed, if you are picking through the rubble of French Theory for salacious, topical nuggets of radicality, you might find that Barthes doesn't present much here that Vox couldn't. This book is an early and highly significant example of these ideas, so it no doubt has that historical value. Thinking about the self-reflexivity, and the temporal and textual aspects of these essays (all written a week apart from the next, he says), is also somewhat interesting.
But, this collection is early Barthes so there's a whole lot of conceited, caustic grandstanding about the bourgeoisie, and incoherent ideas -- namely, myth: the exact word one ought to use to describe this book's own status -- that are better left behind, tipping the balance away from the fascinating essays like "Plastic" or the clever little quips such as "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals..." Actually, I find this Barthes about as unlikable as I find likable the Barthes of Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
What is that perspective? In this essay collection, Barthes attempts to critically unmask the hidden logic of a wide array of mass culture using the theoretical tools of semiotics, Marxism, sociology, and a pinch of psychoanalysis. He is particularly concerned with what he calls "myths" (a historically determined form of de-politicized communication that distorts other signs for devious purposes) and how things are presented as "Natural" when they are in fact historical. If that perspective sounds rote, dogmatic, and arbitrary, that is because it absolutely is and has been for decades. Indeed, if you are picking through the rubble of French Theory for salacious, topical nuggets of radicality, you might find that Barthes doesn't present much here that Vox couldn't. This book is an early and highly significant example of these ideas, so it no doubt has that historical value. Thinking about the self-reflexivity, and the temporal and textual aspects of these essays (all written a week apart from the next, he says), is also somewhat interesting.
But, this collection is early Barthes so there's a whole lot of conceited, caustic grandstanding about the bourgeoisie, and incoherent ideas -- namely, myth: the exact word one ought to use to describe this book's own status -- that are better left behind, tipping the balance away from the fascinating essays like "Plastic" or the clever little quips such as "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals..." Actually, I find this Barthes about as unlikable as I find likable the Barthes of Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
June 20, 2020
As obras de Roland Barthes são sempre incríveis. Uma escrita original, pontos de vista muito interessantes, uma refinada ironia às vezes, e um discurso que flui sem exageros conceptuais, sem palavras difíceis, sem presunções intelectuais.
Os temas de Barthes são sempre diversificados e mantêm-se actuais. A própria aproximação semiológica de Barthes aos temas é muito acessível, compranda-a, por exemplo, com a de Umberto Eco.
Neste livro Barthes analisa vários temas quotidianos e outros, sob o prisma das mitologias. Faz uma análise diversificada e divertida. Desde os detergentes da roupa aos fins-de-semana da realeza monárquica, passando por outros símbolos.
Um livro que dá gosto ler, e que me faz não adiar mais a leitura das obras de Barthes que ainda não conheço.
----
"O rei Paulo vestia uma camisa de mangas curtas, a rainha Frederica um vestido estampado, isto é, não exclusivo, mas cujo padrão se pode reencontrar no corpo de simples mortais: antigamente, os reis fantasiavam-se de pastores; hoje, o signo da fantasia consiste em vestirem-se durante quinze dias com roupas compradas no supermercado. Outro estatuto democrático: levantarem-se às seis horas da manhã. Tudo isto nos informa, por antífrase, de uma certa idealidade da vida quotidiana: usar punhos de renda, fazer-se barbear por um lacaio, levantar-se tarde."
Os temas de Barthes são sempre diversificados e mantêm-se actuais. A própria aproximação semiológica de Barthes aos temas é muito acessível, compranda-a, por exemplo, com a de Umberto Eco.
Neste livro Barthes analisa vários temas quotidianos e outros, sob o prisma das mitologias. Faz uma análise diversificada e divertida. Desde os detergentes da roupa aos fins-de-semana da realeza monárquica, passando por outros símbolos.
Um livro que dá gosto ler, e que me faz não adiar mais a leitura das obras de Barthes que ainda não conheço.
----
"O rei Paulo vestia uma camisa de mangas curtas, a rainha Frederica um vestido estampado, isto é, não exclusivo, mas cujo padrão se pode reencontrar no corpo de simples mortais: antigamente, os reis fantasiavam-se de pastores; hoje, o signo da fantasia consiste em vestirem-se durante quinze dias com roupas compradas no supermercado. Outro estatuto democrático: levantarem-se às seis horas da manhã. Tudo isto nos informa, por antífrase, de uma certa idealidade da vida quotidiana: usar punhos de renda, fazer-se barbear por um lacaio, levantar-se tarde."
March 19, 2019
Knjiga koja - sublimira, sinestezira, prilepljuje, ljubi, intencije mene/čitaoca, i tekst/autora. Rolan interpretira stvarnost, teoriju, ideologiju, mit, jezik, konstruiše da bi dekonstruisao, smulja nešto posve obično, pa ti predoči mikelanđelovog davida. Kak je lipo čitati pametne levičare.
...kao ekonomska činjenica, buržoazija se "imenuje" bez teškoća: kapitalizam se javno ispoveda. Kao politička činjenica, ona se teško prepoznaje: u Skupštini nema "buržoaskih" partija. Kao ideološka činjenica, ona sasvim nestaje: buržoazija je izbrisala svoje ime pri prelasku sa stvarnog na predstavu o stvarnom, sa ekonomskog čoveka na umnog čoveka: ona se zadovoljava činjenicama, ali se ne snalazi sa vrednostima, svoj status podvrgava istinskoj "eksnominaciji"; buržoazija se definiše kao društvena klasa koja ne želi da bude imenovana.
...kao ekonomska činjenica, buržoazija se "imenuje" bez teškoća: kapitalizam se javno ispoveda. Kao politička činjenica, ona se teško prepoznaje: u Skupštini nema "buržoaskih" partija. Kao ideološka činjenica, ona sasvim nestaje: buržoazija je izbrisala svoje ime pri prelasku sa stvarnog na predstavu o stvarnom, sa ekonomskog čoveka na umnog čoveka: ona se zadovoljava činjenicama, ali se ne snalazi sa vrednostima, svoj status podvrgava istinskoj "eksnominaciji"; buržoazija se definiše kao društvena klasa koja ne želi da bude imenovana.
March 31, 2020
Human beings have always known for succumbing to certain ways of consumption patterns of material and non-material entities under the name of this complex whole of culture. Other than this socially obliged conspicuous form of consumption that could be observed in everyday trivial mass activities, there are factors of psychology influenced by what he calls as 'myth' some of which were elucidated by Barthes using then contemporary cultural references of the French society varying from literary articles, wrestling matches, court cases, Charlie Chaplin, Einstein's brain, politics, advertising, etc., These reflections were initially published as monthly articles in French newspapers between 1954 and 1956 ( except for the wrestling essay in 1952), and writing these essays had more to do with the attitude of mass cultural behaviour of seeing things as 'natural' with "which newspapers, art and common sense dress up a reality which even though it is one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history."
The second part of the work 'Myth today' by which Barthes associates using the series of essays to generalize this theory of myth using semiological elements and ideologies driving to the birth of ephemeral forms yet everlasting myths. This is a highly recommended reading for whoever interested in exploring what it means to be a linguist, mythologist or a cultural anthropologist for that matter. And surely, this particular essay needs a lot of revisiting.
"this is the case with mythology: it is a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form."
The second part of the work 'Myth today' by which Barthes associates using the series of essays to generalize this theory of myth using semiological elements and ideologies driving to the birth of ephemeral forms yet everlasting myths. This is a highly recommended reading for whoever interested in exploring what it means to be a linguist, mythologist or a cultural anthropologist for that matter. And surely, this particular essay needs a lot of revisiting.
"this is the case with mythology: it is a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form."
March 1, 2013
I wonder sometimes what it must be like to have been born before the simulacrum became a matter of fact, instead of 1985. What was it like to read Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Guy Debord before Ronald Reagan became president, Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor and the world was recreated in a manmade archipelago off the coast of Dubai? I have no idea. Roland Barthes is a tremendous writer but this book feels too precious, too quaint; serious conversations about the petite bourgeoise just feel so antiquated in the 21st century. I read it and think "How romantic!" "How French!" "That's nice!" My sympathies to the author, he had no way of knowing it would get this weird.
June 24, 2024
Roland Barthes' 1957 SASSAY little collection of essays exploring the nature and use of myth in modern culture.
Barthes uses MARXISM and PSYCHOANALYSIS to deconstruct and critique various pop cultural phenomena.
