barthes and sorel on myth

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Myth and Politics in the Works of Sorel and BarthesAuthor(s): Michael TagerSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1986), pp. 625-639Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709722 .Accessed: 05/07/2011 08:19

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MYTH AND POLITICS IN THE WORKS OFSOREL AND BARTHES

BY MICHAEL TAGER

I. Roland Barthes once argued that in France the bourgeoisie lostits cultural voice during the Dreyfus Affair, when its writers and intel-lectuals released it.1 In the eighteenth century intellectuals had cham-pioned the cause of the bourgeois individual against aristocratic privilege,but grew increasingly ambivalent about the triumphant bourgeoisie duringthe nineteenth century, and finally at the end of the nineteenth centurywere decisively detached from their native class by the aftershocks of the

Dreyfus Affair. With the openingof the

twentieth century landowners,employers, senior civil servants, and executives no longer had congenialaccess to intellectual culture because it called their very existence as aclass into question. That the antibourgeois impulse of the French "clerks"has remained quite strong through the twentieth century is suggested bythe similarity between the statement of Georges Sorel in the introductionto his most famous work that even if none of his ideas bore fruit, "I donot believe I am laboring in vain-for in this way I help to ruin the

prestigeof middle-class

culture,"2and Barthes's claim that "the intel-

lectual's (or the writer's) historical function, today, is to maintain andemphasize the decomposition of bourgeois consciousness."

Barthes realized that this historical shift placed intellectuals in atenuous position. Detached from the bourgeoisie, many sought to rep-resent the proletariat. Yet the spread of bourgeois (now "mass") cultureto the proletariat largely cut off that way of rapprochement. Indeed, theattack on bourgeois culture, settled in the universities so long, itselfbecame an orthodoxy and integrated into the functioning of society. Thesearch for an agent capable of transforming society led Sorel successivelytoward Marxism, syndicalism, nationalism, and Bolshevism, and perhapson to other stages, had he lived beyond 1922. Barthes, too, workedsuccessively under the aegis of various systems as ways of dismantlingbourgeois ideals. Through their intellectual peregrinations both authorsdeveloped theories of myth, in Sorel's case to explain how the transfor-mation of society did and would occur, and in Barthes's case to explainthe continued hegemony of bourgeois norms. I shall examine those the-ories of myth, particularly for their political implications. Starting with

1 Roland Barthes, "Languages at War in a Culture at Peace," Times Literary Sup-plement (October 8, 1971), 1204.

2Georges Sorel, Reflexions sur la violence (Paris, 1908); Reflections on Violence, rans.

T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (New York, 1961), 54.3 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 177), 63.

625

Copyright 1986 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.


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626 MICHAEL TAGER

a similar revulsion against contemporary society and a desire for radicalchange, Sorel and Barthes ironically created two very different dichot-omies of

mythand

politicsthat reflected their own

temperaments,changed historical conditions, and created two divergent perspectives onthe persistence of capitalism.

II. Sorel's interest in myth arose from his belief that "intellectualistphilosophy" could not explain why a man would willingly sacrifice hislife for an ideal. How could one account for revolutions or empires withoutpositing some superior motive force acting within people? In a moregeneral sense the passage from principles to action always contained the

presenceof

myth,which Sorel considered to be a

groupof

imagesin-

tuitively or viscerally apprehended. Myth led to action through the for-mation of an "imaginary world"4 hat people placed ahead of the presentworld. While most human activity proceeded from the calculation of self-interest or evolved from daily routines, myths gripped the mind with amuch greater tenacity than self-interest or habit and enabled people toact in radically new ways. Myths produced their effects spontaneouslywithout leading to reflection or a search for precedents. Historical mythssurrounding the nation or the resurrection of Jesus provoked heroicindividual actions and underlay great social transformations. Sorel hopedthat a contemporary myth like that of a general strike might bridge thegrowing gulf he perceived between thought and action in European so-cialism.

A pragmatic rather than an analytical attitude characterized Sorel'sstudy of myth. What concerned him was not whether an event like theresurrection actually occurred but only its capacity to evoke sacrifice andheroism among its believers. Social scientific standards happily did notapply to myth. Sorel wrote that "in employing the term myth I believedthat I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a positionto refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submitthe idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulateobjections against its practical possibility."5 Sorel defended Marxism fromits critics on this basis. Even if its "laws" like the increasing concentrationof capital, the decreasing of wages to subsistence levels, or the worseningof periodic crises proved false as scientific propositions, they still remainedindispensable for enlightening people about the nature of their exploitationand as a guide for action. Sorel moved toward considering Capital, withits archetypes of "Monsieur Capital" and the "Collective Worker," andMarxism more generally, a myth. He eventually concluded that "writerswho criticized Marx often reproached him with having spoken in symboliclanguage which they did not consider suitable for scientific investigation.

