Myth and Politics in the Works of Sorel and Barthes Author(s): Michael Tager Source: Journal of the History

of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1986), pp. 625-639 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709722 . Accessed: 05/07/2011 08:19
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MYTH AND POLITICS IN THE WORKS OF SOREL AND BARTHES

I. Roland Barthes once argued that in France the bourgeoisie lost its cultural voice during the Dreyfus Affair, when its writers and intellectuals released it.1 In the eighteenth century intellectuals had championed the cause of the bourgeois individual against aristocratic privilege, but grew increasingly ambivalentabout the triumphantbourgeoisie during the nineteenth century, and finally at the end of the nineteenth century were decisively detached from their native class by the aftershocks of the Dreyfus Affair. With the opening of the twentieth century landowners, employers, senior civil servants, and executives no longer had congenial access to intellectual culture because it called their very existence as a class into question. That the antibourgeoisimpulse of the French "clerks" has remained quite strong through the twentieth century is suggested by the similarity between the statement of Georges Sorel in the introduction to his most famous work that even if none of his ideas bore fruit, "I do not believe I am laboring in vain-for in this way I help to ruin the prestige of middle-class culture,"2 and Barthes's claim that "the intellectual's (or the writer's) historical function, today, is to maintain and emphasize the decomposition of bourgeois consciousness." Barthes realized that this historical shift placed intellectuals in a tenuous position. Detached from the bourgeoisie, many sought to represent the proletariat. Yet the spread of bourgeois (now "mass") culture to the proletariat largely cut off that way of rapprochement. Indeed, the attack on bourgeois culture, settled in the universities so long, itself became an orthodoxy and integrated into the functioning of society. The search for an agent capable of transforming society led Sorel successively toward Marxism, syndicalism, nationalism, and Bolshevism, and perhaps on to other stages, had he lived beyond 1922. Barthes, too, worked successively under the aegis of various systems as ways of dismantling bourgeois ideals. Through their intellectual peregrinations both authors developed theories of myth, in Sorel's case to explain how the transformation of society did and would occur, and in Barthes's case to explain the continued hegemony of bourgeois norms. I shall examine those theories of myth, particularly for their political implications. Starting with
1 Roland Barthes, "Languages at War in a Culture at Peace," Times Literary Supplement (October 8, 1971), 1204. 2 Georges Sorel, Reflexions sur la violence(Paris, 1908); Reflections on Violence,trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (New York, 1961), 54. 3 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 177), 63.

625 Copyright 1986 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.

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a similar revulsion against contemporary society and a desire for radical change, Sorel and Barthes ironically created two very different dichotomies of myth and politics that reflected their own temperaments, changed historical conditions, and created two divergent perspectives on the persistence of capitalism. II. Sorel's interest in myth arose from his belief that "intellectualist philosophy" could not explain why a man would willingly sacrifice his life for an ideal. How could one account for revolutions or empires without positing some superior motive force acting within people? In a more general sense the passage from principles to action always contained the presence of myth, which Sorel considered to be a group of images intuitively or viscerally apprehended. Myth led to action through the formation of an "imaginary world"4that people placed ahead of the present world. While most human activity proceeded from the calculation of selfinterest or evolved from daily routines, myths gripped the mind with a much greater tenacity than self-interest or habit and enabled people to act in radically new ways. Myths produced their effects spontaneously without leading to reflection or a search for precedents. Historical myths surrounding the nation or the resurrection of Jesus provoked heroic individual actions and underlay great social transformations. Sorel hoped that a contemporary myth like that of a general strike might bridge the growing gulf he perceived between thought and action in European socialism.