Including (but not limited to):
- advertising
- professional wrestling
- cosmetics
- celebrities
- film and television
- plastic and milk
In so doing, Barths reveals various otherwise covert ways capitalist society imposes its values and ideologies on us.
In addition to MARX/FREUD.
Barths’ critiques are grounded in Saussurean SEMIOTICS.
And yes.
That is a SASSY way to be.
REAL QUICK
Semiotics is the study of SIGNS/SYMBOLS.
Specifically their USE/INTERPRETATION.
And how their meaning is CREATED/COMMUNICATED.
The key concepts in SEMIOTIC theory include:
The SIGNIFIER (S) which is the WORD/SYMBOL form.
The SIGNIFIED (s) which is the actual thing(s) the WORD/SYMBOL is referring to.
And the SIGN (s/S) which is the basic unit of meaning, and which happens when you link the SIGNIFIERS/SIGNIFIED.
SYMBOL SYSTEMS
SIGNS (s/S) do not operate in isolation.
But are rather part of larger SYMBOL SYSTEMS.
MYTHIC SYMBOL SYSTEMS
Barthes defined MYTH is a second-order semiological (SYMBOL) system. Barths posits that MYTH takes existing SIGNS and imbues them with additional EXTRA meanings, often naturalizing cultural and ideological values.
According to Barths, MYTHS transform HISTORY into NATURE, making CULTURAL/IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURES appear as natural realities.
This process DEPOLITICIZES complex social phenomena.
And REIFYS them into SIMPLIFIED, easily accessible forms.
IN OTHER WORDS
MYTHOLOGY camouflages IDEOLOGY (e.g.,CAPITALISM, RACISM PATRIARCHY) so that it seems like a NTURAL FACT.
POPULAR CULTURE ANALYSIS
Barthes deconstructs various aspects of popular culture to show how they serve to maintain the status quo.
Of course Barthes examples are dated (to the 1950’s).
But his greater point remains relevant today.
Maybe even more so now in LATE CAPITALISM.
Barthes criticizes the MYTHS behind CONSUMERISM for naturalizing and perpetuating CAPITALIST and BOURGEOIS values, and falsely representing them as timeless TRUTHS.
Current CLOSE TO HOME examples might include:
- THE AMERICAN DREAM IS POSSIBLE
- RETIREMENT IS POSSIBLE
- UPWARD MOBILITY IS POSSIBLE
- THE PLAYING FIELD IS LEVEL
- HOME OWNERSHIP IS WISE
- MONEY CONFERS HAPPINESS
- STATUS CONFERS VERTUE
- CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IS COOL
- BILLIONAIRES CAN BE BENEVOLENT
All of the above examples can SEEM LIKE NATURAL FACTS.
But reexamining them under Barths’ CRITICAL LENSE reveals their OBVIOUS IDEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS.
Returning to the main point.
Barths asserts MYTH IS DEPOLITICIZED SPEACH.
Barthes concludes that by IDENTIFYING and DECONSTRUCTING and the CORE MYTHS of CONSUMER CAPITALISM, we can expose their IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS and CHALLENGE their apparent NATURALNESS.
IT BREAKS THE SPELL.
Barthes calls for a CRITICAL AWARENESS regarding the MYTHS that shape our sense of SELF/OTHER/WORLD.
GREAT BOOK.
Barths’ is still IMPORTANT and RELEVANT.
And.
As previously mentioned.
Barths’ is a SURPRISINGLY SASSY SAUSSUREAN!
Barths’ clearly stood on the shoulders of other SASSY SOCIAL CRITICS. Most notably Walter Benjamin.
As such.
He’s FUN FUN FUN to read.
Those of you EXPECTING (and DREADING) a HARD DRY SLOG of a book will be PLEASANTLY SURPRISED HEREIN.
5/5 STARS🤩
Barthes uses MARXISM and PSYCHOANALYSIS to deconstruct and critique various pop cultural phenomena.
Including (but not limited to):
- advertising
- professional wrestling
- cosmetics
- celebrities
- film and television
- plastic and milk
In so doing, Barths reveals various otherwise covert ways capitalist society imposes its values and ideologies on us.
In addition to MARX/FREUD.
Barths’ critiques are grounded in Saussurean SEMIOTICS.
And yes.
That is a SASSY way to be.
REAL QUICK
Semiotics is the study of SIGNS/SYMBOLS.
Specifically their USE/INTERPRETATION.
And how their meaning is CREATED/COMMUNICATED.
The key concepts in SEMIOTIC theory include:
The SIGNIFIER (S) which is the WORD/SYMBOL form.
The SIGNIFIED (s) which is the actual thing(s) the WORD/SYMBOL is referring to.
And the SIGN (s/S) which is the basic unit of meaning, and which happens when you link the SIGNIFIERS/SIGNIFIED.
SYMBOL SYSTEMS
SIGNS (s/S) do not operate in isolation.
But are rather part of larger SYMBOL SYSTEMS.
MYTHIC SYMBOL SYSTEMS
Barthes defined MYTH is a second-order semiological (SYMBOL) system. Barths posits that MYTH takes existing SIGNS and imbues them with additional EXTRA meanings, often naturalizing cultural and ideological values.
According to Barths, MYTHS transform HISTORY into NATURE, making CULTURAL/IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURES appear as natural realities.
This process DEPOLITICIZES complex social phenomena.
And REIFYS them into SIMPLIFIED, easily accessible forms.
IN OTHER WORDS
MYTHOLOGY camouflages IDEOLOGY (e.g.,CAPITALISM, RACISM PATRIARCHY) so that it seems like a NTURAL FACT.
POPULAR CULTURE ANALYSIS
Barthes deconstructs various aspects of popular culture to show how they serve to maintain the status quo.
Of course Barthes examples are dated (to the 1950’s).
But his greater point remains relevant today.
Maybe even more so now in LATE CAPITALISM.
Barthes criticizes the MYTHS behind CONSUMERISM for naturalizing and perpetuating CAPITALIST and BOURGEOIS values, and falsely representing them as timeless TRUTHS.
Current CLOSE TO HOME examples might include:
- THE AMERICAN DREAM IS POSSIBLE
- RETIREMENT IS POSSIBLE
- UPWARD MOBILITY IS POSSIBLE
- THE PLAYING FIELD IS LEVEL
- HOME OWNERSHIP IS WISE
- MONEY CONFERS HAPPINESS
- STATUS CONFERS VERTUE
- CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IS COOL
- BILLIONAIRES CAN BE BENEVOLENT
All of the above examples can SEEM LIKE NATURAL FACTS.
But reexamining them under Barths’ CRITICAL LENSE reveals their OBVIOUS IDEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS.
Returning to the main point.
Barths asserts MYTH IS DEPOLITICIZED SPEACH.
Barthes concludes that by IDENTIFYING and DECONSTRUCTING and the CORE MYTHS of CONSUMER CAPITALISM, we can expose their IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS and CHALLENGE their apparent NATURALNESS.
IT BREAKS THE SPELL.
Barthes calls for a CRITICAL AWARENESS regarding the MYTHS that shape our sense of SELF/OTHER/WORLD.
GREAT BOOK.
Barths’ is still IMPORTANT and RELEVANT.
And.
As previously mentioned.
Barths’ is a SURPRISINGLY SASSY SAUSSUREAN!
Barths’ clearly stood on the shoulders of other SASSY SOCIAL CRITICS. Most notably Walter Benjamin.
As such.
He’s FUN FUN FUN to read.
Those of you EXPECTING (and DREADING) a HARD DRY SLOG of a book will be PLEASANTLY SURPRISED HEREIN.
5/5 STARS🤩
September 26, 2014
This is a great, thought-provoking set of essays that suffers from age, despite the lasting relevance of its core arguments. My main gripe was that Barthes' method of choosing bits of contemporary pop culture to illustrate his arguments is of course destined to become dated, and so a few of the chapters when over my head. I'm just not familiar with Chaplin or the Dominici Trial, and I don't know who or what the Abbé Pierre is. However, the central arguments were easy to grasp despite this, and I can't really hold m own ignorance against Barthes.
Secondly, all shock value is lost because the structuralist ideas presented by Barthes have since become very commonplace in academia and the humanities. Again, I can't really blame Barthes for this - if anything it shows how influential he was that now, the conditioning effects of children's toys are well-known and debated, for example, or that the underlying ideology of the 'woman-as-mother' symbol is widely acknowledged and contested.
So even though these complaints are not really the fault of Barthes, I can only rate this book as 'OK' because it failed to deliver the cognitive revolution it promised, and lacked shock value. Also, it would have been better had the longer essay on mythology been truncated slightly and moved to the beginning of the book.
