After I read the Barthes text, I cut & pasted the places in the text where I had highlighted/outlined/noted something that I saw as pertaining directly to the way that he was defining myth and describing myth’s functioning. Here they are:
· Myth is tasked with giving an historical intention a natural justification and making contingency appear eternal.
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· The life and death of mythical language is ruled by human history’s ability to convert reality into speech.
· Myth is a type of speech chosen by history and defined by a constituent ambiguity (it is defined by its intention more than by its literal sense.)
· Myth is speech stolen and restored.
· Myth cannot possibly evolve from a *nature* of things.
· Mythical speech interacts with its subjects even as it is representing them.
· Mythical concepts can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely.
· Mythical concepts can be destroyed by history.
· Does not hide the concept, the signification, signifier, or the meaning or form.
· Distorts the concept, the signification, signifier, or the meaning or form but the distortion is not an obliteration.
· A ubiquity occurs in myth: its point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning.
· Myth requires motivated form/signifier.
· In terms of motivation, myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc.\
· Myth can be received by: focusing on an empty signifier, letting the concept fill the form without ambiguity (this is static and analytical and destroys the myth) or; focusing on a full signifier, distinguishing the meaning and the form and therefore focusing on the distortion and receiving it as an alibi (this is also static and analytical and destroys the myth) or; focusing on the mythical signifier as on an inextricable whole made of meaning and form, therefore receiving ambiguity in the signification and living the myth as a story at once true and unreal (this is dynamic and consumes the myth).
· Myth’s function is to empty reality.
· Myth is depoliticized speech in a bourgeois society but some myths are strong and some are weak and this level of strength/weakness and this level partly determines the fortitude and speed of the depoliticization
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· Myth is a value
· Myth’s function is to talk about things (not to deny them) and to purify them and make them innocent, giving them natural justification.
· The purpose of myth is to assign/give a natural justification to an historical intention.
· Mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world. Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. This unveiling (which is carries out) is therefore a political act.
· Our current alienation arises from our inability to achieve anything other than an unstable grasp of reality. And yet this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.
When I see his ideas/text listed this way, some seem contradictory. Or maybe they “problematize” (I hate that word) the way we think about myth or provide entry ways to understanding the placement of myth, media culture, and the ways that media can operate.
For example, “Mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world. Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. This unveiling (which is carried out) is therefore a political act.” This seems to bump up against Barthes statements about the depoliticized nature of myth as speech.
Also, if “myth requires a motivated form/signifier,” how can a form/signifier have a motivation if it has been naturalized by myth and if it is devoid of meaning on its own? Doesn’t the signification strip or cleanse the concept from the form as it naturalizes it?
Last, back to the portion of the text that says: “Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.” At the end of the text, when Barthes says “Our current alienation arises from our inability to achieve anything other than an unstable grasp of reality. And yet this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge,” isn’t he saying (with the first quote) that the reconciliation can’t actually be reassuring because the alienation is purposefully attempting to make us the alienation?
I do, however, feel pretty comfortable with my summary of the way I’m seeing Barthes, posted on Ning:
I’m understanding Barthes to say that cultural myths are constructed by the bourgeois –via its production and its use of cultural phenomena (e.g., artifacts, objects, ideas, messages) – and for the bourgeois – in that it serves as a foundation for its ideology and is a basis of the power of its ideology to transform the “reality of the world into an image of the world” (16). And, “because the structuring of language enables the structuring of ideologies in any kind of media” (to quote Anne Wysocki), other social structures and systems that have power could be substituted for this example of the bourgeois. They also can be seen as constructing cultural myths to support and communicate and perpetuate their ideology as transforming the reality of the world into its own image of the world. Barthes defines myth as a pure ideographic system of communication (i.e. it is a message) that transforms history into nature…. that naturalizes the concepts about which it communicates.
Barthes uses semiotics as his methodology to track and explain both the operations of this production and use and the after-effects of this production and use. (He uses a lot of the text’s early real estate to flesh-out, define, rationalize, and explain the effects of using semiotics and the role of the mythology reader.) I understand Barthes to be saying that myth is both mediated and acts as a highly-influential mediator and that the bourgeois has successfully exploited this nature and abilities of myth to mediate so that it can self-perpetuate itself. Barthes says that the production and use of cultural phenomena to construct cultural myths in support of this ideology is accomplished by exploiting certain characteristics of myth and by myth’s operations and functions, including by: distorting the underlying concept; transforming history into nature; and its fundamental nature wherein it naturalizes the concepts about which it communicates.