A pragmatic rather than an analytical attitude characterized Sorel's study of myth. What concerned him was not whether an event like the resurrection actually occurred but only its capacity to evoke sacrifice and heroism among its believers. Social scientific standards happily did not apply to myth. Sorel wrote that "in employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility."5Sorel defended Marxism from its critics on this basis. Even if its "laws" like the increasing concentration of capital, the decreasing of wages to subsistence levels, or the worsening of periodic crises proved false as scientific propositions, they still remained indispensablefor enlightening people about the nature of their exploitation and as a guide for action. Sorel moved toward considering Capital, with its archetypes of "Monsieur Capital" and the "Collective Worker," and Marxism more generally, a myth. He eventually concluded that "writers who criticized Marx often reproachedhim with having spoken in symbolic language which they did not consider suitable for scientific investigation.
4 Reflections, 48. 5

Ibid., 43. Cf. Philip Wiener, "Pragmatism," The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, III, 564.

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On the contrary, it is these symbolic portions which were formerly regarded of dubious worth that constitute the definitive value of his work."6 Sorel came to regard the myth of the general strike as embodying the essence of Marx's doctrines of class conflict and revolution in their most explosive form. In his revision of Marx, motive power took precedence over predictive accuracy. Rather than examining the psychological or sociological aspects of myth, Sorel insistently asked a more immediate question: can it provoke a reformation of man and society? His descriptions of the myths associated with various movements therefore rarely contained any extended theoretical treatment because praxis interested him more than etiology. Even the myth of the general strike, the most fully elaborated of any of the myths he studied, remained a somewhat mysterious creature. And so he intended it to be. Sorel's interest in the intuitive, nonrational comprehension of images paralleled developments occurring in the psychological study of personality. He wrote that "it is possible to distinguish in every complex body of knowledge a clear and obscure region and to say the latter is perhaps more important."7Myth operated in this obscure, mysterious region that held man's strongest impulses. In a sense Sorel hoped that myth would tap some of the unconscious energy of society and channel it into revolutionary movements.8 These dynamic, mythcharged movements would reverse the decline of France into mediocrity by overturningthe enervatedbourgeoisie. This class of rational calculators were completely incapable of sustaining any mythic beliefs, and they squashed the vital drives underlying society. They had no higher ideal than the peaceful making of money and would compromise with the proletariat endlessly to maintain it. This produced a state that Sorel, borrowing from Proudhon, called "the most atrocious period in the existence of societies."9The only escape lay in myths that enclosed "the strongest inclinations of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind
with the insistence of instincts ... and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action. . .."10

Sorel contrasted myth with a more commonly used category in political theory, viz., utopia. Myths arose throughout history imperceptibly through concentrations of chance1 that defied analysis. Only the effects,
Georges Sorel, "The Decomposition of Marxism" (Paris, 1907), in Irving Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason (Carbondale, Ill., 1968), 251. 'Reflections, 144. 8 See Jules Monnerot, "Georges Sorel ou l'introduction aux mythes modernes," in Jean Claude Casanova, Science et Conscience de la Societe (Paris, 1971), 379-412, and Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism (Boston, 1953), 148. 9 Georges Sorel, "The Advance Toward Socialism" (Paris, 1920), The Illusions of Progress, trans. John and Edith Stanley (Berkeley, 1969), 211. 0Reflections, 125. Georges Sorel, Le Systeme historiquede Renan (Paris, 1905), 73. 6

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not the origins of myth, could be studied. Even though he wrote at length about the myth of the general strike in Reflexions sur la violence, he claimed that he created nothing and that myths did not arise from works of social criticism. Utopia, however, was clearly an intellectual product, representing the work of a theorist who developed an ideal model of society in order to criticize existing society; and it generally sprang from a self-interested motive to gain followers and ultimately some kind of state office. Usually utopias offered visions of a super-rational order that neglected customs and historical traditions and relied on psychological reductionism to fit all people into an eternal ideal. As an intellectual product, utopias lacked the motive force of myth; they merely described possibilities, whereas myths were "expressions of a determination to
act."12