Secondly, all shock value is lost because the structuralist ideas presented by Barthes have since become very commonplace in academia and the humanities. Again, I can't really blame Barthes for this - if anything it shows how influential he was that now, the conditioning effects of children's toys are well-known and debated, for example, or that the underlying ideology of the 'woman-as-mother' symbol is widely acknowledged and contested.
So even though these complaints are not really the fault of Barthes, I can only rate this book as 'OK' because it failed to deliver the cognitive revolution it promised, and lacked shock value. Also, it would have been better had the longer essay on mythology been truncated slightly and moved to the beginning of the book.
February 12, 2017
أسطوريات
رولان بارت لا يقرأ إلا باللغة التي كتب بها، للحقيقة لم أستطع إكمال الكتاب، كانت هناك فجوات كبيرة لا يسهل ردمها، رغم موضوعات مقالاته الجذابة جداً.
رولان بارت لا يقرأ إلا باللغة التي كتب بها، للحقيقة لم أستطع إكمال الكتاب، كانت هناك فجوات كبيرة لا يسهل ردمها، رغم موضوعات مقالاته الجذابة جداً.
November 8, 2020
"The fact that we cannot manage to achieve more than an unstable grasp of reality doubtless gives the measure of our present alienation: we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still mystified. It would seem that we are condemned for some time yet always to speak excessively about reality. This is probably because ideologism and its opposite are types of behaviour which are still magical, terrorized, blinded and fascinated by the split in the social world. And yet, this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge."
And here we have Barthes, dropping the mic.
And here we have Barthes, dropping the mic.
July 7, 2016
While some of the essays collected in Mythologies are inevitably dated, their basic premise – the idea of cultural phenomena, everything from washing powder and cars to wrestling matches and the face of Greta Garbo, as 'modern myths' – remains both relevant and accessible. Culminating in the longer, linguistics-heavy essay 'Myth Today', the book is intellectually demanding, but it's also playful and even funny at times. A challenging and thought-provoking break from fiction.
January 14, 2020
Farò finta di aver capito tutto
October 2, 2024
::انطباع عام::
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الإنسان هو كائن مُؤسْطِر بالضرورة. ونحن في عصر الصورة بامتياز.
يا ابن الكلب يا بارت! واو! يا للروعة! هذا الكتاب هو أفضل ما قرأت لهذا العام! وكنتُ قد عرفتُ عن هذا الكتاب من بعض مصادر كتاب فراس السواح عن الأسطورة. وهو كتاب أقولها بمنتهى الصدق لن تكون الشخص نفسه بعد الانتهاء من قراءته، فهذه الأساطير اليومية ستوهبك عينًا جديدًا ترى بها كل عمليات الأسطرة التي يقوم بها الإنسان الحديث في الميديا والحياة اليومية سواء أدرك ذلك أم لم يدركه. وهنا هي اللعنة الحقيقية لكونك قادر على تفكيك الأسطورة – لأنها بمجرد تفكيكها تفقد فعلها وبريقها وتتحول إلى مجرد دال مفرغ وميت. فالأسطورة إما أن يتم استيعابها كما هي دون أي إعمال فكري أرسطي، وإما أن تتحول إلى شكل ميت.
هناك بعض الأساطير اليومية التي تناولها بارت في هذا الكتاب لا يمكن أبدًا أن تفقد قيمتها مع الزمن، فهي مُعاشة كل يوم في الميديا والحياة السياسية. كلامه عن المصارعة والتصوير الفوتوغرافي والطعام المبهرج وإعلانات مساحيق التطهير والغسيل التي تنظف إلى (العمق) وذات (رغوة) كبيرة.. وكل ذلك نراه بشكل يوميًا أمامنا دون أن نكشف زيفه. نعم، نحن بشكل يومي نتعرض لكم هائل من الأساطير ونصدقها ونحب أن نصدقها حتى لو قمنا بتفكيكها – هذا لأنها مريحة وجميلة ومباشرة ولأنها تخلّد المعنى وتقدمه ببساطة كما هو. (خذ مثلاً فكرة البطل الكاريزما المخلّص الذي يصنع أسطورته بطريقة مفارقة بين حدي شديدي البُعد فهذا القائد هو منا، لكنه في الوقت ذاته يمتلك من الإمكانيات الخارقة التي تجعله قادرًا على انتشالنا من القاع الذي نحن فيه! وهكذا مبارك علينا تم خلق بطل أسطوري بختم الميديا الحديثة!) لكن هذه العملية هي خطيرة من ناحية تجميد الزمن والتاريخ وتوحيد القصة وجعلها مقُالة من جانب ذي سلطة تجعلها ذات قيمة زمنية بغض النظر عن قيمتها من ميزان الحقيقة.
أما عن الترجمة، فماذا تنتظرون يا سادة؟ هذا الكتاب بأي لغة سيكون صعبًا سواء بالإنجليزية أو الفرنسية أو العربية – فهو نص يتكلم عن النصوص، ولغة تتكلم عن اللغة، وأسطورة تتحدث عن الأسطورة. لابد من نباهة شديدة من القارئ وتخيل للصورة الذهنية التي يتكلم عنها بارت والانفعال الداخلي معه لكي يتم فهم ما يتحدث عنه. نعم، هناك بعض المشاهد والصور والمواقف التي يستعيرها ليدلل على كلامه قد تكون بعيدة عن ثقافتنا وببعض البحث عنها على الانترنت تغدو مفهومة، لكن بشكل عام فكرة الكتاب ثورية ومدمرة للأعصاب حقيقية وفي كل فقرة كنت أصيح: يخرب بيتك يا بارت! إنتا إزاي جبتها كدا؟ - لغة بارت وصفية لدرجة مرعبة، لديه مخزون لغوي جبار، والمترجم –أشعر به في البعيد- ينتحب من زخم النص ومفرداته الغنية. فهنا أشيد بمجهود المترجم.
لا بد من إتباع هذا الكتاب بكتاب بارت الآخر: الكتابة عند الدرجة صفر
إذن كيف السبيل للنجاة من خداع الأسطورة؟ - حسنًا ينهي بارت مقاله بنظرة متشائمة للغاية أنه لا مفر من صراع مستمر بين الأيدولوجية التي تطبّعها الأسطورة، وبين الثورية التي تقدمها اللغة الشعرية البكر الخام. لهذا أقول فعلاً نحن نحتاج إلى شعراء، نحتاج إلى لغة خام، لغة تعيد لنا معاني الأشياء، شعراء يحوّلون الشكل إلى المعنى، وليس محترفين ميديا يؤسطرون المعاني إلى أشكال جامدة مخلّدة. إن الطريقة الوحيدة لتفكيك خداع الأسطورة هو التعامل معها كما قال بارت: كأنك تنظر إلى مشهد من زجاج شفاف من سيارتك. يمكنك التناقل باستمرار بين التركيز على البللور الشفاف وعزل الصورة، أو التركيز على الصورة وعزل شفافية البللور. بهذه الطريقة الذهنية يمكننا فصل الدال (الشكل) عن المدلول (المعنى) وبالتالي نصطاد الخداع الذي فعلته الأسطورة. نحن نحتاج إلى شعراء لا إلى مؤسطرين!!!
***
::في سطور::
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هو كتاب صدر عام 1957 وهو عبارة عن مجموعة من المقالات التي نُشرت لأول مرة من عام 1954 إلى عام 1956، وهي تبحث في ميل أنظمة القيم الاجتماعية المعاصرة إلى خلق الأساطير الحديثة اليومية في الصحافة والإعلام والسينما والمجتمع. كما ينظر بارت أيضًا إلى علم العلامات (السيميولوجيا) لتفكيك عملية خلق الأسطورة، ثم يستند إلى نظام دي سوسير لتحليل العلامات بإضافة مستوى ثانٍ حيث يتم رفع العلامات إلى منظومة ثانية لمستوى الأسطورة.
***
::الكتاب::
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ينقسم الكتاب إلى قسمين: أولاً أسطوريات؛ والأسطورة اليوم. حيث يتألف القسم الأول من مجموعة من المقالات حول أساطير يومية حديثة مختارة يحللها بارت بأسلوبه المميز، بينما يشتمل القسم الثاني على تحليل عام ومعمق لنظرية بارت حول الأسطورة من حيث هي منظومة علاماتية مزدوجة. يسرد القسم الأول مجموعة مختارة من الظواهر الثقافية الحديثة، والتي تم اختيارها لمكانتها كأساطير يومية معاشة وما تحيله من معنى إضافي تم منحها إياها. يحلل بارت كل فصل إحدى هذه الأساطير، بدءًا من دماغ أينشتاين وحتى مساحيق الغسيل والمنظفات.
