myth today myth is a type of speech

Myth Today, page 1 of 26

from Mythologies by Roland Barthes[translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang,New York, 1984]

MYTH TODAYWhat is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset afirst, very simple answer, which is perfectlyconsistent with etymology: myth is a type ofspeech.1

Myth is a type of speechOf course, it is not any type: language needsspecial conditions in order to become myth: weshall see them in a minute. But what must befirmly established at the start is that myth is asystem of communication, that it is a message.This allows one to perceive that myth cannotpossibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it isa mode of signification, a form. Later, we shallhave to assign to this form historical limits,conditions of use, and reintroduce society into it:we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.

It can be seen that to purport to discriminateamong mythical objects according to theirsubstance would be entirely illusory: since mythis a type of speech, everything can be a mythprovided it is conveyed by a discourse. Myth isnot defined by the object of its message, but bythe way in which it utters this message: there areformal limits to myth, there are no 'substantial'ones. Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, Ibelieve this, for the universe is infinitely fertilein suggestions. Every object in the world canpass from a closed, silent existence to an oralstate, open to appropriation by society, for thereis no law, whether natural or not, which forbidstalking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, ofcourse. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouetis no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which isdecorated, adapted to a certain type ofconsumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a typeof social usage which is added to pure matter.

Naturally, everything is not expressed at thesame time: some objects become the prey ofmythical speech for a while, then they disappear,others take their place and attain the status ofmyth. Are there objects which are inevitably asource of suggestiveness, as Baudelairesuggested about Woman? Certainly not: one can

conceive of very ancient myths, but there are noeternal ones; for it is human history whichconverts reality into speech, and it alone rules thelife and the death of mythical language. Ancientor not, mythology can only have an historicalfoundation, for myth is a type of speech chosenby history: it cannot possibly evolve from the'nature' of things.

Speech of this kind is a message. It is thereforeby no means confined to oral speech. It canconsist of modes of writing or of representations;not only written discourse, but also photography,cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, allthese can serve as a support to mythical speech.Myth can be defined neither by its object nor byits material, for any material can arbitrarily beendowed with meaning: the arrow which isbrought in order to signify a challenge is also akind of speech. True, as far as perception isconcerned, writing and pictures, for instance, donot call upon the same type of consciousness;and even with pictures, one can use many kindsof reading: a diagram lends itself to significationmore than a drawing, a copy more than anoriginal, and a caricature more than a portrait.But this is the point: we are no longer dealinghere with a theoretical mode of representation:we are dealing with this particular image, whichis given for this particular signification. Mythicalspeech is made of a material which has alreadybeen worked on so as to make it suitable forcommunication: it is because all the materials ofmyth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose asignifying consciousness, that one can reasonabout them while discounting their substance.This substance is not unimportant: pictures, to besure, are more imperative than writing, theyimpose meaning at one stroke, without analyzingor diluting it. But this is no longer a constitutivedifference. Pictures become a kind of writing assoon as they are meaningful: like writing, theycall for a lexis.

We shall therefore take language, discourse,speech, etc., to mean any significant unit orsynthesis, whether verbal or visual: a photographwill be a kind of speech for us in the same wayas a newspaper article; even objects will becomespeech, if they mean something. This genericway of conceiving language is in fact justified bythe very history of writing: long before theinvention of our alphabet, objects like the Incaquipu, or drawings, as in pictographs, have been


accepted as speech. This does not mean that onemust treat mythical speech like language; mythin fact belongs to the province of a generalscience, coextensive with linguistics, which issemiology.

Myth as a semiological systemFor mythology, since it is the study of a type ofspeech, is but one fragment of this vast scienceof signs which Saussure postulated some fortyyears ago under the name of semiology.Semiology has not yet come into being. Butsince Saussure himself, and sometimesindependently of him, a whole section ofcontemporary research has constantly beenreferred to the problem of meaning: psycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, somenew types of literary criticism of whichBachelard has given the first examples, are nolonger concerned with facts except inasmuch asthey are endowed with significance. Now topostulate a signification is to have recourse tosemiology. I do not mean that semiology couldaccount for all these aspects of research equallywell: they have different contents. But they havea common status: they are all sciences dealingwith values. They are not content with meetingthe facts: they define and explore them as tokensfor something else.

Semiology is a science of forms, since it studiessignifications apart from their content. I shouldlike to say one word about the necessity and thelimits of such a formal science. The necessity isthat which applies in the case of any exactlanguage. Zhdanov made fun of Alexandrov thephilosopher, who spoke of 'the sphericalstructure of our planet.' 'It was thought untilnow', Zhdanov said, 'that form alone could bespherical.' Zhdanov was right: one cannot speakabout structures in terms of forms, and viceversa. It may well be that on the plane of 'life',there is but a totality where structures and formscannot be separated. But science has no use forthe ineffable: it must speak about 'life' if it wantsto transform it. Against a certain quixotism ofsynthesis, quite platonic incidentally, allcriticism must consent to the ascesis, to theartifice of analysis; and in analysis, it must matchmethod and language. Less terrorized by thespecter of 'formalism', historical criticism mighthave been less sterile; it would have understood

that the specific study of forms does not in anyway contradict the necessary principles oftotality and History. On the contrary: the more asystem is specifically defined in its forms, themore amenable it is to historical criticism. Toparody a well-known saying, I shall say that alittle formalism turns one away from History, butthat a lot brings one back to it. Is there a betterexample of total criticism than the description ofsaintliness, at once formal and historical,semiological and ideological, in Sartre's Saint-Genet? The danger, on the contrary, is toconsider forms as ambiguous objects, half- formand half-substance, to endow form with asubstance of form, as was done, for instance, byZhdanovian realism. Semiology, once its limitsare settled, is not a metaphysical trap: it is ascience among others, necessary but notsufficient. The important thing is to see that theunity of an explanation cannot be based on theamputation of one or other of its approaches, but,as Engels said, on the dialectical co-ordination ofthe particular sciences it makes use of. This is thecase with mythology: it is a part both ofsemiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, andof ideology inasmuch as it is an historicalscience: it studies ideas-in-form.2

Let me therefore restate that any semiologypostulates a relation between two terms, asignifier and a signified. This relation concernsobjects which belong to different categories, andthis is why it is not one of equality but one ofequivalence. We must here be on our guard fordespite common parlance which simply says thatthe signifier expresses the signified, we aredealing, in any semiological system, not withtwo, but with three different terms. For what wegrasp is not at all one term after the other, but thecorrelation which unites them: there are,therefore, the signifier, the signified and the sign,which is the associative total of the first twoterms. Take a bunch of roses: I use it to signifymy passion. Do we have here, then, only asignifier and a signified, the roses and mypassion? Not even that: to put it accurately, thereare here only 'passionified' roses. But on theplane of analysis, we do have three terms; forthese roses weighted with passion perfectly andcorrectly allow themselves to be decomposedinto roses and passion: the former and the latterexisted before uniting and forming this thirdobject, which is the sign. It is as true to say thaton the plane of experience I cannot dissociate the


roses from the message they carry, as to say thaton the plane of analysis I cannot confuse theroses as signifier and the roses as sign: thesignifier is empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning.Or take a black pebble: I can make it signify inseveral ways, it is a mere signifier; but if I weighit with a definite signified (a death sentence, forinstance, in an anonymous vote), it will become asign. Naturally, there are between the signifier,the signified and the sign, functional implications(such as that of the part to the whole) which areso close that to analyses them may seem futile;but we shall see in a moment that this distinctionhas a capital importance for the study of myth assemiological schema.

Naturally these three terms are purely formal,and different contents can be given to them. Hereare a few examples: for Saussure, who workedon a particular but methodologically exemplarysemiological system--the language or langue--thesignified is the concept, the signifier is theacoustic image (which is mental) and the relationbetween concept and image is the sign (the word,for instance), which is a concrete entity.3 ForFreud, as is well known, the human psyche is astratification of tokens or representatives. Oneterm (I refrain from giving it any precedence) isconstituted by the manifest meaning of behavior,another, by its latent or real meaning (it is, forinstance, the substratum of the dream); as for thethird term, it is here also a correlation of the firsttwo: it is the dream itself in its totality, theparapraxis (a mistake in speech or behavior) orthe neurosis, conceived as compromises, aseconomies effected thanks to the joining of aform (the first term) and an intentional function(the second term). We can see here hownecessary it is to distinguish the sign from thesignifier: a dream, to Freud, is no more itsmanifest datum than its latent content: it is thefunctional union of these two terms. In Sartreancriticism, finally (I shall keep to these three wellknown examples), the signified is constituted bythe original crisis in the subject (the separationfrom his mother for Baudelaire, the naming ofthe theft for Genet); Literature as discourseforms the signifier; and the relation betweencrisis and discourse defines the work, which is asignification. Of course, this tri-dimensionalpattern, however constant in its form, isactualized in different ways: one cannot thereforesay too often that semiology can have its unityonly at the level of forms, not contents; its field

is limited, it knows only one operation: reading,or deciphering.

In myth, we find again the tri-dimensionalpattern which I have just described: the signifier,the signified and the sign. But myth is a peculiarsystem, in that it is constructed from asemiological chain which existed before it: it is asecond-order semiological system. That which isa sign (namely the associative total of a conceptand an image) in the first system, becomes amere signifier in the second. We must here recallthat the materials of mythical speech (thelanguage itself, photography, painting, posters,rituals, objects, etc.), however different at thestart, are reduced to a pure signifying function assoon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees inthem only the same raw material; their unity isthat they all come down to the status of a merelanguage. Whether it deals with alphabetical orpictorial writing, myth wants to see in them onlya sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of afirst semiological chain. And it is precisely thisfinal term which will become the first term of thegreater system which it builds and of which it isonly a part. Everything happens as if mythshifted the formal system of the firstsignifications sideways. As this lateral shift isessential for the analysis of myth, I shallrepresent it in the following way, it beingunderstood, of course, that the spatialization ofthe pattern is here only a metaphor:

[the following is a stripped-down representationof Barthes's original diagram]

It can be seen that in myth there are twosemiological systems, one of which is staggeredin relation to the other: a linguistic system, thelanguage (or the modes of representation whichare assimilated to it), which I shall call thelanguage-object, because it is the language whichmyth gets hold of in order to build its ownsystem; and myth itself, which I shall call


metalanguage, because it is a second language, inwhich one speaks about the first. When hereflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist nolonger needs to ask himself questions about thecomposition of the language object, he no longerhas to take into account the details of thelinguistic schema; he will only need to know itstotal term, or global sign, and only inasmuch asthis term lends itself to myth. This is why thesemiologist is entitled to treat in the same waywriting and pictures: what he retains from themis the fact that they are both signs, that they bothreach the threshold of myth endowed with thesame signifying function, that they constitute,one just as much as the other, a language-object.

It is now time to give one or two examples ofmythical speech. I shall borrow the first from anobservation by Valery.4 I am a pupil in thesecond form in a French lycee. I open my Latingrammar, and I read a sentence, borrowed fromAesop or Phaedrus: quia ego nominor leo. I stopand think. There is something ambiguous aboutthis statement: on the one hand, the words in itdo have a simple meaning: because my name islion. And on the other hand, the sentence isevidently there in order to signify something elseto me. Inasmuch as it is addressed to me, a pupilin the second form, it tells me clearly: I am agrammatical example meant to illustrate the ruleabout the agreement of the predicate. I am evenforced to realize that the sentence in no waysignifies its meaning to me, that it tries very littleto tell me something about the lion and what sortof name he has; its true and fundamentalsignification is to impose itself on me as thepresence of a certain agreement of the predicate.I conclude that I am faced with a particular,greater, semiological system, since it is co-extensive with the language: there is, indeed, asignifier, but this signifier is itself formed by asum of signs, it is in itself a first semiologicalsystem (my name is lion). Thereafter, the formalpattern is correctly unfolded: there is a signified(I am a grammatical example) and there is aglobal signification, which is none other than thecorrelation of the signifier and the signified; forneither the naming of the lion nor thegrammatical example are given separately.