In addition, since myth kept people's attention centered on the present moment and the impending revolutionarycataclysm, it can only be judged as a means of present action. It did not offer an abstract utopian picture of the future. Myth directed men to destroy the existing state of affairs, whereas "the effect of utopia has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system" (ibid., 50). Utopia compared the present to an imaginary, though attainable, future and thereby encouraged relatively passive attitudes and behavior among its believers. Like Marx, Sorel attacked the trend toward utopianism (related to reformism in Sorel's mind) in the socialist movement. An emphasis on myth implies a concomitant devaluation of language and politics. Aristotle had noted the connection between the latter two concepts when he wrote that only man could use language and settle disputes through dialogue. All other animals lived either through instinct or fighting. Language made man the only "political animal" because politics implied communication or a process of persuasion between people seeking to resolve common problems. Sorel, however, viewed language as a weapon of domination in the hands of those who had a facility with it. Parliamentary politics essentially ensured the subjugation of workers, who lacked this facility, no matter which party governed. He considered language the instrument of professors and politicans, and as long as socialism remained "a doctrine expressed only in words" (ibid., 46), workers would eventually lose control of the revolution made in their name. Myth had the pragmatic function of forestalling the machinations of ambitious socialist leaders and functionaries. The sudden success of parliamentary socialism in France (forty socialist representatives were elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1893) worried Sorel greatly. In 1896 the socialist deputy Alexandre Millerand called for the nationalization of several large industries, and in 1897 the socialist leader Jean
12

Reflections, 50.

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Jaures toured France promoting his vision of a socialist society given unity and direction by the state. Sorel believed these socialist proposals reflected a misreading of Marx's original texts and derided their vision of the socialist future as "a gigantic factory managed by technical perThe performance of socialist sonnel enjoying unchallenged authority."13 confirmed Sorel's fears about Marxism's encounter with parpoliticans liamentary politics: it did not transform the conduct of politics but instead altered its own purpose and character. Sorel moved gradually toward The myth advocating the direct action strategy of radical syndicalism.14 of the general strike was no mere syndicalist propaganda tactic but the most powerful means for the syndicates to resist cooption. It carried the "picture of complete catastrophe,"'5which made gains achieved through reform and compromise seem inconsequential. He argued that the myth of the general strike "drags into the revolutionary track everything it touches.... [T]his idea is so effective as a motive force that once it has entered into the minds of the people they can no longer be controlled by leaders, and ... thus the power of the deputies would be reduced to nothing" (ibid., 134, 125). Yet Sorel's antipathy toward language and politics went deeper still. He used the adjectives "noisy, garrulous, and lying" (ibid., 122) to characterize parliamentary socialism and, rather than representing the worst excesses of language, he felt that language inherently possessed those attributes. He wrote that "it is not necessary to be a very profound philosopher to perceive that language deceives us constantly as to the true nature of the relationships between things" (ibid., 251). Partially due to its innate deceptiveness, the use of language inhibited action. Only myths could move men across the threshold between speech and action by transcending politics based on rational calculation. Without myths one could talk indefinitely of revolts without ever provoking one. Revolution would not erupt through the use of ordinary language but through "a body of images capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society" (ibid., 123). Sorel based his philosophy of action on the violent revolt of oppressed classes made possible by myths that united and incited individuals. The myth of the general strike suffused workers with a conception of socialism, "which language cannot give us with perfect clearness" (ibid., 128), and also created feelings of military solidarity. Under these circumstances
Georges Sorel, "Preface to Formes et essence du socialism by Saverio Merlino (1898)," in Richard Vernon, Commitment and Change: Georges Sorel and the Idea of Revolution (Toronto, 1978), 91. 14 Georges Sorel, "The Socialist Future of the Syndicates" (1898), in John Stanley (ed.), From GeorgesSorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy (New York, 1976), 71-93. 5Reflections, 135.
13

