An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: A Critical Theory of Myths
In the second of his series on Roland Barthes, political theorist Andrew Robinson presents the French author's theory of myths.
Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.
Myth is a metalanguage. It turns language into a means to speak about itself. However, it does this in a repressive way, concealing the construction of signs. The system of myths tends to reduce the raw material of signifying objects to similarity.
Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy which motivates them. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, myths don’t hide anything. Instead, myths inflect or distort particular images or signs to carry a particular meaning. Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the sign.
Barthes’s main objection to myth is that it removes history from language. It makes particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen. It thus transforms history into nature. Its function is to freeze or arrest language. It usually does this by reducing a complex phenomenon to a few traits which are taken as definitive.
This is the key to Barthes' theory myth: it is a bad thing; it distorts and freezes, in effect making a connotation into a denotation, the "goes without saying" problem, the "truth" that is actually a convenient social construct.
Crucially, myths remove any role for the reader in constructing meanings. Myths are received rather than read. A message which is received rather than read does not require an interpretation through a code. It only requires a certain cultural knowledge.
The consumer of myth must here be differentiated from others who actually do read myths. To the semiotician, like Barthes, a myth is just an ‘alibi’, a way of covering up the lack of ground which essences really have. To a producer of myths, such as a newspaper editor choosing a cover photo, they are simply examples or symbols, consciously chosen. In either case, the myth is not ‘received’ as such. Both the journalist and the semiotician knows very well that the myth is constructed.
According to Barthes, someone who consumes a myth – such as most tabloid readers – does not see its construction as a myth. They see the image simply as the presence of the essence it signifies. For instance, they see in the saluting black soldier the presence of French imperiality. They are then convinced that what they’ve seen is a fact, a reality, even an experience – as if they’d actually lived it. It is this kind of reader who reveals the ideological function of myth.
It might be easier to substitute 'producer' of myths here rather than 'reader'.
Barthes sees myth as functioning in a similar way to Althusserian interpellation. It calls out to the person who receives it, like a command or a statement of fact. The content of the injunction is to identify the sign with the essence.
A rare example of where there is some unification of theory.
As a result of myth, people are constantly plunged into a false nature which is actually a constructed system. Semiotic analysis of myth is a political act, establishing the freedom of language from the present system and unveiling the constructedness of social realities. The contingent, historical, socially constructed capitalist system comes to seem as ‘life’, ‘the world’, ‘the way it is’.
Myth is always clear when seen from the standpoint of the signifier which has been robbed. For instance, the mythical nature of the use of the image of the black soldier is apparent if the soldier’s actual narrative is known or considered.
Another aspect of the functioning of myth is that it refuses the explanatory or analytical level. It states facts and posits values, but it does not use theories to explain social phenomena. Facts are taken as self-present, not as mysteries to be explained. The statement of facts or values without explaining them gives an illusory clarity, making it seem that they are obvious, they go without saying.
The goes without saying point is one of Barthes' strongest arguments in my view.
Barthes lists seven common techniques or figures of myth:
1) Inoculation – admitting a little bit of evil in an institution so as to ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. For instance, admitting the existence of ‘a few bad eggs’ in the police so as to cover up the abusive nature of official police practices.
2) Removing history – making it seem like social phenomena simply ‘exist’ or are there for the viewer’s gaze, eliminating both causality and agency. Neoliberalism, for instance, is often treated as ‘globalisation’ or ‘modernisation’, as an abstract economic necessity rather than a political strategy.
3) Identification of the other with the self – projecting inner characteristics onto the other. For instance, in trials, treating a deviant person as a version of the self which has gone astray, based on a view of crime as rooted in human nature. The actual person, their motives and meanings are written out of such accounts.
4) Tautology – treating the failure of language as expressing the essence of a thing – “theatre is theatre”, “Racine is Racine”, or “just because, is all”. Barthes believes this device is an order not to think.
5) Neither-norism – refusing radical differences between phenomena by combining them in a kind of middle ground marked by immobility and permanence. The Third Way is a current example.
6) Quantification of quality – treating differences in kind as differences in degree.
7) Statements of fact without explanation – ‘that’s just the way it is’. The idea of ‘common sense’ is used to command the pursuit of truth to stop at a certain point.