And here is now another example: I am at thebarber's, and a copy of Paris- Match is offered tome. On the cover, a young Negro in a Frenchuniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted,

probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All thisis the meaning of the picture. But, whethernaively or not, I see very well what it signifies tome: that France is a great Empire, that all hersons, without any color discrimination, faithfullyserve under her flag, and that there is no betteranswer to the detractors of an allegedcolonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro inserving his so- called oppressors. I am thereforeagain faced with a greater semiological system:there is a signifier, itself already formed with aprevious system (a black soldier is giving theFrench salute); there is a signified (it is here apurposeful mixture of Frenchness andmilitariness); finally, there is a presence of thesignified through the signifier.

Before tackling the analysis of each term of themythical system, one must agree on terminology.We now know that the signifier can be looked at,in myth, from two points of view: as the finalterm of the linguistic system, or as the first termof the mythical system. We therefore need twonames. On the plane of language, that is, as thefinal term of the first system, I shall call thesignifier: meaning (my name is lion, a Negro isgiving the French salute); on the plane of myth, Ishall call it: form. In the case of the signified, noambiguity is possible: we shall retain the name


concept. The third term is the correlation of thefirst two: in the linguistic system, it is the sign;but it is not possible to use this word againwithout ambiguity, since in myth (and this is thechief peculiarity of the latter), the signifier isalready formed by the signs of the language. Ishall call the third term of myth the signification.This word is here all the better justified sincemyth has in fact a double function: it points outand it notifies, it makes us understand somethingand it imposes it on us.

The form and the conceptThe signifier of myth presents itself in anambiguous way: it is at the same time meaningand form, full on one side and empty on theother. As meaning, the signifier alreadypostulates a reading, I grasp it through my eyes,it has a sensory reality (unlike the linguisticsignifier, which is purely mental), there is arichness in it: the naming of the lion, the Negro'ssalute are credible wholes, they have at theirdisposal a sufficient rationality. As a total oflinguistic signs, the meaning of the myth has itsown value, it belongs to a history, that of the lionor that of the Negro: in the meaning, asignification is already built, and could very wellbe self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of itand did not turn it suddenly into an empty,parasitical form. The meaning is alreadycomplete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, apast, a memory, a comparative order of facts,ideas, decisions.

When it becomes form, the meaning leaves itscontingency behind; it empties itself, it becomesimpoverished, history evaporates, only the letterremains. There is here a paradoxical permutationin the reading operations, an abnormal regressionfrom meaning to form, from the linguistic sign tothe mythical signifier. If one encloses quia egonominor leo in a purely linguistic system, theclause finds again there a fullness, a richness, ahistory: I am an animal, a lion, I live in a certaincountry, I have just been hunting, they wouldhave me share my prey with a heifer, a cow and agoat; but being the stronger, I award myself allthe shares for various reasons, the last of whichis quite simply that my name is lion. But as theform of the myth, the clause hardly retainsanything of this long story. The meaningcontained a whole system of values: a history, a

geography, a morality, a zoology, a Literature.The form has put all this richness at a distance:its newly acquired penury calls for a significationto fill it. The story of the lion must recede a greatdeal in order to make room for the grammaticalexample, one must put the biography of theNegro in parentheses if one wants to free thepicture, and prepare it to receive its signified.

But the essential point in all this is that the formdoes not suppress the meaning, it onlyimpoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds itat one's disposal. One believes that the meaningis going to die, but it is a death with reprieve; themeaning loses its value, but keeps its life, fromwhich the form of the myth will draw itsnourishment. The meaning will be for the formlike an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamedrichness, which it is possible to call and dismissin a sort of rapid alternation: the form mustconstantly be able to be rooted again in themeaning and to get there what nature it needs forits nutriment; above all, it must be able to hidethere. It is this constant game of hide-and-seekbetween the meaning and the form which definesmyth. The form of myth is not a symbol: theNegro who salutes is not the symbol of theFrench Empire: he has too much presence, heappears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous,innocent, indisputable image. But at the sametime this presence is tamed, put at a distance,made almost transparent; it recedes a little, itbecomes the accomplice of a concept whichcomes to it fully armed, French imperiality: oncemade use of, it becomes artificial.

Let us now look at the signified: this historywhich drains out of the form will be whollyabsorbed by the concept. As for the latter, it isdetermined, it is at once historical andintentional; it is the motivation which causes themyth to be uttered. Grammatical exemplarity,French imperiality, are the very drives behind themyth. The concept reconstitutes a chain of causesand effects, motives and intentions. Unlike theform, the concept is in no way abstract: it isfilled with a situation. Through the concept, it isa whole new history which is implanted in themyth. Into the naming of the lion, first drained ofits contingency, the grammatical example willattract my whole existence: Time, which causedme to be born at a certain period when Latingrammar is taught; History, which sets me apart,through a whole mechanism of social


segregation, from the children who do not learnLatin; pedagogic tradition, which caused thisexample to be chosen from Aesop or Phaedrus;my own linguistic habits, which see theagreement of the predicate as a fact worthy ofnotice and illustration. The same goes for theNegro-giving-the-salute: as form, its meaning isshallow, isolated, impoverished; as the conceptof French imperiality, here it is again tied to thetotality of the world: to the general History ofFrance, to its colonial adventures, to its presentdifficulties. Truth to tell, what is invested in theconcept is less reality than a certain knowledgeof reality; in passing from the meaning to theform, the image loses some knowledge: thebetter to receive the knowledge in the concept. Inactual fact, the knowledge contained in amythical concept is confused, made of yielding,shapeless associations. One must firmly stressthis open character of the concept; it is not at allan abstract, purified essence, it is a formless,unstable, nebulous condensation, whose unityand coherence are above all due to its function.

In this sense, we can say that the fundamentalcharacter of the mythical concept is to beappropriated: grammatical exemplarity veryprecisely concerns a given form of pupils, Frenchimperiality must appeal to such and such groupof readers and not another. The concept closelycorresponds to a function, it is defined as atendency. This cannot fail to recall the signifiedin another semiological system, Freudianism. InFreud, the second term of the system is the latentmeaning (the content) of the dream, of theparapraxis, of the neurosis. Now Freud doesremark that the second-order meaning ofbehavior is its real meaning, that which isappropriate to a complete situation, including itsdeeper level; it is, just like the mythical concept,the very intention of behavior.

A signified can have several signifiers: this isindeed the case in linguistics and psycho-analysis. It is also the case in the mythicalconcept: it has at its disposal an unlimited massof signifiers: I can find a thousand Latinsentences to actualize for me the agreement ofthe predicate, I can find a thousand images whichsignify to me French imperiality. This means thatquantitively, the concept is much poorer than thesignifier, it often does nothing but re-presentitself. Poverty and richness are in reverseproportion in the form and the concept: to the

qualitative poverty of the form, which is therepository of a rarefied meaning, therecorresponds the richness of the concept which isopen to the whole of History; and to thequantitative abundance of the forms therecorresponds a small number of concepts. Thisrepetition of the concept through different formsis precious to the mythologist, it allows him todecipher the myth: it is the insistence of a kind ofbehavior which reveals its intention. Thisconfirms that there is no regular ratio betweenthe volume of the signified and that of thesignifier. In language, this ratio is proportionate,it hardly exceeds the word, or at least theconcrete unit. In myth, on the contrary, theconcept can spread over a very large expanse ofsignifier. For instance, a whole book may be thesignifier of a single concept; and conversely, aminute form (a word, a gesture, even incidental,so long as it is noticed) can serve as signifier to aconcept filled with a very rich history. Althoughunusual in language, this disproportion betweensignifier and signified is not specific to myth: inFreud, for instance, the parapraxis is a signifierwhose thinness is out of proportion to the realmeaning which it betrays.

As I said, there is no fixity in mythical concepts:they can come into being, alter, disintegrate,disappear completely. And it is precisely becausethey are historical that history can very easilysuppress them. This instability forces themythologist to use a terminology adapted to it,and about which I should now like to say a word,because it often is a cause for irony: I meanneologism. The concept is a constituting elementof myth: if I want to decipher myths, I mustsomehow be able to name concepts. Thedictionary supplies me with a few: Goodness,Kindness, Wholeness, Humaneness, etc. But bydefinition, since it is the dictionary which givesthem to me, these particular concepts are nothistorical. Now what I need most often isephemeral concepts, in connection with limitedcontingencies: neologism is then inevitable.China is one thing, the idea which a French petitbourgeois could have of it not so long ago isanother: for this peculiar mixture of bells,rickshaws and opium-dens, no othe wordpossible but Sininess.5 Unlovely? One should atleast get some consolation from the fact thatconceptual neologisms are never arbitrary: theyare built according to a highly sensibleproportional rule.


The significationIn semiology, the third term is nothing but theassociation of the first two, as we saw. It is theonly one which is allowed to be seen in a full andsatisfactory way, the only one which isconsumed in actual fact. I have called it: thesignification. We can see that the signification isthe myth itself, just as the Saussurean sign is theword (or more accurately the concrete unit). Butbefore listing the characters of the signification,one must reflect a little on the way in which it isprepared, that is, on the modes of correlation ofthe mythical concept and the mythical form.

First we must note that in myth, the first twoterms are perfectly manifest (unlike whathappens in other semiological systems): one ofthem is not 'hidden' behind the other, they areboth given here (and not one here and the otherthere). However paradoxical it may seem, mythhides nothing: its function is to distort, not tomake disappear. There is no latency of theconcept in relation to the form: there is no needof an unconscious in order to explain myth. Ofcourse, one is dealing with two different types ofmanifestation: form has a literal, immediatepresence; moreover, it is extended. This stems--this cannot be repeated too often--from thenature of the mythical signifier, which is alreadylinguistic: since it is constituted by a meaningwhich is already outlined, it can appear onlythrough a given substance (whereas in language,the signifier remains mental). In the case of oralmyth, this extension is linear (for my name islion); in that of visual myth, it is multi-dimensional (in the center, the Negro's uniform,at the top, the blackness of his face, on the left,the military salute, etc.). The elements of theform therefore are related as to place andproximity: the mode of presence of the form isspatial. The concept, on the contrary, appears inglobal fashion, it is a kind of nebula, thecondensation, more or less hazy, of a certainknowledge. Its elements are linked by associativerelations: it is supported not by an extension butby a depth (although this metaphor is perhapsstill too spatial): its mode of presence ismemorial.

