“The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history… I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.”- Roland Barthes (Barthes 1972, 10)
A propos or a Preface intends to explicate in clear terms the argument that the author proposes to state in the subsequent chapters. Barthes’s propos remarkably serves it purpose in informing the reader that he intends to demystify the process leading to renovation of “History into Nature” (Barthes 1972, 140) done through some sinister abuse of ideologies.
A discussion on works of Barthes, particularly his work on Mythologies, thus, invariably promises to return me (and my patient readers) to the same themes that he so profoundly resented. Therefore, I propose to discuss and analyze in this paper, in light of Barthes’s book Mythologies, his approach to bourgeois discourse and his understanding of myth as a language-object or meta-language.
“Myth is a type of speech.” (Barthes 1972, 107) Barthes calls myth a speech because it amounts to be a communication system, comprising a message. Defining a myth Barthes contends that anything and everything can be a myth as long as “it is conveyed by a discourse” (Barthes 1972, 107). The bourgeois burgeons myths through discourses that they meticulously propel. Barthes contends bourgeois discourse as a potential force creating an “amorphous universe” (Barthes 1972, 140) where social classes are obliterated by means of “immobilization” and “an impoverishment of consciousness.” (Barthes 1972, 140)
The conscious self of all is subject to a singular, universal concept of rational man/woman and an illusory standard is established to which all aspire as the ideal. Thus, bourgeois discourse in Barthes’s reading emerges as “…an illusion to reduce the dominant culture to its inventive core…” (Barthes 1972, 139), thereby, transforming language objects (signifier) by deploying such media as print, oral transmission, spectacles (signification), into a rational, universal concept (signified).
In his endeavor to demystify, the conjuring trick played by bourgeois discourses in turning “History into Nature” (Barthes 1972, 140) Barthes hits upon the mischief played by myth in this process as a “depoliticized speech” (Barthes 1972, 142). In its capacity as a depoliticized speech, myth acts as a metalanguage labeling universal meaning and attaching a value system to everything. Thus, political load behind a simple grammar school example is concealed behind some bourgeois moralizing motto like duty, honor, etc.
Barthes uses the simple example used in grammar classes that of lion hunting out of some sense of duty to demonstrate the process of mythification of the animal world into a moralized world achieved through indefatigable media of bourgeois discourses on morality. The language-object, the lion is therefore, transformed into a predicate for the metalanguage, the myth. A myth thus emerges to be a metalanguage, an all-encompassing and all-mystifying value system that makes the language-object subjunctive to itself to drain history out of reality and inject with myth.
Roland Barthes through the book Mythologies (particularly the entire section on ‘Myth Today’) unveils before our eyes the signification process at work in the bourgeois dominated society whereby ideology is grossly misconstrued or abused to create a metalanguage of morality, good-life, fashion, cuisine, to which all accrue producing a self-gratifying sense of universality and rationality to History. A bourgeois value system becomes the measuring rod of the veracity of History. It is in this process of mythification History looses itself and Nature replaces it, and they become interchangeable leading mankind to “…constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness.” (Barthes 1972, 159)
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Myhtologies (Trans. by Annette Lavers). New York: The Noonday Press.