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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND CRITIQUE
As with the face of Garbo, it is not the objects, their design, or manufacture that he is subjecting to critique but the cultural impact of transformation in mythical form. Technological rationality produces a shift from the ideal materials of nature to artificial and endlessly malleable objects. Plastic has a similar effect in three dimensions to that which photography has in two, in its potential to reproduce and imitate cheaply, en masse. The child's toy, for example, can be moulded in plastic to replicate natural (e.g. an animal) or imaginary (e.g. a cartoon character) forms that are safe and lasting when used in play. The endless identical plastic copies retain their power to precisely represent and miniaturise other forms that are less fragile and precious than the singular carved or shaped toys of earlier materials such as wood or metal. It is in the final essay, titled ‘Myth Today’, written later than the small substantive essays, that Barthes relates his critique of myth to the political dimension. At the beginning, he sounds like an enthusiast for the possibility of a systematic method that will render the mythological structure of cultural products easy to unravel. But the substantive essays do not break down myths into signifiers and signifieds, let alone into ‘mythemes’, as Lévi-Strauss (1976: 211) called the units of myths, and their power owes little if anything to a systematic semiology. Barthes was later to abandon the idea that myth has a structural form analysable like a language, having unsuccessfully attempted to offer a structural analysis of the workings of the ‘rhetorical’ code in The Fashion System (1990). More interestingly, further on in the ‘Myth Today’ essay he makes explicit the links between myth and ideology in which signs have ideological effects that can be subject to critique. Although he is using the word ‘myth’ in a way that connects with the myths of ancient societies – myths of type one – he is also bringing the idea of myth up to date. In modernity myths are not stories of human characters who engage with gods and perform supernatural feats. In their place are the technologies of modernity (such as cinema and plastics moulding), which appear to have magical effects in representing the world, presenting what is human history as if it were natural. Modern myths are moral accounts of value and cause (what is beauty and how it is formed, what is useful and how it is made) that shift with technological changes. The messages of value obscure their origins and appear to be timeless and independent of how they are created: beauty does not change between Garbo and Hepburn but the technology with which it is represented does; usefulness does not begin with plastics, but the magic of technology gives it a new value. What Barthes says of myth is that ‘it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us’ (1993a: 117). In the collection called The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979a) he writes about ‘Conjugations’ – marriages that are reported for public consumption in newspapers. He describes three types of marriage, pointing out that their reporting involves more than the simple denotative meaning that so-and-so has married or will marry so-and-so. Each is mythologised as the marriage is extracted
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