The Mythological Order of Sarcasm

We're back to our regular format this week and continuing our unpacking of Roland Barthes' Mythologies; specifically, signification, the mythologist, and the reader of myths, as well as laying the methodology for how we’re going to be looking at utopia as a philosophical or socio-political ‘strategy.’ We take a look at the signs "the Party of Lincoln" and "MAGA" and, having done so, I could really go for some of "the good French Wine" right about now.

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Barthes, Roland. 2012. Mythologies 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang.

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 9: The Mythological Order of Sarcasm

Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed the previous episode’s departure from our regular format. Presuming you did – and based on some early feedback, it sounds that way – I’m looking forward to doing so again, once I figure out the who, when, and where. 

I’m sure some of you noticed, this episode was like a week late. Just to give you an update on things going on on my end, the number of voiceover auditions coming my way recently almost doubled. Between that and trying to market both my VO work and this podcast, it’s stretched my time a little thin. Since I don’t want to give the podcast any less attention than it deserves, and I don’t think it’s going to be particularly fruitful to try to scale the content down, I’m going to move, at least for a while, into a bi-weekly format. Should things either pivot on the VO side (so I don’t have to audition as much for as much booked work), or should the volume of auditions just fall off again, we may go back to weekly. 

Dragoncon is coming up soon, so photos and hijinks shall be coming to my Instagram. 

If you want to keep up with any of that, check out PhilosphyvsWork.buzzsprout.com. I have links to all of my socials on the webpage. You can follow on Facebook or Instagram, and, despite the fact that Elon Musk makes my skin crawl, I do post updates on X from time to time. 

Today though we’re going to dip back into Roland Barthes, semiotics, and myth as a type of speech and try to set up basically the methodology for how we’re going to be looking at utopia as a philosophical or socio-political ‘strategy.’ 

First though, I need to fill in an oversight on my part in that I never addressed why, especially in Philosophy where the coining of new terms (like Dasein, or Governmentality, or Semiotics, or Neoliberalism, and so on) is fairly common, why Barthes uses an already established word like “mythology;” especially given his whole analysis of second order signs. 

Well, simply put, because he wants to retain the weight that the word myth carries. If you think about mythology, at its root, it’s a story that tries to explain the world – why do we have evil? Well, because of Pandora’s Box. Or consider creation myths, or allegories about justice or hard work. Or take gravity for example; whereas science seeks to establish a theory to explain gravity, myth can ‘explain’ gravity through Aphrodite – and, yes, as the goddess of attraction, gravity was also in her purview. Myth, like science, after a fashion, tells a story (and there’s a whole other topic for consideration in how humanity is given to understand the world through stories) but unlike science, the aim of myth is to naturalize, to eternalize, the subject of the myth. And the same is true for semiological myth. 

 So, as a quick review of the important parts from Episode 7, Barthes is following linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as far as the basis of his semiological system: signifier (mental image) + Signified (the concept of the thing) = sign (the word, for Saussure, or the ‘thing,’ the subject of the analysis, for Barthes, as Barthes is concerned with the broad-spectrum semiotics of culture rather than the semiotics of language specifically – the whole, ‘I’m trying to define things, not words’). The meaning of the sign is determined historically, not naturally. We don’t call a dog a dog because it somehow is naturally “dog,” those that call a dog a dog do so because as the language developed the word dog became the agreed upon word for that animal. 

Another example Barthes uses is a bouquet of roses as a sign of one’s passion for another. There’s nothing about a bouquet of roses, or any token for that matter, that means, naturally, one’s passions for another. One could just as easily give their partner a stack of papers or a handful of rocks, but for the sign of the token to mean one’s passions, it must be recognized by the other as such a sign. Just like the meaning of the sign “dog” in linguistics. 

When it comes to myth though, Barthes points to meaning following a second order semiological system. So, you still have the principal signifier + signified = sign, but that sign, which had been characterized as meaning, now characterized as form, is combined with another signified, another concept, and becomes another sign, a signification. Myth is a kind of speech where the sign is not simply what something means. The principal meaning is held in reserve and can be called upon by the speaker at need. 

Another little bit that we didn’t really touch on, but bears a passing glance at is the idea of indexicality – the ability to literally point at a dog (or an image of a dog) and say that is a dog (or that is blue, or that is hot, or that is running, etc.). Now, this doesn’t have much bearing on what we went over last time, but plays a role in writing and reading myths. 