In the second of his series on Roland Barthes, political theorist Andrew Robinson presents the French author's theory of myths.
Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.
Myth is a metalanguage. It turns language into a means to speak about itself. However, it does this in a repressive way, concealing the construction of signs. The system of myths tends to reduce the raw material of signifying objects to similarity.
Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy which motivates them. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, myths don’t hide anything. Instead, myths inflect or distort particular images or signs to carry a particular meaning. Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the sign.
Barthes’s main objection to myth is that it removes history from language. It makes particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen. It thus transforms history into nature. Its function is to freeze or arrest language. It usually does this by reducing a complex phenomenon to a few traits which are taken as definitive.
This is the key to Barthes' theory myth: it is a bad thing; it distorts and freezes, in effect making a connotation into a denotation, the "goes without saying" problem, the "truth" that is actually a convenient social construct.
Crucially, myths remove any role for the reader in constructing meanings. Myths are received rather than read. A message which is received rather than read does not require an interpretation through a code. It only requires a certain cultural knowledge.
The consumer of myth must here be differentiated from others who actually do read myths. To the semiotician, like Barthes, a myth is just an ‘alibi’, a way of covering up the lack of ground which essences really have. To a producer of myths, such as a newspaper editor choosing a cover photo, they are simply examples or symbols, consciously chosen. In either case, the myth is not ‘received’ as such. Both the journalist and the semiotician knows very well that the myth is constructed.
According to Barthes, someone who consumes a myth – such as most tabloid readers – does not see its construction as a myth. They see the image simply as the presence of the essence it signifies. For instance, they see in the saluting black soldier the presence of French imperiality. They are then convinced that what they’ve seen is a fact, a reality, even an experience – as if they’d actually lived it. It is this kind of reader who reveals the ideological function of myth.
It might be easier to substitute 'producer' of myths here rather than 'reader'.
Barthes sees myth as functioning in a similar way to Althusserian interpellation. It calls out to the person who receives it, like a command or a statement of fact. The content of the injunction is to identify the sign with the essence.
A rare example of where there is some unification of theory.
As a result of myth, people are constantly plunged into a false nature which is actually a constructed system. Semiotic analysis of myth is a political act, establishing the freedom of language from the present system and unveiling the constructedness of social realities. The contingent, historical, socially constructed capitalist system comes to seem as ‘life’, ‘the world’, ‘the way it is’.
Myth is always clear when seen from the standpoint of the signifier which has been robbed. For instance, the mythical nature of the use of the image of the black soldier is apparent if the soldier’s actual narrative is known or considered.
Another aspect of the functioning of myth is that it refuses the explanatory or analytical level. It states facts and posits values, but it does not use theories to explain social phenomena. Facts are taken as self-present, not as mysteries to be explained. The statement of facts or values without explaining them gives an illusory clarity, making it seem that they are obvious, they go without saying.
The goes without saying point is one of Barthes' strongest arguments in my view.
Barthes lists seven common techniques or figures of myth:
1) Inoculation – admitting a little bit of evil in an institution so as to ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. For instance, admitting the existence of ‘a few bad eggs’ in the police so as to cover up the abusive nature of official police practices.
2) Removing history – making it seem like social phenomena simply ‘exist’ or are there for the viewer’s gaze, eliminating both causality and agency. Neoliberalism, for instance, is often treated as ‘globalisation’ or ‘modernisation’, as an abstract economic necessity rather than a political strategy.
3) Identification of the other with the self – projecting inner characteristics onto the other. For instance, in trials, treating a deviant person as a version of the self which has gone astray, based on a view of crime as rooted in human nature. The actual person, their motives and meanings are written out of such accounts.
4) Tautology – treating the failure of language as expressing the essence of a thing – “theatre is theatre”, “Racine is Racine”, or “just because, is all”. Barthes believes this device is an order not to think.
5) Neither-norism – refusing radical differences between phenomena by combining them in a kind of middle ground marked by immobility and permanence. The Third Way is a current example.
6) Quantification of quality – treating differences in kind as differences in degree.
7) Statements of fact without explanation – ‘that’s just the way it is’. The idea of ‘common sense’ is used to command the pursuit of truth to stop at a certain point.
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