مثلاً في مقال عن النبيذ والحليب، يصف بارت الصورة التي تم أسطرتها حول النبيذ الأحمر وكيف تم تبنيه كمشروب وطني فرنسي، وكيف يُنظر إليه باعتباره مُعادلًا اجتماعيًا ومشروب البروليتاريا، ويرجع ذلك جزئيًا إلى أنه يُنظر إليه على أنه يشبه الدم (كما في القربان المقدس) ويشير إلى أنه لا يتم إيلاء سوى القليل من الاهتمام للآثار الضارة للنبيذ الأحمر على الصحة كضرورة ليس أكثر، ولكن بدلاً من ذلك يُنظر إليه على أنه يمنح الحياة وينعش في الطقس البارد، كما يرتبط بكل أساطير الدفء، وفي ذروة الصيف، بكل صور الظل، أي بكل الأشياء الباردة والمتألقة. في فصل آخر، يستكشف بارت أسطورة مصارعة المحترفين. حيث على عكس رياضة الملاكمة التي هدفها فوز ملاكم على آخر وإنهائه، فإن هدف القتال الممسرح الأكروباتي ليس اكتشاف من سيفوز أو إظهار التميز، بل إنه مشهد مستنفذ المسرحيّة يمثل المفاهيم الأساسية البدائية للمجتمع عن الخير والشر، والمعاناة والهزيمة والعدالة. إن الممثلين الذين يتظاهرون بأنهم مصارعون، مثل الشخصيات في التمثيل الإيمائي، يصورون صورًا نمطية مبالغ فيها للضعف البشري: الخائن، والمتغطرس، والدمية الأنثوية. ويتوقع الجمهور أن يشاهدهم وهم يعانون ويعاقبون على تجاوزاتهم لقواعد المصارعة في نسخة ممسرحة من أيديولوجية العدالة في المجتمع، ولهذا يشعر الجمهور بالرضا ليس عن العواطف الصادقة، بل عن التصوير الصادق للعواطف حتى لو كانت مجرد مسرحية!
***
::إذن ما هي الأسطورة؟::
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الأسطورة هي كلام: أي منظومة تواصل تمثل رسالة. فهي شكل وصيغة دلالة وليست موضوعًا أو فكرة. كل شيء إذن يمكن أن يكون أسطورة. لا تتحدد الأسطورة بموضوع رسالتها ولكن تتحدد بالطريقة التي بها تُقال. إذن كل شيء يمكن أن يكون أسطورة لأن الكون إيحائي بلا حدود. الأسطورة هي كلام يختاره التاريخ: فلا يمكن أن تنبثق الأسطورة من طبيعة الأشياء. لا يمكن أن تُعرّف الأسطورة بموضوعها أو مادتها لأن أية مادة يمكن أن تزوّد اعتباطًا بدلالة. يتكون الكلام الأسطوري من مادة اشتُغل عليها بالفعل لجعلها مناسبة لتحقيق تواصل مناسب: فجميع مواد الأسطورة سواء أكانت مصورة أم مكتوبة لكونها تفترض وجود وعي دال، أمكن للمرء أن يفكر فيها باستقلال عن مادتها. والصورة مثلها مثل الكتابة تستدعي معجمًا. ولا توجد أساطير أبدية لأن التاريخ البشري هو الذي يحوّل الواقع إلى حالة كلام. إنه هو وحده وهو الوحيد الذي يضبط حياة اللغة الأسطورية وموتها. إذن الأسطورة هي منظومة علاماتية (سيميولوجية). تدرس الأسطورية الأفكار وهي في ثياب الشكل – فهي جزء من السيميولوجيا من حيث هي شكل وجزء من الإيدولوجيا من حيث هي تاريخ. للأسطورة وظيفة مزدوجة: فهي تعيّن وتبلّغ، وهي تُفهم وتفرض. الأسطورة لا تخفي شيئًا ووظيفتها أن تشوّه لا أن تزيل فلا ثمة استتار في الأسطورة بل عملية تطبيع للواقع وإدخاله في الطبيعيّ. الأسطورة هي كلام مسروق ومستعاد لكن في غير مكانه. إذن الأسطورة لا تتبرأ من الأشياء، بل على العكس من ذلك، وظيفتها هي التحدث عنها: هي ببساطة تنقيها، وتجعلها بريئة، وتبنيها في الطبيعة وفي الأبدية، وتمنحها وضوحًا ليس هو وضوح التفسير، ولكنه وضوح بيان الحقيقة. الأسطورة تطبّع المحظور.
***
::البر��وازية الصغرى والأسطورة اليوم::
----------------------
البرجوازية الصغرى هي اليوم وبجلاء في مرحلة من الاستعمارية الأسطورية. كل قطيعة واسعة شيئًا ما لليوميّ تفضي إلى الاحتفال. وأصبح ما يطلبه الجمهور هو صورة العاطفة لا العاطفة في حد ذاتها. والفضل الأكبر للاحتراق يكون ذا طابع اقتصادي: فنقودي التي دفعتها مثلاً باعتباري متفرجًا صار لها في النهاية مردود قابل للمراقبة.
يستشهد بارت بمفاهيم علم العلامات التي طورها فرديناند دي سوسير، الذي وصف الروابط بين المعنى (المدلول) وتمثيله اللغوي (مثل الكلمة، الدال) وكيف يرتبط الاثنان معًا من خلال العمل بهذه البنية، يواصل بارت إظهار فكرته عن الأسطورة كعلامة أخرى، بجذورها في اللغة، ولكن تمت إضافة شيء إليها. لذا، فمع الكلمة (أو وحدة لغوية أخرى) يجتمع المعنى (المحتوى المدرك) والصوت لتكوين علامة. ولتكوين أسطورة، تُستخدم العلامة اللغوية نفسها كدال، ويُضاف لها من ثمة معنى جديد، وهو المدلول الخاص بالأسطورة. ولكن وفقًا لبارت، لا يُضاف هذا بشكل تعسفي. على الرغم من أننا لسنا على دراية بذلك بالضرورة، إلا أن الأساطير الحديثة تُخلق لسبب في الأغلب يكون أيدولوجي في عالمنا المعاصر. وكما هو الحال في مثال النبيذ الأحمر، يتم تشكيل الأساطير من أجل إدامة فكرة المجتمع التي تلتزم بالأيديولوجيات الحالية للطبقة الحاكمة (البرجوازية الصغرى في فرنسا) ووسائل إعلامها (الميديا).
يقدم بارت أيضًا قائمة بالسمات البلاغية في الأساطير البرجوازية الحديثة:
1_ التلقيحية: تعترف الحكومة بالضرر الذي تسبب فيه إحدى المؤسسات. وبالتركيز على مؤسسة واحدة، تخفي الأسطورة تناقض النظام. وتتلخص التلقيحية في الاعتراف بالشر العرضي لمؤسسة ما مرتبطة بالطبقة من أجل إخفاء شرها الرئيسي. بالتالي تحصن محتويات الخيال الجماعي بتطعيم صغير من الشر المعترف به: فيُحمى هكذا من خطر تخريب معمم.
2_ حرمان التاريخ: يتم إزالة التاريخ الذي يقف وراء الأسطورة. ولا يتساءل الناس من أين أتت الأسطورة؛ فهم ببساطة يؤمنون بها لأنها أصبحت أمامهم ومفهومة ببساطة.
3_ تحديد الهوية: تسعى أيديولوجية البرجوازية إلى التشابه وتنكر كل المفاهيم التي لا تتناسب مع نظامها. إما أن تتجاهل البرجوازية الموضوعات التي تختلف عنها، أو تسعى جاهدة لجعل هذا الموضوع هو نفسه البرجوازية.
4_ الحشو: تحدد أساطير البرجوازية المفاهيم من خلال نفس المفاهيم بسبب فقر لغتها وعدم قدرتها على الإبلاغ فمثلاً المسرح هو المسرح. ويكفي أن يقول هذا التصريح شخص ذو سلطة لكي يضفي عليه القيمة اللازمة لتصديقه.
5_ اللالائية (لا هذا ولا ذاك): حيث يتم تعريف مفهومين من خلال بعضهما البعض، ويعتبر كلا المفهومين غير متسقين. فالخيرات تتلوها شرور مساوية لها في التنجيم مثلاً.