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workers acted without speech, argument, or rational calculation. Myth could impel revolution even during a period of pervasive mediocrity. Sorel's emphasis on the centrality of violence in social transformation reflected his preference for myth over political discourse. If politics involves people persuading each other about alternative courses of action, then violence rejects such techniques. As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, violence is "mute" because it destroys the efficacy of political discourse. Clearly Sorel hoped that the violence inspired by the myth of the general strike would render parliamentary politics insignificant. Violence perhaps constituted the discourse of the proletariat, beyond the control of intellectual discourse. It reflected the clearest manifestation of action motivated by myth. Violence emphasized the present moment and militated against gradual reforms. Sorel compared the violent syndicalist strikes to the early Christian martyrdoms in their positive effect on their respective movements. He envisioned a kind of pure violence without hatred or revenge, almost a spiritual weapon in the hands of the proletariat. Like myth, violence had a pragmatic function in maintaining the integrity of the socialist revolution. It would rebuff the strategy of liberals and parliamentary socialists by reestablishing the hostility between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Sorel wrote that the syndicates must "repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who would protect the workers, to meet with insults the homilies of the defenders of human fraternity, and reply by blows to the propagators of social peace" (ibid., 91). At the same time syndicalist violence would revitalize the bourgeoisie by reawakening its class interest. The French bourgeoisie had lost the conquering spirit that still animated American capitalism (which Sorel much admired), and through concessions they enervated the proletariat as well. Violence would energize both classes and create a revolutionary situation (an idea practiced by the Red Brigades without much success). Sorel's animus against language and politics reflected his hope that myth could change the world in a way that the words and elections of the Third Republic never would. Norman Jacobson claims that political theory begins precisely "at the moment when things become, so to speak, unglued,"16and certainly Sorel had a strong sense of things coming unglued. To make things whole again required nothing less than the scrapping of politics, actually a not uncommon impulse in political theory beginning with Plato's Republic. Socialism, the creation of bourgeois intellectuals, needed a firmer foundation in myth to prevent it from succumbing to the twin dangers of utopianism and reformism. Yet where did the emphasis on myth leave Sorel himself? He implicitly condemned his own work, the linguistic construction of complex and highly discursive arguments, to irrelevance (he perhaps carried the prac16

Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace (Berkeley, 1978), 10.

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tical mentality of his first career as a civil engineer into his subsequent career as a social critic). This paradox appeared even more starkly in Luigi Pirandello's statement after he signed a fascist manifesto in 1925: "I have always fought against words."17And although Sorel generally stayed on the left and certainly considered himself a socialist when he elaborated the myth of the general strike, it seems that the anti-political, anti-rational doctrines he expressed were resolved historically by moving to the right, exemplified by Mussolini's fascism. In a speech made shortly before his march on Rome, Mussolini said "we have created a myth. This myth is a faith, a noble enthusiasm. It does not have to be a reality, it is an impulse and a hope, belief, courage. Our myth is the nation. ..
"18

Myths of the nation, and in Germany of race, short-circuited

reasoned discourse with disastrous effects, particularly from the perspective of someone who hoped for a socialist revolution led and controlled by workers themselves. III. Barthes launched his literary career after World War II in a period that marked the beginnings of French consumer culture. In what was nominally a time of economic rationality, Barthes detected a plethora of new myths emerging that legitimated the existing order. By exposing these myths he continued in the spirit, if not the letter of Sorel's work. The new locus of myth in the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat gave Barthes's work an indirect, rearguardquality: he attempted to pick holes in the ruling class's legitimacy rather than to advocate a frontal assault against its position. An impulse toward demystification underlay Barthes's study of myth which he thought prerequisite to the political advance of socialism. He exhibited a more aesthetic, less pragmatic sensibility than Sorel. Barthes found myth consisted of groups of images and ideas emanating from a wide variety of sources including the press, advertising, movies, consumer goods, cultural or athletic events, and indeed almost anything capable of conveying meanings to people. Myths occurred in fragments, not in long fixed narratives. Wherever myth appeared, it substituted a connoted system of meanings for the denoted system already present. Myth emptied phenomena of their literal meaning and added its He own meanings. Barthes conceptualized myth as "language robbery."19 used the example of a Paris Match cover that showed a young black officer crisply saluting the French flag in the foreground. At least this constituted the denoted system of meanings. But a connoted system of meanings slipped in that put the black man's biography in very small parenthesis. The photograph presented the myth that "France is a great empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully
17 Thomas Sheenan, "Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist," Social Research, 48 (Spring 1981), 53. 18 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1968), 122-23. 19 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 131.