To put it another way, it’s one thing to refer to “a” dog when uttering the sign “man’s best friend,” but its another thing entirely to try to refer to a specific dog, to that dog as “man’s best friend.” More on this later, for now though it’s just something to keep in mind. 

Now, last time we had gone over the first two terms of the myth; the form and the concept, so now we’ll address the third term, the signification. As with the principal semiotic system, this third term is again the association of the first two terms. So, signifier (form) + signified (concept, again) = signification. This signification is myth, and the purpose of myth, as a type of speech, is not to hide, but to distort. 

Where in the first order, the meaning of the signifier is mental – the mental image of a tree, for example, that when combined with the concept of a tree, is the word, “tree” – the meaning of the mythical signifier, sticking with the sign “tree” for a moment, is an already extant sign, not a mental image, it is the word “tree” or a photograph of a tree, in, say, an advertisement for Subaru or REI. 

The ad isn’t for trees, it’s for a car or for sporting goods, but the tree in the ad connotes a certain environment, a lifestyle, preferably happy memories, etc., the associative relations of the concept. Rather than being merely the concept of a tree, in this case the concept functions through memory. The ad-writer’s intent is to draw-up from the audience a positive affect so that they associate positive feelings with the advertised product. It doesn’t matter how they feel about the product in the ad, what matters is that the tree makes them feel positively about the ad; so, if and when they later consider the product, the product is paired with the positive association imparted by the tree. Or better yet, maybe they hadn’t been considering sporting goods at all, but the image got them thinking about fond memories of camping as a child, and now they are thinking about the sporting goods they would need to purchase if they wanted to go camping again, and the solution is right in front of them. Problem, I don’t have camping supplies; solution, REI does. 

Granted, another way to read this is that the real problem is that I didn’t have the problem of not having camping supplies before. This alternative reading begins to get us to the task presented to us by myth. I can, of course, be a reader of myths, a consumer, or I can pass from the role of reader to that of mythologist – a task that I should note is not too unlike that of Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s genealogical method. Rather than trying to narrowly analyze a concept or ideology, such as say morality or governmentality, this method seeks to analyze the full history and scope of the concept, which also serves to highlight the is/ought distinctions within the analysis. For example, rather than rationally analyzing the validity of ‘it is moral to follow the instructions of an authority figure, such as a parent or a police officer,’ a genealogical analysis begins with questioning how did we get authority figures in the first place? What grants them authority? Who grants them authority? Ought that authority exist? If that authority is or ought be false, then how can it be moral to follow those instructions? And so on. 

Barthes thinks of the meaning and the form of the mythic signifier as in a kind of constant rotation, he uses the metaphor of a “rapidly alternating turnstile.” At one moment the signification of the tree is the meaning (tree) and the next it is the form (the memories and associative relations). The one is the alibi of the other. Passing from reader to mythologist requires interrupting this rotation in order to focus on each separately and in turn, to “apply… a static method of deciphering, in short, [one] must go against [myth’s] own dynamics…”

The intent of myth is to make the signification appear natural rather than historical.

Sticking with the tree in our imaginary ad, the intent is to naturalize, to make eternal, the association of the reader’s memory of trees not solely with trees, but with the ad, and thus with the car or the camping supplies. Or, to use our earlier example of “the party of Lincoln,” to de-historicize the modern Republican party and present instead a signification of “Republican” that is and always has been “Lincoln.” Myth, as speech, is a theft (an appropriation) and a restoration. The image of the tree and the “Party of Lincoln” are, as myths, a theft and a restoration of meaning, but the returned meaning is no longer the same. 

Once upon a time, in the late 90s/early 2000s, I worked for Belk selling men’s clothing. The location I worked for was barely 20 minutes from the South Carolina border and a semi-permanent flea market, which made our location a constant target for theft and scams. Sure, we had shoplifters like everyone else, but when I say theft, I mean people that would plan to hit the store first thing in the morning while it was open but most of the staff was still busy putting up new merchandise and verifying invoices and whatnot. One parking lot facing entrance opened into men’s furnishings – dress shirts and ties, and wallets, socks, underwear, basically anything to be worn with a suit – and kitchenware/small appliances. There was a similar entrance downstairs that opened into, depending on the season, women’s coats or something else. Security was pretty well prepared for, and pretty good at busting shoplifters. But these entrances got hit a couple of times by someone parking out front, having a partner run in, grab an armload of whatever they could carry, and run back out. A lot still eventually got caught by local police since the cameras in the parking lot would grab the license plate. But for the rest, most of the stolen merch wound up at that flea market. 

