Demystification: A Dialogue between Barthes and LefebvreAuthor(s): Michael KellyReviewed work(s):Source: Yale French Studies, No. 98, The French Fifties (2000), pp. 79-97Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903229 .Accessed: 13/10/2012 20:42

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MICHAEL KELLY

Demystification: A Dialogue Between Barthes and Lefebvre

Mystification was a ubiquitous motif in France during the 1 950s. It was common currency in the political polemics of the time, and it also played an important role in the emergence of cultural criticism. In par- ticular, it formed a point of convergence between Roland Barthes and Henri Lefebvre, two of the most influential French writers in this tra- dition. Both developed a sustained critical reflection on the domain of everyday life, drawing on the resources of literary criticism, philoso- phy, and social theory. But they are rarely discussed together. By ex- amining their approaches to the question of mystification, and the links between them, it will become clear that the ideas of Barthes and Lefebvre were developed in dialogue and, for a period at least, converged in a common project.

The relationship between Barthes and Lefebvre is acknowledged fleetingly in some of the broader surveys of intellectual movements of the period. Mark Poster, in his wide ranging Existential Marxism, notes that, as an early editor of the review Arguments, Barthes had connec- tions with various currents of independent Marxism, and that his use of structuralism to analyze everyday life was akin to that of Lefebvre. He also surmises that Barthes's Mythologies probably influenced Le- febvre.' Kristin Ross, in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, draws on the con- tribution of both writers to the analysis of everyday life, but does not explore their intellectual affinities.2 Eve Tavor Bannet, discussing Barthes and other major structuralists, acknowledges that they are in various ways indebted to the work of early left-wing critics of modern

1. Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France. From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 313.

2. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

YFS 98, The French Fifties, ed. Susan Weiner, C 2000 by Yale University.

79

80 Yale French Studies society, like Lefebvre.3 This debt can be traced in their perceptions of society, of the functioning of the symbolic order, and of the subject's place within them. However, in discussing Barthes she emphasizes his perception that Marxism has failed. She also alludes to Lefebvre's cri- tique of structuralism, which is generally the context in which Le- febvre is mentioned in studies of Barthes.4 Otherwise, Lefebvre rarely features in discussions of Barthes, or Barthes in discussions of Lefebvre. Their intellectual footprints do not usually overlap, and the dialogue between them has largely gone unnoticed. It is the purpose of this arti- cle to reconstruct it.

There is some biographical evidence that Barthes and Lefebvre were friends and neighbors.5 And although the focus of this study is the con- ceptual exchange between them, it is pertinent to identify a biograph- ical dimension, in order to set a more concrete historical context for their intellectual relationship. Lefebvre was fourteen years older than Barthes, but the two men knew each other well from the late 1940s, and by all accounts became friends. Among other things they shared com- mon roots in the South-West of France, in the Pyrenees where Lefebvre was born and Barthes spent his childhood, and where both of them re- turned regularly, often visiting each other in their respective family homes.6 They were both students at the prestigious Paris lycee Louis- le-Grand, albeit a generation apart.7 There were similarities in their ca- reer trajectories, including the experience of precarious employment, and both became academic sociologists, though without losing their

3. Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Fou- cault, Lacan (London: Macmillan, 1989), 233.

4. See for example: Rick Rylande, Roland Barthes (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994),5; Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes, Structuralism andAfter (London: Methuen, 1982),21.

5. The principal biographical sources used in the following discussion are: Jean-Louis Calvet, Roland Barthes 1915-1980 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), available in English as Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah Wykes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and R6mi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l'aventure du siecle (Paris: M6tailie, 1988). There is also an informative entry on Lefebvre in the "Maitron": Nicole Racine, "Lefebvre, Henri, Frangois," in Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrierfran- Sais. Le Maitron, CD-ROM (Paris: Editions de l'Atelier, 1997). In Calvet, there are two anecdotal references to Lefebvre, where his name is misspelled as Lefevre. Hess offers a small number of anecdotal references to Barthes.

6. Lefebvre was born in 1901 in Hagetmau in the Landes; Barthes was born in 1915, and spent most of his childhood in Bayonne. Lefebvre subsequently took a house further south in Navarrenx, while Barthes's mother took a house in Hendaye and later moved to Urt. All of these places are within a radius of 30 miles in the South-West corner of France.

7. Lefebvre studied at Louis-le-Grand circa 1914-17, Barthes studied there 1930-34 (Hess, 21-25; Calvet, 40-51).

MICHAEL KELLY 81

passionate interest in the arts, literature, and ideas. They both spent much of the 1950s in research posts at the CNRS in Paris.8 This in- cluded a period from 1956 when they were both attached to the same section of sociology. In the early 1960s, they moved on to permanent academic posts, Barthes to senior positions at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris, which specialized in social sciences, and Le- febvre to a chair of sociology first at Strasbourg and then at Nanterre. From the late 1940s, both men circulated in the same milieu of Parisian left-wing intellectuals, on the margins of the communist party (of which Lefebvre was a member until 1958) and of Sartrean existential- ism (they both published articles in Les temps modernes). They had strong affinities with independent Marxists such as Georges Fried- mann and Edgar Morin. Morin in particular was a strong link between them,9 and led them both into involvement with the group around the review Arguments, which had an influential voice within the non- communist left from 1956 to 1962. They therefore often met in both professional and social contexts, at meetings of the Arguments editor- ial board, at thesis examinations, at each other's homes, or in Latin Quarter restaurants. In short, despite their differences, the two intel- lectuals prove to have led surprisingly intertwined lives. They did not lack informal opportunities to pursue a dialogue, which rarely emerges explicitly into the formal published arena.