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serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors" (ibid., 116). Myth had an imperative, buttonholing character according to Barthes, and in this case the myth of French imperialism condemned "the saluting Negro to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier" (ibid., 125). The significance of myth stemmed from its capacity to convert historically determined outcomes into natural phenomena. Things produced by class hierarchy and its moral, cultural, and aesthetic consequences became a matter of course, or what Barthes liked to call the "doxa" (when demystifying he looked for "paradoxa," things that went beyond the received wisdom). Through myth the subordination of colonials, could not argue women, and workers appeared eternally sanctioned-one obliterated the memory that peoples were once conwith nature. Myth quered, hierarchies once imposed, and objects once made. With its anonymous universal representations, myths helped shape the forms and norms that sustained everyday life. Not surprisingly, Barthes called myth "depoliticized speech" (ibid., 143). Politics implies that alternatives exist and that people make their own world by choosing between them, but myth embodied a "defaulting" on any such process. It denied the fabricated, and therefore changeable, quality of reality. Barthes wrote that myth "abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences" (ibid.). Since 1789 myth had operated to erase the name of the bourgeoisie from culture and politics and instead substituted more universal concepts like the "nation." In this way France became awash in an anonymous, disingenuous mythology that implicitly posited class rule. Barthes wrote: the bourgeoisie pervades France: practised on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order-the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations,the more naturalized they become. The fact of the bourgeoisie becomes absorbed into an amorphous universe, whose sole inhabitant is Eternal Man, who is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. (ibid., 140) Ironically, capitalist wealth and power relied on constant technological progress, yet its mythology produced images of unchangeable solidity. Thus Barthes reversed Sorel's categories. Myth prevented rather than stimulated action. The dominant class purified its history and motives through myth, which also taught subordinate people to obey and to accept (even if only vicariously) the status quo. Statistically, Barthes saw myth on the right rather than on the left. Not only did the bourgeoisie need to appropriate myth to justify its dominance, but the proletariat existed in the realm of production, so that its language remained essentially political. In direct contrast to Sorel, Barthes argued that revolutionary language could not be mythical. Revolution, more than anything else, demonstrated the historically contingent character of human institutions

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and practices. It revealed "the political load of the world" (ibid., 146) by remaking that world. Only when revolution changed into "the Left," or an established order seeking to distort itself into nature, did socialist myths emerge. However, Barthes restricted his attention to France and its bourgeois myths. Other reversals of Sorelian categories included Barthes's attitudes toward language and violence. He openly declared his intellectual identity, and indeed defined himself by writing in the third person about himself, that "his place (his milieu) is language: that is where he accepts or rejects, He that is where his body can or cannot."20 tended to interpretall behavior or aesthetically. Any attack on academic or specialized linguistically language he considered part of a broader attack on intellectuals. He wrote that "public opinion does not like the language of intellectuals. Hence he has felt himself to be the object of a kind of racism: they excluded his language" (ibid., 103). His analysis of the rhetoric of Pierre Poujade, leader of a reactionary petty bourgeois movement in the 1950s, showed that he frequently used tautologies like "business is business," thereby negating the communicative value of language and, by extension, intellectuals. Like "helicopters," intellectuals had their heads in the clouds, not standing on firm ground like the "little people." Implicit in Poujadism Barthes found physical and racial claims to superiority, symptoms of an anti-intellectual movement tending toward fascism. As one who lived for and through language, Barthes recognized that violence threatened to render him superfluous. He admitted he disliked the subject and therefore did not give it extended treatment like Sorel. He stressed the latent violence of Poujade and his followers, who presented themselves as strong and virile men of "common sense." Poujade's campaign rhetoric emphasized his rugged past, and he titled his autobiography "J'ai choisi le combat." Barthes wrote that in the myths surrounding that Poujade, "physical plentitude establishes a kind of moral clarity"21 intellectuals, without the aura of violence, lacked. Alby implication though Sorel and Barthes shared an understanding of the implications of violence, their respective dichotomies of myths and politics led them to evaluate its effects differently. Barthes's approach to myth resembled Sorel's in that he chose not to delve into the historical genesis or development of myth. The mechanics of making an advertisementor the class imperativesbehind the production of mass consumer goods did not interest him. He instead focused only on immediate, connoted meanings, not because, as Sorel had it, myths contained an impenetrable element of mystery, but rather because the implications of a statement or appearance of an object constituted its
20 Roland
21

Barthes, 53. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York, 1979), 131.

