Barthes’s Mythologies

I’m taking the lazy way out on my Blog posting by attaching a Precis I wrote for Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies. “Interestingly, I felt like I was reading a manual on being “French”,  as if I were peeking underneath the folds of the “French Zeitgeist” and finding nothing but emptiness. Too bad “Mythologies” was written in 1910s–I wondering what a Barthes treatment of contemporary corporate media culture would render… I bet the entries would probably take up 1000 pages, if not more. Enjoy the Precis.

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The basic message that Barthes seems to convey is that all things which can be read as text (objects, people, pictures, etc, and other representations) can be made into “myth”. To be made into a myth is to be emptied of historicity, to be removed from the contingent present. Barthes describes a myth in various ways: a myth is a type of speech, a naturalized symbol, a text stolen of its expressivity. A myth is depoliticized speech that is removed from the interactions in the world and made into ideology that is static and deliberate.

One “myth” that comes to mind could be the picture of the “Tank Man” standing before an army of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The tank man has been emptied of his history—after all, the man probably had to go home after his act of defiance and eat dinner. Yet, rather than be viewed in its full dynamism, the image of the tank man has become a natural symbol for the resistance of Democracy in the face of oppression. No other interpretations on the image seems to be as compelling as the mythology that has been achieved.

Bathes makes many other illustrations of the myths present in everyday life, and the entire first half of the book is dedicated to this project of breaking down and analyzing daily mythologies. The second half of the book takes a different turn and instead provides the argumentative thrust for his “myth busting” essays.  Basically, Barthes breaks down the semiotic structure of language to demonstrate how “mythologization” works on a linguistic level. He describes in detail how signification is attributed to a “signifier-signified” relationship, how second-order associations are constructed, and how meaning is re-constructed to create the mythology.

Barthes’s project of deconstructing the myths of everyday life seems to be situated in a kind critical theory that is a post-Marxist interrogation of the “manufactured ideologies” that have become naturalized through time. This approach also seems quite Nietzschean, as it attempts to reaffirm the possibility of radical re-signification by focusing on the seemingly trivial objects and symbols in the contingent present (Wine and Milk, wrestling, children toys, etc). The audience of such a work seems to be those who are engaged in a similar project of re-evaluating the social norms.

A few questions I had while reading Barthes’s Mythologies:
Where is “myth” located on the trafficking between the literal and the figurative?
Is it considered “artistic” in Wilde’s sense for a symbol to take on the figure of “myth”?
Is there an author for “myth making”? If so, who claims authority? Can it be controlled?
Does Nietzsche’s “How one becomes what one is” relate to the project of myth making?
What are the social implications of consuming mythologies?