4 Reflections, 48.5 Ibid., 43. Cf. Philip Wiener, "Pragmatism," The Dictionary of the History of Ideas,

III, 564.


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SOREL AND BARTHES 627

On the contrary, it is these symbolic portions which were formerly re-garded of dubious worth that constitute the definitive value of his work."6Sorel came to

regardthe myth of the general strike as embodying the

essence of Marx's doctrines of class conflict and revolution in their mostexplosive form. In his revision of Marx, motive power took precedenceover predictive accuracy. Rather than examining the psychological orsociological aspects of myth, Sorel insistently asked a more immediatequestion: can it provoke a reformation of man and society? His descrip-tions of the myths associated with various movements therefore rarelycontained any extended theoretical treatment because praxis interestedhim more than etiology. Even the myth of the general strike, the mostfully elaborated of any of the myths he studied, remained a somewhatmysterious creature.

And so he intended it to be. Sorel's interest in the intuitive, nonrationalcomprehension of images paralleled developments occurring in the psy-chological study of personality. He wrote that "it is possible to distinguishin every complex body of knowledge a clear and obscure region and tosay the latter is perhaps more important."7 Myth operated in this obscure,mysterious region that held man's strongest impulses. In a sense Sorelhoped that myth would tap some of the unconscious energy of societyand channel it into revolutionary movements.8 These dynamic, myth-charged movements would reverse the decline of France into mediocrityby overturning the enervated bourgeoisie. This class of rational calculatorswere completely incapable of sustaining any mythic beliefs, and theysquashed the vital drives underlying society. They had no higher idealthan the peaceful making of money and would compromise with theproletariat endlessly to maintain it. This produced a state that Sorel,borrowing from Proudhon, called "the most atrocious period in theexistence of societies."9 The only escape lay in myths that enclosed "thestrongest inclinations of a class, inclinations which recur to the mindwith the insistence of instincts ... and which give an aspect of completereality to the hopes of immediate action. . .."10

Sorel contrasted myth with a more commonly used category in po-litical theory, viz., utopia. Myths arose throughout history imperceptiblythrough concentrations of chance1 that defied analysis. Only the effects,

6Georges Sorel, "The Decomposition of Marxism" (Paris, 1907), in Irving Horowitz,

Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason (Carbondale, Ill., 1968), 251.'Reflections, 144.8 See Jules Monnerot, "Georges Sorel ou l'introduction aux mythes modernes," in

Jean Claude Casanova, Science et Conscience de la Societe (Paris, 1971), 379-412, andMonnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism (Boston, 1953), 148.

9Georges Sorel, "The Advance Toward Socialism" (Paris, 1920), The Illusions of

Progress, trans. John and Edith Stanley (Berkeley, 1969), 211.0Reflections, 125.

Georges Sorel, Le Systeme historique de Renan (Paris, 1905), 73.


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628 MICHAEL TAGER

not the origins of myth, could be studied. Even though he wrote at lengthabout the myth of the general strike in Reflexions sur la violence, heclaimed that he created

nothingand that

mythsdid not arise from works

of social criticism. Utopia, however, was clearly an intellectual product,representing the work of a theorist who developed an ideal model ofsociety in order to criticize existing society; and it generally sprang froma self-interested motive to gain followers and ultimately some kind ofstate office. Usually utopias offered visions of a super-rational order thatneglected customs and historical traditions and relied on psychologicalreductionism to fit all people into an eternal ideal. As an intellectualproduct, utopias lacked the motive force of myth; they merely describedpossibilities, whereas myths were "expressions of a determination toact."12

In addition, since myth kept people's attention centered on the presentmoment and the impending revolutionary cataclysm, it can only be judgedas a means of present action. It did not offer an abstract utopian pictureof the future. Myth directed men to destroy the existing state of affairs,whereas "the effect of utopia has always been to direct men's mindstowards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existingsystem" (ibid., 50). Utopia compared the present to an imaginary, thoughattainable, future and thereby encouraged relatively passive attitudes andbehavior among its believers. Like Marx, Sorel attacked the trend towardutopianism (related to reformism in Sorel's mind) in the socialist move-ment.

