Mythologies

1
Mythologies

• Fifty-four Journalistic Articles
• The articles are constituted as opportunistic
  improvisations that provide with a panorama of
  events in France of 1950s.
• The articles focus on various manifestations of
  mass culture to challenge innocence and
  naturalness of cultural events.
• What Barthes is doing stop taking things for
  granted, uncover the secondary meanings and
  connotations.
• Myths Today Le Mythe aujourd hui
• The essay is a retrospectively theoretical
  conspectus that provides a methodological tract
  for the fifty-four articles.

2
Myths Today

• Myth is a type of speech
• Myth is a system of communication it is defined
  by the way in which it utters messages.
• Myth is a form, a mode of signification photo,
  cinema, or sports can be served as a support to
  mythical speech.
• Myth has a historical foundation it is the
  speech chosen by history.
• Myth is a second-order semiological system
• Mythology is one fragment of semiology it
  studies significations apart from their content.
• Mythology is endowed with significance it is a
  science dealing with value.

3
Tri-dimensional Terms of Myth

• . . . We are dealing with, in any semiological
  system, not with two, but with three different
  terms.signifier, signified and sign
• A bunch of Roses

4
The Formation of Myth

• Two Semiological Systems bunch of roses
• A Linguistic System (language-object)
• Sign? the associative total of Signifier and
  Signified
• Myth (metalanguage) a second language
• Sign? a signifier in the second system

5
Signifier and Signified in Metalanguage

• Signifier meaning and form
• meaning a total of linguistic signs that
  postulate a kind of knowledge, a comparative
  order of ideas and memory.
• form meaning leaves its contingency it empties
  itself and only the letter remains.
• meaning to form the form does not suppress
  meaning but impoverishes it meaning is put at a
  distance, lost its value.
• Signified concept
• Concept offers knowledge for impoverished
  meaning.
• It is a formless, unstable and nebulous
  condensation that can spread over a large expanse
  of signifiers.

6
Sign in the Metalanguage

• Sign signification
• The term is the association of the first two, the
  correlation of mythical concept and mythical
  form.
• In signification, the function of myth is to
  distort, not to make disappear with two
  manifestations
• I. form a literal immediate presence that can
  appear only through a given substructure.
• II. concept a kind of nebula, the condensation
  of certain knowledge.
• The correlation of the two is a relation of
  deformation.
• ?concept distorts the full meaning, literally
  deforms it but does not abolish it. The grammatical example

7
The Grammatical Example

• quia ego nominor leo because my name is lion
• In a purely linguistic system, the clause finds a
  fullness
• of history I am an animal, I live in certain
  country. . .
• In a system of myth, the richness is receded at a
  distance
• my name is lion ? I am a grammatical
  example, a presence of a certain agreement of
  the predicate.
• The form of lion remains the naming of lion is
  deprived of memory, not of existence, the
  meaning is distorted by concept.

8
The Elements of Signification in Myth

• The mythical signifier reproduces alibi
• meaning presents the from from outdistances the
  meaning
• ? form empty but present meaning absent but
  full
• Myth is a froze language
• The use of signification confers like a notified
  look behind fact.
• The fact paralyses the intention, makes it
  innocent and frozen.
• ? mythical speech appears as a notification/ a
  statement of fact
• Myth is type of speech defined by its intention
• Myth is always in part motivated and unavoidably
  contains analogy
• Myth plays on the analogy between form/ meaning.
• ? there is no myth without motivated form.