The relation which unites the concept of themyth to its meaning is essentially a relation of

deformation. We find here again a certain formalanalogy with a complex semiological systemsuch as that of the various types of psycho-analysis. Just as for Freud the manifest meaningof behavior is distorted by its latent meaning, inmyth the meaning is distorted by the concept. Ofcourse, this distortion is possible only becausethe form of the myth is already constituted by alinguistic meaning. In a simple system like thelanguage, the signified cannot distort anything atall because the signifier, being empty, arbitrary,offers no resistance to it. But here, everything isdifferent: the signifier has, so to speak, twoaspects: one full, which is the meaning (thehistory of the lion, of the Negro soldier), oneempty, which is the form (for my name is lion;Negro-French- soldier-saluting-the-tricolor).What the concept distorts is of course what isfull, the meaning: the lion and the Negro aredeprived of their history, changed into gestures.What Latin exemplarity distorts is the naming ofthe lion, in all its contingency; and what Frenchimperiality obscures is also a primary language, afactual discourse which was telling me about thesalute of a Negro in uniform. But this distortionis not an obliteration: the lion and the Negroremain here, the concept needs them; they arehalf-amputated, they are deprived of memory,not of existence: they are at once stubborn,silently rooted there, and garrulous, a speechwholly at the service of the concept. Theconcept, literally, deforms, but does not abolishthe meaning; a word can-perfectly render thiscontradiction: it alienates it.

What must always be remembered is that myth isa double system; there occurs in it a sort ofubiquity: its point of departure is constituted bythe arrival of a meaning. To keep a spatialmetaphor, the approximative character of which Ihave already stressed, I shall say that thesignification of the myth is constituted by a sortof constantly moving turnstile which presentsalternately the meaning of the signifier and itsform, a language object and a metalanguage, apurely signifying and a purely imaginingconsciousness. This alternation is, so to speak,gathered up in the concept, which uses it like anambiguous signifier, at once intellective andimaginary, arbitrary and natural.

I do not wish to prejudge the moral implicationsof such a mechanism, but I shall not exceed thelimits of an objective analysis if I point out that


the ubiquity of the signifier in myth exactlyreproduces the physique of the alibi (which is, asone realizes, a spatial term): in the alibi too, thereis a place which is full and one which is empty,linked by a relation of negative identity ('I amnot where you think I am; I am where you think Iam not'). But the ordinary alibi (for the police,for instance) has an end; reality stops theturnstile revolving at a certain point. Myth is avalue, truth is no guarantee for it; nothingprevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it isenough that its signifier has two sides for italways to have an 'elsewhere' at its disposal. Themeaning is always there to present the form; theform is always there to outdistance the meaning.And there never is any contradiction, conflict, orsplit between the meaning and the form: they arenever at the same place. In the same way, if I amin a car and I look at the scenery through thewindow, I can at will focus on the scenery or onthe window-pane. At one moment I grasp thepresence of the glass and the distance of thelandscape; at another, on the contrary, thetransparency of the glass and the depth of thelandscape; but the result of this alternation isconstant: the glass is at once present and emptyto me, and the landscape unreal and full. Thesame thing occurs in the mythical signifier: itsform is empty but present, its meaning absent butfull. To wonder at this contradiction I mustvoluntarily interrupt this turnstile of form andmeaning, I must focus on each separately, andapply to myth a static method of deciphering, inshort, I must go against its own dynamics: tosum up, I must pass from the state of reader tothat of mythologist.

And it is again this duplicity of the signifierwhich determines the characters of thesignification. We now know that myth is a typeof speech defined by its intention (I am agrammatical example) much more than by itsliteral sense (my name is lion); and that in spiteof this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified,eternalized, made absent by this literal sense(The French Empire? It's just a fact: look at thisgood Negro who salutes like one of our ownboys). This constituent ambiguity of mythicalspeech has two consequences for thesignification, which henceforth appears both likea notification and like a statement of fact.

Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character:stemming from an historical concept, directly

springing from contingency (a Latin class, athreatened Empire), it is I whom it has come toseek. It is turned towards me, I am subjected toits intentional force, it summons me to receive itsexpansive ambiguity. If, for instance, I take awalk in Spain, in the Basque country,6 I maywell notice in the houses an architectural unity, acommon style, which leads me to acknowledgethe Basque house as a definite ethnic product.However, I do not feel personally concerned,nor, so to speak, attacked by this unitary style: Isee only too well that it was here before me,without me. It is a complex product which has itsdeterminations at the level of a very widehistory: it does not call out to me, it does notprovoke me into naming it, except if I think ofinserting it into a vast picture of rural habitat. Butif I am in the Paris region and I catch a glimpse,at the end of the rue Gambetta or the rue Jean-Jaures, of a natty white chalet with red tiles, darkbrown half-timbering, an asymmetrical roof anda wattle-and-daub front, I feel as if I werepersonally receiving an imperious injunction toname this object a Basque chalet: or even better,to see it as the very essence of basquity. This isbecause the concept appears to me in all itsappropriative nature: it comes and seeks me outin order to oblige me to acknowledge the body ofintentions which have motivated it and arrangedit there as the signal of an individual history, as aconfidence and a complicity: it is a real call,which the owners of the chalet send out to me.And this call, in order to be more imperious, hasagreed to all manner of impoverishments: all thatjustified the Basque house on the plane oftechnology--the barn, the outside stairs, the dove-cote, etc.--has been dropped; there remains onlya brief order, not to be disputed. And theabomination is so frank that I feel this chalet hasjust been created on the spot, for me, like amagical object springing up in my present lifewithout any trace of the history which has causedit.

For this interpellant speech is at the same time afrozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, itsuspends itself, turns away and assumes the lookof a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself lookneutral and innocent. The appropriation of theconcept is suddenly driven away once more bythe literalness of the meaning. This is a kind ofarrest, in both the physical and the legal sense ofthe term: French imperiality condemns thesaluting Negro to be nothing more than an


instrumental signifier, the Negro suddenly hailsme in the name of French imperiality; but at thesame moment the Negro's salute thickens,becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternalreference meant to establish French imperiality.On the surface of language something hasstopped moving: the use of the signification ishere, hiding behind the fact, and conferring on ita notifying look; but at the same time, the factparalyses the intention, gives it something like amalaise producing immobility: in order to makeit innocent, it freezes it. This is because myth isspeech stolen and restored. Only, speech whichis restored is no longer quite that which wasstolen: when it was brought back, it was not putexactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny,this moment taken for a surreptitious faking,which gives mythical speech its benumbed look.

One last element of the signification remains tobe examined: its motivation. We know that in alanguage, the sign is arbitrary: nothing compelsthe acoustic image tree 'naturally' to mean theconcept tree: the sign, here, is unmotivated. Yetthis arbitrariness has limits, which come from theassociative relations of the word: the languagecan produce a whole fragment of the sign byanalogy with other signs (for instance one saysamiable in French, and not amable, by analogywith aime). The mythical signification, on theother hand, is never arbitrary; it is always in partmotivated, and unavoidably contains someanalogy. For Latin exemplarity to meet thenaming of the lion, there must be an analogy,which is the agreement of the predicate; forFrench imperiality to get hold of the salutingNegro, there must be identity between theNegro's salute and that of the French soldier.Motivation is necessary to the very duplicity ofmyth: myth plays on the analogy betweenmeaning and form, there is no myth withoutmotivated form.7 In order to grasp the power ofmotivation in myth, it is enough to reflect for amoment on an extreme case. I have here beforeme a collection of objects so lacking in order thatI can find no meaning in it; it would seem thathere, deprived of any previous meaning, the formcould not root its analogy in anything, and thatmyth is impossible. But what the form canalways give one to read is disorder itself: it cangive a signification to the absurd, make theabsurd itself a myth. This is what happens whencommonsense mythifies surrealism, for instance.Even the absence of motivation does not

embarrass myth; for this absence will itself besufficiently objectified to become legible: andfinally, the absence of motivation will become asecond-order motivation, and myth will be re-established.

Motivation is unavoidable. It is none the lessvery fragmentary. To start with, it is not 'natural':it is history which supplies its analogies to theform. Then, the analogy between the meaningand the concept is never anything but partial: theform drops many analogous features and keepsonly a few: it keeps the sloping roof, the visiblebeams in the Basque chalet, it abandons thestairs, the barn, the weathered look, etc. Onemust even go further: a complete image wouldexclude myth, or at least would compel it to seizeonly its very completeness. This is just whathappens in the case of bad painting, which iswholly based on the myth of what is 'filled out'and 'finished' (it is the opposite and symmetricalcase of the myth of the absurd: here, the formmythifies an 'absence', there, a surplus). But ingeneral myth prefers to work with poor,incomplete images, where the meaning is alreadyrelieved of its fat, and ready for a signification,such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc.Finally, the motivation is chosen among otherpossible ones: I can very well give to Frenchimperiality many other signifiers beside aNegro's salute: a French general pins adecoration on a one-armed Senegalese, a nunhands a cup of tea to a bed-ridden Arab, a whiteschool- master teaches attentive pickaninnies: thepress undertakes every day to demonstrate thatthe store of mythical signifiers is inexhaustible.

The nature of the mythical signification can infact be well conveyed by one particular simile: itis neither more nor less arbitrary than anideograph. Myth is a pure ideographic system,where the forms are still motivated by theconcept which they represent while not yet, by along way, covering the sum of its possibilities forrepresentation. And just as, historically,ideographs have gradually left the concept andhave become associated with the sound, thusgrowing less and less motivated, the worn outstate of a myth can be recognized by thearbitrariness of its signification: the whole ofMoliere is seen in a doctor's ruff.


Reading and deciphering mythHow is a myth received? We must here oncemore come back to the duplicity of its signifier,which is at once meaning and form. I canproduce three different types of reading byfocusing on the one, or the other, or both at thesame time.8

I. If I focus on an empty signifier, I let theconcept fill the form of the myth withoutambiguity, and I find myself before a simplesystem, where the signification becomes literalagain: the Negro who salutes is an example ofFrench imperiality, he is a symbol for it. Thistype of focusing is, for instance, that of theproducer of myths, of the journalist who startswith a concept and seeks a form for it.9

2. If I focus on a full signifier, in which I clearlydistinguish the meaning and the form, andconsequently the distortion which the oneimposes on the other, I undo the signification ofthe myth, and I receive the latter as an imposture:the saluting Negro becomes the alibi of Frenchimperiality. This type of focusing is that of themythologist: he deciphers the myth, heunderstands a distortion.

3. Finally, if I focus on the mythical signifier ason an inextricable whole made of meaning andform, I receive an ambiguous signification: Irespond to the constituting mechanism of myth,to its own dynamics, I become a reader of myths.The saluting Negro is no longer an example or asymbol, still less an alibi: he is the very presenceof French imperiality.

The first two types of focusing are static,analytical; they destroy the myth, either bymaking its intention obvious, or by unmasking it:the former is cynical, the latter demystifying.The third type of focusing is dynamic, itconsumes the myth according to the very endsbuilt into its structure: the reader lives the mythas a story at once true and unreal.

If one wishes to connect a mythical schema to ageneral history, to explain how it corresponds tothe interests of a definite society, in short, to passfrom semiology to ideology, it is obviously at thelevel of the third type of focusing that one mustplace oneself: it is the reader of myths himselfwho must reveal their essential function. How

does he receive this particular myth today? If hereceives it in an innocent fashion, what is thepoint of proposing it to him? And if he reads itusing his powers of reflection, like themythologist, does it matter which alibi ispresented? If the reader does not see Frenchimperiality in the saluting Negro, it was notworth weighing the latter with it; and if he seesit, the myth is nothing more than a politicalproposition, honestly expressed. In one word,either the intention of the myth is too obscure tobe efficacious, or it is too clear to be believed. Ineither case, where is the ambiguity?