The issue of demystification provides a common point of focus, around which their interests gravitated during the 1950s. It was not a new issue. Claims that those in political or social power may be seek- ing to confuse and deceive have a long history in France, as in many other countries. And the denunciation of mystification has long been a feature of public discourse in France. There are many reasons why it became so prevalent during the 1950s, a period that Nathalie Sarraute aptly called the "era of suspicion."10 Though Sarraute is concerned with a malaise in the novel, her diagnosis of profound mutual suspi- cion can readily be extended beyond the readers and authors of novels. It points to a wider social suspicion that the producers of imagined or constructed narratives are deliberately mendacious, and that their con-

8. The Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) was, and still is, the main agency providing state support for fundamental research in French universities.

9. Lefebvre, for example, shared an office with Morin at the CNRS, while Barthes was a close friend of Morin's wife Violette (Hess, 165; Calvet, 137).

10. Nathalie Sarraute, L'&re du soup~on (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). The essay from which the title is taken was first published in 1950.

82 Yale French Studies sumers are receptive only to stereotypes. The political and social cir- cumstances offered many opportunities to confirm this climate of sus- picion, in which three factors were particularly significant. First, the Cold War was entering its mature phase, as the two globally opposed camps settled into what John Le Carre labeled the "looking-glass war. " 1 1 This was echoed in an institutionalized Manicheanism, which encouraged a preoccupation with masks and deceptions, and nestled deep into everyday life. Second, the wave of postwar prosperity fueled the emergence of a "consumer society," which brought the wonders of modern technology into the domestic sphere. It placed a premium on the efficacy of marketing and other techniques, which Vance Packard called the "hidden persuaders," as well as increasing suspicion of the power these might wield.12 And third, in France particularly, the state was revitalizing its long tradition of censorship and news management, as it strained to retain its control on reporting of the collapse of its colo- nial empire. Taken together, these factors helped to ensure that mysti- fication remained a widespread public preoccupation.

Henri Lefebvre had been a critic of mystification since the 1930s. Together with his collaborator, Norbert Guterman, he had developed a theory of mystification and the mystified mind in the context of a re- formulation of Marxism. 13 Lefebvre's pre-eminent role in the early de- velopment of Marxist philosophy is well documented.14 He was the main exponent of a nondogmatic humanist version of Marxism, based on the theory of alienation, which emerged as the principal alternative to Stalinist Marxism in France. His reflection on mystification sprang from the fact that many workers supported political movements of the right, including fascism and Nazism. This was uncomfortable for left- wing movements, especially the communists, who considered that they themselves represented the true interests of workers. In a some- what polemical work, Lefebvre and Guterman attempted to analyze ideological processes to discover the emergence of alienation within consciousness. Rejecting the Cartesian notion that consciousness is a

11. See John Le Carr6, The Looking-Glass War (London: Heinemann, 1965). 12. See Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957). 13. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, "La Mystification: Notes pour une cri-

tique de la vie quotidienne," Avant-poste 2 (August 1933), 91-107; Henry Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, La conscience mystifige (Paris: Gallimard, 1936).

14. See Poster, Existential Marxism; Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Ox- ford: Blackwell, 1982); Alfred Schmidt, "Henri Lefebvre and Contemporary Interpreta- tions of Marx," in Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, eds., The Unknown Dimension. Eu- ropean Marxism since Lenin (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 322-41.

MICHAEL KELLY 83

guarantor of truth, and the Leninist notion that it is purely a reflection of objective conditions, they identified consciousness as a site of strug- gle, where deception and self-deception are common. And they as- serted the important role played by ideology, especially when deployed by the state. This analysis was not well received in communist circles in the 1930s, where the role of ideology in social development was re- garded as wholly subordinate to the economic infrastructure. Lefebvre reports the angry reaction of George Politzer that "there is no mysti- fied consciousness, there are only hoaxers (mystificateurs)." 15 Politzer was an early collaborator with Lefebvre in the embryonic left-wing in- tellectual movements in the 1920s, and had since become a leading spokesman on intellectual matters for the French Communist Party. His clear implication was that Lefebvre and Guterman were hoaxers, who were attempting to bamboozle the people with complicated but irrelevant abstractions about ideas and ideology.