Okay, bear with me, this really does relate to myth and theft and restoration. 

So, while those thefts were rare, they did result in two very common scams that were often rare to prove. As I recall, in most cases the police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest the scammer and they just wound up banned, often then later getting arrested for trespassing when they tried the scam again. 

What they would do is either a. buy merch on the cheap at the flea market with the Belk tags still on it, then head to Belk and return it – which was super easy, the company was a lay down for returns (I even had a manager at one point that insisted I take a return on a baja (one of those rough woolen hoodie pullovers that everyone had in the 90s) that had to be at least 5 years old and wreaked of cigarette smoke, and other stuff, because they had a price tag for a sweater that had clearly just been pulled off something else – I have no idea if she ever dealt with any repercussions for that, but security had a lot of questions for me about it) – or, b. similar to the baja incident, the scammer would grab some merch at the flea market and use the Belk tags to try to return a bunch of stuff that was clearly a brand we never sold – likely more merch picked up from the flea market. 

See? It relates! The mythical signification functions kind of like these return scams. The real article was stolen and the return is a fraud. 

Another thing to keep in mind, back in the first order, in language, the sign is arbitrary. A tree isn’t called a tree because of some natural, eternal tree-being. It’s called a tree because that was the agreed upon sign as the language developed. Once agreed upon though, once a sign, tree can be used to refer to trees generally or a particular tree specifically. In contrast, the sign “the Party of Lincoln” is indexical. It points to that political party of a specific time, place, ideology, and leadership. Taken individually, the words, as signs, not only remain arbitrary but massively ambiguous – much like uttering “tree” and pointing to an entire forest – history and context, the associative relations, determine the meaning of “the Party of Lincoln” as a sign. 

As an example, if you were in a restaurant and the host or hostess called for “Lincoln, party of 5,” someone may make a joke about the party of Lincoln, but no one would mistake the diners for the Republican party. 

Now, Barthes does also note that the arbitrariness of even the language sign has limits, namely, these associative relations, as with presenting a gift of a stack of papers to represent one’s passions for another, the language sign can’t be purely arbitrary or language would be impossible. Conversely, the mythical signification is never arbitrary. 

Barthes also here speaks of the reader of myths, but I think its critical to skip ahead a little and get to the section he titles, “Reading and Deciphering Myths.” Barthes states, “How is myth received? We must here come back to the duplicity of its signifier which is at once meaning and form. I can produce three different types of reading by focusing on one, or the other, or both at the same time.”

Sidenote, I have to wonder if the use of “duplicity” is a weakness of translation, as Barthes earlier notes that myth isn’t a lie (or an erasure), it’s a distortion. So, as I read this, I’m inclined more towards reading “duplicity” as being a double nature, rather than the common American English use as a lie or falsehood.

These three modes of reading take the following forms:

1. Focusing on the empty signifier, allowing the concept to fill myth’s form without ambiguity, reading it as a simple system, wherein the signifier is once again literal: Lincoln as example and symbol of Republican-ness. This is the producer of myths; “the journalist who starts with a concept and seeks a form for it.”
2. Focusing on the full signifier, clearly distinguishing between meaning and form, and thus the distortion they impose upon each other. This reading undoes the signification, receiving the form (the signifier in the second order) as “imposture” (as an act of fraud, the deception of a con presenting under a false identity – presenting myself as “Bob” changes nothing about me, what it changes is your reading of me). Lincoln becomes the alibi of the Republican. This is the mythologist that deciphers the myth, understands the distortion. 
3. Focusing on the mythical signifier as a “inextricable whole made of meaning and form.” The receiver of “an ambiguous signification.” This reading responds “to the constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics.” Lincoln is neither example, nor symbol, nor alibi, but the essence and presence of American Exceptionalism; and, if Republicans are the Party of Lincoln, then it follows that they too are what it means to be American. This is the reader of myths. 
   
   

Interestingly, its only the reader whose relationship to myth is dynamic. The first two, Barthes notes, are “static, analytical; they destroy the myth either by making its intention obvious or by unmasking it.” 