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essential reality.22So that even though Barthes recognized that myths arose instrumentally because men "depoliticize according to their this insight had little effect on his work. In the main text under needs,"23 study here, Mythologies (published in English under two titles, Mythologies and The Eiffel Tower), Barthes aimed only at exposure and demystification, without seeking to place myth in its larger historical context. Several myths recurred through the work. One justified the subordination of Africans to Frenchmen. In "Bichon and the Blacks" Barthes analyzed a Paris Match story about a young professional couple who, accompanied by their baby Bichon, traveled to paint "cannibal country." The article stressed the heroism of the family and described their trip with the language of conquest. The reader received a vision of the original explorers in a setting "where the code of feelings and values is completely In detached from concrete problems of solidarity or progress."24 addition, the piece perpetuated racial sterotypes, opposing "primitive" and "civilized" cultures in a way that encouraged the colonial relationship. It drained all the complexity from African life and transformed the native into an exotic totem that reflected the Frenchman's contrasting virtues. The article, which Barthes referred to as "Operation Bichon," succeeded in presenting the black world through a white child's eyes, thus negating the demystification of primitive cultures undertaken by ethnologists and anthropologists. The rise of African liberation movements threatened these myths by abruptly converting natural relations into undeniably contingent ones. In his essay "African Grammar" Barthes analyzed popular descriptions of the Algerian crisis reminiscent of Orwell's examples in "Politics and the English Language." To bridge the rift between French norm and African fact required that words diverge from their usual meanings. War and peace underwent strange changes, "god" became a sublimated form of the French government, and rebels struck in "bands" representing "elements" of the native "population." Words like "dishonor," "destiny," and "mission" became prominent in the phraseology of French leaders. Barthes wrote: Destiny exists only in a linked form. It is not militaryconquestwhich has which by performed Providence subjected Algeriato France,it is a conjunction has united two destinies.The link is declaredindissolublein the very period which cannotbe concealed."(ibid., when it is dissolvingwith an explosiveness 104-05)
For a comparison of Barthes with two more historically and theoretically inclined authors, see David Gross, "Lowenthal, Adorno, Barthes: Three Perspectives on Popular Culture," Telos, 45 (Fall 1980), 122-40. 23 Mythologies, 144. 24 The Eiffel Tower, 35.
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A vast effort at naturalization combatted the tide of current events. Another myth justified the subordination of women to men by promoting the naturalness of domestic obligations. In "Conjugations" Barthes explored the reasons why the media so intently covered Sylviane Carpentier's (Miss Europe '53) marriage to an electrician. Rather than modeling or acting, which her title surely allowed her to do, she renounced it all for the anonymity of a bourgeois household. She was a modern bourgeois heroine, as the media implicitly recognized. He wrote: sustainsthe moraleof the social status quo: it is here love-stronger-than-glory not sensibleto leaveone'scondition,it is gloriousto returnto it.... Happiness, in this universe,is to play at a kind of domestic enclosure:"psychological" schedules,the whole gadgets,puttering,householdappliances, questionnaires, of this utensil paradiseof Elle or l'Express glorifiesthe closing of the hearth
.... (ibid., 24-25)