After the war, Lefebvre returned to the issue of mystification in one of his best-known books, Critique of Everyday Life (1947).16 Tracing the ways in which French writers and artists had responded to the mod- ern world over a century, he argued that they have rejected the real im- poverishment of everyday life under capitalism, and sought to escape into various forms of mystical unreality. This has exacerbated a fun- damental ambiguity in human life in which the imagined world has been more valued and better known than the real world. The result is that people have become increasingly ignorant and disempowered in their real lives. Lacking the knowledge to decipher the human land- scape around us, he suggests:

We perceive everyday life only in its familiar, trivial, inauthentic guises. How can we avoid the temptation to turn our backs on it? Like the magnificent fruit and the beautiful creatures of temptation-which crumble to ashes should we touch them-myths, "pure" poetry, mys- teries, await us with open arms. [Critique of Everyday Life, 133]

As an example of these myths, Lefebvre offers the typical response of towndwellers, strolling through the countryside. They are enchanted by the pastoral idyll they see, unaware of the material processes that

15. Lefebvre, La somme etlereste (Paris: M6ridiens Klincksieck, 1989), 458. The text was first published in 1959.

16. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, 1. Introduction (Paris: Grasset, 1947). The second edition, containing a hundred-page Foreword (Paris: L'Arche, 1958), available in English as Critique of Everyday Life, 1. Introduction, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 199 1). Quotations are from the English text.

84 Yale French Studies

produce it. A deeper satisfaction would come, in Lefebvre's view, from an understanding of the difficulties and achievements of the peasants whose work has shaped the countryside over centuries. Another ex- ample is the historian, fascinated by the activities of kings and princes. Studying the formality and pageantry of state occasions, the historian wonders how people were naive enough to be duped by the masquer- ade. Lefebvre suggests that a sharper awareness of the theatricality of everyday life would provide a clearer perspective. It would reveal the fact that words and gestures are usually directed toward action rather than simply reflecting states of mind. Hence it is futile to analyze lan- guage in terms of "sincerity" and "lies, " which he regards as myths. In- stead, he offers, the notion of "thought-action," which encapsulates the point that speaking is directed toward mobilizing people to think, feel, or act in particular ways, regardless of the subjective condition of the speaker. In practice, he argues, speaking is a performance, with the complexity that implies:

In everyday life or in the full glare of the theatre footlights, human be- ings always behave like mystifiers, who manage to 'play a role' precisely by exaggerating their own importance. [Critique of Everyday Life, 136]

The "mystifiers" emphasized by Lefebvre are, in French, the mystifi- cateurs to which Politzer had objected, but which now appear as a par- adigm of real human behavior. There is undoubtedly a different se- mantic field for the French word than its English (partial) equivalent. It is helpful to remember that the French "mystification" is also the word for a hoax, or a magic trick. So the mystificateur is not simply a mystifier, but also a hoaxer, prankster, trickster, jester, joker, and some- thing of a magician: the connotations are not all negative. Moreover, Lefebvre clearly implies that the mystificateur's audience is expected to be aware of the conventions, and to be complicit rather than inno- cent in the performance.

The complexity of this concept of mystification is well illustrated in an article on the "Salon des Arts Menagers" of 1957, published by Paris-Match.I7 The lavish photography features star music-hall dan- cer, Zizi Jeanmaire, and her husband, the magician Roland Petit, in a futuristic automated kitchen. Dressed in their respective stage cos- tumes, they strike poses of wonder and delight at the marvels of tech- nology (push-button controls, microwave oven, ceramic hob, ultra-

17. "La cuisine de demain," Paris-Match, 2 March 1957, 40-47.

MICHAEL KELLY 85

sound dishwasher, automatic washing and ironing machine, and much else). An accompanying text describes in self -parodic tones how the pe- tite menagere (little housewife) enjoys the enchanted kitchen created by her magicien des arts du foyer (magician of the domestic arts), while pointing out that the miraculous kitchen is a substantial feat of mod- ern technology, achieved by American engineers, "whose invisible presence is embodied by the magician Roland Petit."

The article strikingly demonstrates the multiple layers of meaning to which a reader must attend in responding to a "mystification," which combines both the theatrical and the everyday. Text and image emphasize the copresence of contradictory messages. For example, Miss Jeanmaire's figuration of the "little housewife" is contradicted by her presentation as the glamorous star, in matching pink leotard, high- heeled shoes, and long evening gloves, confirmed by her appearance on the magazine cover as "la nouvelle Miss" in pearls and ostrich feath- ers, fresh from her success at the Alhambra.18 Roland Petit's effortless conjuring gestures are contradicted by the visible technology and the account of the installation: brought by special cargo ship with three General Motors engineers, the show kitchen took ten days to assemble and required its own electricity generator. And the appearance of jour- nalistic reportage is contradicted by the details of commercial spon- sorship, by the manufacturers, by the Salon's organizers, by the sup- pliers of decor and products displayed, and by the two magazines responsible for the exhibition stand, Paris-Match and Marie-Claire. All of them, together with the two stars, would expect to benefit from the resulting publicity. No doubt this is a classic mystification in Le- febvre's (or Barthes's) terms, and its success depends on the willing complicity of a reader who is comfortable with conflicting messages. That reader will recognize that the text is a piece of "thought-action," whose principal aim is performative, in seeking to promote certain at- titudes and forms of consumption.