The reader of myths takes myth at face value. The mythologist stops the turnstile, interrogates the meaning and the form in their turn, and denies the naturalization, reintroducing the history and the meaning of the signifiers. The mythologist denies the writer of myths their appropriation of the concept. The ad for the car or camping supplies doesn’t provide a solution for the problem, it provides the problem. The party of Lincoln is not the modern Republican party, nor was the party of Lincoln innocent, natural, or eternal. And this is where the rubber hits the road so to speak. Once recognized as myth, the final “element of signification [that] remains to be examined” is motivation.

Notes Barthes, “We know that in a language the sign is arbitrary: nothing compels the acoustic image tree “naturally” to mean the concept tree: the sign, here, is unmotivated.” On the other hand, the presence of the tree in the ad is absolutely motivated. There was an active choice to use that particular image for the ad, perhaps even to use that particular tree. Consider, rather than a car or camping supplies ad, it’s an ad for jewelry. The ad presents no images of jewelry, just an elderly couple walking arm in arm, receding into the distance, while in the foreground we get an image of a large, old tree with a faded but still strongly legible inscription of some initials in a heart. This image is loaded with signifiers and signification, but to be a mythologist here is to, 1. Recognize the image is an alibi. Romance, commitment, nostalgia, etc., this is an ad for jewelry, these concepts are somewhere else, they only come to the myth-image in reading it and drawing those associations from memory. And that 2. What the image, as myth, is an alibi for isn’t romance or commitment, but consumerism. It’s an attempt to sell something playing dress up as romance. 

In fact, given the ubiquity of advertising in daily life, it’s not at all uncommon for an ad to lack entirely the product being sold, or for the product to take a back seat to the content of the rest of the ad. Or, take for example, the somewhat recent Dunkin Donuts Superbowl ad with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Jennifer Lopez. The now classic 80s ad campaign, ‘time to make the donuts’ is loaded with donuts, but the Affleck ad is loaded with branding. Dunkin’s presence is impossible to miss, but the point of the ad isn’t donuts. Its basically a comedic short film parodying middle age, 90s hip hop, Boston and New York, and so on. The point isn’t to make anyone crave donuts, and certainly not to emphasize how fresh Dunkin’s donuts are, but to implant in the viewer a positive association with Dunkin so that the next time they are craving a donut or a cup of coffee, their first thought is Dunkin. 

Now, to really understand the mythic signification, one has to look into the motive. In the case of an ad, it’s pretty straight forward, to sell some product or service, even if the product or service have no place in the myth itself. Motivation gives the imposture away. Finding the motivation for the myth pulls the curtain back, it reveals the Great Wizard is just a Huckster, a Trickster, a con man.

I’m also reminded of a couple of lines from Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, the Wizard’s Fifth Rule, “Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.” Or the Wizard’s First Rule, People are stupid. They will believe a lie either because they are afraid it’s true or they want it to be true. To some extent, both of these ‘rules’ could be applied to myth, but, take that with a grain of salt. They’re the bumper sticker version really, blunt and over-generalizing, like trying to do surgery with a hammer. 

Also, this is putting aside that Goodkind may not be an ideal citation source. By all accounts I’ve come across, he was apparently kind of a dick to his fans and shit talked the same genre he was writing in as well as other authors, or that he was a self-described objectivist and how deeply problematic that is – hyper short version, objectivism is a belief system posing as philosophy, basically, the philosophical equivalent of pseudo-science, established by novelist Ayn Rand, and established through works of fiction rather than philosophical argument, so she never has to defend its soundness or validity, that cherry picks premises from phenomenology, existentialism, and political libertarianism and warps them to the purpose of defending profound selfishness as the highest morality and regulation-free anarcho-capitalism as the social embodiment of objectivist values. If you hate the rest of humanity and think psychopathy is good for society because psychopaths happen to make “good” CEOs, you may like objectivism. 

Moving on. 

Critical to myth, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t the producer of myths or the mythologist, but the reader, the consumer. Myth can’t function without the dynamic relationship of the reader. If the reader were to read myth, as Barthes states, “innocently,” taking it at face value but not engaging with it, or critically, as does the mythologist, then there’s no point in it. To paraphrase Barthes and stick with the Lincoln example, if the reader doesn’t see heroism and Americanness in Lincoln, then there was no point weighting it with the additional concept; conversely, if the reader does see it, “the myth is nothing more than a political proposition, honestly expressed. In one word, either the intention of the myth is too obscure to be efficacious or it is too clear to be believed.” To use the sign “the Party of Lincoln” as myth it needs to remain ambiguous. 

