Page 61 - Studio International - July August 1975

an axe. The axe and the hammer may be actual conditions of existence. For However, the naturalness of the world
said to belong to the same object system example, Marx declared that the belief ostensibly open before the camera is a
within which, in spite of their common to both factory owner and deceit. Objects present to the camera
similarities, they are differentiated factory worker that labour may fairly are already in use in the production of
according to observable characteristics : be bought for wages is a mystification. meanings, and photography has no
bluntness on the one hand, sharpness The illusion conceals the fact that, as the choice but to operate upon such
on the other. These characteristics are at value of a commodity depends on the meanings. There is, then, a
once the signs of their actual or potential labour invested in it, the owner is 'pre-photographic' stage in the
use and the trace of man's activity upon appropriating as profit what belongs by photographic production of meaning
them. Obviously they are no longer mere right to the labourer: profits are unpaid which must be accounted for.
fragments of rock. Although remaining wages. Where such a conception is The contradictory impulses of man to
substantially identical they are now embedded in the prevailing ideology, it semanticize objects and to camouflage
formally differentiated, they have taken will also be embodied in prevalent forms his communicative intention is a
on a meaning. Moreover, all previously of language. It is common, for instance, dominant theme in much of Roland
`mute' stones in the environment are now to speak of people 'making money' out of Barthes' writing. In Mythologies
overlain with projected significance. speculation in stocks or currency. These Barthes presents a Marxist-inspired
This one is hard in a certain way, say people do not make money in any literal critique of the collective representations —
obsidian, and is 'good for axes'; this one sense: that is the business of the Royal photography, shows, cooking, reporting,
is hard and heavy, say granite, and Mint. And neither do they create etc. — of bourgeois society. The
`good for hammers'; another is soft and wealth. which is done by those bourgeoisie, 'the social class which does
powdery, pumice, and 'good for engaged in productive labour. The not want to be named', presents its
scouring'. expression 'making money' therefore ideology, here called 'myth', as nature.
Differences imposed upon material presents as a mystification, as a sort of Barthes attempts a systematic
substances are trans-formed in sound. knack of conjuring money out of the air, demystification of this 'nature',
The variants bluntness and sharpness the less utterable fact that wealth is systematic because myth according to
become designated by conventions of again merely being appropriated. Barthes is a system of communication, a
sound variation. Humanly produced form. It would be irrelevant, therefore, to
cries, themselves at first brute physical attempt to differentiate mythical objects
`sound substances', become here the Forms of artefacts, as much as forms on the basis of their substance. The very
word 'blunt', there the word 'sharp'. of language, serve to communicate notion of 'mythical object' is unfounded
Material production and language ideologies. If clothing were simply without knowledge of the system within
production both stem from the same functional then it is unlikely we would which it serves; thus . there are formal
need to order the environment. The see either the static uniformity of dress limits to myth, there are no substantial
human labourer must learn how to in People's China or the dynamic ones . .. every object in the world can
differentiate and compose his materials. uniformity of dress in the King's Road. pass from a closed, silent existence to an
He must learn how to form what is Each ostensibly functional material oral state, open to appropriation by
society.'7
natural (the stone, his cries) into what item which appears in the world is
is cultural (the axe, the word). Language classified as an object variant and One of the examples Barthes gives of
is an artefact amongst other artefacts, integrated into an object system. The mythical speech is that of a Paris-Match
an instrument amongst other instruments greater the range of object variants the cover showing a young Negro, dressed
by which man organizes his environment. richer the semantic possibilities (more in French uniform and giving a military
It is a tool used to perform a certain class is 'said' with motor-cars in the West than salute, his eyes uplifted, . . no doubt
of operations in the environment. It is in the East). It is not simply a matter of fixed on a fold of the tricolour'. Barthes
however a doubly privileged tool; not only `status symbols', a notion as ambiguous observes that the literal meaning of the
providing the means of socializing all as it is ubiquitous. The total ideology image is indisputable : it is that a Negro
instrumental operations but also of a society is imprinted in its is giving the French salute. 'But whether
providing the means of constructing production and consumption of material naively or not, I see very'well what it
those abstractions which locate these objects. Even the natural landscape is signifies to me: that France is a great
operations within a culture. appropriated by ideology, being rendered, Empire, that all her sons, without any
In the very moment of their being in anthropocentric perception, colour discrimination, faithfully serve
perceived, objects are placed within an `beautiful' or 'hostile' or 'picturesque'. under her flag, and that there is no better
intelligible system of relationships (no All that constitutes reality for us is, answer to the detractors of an alleged
reality can be innocent before the camera). then, impregnated with meanings. These colonialism than the zeal shown by this
They take their position, that is to say, meanings are the contingent products of Negro in serving his so-called
within an ideology. By ideology we mean, history and in sum reflect our ideology. oppressors.'
in its broadest sense, a complex of We may acknowledge this in an act of
propositions about the natural and social theoretical reflection, but not at the
world which would be generally accepted moment of perception. As Stephen Here, it is as if the natural meaning
in a given society as describing the Heath has put it: 'At the level of were drained from the image. Converted
actual, indeed necessary, nature of the absolute acceptance meaning, into mere vacant form, it now serves to
world and its events. An ideology is the paradoxically, would be everywhere receive an ideological content. But even
sum of taken-for-granted realities of and nowhere : everywhere in the perfect in the instant we make this observation
everyday life; the pre-given clarity of the immediately and always the literal meaning returns. Just as when
determinations of individual intelligible reality, nowhere in that this driving I cannot focus simultaneously on
consciousness; the common frame of reality is lived as immediacy, as the windscreen and the landscape I
reference for the projection of isomorphically simultaneous with can see beyond it, neither can I grasp
individual actions. Ideology takes an Reality, in a manner which reduces the simultaneously the literal meaning and
infinite variety of forms; what is process of knowledge to one of recognition'.6 its ideological motivation: these are
essential about it is that it is contingent caught in a constant 'turnstile'. 'The
and that within it the fact of its contingency This distancing of the subject from a meaning will be for the form like an
is suppressed. separate and neutral reality, in what instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed
Husserl called the 'natural attitude', is richness, which it is possible to call
magnified when the world is viewed and dismiss in a sort of rapid
It is in this taking-for-granted as through a lens. Compressed against the alternation ... It is this constant game
natural and immutable that which is viewing screen into a single plane, of hide-and-seek between the meaning
historical and contingent that we chopped by the viewfinder into neat and the form which defines myth." The
encounter ideology in the classic Marxist rectangles, the world is even more likely literal meaning, Barthes says, serves as
sense. In this sense the essence of to be experienced as remote and inert `alibi' to the myth.
ideology is that it represents the (news cameramen have been killed by `Alibi', 'turnstile', 'hide-and-seek',
individual's 'false consciousness' of his their 'shot' of a soldier pointing a gun). this heaping of metaphors to hold down
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