Lecture 2
Mythologies: A Postwar Text
Roland Barthes's Mythologies is concerned with a number of
important postwar issues (see Les trente
glorieuses: France 1945-75 for a general overview of the period).
These issues are both specifically French - peculiar to France of a
particular historical period - and applicable to postwar developments in
other European countries. These issues include:
One of the most approchable essays on France's colonial struggles - with
more than a few contemporary resonances today - is `Grammaire africaine'
(Barthes: 1970 pp.137-144). As the title suggests `Grammaire africaine'
is an article about language, more specifically, about the language used
in certain right-wing newspapers and magazines to describe, assess and
analyse the conflict taking place in Algeria. What Barthes claimed to find
every time he read a newspaper or magazine article on Algeria, was a
carefully structured and codified way of talking and writing about
Franco-Algerian relations with its own covert presuppositions and
interests. Myth - which Barthes described as `une parole dépolitisée'
(Barthes: 1970 p.230) - is at work here and in `Grammaire africaine'
Barthes seeks to expose it by insisting on the social and historical
`situatedness' of the language used. What `Grammaire africaine' is really
about is the way in which a certain imperialist political agenda is
smuggled into the reporting of foreign affairs. Barthes exposes the
ideologically-loaded nature of the terminology used to describe France's
major imperial conflict, identifying the key mendacious signifiers whose
primary function is to conceal the realities of the Algerian war.
Those who seek independance from French rule, for example, are variously
described as `une bande' or as `hors-la-loi' and their demands are
therefore considered illegitimate. Such terms are never used for the
colons, the French settlers who are invariably described as a
`communauté'. The presence of this `communauté' is justified by the unique
`mission' France is obliged to carry out in the region. The so-called
`destin' of Algeria is with French colonizers rather than as an
independant nation. In contradiction to the reality of the collapse of
France's empire, this `destin' is claimed to be fixed and immutable. The
word `guerre' is never used - Algeria was the quintessential guerre
sans nom, the undeclared war - only terms like `paix' and
`pacification'. More often than not, however, terms like `déchirement'
which suggest a natural - and therefore not man-made - disaster are used
to designate the situation in Algeria.
The whole tone of much of French journalism's reporting of Algeria is
marked by an attempt to drown out or disguise the true violence of the
war. Language here is not an instrument of communication but of
intimidation which seeks to pass off a specific version of events (i.e.
that of the French state) as the sole valid interpretation and to
marginalize those versions which contradict it:
The sexual politics of the domestic sphere (images of femininity, the role
of women etc.) is another of the issues tackled by Barthes. The immediate
postwar years throughout the western world were those of a retour au
foyer, a reaffirmation of traditional gender roles (see Women in Postwar
France: the Domestic Ideal for more details of this). Although the
situation of French women during the war was different to that of their
English or American sisters in that, in general, French women did not
enter the workforce occupying posts once held by men, their experience
after the war was very much the same: an overt and covert attempt to push
women back into the confines of the home and the roles of mother and
housewife. After the liberation, French legislation targeting women was
firmly based on women's role as mamans de France. As such, it
continued the Pétainist family policy and efforts to increase the birth
rate. Quite apart from the specific legislation favouring women's
retour au foyer (e.g. les allocations familiales) there was
the ideological pressure coming from the church, the politicians and,
above all, from the media.
It is interesting to note that one of the important development in the
postwar years was the growing popualrity of weekly and monthly magazines,
particularly those aimed at a predominantly female readership like
Elle (founded in 1945), Marie-France, Marie-Claire
and Femmes d'aujourd'hui. It was publications like these that
interested and irritated Barthes (see Barthes: 1981 pp.96-97). He even
went so far as to describe Elle as a `véritable trésor
mythologique' (Barthes: 1970 p.128). The essay `Conjugales' (Barthes: 1957
pp.47-50) is particularly interesting here. Barthes writes of the
fascination of the popular press for marriages and the ways in which this
legitimates a particular social organisation
The status of technocratic icons within contemporary society (the Citroën
DS, the Eiffel Tower etc.) is another theme in Barthes's
Mythologies. In the postwar world things become charged with a new
value and significance. As consumer durables become more affordable and
more and more people are able to acquire such possessions as cars and washing
machines. The power and presence of advertizing also becomes more
noticible. Important essays include `Saponides et les détergents'
(Barthes: 1970 pp.38-40), `La nouvelle Citroën' (Barthes: 1970 pp.150-2) and
`Publicité et profondeur' (Barthes: 1970 p.82). The principal aim of these
essays is to reveal the petite-bourgeoisie as self- congratulatory,
enamoured of its material benefits and its so-called technological
advances.
