How to read Mythologies

The Mythologies 

There are three concerns in the mythologies; language, culture, & ideology. The concern with language derives from Saussure. Culture from Levi-Strauss. Ideology from Marx. Each of the mythologies takes as its focus an aspect of culture (wine, film, travel guides, etc, etc). Each considers the language of that aspect of culture (object or concept) and how it communicates with us (how it structures how we read it, how it positions us, it's rhetoric). Each shows the ideological systems at work in this specific language of culture. Each mythology expresses this triangular relation of culture-language-ideology [Levi-Strauss-Sassure-Marx]. 

Typically the textual structure of each mythology follows the culture-language-ideology pattern (wine, the rhetoric of wine, the ideology of wine) which could almost be paraphrased as 'artefact x positions us in way y because ideology z'. 

Myth Today

The concern of Myth Today is the lesson of all the Mythologies. It tries to answer the question 'what do all these individual mythologies add up to'. Barthes' answer is rather remarkable - and it is worth reading Myth Today carefully more than once for this reason - myth is the language of capital itself. 

Each of the individual Mythologies is an example of this meta-language of capital [N/B not all of the mythologies are collected in the standard UK edition and there is another set of Mythologies available in an American translation so Myth Today is based on a very wide range of examples]. 

Myth Today could be seen as an attempt to outline the grammar of this language of capital. The culture-language-ideology triplet could be seen as the syntax of this meta-language of myth. The mythologies themselves are so many figures of speech within it. The specific aspects of culture discussed are its nouns. The rhetorics of culture illuminated in each mythology are the verbs of this meta-language. Culture, language, ideology are its registers...

It is worth remembering that this meta-language of capital has only one object, you the reader, and only one tense, the infinite present, because when it speaks it intends to weave us into a world that we are to understand we cannot change because it has always been this way and always will.  

A Collection on S/Z

Barthes S/Z LXIV. THE VOICE OF THE READER

As though terror-struck: who is speaking here? It cannot be Sarrasine, even indirectly, since he interprets La Zambinella's fear as timidity. Above all, it cannot be the narrator, because he knows that La Zambinella really is terrified. The modalization (as though) expresses the interests of only one character, who is neither Sarrasine nor the narrator, but the reader: it is the reader who is concerned that the truth be simultaneously named and evaded, an ambiguity which the discourse nicely creates by as though, which indicates the truth and yet reduces, it declaratively to a mere appearance. What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks. This inversion of our prejudices (which make reading a reception or, to put matters more clearly, a simple psychological participation in the adventure being related), this inversion can be illustrated by a linguistic image: in the Indo-European verb (for example, Greek), two diatheses (specifically: two voices) were set in opposition: the middle voice, according to which the agent performed the action for his own sake (I sacrifice for myself), and the active voice, according to which he performed this same action for another's benefit (as in the case of the priest who sacrificed on his client's behalf). In this accounting, writing is active, for it acts for the reader: it proceeds not from an author but from a public scribe, a notary institutionally responsible not for flattering his client's tastes but rather for registering at his dictation the summary of his interests, the operations by which, within an economy of disclosure, he manages this merchandise: the narrative.

Media Diversity as the Screen of Capital Uniformity (Barthes Soap-Powders & Detergents).

In 'Soap-Powders and Detergents' (from Mythologies) Barthes works through the, very different, semiotic mechanisms used in the advertising of three washing powders injected into French society in the 1950s (Lux, Persil, and Omo) and the fundamental unity of the three on "the plane of the Anglo-Dutch trust Unilever." We tend to forget that Barthes was a marxist and was deeply concerned with the ways in which capital found its expression in, and organised its control over, semiotic systems.  This forgetful reception of Barthes is remarkably similar to the ways in which Benjamin's works are drawn on for over optimistic and non-ethical readings of 'popular-culture' (especially 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction') when even the briefest perusal of 'The Author as Producer' or 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' would show this to be an error.