6_ تكميم النوعية: تقيس الأسطورة الواقع بالأرقام، وليس بالنوعية. بهذه الطريقة، تبسط الأسطورة الواقع بشكل مهين.
7_ المعاينة: الأسطورة لا تفسر الواقع. تؤكد الأسطورة صورة معينة للعالم دون تفسير تمامًا كما تفعل الأمثال.
***
::معادلات::
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دال (د.) + مدلول (م.) = علامة (ع.)
شكل (د.) + متصور (م.) = صورة (ع.)
مادي (د.) + معنى (م.) = دلالة (ع.)
ورد (د.) + عشق (م.) = ورد مُعشقن (ع.)
قارئ الأساطير (مغفل):- الأسطورة (لغة ما ورائية) + أيدولوجيا (أدلجة) + تحويل المعنى إلى شكل + تجميد التاريخ وتخليد الشكل + برجوازية تسعى لمصلحة تجميد أساطيرها + تطبيع الواقع في قصة منزوعة التاريخ
عالم الأساطير (مفكك ومستبعد):- لغة خام + تشعير (الماهية) أو الشعر الخام + تحويل الشكل إلى معنى + عدم اختزال التاريخ + ثورية وقلب لتجميد التاريخ + تعميق الواقع وتوسيعه (الماهية)
الأسطورة هي منظومة تكمن خاصتها في أنها تُبنى من سلسلة علاماتية توجد قبل وجودها: هو نظام علاماتيّ ثان.
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::صورة غلاف مجلة باري ماتش الذي يحللها بارت::
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"أنا عند الحلاق، ويُقدم لي عدد من باري ماتش. على الغلاف شاب زنجي يلبس زيًا عسكريًا فرنسيًا ويؤدي التحية العسكرية وعيناه مرفوعتان ومثبتتان بلا شك على طي علم ثلاثي اللون. هذا هو معنى الصورة لكني سواء أكنت ساذجًا أم لم أكن كذلك، فإني أفهم ما تعنيه الصورة لي: هي تعني أن فرنسا هي إمبراطورية كبرى، وأن جميع أبنائها ودون فروق في لون البشرة، يخدمون بوفاء تحت رايتها؛ وأنه ما من رد أفضل على من يُشنّع على استعمار مزعوم إلا همة هذا الأسود في خدمة من يُعتقد أنهم مضطهدوه. أجد نفسي مرة أخرى هنا أمام منظومة علامية قد رُفعت قيمتها: يوجد دال قد تشكل هو ذاته بعد من منظومة موجودة سلفًا (جندي أسود يؤدي التحية العسكرية الفرنسية)؛ ويوجد مدلول (هو هنا خليط قصديّ للفرنسة وللعسكرة)؛ وأخيرًا هناك حضور لمدلول عبر الدال."
***
::الأسطورة والسلطة::
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يسعى بارت إلى فهم العلاقات بين اللغة والقوة. ويفترض أن الأسطورة تساعد في إضفاء طابع طبيعي (تطبيع) على وجهات نظر (أيدولوجيات) عالمية معينة. فوفقًا لبارت، فإن الأسطورة تستند إلى تاريخ البشر، ولا يمكن للأسطورة أن تحدث بشكل طبيعي. هناك دائمًا بعض النوايا الاتصالية في الأسطورة. يمكن بسهولة تغيير الأسطورة أو تدميرها لأنها من صنع البشر. كما تعتمد الأسطورة على السياق الذي توجد فيه. من خلال تغيير السياق، يمكن للمرء تغيير تأثيرات الأسطورة. في الوقت نفسه، تشارك الأسطورة نفسها في إنشاء أيديولوجية أو تدعيمها. لا تسعى الأسطورة إلى إظهار الحقيقة أو إخفائها عند إنشاء أيديولوجية، بل تسعى إلى الانحراف عن الواقع أي تشويهه. الوظيفة الرئيسية للأسطورة هي إضفاء طابع طبيعي على مفهوم أو اعتقاد ما. تطهر الأسطورة العلامات وتملأها بمعنى جديد وثيق الصلة بالنوايا لأولئك الذين يخلقون الأسطورة. وفي العلامة الجديدة لا توجد تناقضات يمكن أن تثير أي شكوك بشأن الأسطورة الناشئة. الأسطورة ليست عميقة بما يكفي لوجود هذه التناقضات؛ إن الأسطورة تبسط العالم من خلال جعل الناس يعتقدون أن العلامات لها معنى متأصل. إن الأسطورة تلغى تعقيد الأفعال البشرية، وتمنحها بساطة الجوهر، ولهذا هي محبوبة وشديدة التأثير.
إذن لماذا يؤمن الناس بالأسطورة؟ إن قوة الأسطورة تكمن في طابعها المثير للإعجاب المؤثر. إنها تسعى إلى مفاجأة الجمهور. هذا الانطباع أقوى بكثير من أي تفسيرات عقلانية يمكنها دحض الأسطورة. لذا، فإن الأسطورة لا تعمل لأنها تخفي نواياها، ولكن لأن نوايا الأسطورة أصبحت طبيعية ومعلن عنها. من خلال استخدام الأساطير، يمكن للمرء أن يجعل الإمبراطورية، أو الذوق للطراز الباسكيّ، أو أيدولوجية الحكومة، شيئًا طبيعيًا. كما يؤكد بارت أن الأسطورة هي خطاب غير مُسيس. كانت وجهة نظر بارت هي أن المجموعات أو الأفكار المهيمنة في المجتمع تصبح واضحة جدًا أو منطقية بحيث لا يتعين عليها لفت الانتباه إلى نفسها من خلال إعطاء نفسها اسمًا. إنها مجرد الحالة الطبيعية، والتي يمكن الحكم على كل شيء آخر من خلالها. فالبرجوازية تجعل مكانتها تخضع لعملية ترشيح سابقة حقيقية: تُعرَّف البرجوازية بأنها الطبقة الاجتماعية التي لا تريد أن تُسمى فتزيل الأسطورة فهمنا للمفاهيم والمعتقدات كما ابتكرها البشر. بدلاً من ذلك، تقدمهم الأسطورة كشيء طبيعي وبريء ونقي. بالاستعانة بكارل ماركس، يذكر بارت أن حتى أكثر الأشياء طبيعية تتضمن بعض جوانب السياسة. اعتمادًا على مدى قوة الجانب السياسي للأسطورة. هناك أساطير قوية وضعيفة إن نزع الصفة السياسية عن الأساطير القوية يحدث فجأة، لأن الأساطير القوية سياسية بشكل صريح. أما الأساطير الضعيفة فهي الأساطير التي فقدت بالفعل صفتها السياسية. ولكن من الممكن استعادة هذه الصفة.
***
::عالِم الأساطير::
--------------------
يشير بارت إلى ميل المفاهيم والسرديات والافتراضات المبنية اجتماعيًا إلى أن تصبح طبيعية في عملية الأسطرة، أي أن يتم أخذها دون أدنى شك على أنها مسلم بها داخل ثقافة معينة. ينهي بارت كتابه بالنظر إلى كيفية بناء الأساطير من قبل البرجوازية في مظاهرها المختلفة. يعود إلى هذا الموضوع في أعمال لاحقة بما في ذلك "نظام الموضة". وبالتالي يخرج عالِم الأساطير من هذا المأزق بحسب القدرة المتاحة له: سيهتم بطيبة النبيذ وليس بالنبيذ نفسه، تمامًا كما يهتم المؤرخ بإيدولوجيا باسكال، وليس بأفكاره في ذاتها.
فنحن أمام عالمين متنازعين: إما أن يُفترض واقع قابل تمامًا للنافذ على التاريخ والأخذ في أدلجته، وإما على العكس من ذلك أن يُفترض واقع يكون في نهاية الأمر غير قابل للاختراق ولا الاختزال وفي هذه الحالة يؤخذ في تشعيره. ويحسم بارت هذا الصراع بنظرة متشائمة: "أنا لا أرى حتى الآن توليفة بين الأيدولوجيا والشعر (أنا أعني بالشعر وبطريقة عامة جدًا البحث عن معنى الأشياء غير القابل للتصرف.) ... فنحن نبحر باستمرار بين الأداة وإزالة خداعها، عاجزين عن الإحاطة بأكمل وجه فيهما: لأنه إذا اخترقنا إلى داخل الكيان فنحن نحرره، ولكن نحن ندمره. وإذا نحن تركنا له وزنه الكامل، فنحن نحترم ذلك، ولكن نحن نستعيده أيضًا مخادعًا."
