Introduction to Semiotics of Cultures, 2010
Ronald Barthes – Modern Myths
Vesa Matteo Piludu
University of Helsinki
The first part of Mythologies
 Is fragmentary, kaleidoscopic
 The articles seems to be disconnected
 But there is a recurrent topic: all the myths are presented by media
as natural and obvious fact, without historical and social background
 Even are all myths of the ‘50, some element of them could be easily
found in contemporary popular cultures
 For the most part written every month for Les Lettres Nouvelles
between 1954-56
 The theoretic part, analyzed in the first lecture, Myth Today was
written in 1972
 The myths of French society are part of a process in which the
middle class or bourgeois ideology falsely impart universal standing
to symbols that have an historical status
Best cultural criticism: no criticism at all!
 The Middle class hit lights well balanced rhetoric: it is always better
be moderate
 Culture, as a noble universal thing, should be opposed to
ideologies (reactionary or communist)
 Culture is falsely presented as something created ex-nihilo, outside
the social choices
 It should be good for all, light, pure
 Opposed to heavy, dark ideologies
 The culture is supposed be good for all, something neutral, free from
judgment
 The best literature is presented as eternal
Eternal or social artist?
 The best artists or literates are heroes admired without critic, good
only for National pride
 In Italy Dante is considered the eternal poet, it is mythologized and
depurated from his historical and political environments
 But Dante is far to be a neutral moderate: he put an relevant
number of popes, priests and politics into the Inferno (hell)
Critics of novels and drama
 When the critics doesn’t understand a word of the book they add two
arguments:
 Criticism is unnecessary because the subject is ineffable
 If they are too stupid to understand the book, this is unsuitable for the
common folk (even more imbecile)
 So where is the problem? The clarity of the author
 Ideas seems dangerous if they are not controlled by common sense
 Culture should be nothing but a sweet rhetorical function, ready to be
understood by all
 If critics fear the analysis, why they become a critic?
 Problem: it’s impossible to understand philosophy using the common
sense
 But luckily the philosophers are able to understand the critics’
disappointment and common sense
Verne as a national myth
 Verne is a myth of French literature, general synonym for
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adventures
travels
modernity
technology
Verne as the mythographer of closed spaces
 For Barthes Verne’s literature is something else:
 A self-sufficient cosmology of closed spaces
 The travels of Verne are mostly exploration if closures, the delight of
the finite: something similar to a children’s tent
 The Mysterious Island, the travel to the centre of the World
 Verne, as man-child, re-invented a microcosms, it fills it and it close
it: the writer seems to be obsessed by plentitude and appropriation,
accumulation of object
 He tends to be encyclopedic as a Dutch painter and says: the world
is finite, numerable, suitable for inventories and catalogues
Nautilus as a nice house
 Is a progressive bourgeois: the world is like a nutshell, an object in
his hand
 The ship is not a model for departure but closure: a nice finite space
with many objects, a home, a house, like the nautilus, the most lovely
of caves
 Inside the human habits
 Outside the vagueness of waters
 The Nautilus could be considered the opposite of Rimbaud’s
Drunken boat, clearly a symbol of exploration
Nemo in the Nautilus
Outside the Nautilus
Writers in holiday
 Article on Le Figaro
 Bossuet going down to Congo
 In vacation the writer add vocation to leisure
 Common holidays are for working people
 The writer is different from the common mortals: even in vacation, he
doesn’t stop producing:
 He is writing memories, correcting proofs or preparing in absolute
secret his next book
 It’s natural that the writer is writing all the time and in all the
situations
 He is prey of an inner god who speaks all the time: his muse doesn’t
know the word vacation
 Angiographies of genius, of different beings
Women novellist
 According to Elle
 Women novelists produce essentially to things: children and novels
 Jacqueline Lenoir (two daughter, one novel), Marina Gray (one son,
one novel), Nicole Dutreil (two sons, four novels)
 It seems that the little bohemia allowed (be a writer), is logically
connected to the previous tribute to nature
 Discurse:
 Women novelists are obviously brave, symbols of self-confidence,
they write like men: a model
 Even so, don’t forget they are women too
 Women are considered mostly as homogenous being
The mystic brain of Einstein
 The genius’ brain had a
magical dimension, that had
been studied with
seismographers
 Einstein death: “the most
powerful brain has stopped
thinking”
 The formula E=mc2 is of an
unexpected simplicity, suitable
for modern myth
 It has been considered a kid of
magic formula of the word
The magician that failed
 Also Einstein is a common
mortal, suitable to failure
 He died without having been
able to verify the equation in
which the secret of the world
was enclosed
The craziness of genius
The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain
????