This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothingand flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither alie nor a confession: it is an inflection. Placedbefore the dilemma which I mentioned a momentago, myth finds a third way out. Threatened withdisappearance if it yields to either of the first twotypes of focusing, it gets out of this tight spotthanks to a compromise--it is this compromise.Entrusted with 'glossing over' an intentionalconcept, myth encounters nothing but betrayal inlanguage, for language can only obliterate theconcept if it hides it, or unmask it if it formulatesit. The elaboration of a second-ordersemiological system will enable myth to escapethis dilemma: driven to having either to unveil orto liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it.

We reach here the very principle of myth: ittransforms history into nature. We nowunderstand why, in the eyes of the mythconsumer, the intention, the adhomination of theconcept can remain manifest without howeverappearing to have an interest in the matter: whatcauses mythical speech to be uttered is perfectlyexplicit, but it is immediately frozen intosomething natural; it is not read as a motive, butas a reason. If I read the Negro-saluting assymbol pure and simple of imperiality, I mustrenounce the reality of the picture, it discreditsitself in my eyes when it becomes an instrument.Conversely, if I decipher the Negro's salute as analibi of coloniality, I shatter the myth even moresurely by the obviousness of its motivation. Butfor the myth-reader, the outcome is quitedifferent: everything happens as if the picturenaturally conjured up the concept, as if thesignifier gave a foundation to the signified: themyth exists from the precise moment whenFrench imperiality achieves the natural state:myth is speech justified in excess.


Here is a new example which will helpunderstand clearly how the myth-reader is led torationalize the signified by means of thesignifier. We are in the month of July, I read abig headline in France-Soir: THE FALL INPRICES: FIRST INDICATIONS.VEGETABLES: PRICE DROP BEGINS. Let usquickly sketch the semiological schema: theexample being a sentence, the first system ispurely linguistic. The signifier of the secondsystem is composed here of a certain number ofaccidents, some lexical (the words: first, begins,the [fall]), some typographical (enormousheadlines where the reader usually sees news ofworld importance). The signified or concept iswhat must be called by a barbarous butunavoidable neologism: governmentality, theGovernment presented by the national press asthe Essence of efficacy. The signification of themyth follows clearly from this: fruit andvegetable prices are falling because thegovernment has so decided. Now it so happens inthis case (and this is on the whole fairly rare) thatthe newspaper itself has, two lines below,allowed one to see through the myth which it hadjust elaborated--whether this is due to self-assurance or honesty. It adds (in small type, it istrue): 'The fall in prices is helped by the return ofseasonal abundance.' This example is instructivefor two reasons. Firstly it conspicuously showsthat myth essentially aims at causing animmediate impression--it does not matter if oneis later allowed to see through the myth, itsaction is assumed to be stronger than the rationa lexplanations which may later belie it. This meansthat the reading of a myth is exhausted at onestroke. I cast a quick glance at my neighbor'sFrance-Soir: I cull only a meaning there, but Iread a true signification; I receive the presence ofgovernmental action in the fall in fruit andvegetable prices. That is all, and that is enough.A more attentive reading of the myth will in noway increase its power or its ineffectiveness: amyth is at the same time imperfectible andunquestionable; time or knowledge will not makeit better or worse.

Secondly, the naturalization of the concept,which I have just identified as the essentialfunction of myth, is here exemplary. In a first(exclusively linguistic) system, causality wouldbe, literally, natural: fruit and vegetable pricesfall because they are in season. In the second

(mythical) system, causality is artificial, false;but it creeps, so to speak, through the back doorof Nature. This is why myth is experienced asinnocent speech: not because its intentions arehidden--if they were hidden, they could not beefficacious--but because they are naturalized.

In fact, what allows the reader to consume mythinnocently is that he does not see it as asemiological system but as an inductive one.Where there is only an equivalence, he sees akind of causal process: the signifier and thesignified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship.This confusion can be expressed otherwise: anysemiological system is a system of values; nowthe myth consumer takes the signification for asystem of facts: myth is read as a factual system,whereas it is but a semiological system.

Myth as stolen languageWhat is characteristic of myth? To transform ameaning into form. In other words, myth isalways a language-robbery. I rob the Negro whois saluting, the white and brown chalet, theseasonal fall in fruit prices, not to make theminto examples or symbols, but to naturalizethrough them the Empire, my taste for Basquethings, the Government. Are all primarylanguages a prey for myth? Is there no meaningwhich can resist this capture with which formthreatens it? In fact, nothing can be safe frommyth, myth can develop its second-order schemafrom any meaning and, as we saw, start from thevery lack of meaning. But all languages do notresist equally well.

Articulated language, which is most often robbedby myth, offers little resistance. It contains initself some mythical dispositions, the outline of asign-structure meant to manifest the intentionwhich led to its being used: it is what could becalled the expressiveness of language. Theimperative or the subjunctive mode, for instance,arethe form of a particular signified, differentfrom the meaning: the signified is here my willor my request. This is why some linguists havedefined the indicative, forinstance, as a zero stateor degree, compared to the subjunctive or theimperative. Now in a fully constituted myth, themeaning is never at zero degree, and this is whythe concept can distort it, naturalize it. We mustremember once again that the privation of


meaning is in no way a zero degree: this is whymyth can perfectly well gethold of it, give it forinstance the signification of the absurd, ofsurrealism, etc. At bottom, it would only be thezero degree which could resist myth.

Language lends itself to myth in another way: itis very rare that it imposes at the outset a fullmeaning which it is impossible to distort. Thiscomes from the abstractness of its concept: theconcept of tree is vague, it lends itself to multiplecontingencies. True, a language always has at itsdisposal a whole appropriating organization (thistree, the tree which, etc.). But there alwaysremains, around the final meaning, a halo ofvirtualities where other possible meanings arefloating: the meaning can almost always beinterpreted. One could say that a language offersto myth an open-work meaning. Myth can easilyinsinuate itself into it, and swell there: it is arobbery by colonization (for instance: the fall inprices has started. But what fall? That due to theseason or that due to the government? thesignification becomes here a parasite of thearticle, in spite of the latter being definite).

When the meaning is too full for myth to be ableto invade it, myth goes around it, and carries itaway bodily. This is what happens tomathematical language. In itself, it cannot bedistorted, it has taken all possible precautionsagainst interpretation: no parasitical significationcan worm itself into it. And this is why,precisely, myth takes it away en bloc; it takes acertain mathematical formula (E = mc2), andmakes of this unalterable meaning the puresignifier of mathematicity. We can see that whatis here robbed by myth is something whichresists, something pure. Myth can reacheverything, corrupt everything, and even the veryact of refusing oneself to it. So that the more thelanguage-object resists at first, the greater itsfinal prostitution; whoever here resistscompletely yields completely: Einstein on oneside, Paris-Match on the other. One can give atemporal image of this conflict: mathematicallanguage is a finished language, which derives itsvery perfection from this acceptance of death.Myth, on the contrary, is a language which doesnot want to die: it wrests from the meaningswhich give it its sustenance an insidious,degraded survival, it provokes in them anartificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably,it turns them into speaking corpses.

Here is another language which resists myth asmuch as it can: our poetic language.Contemporary poetry10 is a regressivesemiological system. Whereas myth aims at anultra-signification, at the amplification of a firstsystem, poetry, on the contrary, attempts toregain an infra-signification, a pre-semiologicalstate of language; in short, it tries to transformthe sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately,would be to reach not the meaning of words, butthe meaning of things themselves.11 This is whyit clouds the language, increases as much as itcan the abstractness of the concept and thearbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limitthe link between signifier and signified. Theopen-work structure of the concept is heremaximally exploited: unlike what happens inprose, it is all the potential of the signified thatthe poetic sign tries to actualize, in the hope of atlast reaching something like the transcendentquality of the thing, its natural (not human)meaning. Hence the essentialist ambitions ofpoetry, the conviction that it alone catches thething in itself; inasmuch, precisely, as it wants tobe an anti-language. All told, of all those whouse speech, poets are the least formalist, for theyare the only ones who believe that the meaningof the words is only a form, with which they,being realists, cannot be content. This is why ourmodern poetry always asserts itself as a murderof language, a kind of spatial, tangible analogueof silence. Poetry occupies a position which isthe reverse of that of myth: myth is asemiological system which has the pretension oftranscending itself into a factual system; poetryis a semiological system which has thepretension of contracting into an essentialsystem.

But here again, as in the case of mathematicallanguage, the very resistance offered by poetrymakes it an ideal prey for myth: the apparentlack of order of signs, which is the poetic facet ofan essential order, is captured by myth, andtransformed into an empty signifier, which willserve to signify poetry. This explains theimprobable character of modern poetry: byfiercely refusing myth, poetry surrenders to itbound hand and foot. Conversely, the rules inclassical poetry constituted an accepted myth, theconspicuous arbitrariness of which amounted toperfection of a kind, since the equilibrium of a


semiological system comes from the arbitrarinessof its signs.

A voluntary acceptance of myth can in factdefine the whole of our traditional Literature.According to our norms, this Literature is anundoubted mythical system: there is a meaning,that of the discourse; there is a signifier, which isthis same discourse as form or writing; there is asignified, which is the concept of literature; thereis a signification, which is the literary discourse.I began to discuss this problem in WritingDegree Zero, which was, all told, nothing but amythology of literary language. There I definedwriting as the signifier of the literary myth, thatis, as a form which is already filled with meaningand which receives from the concept ofLiterature a new signification.12 I suggested thathistory, in modifying the writer's consciousness,had provoked, a hundred years or so ago, a moralcrisis of literary language: writing was revealedas signifier, Literature as signification; rejectingthe false nature of traditional literary language,the writer violently shifted his position in thedirection of an anti-nature of language. Thesubversion of writing was the radical act bywhich a number of writers have attempted toreject Literature as a mythical system. Everyrevolt of this kind has been a murder ofLiterature as signification: all have postulated thereduction of literary discourse to a simplesemiological system, oreven, in the case ofpoetry, to a pre-semiological system. This is animmense task, which required radical types ofbehavior: it is well known that some went as faras the pure and simple scuttling of the discourse,silence--whether real or transposed--appearing asthe only possible weapon against the majorpower of myth: its recurrence.