An emphasis on myth implies a concomitant devaluation of languageand politics. Aristotle had noted the connection between the latter twoconcepts when he wrote that only man could use language and settledisputes through dialogue. All other animals lived either through instinctor fighting. Language made man the only "political animal" becausepolitics implied communication or a process of persuasion between peopleseeking to resolve common problems. Sorel, however, viewed languageas a weapon of domination in the hands of those who had a facility withit. Parliamentary politics essentially ensured the subjugation of workers,who lacked this facility, no matter which party governed. He consideredlanguage the instrument of professors and politicans, and as long as

socialism remained "a doctrine expressed only in words" (ibid., 46),workers would eventually lose control of the revolution made in theirname. Myth had the pragmatic function of forestalling the machinationsof ambitious socialist leaders and functionaries. The sudden success ofparliamentary socialism in France (forty socialist representatives wereelected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1893) worried Sorel greatly. In1896 the socialist deputy Alexandre Millerand called for the nationali-zation of several large industries, and in 1897 the socialist leader Jean

12Reflections, 50.


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Jaures toured France promoting his vision of a socialist society givenunity and direction by the state. Sorel believed these socialist proposalsreflected a

misreadingof Marx's

originaltexts and derided their vision

of the socialist future as "a gigantic factory managed by technical per-sonnel enjoying unchallenged authority."13 The performance of socialist

politicans confirmed Sorel's fears about Marxism's encounter with par-liamentary politics: it did not transform the conduct of politics but insteadaltered its own purpose and character. Sorel moved gradually toward

advocating the direct action strategy of radical syndicalism.14 The mythof the general strike was no mere syndicalist propaganda tactic but the

most powerful means for the syndicates to resist cooption. It carried the"picture of complete catastrophe,"'5 which made gains achieved throughreform and compromise seem inconsequential. He argued that the mythof the general strike "drags into the revolutionary track everything ittouches.... [T]his idea is so effective as a motive force that once it hasentered into the minds of the people they can no longer be controlledby leaders, and ... thus the power of the deputies would be reduced to

nothing" (ibid., 134, 125).

Yet Sorel's antipathy toward language and politics went deeper still.He used the adjectives "noisy, garrulous, and lying" (ibid., 122) to char-acterize parliamentary socialism and, rather than representing the worstexcesses of language, he felt that language inherently possessed thoseattributes. He wrote that "it is not necessary to be a very profoundphilosopher to perceive that language deceives us constantly as to thetrue nature of the relationships between things" (ibid., 251). Partiallydue to its innate deceptiveness, the use of language inhibited action. Only

myths could move men across the threshold between speech and actionby transcending politics based on rational calculation. Without mythsone could talk indefinitely of revolts without ever provoking one. Rev-olution would not erupt through the use of ordinary language but through"a body of images capable of evoking as an undivided whole the massof sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of thewar undertaken by Socialism against modern society" (ibid., 123). Sorelbased his philosophy of action on the violent revolt of oppressed classes

made possible by myths that united and incited individuals. The mythof the general strike suffused workers with a conception of socialism,"which language cannot give us with perfect clearness" (ibid., 128), andalso created feelings of military solidarity. Under these circumstances

13Georges Sorel, "Preface to Formes et essence du socialism by Saverio Merlino

(1898)," in Richard Vernon, Commitment and Change: Georges Sorel and the Idea ofRevolution (Toronto, 1978), 91.

14 Georges Sorel, "The Socialist Future of the Syndicates" (1898), in John Stanley(ed.), From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy (New York, 1976), 71-93.

5Reflections, 135.


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630 MICHAEL TAGER

workers acted without speech, argument, or rational calculation. Mythcould impel revolution even during a period of pervasive mediocrity.

Sorel'semphasis

on thecentrality

of violence in social transformationreflected his preference for myth over political discourse. If politics in-volves people persuading each other about alternative courses of action,then violence rejects such techniques. As Hannah Arendt noted in TheHuman Condition, violence is "mute" because it destroys the efficacy ofpolitical discourse. Clearly Sorel hoped that the violence inspired by themyth of the general strike would render parliamentary politics insignif-icant. Violence perhaps constituted the discourse of the proletariat, be-

yondthe control of intellectual discourse. It reflected the clearest

manifestation of action motivated by myth. Violence emphasized thepresent moment and militated against gradual reforms. Sorel comparedthe violent syndicalist strikes to the early Christian martyrdoms in theirpositive effect on their respective movements. He envisioned a kind ofpure violence without hatred or revenge, almost a spiritual weapon inthe hands of the proletariat.