The Lincoln Project is explicitly political, they’re not using the image of Lincoln to hide anything about their agenda. But they do use Lincoln as myth in terms of what they don’t say, or rather, what they don’t need to say; “we’re the real Republicans.” They also gain advantage in their message by the very faction of the party they’re opposed to. 

Let’s do a quick Philosophy 101 exercise, a little propositional logic, the good old syllogism, if (A and B) then C.

Premise A. The Republican Party is the party that stands for justice, freedom, and the constitution. 

Premise B. Abraham Lincoln is the exemplar of a Republican. 

Conclusion: To be like Abraham Lincoln, is therefore to be for justice, freedom, and the constitution.

Now, as for whether or not that conclusion is true… Is A true? Yes/No. Is B true? Yes/No. If A and B are true, then C is a sound and valid conclusion. 

From which, you can draw the implied, secondary conclusion:

Trump/MAGA claim the Republican Party is the party that stands for justice, freedom, and the constitution. The Lincoln Project also makes this claim, but they claim Trump/MAGA is false. If the claim about the Republican party is true, and Lincoln is the exemplar of a Republican, then it would appear that Trump/MAGA must be false. 

Now, of course that’s not actually true on any count. Even though it takes the form of a valid proposition, it’s not sound. There’s a logical fallacy in both premises in that referring to Trump, the Republican Party, and Lincoln are all appeals to authority. For any of the above to be true, one actually has to argue how and why they do in fact stand for justice, freedom, and the constitution. 

Myth, needs make no such claim. Myth is a totally different kind of speech from a proposition. Myth relies on the associative relations made by the reader in encountering myth. Even more so than the sign “the Party of Lincoln,” the sign “Make America Great Again” relies completely on the associative relations of the reader. Hop on YouTube and check out a clip of Jordan Klepper asking Trump supporters about MAGA and they all have different ‘definitions’ of what it means. The signifier is completely empty, and so those that speak “MAGA” can fill it with whatever they need to make their point. 

That said, we need to dig a little more into the idea that what myth does is transform history into nature – now, when Barthes refers to this “principle function” he doesn’t mean history like a school subject, it’s not limited to ‘the past’ in a literal sense, like, the literal Lincoln; he means that which is determined historically (speech, language, words, etc., in other words, meaning) being transformed into something which comes from nature – the actual blade of grass vs the word “grass.” The function of myth is to transform the word into the thing by naturalizing the concept. 

I’m going to cite Barthes next example nearly in full here, as I think it’s incredibly relevant today as far as economic conditions and political rhetoric, seriously, the words barely need to be changed and it could be dropped directly into the current campaign discourse. Quote: 

Here is a new example which will help with understanding clearly how the myth reader is led to rationalize the signified by means of the signifier. We are in the month of July, I read a big headline in the France-Soir: THE FALL IN PRICES: FIRST INDICATIONS. VEGETABLES: PRICE DROP BEGINS. Let us quickly sketch the semiological schema: the example being a sentence, the first system is purely linguistic. The second system is composed here of a … number of accidents, some lexical (the words: first, begins, the [fall]), some typographical (enormous headlines where the reader usually sees news of world importance.) … The signification of the myth follows clearly from this: fruit and vegetable prices are falling because the government has so decided. Now, it so happens in this case (and this is on the whole fairly rare) that the newspaper itself has, two lines below, allowed one to see through the myth which it has just elaborated – whether this is due to self-assurance or honesty. It adds (in small type, it is true): ‘The fall in prices is helped by the return of seasonal abundance.”

Now, to be fair, the form the newspaper article takes may not translate quite as well to modern America, but the form of the myth would work just as well and in the same way. It would likely be dramatically more effective in modern America due to the transformation of the mediascape to a massively diffuse one focused on headlines, soundbites, and rapid consumption. The myth functions because all the reader receives is the headline, to which they draw conclusions from their associative relations – and this example is just a single dimension myth, recall, text is linear and an image is multidimensional (a picture speaks a thousand words, so to speak).

