In this video, I'd like to get to the second part of Roland Barthes' "Mythologies," from 1957,
and this is where things get really interesting in terms of the theory. So we'll try to sketch out
some of the basics and then in subsequent videos we'll flesh things out. At the beginning of the
second part, Barthes talks about how every kind of language or form of communication can become
a myth, from a cave drawing to a ship's flag. The examples go on [and on], and he's really trying to
figure out how this movement from language or discourse to myth ultimately works. So,
what we're dealing with here then is he's focused on semiotics, as we have discussed.
Semiotics ... is the study of signs, and he wants us to get to mythology. By mythology he just means
that these signs take on an extra kind of meaning. They present a kind of worldview, a perspective on
life. This secondary meaning is, according to Barthes anyway, somewhat artificial, because
it's imposed on these signs. Similarly, then, we can say that we move from form (the words are the
forms) and we move to ideas. And Barthes talks about how he studies ideas taking form, taking
the form of words and objects, and so on. And all of this is really then the study of ideology.
So this is a pretty classical kind of Marxist approach here. You're trying to study ideology, in
this case through myth and language, and you want to get back to history ultimately. How is history
being shaped through language and through the ideas that we impose on it? That's very Marxist
ultimately, because you're trying to get back to the economic aspect, right, the base, before
we get to the superstructure. Okay, so we have a general sense of what Barthes is doing here. Now,
let's remind ourselves of the basic ideas of the sign, or the basic aspects. And as we said before,
we have a signifier, when it comes to the sign, and that might be something like "tree." So the
word "tree" -- there we go -- conjures up an image or concept, and we call that the signified. ...
And we'll just draw a very quick tree here, because I'm sure this is familiar to you
from the previous videos. In any case, if you studied Ferdinand de Saussure, or linguistics,
you will know about these things as well. So all of this together -- let's draw a big
kind of egg shape thing here -- all of this together is the sign. There we are. And we can see
this structure elsewhere as well. So if we turn, for instance, to Freud ... he talks about dreams.
So if we think about a dream, then on the one hand we have what he calls the manifest content.
This would be what you remember in the morning. You wake up, you had a dream,
and you kind of go, okay, well, I remember that I did this weird thing. Or, you know,
I was being chased through a maze of streets by a witch. Or who knows what. But then what does it
mean? And that deeper meaning -- the stuff that's hidden -- is what Freud calls the latent content.
He argues that the interpreter of dreams really needs to get beyond the manifest content and try
to understand the latent content, the hidden content. So the dream then is similar to the
overall sign. It has a similar structure. But, as we'll see as we go on, there are major differences
as well that Barthes actually wants to point out here, especially when it comes to myth.
Okay, so we've talked a little bit about how in myth we are dealing with a second kind of
meaning that's imposed on the word. And Bart sketches this out somewhat.
Again, we're going to have a bit of overlap with what we talked about. Let's say that we have sign
one ... and of course as we said before we have the signified. I'm going to shorten this ... well,
actually I should write it out, because it's going to be confusing otherwise. And we have
the signifier -- there we go -- and all of this [let's] put it in a box --is sign one. Now,
what he's saying is that what happens in myth is that all of this sign one (I'll just use a
different color here to make it clear) -- all of this sign one becomes the new signifier.
And this ... new signifier has a new signified attached to it.
We'll call all of this together sign two. There we are. Let's look at an example here. So,
if we take our example of the tree, which we had before ... so here's our tree. Now,
all of this together becomes our new signifier. And then what is our new signified? Well, it could
be that the tree is a symbol. (We'll talk about the word "symbol," because that's not quite the
right word). It's some kind of sign that suggests temptation here. Temptation, maybe organic life,
and the list goes on. Any kind of signifier can mean a whole host of different things. We
add this meaning to it. So what has happened here is that this first level sign has taken
on a new meaning. It has become a signifier to a new signified. And that is our second
sign. That's the myth that we're dealing with. So what Barthes argues then is that
when it comes to myth we are dealing with what he calls a "second-order semiological system." That's
this part. We've added this to the first part, the basic sign. He also calls this a "metalanguage."
So it's about another language. It interprets another language. Conversely, he calls the
first sign ... a language object. It's the object that can be used for new purposes. Let's look at
a couple more examples here. He talks about how in grammar school back in the day people learning
Latin would come across this sentence, and this basically just means "because I'm called a lion."
But this is not really a sentence that teaches you anything but lions. If this is sign 1,
you would think, okay, this is about lions and somebody being called a lion or the lion being
called a lion, but in the second level of meaning it's really just a sentence that's used to show
grammar. For instance, does the the verb match up with the pronoun, with the subject? And even more
importantly, how do the pronoun and the noun ("ego" and "leo") -- how do they relate? Are
they in the same form you might say? Okay, I'm not going to get into Latin here too much, but I think
you can see that what he's trying to say is that the example of the lion tells you nothing about
lions. It tells you everything about grammar. And that's how we move from sign 1 to sign 2.
Another example is of a soldier, let's say a black soldier, giving a salute to the flag. And I've
just changed the flag here from the French one to the American one, but it's really the same idea.
On the level of sign 1 this is simply somebody giving a salute. On the level of sign 2 this
tells you everything about the empire, about the military, about patriotism -- all of these kinds
of things. So that's how every time we move from sign 1, which then turns into sign 2.
Coming back to our diagrams here, Barthes assigns three different words to his diagram to explain
what each part now is. The first part here is the "form." We can say that sign 1 becomes the form
in which we stick the content of sign 2, you might say. You can also say that
the signifier here is the form as well, because ultimately all of sign 1 becomes the signifier.
So that's the form. Think of it a little bit as maybe a vase. You have a nice vase. Well,
probably nicer than this one, and you can stick all kinds of stuff in it. You could
stick a flower in it if you wanted to. There we go. Give it a couple of leaves.