Like myth, violence had a pragmatic function in maintaining theintegrity of the socialist revolution. It would rebuff the strategy of liberalsand parliamentary socialists by reestablishing the hostility between thebourgeoisie and the proletariat. Sorel wrote that the syndicates must"repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who would protectthe workers, to meet with insults the homilies of the defenders of humanfraternity, and reply by blows to the propagators of social peace" (ibid.,91). At the same time syndicalist violence would revitalize the bourgeoisieby reawakening its class interest. The French bourgeoisie had lost theconquering spirit that still animated American capitalism (which Sorelmuch admired), and through concessions they enervated the proletariatas well. Violence would energize both classes and create a revolutionarysituation (an idea practiced by the Red Brigades without much success).

Sorel's animus against language and politics reflected his hope thatmyth could change the world in a way that the words and elections ofthe Third Republic never would. Norman Jacobson claims that politicaltheory begins precisely "at the moment when things become, so to speak,unglued,"16 and certainly Sorel had a strong sense of things comingunglued. To make things whole again required nothing less than thescrapping of politics, actually a not uncommon impulse in political theorybeginning with Plato's Republic. Socialism, the creation of bourgeoisintellectuals, needed a firmer foundation in myth to prevent it fromsuccumbing to the twin dangers of utopianism and reformism.

Yet where did the emphasis on myth leave Sorel himself? He implicitlycondemned his own work, the linguistic construction of complex andhighly discursive arguments, to irrelevance (he perhaps carried the prac-

16 Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace (Berkeley, 1978), 10.


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tical mentality of his first career as a civil engineer into his subsequentcareer as a social critic). This paradox appeared even more starkly inLuigi Pirandello's statement after he signed a fascist manifesto in 1925:

"I have always fought against words."17 And although Sorel generallystayed on the left and certainly considered himself a socialist when heelaborated the myth of the general strike, it seems that the anti-political,anti-rational doctrines he expressed were resolved historically by movingto the right, exemplified by Mussolini's fascism. In a speech made shortlybefore his march on Rome, Mussolini said "we have created a myth.This myth is a faith, a noble enthusiasm. It does not have to be a reality,it is an impulse and a hope, belief, courage. Our myth is the na-

tion. .. "18 Myths of the nation, and in Germany of race, short-circuitedreasoned discourse with disastrous effects, particularly from the per-spective of someone who hoped for a socialist revolution led and con-trolled by workers themselves.

III. Barthes launched his literary career after World War II in aperiod that marked the beginnings of French consumer culture. In whatwas nominally a time of economic rationality, Barthes detected a plethoraof new myths emerging that legitimated the existing order. By exposing

these myths he continued in the spirit, if not the letter of Sorel's work.The new locus of myth in the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat gaveBarthes's work an indirect, rearguard quality: he attempted to pick holesin the ruling class's legitimacy rather than to advocate a frontal assaultagainst its position. An impulse toward demystification underlayBarthes's study of myth which he thought prerequisite to the politicaladvance of socialism. He exhibited a more aesthetic, less pragmatic sen-sibility than Sorel.

Barthes found myth consisted of groups of images and ideas ema-nating from a wide variety of sources including the press, advertising,movies, consumer goods, cultural or athletic events, and indeed almostanything capable of conveying meanings to people. Myths occurred infragments, not in long fixed narratives. Wherever myth appeared, itsubstituted a connoted system of meanings for the denoted system alreadypresent. Myth emptied phenomena of their literal meaning and added itsown meanings. Barthes conceptualized myth as "language robbery."19 He

used the example of a Paris Match cover that showed a young blackofficer crisply saluting the French flag in the foreground. At least thisconstituted the denoted system of meanings. But a connoted system ofmeanings slipped in that put the black man's biography in very smallparenthesis. The photograph presented the myth that "France is a greatempire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully

17 Thomas Sheenan, "Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de

Benoist," Social Research, 48 (Spring 1981), 53.18 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1968), 122-23.19 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 131.