Only a few weeks ago the AP reported inflation was below zero – prices actually fell for the period being tracked, the Fed is expected to start dropping interest rates at their next meeting, the only question being how much and how frequently, and just the other day, July 30th, NPR reported consumer sentiment was positive for the first time since January. By every traditional economic indicator – stock market, employment, wages, inflation, the US economy is booming. Yet to hear any politician on either side, and any talking head on Fox, the economy is somewhere between struggling and collapsing outright. Personally, my take on this is that the traditional indicators are flawed – not wrong, just flawed – they’re the wrong indicators. The indicators are based on a successful, capitalist economy, and by those terms the economy is a booming success. The stock market (which was always speculative, and now based entirely on investor sentiment and short term profit harvesting rather than real assets and revenue of any given company) and corporate profits are booming, the personal wealth of the owners of those stocks and companies is soaring, unemployment is low and wages are rising (though upwards of half the jobs are meaningless and/or unfulfilling and wages haven’t been anywhere remotely close to either productivity or cost of living for 40 years – look up the Great Decoupling for more information on this phenomenon). Now, Info-tainment like Fox News can more easily wield myth stating something like ‘the economy is in the toilet’ than the Wall Street Journal, despite also being conservative, can drop a headline ‘the economy is booming’ because the pain and anxiety people are currently feeling is the more readily accessed associative relation. Social media can wield myth more easily still, it’s literally baked into their operational model. They need the information distributed in snippets, and they need you to have quick, emotional, associative relations to the content in order to remain on the platform in order to shove more advertising in your face. It’s hard enough for the reader to be a mythologist and try to decipher the myth without also having to overcome their own fears and anxieties. Fear and cognitive biases can do wonders to empower myth. 

Circling back to Barthes, here’s a critical distinction. Myth is not propaganda. Propaganda is overt, in your face, it makes no pretense at being anything other than what it is – even if the producer of propaganda lies about its nature and tries to hawk it off as news or journalism. Both are motivated, but myth is passive, it needs the reader to draw the conclusions, whereas propaganda actively aims at shaping beliefs and motivating further action. 

Regarding the France-Soir headline, “The Fall in Prices…” immediately leads into economic data, presenting the association, ‘the government is bringing prices under control’ as the cause of the price drop; but the following article belies the association by revealing the fall in prices actually being due to ‘seasonal abundance.’ It’s also a case where the motivation, to credit the government, is fairly obvious. If the motivation was to simply deliver the news, why wasn’t the headline something more like ‘Seasonal Abundance yields Fall in Prices.’ Causality in myth is artificial, the meaning is stolen but is returned as Nature. The fall in prices is naturally the result of the efforts of the government, that had been concerned with prices, because the people were concerned with prices – yeah, keep in mind, this is France and the late 50s, not the modern US – Likewise, Lincoln is naturally what it means to be a Republican. A Subaru is naturally the vehicle of choice for those that enjoy the outdoors. 

Personally, I think it’s naturally a Miata, so long as the outdoors is between 60 and 80 degrees, it’s not raining, and the roads are windy. 

A final note on reading myth, causality and nature. Then we need to turn to Barthes’ conclusion. I am, for the sake of brevity, and yeah, I get it, this isn’t a particularly brief episode, putting aside for now Barthes’ thoughts on myth as regards the bourgeoisie, and right and left politics – note though, where Barthes is talking about the Left, he isn’t talking about anything resembling the American quote-unquote-Left. American liberalism falls squarely into the Right here as it’s fundamentally about preserving markets and governmental institutions, then using those markets and institutions for the betterment of society (in contrast to American, well, more traditional American Conservativism, which aimed at limiting government institutions in favor of expanding market power). The Left for Barthes is a radical, revolutionary movement in a Marxist sense. So, I think these passages will make more sense after we get through some Marx. 

Also, quick reminder about inductive logic; unlike deductive (if A, then B; A exists, therefore B exists), induction is a system that purports something natural/eternal and projects into the future (A has always existed in the past, therefore A will always exist in the future), and as Hume and later Foucault show, inductive logic is a logical fallacy. Just because something occurred in the past, is no guarantee it will occur in the future. At best, it is only likely it will happen in the future. Plenty more on Foucault to come, though it will be next year sometime, we definitely need to talk about Disciplinary Societies, Biopower, and Neoliberalism. 

So. Barthes notes that this ‘creeping back in’ of causality as Nature, and of the theft and fraudulent return of meaning, as why, for the reader of myth, myth is “experienced as innocent speech…”He continues, 

“In fact, what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he seems a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be put otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system.”