The are other articles on the importance of advertizing, the `hidden
persuaders' (Vance Packard) which was increasing used in postwar France to
fuel the consumer boom. Jean-Luc Godard in Une femme mariée (1964),
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966) and
Masculin-féminin (1966) explores the role of mass-produced images
in his films of the 1960s but Barthes is already there before him.
Advertizing creates ultimately alienating images of a bourgeois
savoir-vivre to which everyone is encouraged to aspire. More than
this, however, advertizing is responsible for promoting the `myth' of free
choice. In `Saponides et détergents' (Barthes: 1970 pp.38-40) he discusses
the different advertising approaches to Omo and Persil. Their advertising
promotes two different products with two different properties. In reality,
these two products are almost the same and are both manufactured by the
Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilver.
The atrophy and complacency, mendacity and inertia of French institiutions
(the educational system, the judiciary etc.) was something that
preoccupied the French as much as the English in the postwar period and
especially Barthes. Miscarriages of justice, an educational system that
was dogmatic and out-of- touch with its youth, a complacent and arrogant
political class.
In `Dominici ou le triomphe de la littérature' (Barthes: 1970 pp.50-53)
Barthes argues that the language used to condemn Gaston Dominici implies a
whole psychology of petit-bourgeois assumptions and linguistic terrorism.
He was a simple peasant accused of killing a family of English holiday
makers and faced with a legal language he did not understand. In `Le
Procès Dupriez' (Barthes: 1970 pp.102-105) Gérard Dupriez, a man who
killed his father and mother without motive is condemned to death because
the law works on a fixed notion of what constitutes the psychology of
human motivation.
Many have claimed, and with good reason, that Mythologies is one of
the principal texts of contemporary cultural studies. John Storey has
described it as `one of the founding texts of cultural studies' (Storey:
1992 p.77) and Antony Easthope as one of the two books (the other being
Raymond Williams's Culture and Society) that `initiate modern
cultural studies' (Easthope: 1991 p.140). Barthes is fundamental to
contemporary cultural studies because he was amongst the first to take
seriously `mass culture' and to apply to it methods of analysis formerly
the preserve of `high culture'. What makes Barthes even more interesting
was that he did this at a time of rapid social and economic change when
cultural practices were undergoing major shifts.
Certainly, Barthes's Mythologies is a text that breaks new ground
insofar as it takes as the object of its intellectual inquiry the world of
mass culture: cinema, sport, advertizing, the popular press, women's
magazines and so on. Barthes was one of the earliest commentators on mass
culture, on the modern consumer culture of the postwar era. Barthes
expands the definition of intellectual activity in France. He examines a
strikingly broad range of subjects and cultural artefacts: wrestling, the
circus, shopping, toys, cars, washing powders, food, women's magazines,
beauty competitions, photography, popular fiction.
Roland Barthes's Mythologies is a book which plays around in the
consumer toyshop. It is a text which plunges into the `image trove' (see
Rylance: 1994 pp.63-64) of culture - understood in the most inclusive way
possible - to find new objects of intellectual speculation.
Mythologies takes great relish in its exploration of cultural
artefacts and phenomena. The book enacts a paradox in its imaginative and
playful readings of culture in a heavily mythologized world which should
have abolished such imaginative play.
On one level, what Barthes seems to be doing in Mythologies
destabilizing the boundary between `high culture' and `popular culture'.
Barthes accords popular culture a complexity, a density and richness of
texture thought to be the sole preserve of high culture. One key example
of this is wrestling discussed in the article `Le monde où l'on catche'
(Barthes: 1970 pp.13-24). Wrestling is often thought of as the least
intellectual pastime in our culture and is dismissed as vulgar fodder to
the uneducated masses. What Barthes does, in a striking and provocative
gesture, is claim that wrestling and its audience are in fact every bit as
sophisticated as high drama or opera. Wrestling is a modern variant of
the classical theatre or of an ancient religious rite in which the
spectacle of suffering and humiliation is played out. Like these high
cultural forms, wrestling is a formal spectacle informed by fixed codes
and conventions and played out in rigorously formalized gestures and
movements. It is every bit as codified, conventionalized and choreographed
as classical tragedy - the dramatic genre to which Barthes compares
wrestling throughout the article. Another important article which adopts
a similar approach is `Au Music-Hall' (Barthes: 1970 pp.176-179) about, as
the title suggests music hall. In this article Barthes invokes the
nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire to describe the formalized
beauties of the spectacle.