*.*.*.*.*
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الإنسان هو كائن مُؤسْطِر بالضرورة. ونحن في عصر الصورة بامتياز.
يا ابن الكلب يا بارت! واو! يا للروعة! هذا الكتاب هو أفضل ما قرأت لهذا العام! وكنتُ قد عرفتُ عن هذا الكتاب من بعض مصادر كتاب فراس السواح عن الأسطورة. وهو كتاب أقولها بمنتهى الصدق لن تكون الشخص نفسه بعد الانتهاء من قراءته، فهذه الأساطير اليومية ستوهبك عينًا جديدًا ترى بها كل عمليات الأسطرة التي يقوم بها الإنسان الحديث في الميديا والحياة اليومية سواء أدرك ذلك أم لم يدركه. وهنا هي اللعنة الحقيقية لكونك قادر على تفكيك الأسطورة – لأنها بمجرد تفكيكها تفقد فعلها وبريقها وتتحول إلى مجرد دال مفرغ وميت. فالأسطورة إما أن يتم استيعابها كما هي دون أي إعمال فكري أرسطي، وإما أن تتحول إلى شكل ميت.
هناك بعض الأساطير اليومية التي تناولها بارت في هذا الكتاب لا يمكن أبدًا أن تفقد قيمتها مع الزمن، فهي مُعاشة كل يوم في الميديا والحياة السياسية. كلامه عن المصارعة والتصوير الفوتوغرافي والطعام المبهرج وإعلانات مساحيق التطهير والغسيل التي تنظف إلى (العمق) وذات (رغوة) كبيرة.. وكل ذلك نراه بشكل يوميًا أمامنا دون أن نكشف زيفه. نعم، نحن بشكل يومي نتعرض لكم هائل من الأساطير ونصدقها ونحب أن نصدقها حتى لو قمنا بتفكيكها – هذا لأنها مريحة وجميلة ومباشرة ولأنها تخلّد المعنى وتقدمه ببساطة كما هو. (خذ مثلاً فكرة البطل الكاريزما المخلّص الذي يصنع أسطورته بطريقة مفارقة بين حدي شديدي البُعد فهذا القائد هو منا، لكنه في الوقت ذاته يمتلك من الإمكانيات الخارقة التي تجعله قادرًا على انتشالنا من القاع الذي نحن فيه! وهكذا مبارك علينا تم خلق بطل أسطوري بختم الميديا الحديثة!) لكن هذه العملية هي خطيرة من ناحية تجميد الزمن والتاريخ وتوحيد القصة وجعلها مقُالة من جانب ذي سلطة تجعلها ذات قيمة زمنية بغض النظر عن قيمتها من ميزان الحقيقة.
أما عن الترجمة، فماذا تنتظرون يا سادة؟ هذا الكتاب بأي لغة سيكون صعبًا سواء بالإنجليزية أو الفرنسية أو العربية – فهو نص يتكلم عن النصوص، ولغة تتكلم عن اللغة، وأسطورة تتحدث عن الأسطورة. لابد من نباهة شديدة من القارئ وتخيل للصورة الذهنية التي يتكلم عنها بارت والانفعال الداخلي معه لكي يتم فهم ما يتحدث عنه. نعم، هناك بعض المشاهد والصور والمواقف التي يستعيرها ليدلل على كلامه قد تكون بعيدة عن ثقافتنا وببعض البحث عنها على الانترنت تغدو مفهومة، لكن بشكل عام فكرة الكتاب ثورية ومدمرة للأعصاب حقيقية وفي كل فقرة كنت أصيح: يخرب بيتك يا بارت! إنتا إزاي جبتها كدا؟ - لغة بارت وصفية لدرجة مرعبة، لديه مخزون لغوي جبار، والمترجم –أشعر به في البعيد- ينتحب من زخم النص ومفرداته الغنية. فهنا أشيد بمجهود المترجم.
لا بد من إتباع هذا الكتاب بكتاب بارت الآخر: الكتابة عند الدرجة صفر
إذن كيف السبيل للنجاة من خداع الأسطورة؟ - حسنًا ينهي بارت مقاله بنظرة متشائمة للغاية أنه لا مفر من صراع مستمر بين الأيدولوجية التي تطبّعها الأسطورة، وبين الثورية التي تقدمها اللغة الشعرية البكر الخام. لهذا أقول فعلاً نحن نحتاج إلى شعراء، نحتاج إلى لغة خام، لغة تعيد لنا معاني الأشياء، شعراء يحوّلون الشكل إلى المعنى، وليس محترفين ميديا يؤسطرون المعاني إلى أشكال جامدة مخلّدة. إن الطريقة الوحيدة لتفكيك خداع الأسطورة هو التعامل معها كما قال بارت: كأنك تنظر إلى مشهد من زجاج شفاف من سيارتك. يمكنك التناقل باستمرار بين التركيز على البللور الشفاف وعزل الصورة، أو التركيز على الصورة وعزل شفافية البللور. بهذه الطريقة الذهنية يمكننا فصل الدال (الشكل) عن المدلول (المعنى) وبالتالي نصطاد الخداع الذي فعلته الأسطورة. نحن نحتاج إلى شعراء لا إلى مؤسطرين!!!
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::في سطور::
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هو كتاب صدر عام 1957 وهو عبارة عن مجموعة من المقالات التي نُشرت لأول مرة من عام 1954 إلى عام 1956، وهي تبحث في ميل أنظمة القيم الاجتماعية المعاصرة إلى خلق الأساطير الحديثة اليومية في الصحافة والإعلام والسينما والمجتمع. كما ينظر بارت أيضًا إلى علم العلامات (السيميولوجيا) لتفكيك عملية خلق الأسطورة، ثم يستند إلى نظام دي سوسير لتحليل العلامات بإضافة مستوى ثانٍ حيث يتم رفع العلامات إلى منظومة ثانية لمستوى الأسطورة.
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::الكتاب::
------
ينقسم الكتاب إلى قسمين: أولاً أسطوريات؛ والأسطورة اليوم. حيث يتألف القسم الأول من مجموعة من المقالات حول أساطير يومية حديثة مختارة يحللها بارت بأسلوبه المميز، بينما يشتمل القسم الثاني على تحليل عام ومعمق لنظرية بارت حول الأسطورة من حيث هي منظومة علاماتية مزدوجة. يسرد القسم الأول مجموعة مختارة من الظواهر الثقافية الحديثة، والتي تم اختيارها لمكانتها كأساطير يومية معاشة وما تحيله من معنى إضافي تم منحها إياها. يحلل بارت كل فصل إحدى هذه الأساطير، بدءًا من دماغ أينشتاين وحتى مساحيق الغسيل والمنظفات.
مثلاً في مقال عن النبيذ والحليب، يصف بارت الصورة التي تم أسطرتها حول النبيذ الأحمر وكيف تم تبنيه كمشروب وطني فرنسي، وكيف يُنظر إليه باعتباره مُعادلًا اجتماعيًا ومشروب البروليتاريا، ويرجع ذلك جزئيًا إلى أنه يُنظر إليه على أنه يشبه الدم (كما في القربان المقدس) ويشير إلى أنه لا يتم إيلاء سوى القليل من الاهتمام للآثار الضارة للنبيذ الأحمر على الصحة كضرورة ليس أكثر، ولكن بدلاً من ذلك يُنظر إليه على أنه يمنح الحياة وينعش في الطقس البارد، كما يرتبط بكل أساطير الدفء، وفي ذروة الصيف، بكل صور الظل، أي بكل الأشياء الباردة والمتألقة. في فصل آخر، يستكشف بارت أسطورة مصارعة المحترفين. حيث على عكس رياضة الملاكمة التي هدفها فوز ملاكم على آخر وإنهائه، فإن هدف القتال الممسرح الأكروباتي ليس اكتشاف من سيفوز أو إظهار التميز، بل إنه مشهد مستنفذ المسرحيّة يمثل المفاهيم الأساسية البدائية للمجتمع عن الخير والشر، والمعاناة والهزيمة والعدالة. إن الممثلين الذين يتظاهرون بأنهم مصارعون، مثل الشخصيات في التمثيل الإيمائي، يصورون صورًا نمطية مبالغ فيها للضعف البشري: الخائن، والمتغطرس، والدمية الأنثوية. ويتوقع الجمهور أن يشاهدهم وهم يعانون ويعاقبون على تجاوزاتهم لقواعد المصارعة في نسخة ممسرحة من أيديولوجية العدالة في المجتمع، ولهذا يشعر الجمهور بالرضا ليس عن العواطف الصادقة، بل عن التصوير الصادق للعواطف حتى لو كانت مجرد مسرحية!