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serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractorsof an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in servinghis so-called

oppressors"(ibid.,

116). Mythhad an

imperative,button-

holing character according to Barthes, and in this case the myth of French

imperialism condemned "the saluting Negro to be nothing more than aninstrumental signifier" (ibid., 125).

The significance of myth stemmed from its capacity to convert his-

torically determined outcomes into natural phenomena. Things producedby class hierarchy and its moral, cultural, and aesthetic consequencesbecame a matter of course, or what Barthes liked to call the "doxa"

(when demystifying he looked for "paradoxa," things that went beyondthe received wisdom). Through myth the subordination of colonials,women, and workers appeared eternally sanctioned-one could not arguewith nature. Myth obliterated the memory that peoples were once con-

quered, hierarchies once imposed, and objects once made. With its anon-

ymous universal representations, myths helped shape the forms and normsthat sustained everyday life.

Not surprisingly, Barthes called myth "depoliticized speech" (ibid.,143). Politics implies that alternatives exist and that people make theirown world by choosing between them, but myth embodied a "defaulting"on any such process. It denied the fabricated, and therefore changeable,quality of reality. Barthes wrote that myth "abolishes the complexity ofhuman acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences" (ibid.). Since 1789

myth had operated to erase the name of the bourgeoisie from cultureand politics and instead substituted more universal concepts like the"nation." In this way France became awash in an anonymous, disingen-uous mythology that implicitly posited class rule. Barthes wrote:

the bourgeoisie pervades France: practised on a national scale, bourgeois normsare experienced as the evident laws of a natural order-the further the bourgeoisclass propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become. The factof the bourgeoisie becomes absorbed into an amorphous universe, whose soleinhabitant is Eternal Man, who is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. (ibid., 140)

Ironically, capitalist wealth and power relied on constant technologicalprogress, yet its mythology produced images of unchangeable solidity.

Thus Barthes reversed Sorel's categories. Myth prevented rather thanstimulated action. The dominant class purified its history and motives

through myth, which also taught subordinate people to obey and to accept(even if only vicariously) the status quo. Statistically, Barthes saw mython the right rather than on the left. Not only did the bourgeoisie needto appropriate myth to justify its dominance, but the proletariat existedin the realm of production, so that its language remained essentiallypolitical. In direct contrast to Sorel, Barthes argued that revolutionary

language could not be mythical. Revolution, more than anything else,demonstrated the historically contingent character of human institutions


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and practices. It revealed "the political load of the world" (ibid., 146)by remaking that world. Only when revolution changed into "the Left,"or an established order seeking to distort itself into nature, did socialistmyths emerge. However, Barthes restricted his attention to France andits bourgeois myths.

Other reversals of Sorelian categories included Barthes's attitudestoward language and violence. He openly declared his intellectual identity,and indeed defined himself by writing in the third person about himself,that "his place (his milieu) is language: that is where he accepts or rejects,that is where his body can or cannot."20 He tended to interpret all behavior

linguisticallyor

aesthetically. Anyattack on academic or

specializedlanguage he considered part of a broader attack on intellectuals. He wrotethat "public opinion does not like the language of intellectuals. Hencehe has felt himself to be the object of a kind of racism: they excludedhis language" (ibid., 103). His analysis of the rhetoric of Pierre Poujade,leader of a reactionary petty bourgeois movement in the 1950s, showedthat he frequently used tautologies like "business is business," therebynegating the communicative value of language and, by extension, intel-

lectuals. Like "helicopters," intellectuals had their heads in the clouds,not standing on firm ground like the "little people." Implicit in PoujadismBarthes found physical and racial claims to superiority, symptoms of ananti-intellectual movement tending toward fascism.

As one who lived for and through language, Barthes recognized thatviolence threatened to render him superfluous. He admitted he dislikedthe subject and therefore did not give it extended treatment like Sorel.He stressed the latent violence of Poujade and his followers, who presented

themselves as strong and virile men of "common sense." Poujade's cam-paign rhetoric emphasized his rugged past, and he titled his autobiography"J'ai choisi le combat." Barthes wrote that in the myths surroundingPoujade, "physical plentitude establishes a kind of moral clarity"21 hatby implication intellectuals, without the aura of violence, lacked. Al-

though Sorel and Barthes shared an understanding of the implicationsof violence, their respective dichotomies of myths and politics led themto evaluate its effects differently.