Although Barthes undertakes a sympathetic appraisal of two cultural
practices that one would certainly not describe as belonging to the the
world of `high culture', these two articles are exceptions. Moreover, both
wrestling and music hall are two manifestations of earlier forms of
popular culture rather than modern mass culture. Barthes can grant them
the same value as high cultural forms because they belong to and spring
from a recognisable tradition. Barthes's analysis of mass culture which
forms the basis of most of the book, on the other hand, is characterized
by a certain denunciatory rhetoric. Barthes sees modern mass culture as
controlled by the ethos of the petite-bourgeosie. The working class
have lost their own culture populaire and have bought into a
culture - la culture petit-bourgeoise - which is not their own.
The essays collected in Mythologies express both pessimism and
nostalgia: pessimism at the state of culture in France which, contrary to
what most people think, is threatened by mass culture which seeks to
homogenize and efface difference; nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian state
(literally, before the fall) when the working class had their own vibrant
culture, an authentic culture populaire which proudly asserted its
difference from petit-bourgeois norms. Barthes sees culture as somehow
fallen under the influence of the petty-bourgeoisie. Take these statements
made by Barthes in later interviews and writings:
... le prolétariat (les producteurs) n'a aucune culture propre: dans
les pays dits dévelopés, son langage est celui de la petite-bourgeoisie,
parce que c'est le langage qui lui est offert par les communications de
masse (grande presse, radio, télévision): la culture de masse est
petite-bourgeoise (Barthes: 1984 p.110)
L'un des aspects de la crise de la culture, en France, c'est précisément
que les Français, dans leur masse, me semble-t-il, ne s'intéressent pas à
leur langue. Le goût de la langue française a été entièrement hypothèqué
par la scolarité bourgeoise; s'intéresser à la langue française, à sa
musicalité (...) est devenu par la force des choses une attitude
esthétisante, mandarinale. Et pourtant, il y a eu des moments où un
certain contact était maintenu entre le `peuple' et la langue, à travers
la poésie populaire, la chanson populaire ou la pression même de la masse
pour transformer la langue en dehors des écoles-musées. On dirait que le
contact a disparu; on ne le perçoit pas aujourd'hui dans la culture
`populaire', qui n'est guère qu'une culture fabriquée (par la radio, la
télévision etc.). (Barthes: 1981 p.177)
To conclude this section then, I would claim that although Barthes goes
some way in in abolishing what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
would later call `la frontière sacrée' (Bourdieu: 1979 p.7) between `high
culture' and `popular culture', granting the latter a complexity once
considered the sole preserve of the former, Mythologies nonetheless
is informed by a certain hierarchy of cultural value. Mass culture is
clearly seen as inferior to both the `high culture' it mimics and the
`popular culture' it replaces. This disdain for, and condemnation of, mass
culture runs throughout the book.
`Critique muette et aveugle' (Barthes: 1970 pp.36-7) argues that one
common form of anti-intellectualism is to feign incomprehension. The
challenge of difficult ideas can be disarmed and their intellectual threat
defused. By accusing a writer of being obscure and lacking `le bon sens',
one can escape serious argument and, more importantly, avoid having to
make explicit one's own ideological position. They seek to avoid serious
intellectual debate by appealing to a universal common sense. Barthes,
howevers, holds firm to the notion of the intellectual's responsibility to
to challenge such dominant - and complacent - modes of thought, as he
makes clear in a later text:
But Barthes's Mythologies as a collection of polemical texts taking
issue with the taken-for-granted truths of our culture, engage with all
important political questions. As a mythologist who finds everywhere, even
in the most unlikely places, the hidden myths which help perpetuate the
status quo, Barthes in Mythologies cannot but take sides.
In Barthes's view, myth reinforces the ideology of capitalist society. The
essence of myth is that it disguises what are in fact bourgeois
representations as facts of a universal nature. Myth like ideology is
ever-present it is impossible to escape or elude it on a daily level.