For Lefebvre, mystification is not a process by which the innocent are duped by the devious, but rather a collective process by which so- cial relations, including power relations, are acted out in everyday life in the domain of ideology. He even warns that "we should avoid falling into the proletarian myth of the sadistic bourgeois, rotten to the mar- row, consciously and strategically mendacious, a myth which in point

18. Paris-Match, 2 March 1957, 1. "La nouvelle Miss' (the new Miss), the title of the front-cover caption, is a reference to Mistinguette (originally Miss Tinguette), France's most famous female music-hall performer, who died in 1956.

86 Yale French Studies of fact only the Fascists made into a reality" [Critique of Everyday Life, 148]. The real danger, in his view, is that mystification privatizes con- sciousness, promotes a sense that experience is unique to the individ- ual, and masks the awareness of social context. Like ideology more gen- erally, mystification therefore conflicts with the development of a critical knowledge of real social structures, and prevents people from taking effective practical steps to overcome the alienation of their everyday life.

Lefebvre's analysis in the Critique of Everyday Life was essentially optimistic, not because he believed mystification (or ideology) could be abolished, but because he believed that it could be transcended by knowledge and action. It was in this process of transcendence, he be- lieved, that human potential could be most fully realized, and he held out the utopian vision of l'homme total (the whole man) as the end goal. He argued that Marxist philosophy provided the necessary critical knowledge to secure this transcendence. But despite being a member of the French Communist Party at the time of the Critique's writing and first publication, Lefebvre did not draw a direct link between his analy- sis and the party's policies or actions. Perhaps for this reason, his ideas found a more receptive audience among the noncommunist intelli- gentsia than among party members, for whom he appeared increasingly heterodox. Among his readers was undoubtedly Roland Barthes.

Barthes's knowledge of Marxism was certainly eclectic. He had a de- tailed knowledge of Marx's historical writings, which he read in con- nection with his long-term study of Michelet and French history in the nineteenth century. And he was also familiar with a range of Trotsky- ist and anti-Stalinist critiques of social alienation, whose thrust he broadly espoused (Calvet, 87-89). No doubt he was also familiar with Lefebvre's best-selling popularizations, which presented his non-Stal- inist account of Marxist philosophy. 19 Though he gave less prominence to it than Lefebvre, Barthes found the concept of alienation to be a fruit- ful context for his work. His essay Writing Degree Zero (1953 )20 echoed Lefebvre's utopian perspectives, seeking the disalienation of language in literature:

19. Lefebvre's books, Materialisme dialectique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1939), and Le marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), were re- printed many times, the latter in the popular "Que sais-je" paperback series.

20. Roland Barthes, Degrg zero de 1'9criture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), available in English as Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). The quotations are taken from the English translation.

MICHAEL KELLY 87

Like modern art in its entirety, literary writing carries at the same time the alienation of History and the dream of History; as a Necessity it tes- tifies to the division of languages which is inseparable from the division of classes; as Freedom, it is the consciousness of this division and the very effort which seeks to surmount it. [87-88]

The trajectory of literature, from alienation to utopia, is a particular figuration of the general movement of societies, and the struggle within language and literature takes its importance in part at least from a par- ticipation in the wider struggle. The optimism of Barthes's final decla- ration, that 'Literature becomes the Utopia of language' (88), is attenu- ated by recognition that the struggle may be a perpetual one. In any case its success cannot be secured without a successful outcome in the other social domains of struggle. He suggests that most modern writers un- derstand that "there can be no universal language outside a concrete, and no longer mystical or merely nominal, universality of society (monde civil)" (87).

The link between writing and revolution in Writing Degree Zero is transposed into an application of linguistic analysis to social struggle in Barthes's most politically committed work, Mythologies.2' The fifty-three vignettes of French life in the 1 950s were written with a view to exposing the ideological abuse concealed by the presentation of con- temporary events. Barthes accepted that this implied a political agenda, though he leaves it to the reader to work out what his standpoint (mon pani) might be (12).

Lefebvre makes a surprising appearance in Mythologies, not as a philosopher but as a playwright. His play, based on the life of the Dan- ish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard,22 was the occasion for one of Barthes's more caustic pieces, castigating the conservative reviewers who disingenuously professed not to understand a word of the play. At- tacking the tactics of "dumb and blind criticism," he exposed the bad faith of critics who feigned incomprehension in order to dismiss the Marxist and existentialist ideas in it, without having to discuss them. Apostrophizing them, he concluded:

You don't explain philosophers, but they explain you. You don't want to understand the play by Lefebvre the Marxist, but you can be sure that

21. Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, Seuil, 1957), reprinted with a short Preface in 1970. A selection from the book is available in English as Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London, Paladin, 1973). Quotations are from the English text.

22. The text was published as Lefebvre, "Le Don Juan du Nord, piece en 3 actes (in- spiration a la Kierkegaard)," Europe 28 (1948), 73ff.