This forgetfulness of marxism is especially problematic for the study of current media forms because there is so much unity on the plane of capital behind the seeming diversity of our media.  It is of course obvious on the level of the mega institutions such as News Corporation but Barthes can help us think through this quality of being unified by the flows of capital 'behind' the media and its texts on a personal and/or individualised basis. For instance Andy Murray, Lewis Hamilton, and Cathy Dennis are all unified with Pop Idol (in its many versions) by the capital flows personified in Simon Fuller (who, of course, also unifies the Spice Girls and S Club 7 and The X Factor and to some extent Simon Cowell on that same plane of capital).

Perhaps the most useful working through of this 'unified by the flows of capital' approach concerns Endemol because of the great diversity of semiotic mechanisms it utilises and the plane of capital that it's diverse products are finally unified on.  Endemol (originally a Dutch based TV production company) is probably most famous for Big Brother and its off-shoots but in the UK is also behind Charlie Brooker and his Zeppotron Agent/Production Company.  The radical distinction between the semiotic mechanisms utilised by these two parts of the same capital flows cover the essential unity involved.  The semiotic contrast between Zeppotron's Dead Set, Screen Wipe, or A Touch of Cloth and Endemol's Deal or no Deal, Million Pound Drop, or Big Brother could not be more different but they are all the same on the plane of capital.

The nature of the plane of capital on which these media products are unified is most interesting.  Endemol was partially purchased by one of Silvio Berlusconi's media corporations in 2007 (along with one of its original founders &, seemingly, Goldman Sachs) before a 'debt restructuring deal' in 2012 saw ownership of Endemol dissipate into the ether of financial-capital (RBS seemingly taking a stake). So for five years Charlie Brooker was unified with Silvio Berlusconi on the same plane of capital but now is merely adrift on the miasmic plane of global financial capital.

NARRATIVE & STRUCTURALISM

Narrative & Narratology: stories & structuralisms on Prezi

NOTES ON S/Z BY BARTHES

Notes on Barthes SZ

S/Z XI The Five Codes & XII The Weaving of Voices

Barthes emphasizes five codes/voices in sections X-XII (p16-22) of S/Z;
• Hermeneutic - Enigma - The Voice of Truth
• Semantic - Signifier - The Voice of the Person
• Symbolic - Antithesis - The Voice of Symbol
• Proairetic - Action - The Voice of Empirics
• Cultural - (codes) Reference/Knowledge - The Voice of Science

These codes/voices are not the limit of codes/voices that could exist or be analyzed but are rather the ones that his re-reading of Sarrasine requires or calls-forth.

Together these codes/voices "create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes" on its way to becoming a text. They do not structure the text and nor are they "a paradigm that must be reconstituted" rather they "a perspective of quotations" that refer to the process of reading and re-reading the text. We must use them as a starting point for our own explorations of the text and our own discovery of other codes/voices rather than as an end.

Contexts of Reception

The audience's act of reception of a text is always situated within a socio-cultural context the nature of which provides the frameworks on/from which the meaning (or meanings) of the text is constructed. The text does not posses meaning in & of itself. Rather it's meaning lies in it's use within a given set of rules of use in a given setting. The text will be encoded with meaning by the producers and medium of the text but the acceptance (or otherwise) of that preferred reading is an act of the audience not of the text producers or its medium (although it must not be forgotten that the creators of the text and its medium are a part of and or have an effect on the socio-cultural context of reception and so are more involved in the act of reception than in just the provision of an encoded text to be worked on by the audience; see below).

This Wittgensteinian point has been made by Stuart Hall (Encoding/Decoding), David Morely (Family Television & Nationwide), Roland Barthes (Denotation-Connotation), and other proponents of Reception Theory.

The heart of the matter lies not with the text (although it's 'encoding' is a part of the act of reception it is not necessarily essential) but with the socio-cultural context. It is that context that provides the arena in which the text is used and it is in that use that its meaning lies.

