it's 2 hours before my final in cultural studies and you just so easily explained the topic which made cultural studies so hard for me the past two semesters- thank you! it was very understandable. keep on the good work!
Comments 25 on3-7-2022. Mythological speach, for example, a parable, does not nescesserilly describe fact. The signifyer / signified dynamic of presentation in written word, or gesture is largely arbitrary. "I can see the thunder clouds on the horizon as I write" may be due to an awareness of the wider reaction to the quote "all language is myth". Barthes used a car to represent middle class advancement, at least in its financial context, as well as the 'middle class' part of its production.
I've been reading a lot of Joan Didion lately, and see her as a kind of Californian Barthes. Not in the theoretical realm or with the same level of rigor, but in the way they both expose pernicious cultural and societal myths, in the Barthesian sense of the term.
I began watching confused and overwhelmed with the vast number of sources that explained Barthes' notion, contemplating which source is reliable and let alone understandable that I should pursue. I concluded the video with a solid understanding of the concept of 'myth' under Barthes' premise - a profusion of thanks, David.
Excelent video!! So elucidating. I am reading Mythologies but I assume that I am not the biggest fervent reader of theories in English, since my mother tongue is Portuguese, and it becomes quite difficult. Thank you so much for your work.
Oh wow. Says the name all French-like. Would like to hear his pronunciation of foie gras. In the end Barthes like almost all French frites end up reiterating, reacting to or against DesCartes IMO. Significant to me. Myth and language all subjective. Even the author ✍️ may not exist. My subjective process of thinking 🤔 only thing I’m sure of. Cogito ergo sum. Nice explanation here. Good stuff.
Of course words are not entirely arbitrary. They have a history and imply the existence of things in the past. Anthropologists attach significance to words as points of reference to the existence of artifacts for example the "Wheel." We can make certain assumptions regarding a culture and its' world regarding such facts. Metaphor, the undisputed engine of words, relies on the similarity of things signified to draw analogies between objects. Such relations are not arbitrary but substantive and cognitive. The connotative meanings that come to us do not directly signify things in the world as your examples show. They have an added layer of meaning. And may imply a moral attitude or be propaganda supporting political or class interests. This Barthes calls mythological. However such a view of mythology effaces the sacred nature of mythology as commonly understood. Barthes caution to not seek a transcendent truth behind language is contradicted by his own truth claims for what he calls mythological. Barthes analysis seems ironic and implies therefore some notion of truth. It is a truth that stays hidden. Here we can already see the post-truth poststructuralist argument being formulated. Since there is no truth, there is only a visceral response, we are left with decentered (the author is dead) verbal activity. We are left with a fence sitter who makes snide comments. Who uses his authorial absence as an alibi.
Excellent! And completely correct. This aligns with the revelations I had while completing my English degree. Barthes is quite literally "Baby's First Anti-Humanism." The ideology that Barthes and other contemporaries created is an absolute joke and you don't need to be at the doctorate level to realize that -- you just have to have basic intuition. I started my degree as a postmodern leftist, a devout Marxist-Leninist, and now I'm ending it as an extremely skeptical moderate.
First time here. I love your approach and the way you explain these concepts. I had theory of literature in my bachelor's as well as master studies and I always enjoyed listening to those lectures. One thing I noticed is that books related to theory of literature and literary theory rarely mention Charles Saunders Pierces. Interestingly he was talking about sings before Saussure ( I believe Saussure wrote that in 1904 or so) but Pierce did it in 1890s. Maybe I am wrong about the dates. Pierce's semiology is a bit different from Saussure's because he developed the so called 'semiotic triangle' consisting of (signifier signified and the interpretant which as far as I understood is the meaning created in the mind). Overall his theory is a bit harder to grasp. I wonder if you would do a video on him! A professor once wrote me in an email that for Pierce "a sign is Something which stands for Something for Somebody under some Aspect. That's it!"
I SO appreciate this, you're fantastic at explaining in simple terms what were looking at. please keep this up im so thrilled to have come across your channel
Mythologys was on the academic reading list. I did a close reading of it. I could bore you for weeks talking about those essays, but it is better if you read it several times and match it up. There is a film called "They Live" that provides a good example of some of it, were a man puts on a pair of classess and sees subliminal messages in all the advertising. You get those eyes after doing a sociology course.
You present with the money in a brown paper bag. People I never heard of nor dreamed existed are arguing fiercely against that which I never would have thought to question. You are like them. You are against the obvious, but at least you are honest about it. I am suspicious albeit glad for the revelations. You must be merely feigning that attitude of intellectual curiosity, because your content is usually aimed at the audience of your study rather than the author of it. Yet and still I am grateful for the introductions and will now study Mr. Barthes. ty.
Wonderful video! Thank you very much! Personally I struggle quite a bit to read Barthes. In fact, I’m interested in understanding “The pleasure of the text” and his metaphor of the definition of text as fabric - I hope you make a video on this one day :)))) thanks again!
First of all thank you for this video! It helped me a lot in the understanding of Myths. I do have a question, could you give a example of a object in our culture today, which could be read as a myth?
Mr. Barthes, as quoted by David, is explicit in defining myth. It is a form and as such it has a signifier. How can Barthes condition be described as absence; moreover, why should it.
The absence, in my understanding of the text, is an absence of context. To quote Barthes (1972: 142): “…myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made. The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.” If we return to the example of the black childs salute, we can describe the absence as the absence of the act of colonising within the signifier. The childs circumstances are presented as a natural reality; how the circumstances came to be is never questioned. Yet in reality the circumstance (being colonised) is a manmade reality, a consequence of (often brutally violent) actions by imperial France. The actions are absent from the myth and their consequences are presented as a natural state of affairs.