Nibbing on Einstein’s brain
Einstein Brain Station (!)
Jet - pilot
 Jet – pilot as a new race: half robot with a new skin
 Dietetic prescriptions
 New technical race
Aviators vs. Jet - pilot
 First aviators: hagiography,
age of miracles and excess
 Jet-age: monastic, continence,
temperance
 Uniform and mask
 Submission to collective ends
 Inhuman condition and
religious call
Electoral photography
 The nature of the election is elitist and paternalist
 Electoral photos try desperately to create a personal link between the
politicians and the electorate
 The politic exalted himself as a perfect model of a social type, that is
somewhat similar to the elector
 In a certain sense the elector is persuaded to elect a double of
himself
Electoral photography
 Mystical connection between
thought, will, reflections,
actions: the inner dream
 Hit lighted social status,
respectability
Spider-Obama
The Savage Dragon
Myths and elections:
“Rome is a jungle … Vote for Tarzan!”
The wrestling and performance of pain
 Is not a sport, a demonstration of excellence, as boxing or judo
 Judo in particular eludes any theatrical element, has a esoteric
meaning and even the defeat is eluded rapidly
 Is a staged event
 Is a show of excess, like the one in Ancient theatres
 A spectacle, a performance of suffering and passion
 The public is completely disinterested if the contest is rigged or
not, they are interested in the quality of the performance
 In wrestling there should be an immediate reading of passions: all
the gestures are excessive, especially in defeat
Wrestlers and theatre
 The wrestlers are presented as types, as mask of the antiquity or
Commedia dell’Arte
 Orsano was the effeminate teddy boy
 Reinières the image of passivity
 Mauzard arrogant as a cock
 Thauyin was the very representation of ugliness, baseness: dead
flesh
 All his action were represented by viscosity
 The body is a symbol of the moral values: treachery, cruelty and
cowardice
 The types represent an Human comedy of passion were all is clear,
intelligible, an immediate pantomime
 The suffering man is similar to a tragic mask
Wrestling and justice
 The pleasure in wrestling is seeing a barbarian concept of justice
working perfectly: eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
 In wrestling the villain is about to win, doing all the kind of tricks and
breaking all the rules: he is the very image of transgression
 The public is revolted against him and in favor of the contestant
 At the end the contestant win and the public enjoys to see how the
villa is defeated
 For this reason, a fair fight is an exception, in wrestling the orgy of
evil works better to create interest in the public
 The public loves the baroque confusion
French and American wrestling
 In France wrestling is more connected with the barabarian concept of
justice
 In America there are more complicate symbols connected to politics
and ethnic issues: the wrestling seems a mythological fight between
good and evil
The Villain
 Is an unstable, socially unpredictable
 He accept the rules when they are useful to him, but takes refuge
behind the rules when he consider that they are favorable to him
 It breaks all the possible laws when is useful to do so
 The wrestling villain isn’t only cruel, he is inconsistent: he offend not
only moral, but logic
 For the public what is intolerable is not the rule-breaking, that is
normal, but the fact that the villain remain unpunished, as it generally
happens in real life
 The wrestling should be exactly what the public expect: pure
signification of an ideal brutal justice
 The villains are somewhat similar to many Italian politics, but
unfortunately these are never brutally punished by machos on a
public stage
Papa Shango vs. Ultimate Warrior 1992
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrQnoplcmz0&feature=related
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6nU3tU87ew&feature=related
Spider Man – Green Goblin
Asterix
Bud Spencer & Terence Hill
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9jHnSNYMxU
Striptease
 Few erotism
 Baroque exoticism: Chinese woman with an opium pipe
 Venetian decor with gondola
 Fours, adornments more important than naked skin: ritualized
objects are acting as a luxurious shell
 The woman is presented as a mineral
 The alibi of art makes ritual gestures that are a kind of exorcism of
sex
 Moulin Rouge even worse: contest and prizes
 Striptease became a sport, a career, even a National institution
The Lost Continent: postcard ethnography
 False ethnographic film
 4 Italian explorers in Malay archipelago
 All is easy, innocent as a tourist boat trip
 Postcard world based on the glamour of the images
 Formal exotism without historical background
 The Far East is somewhat similar to west: the Buddhists monks are
presented was quasi-Christian
 All the folkloric rituals are presented as natural, they “illustrate” the
nature (season, death, storm or whatever), never history
 Fishing is not presented in its reality, but is presented the romantic
essence of be a fisherman
Edward Curtis’ staged natives
The Lost Continent: postcard ethnography
 Fishing is not presented in its reality, but is presented the romantic
essence of be a fisherman
 Beautiful sunset, eternal natural condition
 Peril on the sea and women weeping at home
The madonnas of Curtis
Curtis Natives
Amazon indios
Indios and boxers
The Blue Guide’s world: human commedia?
