Myth into Performance week 2

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Myth into Performance week 2
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Today we look at the work of Roland Barthes
(1915-80)

• and his influential deconstruction of myth in
  Mythologies.

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For Barthes the bourgeois society is identified
by the following conditions

• a capitalist economy
• a certain social order such as a form of
  democracy
• a recent history of imperialism in the form of
  colonialism
• an ideology, less identifiable but generally
  agreed to be based on liberal, humanist values
  such as individualism, human rights, freedom of
  expression and so forth.

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Barthes reads myth as a coded form of propaganda
and argues that contemporary myths are bourgeois
myths.

• In Mythologies he attempts to expose myth as a
  seemingly benign agent of social control.
  Bourgeois ideology pretends that cultural
  construction is natural phenomenon (Coupe 157).

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Myth is

• 1. a type of speech
• 2. a system of communication, i.e. It
  communicates a message.
• 3. a mode of signification, a form. It is
  active. A myth is a transmission device.
• 4. everything can be a myth provided that it is
  conveyed by discourse.
• 5. not defined by the object of its message but
  by the way that it utters this message. (c.f.
  The medium is message)
• a type of speech chosen by history, it cannot
  evolve from the nature of things. I.e. Myth is
  a constructed thing.

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Caesar

• Bustwhat does this signify?

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Caesar statue

• What ideas are expressed in this image?
• How do we see and experience these ideas?

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Brando as Anthony

• Does this have the same effect as the statute?
• Why/why not?
• What is signified?

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Brando as Anthony 2

• What is signified here?