Myths and big pictures

I recently finished Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Early in “Myth Today,” the meaty text that comprises the last third of the book, Barthes gives a rigorous and brilliant semiotic analysis of the unique, multi-layered form of representation that he calls myth.

Mythologies is a thin book at just 159 pages, but it took me five years to read. For most of that time, I had it lying around the house or stuffed in my backpack. If I was bored, I might read one of the book’s numerous short essays, in which Barthes makes all sorts of clever observations about the contemporary world. A couple of months ago, I resolved to work my way through “Myth Today,” where he makes explicit the theory underpinning his critique of culture.

After carefully disassembling the mechanisms of our everyday myths, Barthes does away with restraint in order to make a series of far-reaching Marxist claims about French culture. In the age after Popper, this kind of analysis—presented without so much as an acknowledgment of controversy—comes off as poorly justified, even naïve.

Extravagance is a weakness of Continental philosophy in general. The genius of Hegel was in recognizing that logic is historical: the negation of an idea is a time-bound act that results in a new form of consciousness; it can no more be reversed than the shattering of a glass. The madness of Hegel was in positing that history is logical, that the events of the French Revolution, for instance, were a priori inevitable.

The reaction of the analytic philosophers to Continental philosophy—and to the excesses of Hegel in particular—was to cut to the bone, stripping away speculative reasoning in favor of a rigor and clarity that pretends to the accuracy of mathematics. But if they got rid of the fat, they also git rid of the meat. Analytics write with extraordinary precision but very little consequence.

We must find a way to take the better insights of our philosophers and apply them to broader concerns in ways that don’t come off as silly. I see an opportunity here for naturalistic philosophy. For instance, is there a way to operationalize Barthes’ claim that late-20th century France was a bourgeois society? Or that left-wing political speech tends to be a poor vehicle for mythological linguistic structures?

Barthes the sociologist seems to recognize this potential himself when he laments, near the end of “Myth Today,” the lack of an “analytical sociology of the press” as a basis for exploring the spread of myth.