Even women novelists, who presumably established independent careers, did not escape mythological reduction. In his essay "Novels and Children" Barthes noted that an article in Elle introduced its female subjects by the quantity of their children and novels. While admiring their literary accomplishments, the article implied that women must always define themselves in terms of their family. Barthes outlined the myth involved"Women are on earth to give children to men; let them write as much as they want, let them decorate their condition, but above all, let them not depart from it.... Women, compensate for your books by your children."24Men did not appear in the article, but their presence and authority clearly loomed large. A third myth justified the subordination of workers to owners. As one example Barthes pointed to the movie "On the Waterfront," which depicted workers as a feeble group exploited by corrupt union leaders, while the state representedabsolutejustice and the workers' only recourse against exploitation. At the end a beaten Marlon Brando presentedhimself to the boss, signaling the restoration of order with the worker giving himself willingly into the hands of his employer. This relationship assumed the aura of naturalness because the audience identified powerfully with the Brando character. Another example concerned the exhibition of photographs called "The Family of Man," which tried to show the universalities in the daily lives of different peoples. The photographs appeared under abstract categories like birth, play, work, death, love, etc. accompanied by Old Testament proverbs. This myth of the "human condition" attempted to submerge relevant differences into a larger human community. Barthes asked rhetorically how the parents of Emmet Till or the North African workers in the slums of Paris might feel about
25

Mythologies, 50.