 In classic tourist guide book’s all is picturesque: landscapes,
humans, monuments
 Man seems to exist only as types: Basque sailor, Catalan tradesman,
Cantabrian sentimental highlander, Italian romantic lover man,
Brazilian sensual, Parisian sophisticate
 All the “national” characters are clear prototypes of a classical ballet
or Commedia dell’arte
 Only in trains or metro: there is a very “mixed” people
 Any analytical description is futile
Many of the monument preserved:
 Present a country selecting only national characters and
monuments suppress the social reality of the land
 Art is presented as the fundamental value of cultures, eliminating the
rest
 Arts is represented as an economic good, that could be
“accumulated”: ´Spain is full of art, rich of sculpture … the
museums are full of treasures of art
 The country seems in competition to demonstrate to have more art or
more relevant, ancient art
 The contents of the art, or the meaning of paintings, seems to be
less interesting of the great amount of it
Abbé Pierre
 Presented bearded: a clear symbol of monastic evangelical life,
missionaries, poverty, apostleship or hermits
 The secular, urban clergy is represented shaved, more temporal
Padre pio – Sant’Antonio Abate
Soap-powders and detergents
 In the first Word Detergent Congress
 There was Omo euphoria
 The detergents haven’t harmful effect on skin and they could save
miners from silicosis
 Chlorinated fluids are presented as aggressive: they beats,
pushes
 They are like liquid saviors but blind, liquid fire in war: they burn, kill
the dirt
 Powders are selective: are separating agents of liberation
 The dirt isn’t killed, is forced out, as in an exorcism
 They aren’t soldiers, are police
 The dirt, in any case, is the enemy
Omo myths: dept and foamy
 Commercial and social vanity: comparison between two objects and
one is whither than the other
 In Omo myths, the consumer is helping the police, he is the
accomplice of a liberation
 Omo is cleaning in dept all what is obscure
 But are the clothes so deep as seas or oceans
 Mythology of foam
 the foam is absolutely useless
 It’s only luxury, a symbol of abundant proliferation, a vigorous germ,
an airy substance
 Bubbles connected with air and spirituality
 The mythology cover the real abrasive function of the detergent
under the cover of a mystical substance that govern the molecular
order of materials … transforming all in bubbles
Commercials
 Retro Tide commercial
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AVfhSWoI1g&feature=related
 Tide Detergent Commercial - VINTAGE - 1950s
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSB7HTFECdk&feature=related
 OMO Commercial - Dirt Is Good
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MX2Fq2VZW4
 Ajax washing powder - Australian TV commercial
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhOOhqXyleg&feature=related
 Tide Laundry Detergent Ad from 1990
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiOUFkz1jcU&feature=related
 Mr. Clean Commercial
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0YPsuZYZIY&feature=related
Plastic
 Names of Greek shepherds (Polystirene, Polyvinil)
 Alchemical power: transmutation and infinite powers of
transformation
 It seems that is possible to plasticize the entire world
Plastic
 Plastic is the material of the imitations that have only the pretention
and the appearance of the original material
 Plastic is reproducing cheaply something more luxurious, but have
no noble mineral origin (wood, metal, glass)
 Plastic is not hard, not deep, but have resistance
 Disgraced material: opaque, creamy
 when it fall, make no sound
 Colors are chemical, of aggressive quality
Finnish Wood Design: Tapio Wirkkala
Finnish Glass Design: Tapio Wirkkala
Finnish Plastic Design: Yki Nummi (1925-1984)
Finnish Glass Design: Alvar Aalto
Citroen
 Cars as modern gothic cathedrals
 Supreme creation of an era
 Conceived by unknown artists
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New Citroen as Nautilus
Round shaped
Exaltation of glass
Soap bubbles
Toys as microcosms
 French toys are a small model of the adult world, a microcosms:
army, the post office, transports, school, medicine
 The toys prefigure in the children the world of the adult
 They learn to accept is as natural, inevitable
 The social order is like a second nature, expressed as an imitation –
abdication: even the dolls are able to urinate
 The children is essentially an owner, not a creator: doesn’t invent the
world, he used it
 All is ready made by plastic, a product of chemistry, not nature
 Disappearance of wood toys, with their natural warm
 The wood toys last a long time and live with the child
 Are a product of the era of the craftsman, not of industry
Block toys
 Different logic
 The children are creators, demiurges
 They create the world and the forms they want to, not necessarily the
one that are imposed them
Margarine: your uncle will be furious!
