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.Magniloquent and noble, in one word 'serious', sheonly sends them to sleep.105 106consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, inMYTH TODAYshort with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.Naturally, everything is not expressed at the same time: someobjects become the prey of mythical speech for a while, then theyWhat is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simpledisappear, others take their place and attain the status of myth.Areanswer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is athere objects which are inevitably a source of suggestiveness, astype of speech.1Baudelaire suggested about Woman? Certainly not: one canconceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for itis human history which converts reality into speech, and it alonerules the life and the death of mythical language.Ancient or not,mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is atype of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve fromMyth is a type of speechthe 'nature' of things.Speech of this kind is a message.It is therefore by no meansconfined to oral speech.It can consist of modes of writing or ofOf course, it is not any type: language needs special conditions inrepresentations; not only written discourse, but also photography,order to become myth: we shall see them in a minute.But whatcinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as amust be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system ofsupport to mythical speech.Myth can be defined neither by itscommunication, that it is a message.This allows one to perceiveobject nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily bethat myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is aendowed with meaning: the arrow which is brought in order tomode of signification, a form.Later, we shall have to assign to thissignify a challenge is also a kind of speech.True, as far asform historical limits, conditions of use, and reintroduce societyperception is concerned, writing and pictures, for instance, do notinto it: we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.call upon the same type of consciousness; and even with pictures,one can use many kinds of reading: a diagram lends itself toIt can be seen that to purport to discriminate among mythicalsignification more than a drawing, a copy more than an original,objects according to their substance would be entirely illusory:and a caricature more than a portrait.But this is the point: we aresince myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth providedno longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation:it is conveyed by a discourse.Myth is not defined by the object ofwe are dealing with this particular image, which is given for thisits message, but by the way in which it utters this message: thereparticular signification.Mythical speech is made of a materialare formal limits to myth, there are no 'substantial' ones.which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable forEverything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for thecommunication: it is because all the materials of myth (whetheruniverse is infinitely fertile in suggestions.Every object in thepictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, thatworld can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, openone can reason about them while discounting their substance.Thisto appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural orsubstance is not unimportant: pictures, to be sure, are morenot, which forbids talking about things.A tree is a tree.Yes, ofimperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke,course.But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quitewithout analysing or diluting it.But this is no longer a constitutivea tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of107 108difference.Pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they aremeaningful: like writing, they call for a lexis.Myth as a semiological systemWe shall therefore take language, discourse, speech, etc., to meanany significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: aphotograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as aFor mythology, since it is the study of a type of speech, is but onenewspaper article; even objects will become speech, if they meanfragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulatedsomething.This generic way of conceiving language is in factsome forty years ago under the name of semiology.Semiology hasjustified by the very history of writing: long before the invention ofnot yet come into being.But since Saussure himself, andour alphabet, objects like the Inca quipu, or drawings, as insometimes independently of him, a whole section of contemporarypictographs, have been accepted as speech.This does not meanresearch has constantly been referred to the problem of meaning:that one must treat mythical speech like language; myth in factpsycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, some newbelongs to the province of a general science, coextensive withtypes of literary criticism of which Bachelard has given the firstlinguistics, which is semiology.examples, are no longer concerned with facts except inasmuch asthey are endowed with significance.Now to postulate asignification is to have recourse to semiology.I do not mean thatsemiology could account for all these aspects of research equallywell: they have different contents.But they have a common status:they are all sciences dealing with values.They are not content withmeeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens forsomething else.Semiology is a science of forms, since it studies significationsapart from their content.I should like to say one word about thenecessity and the limits of such a formal science.The necessity isthat which applies in the case of any exact language.Zhdanovmade fun of Alexandrov the philosopher, who spoke of 'thespherical structure of our planet.' 'It was thought until now',Zhdanov said, 'that form alone could be spherical.' Zhdanov wasright: one cannot speak about structures in terms of forms, and viceversa.It may well be that on the plane of 'life', there is but a totalitywhere structures and forms cannot be separated.But science has nouse for the ineffable: it must speak about 'life' if it wants totransform it.Against a certain quixotism of synthesis, quiteplatonic incidentally, all criticism must consent to the ascesis, tothe artifice of analysis; and in analysis, it must match method andlanguage.Less terrorized by the spectre of 'formalism', historicalcriticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood109 110that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the forming this third object, which is the sign.It is as true to say thatnecessary principles of totality and History [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]