88 Yale French Studies Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in cul- ture) the delightfully "harmless" confession you make of it. [35]

In this generous endorsement of Henri Lefebvre, Barthes both co-opts him as a fellow mythologist and implies a solidarity with his Marxism. Commentators have differed about whether Barthes could himself be considered a Marxist. He occasionally described himself as a Marxist at this period, though it was more an expression of intellectual sympa- thies than of any doctrinal obedience. At all events, he shared with Lefebvre a common point of reference in Marx's and Engels's text The German Ideology,23 which is explicitly quoted in both Mythologies and the Critique of Everyday Life. Their common strategy of demysti- fication is rooted in the ideas most clearly laid out in a short but much quoted section of the work.24 The passage develops a theory of ideol- ogy, which sees thought and language as being produced by people in their real life activity, but with the difference that people have an up- side-down perception of their activity and relationships. As Marx and Engels put it:

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their his- torical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.25

This "inversion" is constitutive of what Lefebvre calls "mystified con- sciousness" and what Barthes usually calls mythology. Taken together with the idea of the camera obscura, inversion is a productive meta- phor, particularly if it is not seen as a purely mechanical process. Barthes later recalled that the camera obscura ("dark room"), more fairly called a camera lucida ("light room"), was a prephotographic de- vice, principally designed to enable its user to make a drawing of the object on which it was focused.26 Ideological notions are therefore like the camera image in that they are produced with care and for a purpose.

23. This text, written in 1845-46, was not published until 1932, and the first French edition appeared in 1937, as part of the (Euvres compltes published by Costes.

24. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol 5 (New York: Interna- tional Publishers, 1976). The text of The German Ideology comprises 250 pages and oc- cupies most of the volume. The passage under discussion is on pages 35-49.

25. German Ideology, 36, quoted in Mythologies, 141, in a slightly different transla- tion.

26. Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), 106.

MICHAEL KELLY 89

While they may be viewed as banal and self-evident, as Barthes suggests photographs often are, they also call for a careful reading to distinguish their ostensible meaning, or "studium, " from their connection with so- cial reality, or "punctum" (Camera lucida, 25-27). Ideology is exem- plified by the tendency of the bourgeoisie to view (or to present) the his- torical reality of the world as timeless and natural. To demystify it requires a process of reconstitution, which will restore the social and historical connections. Barthes refers the reader to Marx's example of the cherry tree, which was frequently invoked by philosophers as the typical example of an object of simple sensual certainty. But the cherry tree, like most species of fruit tree, was introduced into Europe by traders at a particular period in history. Its "sensual certainty" has therefore been socially produced. The task of the mythologist or de- mystifier is to restore the sense of a link between the mystified image and its social and political context. In Barthes's terms the task is to identify "a political trace, however faint and diluted, the more or less memorable presence of the human act which has produced, fitted up, used, subjected or rejected it" (Mythologies, 143-44). The exhibiting of such a trace, he argues, is easily achieved by the "language-object" that "speaks things" rather than by the metalanguage that "speaks of things" (144).

Barthes's concept of "language-object" is mentioned briefly in com- mentaries, which acknowledge, for example, that "at various points in Mythologies, Barthes celebrates a different, direct relationship be- tween language and reality. "27 But the idea is rarely examined in detail. In part, this reticence may spring from embarrassment, since the idea is expounded in one of Barthes's more revolutionary-romantic pas- sages. In it, he absolves the Left from myth-making as an essential func- tion, and offers the Revolution and the oppressed proletarian or colonial peoples as exemplars of immediate speech, stripped of meta- linguistic myths. But while Barthes subsequently dwells more ex- tensively on the structures of metalanguage, his notion of "language- object" is an important point in his analysis, and suggestively echoes Lefebvre's concept of "thought-action." Barthes recognizes that met- alinguistic myths colonize and depend parasitically upon object-lan- guage, and identifies myths as intransitive and theatrical (149). Their function is seen as being conservative, preventing change, and opposed to the transitive, transformative language-object. This is an apparent

27. Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 29.

90 Yale French Studies point of difference from Lefebvre, whose notion of mystification is both theatrical and transitive. Lefebvre insists on its political efficacy, which implies a measure of transitivity. Barthes recognized the politi- cal efficacy of myth as "stolen language," but conceived it as a process of disabling the active relationship of language-object to the world. The principal point of difference between the two accounts may then reside in the stance of the everyday reader. Whereas Lefebvre posits an every- day reader akin to a theater-goer, aware of the contradictory relation- ship between language and society, Barthes is more pessimistic. His analysis permits three distinct reading positions, depending on how the duplicitous signifier of myth is received. They correspond to the myth- producer, the demystifier, and the myth-consumer (128-29). But the first two positions are occupied by the media elite of journalists and critics, while the everyday reader is left in the third position of dupe.