Mythologies examines the ways the petty bourgeoisie in
twentieth-century France naturalizes and universalizes its own values via
specific mecanisms - the press, advertizing, the legal system and the
like. Barthes examines the way in which apparently apolitical activities -
wrestling, the Tour de France, strip-tease, drinking wine and eating steak
and chips - are expressive of certain ideological positions. French
culture appears to be natural but is, in fact, deeply historical and
political.
The petite bourgeoisie projects a certain state of affairs - a
state of affairs in their own interest - as being natural with the aim of
naturalizing it, legitimating it by making it appear immutable,
unchangeable. Brian Rigby claims that `There is a distinct Marxist strain
in Mythologies, and the essays can be seen as an attempt to show
how the whole of mass culture is a capitalist mystification of social and
cultural reality' (Rigby: 1991 p.177). The essay `Le Mythe aujourd'hui'
comes close to being a theory of ideology as a system of representations
by which the ruling class reproduces its dominance at the level of daily
experience.
Click on Lecture
3
Works by Barthes Cited
The Intellectual and Mass Culture
Mass Culture and the Intellectual
The Politics of Mythologies
Further Reading
Mythologies: A Postwar Text
France's Imperial Crises
The Sexual Politics of the Domestic
Changing Patterns of Cultural
Consumption
Technocratic Icons of Modernization
Institutional Inertia
Further Reading
France's Imperial Crises
Le mythe ne nie pas les choses, sa fonction est au contraire d'en
parler; simplement, il les purifie, les innocente, les fonde en nature et
en éternité, il leur donne une clarté qui n'est pas celle de
l'explication, mais celle du constat ... (Barthes: 1970 p.230)
The period immediately following the Second World War were the years of
decolonisation in which the former colonial powers were divested of their
former territories. France, as the main imperial power after Great
Britain, was inevitably deeply embroiled in these processes (mainly in
Indochina and North Africa). France, at the time Barthes was writing
Mythologies, was in the midst of a bloody and bitter colonial war:
la guerre d'Algérie. Barthes's Mythologies is a book which
responds to decolonisation and is all about Frenchness and French
identity. There are references, for example, to right-wing politicians
like Poujade and Le Pen who whipped up racist feelings in such articles as
`Quelques paroles de M. Poujade' (Barthes: 1970 pp.85-7) and `Poujade et
les intellectuels' (Barthes: 1970 pp.182-90). `Bichon chez les nègres'
(Barthes: 1970 pp.64-67) is another important text about racism.
Le vocabulaire officiel des affaires africaines est, on s'en doute,
purement axiomatique. C'est dire qu'il n'a aucune valeur de communication,
mais seulement d'intimidation. Il constitue donc une écriture,
c'est-à-dire un langage chargé d'opérer une coïncidence entre les normes
et les faits, et de donner à un réel cynique la caution d'une morale
noble. D'une manière générale, c'est un langage qui fonctionne
essentiellement comme un code, c'est-à-dire que les mots y ont un rapport
nul ou contraire à leur contenu. C'est une écriture que l'on pourrait
appeler cosmétique parce qu'elle vise à recouvrir les faits d'un bruit de
langage ... (Barthes: 1970 p.137).
Another important article of relevance to Barthes's critique of French
journalism's (mis)representation of politics in Algeria is `La Critique
Ni-Ni' (Barthes: 1970 p.144-46). It neatly takes apart those journalists
who have perfected the art of taking sides whilst appearing to be neutral
and merely expressing the voice of common sense. Common sense, suggests
Barthes, deeply ideological. Rather than expressing natural, self-evident
truths, it expresses the world-order and outlook of a historically
specific social class. In his later writings Barthes replaces the term
`bon sens' or `sens commun' with the term doxa which he uses to
designate those ideas and values that claim their origins in common sense:
La Doxa (mot qui va revenir souvent), c'est l'Opinion publique,
l'Esprit majoritaire, le Consensus petit-bourgeois, la Voix du Naturel, la
Violence du Préjugé ... (Barthes: 1975 p.51)
The Sexual Politics of the Domestic
L'union de Syviane Carpentier, Miss Europe 53 et de son ami d'enfance,
l'électricien Michel Warembourg permet de développer une image différente,
celle de la chaumière heureuse. Grâce à son titre, Sylviane aurait pu
mener la carrière brillante d'une star, voyager, faire du cinéma, gagner
beaucoup d'argent: sage et modeste, elle a renoncé à "la gloire ephémère"
et, fidèle à son passé, elle a épousé un électricien de Palaisseau. Les
jeunes époux nous sont ici présentés dans la phase postnuptiale de leur
union, en train d'établir les habitudes de leur bonheur et de s'installer
dans l'anoymat d'un petit confort: on arrange le deux-pièces-cuisine, on
prend le petit déjeuner, on va au cinéma, on fait le marché.
