An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson 3: Mythologies: Naturalisation, Politics and everyday life

An A to Z of Theory | Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: Naturalisation, Politics and everyday life

Mythology and Naturalisation

Barthes claims that dominant institutions lull us into the belief that the current system is natural. It portrays the way things are as natural and eternal. It also portrays conventional, ‘common sense’ ways of viewing things as natural and obvious.

For instance, old reactionaries in Barthes’s day (and some today) would maintain that it is natural that men and women are attracted to each other, that certain ‘races’ are superior to others, and that a woman’s place is in the home. People who think in ‘bourgeois’ ways assume that everyone has to ‘pay their way’ and that life is a transaction.

For Barthes, all such arrangements and ways of seeing are never natural. They are socially constructed. The way they are constructed is through the use of signs. Furthermore, the appearance that they are natural is also created with signs. People misuse the word ‘natural’ when they mean socially conventional, moral, or beautiful. What seems ‘natural’ or conventional varies with social settings and time-periods.

This is not to say that everything is semiotic. Barthes believes that there is a certain residue to such phenomena as birth, death, sex, sleep and eating which is natural. However, the way people do these things is far more significant than the fact of doing them. Even when dealing with ‘natural’ acts, it is far more important to understand how they are turned into signs.

The problem for Barthes is that most people need 'absolute truths'; they cannot indulge in the high-thinking and probing analysis of semiotic structuralist writers. Barthes is a sort of intellectual flâneur, other people have duties, responsibilities, and a need for order and are thus responsive to myths.

In order to make sense of their lives, to add order and structure, it is necessary to have some 'simple truths'. You cannot have everything moving and relative. Myths, on this basis are necessary in order for social constructs to operate. The alternative is anarchy. 

Myth in Politics and Everyday Life 

Myth opens up in a space where active relations to others or to objects are closed down.
 

Take for instance the phenomenon of moral regulation in tabloid discourse. A particular incident in everyday life – a child breaking a window, a Muslim youth arrested for terrorism, an asylum seeker being convicted of reckless driving – is stripped out of its context and taken to signify something else. It stands for moral collapse, and ‘what’s wrong with this country’.

Look more closely at the examples and something else might appear. Perhaps the Muslim youth is an innocent victim of repressive policies. Perhaps the child is a bullying or abuse survivor, working through frustration. Perhaps the asylum seeker drove too fast because of the pressures of the underground economy s/he was forced to work in due to a lack of legal work and benefits. All of these things are possible, and would come to mind in a suspension of judgement.

But mythologies are geared towards instant judgements: ‘this means that’. They produce equally instant responses: cracking down, punishing, restoring ‘order’.

People who consume myths believe that they are acting on what they see, hear or experience. They’re talking ‘clearly’ and ‘directly’ about ‘life’. In fact they’re not seeing what really happened at all, because their myths are getting between themselves and the events they interpret.

Mythology and Capitalism

According to Barthes, capitalist society is especially prone to mythical signification. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to be named, especially at the level of ideology and everyday life. This is a fundamental part of capitalist functioning. In particular, it is the way a particular arrangement of the world is turned into an image of the world.

The bourgeois move of refusing to name oneself occurs by moving from an ‘anti-physis’ – the refusal of engagement with a real world of praxis – to a ‘pseudo-physis’ – an appearance of a real world which is actually a world of signs. ’Pseudo-physis’ denies to people their ability to remake the world by setting narrow limits on how people are to live so as not to upset the dominant order.
In everyday life, signifiers are nearly all dependent on bourgeois ideology, anonymised in the form of myth. They carry a particular perspective on humanity’s relationship to the world which comes from the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois norms are wrongly viewed as those of natural order. Bourgeois man seems to be eternal man. This is partly because these norms are practiced nationwide, and come to seem self-evident.

For example, today’s petty-bourgeoisie (think Daily Mail readers) are attached to bourgeois norms from sixty years ago, or over a century ago – ideas of self-abnegation, explicit authoritarianism, hatred of nonconformity and strict moral regulation.

Robinson unwittingly perpetrates a myth here: "think Daily Mail readers". He is reading the myth himself with us as the audience consuming the 'fact' that Daily Mail readers are all attached to bourgeoisie norms. It is a function of Barthes theory that it it is not specifically an anti capitalist theory but any form of dogma, including, for example, socialist dogma (the most explicit of all) and religion.

Today’s bourgeoisie are smarter – they’ve moved on to new forms of managerialism which seek to shape environments, produce compliance through micro-management and graded rewards and punishments, and command in a way which seems inclusive, while making their own framing role unconditional and invisible.




This is a really good point: the idea that our control mechanisms have morphed into something more subtle.