The different conceptions of reading then lead to different strategies for resisting mystification. Where Lefebvre advocates a strategy of knowledge (of the world) and action, Barthes's strategy of demystifica- tion is the unveiling of the hidden links, and therefore drawing the myth-consumer into the position of the demystifier. He draws back from offering either a positive social analysis, or a recommendation for social action, other than a generalization of the process of unveiling. Barthes agreed that the purpose of his critique of mythology was to con- tribute to the struggle against alienation, but his pessimism over its outcome deepened during the 1950s. By the time he wrote the conclu- sion of Mythologies, he was offering a sense of much deeper alienation, which posed ever greater obstacles to the desired "reconciliation be- tween reality and men":

The fact that we cannot manage to achieve more than an unstable grasp of reality doubtless gives the measure of our present alienation: we con- stantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. [159]

Barthes's anguish stems substantially from a nostalgia for the third po- sition of reading, which in his account is "dynamic" and generates a unity of form and meaning. It is therefore both attractive in offering a kind of wholeness and repulsive in that it is ideological and illusory. Consequently he suggests that alienation is insuperable, and that the connections between the text or image and civil society were more likely to reinforce alienation and mystification than to provide oppor- tunities for emancipation. For him the critic's role remains demystifi-

MICHAEL KELLY 91

catory, but focused more on the analysis of internal contradictions and their workings than on the means by which they might be overcome. In the "Avant-propos" to the volume, he teases the reader about the po- litical standpoint implied by the essays:

What I sought through this book were significant features. Is this a sig- nificance which I read into them? In other words, is there a mythology of the mythologist? No doubt, and the reader will easily see where I stand. But to tell the truth, I don't think this is quite the right way to state the problem. "Demystification"-to use a word which is begin- ning to show signs of wear-is not an Olympian operation. [12]

It seems clear that his concern for the politics of demystification had passed its peak by the time he wrote this. His preponderant concern for the processes of mystification increasingly outweighed his concern for the "concrete universality of society." But even within the process, there is a significant difference between Barthes and Lefebvre, which can to some extent be attributed to the model of causality that each de- ploys. Whereas Barthes largely adopts a structural causality associated with the Saussurian concept of the linguistic sign, Lefebvre's causality is dialectic. Where the dialectic offers a reciprocal interaction between the two opposed terms, the Saussurian sign proposes the arbitrary jux- taposition of signifier and signified. The mythological signifier does contain a potential dialectical movement in its ambiguous status as fi- nal term of the linguistic sign and the initial term of the mythological sign. It is therefore "at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other" (1 17). This ambiguous term provides the basis for the deliberate (motivated) character of myth, since its open- ness (or emptiness) is the hook to which connotations may be attached, while at the same time its denoted meaning provides the screen, which conceals the power to mystify. Barthes analyzes the relation of ambi- guity as two aspects that oscillate in a "tourniquet" or revolving-door fashion, but in their mutual interdependence they exhibit many of the characteristics of a dialectic, or at least a "dialogic," to borrow Morin's term.28 But both Barthes and Morin share the notion of a relationship between opposites based on perpetual recursion. It therefore differs from Lefebvre's dialectic, which adopts the Hegelian notion of "Aufhe- bung," the moment of transcendence by which the opposition can be resolved or overcome.

28. See Myron Kofman, Edgar Morin (London: Pluto, 1996), 59-60.

92 Yale French Studies Lefebvre was impressed by Barthes's theoretical essay in Mytholo-

gies, and he referred to it in several subsequent works.29 In a most gen- eral sense, it contributed to steering Lefebvre toward a "linguistic turn," which has been little remarked upon, but began to emerge in 1958.30 He was clearly struck, not only by the parallel concern with de- mystification, but also with the productive way in which linguistic theory could be used to elucidate social problems. A second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, appearing in 1961, demonstrated the im- portance language was beginning to assume.31 The book attempts to found a sociology of everyday life, and proposes a framework of con- cepts and strategies. Lefebvre suggests that the old Hegelian concept of "totality" is misleading, and offers the concept of "field" as a produc- tive replacement. The whole of human social practice (praxis) can be regarded as the "whole field" (champ total), although it is only grasped in partial and fragmentary ways. Within it there are smaller domains, which can also usefully be understood as fields in their own right. Each field has its own rules and logic, and distinctive conceptual strategies with which it can be elucidated (Critique II, 274-77). Though the term is the same as the one later popularized by Pierre Bourdieu, Lefebvre's concept of a field does not refer to a particular group or community within society. Rather, it refers to a domain of social activity, which re- quires a particular branch of knowledge. The relationship between the activity and its related branch of knowledge is dialectical and changes over time.

The example Lefebvre chooses to analyze is the "semantic field, " of which language is a part. Assisted by linguistics and communications theory, Lefebvre seeks to analyze this domain of signals, signs, sym- bols, and images, in their historical and social context. He acknowl- edges the value of Barthes's notion of the "tourniquet" relationship be- tween the three terms of the sign-system (signifier, signified, sign), and the consequent oscillation of discourse between the two poles of plat- itude (denotation) and rhetoric (connotation), which become increas-

29. The first of several references is in Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 462. The ref- erence is in a footnote that says: "Le travail de R. Barthes sur les 'Mythologies' contient, surtout dans les cent dernieres pages, des 6l6ments th6oriques d'un grand int6rkt." (The work of R. Barthes on "Mythologies" contains, especially in the last hundred pages, some very interesting theoretical elements).