The article `Jouets' (Barthes: 1970 pp.58-60), although not explicitly
about the sexual politics of the domestic, is concerned with the ways in
which toys encourage children to adopt pre-determined gender and class
positions. Children are encouraged to become owners rather than creative
users of toys which appear to be `productive' but which, Barthes claims,
encourage passivity. `Romans et enfants' (Barthes: 1907 pp.56-8) is an
interesting essay on gender stereotyping, this time focussing on women
writers. Women writers are seen as acceptable but they must pay a heavy
price for their creativity by neglecting their `biological destiny'. `Celle
qui voit clair' (Barthes: 1957 pp.125-8) is an article on the agony columns
in women's magazines. The advice dispensed in these columns constructs a
female condition - women, unlike men are defined by their close relation
to the heart - which it claims to be eternal. No references are ever made
to women's real social and economic conditions as their realm is the home
and the heart. The notion - or myth - of woman promulgated in le
courrier du coeur is that women have no other role than that defined
by men:
... la morale du Courrier ne postule jamais pour la femme d'autre
condition que parasitaire: seul le mariage, en la nommant juridiquement,
la fait exister. On retrouve ici la structure même du gynécée, défini
comme une liberté close sous le regard extérieur de l'homme. (Barthes:
1970 p.127)
The Changing Culture of the Working Class
For me, cultural studies really begins with the debate about the nature of
social and cultural change in postwar Britain. An attempt to address the
manifest break-up of traditional culture, especially traditional class
cultures, it set about registering the impact of the new forms of
affluence and consumer society on the very hierarchical and pyramidal
structure of British society. Trying to come to terms with the fluidity
and the undermining impact of the mass media and of an emerging mass
society on this old European class society, it registered the long-delayed
entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world. (Hall: 1990 p.12)
The thirty years between libération and the first crise
pétrolière popularly known as les trente glorieuses were years
of unbroken prosperity and consistent economic growth. The changing
cultural conditions of a working-class made more prosperous - and more
petit-bourgeois according to Barthes - due to the higher standards of
living of the postwar period. This, remember, is the era of the so-called
`affluent worker' with more disposable income than ever before. What did
this `affluent worker' buy and what were his/her cultural habits? One of
the developments Barthes is writing about in Mythologies, is the
transition from a genuine popular culture deep-rooted in ordinary
working-class people's ways of life to mass culture which Barthes sees as
a petit-bourgeois phenomenon imposed upon a newly affluent working class.
Indeed, one could go further and claim that this is the claim of the book:
the death of an authentic popular culture at the hands of petit-bourgeois
mass culture.
Technocratic Icons
In postwar France the car became the very symbol of modernity. This is
reflected in a number of films of the period such as Lola (1960),
La Belle Américaine (1961) and, more catastrophically, Jean-Luc
Godard's Weekend (1967). The automobile industry was central to
France's increasing industrialization with Renault's vast modern factory
at Billancourt as its most visible reminder. This factory, incidentally,
provided the setting for Claire Etcherelli's Élise ou la vraie vie
(1967). In `La nouvelle Citroën' (Barthes: 1970 p.150-2) Barthes
understands this perfectly and analyses the ways in which the car has
become the very icon of France's modernization. He compares the car to a
mediaeval cathedral: both are works produced by anonymous artists which
enchant the masses.
Institutional Inertia
The Intellectual and Mass Culture
La populaire? Ici, disparition de toute activité magique ou
poétique: plus de carnaval, on ne joue plus avec les mots: fin des
métaphores, règne des stéréotypes imposés par la culture
petite-bourgeoise. (Barthes: 1973 p.62)
Contrary to the accepted opinion of France as the powerhouse of European
culture, Barthes sees France as a deeply philistine country with little
understanding or appreciation of the complexities of intellectual and
cultural life. Mythologies is a very entrenched and self-defensive
collection of texts, and may be read as an apology or defence of
intellectuals against the incursion of the barbarity of mass culture.