It thus appears that it is extremely difficult tovanquish myth from the inside: for the veryeffort one makes in order to escape its stranglehold becomes in its turn the prey of myth: mythcan always, as a last resort, signify the resistancewhich is brought to bear against it. Truth to tell,the best weapon against myth is perhaps tomythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificialmyth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact bea mythology. Since myth robs language ofsomething, why not rob myth? All that is neededis to use it as the departure point for a thirdsemiological chain, to take its signification as thefirst term of a second myth. Literature offers

some great examples of such artificialmythologies. I shall only evoke here Flaubert'sBouvard and Pecuchet. It is what could be calledan experimental myth, a second-order myth.Bouvard and his friend Pecachet represent acertain kind of bourgeoisie (which is incidentallyin conflict with other bourgeois strata): theirdiscourse already constitutes a mythical type ofspeech; its language does have a meaning, butthis meaning is the empty form of a conceptualsignified, which here is a kind of technologicalunsatedness. The meeting of meaning andconcept forms, in this first mythical system, asignification which is the rhetoric of Bouvardand Pecuchet. It is at this point (I am breakingthe process into its components for the sake ofanalysis) that Flaubert intervenes: to this firstmythical system, which already is a secondsemiological system, he superimposes a thirdchain, in which the first link is the signification,or final term, of the first myth. The rhetoric ofBouvard and Pecuchet becomes the form of thenew system; the concept here is due to Flauberthimself, to Flaubert's gaze on the myth whichBouvard and Pecuchet had built for themselves:it consists of their natively ineffectualinclinations, their inability to feel satisfied, thepanic succession of their apprenticeships, inshort what I would very much like to call (but Isee storm clouds on the horizon): Bouvard-and-pecachet-ity. As for the final signification, it isthe book, it is Bouvard and Pecuchet for us. Thepower of the second myth is that it gives the firstits basis as a naivety which is looked at. Flauberthas undertaken a real archaeological restorationof a given mythical speech: he is the Viollet-le-Duc of a certain bourgeois ideology. But lessnaive than Viollet-le-Duc, he has strewn hisreconstitution with supplementary ornamentswhich demystify it. These ornaments (which arethe form of the second myth) are subjunctive inkind: there is a semiological equivalencebetween the subjunctive restitution of thediscourse of Bouvard and Pecuchet and theirineffectualness.13

Flaubert's great merit (and that of all artificialmythologies: there are remarkable ones inSartre's work), is that he gave to the problem ofrealism a frankly semiological solution. True, itis a somewhat incomplete merit, for Flaubert'sideology, since the bourgeois was for him onlyan aesthetic eyesore, was not at all realistic. Butat least he avoided the major sin in literary


matters, which is to confuse ideological withsemiological reality. As ideology, literaryrealism does not depend at all on the languagespoken by the writer. Language is a form, itcannot possibly be either realistic or unrealistic.All it can do is either to be mythical or not, orperhaps, as in Bouvard and Pecuchet, counter-mythical. Now, unfortunately, there is noantipathy between realism and myth. It is wellknown how often our 'realistic' literature ismythical (if only as a crude myth of realism) andhow our 'literature of the unreal' has at least themerit of being only slightly so. The wise thingwould of course be to define the writer's realismas an essentially ideological problem. Thiscertainly does not mean that there is noresponsibility of form towards reality. But thisresponsibility can be measured only insemiological terms. A form can be judged (sinceforms are on trial) only as signification, not asexpression. The writer's language is not expectedto represent reality, but to signify it. This shouldimpose on critics the duty of using tworigorously distinct methods: one must deal withthe writer's realism either as an ideologicalsubstance (Marxist themes in Brecht's work, forinstance) or as a semiological value (the props,the actors, the music, the colors in Brechtiandramaturgy). The ideal of course would be tocombine these two types of criticism; the mistakewhich is constantly made is to confuse them:ideology has its methods, and so has semiology.

The bourgeoisie as a joint-stockcompanyMyth lends itself to history in two ways: by itsform, which is only relatively motivated; by itsconcept, the nature of which is historical. Onecan therefore imagine a diachronic study ofmyths, whether one submits them to aretrospection (which means founding anhistorical mythology) or whether one followssome of yesterday's myths down to their presentforms (which means founding prospectivehistory). If I keep here to a synchronic sketch ofcontemporary myths, it is for an objectivereason: our society is the privileged field ofmythical significations. We must now say why.

Whatever the accidents, the compromises, theconcessions and the political adventures,

whatever the technical, economic, or even socialchanges which history brings us, our society isstill a bourgeois society. I am not forgetting thatsince I789, in France, several types ofbourgeoisie have succeeded one another inpower; but the same status--a certain regime ofownership, a certain order, a certain ideology--remains at a deeper level. Now a remarkablephenomenon occurs in the matter of naming thisregime: as an economic fact, the bourgeoisie isnamed without any difficulty: capitalism isopenly professed.14 As a political fact, thebourgeoisie has some difficulty inacknowledging itself: there are no 'bourgeois'parties in the Chamber. As an ideological fact, itcompletely disappears: the bourgeoisie hasobliterated its name in passing from reality torepresentation, from economic man to mentalman. It comes to an agreement with the facts, butdoes not compromise about values, it makes itsstatus undergo a real ex-nominating operation:the bourgeoisie is defined as the social classwhich does not want to be named. 'Bourgeois','petitbourgeois', 'capitalism',15 'proletariat'16 arethe locus of an unceasing hemorrhage: meaningflows out of them until their very name becomesunnecessary.

This ex-nominating phenomenon is important;let us examine it a little more closely. Politically,the hemorrhage of the name 'bourgeois' iseffected through the idea of nation. This wasonce a progressive idea, which has served to getrid of the aristocracy; today, the bourgeoisiemerges into the nation, even if it has, in order todo so, to exclude from it the elements which itdecides are allogenous (the Communists). Thisplanned syncretism allows the bourgeoisie toattract the numerical support of its temporaryallies, all the intermediate, therefore 'shapeless'classes. A long-continued use of the word nationhas failed to depoliticize it in depth; the politicalsubstratum is there, very near the surface, andsome circumstances make it suddenly manifest.There are in the Chamber some 'national' parties,and nominal syncretism here makes conspicuouswhat it had the ambition of hiding: an essentialdisparity. Thus the political vocabulary of thebourgeoisie already postulates that the universalexists: for it, politics is already a representation,a fragment of ideology.

Politically, in spite of the universalistic effort ofits vocabulary, the bourgeoisie eventually strikes


against a resisting core which is, by definition,the revolutionary party. But this party canconstitute only a political richness: in abourgeois culture, there is neither proletarianculture nor proletarian morality, there is noproletarian art; ideologically, all that is notbourgeois is obliged to borrow from thebourgeoisie. Bourgeois ideology can thereforespread over everything and in so doing lose itsname without risk: no one here will throw thisname of bourgeois back at it. It can withoutresistance subsume bourgeois theater, art andhumanity under their eternal analogues; in aword, it can exnominate itself without restraintwhen there is only one single human nature left:the defection from the name 'bourgeois' is herecomplete.

True, there are revolts against bourgeoisideology. This is what one generally calls theavant-garde. But these revolts are sociallylimited, they remain open to salvage. First,because they come from a small section of thebourgeoisie itself, from a minority group ofartists and intellectuals, without public other thanthe class which they contest, and who remaindependent on its money in order to expressthemselves. Then, these revolts always get theirinspiration from a very strongly made distinctionbetween the ethically and the politicallybourgeois: what the avant-garde contests is thebourgeois in art or morals--the shopkeeper, thePhilistine, as in the heyday of Romanticism; butas for political contestation, there is none.17 Whatthe avant-garde does not tolerate about thebourgeoisie is its language, not its status. Thisdoes not necessarily mean that it approves of thisstatus; simply, it leaves it aside. Whatever theviolence of the provocation, the nature it finallyendorses is that of 'derelict' man, not alienatedman; and derelict man is still Eternal Man.18

This anonymity of the bourgeoisie becomes evenmore marked when one passes from bourgeoisculture proper to its derived, vulgarized andapplied forms, to what one could call publicphilosophy, that which sustains everyday life,civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short theunwritten norms of interrelationships in abourgeois society. It is an illusion to reduce thedominant culture to its inventive core: there alsois a bourgeois culture which consists ofconsumption alone. The whole of France issteeped in this anonymous ideology: our press,

our films, our theater, our pulp literature, ourrituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, ourconversations, our remarks about the weather, amurder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking wedream of, the garments we wear, everything, ineveryday life, is dependent on the representationwhich the bourgeoisie has and makes us have ofthe relations between man and the world. These'normalized' forms attract little attention, by thevery fact of their extension, in which their originis easily lost. They enjoy an intermediateposition: being neither directly political nordirectly ideological, they live peacefully betweenthe action of the militants and the quarrels of theintellectuals; more or less abandoned by theformer and the latter, they gravitate towards theenormous mass of the undifferentiated, of theinsignificant, in short, of nature. Yet it is throughits ethic that the bourgeoisie pervades France:practised on a national scale, bourgeois normsare experienced as the evident laws of a naturalorder--the further the bourgeois class propagatesits representations, the more naturalized theybecome. The fact of the bourgeoisie becomesabsorbed into an amorphous universe, whosesole inhabitant is Eternal Man, who is neitherproletarian nor bourgeois.

It is therefore by penetrating the intermediateclasses that the bourgeois ideology can mostsurely lose its name. Petit-bourgeois norms arethe residue of bourgeois culture, they arebourgeois truths which have become degraded,impoverished, commercialized, slightly archaic,or shall we say, out of date? The politicalalliance of the bourgeoisie and the petite-bourgeoisie has for more than a centurydetermined the history of France; it has rarelybeen broken, and each time only temporarily(1848, 1871, 1936). This alliance got closer astime passed, it gradually became a symbiosis;transient awakenings might happen, but thecommon ideology was never questioned again.The same 'natural' varnish covers up all 'national'representations: the big wedding of thebourgeoisie, which originates in a class ritual(the display and consumption of wealth), canbear no relation to the economic status of thelower middle-class: but through the press, thenews, and literature, it slowly becomes the verynorm as dreamed, though not actually lived, ofthe petit-bourgeois couple. The bourgeoisie isconstantly absorbing into its ideology a wholesection of humanity which does not have its


basic status and cannot live up to it except inimagination, that is, at the cost of animmobilization and an impoverishment ofconsciousness.19 By spreading its representationsover a whole catalogue of collective images forpetit-bourgeois use, the bourgeoisiecountenances the illusory lack of differentiationof the social classes: it is as from the momentwhen a typist earning twenty pounds a monthrecognizes herself in the big wedding of thebourgeoisie that bourgeois ex-nominationachieves its full effect.

The flight from the name 'bourgeois' is nottherefore an illusory, accidental, secondary,natural or insignificant phenomenon: it is thebourgeois ideology itself, the process throughwhich the bourgeoisie transforms the reality ofthe world into an image of the world, Historyinto Nature. And this image has a remarkablefeature: it is upside down.20 The status of thebourgeoisie is particular, historical: man asrepresented by it is universal, eternal. Thebourgeois class has precisely built its power ontechnical, scientific progress, on an unlimitedtransformation of nature: bourgeois ideologyyields in return an unchangeable nature. The firstbourgeois philosophers pervaded the world withsignifications, subjected all things to an idea ofthe rational, and decreed that they were meantfor man: bourgeois ideology is of the scientisticor the intuitive kind, it records facts or perceivesvalues, but refuses explanations; the order of theworld can be seen as sufficient or ineffable, it isnever seen as significant. Finally, the basic ideaof a perfectible mobile world, produces theinverted image of an unchanging humanity,characterized by an indefinite repetition of itsidentity. In a word, in the contemporarybourgeois society, the passage from the real tothe ideological is defined as that from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis.

Myth is depoliticized speechAnd this is where we come back to myth.Semiology has taught us that myth has the taskof giving an historical intention a naturaljustification, and making contingency appeareternal. Now this process is exactly that ofbourgeois ideology. If our society is objectivelythe privileged field of mythical significations, itis because formally myth is the most appropriate

instrument for the ideological inversion whichdefines this society: at all the levels of humancommunication, myth operates the inversion ofanti-physis into pseudo-physis.

What the world supplies to myth is an historicalreality, defined, even if this goes back quite awhile, by the way in which men have producedor used it; and what myth gives in return is anatural image of this reality. And just asbourgeois ideology is defined by theabandonment of the name 'bourgeois', myth isconstituted by the loss of the historical quality ofthings: in it, things lose the memory that theyonce were made. The world enters language as adialectical relation between activities, betweenhuman actions; it comes out of myth as aharmonious display of essences. A conjuringtrick has taken place; it has turned reality insideout, it has emptied it of history and has filled itwith nature, it has removed from things theirhuman meaning so as to make them signify ahuman insignificance. The function of myth is toempty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowingout, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, inshort a perceptible absence.

