Mythologies II by Roland Barthes Notes

Myth Today

• Myth is a type of speech, a system of communication, and a message that can be conveyed through various means such as language (oral or written), photography, cinema, sports, shows, publicity, painting, posters, rituals, and objects.
• Barthes analyzes myth as a kind of language using Ferdinand Saussure's semiology to study signs as meaning-making.

Semiology

• Semiology is the study of signs as meaning-making.

Signs

• Signs consist of signifiers and signifieds.
• Signs are concepts in our minds that correlate to objects, people, and events (referents) in the world.
• These concepts stand for and stand in the place of whatever they refer to.
• Example: The word "cat" refers to the cat but also stands in place of the actual cat.
• Signifier: the word "cat" or a photograph of a cat.
• Signified: the image you get in your head when you say "cat"; the meaning of the combination of sounds and letters.
• Neither the signifier nor the signified is the actual cat itself.

Arbitrary Relationship

• The relationship between a sign and a referent is arbitrary.
• A cat can be represented by "cat" in English, "gato" in Spanish, or "michi" in Quechua.
• Example: Green lights mean go, but it could just as easily have been a blue or orange light.

Meaning Construction

• Meaning is constructed by the system of language.
• The fact that English speakers hear "cat" and think of the object "cat" is a result of the language, not of something inherent in the cat.
• Meaning doesn’t exist in the object itself; it is produced by a system of representation.
• Concepts or meanings are organized and classified into complex relations, forming a system (a language).
• Musical notation and scientific notation are also languages in this sense.

Relational Meaning

• Words/signs only have meaning in relation to other words.
• "Cat" has meaning in relation to "dog", "lion", etc.
• These systems or languages are shared between human beings.
• We exist within a system of representation, a language, a set of codes, and a culture, all of which precede us, making us cultural subjects rather than simply biological individuals.

Prison-House of Language

• The structuralist model posits that individuals are born into pre-existing languages, codes, and systems, forcing them to use social codes even when expressing private thoughts.
• Saussure’s distinction: langue vs. parole.
  • Parole: acts of speech, individual sentences, attempts to communicate.
  • Langue: the deep structure of language, grammatical codes.
• Learning a foreign language forces one to produce speech acts (parole) with only imperfect knowledge of the language’s deep structures (langue).

Culture as Language

• Barthes studies culture as if it were a language.
• Cultural objects convey meaning, and cultural practices depend on meaning, thus they must use signs.
• The aim is to deduce the underlying codes and rules through which objects and practices produce meaning, not just to look at the surface signs.
• To look for something like the grammar governing the rules and place of fashion or sports.
• Analyze langue (language) rather than just parole (acts of speaking).
• What is the underlying structure that makes advertising a common practice in society?

Second-Order Semiological System

• Culture is a second-order semiological system.
• First-order system: the word "cow" denotes the animal cow.
• Second-order system: the cow as a cultural sign; for some cultures, it is food (a burger), for others, it is sacred and prohibited from being eaten.
• A sign in a language (signified + signifier) becomes a signifier on the level of culture as it acquires another meaning.
• $Signifier + Signified = Sign \rightarrow Form + Concept = Signification$
  (on the level of metalanguage).

"quia ego nominor leo"/"I am a lion"

• Example of a student reading a Latin sentence.
• First level: the letters form a sentence that reads "I am a lion."
• Second level: the sentence means "I am a grammatical example of Latin."
• This second level wouldn’t apply to a Roman writer reading a friend's poem containing the same sentence; the meaning differs.
• For us, reading a grammar book, the same sentence signifies a grammatical example.

Emptying Out of Meaning

• "When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains."
• Reading "I am a lion" in its original context suggests things like: "I am an animal, a lion, I live in a a certain country, I have just been hunting".
• The richness of the original sentence recedes to make room for the grammatical example.

Dynamic of Meaning

• The original meaning isn't completely lost; it remains in the background and can be accessed again.
• It is both there and not there, which is essential to myth.
• The thing becomes a new container (form) and acquires a new meaning:
• the sentence is now a grammatical example.
• This is shaped by time, history, and pedagogic tradition.

