Roland Barthes – Mythologies - soundenvironments

Neither-Nor CriticismWe were able to read in one of the first numbers of L'Express (thedaily) the (anonymous) profession of faith of a critic, which was asuperb piece of balanced rhetoric. Its idea was that criticism mustbe 'neither a parlour game, nor a municipal service' which meansthat it must be neither reactionary nor communist, neithergratuitous nor political.We are dealing here with a mechanism based on a doubleexclusion largely pertaining to this enumerative mania which wehave already come across several times, and which I thought Icould broadly define as a petit-bourgeois trait. One reckons all themethods with scales, one piles them up on each side as one thinksbest, so as to appear oneself as an imponderable arbiter endowedwith a spirituality which is ideal and thereby just, like the beamwhich is the judge in the weighing.The faults indispensable to this operation of accountancy consist inthe morality of the terms used. According to an old terrorist device(one cannot escape terrorism at will), one judges at the same timeas one names, and the word, ballasted by a prior culpability, quitenaturally comes to weigh down one of the scales. For instance,culture will be opposed to ideologies. Culture is a noble, universalthing, placed outside social choices: culture has no weight.Ideologies, on the other hand, are partisan inventions: so, onto thescales, and out with them! Both sides are dismissed under the sterngaze of culture (without realizing that culture itself is, in the lastanalysis, an ideology). Everything happens as if there were on oneside heavy, defective words (ideology, catechism, militant), meantto serve for the ignominious game of the scales; and on the other,light, pure, immaterial words, noble by divine right, sublime to thepoint of evading the sordid law of numbers (adventure, passion,grandeur, virtue, honour), words placed above the sorrycomputation of lies. The latter group has the function of81admonishing the former: there are words which are criminal andthere are others which judge them. Needless to say, this finemorality of the Third Party unavoidably leads to new dichotomy,quite as simplistic as that which one wanted to expose in the veryname of complexity. True, our world may well be subjected to alaw of alternations; but you can be sure that it is a schism withoutTribunal; no salvation for the judges: they also are well and trulycommitted.Besides, it is enough to see which other myths emerge in thisNeither-Nor criticism, to understand on which side it is situated.Without speaking further on the myth of timelessness which is atthe core of any appeal to an eternal 'culture' ('an art for all time'), Ialso find, in our Neither-Nor doctrine, two common expedients ofbourgeois mythology. The first consists in a certain idea offreedom, conceived as 'the refusal of a priori judgments'. Now aliterary judgment is always determined by the whole of which it isa part, and the very absence of a system - especially when itbecomes a profession of faith - stems from a very definite system,which in this case is a very common variety of bourgeois ideology(or of culture, as our anonymous writer would say). It can even besaid it is when man proclaims his primal liberty that hissubordination is least disputable. One can without fear defy anyoneever to practise an innocent criticism, free from any systematicdetermination: the Neither-Nor brigade themselves are committedto a system, which is not necessarily the one to which theyproclaim their allegiance. One cannot judge Literature withoutsome previous idea of Man and History, of Good, Evil, Society,etc.: even in the simple word adventure, which is used with suchalacrity by our Neither-Nor critics in order to moralize againstthose nasty systems which 'don't cause any surprise', whatheredity, what fatality, what routine! Any kind of freedom alwaysin the end re-integrates a known type of coherence, which isnothing but a given a priori. So that freedom, for the critic, is notto refuse the wager (impossible!), it is to make his own wagerobvious or not. *82