This meaning need not be just of the text and its elements (i.e. of plot etc) but of the text in context. The meaning of a TV drama (for instance) can be constructed to show a range of ideological, narrative, representational messages but its meanings also involve its quality as entertainment or as group interaction (family time or as part of a friendship) or indeed as interpersonal communion (a date). The range of meaning of the text within its socio-cultural context also involves distinction (from Bourdieu), social-status, phatic communication (what the USA calls the 'water-cooler moment'; it gives something to talk about), the establishment of social solidarity (i.e. from Durkheim) in that it can create a connection between people, finally we could consider the range of communities that could be formed around the text ('fandom').

NARRATIVE: STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism is an area of social & cultural theory that focused on and analysed the structures found in human society. It was very important in the early & middle C.20th and is still a very useful perspective even though there have been several more recent developments (such as Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction).

Structuralism emerged from the realisation of certain linguistic & literary theorist and anthropologist that all human societies and cultures possessed shared elements. Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, noticed the universal prevalence of incest-taboos and binary oppositions in narratives (e.g. good/bad, man/women, young/old).

Most structural theory of narrative isn’t that immediately useful to us but three things certainly are;

•The Death of the Author

•The ‘equilibrium’ theory of Todorov

•The ‘narrative codes’ of Roland Barthes

The Death of the Author - This is the title of an essay by Barthes on why authors are unimportant in the understanding of a text and which draws its inspiration from the remarkable finding of structuralist anthropology and literary theory that all stories contained the same or similar elements regardless of the society and/or culture they originated from. All human stories were made up from the same narrative elements (see Propp, The Brothers Grimm, the aforementioned Levi-Strauss, Todorov & Barthes (see below) and so all an ‘author’ really does it reform those existing elements into a specific (not even necessarily new) pattern. If the creators of texts are not their ‘authors’, in the sense of the originating force, then we should only think of them as writers and relegate them to the background of analysis.

The ‘equilibrium’ theory of Todorov - Todorov established that most narratives could be shown to conform to one narrative pattern and that this pattern was indicative of a conservative ideology. Equilibrium - Todorov suggests that a narrative pattern based on equilibrium - disruption - return to equilibrium - new (or re-established) equilibrium. By which we mean that this narrative pattern would present itself in a text as some form of social stability (family life, a peaceful setting, daily life, political stability) which is disrupted (murder, revolution, the return of a prodigal family member, the appearance of a super villain) this disruption needs to be worked through (by investigating the crime, the superhero struggling for good, the family mending itself, society repairing itself or being repaired) so that a new or re-establish social stability is in place for the conclusion of the text (the hero defeats the villain and his evil plan, the murderer is apprehended, the family is at peace with itself, the safety of the old order is repaired). Todorov did not contend that all narratives conformed to this pattern but that a majority of them did and that they did so for ideological reasons. Todorov shows this pattern to be an ideological tool that acts against change and in favour of the status quo.

The ‘narrative codes’ of Barthes - Barthes extended the structural analysis of narrative by suggesting that all narratives where built up from five interweaving codes. These codes, the hermeneutic (based on enigma), the proairetic (based on action), the ‘semantic’ (based on connotation), the ‘symbolic’ code (based on antithesis), and the ‘cultural’ code (based on shared knowledge & intertextuality), are mixed in different ways throughout different texts. For our purposes (A-level media studies) the first two codes, the hermeneutic (enigma) and the proairetic (action) are the most important because they are the most obvious. We can see them at work whenever there is a mystery to be solved or when action is needed to resolve a situation (they are very commonly seen in crime & thriller fiction) and they both have a strong interpellative effect in that they draw us in to the text. This is useful because we can see how narrative elements are used ideologically.

Links for further reading:

http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/narrative.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8332523/Narrative-theory-notes

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/narratology/

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuralism.htm

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/anthropology.htm#Structural%20Anthropology

http://www.utpa.edu/faculty/mglazer/Theory/structuralism.htm

http://web.as.ua.edu/ant/cultures/cultures.php

http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/PrimarySources/TodorovStructuralAnalysisofNarrative.pdf