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humanism_act.0 [2018/07/14 00:55]
joshua
humanism_act.0 [2018/07/14 20:12]
joshua
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 {{ :​cedric_price_-_thinkbelt.pdf|Cedric Price on The Potteries Thinkbelt}} {{ :​cedric_price_-_thinkbelt.pdf|Cedric Price on The Potteries Thinkbelt}}
 +
 +1957 PREFACE TO {{ :​roland-barthes-mythologies.pdf|**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.
 +1957                     - R. B.
 +
 +* 'Bis repetita placent':​ a paraphrase, used in French, of Horace'​s
 +saying 'Haec decies repetita placebit'​ (Ars Poetica). ​