Mythologies

Mythologies (1972; 1957 in French)
By Roland Barthes

Synopsis: French literary critic Barthes attempts to show the ways in which the bourgeois try to naturalize myth. Each chapter focuses on a different myth or symbol and discusses what that symbol/object has come to represent. Includes things like wrestling, fringe bangs signaling "Ancient Roman-ness," the platonic beauty of certain faces, wine, steak as symbolizing vigor, Einstein's brain as symbolizing man's triumph over nature, photos of political candidates, etc. "Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion" (129). "The naturalization of the concept...[is] the essential function of myth" (131). This is one of the goals of the bourgeois, to get people to see their ideas as true realities/facts, and not as the constructs that they are. If the bourgeois can get people to see myths as natural or as a matter of common sense, then they can control reality, in a way; can get others to believe that their (the bourgeois) system, is the naturally right and true system (this is my take on him, at least).

Interesting Specifics:

"Myth is a type of speech" (109).

Signifier + signified = sign

Signifiers: "Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full" (124).

"Myth is always a language robbery" (131).

"Myth is depoliticized speech" (143); it purifies things and "makes them innocent" (143).

"Myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts" (143).

"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth" (146).

There are no left-wing myths.

"The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it" (155).

Interacts With;
Barthes is supposedly a structuralist (i.e. looks are things as eternal; ahistorical) on the cusp of poststructuralism. But, you cannot do poststructuralist myth and symbol because poststructuralism is all about being contingent on history, politics, class, conditions, etc; myth, by definition, transcends all these things.

Apparently Barthes believes that all myths are bad - no matter who wields them - because they are inherently oppressive.