Everyday Myths

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mythen des Alltags ( Mythologies ) is a culturally semiotic work by the French post-structuralist and semioticist Roland Barthes from 1957. A German translation by Helmut Scheffel first appeared in 1964 in Suhrkamp Verlag - without the essays. In 2010 the Mythologies was published in full in a German translation by Horst Brühmann.

content

The expanded concept of myth

The expanded concept of myth , which not only means a well-known story, but also the unconscious and collective meanings for a society that it “derives from a semiotic process”, is attributed to Barthes in the sciences.

In myths of everyday life , Barthes succeeds in analyzing modern and ancient myths (such as that of the human condition using the example of the exhibition The Family of Man ) as a form of naturalization and essentialization : “The myth of the human condition is based on a very strong one old mystification, which has always consisted of placing nature on the foundation of history. ”Barthes adds the justification for a scientific approach to the analysis of myths to the analysis of numerous everyday examples of myth in the form of short essays and develops the basis here for a critical semiotics .

The myth is a statement

According to the etymology of the word, Barthes states: “the myth is a statement ”, more precisely: “a system of communication , a message . (…) One sees from this that the myth cannot be an object , a concept or an idea ; it is a way of meaning, a form . "

For a definition of what the myth is, the different meanings of the word myth are irrelevant: “You can counter a hundred other meanings of the word myth against me. I tried to define things , not words. ”Barthes first describes the form and later for“ this form the historical limits, the conditions of its use ”, in which“ society must be reintroduced into it ”.

In order to recognize the myth, it is not necessary, "to want to make a substantial distinction (...)" between the mythical objects - because not determine the properties, which the myth is, but the way how the objects are addressed: “Since the myth is a statement, anything that a discourse can account for can become myth. The myth is not defined by the object of his message, but by the way in which he pronounces it. "

The myth has no content restrictions. Almost everything can be provided with a statement, with a myth and socially appropriated: “There are formal limits to the myth, but no content-related… Every object in the world can go from a closed, silent existence to a discussed one, for appropriation by society to pass over an open state, because no law - natural or unnatural - forbids speaking of things. "

The myth as part of society

Society is needed so that things get meaning and are no longer just matter . In addition to the purely material side of things, the statement about things adds a social use to things: “A tree is a tree. Certainly! But a tree pronounced by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a decorated tree that is adapted to a certain consumption, which is provided with literary pleasures, with revolts, with images, in short: with a social one Use that adds to pure matter. ”It is only when things are addressed in society that they become objects of myth:“ Of course not everything is said at the same time. Some objects only fall prey to the mythical word for a moment, then they disappear again, others take their place and arrive at the myth. "

The myth transforms the " real " into the "state of the statement". A fundamental condition for the myth is its temporal and historical determinacy, because myths do not inevitably arise and do not arise from what society imagines as “ nature ”: “Are there inevitably suggestive objects (...)? Certainly not: one can imagine very old myths, but there are no eternal ones; for only human history allows the real to pass into the state of the statement, and it alone determines the life and death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have a historical basis, for myth is a proposition chosen by history ; he cannot emerge from the 'nature' of things. "

The myth as a semiological sign

The myth as a message can be conveyed in a wide variety of forms and via a wide variety of media : “It can therefore very well be other than oral, it can consist of written or representations. The written discourse, the sport, but also the photography, the film, the reportage, the plays and the advertisement , all this can be the carrier of the mythical statement. ”Accordingly, the myth cannot be determined by“ its object ”and the matter of the object. “Because any matter can be arbitrarily endowed with meaning.” Barthes cites the “arrow that is presented and means challenge” as an example. This transfer is, regardless of the material shape of the object, "also a statement"

Barthes sees this generalized conception of language , which does not only refer to alphabetic characters , as “justified by the history of scripts themselves”, because “long before the invention of our alphabet , objects like the kipu of the Incas or drawings like picture scripts were real statements ". At this point Barthes addresses the question of the scientific approach to the analysis of myths, and whether the analysis of myths can be the subject of linguistics: “That is not to say, however, that the mythical proposition must be treated like language. Myth belongs in a science that goes beyond linguistics ; it belongs in semiology . "

The semiological system

For Barthes - unlike Ferdinand de Saussure , for example - a “semiological system” consists of three different terms : the significant (the signifier in Saussure), the meaning (the signified ) and the sign , “which is the associative totality of the first two terms is. "

