Roland Barthes â Mythologies - soundenvironments
Roland Barthes â Mythologies - soundenvironments Roland Barthes â Mythologies - soundenvironments
the 'problem'. A three-quarter face photograph, which is morecommon, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly inthe future, it does not confront, it soars, and fertilizes some otherdomain, which is chastely left undefined. Almost all three-quarterface photos arc ascensional, the face is lifted towards asupernatural light which draws it up and elevates it to the realm ofa higher humanity; the candidate reaches the Olympus of elevatedfeelings, where all political contradictions are solved: peace andwar in Algeria, social progress and employers' profits, so-called'free' religious schools and subsidies from the sugar-beet lobby, theRight and the Left (an opposition always 'superseded'!): all thesecoexist peacefully in this thoughtful gaze, nobly fixed on thehidden interests of Order.93The Lost ContinentA film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the currentmyth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretextof which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidentlyfalse, incidentally, led by three or four bearded Italians into theMalay Archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy,innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisuretime with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, alittle bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no filmabout the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary onthe tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish ofspaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people,anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historicalor sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means morefor them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in anessentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has todaybecome the political centre of the world we see here all flattened,made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring theworld is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should atthis point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema).Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodiedthrough the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for thespiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bearas a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists willhave no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form,while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at leastthe Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions oftheir own? Never mind, these variations matter very littlecompared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made atonce specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquantspectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol. And even if Buddhism isnot strictly speaking Christian, does it matter, since it also has nuns94
who have their heads shaven (a major theme in the pathos of allceremonies of taking the veil), since it has monks who kneel andconfess to their superior, and finally since, as in Seville, thefaithful come and cover with gold the statue of their god? * It istrue that it is always the forms which emphasize best the identity ofall religions; but here this identity, far from unmasking them, givesthem a firm basis instead and credits them all to a higher form ofCatholicism.It is well known that syncretism has always been one of the greatassimilating techniques of the Church. In the seventeenth century,in this same Orient whose Christian predispositions are shown tous by The Lost Continent, the Jesuits went very far towards theoecumemcity of forms: thus were born the Malabar rites, which thePope, in fact, eventually condemned. It is this same 'all things arealike' which is hinted at by our ethnographers: East and West, it isall the same, they are only different in hue, their essential core isidentical, and that is the eternal postulation of man towards God,the paltry and contingent character of geographical considerationscompared to this human nature of which Christianity alone holdsthe key. Even the legends, all this 'primitive' folklore whosestrangeness seems ostensibly pointed out to us, have as their solemission the illustration of 'Nature': the rites, the cultural facts, arenever related to a particular historical order, an explicit economicor social status, but only to the great neutral forms of cosmiccommonplaces (the seasons, storms, death, etc.). If we areconcerned with fishermen, it is not at all the type of fishing whichis shown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, aromantic essence of the fisherman, presented not as a workmandependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, butrather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is faraway and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping andpraying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long processionof which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: toidentify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences ofrefugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.All told, exoticism here shows well its fundamental justification,which is to deny any identification by History. By appending toEastern realities a few positive signs which mean 'native', onereliably immunizes them against any responsible content. A little'situating', as superficial as possible, supplies the necessary alibiand exempts one from accounting for the situation in depth. Facedwith anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two typesof behaviour, which are both mutilating: either to acknowledge itas a Punch and Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of theWest. In any case, the main thing is to deprive it of its history. Wesee therefore that the 'beautiful pictures' of The Lost Continentcannot be innocent: it cannot be innocent to lose the continentwhich found itself again at Bandoeng.* This provides us with a fine example of the mystifying power ofmusic: all the 'Buddhist' scenes are supported by a nondescriptmusical treacle, which takes after both American crooning andGregorian chant: it is monodic, anyway (the sign of monasticity).9596
- Page 2 and 3: MYTHOLOGIESBooks by Roland BarthesA
- Page 4 and 5: Reading and deciphering myth 127Myt
- Page 6 and 7: * See Translator's Note on neologis
- Page 8 and 9: The World of WrestlingThe grandiloq
- Page 10 and 11: exhaustion of the content by the fo
- Page 12 and 13: or function because in fact half th
- Page 14 and 15: integration of Roman capillary habi
- Page 16 and 17: The good-natured image of 'the writ
- Page 18 and 19: Blind and Dumb CriticismCritics (of
- Page 20 and 21: having disguised the abrasive funct
- Page 22 and 23: It is a kind of homeopathy: one cur
- Page 24 and 25: And this 'universal' language comes
- Page 26 and 27: not the alibi which a sizeable part
- Page 28 and 29: ToysFrench toys: one could not find
- Page 30 and 31: of beauty than the essence of her c
- Page 32 and 33: American films, in which the hero,
- Page 34 and 35: The Nautilus and the Drunken BoatTh
- Page 36 and 37: him, the cessation of a localized f
- Page 38 and 39: All this would be commonplace if we
- Page 40 and 41: support given by the Guide to Franc
- Page 42 and 43: Neither-Nor CriticismWe were able t
- Page 44 and 45: incongruous and artificial clothing
- Page 46 and 47: course is meant to prepare one for
- Page 50 and 51: PlasticDespite having names of Gree
- Page 52 and 53: which accompany each chapter of the
- Page 54 and 55: Thus we begin to see better the myt
- Page 56 and 57: difference. Pictures become a kind
- Page 58 and 59: which is a signification. Of course
- Page 60 and 61: But the essential point in all this
- Page 62 and 63: metaphor is perhaps still too spati
- Page 64 and 65: salute and that of the French soldi
- Page 66 and 67: instrument. Conversely, if I deciph
- Page 68 and 69: ut the meaning of things themselves
- Page 70 and 71: The bourgeoisie as a joint-stock co
- Page 72 and 73: particular, historical: man as repr
- Page 74 and 75: enthralled by the story of the lion
- Page 76 and 77: empty form, open to the innocence o
- Page 78 and 79: only weigh like against like. There
- Page 80 and 81: Necessity and limits of mythologyI
- Page 82 and 83: weigh the signification with the fu
the 'problem'. A three-quarter face photograph, which is morecommon, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly inthe future, it does not confront, it soars, and fertilizes some otherdomain, which is chastely left undefined. Almost all three-quarterface photos arc ascensional, the face is lifted towards asupernatural light which draws it up and elevates it to the realm ofa higher humanity; the candidate reaches the Olympus of elevatedfeelings, where all political contradictions are solved: peace andwar in Algeria, social progress and employers' profits, so-called'free' religious schools and subsidies from the sugar-beet lobby, theRight and the Left (an opposition always 'superseded'!): all thesecoexist peacefully in this thoughtful gaze, nobly fixed on thehidden interests of Order.93The Lost ContinentA film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the currentmyth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretextof which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidentlyfalse, incidentally, led by three or four bearded Italians into theMalay Archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy,innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisuretime with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, alittle bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no filmabout the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary onthe tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish ofspaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people,anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historicalor sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means morefor them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in anessentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has todaybecome the political centre of the world we see here all flattened,made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring theworld is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should atthis point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema).Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodiedthrough the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for thespiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bearas a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists willhave no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form,while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at leastthe Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions oftheir own? Never mind, these variations matter very littlecompared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made atonce specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquantspectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol. And even if Buddhism isnot strictly speaking Christian, does it matter, since it also has nuns94
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