A Discussion of Myth, Roland Barthes and the Power of Persuasive Language
Barthes begins his definition of myth by stating that myth is not confined to oral speech. It encompasses photography, films, reporting, shows, and publicity. (110) Myth is a type of speech that is composed entirely of pre-fabricated speech patterns. (110) He uses the term “second order signification” in order to describe the way in which myth disguises its true intentions. By taking an already formed linguistic sign (composed of a signifier and a signified) and draining it of its meaning, he is able to form a system that is imbued with the myth-concept, in turn causing the formation of a second order of signification. (114) For example, Barthes cites the cover of Paris-March which depicts a black French soldier, ostensibly saluting the tricolor. While image-wise this has a first-order meaning of an individual serving in the military and saluting, the inner-workings of myth have distorted the image to become a statement about French imperialism.
Barthes explains that myth uses language to construct its system of rhetoric. (115) Myth, Barthes explains, has two functions: It points out and notifies us and also makes us understand something and imposes it on us. (117)
Myth cannot be defined by its objects, nor can its material – any object can be arbitrarily endowed with meaning, Barthes claims. (110) One of the most difficult concepts for people to grasp is the fact that myth and meaning are elusive. Myth reduces language, photography, or any other type of communicator into a purely signifying function as soon as they are tapped for use. They are only united in that they are all brought down to the status of a mere language. (114) Myths implant whole new meanings onto benign objects. (119) Barthes claims that the relationship between meaning and form is that of “hide and seek”. (118) Myth also has an unlimited resource of signifiers. All the underlying concept needs to do in order to reinvent itself is to choose another signifier. (120) Barthes uses the term “language-robbery” (131) when describing myth in order to express how easily myth can manifest itself into our everyday conversation under false pretenses.
Myth takes a signifier and empties it of all meaning. It impoverishes history until meaning is held at a distance far, far away. Barthes doesn’t say that myth destroys meaning, it only masks and/or distorts it. (118) Myth strives to turn history into nature. (130)
Barthes states that there are three ways in which one can read a myth: by creating myth (focusing on the empty signifier), by deciphering the myth (focusing on the full signifier), and by consuming the myth (focusing on the mythical signifier). (128)
There are seven ways in which myth is able to conceal its underlying presence: Inoculation (which consists of admitting the accidental evils, one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion), the privation of history (here, history evaporates – things have always been the way they are and will continue to be this way in the future), identification (whereby any “Otherness” is ignored, shunned, or reduced to “sameness” – a scandal which threatens the myth’s existence), tautology (meaning things are as they are “just because” – this weak defense is only halfway-salient when backed up by authority), neither/norism (stating two opposites against each other and rejecting them both), the quantification of quality (where myth economizes intelligence and reduces all quality to quantity), and statement of facts (where myth tends to assert the “truth” based on “common sense” or proverb-type phrases). (150-154)
Barthes’s most compelling focus, however, is his ideas on how myth operates in society. In society, (at least insofar as Barthes views French, or perhaps Western society) the dominant force consists of the bourgeoisie. In fact, Barthes sees this power and influence to be so widespread as to “ex-nominate” itself. (138) He claims that “bourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in doing so lose its name without risk”.(139) Bourgeois ideology, in other words, becomes universal, its power reinforced by its ubiquitous and unnamed nature.
As stated earlier, Barthes contends that myth is that which robs images of their historicity in order to make them serve to perpetuate the dominant bourgeois culture. This, ultimately (because “statistically, myth is on the right”) serves to showcase and conserve bourgeois culture, framing its brief, historical characteristics as somehow eternal, inevitable and not to be challenged.
Barthes analysis depends on the bourgeois nature of myth and the supposed cultural dominance of the bourgeoisie. He repeatedly places a negative connotation on the notion of myth. But who is to say that that myth is necessarily negative? It seems as if Barthes is overly pessimistic about the function of myth in society. He views his own role as a mythologist as some sort of savior. The point that consistently eludes Barthes is that perhaps people don’t want to be saved. He believes his role is to expose all of the underlying negativity and point the world towards a more truthful, positive understanding of the world’s reality. Barthes also equates myth with “the big lie”, by which the status quo is peacefully and absentmindedly maintained. At the same time, Barthes does not convince his audience that the maintenance of the status quo is such an awful thing. Although Barthes’ arguments make sense a majority of the time, his essay is not adequately convincing when it comes to his ethical treatment of the notion of myth and the role of the mythologist.
What Barthes doesn’t account for is that sometimes myth and the perpetuation of certain truisms are essential for the successful workings of broad-ranging organizations such as governments and mass media. In journalism, there is a similar concept called “propaganda” that works in many of the same ways as myth. Propaganda was first discussed at length by Jacques Ellul in the 1930s. Propaganda is effort by states or institutions in modern mass society to modify values and behavior on a culture-wide basis by “reaching and encircling the whole man and all men”. (Ellul 11) Propaganda infiltrates what we learn by playing on our will or on his needs, through our conscious and our unconscious. Basically, it simplifies the world and it furnishes us with a complete system for explaining it. Propaganda, says Ellul, is necessary on a broad scale to ensure the successful operation of governments and large private organizations functioning in all mass societies, even when these societies describe themselves as being democracies. Ellul says that the individual in mass society who ultimately receives and internalizes this information actually “craves propagandized information, from the bottom of his being”. (Ellul 11) This is because propaganda creates most of the world-defining content we receive.
Walter Lippmann elaborates on this point in his book entitled, “Public Opinion”. He states that human beings tend to create a “pseudo-environment” that they place between themselves and the overwhelming complexity of human existence. They do this mainly because the “real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage within it.” (Lippmann 15)
Perhaps in the way that man craves propaganda, man craves myth as well? Barthes, in his writings, doesn’t seem to think so. He does believe that myth has a powerful effect on the lives and minds of the people within a society, but his ideas concerning the innate evils of myth are ones that could stand to be re-evaluated.
Works Cited:
1. Barthes, Roland. Selections from Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972)
2. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)
3. Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1957)