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::إذن ما هي الأسطورة؟::
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الأسطورة هي كلام: أي منظومة تواصل تمثل رسالة. فهي شكل وصيغة دلالة وليست موضوعًا أو فكرة. كل شيء إذن يمكن أن يكون أسطورة. لا تتحدد الأسطورة بموضوع رسالتها ولكن تتحدد بالطريقة التي بها تُقال. إذن كل شيء يمكن أن يكون أسطورة لأن الكون إيحائي بلا حدود. الأسطورة هي كلام يختاره التاريخ: فلا يمكن أن تنبثق الأسطورة من طبيعة الأشياء. لا يمكن أن تُعرّف الأسطورة بموضوعها أو مادتها لأن أية مادة يمكن أن تزوّد اعتباطًا بدلالة. يتكون الكلام الأسطوري من مادة اشتُغل عليها بالفعل لجعلها مناسبة لتحقيق تواصل مناسب: فجميع مواد الأسطورة سواء أكانت مصورة أم مكتوبة لكونها تفترض وجود وعي دال، أمكن للمرء أن يفكر فيها باستقلال عن مادتها. والصورة مثلها مثل الكتابة تستدعي معجمًا. ولا توجد أساطير أبدية لأن التاريخ البشري هو الذي يحوّل الواقع إلى حالة كلام. إنه هو وحده وهو الوحيد الذي يضبط حياة اللغة الأسطورية وموتها. إذن الأسطورة هي منظومة علاماتية (سيميولوجية). تدرس الأسطورية الأفكار وهي في ثياب الشكل – فهي جزء من السيميولوجيا من حيث هي شكل وجزء من الإيدولوجيا من حيث هي تاريخ. للأسطورة وظيفة مزدوجة: فهي تعيّن وتبلّغ، وهي تُفهم وتفرض. الأسطورة لا تخفي شيئًا ووظيفتها أن تشوّه لا أن تزيل فلا ثمة استتار في الأسطورة بل عملية تطبيع للواقع وإدخاله في الطبيعيّ. الأسطورة هي كلام مسروق ومستعاد لكن في غير مكانه. إذن الأسطورة لا تتبرأ من الأشياء، بل على العكس من ذلك، وظيفتها هي التحدث عنها: هي ببساطة تنقيها، وتجعلها بريئة، وتبنيها في الطبيعة وفي الأبدية، وتمنحها وضوحًا ليس هو وضوح التفسير، ولكنه وضوح بيان الحقيقة. الأسطورة تطبّع المحظور.
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::البر��وازية الصغرى والأسطورة اليوم::
----------------------
البرجوازية الصغرى هي اليوم وبجلاء في مرحلة من الاستعمارية الأسطورية. كل قطيعة واسعة شيئًا ما لليوميّ تفضي إلى الاحتفال. وأصبح ما يطلبه الجمهور هو صورة العاطفة لا العاطفة في حد ذاتها. والفضل الأكبر للاحتراق يكون ذا طابع اقتصادي: فنقودي التي دفعتها مثلاً باعتباري متفرجًا صار لها في النهاية مردود قابل للمراقبة.
يستشهد بارت بمفاهيم علم العلامات التي طورها فرديناند دي سوسير، الذي وصف الروابط بين المعنى (المدلول) وتمثيله اللغوي (مثل الكلمة، الدال) وكيف يرتبط الاثنان معًا من خلال العمل بهذه البنية، يواصل بارت إظهار فكرته عن الأسطورة كعلامة أخرى، بجذورها في اللغة، ولكن تمت إضافة شيء إليها. لذا، فمع الكلمة (أو وحدة لغوية أخرى) يجتمع المعنى (المحتوى المدرك) والصوت لتكوين علامة. ولتكوين أسطورة، تُستخدم العلامة اللغوية نفسها كدال، ويُضاف لها من ثمة معنى جديد، وهو المدلول الخاص بالأسطورة. ولكن وفقًا لبارت، لا يُضاف هذا بشكل تعسفي. على الرغم من أننا لسنا على دراية بذلك بالضرورة، إلا أن الأساطير الحديثة تُخلق لسبب في الأغلب يكون أيدولوجي في عالمنا المعاصر. وكما هو الحال في مثال النبيذ الأحمر، يتم تشكيل الأساطير من أجل إدامة فكرة المجتمع التي تلتزم بالأيديولوجيات الحالية للطبقة الحاكمة (البرجوازية الصغرى في فرنسا) ووسائل إعلامها (الميديا).
يقدم بارت أيضًا قائمة بالسمات البلاغية في الأساطير البرجوازية الحديثة:
1_ التلقيحية: تعترف الحكومة بالضرر الذي تسبب فيه إحدى المؤسسات. وبالتركيز على مؤسسة واحدة، تخفي الأسطورة تناقض النظام. وتتلخص التلقيحية في الاعتراف بالشر العرضي لمؤسسة ما مرتبطة بالطبقة من أجل إخفاء شرها الرئيسي. بالتالي تحصن محتويات الخيال الجماعي بتطعيم صغير من الشر المعترف به: فيُحمى هكذا من خطر تخريب معمم.
2_ حرمان التاريخ: يتم إزالة التاريخ الذي يقف وراء الأسطورة. ولا يتساءل الناس من أين أتت الأسطورة؛ فهم ببساطة يؤمنون بها لأنها أصبحت أمامهم ومفهومة ببساطة.
3_ تحديد الهوية: تسعى أيديولوجية البرجوازية إلى التشابه وتنكر كل المفاهيم التي لا تتناسب مع نظامها. إما أن تتجاهل البرجوازية الموضوعات التي تختلف عنها، أو تسعى جاهدة لجعل هذا الموضوع هو نفسه البرجوازية.
4_ الحشو: تحدد أساطير البرجوازية المفاهيم من خلال نفس المفاهيم بسبب فقر لغتها وعدم قدرتها على الإبلاغ فمثلاً المسرح هو المسرح. ويكفي أن يقول هذا التصريح شخص ذو سلطة لكي يضفي عليه القيمة اللازمة لتصديقه.
5_ اللالائية (لا هذا ولا ذاك): حيث يتم تعريف مفهومين من خلال بعضهما البعض، ويعتبر كلا المفهومين غير متسقين. فالخيرات تتلوها شرور مساوية لها في التنجيم مثلاً.
6_ تكميم النوعية: تقيس الأسطورة الواقع بالأرقام، وليس بالنوعية. بهذه الطريقة، تبسط الأسطورة الواقع بشكل مهين.
7_ المعاينة: الأسطورة لا تفسر الواقع. تؤكد الأسطورة صورة معينة للعالم دون تفسير تمامًا كما تفعل الأمثال.
***
::معادلات::
-------
دال (د.) + مدلول (م.) = علامة (ع.)
شكل (د.) + متصور (م.) = صورة (ع.)
مادي (د.) + معنى (م.) = دلالة (ع.)
ورد (د.) + عشق (م.) = ورد مُعشقن (ع.)
قارئ الأساطير (مغفل):- الأسطورة (لغة ما ورائية) + أيدولوجيا (أدلجة) + تحويل المعنى إلى شكل + تجميد التاريخ وتخليد الشكل + برجوازية تسعى لمصلحة تجميد أساطيرها + تطبيع الواقع في قصة منزوعة التاريخ
عالم الأساطير (مفكك ومستبعد):- لغة خام + تشعير (الماهية) أو الشعر الخام + تحويل الشكل إلى معنى + عدم اختزال التاريخ + ثورية وقلب لتجميد التاريخ + تعميق الواقع وتوسيعه (الماهية)
الأسطورة هي منظومة تكمن خاصتها في أنها تُبنى من سلسلة علاماتية توجد قبل وجودها: هو نظام علاماتيّ ثان.
