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.

Reflections on a haircut

When I arrived at the philosophy program at Boston College, I noticed that an unusual number of men associated with the department—both graduate students and professors—groomed themselves in one of two distinct styles, both of which struck me as somehow more “philosophical.”

The first was to allow one’s beard to grow long and unkempt. Unlike the unkempt beards I had seen on undergraduates at NCSU, this was not a token of laziness or disregard for one’s personal appearance. The individuals wearing beards were otherwise impeccably well-groomed, and oftentimes found in class wearing suits. I came to call this look “The Socrates.”

The second look was to be completely clean-shaven, and wear one’s hair gelled back and up, in order to create the illusion that one’s head was several inches taller than it really was. I called this “The Derrida.” My hair was kind of already going in that direction, and I thought it looked like a good, modern look for a man in a philosophy program, so this is the style I adopted.

(After finishing up at BC, I wore my hair down with a loose part for several months. I never really liked it, so I’m back to The Derrida, or the “Wall Street hair” as one of my coworkers calls it.)

Having formulated these observations, I recently enjoyed reading Barthes’ “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre” in his Mythologies collection:

The Abbé Pierre’s haircut, obviously devised so as to reach a neutral equilibrium between short hair (an indispensable convention if one does not want to be noticed) and unkempt hair (a state suitable to express contempt for other conventions), thus becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness...

For among priests, it is no due to chance whether one is bearded or not; beards are chiefly the attribute of missionaries or Capuchins, they cannot but signify apostleship and poverty... Shaven priests are supposed to be more temporal, bearded ones more evangelical...

Barthes worries about the overconsumption of these signs, in place of true justice and charity. I think this is a legitimate concern. But I have also noticed that in our socially constructed world, truth must come with a little bit of rhetoric in order to find a foothold.

What does all this have to do with technology? Consider the industrial design explosion of the last decade. There are quite a lot of individuals who find it all a lot of fuss with no substance. If your box works well, who cares what it looks like? These are the folks who would never buy an iPod, because you would have to be an idiot to shell out for one when you can get a player that has more storage space for less.

But the market disagrees with the theory that an iPod is worth less than a SanDisk. The iPod signals to others, among other things, an appreciation for Apple products, for fashion, and for modern design. Your choice of mp3 player may not play a role in determining your identity, but it does play a considerable role in communicating your identity. It has value, in short, as a Barthesian myth.

If you need confirmation of this theory, just count how many times in a day your friends and coworkers emote—either in disgust or appreciation—at the personal appearances, affections, and possessions of people they don’t know, or know only marginally. The things we surround ourselves with have utility not merely in pursuing our individual tele, but in pursuing our goals as social actors, as well. This is common sense, but too often disappears from discussions of an artifact’s utility as such.