Barthes's approach to myth resembled Sorel's in that he chose notto delve into the historical genesis or development of myth. The mechanicsof making an advertisement or the class imperatives behind the productionof mass consumer goods did not interest him. He instead focused onlyon immediate, connoted meanings, not because, as Sorel had it, mythscontained an impenetrable element of mystery, but rather because the

implications of a statement or appearance of an object constituted its

20 Roland Barthes, 53.21 Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York, 1979), 131.


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634 MICHAEL TAGER

essential reality.22 So that even though Barthes recognized that mythsarose instrumentally because men "depoliticize according to their

needs,"23his

insighthad little effect on his work. In the main text under

study here, Mythologies (published in English under two titles, Mythol-ogies and The Eiffel Tower), Barthes aimed only at exposure and de-mystification, without seeking to place myth in its larger historicalcontext.

Several myths recurred through the work. One justified the subor-dination of Africans to Frenchmen. In "Bichon and the Blacks" Barthesanalyzed a Paris Match story about a young professional couple who,

accompanied bytheir

baby Bichon,traveled to

paint"cannibal

country."The article stressed the heroism of the family and described their tripwith the language of conquest. The reader received a vision of the originalexplorers in a setting "where the code of feelings and values is completelydetached from concrete problems of solidarity or progress."24 n addition,the piece perpetuated racial sterotypes, opposing "primitive" and "civi-lized" cultures in a way that encouraged the colonial relationship. Itdrained all the complexity from African life and transformed the nativeinto an exotic totem that reflected the Frenchman's contrasting virtues.The article, which Barthes referred to as "Operation Bichon," succeededin presenting the black world through a white child's eyes, thus negatingthe demystification of primitive cultures undertaken by ethnologists andanthropologists.

The rise of African liberation movements threatened these myths byabruptly converting natural relations into undeniably contingent ones. Inhis essay "African Grammar" Barthes analyzed popular descriptions ofthe Algerian crisis reminiscent of Orwell's examples in "Politics and theEnglish Language." To bridge the rift between French norm and Africanfact required that words diverge from their usual meanings. War andpeace underwent strange changes, "god" became a sublimated form ofthe French government, and rebels struck in "bands" representing "ele-ments" of the native "population." Words like "dishonor," "destiny,"and "mission" became prominent in the phraseology of French leaders.Barthes wrote:

Destiny exists only in a linked form. It is not military conquest which hassubjected Algeria o France, t is a conjunction erformed y Providence whichhas united two destinies. The link is declared ndissoluble n the very periodwhen it is dissolving with an explosiveness which cannot be concealed." ibid.,104-05)

22 For a comparison of Barthes with two more historically and theoretically inclinedauthors, see David Gross, "Lowenthal, Adorno, Barthes: Three Perspectives on PopularCulture," Telos, 45 (Fall 1980), 122-40.

23Mythologies, 144.24 The Eiffel Tower, 35.


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A vast effort at naturalization combatted the tide of current events.Another myth justified the subordination of women to men by pro-

moting the naturalness of domestic obligations. In "Conjugations"Barthes explored the reasons why the media so intently covered SylvianeCarpentier's (Miss Europe '53) marriage to an electrician. Rather than

modeling or acting, which her title surely allowed her to do, she renouncedit all for the anonymity of a bourgeois household. She was a modern

bourgeois heroine, as the media implicitly recognized. He wrote:

here love-stronger-than-glory ustains he morale of the social status quo: it isnot sensible o leave one's condition, t is glorious o return o it.... Happiness,in this universe, s to play at a kind of domestic enclosure: "psychological"questionnaires, adgets, puttering, household appliances, chedules, he wholeof this utensil paradise of Elle or l'Express glorifies he closing of the hearth.... (ibid., 24-25)

Even women novelists, who presumably established independent careers,did not escape mythological reduction. In his essay "Novels and Chil-dren" Barthes noted that an article in Elle introduced its female subjects

by the quantity of their children and novels. While admiring their literaryaccomplishments, the article implied that women must always definethemselves in terms of their family. Barthes outlined the myth involved-"Women are on earth to give children to men; let them write as muchas they want, let them decorate their condition, but above all, let themnot depart from it.... Women, compensate for your books by yourchildren."24 Men did not appear in the article, but their presence andauthority clearly loomed large.