It is now possible to complete the semiologicaldefinition of myth in a bourgeois society: myth isdepoliticized speech. One must naturallyunderstand political in its deeper meaning, asdescribing the whole of human relations in theirreal, social structure, in their power of makingthe world; one must above all give an activevalue to the prefix de-: here it represents anoperational movement, it permanently embodiesa defaulting. In the case of the soldier-Negro, forinstance, what is got rid of is certainly not Frenchimperiality (on the contrary, since what must beactualized is its presence); it is the contingent,historical, in one word: fabricated, quality ofcolonialism. Myth does not deny things, on thecontrary, its function is to talk about them;simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent,it gives them a natural and eternal justification, itgives them a clarity which is not that of anexplanation but that of a statement of fact. If Istate the fact of French imperiality withoutexplaining it, I am very near to finding that it isnatural and goes without saying: I am reassured.In passing from history to nature, myth actseconomically: it abolishes the complexity ofhuman acts, it gives them the simplicity ofessences, it does away with all dialectics, with


any going back beyond what is immediatelyvisible, it organizes a world which is withoutcontradictions because it is without depth, aworld wide open and wallowing in the evident, itestablishes a blissful clarity: things appear tomean something by themselves.21

However, is myth always depoliticized speech ?In other words, is reality always political? Is itenough to speak about a thing naturally for it tobecome mythical ? One could answer with Marxthat the most natural object contains a politicaltrace, however faint and diluted, the more or lessmemorable presence of the human act which hasproduced, fitted up, used, subjected or rejectedit.22 The language-object, which 'speaks things',can easily exhibit this trace; the metalanguage,which speaks of things, much less easily. Nowmyth always comes under the heading ofmetalanguage: the depoliticization which itcarries out often supervenes against abackground which is already naturalized,depoliticized by a general metalanguage which istrained to celebrate things, and no longer to 'actthem'. It goes without saying that the forceneeded by myth to distort its object is much lessin the case of a tree than in the case of aSudanese: in the latter case, the political load isvery near the surface, a large quantity of artificialnature is needed in order to disperse it; in theformer case, it is remote, purified by a wholecentury-old layer of metalanguage. There are,therefore, strong myths and weak myths; in theformer, the political quantum is immediate, thedepoliticization is abrupt; in the latter, thepolitical quality of the object has faded like acolor, but the slightest thing can bring back itsstrength brutally: what is more natural than thesea? and what more 'political' than the seacelebrated by the makers of the film The LostContinent?23

In fact, metalanguage constitutes a kind ofpreserve for myth. Men do not have with myth arelationship based on truth but on use: theydepoliticize according to their needs. Somemythical objects are left dormant for a time; theyare then no more than vague mythical schematawhose political load seems almost neutral. Butthis indicates only that their situation has broughtthis about, not that their structure is different.This is the case with our Latin-grammarexample. We must note that here mythicalspeech works on a material which has long been

transformed: the sentence by Aesop belongs toliterature, it is at the very start mythified(therefore made innocent) by its being fiction.But it is enough to replace the initial term of thechain for an instant into its nature as language-object, to gauge the emptying of realityoperatedby myth: can one imagine the feelings of a realsociety of animals on finding itself transformedinto a grammar example, into a predicativenature! In order to gauge the political load of anobject and the mythical hollow which espousesit, one must never look at things from the pointof view of the signification, but from that of thesignifier, of the thing which has been robbed;and within the signifier, from the point of viewof the language-object, that is, of the meaning.There is no doubt that if we consulted a real lion,he would maintain that the grammar example is astrongly depoliticized state, he would qualify asfully political the jurisprudence which leads himto claim a prey because he is the strongest, unlesswe deal with a bourgeois lion who would not failto mythify his strength by giving it the form of aduty.

One can clearly see that in this case the politicalinsignificance of the myth comes from itssituation. Myth, as we know, is a value: it isenough to modify its circumstances, the general(and precarious) system in which it occurs, inorder to regulate its scope with great accuracy.The field of the myth is in this case reduced tothe second form of a French lycee. But I supposethat a child enthralled by the story of the lion, theheifer and the cow, and recovering through thelife of the imagination the actual reality of theseanimals, would appreciate with much lessunconcern than we do the disappearance of thislion changed into a predicate. In fact, we holdthis myth to be politically insignificant onlybecause it is not meant for us.

Myth on the LeftIf myth is depoliticized speech, there is at leastone type of speech which is the opposite ofmyth: that which remains political. Here we mustgo back to the distinction between language-object and metalanguage. If I am a woodcutterand I am led to name the tree which I am felling,whatever the form of my sentence, I 'speak thetree', I do not speak about it. This means that mylanguage is operational, transitively linked to its


object; between the tree and myself, there isnothing but my labor, that is to say, an action.This is a political language: it represents naturefor me only inasmuch as I am going to transformit, it is a language thanks to which I 'act theobject'; the tree is not an image for me, it issimply the meaning of my action. But if I am nota woodcutter, I can no longer 'speak the tree', Ican only speak about it, on it. My language is nolonger the instrument of an 'acted- upon tree', itis the 'tree-celebrated' which becomes theinstrument of my language. I no longer haveanything more than an intransitive relationshipwith the tree; this tree is no longer the meaningof reality as a human action, it is an image-at-one's-disposal. Compared to the real language ofthe woodcutter, the language I create is a second-order language, a metalanguage in which I shallhenceforth not 'act the things' but 'act theirnames', and which is to the primary languagewhat the gesture is to the act. This second-orderlanguage is not entirely mythical, but it is thevery locus where myth settles; for myth can workonly on objects which have already received themediation of a first language.

There is therefore one language which is notmythical, it is the language of man as a producer:wherever man speaks in order to transformreality and no longer to preserve it as an image,wherever he links his language to the making ofthings, metalanguage is referred to a language-object, and myth is impossible. This is whyrevolutionary language proper cannot bemythical. Revolution is defined as a cathartic actmeant to reveal the political load of the world: itmakes the world; and its language, all of it, isfunctionally absorbed in this making. It isbecause it generates speech which is fully, that isto say initially and finally, political, and not, likemyth, speech which is initially political andfinally natural, that Revolution excludes myth.Just as bourgeois ex-nomination characterizes atonce bourgeois ideology and myth itself,revolutionary denomination identifies revolutionand the absence of myth. The bourgeoisie hidesthe fact that it is the bourgeoisie and therebyproduces myth; revolution announces itselfopenly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

I have been asked whether there are myths 'onthe Left'. Of course, inasmuch, precisely, as theLeft is not revolution. Leftwing myth supervenesprecisely at the moment when revolution changes

itself into 'the Left', that is, when it accepts towear a mask, to hide its name, to generate aninnocent metalanguage and to distort itself into'Nature'. This revolutionary ex-nomination mayor may not be tactical, this is no place to discussit. At any rate, it is sooner or later experienced asa process contrary to revolution, and it is alwaysmore or less in relation to myth thatrevolutionary history defines its 'deviations'.There came a day, for instance, when it wassocialism itself which defined the Stalin myth.Stalin, as a spoken object, has exhibited foryears, in their pure state, the constituentcharacters of mythical speech: a meaning, whichwas the real Stalin, that of history; a signifier,which was the ritual invocation to Stalin, and theinevitable character of the 'natural' epithets withwhich his name was surrounded; a signified,which was the intention to respect orthodoxy,discipline and unity, appropriated by theCommunist parties to a definite situation; and asignification, which was a sanctified Stalin,whose historical determinants found themselvesgrounded in nature, sublimated under the nameof Genius, that is, something irrational andinexpressible: here, depoliticization is evident, itfully reveals the presence of a myth.24

Yes, myth exists on the Left, but it does not at allhave there the same qualities as bourgeois myth.Left-wing myth is inessential. To start with, theobjects which it takes hold of are rare--only afew political notions--unless it has itself recourseto the whole repertoire of the bourgeois myths.Left-wing myth never reaches the immense fieldof human relationships, the very vast surface of'insignificant' ideology. Everyday life isinaccessible to it: in a bourgeois society, thereare no 'Left-wing' myths concerning marriage,cooking, the home, the theater, the law, morality,etc. Then, it is an incidental myth, its use is notpart of a strategy, as is the case with bourgeoismyth, but only of a tactics, or, at the worst, of adeviation; if it occurs, it is as a myth suited to aconvenience, not to a necessity.

Finally, and above all, this myth is, in essence,poverty-stricken. It does not know how toproliferate; being produced on order and for atemporally limited prospect, it is invented withdifficulty. It lacks a major faculty, that offabulizing. Whatever it does, there remains aboutit something stiff and literal, a suggestion ofsomething done to order. As it is expressively


put, it remains barren. In fact, what can be moremeager than the Stalin myth? No inventivenesshere, and only a clumsy appropriation: thesignifier of the myth (this form whose infinitewealth in bourgeois myth we have just seen) isnot varied in the least: it is reduced to a litany.

This imperfection, if that is the word for it,comes from the nature of the 'Left': whatever theimprecision of the term, the Left always definesitself in relation to the oppressed, whetherproletarian or colonized.25 Now the speech of theoppressed can only be poor, monotonous,immediate: his destitution is the very yardstick ofhis language: he has only one, always the same,that of his actions; metalanguage is a luxury, hecannot yet have access to it. The speech of theoppressed is real, like that of the woodcutter; it isa transitive type of speech: it is quasi-unable tolie; lying is a richness, a lie presupposesproperty, truths and forms to spare. This essentialbarrenness produces rare, threadbare myths:either transient, or clumsily indiscreet; by theirvery being, they label themselves as myths, andpoint to their masks. And this mask is hardly thatof a pseudo-physics: for that type of physics isalso a richness of a sort, the oppressed can onlyborrow it: he is unable to throw out the realmeaning of things, to give them the luxury of anempty form, open to the innocence of a falseNature. One can say that in a sense, Left-wingmyth is always an artificial myth, a reconstitutedmyth: hence its clumsiness.

Myth on the RightStatistically, myth is on the right. There, it isessential; well fed, sleek, expansive, garrulous, itinvents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold ofeverything, all aspects of the law, of morality, ofaesthetics, of diplomacy, of householdequipment, of Literature, of entertainment. Itsexpansion has the very dimensions of bourgeoisex-nomination. The bourgeoisie wants to keepreality without keeping the appearances: it istherefore the very negativity of bourgeoisappearance, infinite like every negativity, whichsolicits myth infinitely. The oppressed isnothing, he has only one language, that of hisemancipation; the oppressor is everything, hislanguage is rich, multiform, supple, with all thepossible degrees of dignity at its disposal: he hasan exclusive right to meta-language. The

oppressed makes the world, he has only anactive, transitive (political) language; theoppressor conserves it, his language is plenary,intransitive, gestural, theatrical: it is Myth. Thelanguage of the former aims at transforming, ofthe latter at eternalizing.

Does this completeness of the myths of Order(this is the name the bourgeoisie gives to itself)include inner differences? Are there, for instance,bourgeois myths and petit-bourgeois myths?There cannot be any fundamental differences, forwhatever the public which consumes it, mythalways postulated the immobility of Nature. Butthere can be degrees of fulfillment or expansion:some myths ripen better in some social strata: formyth also, there are micro-climates.

The myth of Childhood-as-Poet, for instance, isan advanced bourgeois myth: it has hardly comeout of inventive culture (Cocteau, for example)and is just reaching consumer culture(L'Express). Part of the bourgeoisie can still findit too obviously invented, not mythical enough tofeel entitled to countenance it (a whole part ofbourgeois criticism works only with dulymythical materials). It is a myth which is not yetwell run in, it does not yet contain enoughnature: in order to make the Child Poet part of acosmogony, one must renounce the prodigy(Mozart, Rimbaud, etc.), and accept new norms,those of psychopedagogy, Freudianism, etc.: as amyth, it is still unripe.