30. See Lefebvre, "Besoins et langage, " Cahiers de l'Institut de science 6conomique appliqu6e 75 (December 1958): 33-52.

31. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne II. Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidiennet6 (Paris: L'Arche, 1961).

MICHAEL KELLY 93

ingly dissociated (Critique II, 283-84). But Lefebvre adds that the sign is built on the prior foundation of signals, units of communication, which are in themselves meaningless, or virtually so. And he empha- sizes that signs also contribute to the rich and historically constituted body of symbols. The semantic field makes a particular contribution to general alienation, expressed in the "law of displacement," an en- tropy of meaning by which the entire field tends toward the pole of the signal. This means that, in modern society, symbols are overthrown by social change or corroded by signs, while signs themselves decay to the level of mere signals (301). This tendency is not smooth or gradual, but is characterized by upheavals and resurgences (306).

From the point of view of individual experience, the semantic field takes the form of the "social text," a concept with which Lefebvre at- tempts to define the impact of his analysis on an understanding of everyday life. It is an adventurous concept, which reveals the extent to which his philosophy has been inflected by Barthes. He argues that:

Everyone is constantly-daily-faced with a social text. We scan it, we read it. We communicate with others, with global society on the one hand, with nature on the other, through this text and through reading it. At the same time, everyone is part of a social text. Not only do we read, but we are read, deciphered, illuminated (or not). Everyone is both object and subject, indissolubly. [307, my translation]

The dialectic of subject and object within the social text revalorizes the reader in ways that anticipate Barthes's later essays,32 in which "the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed" ("Death of the Author," 148). Like Barthes, Lefebvre de- fines the social text by whether it is more or less legible. He distin- guishes a scale of legibility from the excessively rich text, overloaded with symbolism or information, to the trivial text, tediously repetitive and reduced to banal signals. Somewhere between them lies the good social text, informative and even surprising, but not exceeding the ca- pability of the subject to read it. He also recognizes that readers differ, from the ignorant to the informed. To exemplify the social text, Le- febvre evokes contrasting encounters with the village and the town. Whereas the village is a simple and archaic environment, dominated by symbols, the town is a complex modern experience, traversed by

32. For example, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), and "The Death of the Author," an essay of 1968, reprinted in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-48.

94 Yale French Studies struggle and ranging from the rich symbolism of churches and monu- ments, to the poor signal-dominated zones of traffic and factories.

To a large extent, Lefebvre's theory of the social text adopted Barthes's concept of the reader, together with his version of Saussurian linguistics. The principal difference in their position was that Le- febvre's social text was located in a broader account of the semantic field, which was in turn articulated with a theory of social practice. As a result, Lefebvre was able to maintain a dialectical relationship be- tween the text on the one hand and both knowledge and action on the other. This enabled him to argue that the social text could affect, or be affected by, changes in both scientific knowledge or social practice. As a result, a more informed, demystified, reading of the social text could produce positively disalienating effects in either knowledge or prac- tice. However, it remained something of a difficulty that the linguistic framework did not readily lend itself to dialectical analysis. Barthes maintained that "language is not dialectical-it allows only a move- ment in two stages" and that a third (transcending) term could only be "pure oratorical flourish, rhetorical assertion, pious hope" (Image Mu- sic Text, 199-200). Extending this point to discourse more generally, Barthes argues that progress is not made by transcendence but by "para- dox, " in which a new discourse emerges in opposition to the preceding doxa. The resulting form of progress, in a spiral of separation and re- newal, remains internal to the discursive process. Lacking a concept of transcendence, it cannot readily be linked to other social processes.

However, Lefebvre's search for a dialectical third term was sub- stantially assisted by Barthes's notion of the "imagination of the sign."33 In his essay of the same title, Barthes elaborates on the three relations implied by every sign. The symbolic relation connects the sig- nifier to a particular signified. The paradigmatic relation differentiates the sign within a system of similar signs. And the syntagmatic relation associates it with a dynamic sequence of other signs. He sees the "par- adigmatic consciousness" as the defining preoccupation of structural- ism, superseding the crumbling "symbolic consciousness," which es- sentially rejected any consideration of formal relations. As an example, he cites the Christian sign of the Cross. On its own, the Cross is a pow- erful symbol of Christianity, but when it is incorporated into the title

33. Barthes, "The Imagination of the Sign," in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Vintage, 1993), 211-17. Written in 1962, it was published in Barthes's Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964).

MICHAEL KELLY 95

of the Red Cross and set beside the Red Crescent, a paradigmatic aware- ness is irresistibly produced which perceives the homology between the two. In Barthes's terms, this defines the structuralist threshold. It was crossed, for example, by Levi-Strauss who solved the riddle of totemism by abandoning attempts to discover symbolic analogies be- tween totem and clan, and proposed a homology of relations between totems and between clans.