A third myth justified the subordination of workers to owners. Asone example Barthes pointed to the movie "On the Waterfront," which

depicted workers as a feeble group exploited by corrupt union leaders,while the state represented absolute justice and the workers' only recourse

against exploitation. At the end a beaten Marlon Brando presented himselfto the boss, signaling the restoration of order with the worker givinghimself willingly into the hands of his employer. This relationship as-sumed the aura of naturalness because the audience identified powerfullywith the Brando character. Another example concerned the exhibitionof photographs called "The Family of Man," which tried to show theuniversalities in the daily lives of different peoples. The photographsappeared under abstract categories like birth, play, work, death, love,etc. accompanied by Old Testament proverbs. This myth of the "humancondition" attempted to submerge relevant differences into a larger hu-man community. Barthes asked rhetorically how the parents of EmmetTill or the North African workers in the slums of Paris might feel about

25 Mythologies, 50.


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636 MICHAEL TAGER

"the great family of man." By making the gestures of man look eternalthe exhibit emptied them of political content and thereby defused them.

One finalrecurring myth

involvedconsumption. Consuming goodsnot only had intrinsic value but it embodied an entire experience or state

of mind as well. Thus Barthes compared the new Citroen models toGothic cathedrals in that they represented the supreme creation of theera done by unknown artists. The car signified more than a mere in-strument of transportation. Similarly, the consumption of wine wentbeyond reasons of taste or alcoholic content because it embodied anessence of the French character mythologically. Of course these mythswere not innocent-behind them

laythe

exploitationof workers that

made their production possible. But myths kept that hidden and insteadflooded the consumer with images of eternal states of mind unlocked byconsumption.

However, Barthes eventually chafed at the limitations of his owntheory of myth. Although he believed that demystification carried polit-ical implications for the freeing of public discourse, he still felt distantfrom political reality. Besides, the myth-making apparatus seemed tohave an unlimited productive capacity. Barthes unveiled only a fractionof the myths to a fraction of their potential audience. The focus on mythled to an undue pessimism and an inability to imagine a better future.Barthes wrote that "we constantly drift between the object and its de-mystification, powerless to render its wholeness" (ibid., 159). Undoubt-edly this stemmed from Barthes's ahistorical method of analysis-withoutprobing beneath the surface, it is not surprising that he could not envisionhow to go beyond demystification.26

In addition, the study of myths increased Barthes's sense of alienation.Rather than discussing objects themselves, he always discussed theirimplications. Also, he excluded himself from the society of myth-con-sumers. By conceiving of an event like the Tour de France as a complexmythological event, Barthes felt removed from the people entertained bythe event. He wrote that "the mythologist is condemned to live in atheoretical sociality; for him, to be in society is, at best, to be truthful:his utmost sociality dwells in his utmost morality. His connection withthe world is of the order of sarcasm."27 And although in the introductionBarthes suggested that in a consumer culture sarcasm may well be "thecondition of truth" (ibid., 12), in his conclusion he clearly saw its limi-tations.

This became more evident in a later essay titled "Change the ObjectItself." In it Barthes reviewed his earlier theory of myth and concludedthat nothing about French society had fundamentally changed, so that

26 For a critique of Barthes along these lines see Eugene Goodheart, "The Myths ofRoland," Partisan Review, 47 (1980), 199-212.

27Mythologies, 157.


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"the mythical still abounds, just as anonymous and slippery, fragmentedand garrulous, available both for ideological criticism and semiologicaldismantling."28 Yet in the intervening years he perceived that demysti-fication itself had become a "common sense" orthodoxy and indeed haddeveloped its own mythology. The decipherment of myths no longerrepresented an adequate strategy. Instead he suggested that the objectitself must be transformed, although he provided no clue as to how thismight be done. He explained that "the problem is not to reveal the(latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissurethe very representation of meaning."29 Here Barthes's eloquence hardlydisguised his inability to visualize how to progress from demystificationto a more positive program for the nonmythological reconstruction ofculture.