But we could stick other stuff in there. We could stick a pen in it if we wanted to. There we go.
And the idea here is that the form becomes kind of transparent. We look at this and we don't even
really notice anymore that this is a container. In the same way the grammatical sentence becomes
the container for a grammatical lesson, the black person saluting becomes the container, the vase,
in which we stick a different meaning, and so on and so forth. That's really the first idea here,
that we have the form which we are using, and we empty out its historical meaning. The lion,
the soldier's history -- all that kind of stuff. And then we stick in something new.
Now, I mentioned the word "symbol" before, and I just want to come back to that,
because the form here is is not a symbol. ... The reason for that is because the black soldier,
let's say, or even the sentence about the lion -- there's too much reality there, too much presence,
too much history. We're not just talking about some abstract rose symbolizing something else, or
a heart symbolizing love. We're talking about real history. And we shouldn't forget that, especially
because this is a Marxist analysis. History is real and granular, and we need to appreciate that.
Okay, so not quite a symbol then. And we've called this first part the sign. The other
parts of the language [that Barthes uses] here are that sign 2 here, the signified,
can now be called the concept. So this Barthes calls the concept. From now on it's the signified
in the myth. And if you think about part 1, for instance, we talked about wrestling. What
does wrestling mean as a concept? Well, it means spectacle! That would be an example.
And then finally, all of sign 2, so the the whole thing here, is what he calls the signification.
So far, then, we've talked about the form,
but let's zoom in a little bit more to the concept and the signification.
One of the interesting words that he uses to talk about the concept is the word "condensation,"
which if you know some Freud you would probably recognize this word, because Freud talks a lot
about how condensation happens in dreams and elsewhere. Think for instance of, let's say, a
window. You get up in the morning, right, there's condensation on the window, drops of water.
And what you see there is how how the moisture in the air has become condensed you might say on the
window pane. In the same way if you're dreaming, then often what happens is that some little detail
is what you remember. It's like that little drop of water, but there's a reason for that little
detail in your dream. It's a condensed version of all kinds of other stuff in the background:
the latent meaning, the traumas that you're dealing with, and so on. So condensation is a
really fascinating idea here because for Barthes the concept that we have here is really just
a brief condensation of a much bigger picture. We might say that the signified
has behind it all of this other stuff, this whole ideology or way of looking at things.
And he says often it's very difficult to capture what that concept is. In fact, we often have to
make up words to be able to describe this concept. Let me give you a couple of examples here. If you
take the word "hipster," for instance, it's a great word. Well, what is a hipster? You could
write paragraphs and essays trying to define what a hipster is. But intuitively you kind of grasp
that this concept is something. It's something out there. But if we really wanted to fill it in we
would need all of this background information. That's where we see the condensation of the
concept, which is a really fascinating idea. Maybe one more example. If we talk about "Oxbridge,"
which is a combination of Oxford and Cambridge, then again we are dealing with this kind of
made-up concept that allows us to make sense of a certain culture, a certain perspective
on life. Both of these [words] are then called neologisms, which are just words that are coined
to register something. I think I'm missing an "s" here: neologisms! There you go. At this point,
then, we can move on finally to the signification. We've talked about the form, the concept, and now
the signification. There's this great sentence in the book where Barthes writes, "However
paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing. It's function is to distort, not to make disappear."
What you see here is that Barthes is now thinking about the whole signification, the whole sign,
and its purpose. He's saying myth is not about hiding stuff. It's about making things clear.
Like the black person saluting the flag. That's meant to really point you to patriotism. It's
sending a message, and you can see ideology at work here. Well, there are a few things we can
say about this. First of all, this is different from Freud as we saw before. So with Freud the
latent content is hidden and the manifest content is what you remember in the morning.
There things are hidden, and there's a reason for that. It's often because these things that
are hidden are too traumatic for us to face. We kind of want to hide them from our perspective.
He does agree with Freud, however, that there is distortion in the myth. What tends to happen
is that if we think back to our signified and our signifier, we constantly go back and forth
between these two things. The form and the concept keep being interchanged, and so on.
Sometimes we think about the soldiers, sometimes about the empire. We just keep going back and
forth between them. We also recognize that there's some deformation. The soldier does
not naturally represent these things, but we're using the soldier for this particular purpose.
Coming back to our quotation and the idea that myth hides nothing, another thing we
can say about this is that it doesn't always match what Barthes says elsewhere. When he
talks about Operation Margarine, as you might remember, he suggested that there's an element
of deception there. We are given all the bad features of margarine in order to prepare us
to accept margarine overall nevertheless, as a great thing. So you might say then that the
faults of margarine are openly confessed. That part is honest. But the strategy is hidden.
In other words, does myth hide nothing? Not necessarily! And finally, we'll finish here with a
reference to another thinker. If you read the the thought of Slavoj Zizek who is a philosopher, his
view of myth I think is somewhat different because he often argues that myth is all about hiding
things. The classic example here is the concept of the Jew. What happens with scapegoating the
Jew is that we do that (well, hopefully we don't do that, but some people do!) in order to hide
our hidden trauma. We want to have this notion of a whole organic society without blemishes,
and we struggle with our own lack of wholeness. So what do we is we create the Jew as a scapegoat. We
put the Jew outside of our community and say this person is other and different. Why do we do it? It
is because we actually are more interested in ourselves and in creating a certain image of
ourselves and overcoming our traumas. What you see there is that we've created one sign, the Jew, in
order to hide from ourselves the actual meaning, the actual trauma that we're dealing with.
So that allows you then to have a basic sense of Barthes' categories and his concepts,
and hopefully it also provides some opportunities to reflect on them and start critiquing them.