Barthes explains this three-digit number using the example of the rose: “Just think of a bouquet of roses: I let it mean my passion. Isn't there just one important and one important, the rose and my passion? Not even that, in truth there are only the 'passionate' roses here. But in the field of analysis there are three terms, because these passionate roses can be broken down into roses and passion, and rightly so. One, like the other, existed before they combined and formed this third object, the sign. As little as I can separate the roses from the message they carry in the area of ​​experience, just as little in the area of ​​analysis can I equate the roses as significant with roses as signs: the significant is empty, the sign is fulfilled, it is a Sense . "

The myth as a secondary semiological system

The myth consists of a chain of semiological systems. A simple system, when viewed analytically, forms the sign from what is significant and what is meant, whereby the sign results as an associative whole. The myth already contains the first sign of a semiological system, only here it functions as something significant in the second system: This is the central definition in everyday myths :

“In the myth one finds the (...) three-dimensional scheme: the meaning, the meaning and the sign. But the myth is a special system in that it is built on a semiological chain that preceded it; it is a secondary semiological system . What is a sign in the first system (that is, the associative whole of a concept and an image) is simply significant in the second. (…) Whether it is actual or figurative writing, the myth sees in it a totality of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. And it is precisely this ending term that becomes the first or partial term of the enlarged system that it establishes. Everything happens as if the myth displaced the formal system of the first meaning by one notch. "

As already mentioned, it is not important for the myth whether its statement is expressed in writing, photographically, artistically or in the material form of a building, a plant or a rite : “One must remember here that the materials of the mythical statement (Language, photography, painting, poster, rite, object, etc.), however different they may be at first, are reduced to the pure function of meaning as soon as the myth takes hold of them. The myth sees them as one and the same raw material. Their unity consists in the fact that they are all reduced to the simple status of an expression. "

Ethical considerations

In the margins of his investigation of the myth, as it were in a footnote, Barthes formulates his ethical aspects on the myth. According to this, “what is disturbing in myth is precisely that its form is motivated.” If there were such a thing as “health” of language, this would be justified “by the arbitrariness of the sign”. However, every myth has a motivating form; meaning is transformed into form, deformed, robbed of its history:

“What is repulsive in myth is its refuge in a false nature, is the luxury of meaningful forms, such as those objects that decorate their usefulness with a natural external appearance. The will to make the meaning heavier through the whole guarantee of nature evokes a kind of disgust: the myth is too rich, and precisely its motivation is too much in it. ”For this aversion which the myth generates for Barthes brings he finds a correspondence from the field of art that alternates between nature and anti-nature : “This disgust is the same that I feel in the face of arts that do not want to choose between nature and anti-nature and the first as ideal and use the second as a savings. From an ethical point of view, it shows lowliness to want to play in both areas at the same time. "

See also

expenditure

  • Mythologies. Seuil, Paris 1957.
  • Everyday Myths. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1964 a. 2003, ISBN 3-518-12425-0 .
  • Everyday Myths. First complete German edition. Translated from the French by Horst Brühmann. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-518-41969-2 (published in paperback in 2012).

literature

  • Umberto Eco / Isabella Pezzini: La sémiologie des Mythologies. In: Communications 36 (1982), pp. 19-42.
  • Mona Körte, Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (ed.): Mythologies - Myths of everyday life. Roland Barthes' classics of cultural studies . Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86599-243-7 .
  • Björn Weyand: Culture classics: Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Mythologies (1957). In: KulturPoetik 12 (2012) 2, pp. 258–271.

Web links

Footnotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roland Barthes: The great family of people . In: Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 17.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Barthes: Myths of everyday life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 85.
  3. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 86 f.
  4. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 87 f.
  5. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 90.
  6. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 90 f.
  7. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 92 f.
  8. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 93.
  9. ↑ Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964, p. 108

Remarks

  1. ↑ The new edition was the occasion for the cultural studies volume by Mona Körte and Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (eds.): Mythologies - Mythen des Alltags. Roland Barthes' classics of cultural studies . Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2014.
  2. ↑ See www.mediamanual.at , the content of Barthes' concept of myth can also be traced in the Essen Study Encyclopedia Linguistics , especially in Chapter 3.3 ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.linse.uni-due.de