***
::صورة غلاف مجلة باري ماتش الذي يحللها بارت::
---------------------------
"أنا عند الحلاق، ويُقدم لي عدد من باري ماتش. على الغلاف شاب زنجي يلبس زيًا عسكريًا فرنسيًا ويؤدي التحية العسكرية وعيناه مرفوعتان ومثبتتان بلا شك على طي علم ثلاثي اللون. هذا هو معنى الصورة لكني سواء أكنت ساذجًا أم لم أكن كذلك، فإني أفهم ما تعنيه الصورة لي: هي تعني أن فرنسا هي إمبراطورية كبرى، وأن جميع أبنائها ودون فروق في لون البشرة، يخدمون بوفاء تحت رايتها؛ وأنه ما من رد أفضل على من يُشنّع على استعمار مزعوم إلا همة هذا الأسود في خدمة من يُعتقد أنهم مضطهدوه. أجد نفسي مرة أخرى هنا أمام منظومة علامية قد رُفعت قيمتها: يوجد دال قد تشكل هو ذاته بعد من منظومة موجودة سلفًا (جندي أسود يؤدي التحية العسكرية الفرنسية)؛ ويوجد مدلول (هو هنا خليط قصديّ للفرنسة وللعسكرة)؛ وأخيرًا هناك حضور لمدلول عبر الدال."
***
::الأسطورة والسلطة::
-----------------------
يسعى بارت إلى فهم العلاقات بين اللغة والقوة. ويفترض أن الأسطورة تساعد في إضفاء طابع طبيعي (تطبيع) على وجهات نظر (أيدولوجيات) عالمية معينة. فوفقًا لبارت، فإن الأسطورة تستند إلى تاريخ البشر، ولا يمكن للأسطورة أن تحدث بشكل طبيعي. هناك دائمًا بعض النوايا الاتصالية في الأسطورة. يمكن بسهولة تغيير الأسطورة أو تدميرها لأنها من صنع البشر. كما تعتمد الأسطورة على السياق الذي توجد فيه. من خلال تغيير السياق، يمكن للمرء تغيير تأثيرات الأسطورة. في الوقت نفسه، تشارك الأسطورة نفسها في إنشاء أيديولوجية أو تدعيمها. لا تسعى الأسطورة إلى إظهار الحقيقة أو إخفائها عند إنشاء أيديولوجية، بل تسعى إلى الانحراف عن الواقع أي تشويهه. الوظيفة الرئيسية للأسطورة هي إضفاء طابع طبيعي على مفهوم أو اعتقاد ما. تطهر الأسطورة العلامات وتملأها بمعنى جديد وثيق الصلة بالنوايا لأولئك الذين يخلقون الأسطورة. وفي العلامة الجديدة لا توجد تناقضات يمكن أن تثير أي شكوك بشأن الأسطورة الناشئة. الأسطورة ليست عميقة بما يكفي لوجود هذه التناقضات؛ إن الأسطورة تبسط العالم من خلال جعل الناس يعتقدون أن العلامات لها معنى متأصل. إن الأسطورة تلغى تعقيد الأفعال البشرية، وتمنحها بساطة الجوهر، ولهذا هي محبوبة وشديدة التأثير.
إذن لماذا يؤمن الناس بالأسطورة؟ إن قوة الأسطورة تكمن في طابعها المثير للإعجاب المؤثر. إنها تسعى إلى مفاجأة الجمهور. هذا الانطباع أقوى بكثير من أي تفسيرات عقلانية يمكنها دحض الأسطورة. لذا، فإن الأسطورة لا تعمل لأنها تخفي نواياها، ولكن لأن نوايا الأسطورة أصبحت طبيعية ومعلن عنها. من خلال استخدام الأساطير، يمكن للمرء أن يجعل الإمبراطورية، أو الذوق للطراز الباسكيّ، أو أيدولوجية الحكومة، شيئًا طبيعيًا. كما يؤكد بارت أن الأسطورة هي خطاب غير مُسيس. كانت وجهة نظر بارت هي أن المجموعات أو الأفكار المهيمنة في المجتمع تصبح واضحة جدًا أو منطقية بحيث لا يتعين عليها لفت الانتباه إلى نفسها من خلال إعطاء نفسها اسمًا. إنها مجرد الحالة الطبيعية، والتي يمكن الحكم على كل شيء آخر من خلالها. فالبرجوازية تجعل مكانتها تخضع لعملية ترشيح سابقة حقيقية: تُعرَّف البرجوازية بأنها الطبقة الاجتماعية التي لا تريد أن تُسمى فتزيل الأسطورة فهمنا للمفاهيم والمعتقدات كما ابتكرها البشر. بدلاً من ذلك، تقدمهم الأسطورة كشيء طبيعي وبريء ونقي. بالاستعانة بكارل ماركس، يذكر بارت أن حتى أكثر الأشياء طبيعية تتضمن بعض جوانب السياسة. اعتمادًا على مدى قوة الجانب السياسي للأسطورة. هناك أساطير قوية وضعيفة إن نزع الصفة السياسية عن الأساطير القوية يحدث فجأة، لأن الأساطير القوية سياسية بشكل صريح. أما الأساطير الضعيفة فهي الأساطير التي فقدت بالفعل صفتها السياسية. ولكن من الممكن استعادة هذه الصفة.
***
::عالِم الأساطير::
--------------------
يشير بارت إلى ميل المفاهيم والسرديات والافتراضات المبنية اجتماعيًا إلى أن تصبح طبيعية في عملية الأسطرة، أي أن يتم أخذها دون أدنى شك على أنها مسلم بها داخل ثقافة معينة. ينهي بارت كتابه بالنظر إلى كيفية بناء الأساطير من قبل البرجوازية في مظاهرها المختلفة. يعود إلى هذا الموضوع في أعمال لاحقة بما في ذلك "نظام الموضة". وبالتالي يخرج عالِم الأساطير من هذا المأزق بحسب القدرة المتاحة له: سيهتم بطيبة النبيذ وليس بالنبيذ نفسه، تمامًا كما يهتم المؤرخ بإيدولوجيا باسكال، وليس بأفكاره في ذاتها.
فنحن أمام عالمين متنازعين: إما أن يُفترض واقع قابل تمامًا للنافذ على التاريخ والأخذ في أدلجته، وإما على العكس من ذلك أن يُفترض واقع يكون في نهاية الأمر غير قابل للاختراق ولا الاختزال وفي هذه الحالة يؤخذ في تشعيره. ويحسم بارت هذا الصراع بنظرة متشائمة: "أنا لا أرى حتى الآن توليفة بين الأيدولوجيا والشعر (أنا أعني بالشعر وبطريقة عامة جدًا البحث عن معنى الأشياء غير القابل للتصرف.) ... فنحن نبحر باستمرار بين الأداة وإزالة خداعها، عاجزين عن الإحاطة بأكمل وجه فيهما: لأنه إذا اخترقنا إلى داخل الكيان فنحن نحرره، ولكن نحن ندمره. وإذا نحن تركنا له وزنه الكامل، فنحن نحترم ذلك، ولكن نحن نستعيده أيضًا مخادعًا."
*.*.*.*.*
January 3, 2010
My advice is to read this book backwards. Some of the short essays, including "Wine and Milk," "Steak and Chips," "The Blue Guide," and "The Lost Continent," are exemplary demonstrations of the ideas laid out in the long essay, "Myth Today," that concludes the book. There Barthes argues for a dense handful of concepts related to the signifier and the signified, noting especially the extent to which mythology tries to depict things properly categorized as "historical" in a manner that we might call "natural." For instance, the image of Uncle Sam, signifying an appeal to patriotic fealty firmly rooted in history, adopts the trope of "uncle" to make the historical enterprise in question--the US government--appear as natural as a family relation.
I was reading the final essay in an airport, and the thought occurred to me that the Dept. of Homeland Security employs another aspect of Barthes' mythology in its use of "Threat Level ORANGE" or "Threat Level YELLOW." A historical thing that ultimately defies metrics--the threat posed to our country by terrorists--is nevertheless rendered "natural" by assigning it a color from nature. Further examples abound, and as the two above examples show, Barthes' final essay in this volume makes for stimulating reading when mapped onto political landscapes. Yet the lack of specificity and the abundance of abstraction in the final essay recommend its being read first, before the short essays that precede it in the volume. They supplement, fill out, and exemplify the abstractions set forth in the final essay.
I was reading the final essay in an airport, and the thought occurred to me that the Dept. of Homeland Security employs another aspect of Barthes' mythology in its use of "Threat Level ORANGE" or "Threat Level YELLOW." A historical thing that ultimately defies metrics--the threat posed to our country by terrorists--is nevertheless rendered "natural" by assigning it a color from nature. Further examples abound, and as the two above examples show, Barthes' final essay in this volume makes for stimulating reading when mapped onto political landscapes. Yet the lack of specificity and the abundance of abstraction in the final essay recommend its being read first, before the short essays that precede it in the volume. They supplement, fill out, and exemplify the abstractions set forth in the final essay.
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