Thus every myth can have its history and itsgeography; each is in fact the sign of the other: amyth ripens because it spreads. I have not beenable to carry out any real study of the socialgeography of myths. But it is perfectly possibleto draw what linguists would call the isoglossesof a myth, the lines which limit the social regionwhere it is spoken. As this region is shifting, itwould be better to speak of the waves ofimplantation of the myth. The Minou Drouetmyth has thus had at least three waves ofamplification: (I) L'Express; (2) Paris-Match,Elle; (3) France-Soir. Some myths hesitate: willthey pass into tabloids, the home of thesuburbanite of private means, the hairdresser'ssalon, the tube? The social geography of mythswill remain difficult to trace as long as we lackan analytical sociology of the press.26 But we cansay that its place already exists.


Since we cannot yet draw up the list of thedialectal forms of bourgeois myth, we canalways sketch its rhetorical forms. One mustunderstand here by rhetoric a set of fixed,regulated, insistent figures, according to whichthe varied forms of the mythical signifier arrangethemselves. These figures are transparentinasmuch as they do not affect the plasticity ofthe signifier; but they are already sufficientlyconceptualized to adapt to an historicalrepresentation of the world (just as classicalrhetoric can account for a representation of theAristotelian type). It is through their rhetoric thatbourgeois myths outline the general prospect ofthis pseudo-physis which defines the dream ofthe contemporary bourgeois world. Here are itsprincipal figures:

I. The inoculation. I have already given examplesof this very general figure, which consists inadmitting the accidental evil of a class-boundinstitution the better to conceal its principal evil.One immunizes the contents of the collectiveimagination by means of a small inoculation ofacknowledged evil; one thus protects it againstthe risk of a generalized subversion. This liberaltreatment would not have been possible only ahundred years ago. Then, the bourgeois Good didnot compromise with anything, it was quite stiff.It has become much more supple since: thebourgeoisie no longer hesitates to acknowledgesome localized subversions: the avant-garde, theirrational in childhood, etc. It now lives in abalanced economy: as in any sound joint-stockcompany, the smaller shares--in law but not infact-- compensate the big ones.

2. The privation of History. Myth deprives theobject of which it speaks of all History.27 In it,history evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: itprepares all things, brings them, lays them out,the master arrives, it silently disappears: all thatis left for one to do is to enjoy this beautifulobject without wondering where it comes from.Or even better: it can only come from eternity:since the beginning of time, it has been made forbourgeois man, the Spain of the Blue Guide hasbeen made for the tourist, and 'primitives' haveprepared their dances with a view to an exoticfestivity. We can see all the disturbing thingswhich this felicitous figure removes from sight:both determinism and freedom. Nothing isproduced, nothing is chosen: all one has to do isto possess these new objects from which all

soiling trace of origin or choice has beenremoved. This miraculous evaporation of historyis another form of a concept common to mostbourgeois myths: the irresponsibility of man.

3. Identification. The petit-bourgeois is a manunable to imagine the Other.28 If he comes faceto face with him, he blinds himself, ignores anddenies him, or else transforms him into himself.In the petit-bourgeois universe, all theexperiences of confrontation are reverberating,any otherness is reduced to sameness. Thespectacle or the tribunal, which are both placeswhere the Other threatens to appear in full view,become mirrors. This is because the Other is ascandal which threatens his essence. Dominicicannot have access to social existence unless heis previously reduced to the state of a smallsimulacrum of the President of the Assizes or thePublic Prosecutor: this is the price one must payin order to condemn him justly, since Justice is aweighing operation and since scales can onlyweigh like against like. There are, in any petit-bourgeois consciousness, small simulacra of thehooligan, the parricide, the homosexual, etc.,which periodically the judiciary extracts from itsbrain, puts in the dock, admonishes andcondemns: one never tries anybody butanalogues who have gone astray: it is a questionof direction, not of nature, for that's how menare. Sometimes--rarely--the Other is revealed asirreducible: not because of a sudden scruple, butbecause common sense rebels: a man does nothave a white skin, but a black one, another drinkspear juice, not Pernod. How can one assimilatethe Negro, the Russian? There is here a figure foremergencies: exoticism. The Other becomes apure object, a spectacle, a clown. Relegated tothe confines of humanity, he no longer threatensthe security of the home. This figure is chieflypetit-bourgeois. For, even if he is unable toexperience the Other in himself, the bourgeoiscan at least imagine the place where he fits in:this is what is known as liberalism, which is asort of intellectual equilibrium based onrecognized places. The petitbourgeois class is notliberal (it produces Fascism, whereas thebourgeoisie uses it): it follows the same route asthe bourgeoisie, but lags behind.

4. Tautology. Yes, I know, it's an ugly word. Butso is the thing. Tautology is this verbal devicewhich consists in defining like by like ('Drama isdrama'). We can view it as one of those types of


magical behavior dealt with by Sartre in hisOutline of a Theory of the Emotions: one takesrefuge in tautology as one does in fear, or anger,or sadness, when one is at a loss for anexplanation: the accidental failure of language ismagically identified with what one decides is anatural resistance of the object. In tautology,there is a double murder: one kills rationalitybecause it resists one; one kills language becauseit betrays one. Tautology is a faint at the rightmoment, a saving aphasia, it is a death, orperhaps a comedy, the indignant 'representation'of the rights of reality over and above language.Since it is magical, it can of course only takerefuge behind the argument of authority: thus doparents at the end of their tether reply to the childwho keeps on asking for explanations: 'becausethat's how it is', or even better: 'just because,that's all'--a magical act ashamed of itself, whichverbally makes the gesture of rationality, butimmediately abandons the latter, and believesitself to be even with causality because it hasuttered the word which introduces it. Tautologytestifies to a profound distrust of language, whichis rejected because it has failed. Now any refusalof language is a death. Tautology creates a dead,a motionless world.

5. Neither-Norism. By this I mean thismythological figure which consists in stating twoopposites and balancing the one by the other soas to reject them both. (I want neither this northat.) It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for itrelates to a modern form of liberalism. We findagain here the figure of the scales: reality is firstreduced to analogues; then it is weighed; finally,equality having been ascertained, it is got rid of.Here also there is magical behavior: both partiesare dismissed because it is embarrassing tochoose between them; one flees from anintolerable reality, reducing it to two oppositeswhich balance each other only inasmuch as theyare purely formal, relieved of all their specificweight. Neither-Norism can have degradedforms: in astrology, for example, ill luck isalways followed by equal good-luck; they arealways predicted in a prudently compensatoryperspective: a final equilibrium immobilizesvalues, life, destiny, etc.: one no longer needs tochoose, but only to endorse.

6. The quantification of quality. This is a figurewhich is latent in all the preceding ones. Byreducing any quality to quantity, myth

economizes intelligence: it understands realitymore cheaply. I have given several examples ofthis mechanism which bourgeois--and especiallypetit-bourgeois--mythology does not hesitate toapply to aesthetic realities which it deems on theother hand to partake of an immaterial essence.Bourgeois theater is a good example of thiscontradiction: on the one hand, theater ispresented as an essence which cannot be reducedto any language and reveals itself only to theheart, to intuition. From this quality, it receivesan irritable dignity (it is forbidden as a crime of'lese-essence' to speak about the theaterscientifically: or rather, any intellectual way ofviewing the theater is discredited as scientism orpedantic language). On the other hand, bourgeoisdramatic art rests on a pure quantification ofeffects: a whole circuit of computableappearances establishes a quantitative equalitybetween the cost of a ticket and the tears of anactor or the luxuriousness of a set: what iscurrently meant by the 'naturalness' of an actor,for instance, is above all a conspicuous quantityof effects.

7. The statement of fact. Myths tend towardsproverbs. Bourgeois ideology invests in thisfigure interests which are bound to its veryessence: universalism, the refusal of anyexplanation, an unalterable hierarchy of theworld. But we must again distinguish thelanguage-object from the metalanguage. Popular,ancestral proverbs still partake of an instrumentalgrasp of the world as object. A rural statement offact, such as 'the weather is fine' keeps a real linkwith the usefulness of fine weather. It is animplicitly technological statement; the word,here, in spite of its general, abstract form, pavesthe way for actions, it inserts itself into afabricating order: the farmer does not speakabout the weather, he 'acts it', he draws it into hislabor. All our popular proverbs thus representactive speech which has gradually solidified intoreflexive speech, but where reflection iscurtailed, reduced to a statement of fact, and soto speak timid, prudent, and closely huggingexperience. Popular proverbs foresee more thanthey assert, they remain the speech of a humanitywhich is making itself, not one which is.Bourgeois aphorisms, on the other hand, belongto metalanguage; they are a second-orderlanguage which bears on objects alreadyprepared. Their classical form is the maxim.Here the statement is no longer directed towards


a world to be made; it must overlay one which isalready made, bury the traces of this productionunder a self-evident appearance of eternity: it is acounter-explanation, the decorous equivalent of atautology, of this peremptory because whichparents in need of knowledge hang above theheads of their children. The foundation of thebourgeois statement of fact is common sense,that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary orderof him who speaks it.

I have listed these rhetorical figures without anyspecial order, and there may well be manyothers: some can become worn out, others cancome into being. But it is obvious that thosegiven here, such as they are, fall into two greatcategories, which are like the Zodiacal Signs ofthe bourgeois universe: the Essences and theScales. Bourgeois ideology continuouslytransforms the products of history into essentialtypes. Just as the cuttlefish squirts its ink in orderto protect itself, it cannot rest until it hasobscured the ceaseless making of the world,fixated this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmedit, and injected into reality some purifyingessence which will stop its transformation, itsflight towards other forms of existence. Andthese riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at lastbecome computable: bourgeois morality willessentially be a weighing operation, the essenceswill be placed in scales of which bourgeois manwill remain the motionless beam. For the veryend of myths is to immobilize the world: theymust suggest and mimic a universal order whichhas fixated once and for all the hierarchy ofpossessions. Thus, every day and everywhere,man is stopped by myths, referred by them tothis motionless prototype which lives in hisplace, stifles him in the manner of a huge internalparasite and assigns to his activity the narrowlimits within which he is allowed to sufferwithout upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudo-physics is in the fullest sense a prohibition forman against inventing himself. Myths arenothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation,this insidious and inflexible demand that all menrecognize themselves in this image, eternal yetbearing a date, which was built of them one dayas if for all time. For the Nature, in which theyare locked up under the pretext of beingeternalized, is nothing but an Usage. And it isthis Usage, however lofty, that they must take inhand and transform.

Necessity and limits ofmythologyI must, as a conclusion, say a few words aboutthe mythologist himself. This term is rathergrand and self-assured. Yet one can predict forthe mythologist, if there ever is one, a fewdifficulties, in feeling if not in method. True, hewill have no trouble in feeling justified: whateverits mistakes, mythology is certain to participatein the making of the world. Holding as aprinciple that man in a bourgeois society is atevery turn plunged into a false Nature, itattempts to find again under the assumedinnocence of the most unsophisticatedrelationships, the profound alienation which thisinnocence is meant to make one accept. Theunveiling which it carries out is therefore apolitical act: founded on a responsible idea oflanguage, mythology thereby postulates thefreedom of the latter. It is certain that in thissense mythology harmonizes with the world, notas it is, but as it wants to create itself (Brecht hadfor this an efficiently ambiguous word:Einverstandnis, at once an understanding ofreality and a complicity with it).