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"the great family of man." By making the gestures of man look eternal the exhibit emptied them of political content and thereby defused them. One final recurring myth involved consumption. Consuming goods not only had intrinsic value but it embodied an entire experience or state of mind as well. Thus Barthes compared the new Citroen models to Gothic cathedrals in that they represented the supreme creation of the era done by unknown artists. The car signified more than a mere instrument of transportation. Similarly, the consumption of wine went beyond reasons of taste or alcoholic content because it embodied an essence of the French character mythologically. Of course these myths were not innocent-behind them lay the exploitation of workers that made their production possible. But myths kept that hidden and instead flooded the consumer with images of eternal states of mind unlocked by consumption. However, Barthes eventually chafed at the limitations of his own theory of myth. Although he believed that demystification carried political implications for the freeing of public discourse, he still felt distant from political reality. Besides, the myth-making apparatus seemed to have an unlimited productive capacity. Barthes unveiled only a fraction of the myths to a fraction of their potential audience. The focus on myth led to an undue pessimism and an inability to imagine a better future. Barthes wrote that "we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness" (ibid., 159). Undoubtedly this stemmed from Barthes's ahistorical method of analysis-without probing beneath the surface, it is not surprisingthat he could not envision how to go beyond demystification.26 In addition, the study of myths increased Barthes's sense of alienation. Rather than discussing objects themselves, he always discussed their implications. Also, he excluded himself from the society of myth-consumers. By conceiving of an event like the Tour de France as a complex mythological event, Barthes felt removed from the people entertained by the event. He wrote that "the mythologist is condemned to live in a theoretical sociality; for him, to be in society is, at best, to be truthful: his utmost sociality dwells in his utmost morality. His connection with the world is of the order of sarcasm."27 And although in the introduction Barthes suggested that in a consumer culture sarcasm may well be "the condition of truth" (ibid., 12), in his conclusion he clearly saw its limitations. This became more evident in a later essay titled "Change the Object Itself." In it Barthes reviewed his earlier theory of myth and concluded that nothing about French society had fundamentally changed, so that
For a critique of Barthes along these lines see Eugene Goodheart, "The Myths of Roland," Partisan Review, 47 (1980), 199-212. 27Mythologies,157.
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"the mythical still abounds, just as anonymous and slippery, fragmented and garrulous, available both for ideological criticism and semiological dismantling."28Yet in the intervening years he perceived that demystification itself had become a "common sense" orthodoxy and indeed had developed its own mythology. The decipherment of myths no longer represented an adequate strategy. Instead he suggested that the object itself must be transformed, although he provided no clue as to how this might be done. He explained that "the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning."29 Here Barthes's eloquence hardly disguised his inability to visualize how to progress from demystification to a more positive program for the nonmythological reconstruction of culture. IV. Sorel and Barthes lived uneasy careers as intellectuals. Both sons of the bourgeoisie, they vigorously attacked the bourgeoisie throughout their work. Sorel presented the case of an anti-intellectual intellectual fascinated with myth and violence as a means of overcoming the stranglehold intellectuals exercised on politics and culture. Barthes did not exhibit this powerful double alienation (from society and from himself), but he did recognize what the estrangementresulting from his emphasis on myth cost him in terms of his ability to enjoy the world. Both Sorel and Barthes ultimately arrived at an impasse, one over finding a truly revolutionary myth, the other over dismantling bourgeois myth. By 1908 or 1909 Sorel realized the myth of the general strike did not have the effect he once attributed to it, nor did the syndicates maintain a purely apolitical orientation. His subsequent search for myth carried him to the far right and left ends of the European ideological spectrum, first with an ambivalent association with integral nationalism and the Action Frangaise before World War I, and then as an ardent defender of Bolshevism, which he misinterpreted as a movement establishing soviets, or self-governing groups of producers, under the charismatic leadership of Lenin. Barthes, too, realized by the 1970s that his earlier study of myth no longer bore the weight of his original anti-bourgeois impulse, and in his last decade he concentrated on more literary and aesthetic subjects. To some extent the contradiction between Sorel's and Barthes's formulations of myth rested in the semantic use of the terms "ideology" and "myth."30Sorel used "ideology" to refer to the justification for the activities of a particular group or class. An ideology articulated these justifications into a reasonably coherent system of thought that had an appearance of universality. The appearance of universality, as opposed
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 166. 29Ibid., 167. 30 Ben Halpern, "Myth and Ideology in Modern Usage," History and Theory,2 (1961), 129-49.
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to arguments from pure self-interest, helped legitimate the group's activities and also reflected the level of self-confidence of the group. Sorel followed Marx's argument that the ideology of the dominant class functioned as the society's ideology. His book Les Illusions du Progres examined the ideology of progress that accompanied the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though Barthes found the projection of universality not in an ideology of progress but in more fragmentary messages that erased the history of objects and relationships, one can see the parallels between Sorel's concept of ideology and Barthes's concept of myth. Barthes implied that myths helped solidify bourgeois ideology and gave it the appearance of uncontestability. In Sorel's work, however, ideology simply lacked the motive force of more intuitively apprehended myths. This more than anything else differentiated their theories of myth. Sorel's fascination with, and Barthes's antipathy toward, myth also reflected the different intellectual climates of the late nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries. Sorel reacted against the extreme version of positivism that dominated French intellectual life for much of the nineteenth century. Other thinkers throughout Europe revolted against the idea that an exact science of society could account for all human actions and began to reevaluate the importance of irrational motivations and practices heretofore ignored. Thus historians have placed Sorel in the broader "revolt Barthes, however, against reason" afoot in the late nineteenth century.31 could not ignore the glorification of the irrational, of violence, and of myth by the European fascist movements. Ernst Cassirer reflected the shift in attitudes toward myth in a book published just after World War II in which he described myth as a primitive anachronism, banished but always waiting for a opportunity to subvert the rational organization of society.32Barthes saw Poujade as a lightening rod for contemporary myth and the potential leader of a revivified fascist movement. While Barthes considered contemporary myth a very sophisticated rather than primitive phenomenon and not at all an anachronism, he too perceived it negatively. Barthes's preoccupation with demystification placed him closer than Sorel to the concerns of current American political science, which generally uses the term "myth" to refer to a widely held illusion. A popular introductory college textbook on American politics begins by listing several myths such as "the American way is the only democratic way" or "a ruling few dictate policy in America." The authors claim that these myths distort reality and hinder people's understanding of politics. They conclude their brief survey of political myths by writing, "by the time
Stuart Hughes, Consciousnessand Society (New York, 1958); Horowitz; S. P. Rouanet, "Irrationalism and Myths in Georges Sorel," Review of Politics, 26 (1964), 4569. 32 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946), 279-80.
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we have examined the actual conduct of American government, we hope the reader will be able to replace a misconception with an understanding more rooted in reality."33The textbook implies that if every citizen received a proper introduction to politics, then myths would lose their force, and gradually disappear. Political activity would become more rational and more susceptible to further logical analysis by political scientists. This study has attempted to show that myths are a more complex and significant entity than sometimes assumed; and, they are also, as Barthes might advise the political scientists, much more intractable. Queens College, Charlotte, N.C.

33 Marian Irish, James Prothro, Richard Richardson, The Politics of American Democracy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1977), 8.