Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Criticism
Roland Barthes' collection of compositions titled "Mythologies" and his attached programmatic essay
"Myth Today" are considered to be groundbreaking texts in structural
analysis and cultural analysis in general, but there are not free from faults
or criticism.
Barthes works to unravel the workings of the myth and to de-naturalize
what myth makes natural and transparent. Barthes sees myth analysis as a political
activity whose objective it to locate the historical ideology at the base of
cultural representations. One of the criticisms pointed at Barthes in this
regard is that he denies the masses the capacity for independent thinking and
creative or deliberative consumption of cultural products. Barthes' perception resembles
the too crude idea of the culture
industry suggested by the Frankfurt School or the role of the intellectual
as perceived by Gramsci which do not leave any room for critical thinking among
the none-academic commons. Barthes
assumes that cultural, that is ideological, texts have only one way of being
read and that it is the role of the Marxist critique to unveil the hidden
ideology inscribed in them which eludes the masses. For example, Stuart Hall
had rather different notions regarding the people's ability to converse and criticize
cultural texts (see for example: "Notes
on Deconstructing the Popular" and "Encoding, Decoding").
On the other hand, another
critique pointed at Barthes' "Myth Today" and his theory is that
analyzing the myth does not necessarily mean that it potency and effect are
diminished. Demystifying myth by mean of their analysis does not necessarily
detract from its effectiveness. On the contrary, agents such as politicians and
admen can even make good use of Barthes' theory of myth in order to construct
their own myth for their own agenda.
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