This harmony justifies the mythologist but doesnot fulfil him: his status still remains basicallyone of being excluded. Justified by the politicaldimension, the mythologist is still at a distancefrom it. His speech is a metalanguage, it 'acts'nothing; at the most, it unveils--or does it? Towhom? His task always remains ambiguous,hampered by its ethical origin. He can liverevolutionary action only vicariously: hence theself-conscious character of his function, thissomething a little stiff and painstaking,muddledand excessively simplified which brands anyintellectual behavior with an openly politicalfoundation ('uncommitted' types of literature areinfinitely more 'elegant'; they are in their place inmetalanguage).

Also, the mythologist cuts himself off from allthe myth consumers, and this is no small matter.If this applied to a particular section of thecollectivity, well and good.29 But when a mythreaches the entire community, it is from the latterthat the mythologist must become estranged if hewants to liberate the myth. Any myth with some


degree of generality is in fact ambiguous,because it represents the very humanity of thosewho, having nothing, have borrowed it. Todecipher the Tour de France or the 'good FrenchWine' is to cut oneself off from those who areentertained or warmed up by them. Themythologist is condemned to live in a theoreticalsociality; for him, to be in society is, at best, tobe truthful: his utmost sociality dwells in hisutmost morality. His connection with the worldis of the order of sarcasm.

One must even go further: in a sense, themythologist is excluded from this history in thename of which he professes to act. The havocwhich he wreaks in the language of thecommunity is absolute for him, it fills hisassignment to the brim: he must live thisassignment without any hope of going back orany assumption of payment. It is forbidden forhim to imagine what the world will concretely belike, when the immediate object of his criticismhas disappeared. Utopia is an impossible luxuryfor him: he greatly doubts that tomorrow's truthswill be the exact reverse of today's lies. Historynever ensures the triumph pure and simple ofsomething over its opposite: it unveils, whilemaking itself, unimaginable solutions,unforeseeable syntheses. The mythologist is noteven in a Moses-like situation: he cannot see thePromised Land. For him, tomorrow's positivity isentirely hidden by today's negativity. All thevalues of his undertaking appear to him as acts ofdestruction: the latter accurately cover theformer, nothing protrudes. This subjective graspof history in which the potent seed of the futureis nothing but the most profound apocalypse ofthe present has been expressed by Saint-Just in astrange saying: 'What constitutes the Republic isthe total destruction of what is opposed to it.'This must not, I think, be understood in thetrivial sense of: 'One has to clear the way beforereconstructing.' The copula has an exhaustivemeaning: there is for some men a subjective darknight of history where the future becomes anessence, the essential destruction of the past.

One last exclusion threatens the mythologist: heconstantly runs the risk of causing the realitywhich he purports to protect, to disappear. Quiteapart from all speech, the D.S.19 is atechnologically defined object: it is capable of acertain speed, it meets the wind in a certain way,etc. And this type of reality cannot be spoken of

by the mythologist. The mechanic, the engineer,even the user, 'speak the object'; but themythologist is condemned to metalanguage. Thisexclusion already has a name: it is what is calledideologism. Zhdanovism has roundly condemnedit (without proving, incidentally, that it was, forthe time being, avoidable) in the early Lukacs, inMarr's linguistics, in works like those ofBenichou or Goldmann, opposing to it thereticence of a reality inaccessible to ideology,such as that of language according to Stalin. It istrue that ideologism resolves the contradiction ofalienated reality by an amputation, not asynthesis (but as for Zhdanovism, it does noteven resolve it): wine is objectively good, and atthe same time, the goodness of wine is a myth:here is the aporia. The mythologist gets out ofthis as best he can: he deals with the goodness ofwine, not with the wine itself, just as thehistorian deals with Pascal's ideology, not withthe Pensees in themselves.30

It seems that this is a difficulty pertaining to ourtimes: there is as yet only one possible choice,and this choice can bear only on two equallyextreme methods: either to posit a reality whichis entirely permeable to history, and ideologize;or, conversely, to posit a reality which isultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in thiscase, poetize. In a word, I do not yet see asynthesis between ideology and poetry (bypoetry I understand, in a very general way, thesearch for the inalienable meaning of things).

The fact that we cannot manage to achieve morethan an unstable grasp of reality doubtless givesthe measure of our present alienation: weconstantly drift between the object and itsdemystification, powerless to render itswholeness. For if we penetrate the object, weliberate it but we destroy it; and if weacknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but werestore it to a state which is still mystified. Itwould seem that we are condemned for sometime yet always to speak excessively aboutreality. This is probably because ideologism andits opposite are types of behavior which are stillmagical, terrorized, blinded and fascinated by thesplit in the social world. And yet, this is what wemust seek: a reconciliation between reality andmen, between description and explanation,between object and knowledge.


Notes1 Innumerable other meanings of the word 'myth'can be cited against this. But I have tried todefine things, not words.

2 The development of publicity, of a nationalpress, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speakof the survival of a myriad rites ofcommunication which rule social appearancesmakes the development of a semiological sciencemore urgent than ever. In a single day, howmany really non-signifying fields do we cross?Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before thesea; it is true that it bears no message. But on thebeach, what material for semiology! Flags,slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntaneven, which are so many messages to me.

3 The notion of word is one of the mostcontroversial in linguistics. I keep it here for thesake of simplicity.

4 Tel Quel, II, p. 191.

5 Or perhaps Sinity? Just as if Latin/latinity =Basque/x, x = Basquity.

6 I say 'in Spain' because, in France, petit-bourgeois advancement has caused a whole'mythical' architecture of the Basque chalet toflourish.

7 From the point of view of ethics, what isdisturbing in myth is precisely that its form ismotivated. For if there is a 'health' of language, itis the arbitrariness of the sign which is itsgrounding. What is sickening in myth is its resortto a false nature, its superabundance ofsignificant forms, as in these objects whichdecorate their usefulness with a naturalappearance. The will to weigh the significationwith the full guarantee of nature causes a kind ofnausea; myth is too rich, and what is in excess isprecisely its motivation. This nausea is like theone I feel before the arts which refuse to choosebetween physis and anti-physis, using the first asan ideal and the second as an economy.Ethically, there is a kind of baseness in hedgingone's bets.

8 The freedom in choosing what one focuses onis a problem which does not belong to the

province of semiology: it depends on theconcrete situation of the subject.

9 We receive the naming of the lion as a pureexample of Latin grammar because we are, asgrown-ups, in a creative position in relation to it.I shall come back later to the value of the contextin this mythical schema.

10 Classical poetry, on the contrary, would be,according to such norms, a strongly mythicalsystem, since it imposes on the meaning oneextra signified, which is regularity. Thealexandrine, for instance, has value both asmeaning of a discourse and as signifier of a newwhole, which is its poetic signification. Success,when it occurs, comes from the degree ofapparent fusion of the two systems. It can beseen that we deal in no way with a harmonybetween content and form, but with anelegantabsorption of one form into another. By eleganceI mean the most economical use of the meansemployed. It is because of an age-old abuse thatcritics confuse meaning and content. Thelanguage is never anything but a system offorms, and the meaning is a form.

11 We are again dealing here with the meaning,in Sartre's use of the terms, as a natural quality ofthings, situated outside a semiological system(Saint-Genet, p.283).

12 Style, at least as I defined it then, is not aform, it does not belong to the province of asemiological analysis of Literature. In fact, styleis a substance constantly threatened withformalization. To start with, it can perfectly wellbecome degraded into a mode of writing: there isa 'Malraux-type' writing, and even in Malrauxhimself. Then, style can also become a particularlanguage, that used by the writer for himself andfor himself alone. Style then becomes a sort ofsolipsistic myth, the languagewhich the writerspeaks to himself. It is easy to understand that atsuch a degree of solidification, style calls for adeciphering. The works of J.P. Richard are anexample of this necessary critique of styles.

13 A subjunctive form because it is in thesubjunctive mode that Latin expressed 'indirectstyle or discourse', which is an admirableinstrument for demystification.


14 'The fate of capitalism is to make the workerwealthy,' Paris-Match tells us.

15 The word 'capitalism' is taboo, noteconomically, but ideologically; it cannotpossibly enter the vocabulary of bourgeoisrepresentations. Only in Farouk's Egypt could aprisoner be condemned by a tribunal for 'anti-capitalist plotting' in so many words.

16 The bourgeoisie never uses the word'Proletariat', which is supposed to be a Left- wingmyth, except when it is in its interest to imaginethe Proletariat being led astray by theCommunist Party.

17 It is remarkable that the adversaries of thebourgeoisie on matters of ethics or aestheticsremain for the most part indifferent, or evenattached, to its political determinations.Conversely, its political adversaries neglect toissue a basic condemnation of its representations:they often go so far as to share them. Thisdiversity of attacks benefits the bourgeoisie, itallows it to camouflage its name. For thebourgeoisie should be understood only assynthesis of its determinations and itsrepresentations.

18 There can be figures of derelict man whichlack all order (Ionesco for example). This doesnot affect in any way the security of theEssences.

19 To induce a collective content for theimagination is always an inhuman undertaking,not only because dreaming essentializes life intodestiny, but also because dreams areimpoverished, and the alibi of an absence.

20 'If men and their conditions appear throughoutideology inverted as in a camera obscura, thisphenomenon follows from their historical vitalprocess...' (Marx, The German Ideology).

21 To the pleasure-principle of Freudian mancould be added the clarity-principle ofmythological humanity. All the ambiguity ofmyth is there: its clarity is euphoric.

22 cf. Marx and the example of the cherry-tree,The German Ideology.

23 cf. p.94.

24 It is remarkable that Krushchevism presenteditself not as a political change, but essentiallyand only as a linguistic conversion. Anincomplete conversion, incidentally, forKrushchev devalued Stalin, but did not explainhim--did not re-politicize him.

25 Today it is the colonized peoples who assumeto the full the ethical and political conditiondescribed by Marx as being that of theproletariat.

26 The circulation of newspapers is aninsufficient datum. Other information comesonly by accident. Paris-Match has given--significantly, as publicity--the composition of itspublic in terms of standard of living (Le Figaro,July 12th, 1955): out of each 100 readers livingin town, 53 have a car, 49 a bathroom, etc.,whereas the average standard of living in Franceis reckoned as follows: car, 22 per cent;bathroom, 13 per cent. That the purchasingpower of the Paris-Match reader is high couldhave been predicted from the mythology of thispublication.

27 Marx: '...we must pay attention to this history,since ideology boils down to either an erroneousconception of this history, or to a completeabstraction from it' (The German Ideology).

28 Marx: '...what makes them representative ofthe petit-bourgeois class, is that their minds, theirconsciousnesses do not extend beyond the limitswhich this class has set to its activities' (TheEighteenth Brumaire). And Gorki: 'the petit-bourgeois is the man who has preferred himselfto all else.'

29 It is not only from the public that onebecomes estranged; it is sometimes also from thevery object of the myth. In order to demystifyPoetic Childhood, for instance, I have had, so tospeak, to lack confidence in Mionou Drouet thechild. I have had to ignore, in her, under theenormous myth with which she is cumbered,something like a tender, open, possibility. It isnever a good thing to speak against a little girl.

30 Even here, in these mythologies, I have usedtrickery: finding it painful constantly to work onthe evaporation of reality, I have started to makeit excessively dense, and to discover in it a


surprising compactness which I savoured withdelight, and I have given a few examples of'substantial psycho-analysis' about somemythical objects.

myth today myth is a type of speech

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