 Astra’s commercial
 Margarine? Unthinkable!
 “Your uncle will be furious!”
 The commercial show a prejudice
 Then the eyes are opened and margarine is a delicious food …
 And cheap
 It goes further than butter, and cost less
 Alchemical transformation of values
 Metaphor of political propaganda
 What does it matter if the political and economical order is a little
brutal?
 It allows us to live cheaply
Romans in films
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Many clichés
All the Ancient Romans are presented with fringes
Symbol of virtue, conquest, self righteousness, simplicity
Evidence of the being a good Roman
 Many Anglo-Saxons actors are ridiculous in their Ancient Roman
looks
 For Barthes, only Marlon Brando is Latin in off to be credible
 Another clichés: the Roman’s face sweat constantly, being full of
Vaseline
 It’s a strange symbol for moral feeling: the Roman are beings
tormented by virtues or violent things
 Banality: to sweat is to think
 Degraded spectacle of the sweating of thoughts
 Only Caesar isn’t sweating: it’s becaouse he is the object of the
crime, he doesn’t know about it, so he doesn’t think and sweat
Roman Brando
 Julius Caesar 1953 Theatrical Trailer
 adaptation of Shakespeare's play by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for MGM
starring Marlon Brando. Brando's performance resulted in his third
consecutive Best Actor nomination in 1953.
 Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar (1953)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KXhfjOkKPM&feature=related
Troy
 Achilles dies:
 Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0g8uTZmKM4&feature=related
Greta Garbo
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The Divine
The iconographical image of female beauty
Mystical feeling
In Queen Christina the make is like a mask sculpted in snow
Perfect and ephemeral
 A platonic idea of a human creature
 The perfection of Garbo is more intellectual than formal
 Her mask is a sum of lines and their thematic harmony
 Garbo is the archetype of the lyricism of women
 It creates awe and charm
 Audrey Hepburn is another model, more individualized, suitable for
different themes (woman-kitten-child): its more “substance” than idea
 If Garbo is an Idea, Hepburn is an Event
Greta Garbo: the Idea
QUEEN CHRISTINA 1933
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52xrA9hQhI8
 MGM 1933. Greta Garbo, John Gilbert
In 1632, after her father, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, dies
on the battlefield, six-year-old Christina is crowned ruler. Reared by
her father as a boy, Christina accepts the crown as the "king" of
Sweden and then vows to her court, which is headed by Chancellor
Oxenstierna, that Sweden will fight until it wins the war.
Audrey Hepburn: the Event
Chaplin and Modern Times
 Problem in socialist films or drama: the worker is fulfilled with sense
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of destiny, obviously he is a revolutionary
In Modern Times, Chaplin offer a more realist image of the worker
that is still blind: interested only in basic needs, he is a man who’s
hungry
He is totally alienated, at the hands of his masters-employers and
police
The artificial worker’s life is well expressed by the food dispensing
machine
Showing the blindness of the worker, Chaplin is able to show also
the blindness of the public
The anarchy of Chaplin seems the most efficient form of revolution in
art
 No socialist work succeeded in expressing the condition of the
worker so well
 In Brecht there is the representation of the workers’ conscious fight
for their right, but the texts are poor of aesthetic force
Charlie Chaplin - Modern times
 Charlie Chaplin - Modern times part 1/9
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0XjRivGfiw
 Charlie Chaplin - Modern times part 2/9
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvNQiF89Pek&feature=related