Modern Mythologies

Hey all,

This week Alan is hosting the topic. Here's the write-up below!

What if the things we encounter every day are secretly telling us what kind of people we are supposed to be? In Mythologies, Roland Barthes takes seemingly trivial objects and cultural practices (wrestling, advertisements, toys, food, cars, photography, film, and fashion) and asks a deceptively simple question: What do these things make us believe? Rather than treating mythology as something belonging to ancient Greece or Rome, Barthes argues that modern societies produce their own myths. A magazine photograph, a restaurant menu, a children's toy, or a luxury automobile can appear to be nothing more than an ordinary object. But beneath its surface, it can communicate ideas about class, gender, nationality, morality, consumption, and what counts as "normal." In this talk, we will explore Barthes's semiology, the structuralist relationship between signifier, signified, and sign, and the way myth develops as a second-order system of signification. We will examine how myth transforms historically and socially produced meanings into things that appear natural, self-evident, and inevitable, from patriotism and literary criticism to luxury cruises, dance, and the ideology of soap detergents.

We will unpack Barthes's claim that “myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to disappear” and consider what this means for the relationship between signs, ideology, and power. We will also compare Barthes's conception of myth with Žižek's account of ideology: if Barthes shows us how ideology becomes naturalized through signs, what does Žižek add to our understanding of why we continue to participate in ideological systems even when we recognize them as constructed? Finally, we will turn the question toward the present: What are the mythologies of our own everyday lives? What contemporary images, objects, commodities, rituals, and forms of media appear to simply "be what they are," while quietly producing and naturalizing particular ways of seeing the world? The goal is not simply to understand Barthes's theory of myth, but to develop a way of seeing the myths embedded in the ordinary. Selected readings for this presentation include the chapters Blind and Dumb Criticism, Soap-powders and Detergents, and The Poor and the Proletariat

https://soundenvironments.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/roland-barthes-mythologies.pdf

https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/KleinhansFilmTheory/5DOC-roland-barthes-mythologies.pdf