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 [[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/849|{{:potteries_thinkbelt_2.jpg?direct|External Link}}]]
+{{ :cedric_price_-_thinkbelt.pdf|Cedric Price on The Potteries Thinkbelt}}
+PREFACE TO **MYTHOLOGIES**, ROLAND BARTHES
+The following essays were written one each month for about two
+years, from 1954 to 1956, on topics suggested by current events. I
+was at the time trying to reflect regularly on some myths of French
+daily life. The media which prompted these reflections may well
+appear heterogeneous (a newspaper article, a photograph in a
+weekly, a film, a show, an exhibition), and their subject-matter
+very arbitrary: I was of course guided by my own current interests.
+The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of
+impatience at the sight of the 'naturalness' with which newspapers,
+art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even
+though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by
+history. In short, in the account given of our contemporary
+circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at
+every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of
+what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my
+view, is hidden there.
+Right from the start, the notion of myth seemed to me to explain
+these examples of the falsely obvious. At that time, I still used the
+word 'myth' in its traditional sense. But I was already certain of a
+fact from which I later tried to draw all the consequences: myth is
+a language. So that while concerning myself with phenomena
+apparently most unlike literature (a wrestling-match, an elaborate
+dish, a plastics exhibition), I did not feel I was leaving the field of
+this general semiology of our bourgeois world, the literary aspect
+of which I had begun to study in earlier essays. It was only,
+however, after having explored a number of current social
+phenomena that I attempted to define contemporary myth in
+methodical fashion; I have naturally placed this particular essay at
+the end of the book, since all it does is systematize topics discussed
+previously.
+Having been written month by month, these essays do not pretend
+to show any organic development: the link between them is rather
+one of insistence and repetition. For while I don't know whether, as
+the saying goes, 'things which are repeated are pleasing', * my
+belief is that they are significant. And what I sought throughout
+this book were significant features. Is this a significance which I
+read into them? In other words, is there a mythology of the
+mythologist? No doubt, and the reader will easily see where I
+stand. But to tell the truth, I don't think that this is quite the right
+way of stating the problem. 'Demystification' - to use a word which
+is beginning to show signs of wear - is not an Olympian operation.
+What I mean is that I cannot countenance the traditional belief
+which postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of
+the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were
+endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation' equally
+suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of
+their situation. What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction
+of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
+                     - R. B.
+* 'Bis repetita placent': a paraphrase, used in French, of Horace's
+saying 'Haec decies repetita placebit' (Ars Poetica).