By Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers
''[ Mythologies ] illustrates the attractive generosity of Barthes's revolutionary curiosity within the which means (his be aware is signification) of virtually every thing round him, not just the books and work of excessive paintings, but in addition the slogans, trivialities, toys, meals, and well known rituals (cruises, striptease, consuming, wrestling suits) of latest existence . . . For Barthes, phrases and items have in universal the prepared capability to assert whatever; even as, considering they're symptoms, phrases and gadgets have the undesirable religion continually to seem typical to their client, as though what they are saying is everlasting, real, beneficial, rather than arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies unearths Barthes revealing the formed structures of principles that give the chance, for instance, for 'Einstein's mind' to face for, be the parable of, 'a genius so missing in magic that one speaks approximately his notion as a sensible hard work analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' all the little essays during this publication wrenches a definition out of a typical yet built item, making the thing converse its hidden, yet ever-so-present, reservoir of synthetic sense.''--Edward W. acknowledged
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Example text
Photography constitutes here a veritable blackmail by means of moral values: country, army, family, honour, reckless heroism. The conventions of photography, moreover, are themselves replete with signs. A full-face photograph underlines the realistic outlook of the candidate, especially if he is provided with scrutinizing glasses. Everything there expresses penetration, gravity, frankness: the future deputy is looking squarely at the enemy, the obstacle, 92 the 'problem'. A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars, and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.
It goes without saying that this myth of travel is becoming quite anachronistic, even among the bourgeoisie, and I suppose that if one entrusted the preparation of a new guide-book to, say, the lady-editors at L'Express or the editors of Match, we would see appearing, questionable as they would still probably be, quite different countries: after the Spain of Anquetil or Larousse, would follow the Spain of Siegfried, then that of Fourastié. Notice how already, in the Michelin Guide, the number of bathrooms and forks indicating good restaurants is vying with that of 'artistic curiosities': even bourgeois myths have their differential geology.
There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare. Exoticism is the first of these barriers, for it is always of a petrified kind which transports the body into the world of legend or romance: a Chinese woman equipped with an opium pipe (the indispensable symbol of 'Sininess' *), an undulating vamp with a gigantic cigarette-holder, a Venetian decor complete with gondola, a dress with panniers and a singer of serenades: all aim at establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise.