As I spent a lot of time on trains the last few days, I had a chance to finish Roland Barthes' Mythologies which describes itself in the introduction as 'a corrosive, insolent, strange, cold, and yet witty book'. Having read it, I guess this description is accurate (if a little negative), but still it lacks one very important qualification, in my opinion, which is 'wildly interesting'.
What Roland Barthes - a French cultural critic (1915-1980) - meant to do in this book is make a semiological analysis of contemporary cultural myths. Now before you stop reading this, let me rephrase that in normal language. Barthes' approach is simple. He investigates elements of French culture, like soap-powder and detergents, toys, wrestling matches, news pieces and other, apparently ordinary cultural trivia and reads them like myths, i.e. he explores how they represent a deeper cultural disposition. In doing so, he is able to make some extraordinary analyses of how French culture (mind you, it's French culture from the 1950s!) represents its values.
If all this still sounds too hoity-toity for your taste, let me give an example. Barthes takes Jules Verne's story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) about a man exploring the deep sea in a submarine (science fiction at the time!), and uses it to analyse a very common cultural idea which we all share: the enjoyment of being enclosed. It's true, we all love being in a small space where we are the supreme master. It's why children love huts and tents, why adults like driving a car: you may be shut up in a small place, but within it you have everything under control. Yet there is one extra element: it's the combination of inwardness (being closed in) with the outside that we like. Indeed, you might be stuck in wooden (hut) or a steel (car) box, but from it, you can see the whole world. And that's what appeals to us.
If you think about it, this 'myth' returns in many elements of our culture. Watching TV when it's raining outside, surfing the internet, riding glass elevators in tall buildings, having an apartment with a terrace, sunbathing on a towel on a beach, and perhaps the best example of all: reading on the toilet. They're all examples of combining unbroken inwardness with the vagueness of the outside, to use Barthes' words. And all of these situations give us a hugely pleasant sensation. It makes us feel safe and in command at the same time.
And that's why Barthes' Mythologies is a wildly interesting book. It takes very familiar things and situations and explains what the cultural motivations behind them are. Like no other book it takes the ordinary out of the ordinary. And to be frank, humbly trying to piece together a piece of cultural criticism myself once in a while, I'm insanely jealous of Barthes' talent for doing just this.
To finish it off, just one quote which struck me as very relevant even today. Something Vic Van Aelst should keep in mind next time he criticizes Di Rupo's or Milquet's Dutch:
Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there is also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends us. (...) To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders
What Roland Barthes - a French cultural critic (1915-1980) - meant to do in this book is make a semiological analysis of contemporary cultural myths. Now before you stop reading this, let me rephrase that in normal language. Barthes' approach is simple. He investigates elements of French culture, like soap-powder and detergents, toys, wrestling matches, news pieces and other, apparently ordinary cultural trivia and reads them like myths, i.e. he explores how they represent a deeper cultural disposition. In doing so, he is able to make some extraordinary analyses of how French culture (mind you, it's French culture from the 1950s!) represents its values.
If all this still sounds too hoity-toity for your taste, let me give an example. Barthes takes Jules Verne's story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) about a man exploring the deep sea in a submarine (science fiction at the time!), and uses it to analyse a very common cultural idea which we all share: the enjoyment of being enclosed. It's true, we all love being in a small space where we are the supreme master. It's why children love huts and tents, why adults like driving a car: you may be shut up in a small place, but within it you have everything under control. Yet there is one extra element: it's the combination of inwardness (being closed in) with the outside that we like. Indeed, you might be stuck in wooden (hut) or a steel (car) box, but from it, you can see the whole world. And that's what appeals to us.
If you think about it, this 'myth' returns in many elements of our culture. Watching TV when it's raining outside, surfing the internet, riding glass elevators in tall buildings, having an apartment with a terrace, sunbathing on a towel on a beach, and perhaps the best example of all: reading on the toilet. They're all examples of combining unbroken inwardness with the vagueness of the outside, to use Barthes' words. And all of these situations give us a hugely pleasant sensation. It makes us feel safe and in command at the same time.
And that's why Barthes' Mythologies is a wildly interesting book. It takes very familiar things and situations and explains what the cultural motivations behind them are. Like no other book it takes the ordinary out of the ordinary. And to be frank, humbly trying to piece together a piece of cultural criticism myself once in a while, I'm insanely jealous of Barthes' talent for doing just this.
To finish it off, just one quote which struck me as very relevant even today. Something Vic Van Aelst should keep in mind next time he criticizes Di Rupo's or Milquet's Dutch:
Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there is also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends us. (...) To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders
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