Andrew Leak's description of the attitude adopted by Barthes in
Mythologies as a `posture of isolation and singularity' (Leak:
1994 p.9) is a good one. Barthes expresses a self-consciously intellectual
contempt for mass-culture. According to Barthes the intellectual has to
retain distance from the mass, must become what Claude Duneton calls a
`rieur' and maintain a sarcastic or ironic distance from mass culture.
This conviction is apparent at the very beginning of Mythologies:
... je réclame de vivre pleinement la contradiction de mon temps, qui
peut faire d'un sarcasme la condition de la vérité. (Barthes: 1970 p.10)
Although he may have a valid point in claiming that much mass culture is a
degraded, inferior replacement to popular culture, he doesn't acknowledge
that the consumers of mass culture may well be able to resist its
messages. In short, Barthes produces a patronizing portrait of the
consumer as a passive recipient, a void, an empty vessel waiting to be
filled, to be told what to think and how to act. Indeed, one of the
criticisms that can - and have - been made of the work of `early' Barthes
(i.e. of the 1950s and early 1960s) is that he is too text-oriented and
does not concern himself with how texts are received and consumed.
Barthes's account of a working class uncritically consuming an alien - and
alienating - culture seems to belong to a familar tradition of
intellectual contempt for both that culture and its audience.
Mass Culture and The Intellectual
L'opinion courante n'aime pas le langage des intellectuels. Aussi a-t-il
été souvent fiché sous l'accusation de jargon intellectualiste. Il se
sentait alors l'objet d'une sorte de racisme: on excluait son langage,
c'est-à-dire son corps: «tu ne parles pas comme moi, donc je t'exclus.»
(Barthes: 1975 p.107)
In Mythologies mass culture is seen to have an altogether harmful
effect on French political and cultural life, homogenizing difference and
encouraging uniformity to petit-bourgeois social norms. But this mass
culture is also seen to be hostile to any questionning or intellectual
inquiry. This explains in part the often defensive and entrenched position
Barthes adopts in his discussion of representations of the intellectual
within mass culture. In a piece written for Le Monde in 1974 on the
status of the intellectual in France, Barthes made the claim that:
L'intellectuel est traité comme un sourcier pourrait l'être par une
peuplade de marchands, d'hommes d'affaires et de légistes: il est celui
qui dérange des intérêts idéologiques. L'anti-intellectualisme est un
mythe historique, lié sans doute à l'ascension petite-bourgeoise. Poujade
a donné naguère à ce mythe sa forme toute crue (`le poisson pourrit par la
tête'). (Barthes: 1981 p.186)
Poujade's claim that a dead fish starts to rot from the head down is
indicative of petit-bourgeois distrust of intellectuals, a distrust that
Barthes appears to come across again and again in his readings of mass
culture. In a number of the texts like `L'écrivain en vacances' (Barthes:
1970 pp.30-33) discuss this. `L'écrivain en vacances' about the portrayal
by a right-wing newspaper (Le Figaro) of well-known writers on
holiday.`La Critique Ni-Ni' (Barthes: 1970 pp.144-146) is an interesting
essay to read in the light of Barthes's preoccupation with the
marginalization of the intellectual in French society by the popular
press.
Admettons que la tâche historique de l'intellectuel (ou de l'écrivain), ce
soit aujourd'hui d'entretenir et d'accentuer la décomposition de la
conscience bourgeoise. Il faut alors garder à l'image toute sa précision;
cela veut dire que l'on feint volontairement de rester à l'intérieur de
cette conscience et qu'on va la délabrer, l'affaisser, l'effondrer, sur
place, comme on ferait d'un morceau de sucre en l'imbibant d'eau.
(Barthes: 1975 p.67)
The Politics of Mythologies
The decidedly idiosyncratic Marxisms of Sartre and Brecht are as `useful'
to him as is Marx himself. Barthes's attitude towards constituted
theoretical thought in Mythologies - and elsewhere - could be
described as cavalier, in the best sense of the word: he picks up
concepts, uses them, and drops them when they have outstayed their
welcome. (Leak: 1994 p.38)
The question of Barthes's politics has long been a problem to Barthes's
critics. He is notoriously difficult to pin down - he prides himself on
being irrepérable - on the matter of political allegiances past and
present. He began and, arguably, ended his intellectual career as a `man
of the left' but he was never a member of the Parti communiste français
(PCF) unlike so many other writers and intellectuals in the postwar
period.
Further Reading
Works on Barthes
Works of Related Interest
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Update 11-Feb-99