The robbery of language?: on Roland Barthes and myth

This article focuses on a text that nearly everyone has read, but has done so a little too quickly – Roland Barthes’s ‘Myth Today’ from his Mythologies. My agenda is to read this text carefully and in the same way that Barthes reads other texts, that is, looking for various hints and suggestions that open up other possibilities. In the first part, I trace Barthes’s argument quite closely, distinguishing between his careful, dispassionate, and technical description of myth in terms of a basic semiological schema and his passionate condemnation of myth. The former attempts to be a universal description of the workings of myth; the latter is a critique of the mythologies of the French bourgeoisie. Barthes also tries to find modes of resistance to such a dominating collection, but his search ends up being forlorn and futile. At this point, I turn and reread Barthes, tracing hints that the myths with which he deals are not so uniform or so suffocatingly dominant. Picking up the passing suggestion that the best option may be to turn myth against itself, I explore what myth conceals (its process of distortion), how it produces resistance and seeks to close it down, how it preserves such resistance by leaving open the possibility that resistance may twist out from under the hand of oppression and gain a voice of its own once again. At this moment, I bring in some of Barthes’s own myths, especially the utopian one of an imaginary Japan in Empire of Signs. Here is an alternative myth of resistance that emerges precisely when it seems as though the semiological foothold for myth has been eliminated