IV. Sorel and Barthes lived uneasy careers as intellectuals. Both sonsof the bourgeoisie, they vigorously attacked the bourgeoisie throughouttheir work. Sorel presented the case of an anti-intellectual intellectualfascinated with myth and violence as a means of overcoming the strangle-hold intellectuals exercised on politics and culture. Barthes did not exhibitthis powerful double alienation (from society and from himself), but he

did recognize what the estrangement resulting from his emphasis on mythcost him in terms of his ability to enjoy the world. Both Sorel and Barthesultimately arrived at an impasse, one over finding a truly revolutionarymyth, the other over dismantling bourgeois myth. By 1908 or 1909 Sorelrealized the myth of the general strike did not have the effect he onceattributed to it, nor did the syndicates maintain a purely apolitical ori-entation. His subsequent search for myth carried him to the far rightand left ends of the European ideological spectrum, first with an ambi-

valent association with integral nationalism and the Action Frangaisebefore World War I, and then as an ardent defender of Bolshevism, whichhe misinterpreted as a movement establishing soviets, or self-governinggroups of producers, under the charismatic leadership of Lenin. Barthes,too, realized by the 1970s that his earlier study of myth no longer borethe weight of his original anti-bourgeois impulse, and in his last decadehe concentrated on more literary and aesthetic subjects.

To some extent the contradiction between Sorel's and Barthes's for-

mulations of myth rested in the semantic use of the terms "ideology"and "myth."30 Sorel used "ideology" to refer to the justification for theactivities of a particular group or class. An ideology articulated thesejustifications into a reasonably coherent system of thought that had anappearance of universality. The appearance of universality, as opposed

28 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 166.29Ibid., 167.

30 Ben Halpern, "Myth and Ideology in Modern Usage," History and Theory, 2 (1961),129-49.


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638 MICHAEL TAGER

to arguments from pure self-interest, helped legitimate the group's ac-tivities and also reflected the level of self-confidence of the group. Sorelfollowed Marx's

argumentthat the

ideologyof the dominant class func-

tioned as the society's ideology. His book Les Illusions du Progres ex-amined the ideology of progress that accompanied the emergence of thebourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though Barthesfound the projection of universality not in an ideology of progress butin more fragmentary messages that erased the history of objects andrelationships, one can see the parallels between Sorel's concept of ideologyand Barthes's concept of myth. Barthes implied that myths helped solidify

bourgeois ideologyand

gaveit the

appearanceof

uncontestability.In

Sorel's work, however, ideology simply lacked the motive force of moreintuitively apprehended myths. This more than anything else differen-tiated their theories of myth.

Sorel's fascination with, and Barthes's antipathy toward, myth alsoreflected the different intellectual climates of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Sorel reacted against the extreme version of positivismthat dominated French intellectual life for much of the nineteenth century.Other thinkers

throughout Europerevolted

againstthe idea that an exact

science of society could account for all human actions and began toreevaluate the importance of irrational motivations and practices here-tofore ignored. Thus historians have placed Sorel in the broader "revoltagainst reason" afoot in the late nineteenth century.31 Barthes, however,could not ignore the glorification of the irrational, of violence, and ofmyth by the European fascist movements. Ernst Cassirer reflected theshift in attitudes toward myth in a book published just after World WarII in which he described myth as a primitive anachronism, banished butalways waiting for a opportunity to subvert the rational organization ofsociety.32 Barthes saw Poujade as a lightening rod for contemporary mythand the potential leader of a revivified fascist movement. While Barthesconsidered contemporary myth a very sophisticated rather than primitivephenomenon and not at all an anachronism, he too perceived it negatively.

Barthes's preoccupation with demystification placed him closer thanSorel to the concerns of current American political science, which gen-erally uses the term "myth" to refer to a widely held illusion. A popularintroductory college textbook on American politics begins by listing sev-eral myths such as "the American way is the only democratic way" or"a ruling few dictate policy in America." The authors claim that thesemyths distort reality and hinder people's understanding of politics. Theyconclude their brief survey of political myths by writing, "by the time

31 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958); Horowitz; S. P.Rouanet, "Irrationalism and Myths in Georges Sorel," Review of Politics, 26 (1964), 45-69.

32 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946), 279-80.


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we have examined the actual conduct of American government, we hopethe reader will be able to replace a misconception with an understandingmore rooted in

reality."33The textbook

impliesthat if

everycitizen

received a proper introduction to politics, then myths would lose theirforce, and gradually disappear. Political activity would become morerational and more susceptible to further logical analysis by political sci-entists. This study has attempted to show that myths are a more complexand significant entity than sometimes assumed; and, they are also, asBarthes might advise the political scientists, much more intractable.

Queens College, Charlotte, N.C.

33 Marian Irish, James Prothro, Richard Richardson, The Politics of American De-mocracy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1977), 8.

barthes and sorel on myth

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