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First PDF file -- Myth Today

Submitted by fchen on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 2:00pm. VIS201 -- Contemporary Critical Issues

This PDF file is 10.9MB. Click the name of the file to download it: Myth Today 1.PDF .

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Myth Today

Submitted by mcoors on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 1:29am.

In reading Barthes’ Myth Today, one is struck early on by his relentless deconstruction of the terminology and meaning of the “myth.” Barthes’ exhaustive picking apart of the functioning elements of this “type of speech” reduce it to an unrecognizable state and gradually leave the reader with the impression that he or she no longer has any idea what a myth is or could be.

The essay goes on, however, to reconstruct and redefine myth according to Barthes’ convictions; soon he explains that contemporary myth serves to depoliticize things and make them seem “natural” rather than derived from political and historical contexts. When he claims that the only type of language able to counteract the whitewashing effects of myth is language that remains political or seeks to transform reality, it is suddenly easy to begin to view his aforementioned preliminary deconstruction of “myth” as a performative prelude to the essay—wherein he works from the outset to establish himself as a “reality transformer” (in redefining conventional understandings of myth).

However, in terms of Barthes’ assertion that “revolutionary language cannot be mythical,” it seems difficult to understand what precise characteristics differentiate an instance of language that seeks to “transform reality” from an instance that does not. One could easily assert that an utterance of any kind will necessarily transform reality, based on the simple fact of its new existence. If it is contended that the intention of the speaker is necessary for language to be considered “revolutionary,” what is to be made of the possibility that one speaker’s “mythic” intentions could be misinterpreted or mistranslated, with reality-transforming results? Or, if one believes in a “complexity of human acts” that should result in a complete range of innumerable possible instances of speech (and, therefore, limitlessly variable expressions of the intensity of one’s desire for transformation), how can we possibly devise a reliable way to distinguish “myth” from “revolution” according to Barthes’ terms?

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Barthes went through many

Submitted by ejsmith on Fri, 04/20/2007 - 6:24pm.
Barthes went through many stages; however his concern with writing shows that no form or style of writing is a free expression of an author's subjectivity. as you rightly pointed out, writing is always loaded with social and ideological values and language is never innocent. critiques* have the power to mask and unmask these latent intersticies that highlight the belied historical-political features of the social world...together with a utopian longing for a different world and different forms of writing, provides the impulse behind his analyses of "mythologies"...in this way, he prefigures the announcement of the death of an author. *by critique, i don't mean just art historians and critics, but artists that create works that highlight the latent functions of intertextuality.
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I was interested in what

Submitted by becraft on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 12:58am.
I was interested in what might be, paradoxically, resuscitative in myth. (I don't know if this is possible or probable...I feel like it was hinted at: "the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth.") Barthes seems to explain myth as predominantly serving to neutralize and corrupt, "eternalize" and "Naturalize" signification-----meaning/form-----reducing them to, or subsuming them as part of dominant ideologies. But when he finally speaks of an "impenetrable, irreducible reality," in opposition to a reality that is "entirely permeable to history," could it also be with latent capability, in combination with an extraneous myth that may work as a framework, to provide a third space for signification? The simple analogy, a+b=c, c does not equal a or b, I think is similar. I think this is different from the "neither-norism" Barthe mentions, a elements reduced to analogues, balanced, and disposed, and closer to things simply being what they are not. For example, what he says; "the future is essence, the essential destruction of the past," not the "trivial," iconoclastic view of "we must destroy before we can build." Myth is language of language, language inscribed in language----the necessity for an appropriately particular framework that shares the same structure of meta-language makes sense, working to make its function transparent, to some extent. They are intentionally apolitical, (in so far as it does not pretend not to be in vicarious relation to the "language-object," it is aware of its position) and for this reason "elegant...[and] in their place in meta-language." This could be what "ejsmith...On?" is suggesting when she mentions critique. Art that is reflexive and critical.
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