Mythologies

1. 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.

2. 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”.

3. 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”

4. The Formation of Myth Two Semiological Systems <e.g “A bunch of roses”> • A Linguistic System (language-object) Sign the associative total of Signifier and Signified • Myth (metalanguage): a second language Sign a signifier in the second system

5. 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.

6. 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”>

7. 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.

8. 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.