Signified and Signifier in Myth

• Signified and signifier are both manifest in myth.
• Myth does not hide; it distorts by emptying out the form of its first level of meaning.
• It is amputated: the lion is deprived of memory but not existence.
• There is an interplay of old and new meaning; it is there but at the service of a new concept.
• Metaphor: a train window through which you see the countryside.
  • You can focus on the glass, and the countryside becomes hazy, or you can focus on the countryside, and the window becomes a means to that end.
  • The window disappears as such, but both the countryside and the window are present.

Example: African Man Saluting French Flag

• Image: African man saluting the French flag in Paris Match (1960, independence of French colonies).
• Intention: to promote an image (myth) of French imperialism to French audiences, including the idea of liberty/fraternity/equality as a result of colonial rule.
• The intention is purified, made absent by the "facticity" implied by the image.
• The image naturalizes the French Empire; the young African man is "frozen" and signifies French imperialism.
• The image tries to erase the history of colonial oppression and the fact that allegiance to the French flag would be contested.
• This isn't a myth for us because it doesn't seem natural or common-sense.

How to Be a Myth-Reader

• It's harder to read myths when you're immersed in them; need to perceive both levels of signification at once.
• See the glass as a thing as you look through to the countryside.
• Perceive the myth as a "full signifier" and perceive the distortion it undergoes to become empty for another level of meaning.
• Don't just unmask the myth from a critical distance, or you'll miss its function and effect.
• Don't just dismiss it from a position of superiority; that reveals nothing about how myths are lived by those under their meaning.
• Barthes is formulating a different critical approach from traditional ideological critique.

Myths Turn History into Nature

• Myth is language defined by intention more than literal sense, but its intention is frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by literal sense; made to seem innocent, natural.
• Being a myth-reader means seeing history, seeing something as intended, instead of just how things are.

The Fish in Water

• Michel Foucault: "The fish never discovers that it lives in the water. In fact, since he lives immersed in it, his life goes by without noticing its existence. Similarly, behavior that is normalized in a dominant cultural setting becomes invisible."

Bourgeois Ideology

• Bourgeois rule works through anonymous ideology (seemingly without origin or author).
• The whole of France is steeped in this ideology, which normalizes bourgeois representations of the relations between man and the world.
• These 'normalized' forms attract little attention, obscuring their origin.

Examples

• The typist who identifies with a big wedding she can't afford exemplifies how the bourgeois institution becomes a norm everyone aspires to.
• Ornamental cookery in Elle magazine: cookery based on disguise. It sells you the "idea" of a certain kind of cooking, involving ornaments and ostentation, not actually learning to cook.

Plastics

• The piece on plastics revolves around technical scientific progress and transformation of nature.
• Plastic contains the idea of infinite transformation.
• "The scope of the transformations gives man the measure of his power.”
• Price to pay: plastic hardly exists as a substance; it is a 'shaped' substance.
• Hierarchy of substances abolished: the whole world can be plasticized.

Einstein’s Brain

• The Einstein piece also heralds the power of man over nature.
• Einstein's brain is seeking to open up the secret of the universe, his brain described as a machine.
• The way his brain is talked about preserves the power of religion since Einstein fails at unlocking the secret of the universe.

Blue-Guide

• Governed by "the picturesque" (cult of nature/puritanism/mountainous landscapes).
• Denial of history: the landscape of Spain reduced to religious monuments.
• People reduced to 'types' [disease of thinking in essences: bourgeois mythology of man].
• It is an uninhabited world of monuments.
• There's no mention of the fascism of Franco’s regime (there is in fact latent support of Franco).

Dominici

• There is no place for the Other in the bourgeois version of the world.
• The piece on Dominici tells us about the presumed universalism of the language of law and literature.
• The old peasant from the Alps is accused in a language he cannot understand, based on literary conventions.
• “We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders.”

Other Myths