To a large extent, Lefebvre's critique of structuralism focuses on its abandonment of "symbolic" content in favor of "paradigmatic" form.34 But he takes Barthes's analysis as the basis for incorporating the lessons of structural linguistics into his own Marxist framework. His book Le langage et la societe (1966) is an extended reflection on the debates within linguistics and how they might contribute to a deeper under- standing of society.35 He argues against the prevailing binarism of structural linguistics, in favour of a three-dimensional analysis echo- ing Barthes's three relations of the sign. Taking Barthes's example of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, he accepts that when two symbols can be compared, they drift toward the sign (ils derivent vers le signe, 252). However, he argues, the "sign of the Cross" is not just a sign, but also a symbolic act, enabling the believer to identify with Christ's suffering and participate in a cosmic drama. The form of the Cross serves as a mediation, and in this sense, the symbol transcends the sign. Lefebvre does not wish to return to prestructural linguistics or to introduce a form of mysticism, but rather to recall that signs are attached to social practices and socially constituted meanings that precede them. He therefore reverses Barthes's argument that symbolic awareness crum- bles in the presence of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic. On the con- trary, he argues, it is the symbolic dimension that transcends the sign, linking discourse to history and to lived human experience. But the transcendence is in this case a Hegelian "Aufhebung" in which the first two terms are conserved. In reasserting the importance of the symbolic dimension, Lefebvre also acknowledges the respective importance of par- adigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions. The three-dimensional model of language enables him to integrate translinguistic realities into his

34. See the following works by Lefebvre: Position. Contre les technocrates (Paris: Gonthier, 1967), reprinted as Vers le cybernanthrope (Paris: Gonthier, 1971); andAu-dela du structuralisme (Paris: Anthropos, 1971), partially reprinted as L'ideologie structural- iste (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

35. Lefebvre, Le langage et la societ6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

96 Yale French Studies

analysis. The resulting-model then provides Lefebvre with an analyti- cal tool, which can help to elucidate many areas of social activity, much as Barthes mobilized Saussurian linguistics in Mythologies.

Taking one example, Lefebvre schematizes the traditional town. In the paradigmatic axis, the town is opposed to the country, the inside to the outside, the center to the periphery, and the walls (or boundaries) to the gates (or entrances). In the syntagmatic axis, he distinguishes itineraries, connecting networks, residential units and links between them. In the symbolic axis, he identifies monuments, a style, histori- cal memories and continuity. Applying this schema to a modern town, Lefebvre notes that the practical results of urban development have produced an impoverishment along each of the three axes. He com- ments that:

Here, the fragmentation of the town as a form (not as a set of functions, of course, or of structures) coincides with the predominance of the syn- tagmatic. The symbolic dimension has almost disappeared in the "new districts" and has been transformed into "microcosms" in suburban houses. The paradigmatic dimension is fading. All that is left is traffic routes and networks of "services." [290, my translation]

Its application to urban forms of alienation not only demonstrates the analytical value of the model, but also provides a basis for developing strategies to overcome the social problems it identifies, at least to the extent of pointing to the axes along which remedial action needs to be directed.

In this way, over a period of twenty years, Lefebvre and Barthes con- ducted a fruitful dialogue on the nature of mystification. They did not conclude in any obvious agreement, and in some respects they diverged significantly. By 1966, Lefebvre had incorporated much of the armature of linguistic theory into his social analysis, while Barthes had increas- ingly distanced himself from any specific sociopolitical target for his critique. Lefebvre's biographer relates that the two men were dining to- gether in the Saint-Germain district one night in May 1968 when riots first broke out, but this did not prevent them from ordering a bottle of good wine (Hess, 243). Their companionable conviviality did not pre- vent them from taking sharply divergent stances on the May upheavals. Barthes conspicuously withdrew from events, which he subsequently treated with considerable suspicion. Lefebvre, on the other hand, was deeply engaged in them. As a professor at Nanterre, he was at the epi- center of events, and the mentor of many student activists. Subse-

MICHAEL KELLY 97

quently, he was among the most energetic in attempting to analyze and understand what had transpired.36 The divergence is clear in their subs sequent writings, and may be measured by comparing, for example, Barthes's efforts to define a utopian realm of text outside the embrace of power,37 with Lefebvre's attempt to define a strategy for the social transformation of urban space.38 While Lefebvre's voice is no more than a residual trace in Barthes's later writings, Barthes is a continuing interlocutor in Lefebvre's. No doubt this reflects a broader shift of French intellectual life after 1968, in which critical theory moved away from social concerns, while social theory attached increasing impor- tance to discursive strategies. If so, the trajectories of Barthes and Le- febvre may appear as reminders that, for a seminal period during the 1950s, there was a degree of convergence between social and critical theory in the common project of demystification.

36. See Lefebvre, L'irruption de Nanterre au sommet (Paris: Anthropos, 1968). 37. See Barthes, "Inaugural lecture, Collge de France" inA Barthes Reader, 457-78. 38. See, for example, Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-

Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).