Mythologies

Fifty-four Journalistic Articles The articles are constituted as opportunistic improvisations that

provide with a panorama of events in France of 1950s. The articles focus on various manifestations of mass culture to

challenge “innocence” and “naturalness” of cultural events. What Barthes is doing: stop taking things for granted, uncover the

secondary meanings and connotations.

Myths Today: Le Mythe aujourd ‘hui’ The essay is a retrospectively theoretical conspectus that provides a

methodological tract for the fifty-four articles.

Myths Today

Myth is a type of speech Myth is a system of communication: it is defined by the way in

which it utters messages. Myth is a form, a mode of signification: photo, cinema, or sports can

be served as a support to mythical speech. Myth has a historical foundation: it is the speech chosen by history.

Myth is a second-order semiological system Mythology is one fragment of semiology: it studies significations

apart from their content. Mythology is endowed with significance; it is a science dealing with

“value”.

Tri-dimensional Terms of Myth

“ . . . We are dealing with, in any semiological system, not with two, but with three different terms.”—signifier, signified and sign

“A bunch of Roses”

Language 1.The form of Rose

2.The concept of Rose

Myth

3. The Sign: Rose

I. A bunch of roses II. Passion

III. A bunch of “passionified roses”

The Formation of Myth

Two Semiological Systems <e.g “A bunch of roses”>

I. A Linguistic System (language-object)

Sign the associative total of Signifier and Signified

II. Myth (metalanguage): a second language

Sign a signifier in the second system

Language 1. Signifier 2. Signified

Myth

3. Sign

I. Signifier II. Signified

III. Sign

Signifier and Signified in Metalanguage

Signifier: meaning and form meaning: a total of linguistic signs that postulate a kind of

knowledge, a comparative order of ideas and memory. form: meaning leaves its contingency; it empties itself and only the

letter remains. meaning to form: the form does not suppress meaning but

impoverishes it; meaning is put at a distance, lost its value.

Signified: concept Concept offers knowledge for impoverished meaning. It is a formless, unstable and nebulous condensation that can spread

over a large expanse of signifiers.

Sign in the Metalanguage

Sign: signification The term is the association of the first two, the correlation of

mythical concept and mythical form. In signification, the function of myth is to distort, not to make

disappear with two manifestations:

I. form: a literal immediate presence that can appear only through a given substructure.

II. concept: a kind of nebula, the condensation of certain knowledge. The correlation of the two is a relation of deformation.

concept distorts the full meaning, literally deforms it but does not abolish it. <e.g. “The grammatical example”>

The Grammatical Example

quia ego nominor leo: “because my name is lion” In a purely linguistic system, the clause finds a fullness

of history: I am an animal, I live in certain country. . . In a system of myth, the richness is receded at a distance:

“my name is lion” “I am a grammatical example”, a presence of a certain agreement of the predicate.

The form of lion remains; the naming of lion is deprived of “memory,” not of “existence,” the meaning is distorted by concept.

The Elements of Signification in Myth

The mythical signifier reproduces alibi meaning presents the from; from outdistances the meaning

form empty but present; meaning absent but full

Myth is a froze language The use of signification confers like a notified look behind fact. The fact paralyses the intention, makes it innocent and frozen.

mythical speech appears as a notification/ a statement of fact

Myth is type of speech defined by its intention Myth is always in part motivated and unavoidably contains analogy Myth plays on the analogy between form/ meaning.

there is no myth without motivated form.