Roland Barthes
What is Barthes trying to do with
mythologies?
• “Trying to examine the normally hidden set of rules,
codes and conventions through which meanings particular
to specific social groups (i.e. those in power) are rendered
universal and ‘given’ for the whole of society” (Hebdige,
p. 9)
• Barthes is trying to explain how the bourgeois ideology is
represented through ‘natural’ myths and stereotypes in
everyday life.
– Think about last weeks readings about ideology and hegemony.
In short, the ruling class wants to present the ideas as universal
to a whole society. Barthes thinks they do this through myths.
Myth as a semiological system
• Denotation/signifier: The literal meaning of a word or an object.
• Connotation/signified: The meanings or associations linked to a word
or an object.
• The sign/signification: the associative total of the signifier and
signified.
• For example, it is natrual in our culture, to connect the physical sign
’rose’, with love; and courage and strength with a (character) phrase ’to
grow a pair of *****. On that note the content of the myth illustrates,
how the culture thinks about itself and its context.
• Myth is the signification in the connotative level.
What is a Myth?
• In “Mythologies,” Barthes
– Showed how, “all the apparently spontaneous forms and rituals of
contemporary bourgeois societies are subject to systematic distortion, liable
at any moment to be dehistoricized, ‘naturalized’, and converted into
myth.” (Hebdige, p.9)
– “Everything in everyday life is dependent on the representation which the
bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between men and the
world.” (Barthes, p.9)
– Myth is a figure of speech that provides the reader with hidden agendas or
ideologies. It’s a system of communication; a message. Therefore speech is
not only oral, but everything that creates communication and meaning;
photography, cinema, shows, publicity etc.
The Spectacle
• Spectacle: “…are often irreplaceable and refer to the interplay
of action, representation and alienation in man and in society”
(Barthes, p. 7)
– It’s a visualization of man and society. A visual metaphor of everyday
life and ideology.
– The World of Wrestling
The World of Wrestling
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A staged spectacle similar to Greek drama.
Wrestling is not a sport.
Wrestlers perform society’s concepts of “Suffering, Defeat, and Justice.”
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Mythological fight between the duality of Good and Evil.
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The Exhibition of Suffering: The wrestler shows exaggerated pain with body and facial expressions
during arm-locks and leg twists. Externalized image of torture.
Defeat: Display of crucifying the wrestler and humiliating him.
Justice is displayed as a moral compensation (eye for an eye). Making the “bastard” character pay.
Exaggerated movements and caricatures.
In American wrestling, the evil character has political connotations (“Red” or communist).
In French wrestling, the focus is on the strength of the evil character, the bastard.
The stronger the bastard, the harder the fight between good and evil, the audience enjoys justice more.
Wrestling portrays an “ideal” understanding of things.
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“It is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations
and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at least correspond to
causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” (Barthes, pp23)
The World of Wrestling
• The wrestling essay is a representation of the ideologies that ‘rules’ in a
specific culture or society. It visually presents the moral and ideology. It’s
not about the sport itself, but rather the world of the sport. In this way The
World of Wrestling is a reflection of our everyday life and our everyday
encounters.
• http://movieclips.com/search/?q=gladiator#p=1
• Can you think of any wrestling myth in today’s culture?
The Seven Rhetorical Figures
• “One must understand here by rhetoric a set of fixed, regulated, insistent
figures, according to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier
arrange themselves.” (Barthes, p.151)
• “It is through their rhetoric that bourgeois myths outline the general
prospect of this pseuo-physis which defines the dream of the contemporary
bourgeois world.” (Barthes, p.151)
• Rhetorical figures are used to persuade an audience toward a specific point
of view or to take a course of action. They construct written or oral
languages and images to provide a rational argument.
The Seven Rhetorical Figures
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The inoculation
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The privation of History
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“…consist in admitting the accidental evil of a class bound institution the better to conceal its
principal evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small
inoculation of acknowledged evil… ” (Barthes, pp. 151)
Discourse in which someone admits some of the evils of an oppressive institution so as to cover its
generally oppressive character (i.e. US governments justifying their policies of killing civilians in Iraq
War to defeat terrorism).
http://movieclips.com/GtXwi-thank-you-for-smoking-movie-the-joan-show/
Social phenomena’s ‘simply’ exist, so there’s no causality or agency
“Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it history evaporates…all that is left for
one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from.” (Barthes, p. 152).
Identification
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“…the petit-bourgeois as a person ‘unable to imagine the Other … the Other is a scandal which
threatens his existence’ (Barthes, 1972)”
“…the Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated. Here, the difference is simply denied
(‘Otherness is reduced to sameness’)” (Hebdige, p. 97)
The Seven Rhetorical Figures
continued…
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Tautology
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Neither-Norism
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A “… mythological figure which consist in starting two opposites and balancing the one by the other
so as to reject them both” (Barthes, p. 154)
http://movieclips.com/XYW5-thank-you-for-smoking-movie-ice-cream-politics/
The quantification of quality
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A verbal device that defines like by like, to state the obvious using the same word. It makes words
redundant and thereby it “… creates a dead, a motionless world.” (Barthes, p. 154)
“By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more
cheaply.” (Barthes, p. 154)
For example, The 2009 Britney Spears Circus Tour in Australia.
• Australian fans walked out of Spear’s performance because she lip synced.
• They quantified her performance to the numerical value of their tickets.
• Fans expected more for their money.
The statement of fact
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“Bourgeois ideology invest in this figure interest which are bound to its very essence: universalism,
the refusal of any explanation, an unalterable hierarchy of the world.” (Barthes, p. 154)
Relies on facts and common sense to convince the mass of the ‘truth’ of the myth.
http://movieclips.com/uDWwR-thank-you-for-smoking-movie-everyone-has-a-talent/
Dick Hebdige
Subculture
What is subculture?
• “Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference sequence
which leads from real vets and phenomena to their representation in
media.” (Hebdige, p. 90)
• Subculture represents a challenge to hegemony. The subculture isn’t a
direct threat (to the ideology), but rather the visualization of different
styles. This challenges the myths of society and the ruling class’
dominating ideas.
• “Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformation
go ‘against nature’, interrupting the process of ‘normalization’.” (Hebdige,
p. 18)
• Is subculture only style? Can it be a social group?
The Process of Recuperation
• The process of recuperation involves incorporating a subculture
within the dominant mythologies of our culture by becoming a
commodity and/or the process of identification.
• The commodity form
– “The conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced
objects.” (Hebdige, p.94)
– Subculture’s style establishes new trends, visual and audio, which feed back
into different industries and creating new myths.
• Twiggy, when she came to the US it created a new style but also it created
a new ideal of how one should look physically.
• Hip-Hop and break dance.
– Once a subculture becomes commercial, they lose their originality and stop
developing.
The Process of Recuperation
The ideological form – Barthes rhetorical figure
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“The ‘labeling’ and re-definition of deviant behavior by dominant groups – the police, the
media, the judiciary.” (Hebdige, p. 94)
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In the threat of subculture, the petit-bourgeois uses Barthes’s identification to define them.
There’s two strategies for dealing with this:
1. Reducing otherness into sameness
• The difference of the Other is denied.
• The Other can be trivialized, naturalized, and domesticated.
2. “The Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, a ‘pure object, a spectacle, a
clown.’ (Barthes, 1972)” (Hebdige, p.97)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1RvTtPMnbk
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In your opinion, does this comedian use the identification rhetoric to make the Muslim
terrorist the Other?