And here I’m just going to use one last example of Barthes’ since I think this one’s great. Whereas we were talking about indexicality earlier, this tree, that dog, the Abraham Lincoln (in contrast to the party of Lincoln), even here Barthes notes that language “lends itself to myth” so that there’s still a way for myth to get around the specificity, or the fullness, of the meaning.  Where it can’t invade it, it simply “carries it away bodily.” Which, he notes, is what happens with mathematical language. 

So, by this, we’re not talking about the manipulability of probability or statistics, but mathematical language itself. The example being E=mc2 where, despite as a sign having a “unalterable meaning” it has been appropriated and transformed into form, “the signifier of pure mathematicity” as Barthes states. Though today I would push even further that the equation has also since come to mean intelligence, geekiness, and even a certain kind counter-cultural cool-geek (though, given the ubiquity and popularity of comic book movies and shows like the Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things, I’d hardly say the cool-geek is counter cultural anymore). 

So, in the coming weeks, as we get into utopias, and hope, and work, and Capitalism, and Communism, and progress, the bourgeoisie, the future… my intent is to treat these signs semiologically.  Signs like Capitalism, Communism, and Marx are heavily, heavily weighted. They carry a ton of associative baggage, both real and propagandistic, and my intent is to address them critically by focusing on the concepts themselves and how they relate to a ‘philosophy of work’ rather than ideologically. 

Now, I realize at this point it may feel like I’ve given short shrift to the journalist-producer or myths and the mythologist, but this is intentional, for two reasons. On the one hand, digging into these modes of reading (or writing) myth requires a lot of conceptual scaffolding regarding bourgeois, without which talking about bourgeois ideology won’t make much sense, (I mean, we’re not talking about bougey-ness as an ideology or the value of a black coffee vs a caramel macchiato with almond milk; personally, I think bourgeois remains a mythic signifier even in how Barthes is using it) and, on the other, I think it will lend approachability to the upcoming episodes to come at them first as a reader and then read critically, without getting buried in the semiotic weeds, or attempting to counter-mythify them. 

Finally, it may have dawned on you, that, despite the title of the episode, I haven’t said anything about sarcasm yet. Well, that’s because this has been a tough turn of phrase of Barthes for me to unpack in a way that I find particularly satisfying. 

Where Nietzsche holds up being a genealogist as the proper mode of dealing with concepts, Barthes brings up being a mythologist to deal with myth, but then holds up the role of the mythologist as nearly impossible. 

So, here’s the passage, and then I’ll go into what I think. Barthes states, following two more examples, the Tour de France and the “good French Wine”…

“To decipher the Tour de France and the “good French Wine” is to cut oneself off from those who are entertained or warmed up by them. 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.”

Now, I think there’s a couple of ways to read this. The first is an almost violent literalness. Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word sarcasm comes to English through Latin from the Greek sarkasmos and earlier sarkazein “to speak bitterly, sneer," literally "to strip off the flesh" (like dogs), from the word sarx … "flesh," properly "piece of meat." Now, if this is what Barthes means, then my thinking is that to read as a mythologist is to strip ‘the flesh’ off of the sign. Which is a reasonable if graphic metaphor for reading critically. But Barthes goes further than that and indicates this is a function of the mythologist’s utmost, truthful, moral being. The mythologist can’t but tear signs apart, and thus is condemned to living their life this way.

The other mode I have in mind is something of a Socratean approach to life. Treating everything and everyone with a biting skepticism, if not outright cynicism, trying to get to the truth of everything by questioning everything and mocking all beliefs – almost all, he did love his home of Athens. Again, this fits the pattern of a condemned and lonely, if truthful, life. Even in his trial, after being found guilty and upon being asked what he would recommend for his sentence – both parties were allowed to propose punishment, the plaintiff (Athens) proposed death, it was expected Socrates would counter with exile, which would be granted; however, he argued he should be sentenced to free meals in a public dining hall in the center of Athens. I mean, what greater example is there of the sarcastic philosopher-hero than Socrates?

At least it’s unlikely one would be sentenced to death for trying to speak truth to power these days. Um, it is still unlikely, right? 

So, with that in mind, I don’t plan to be a mythologist per se in the upcoming episodes, my aim is not to tear utopia down in order to build it back up cleansed of the taint of myth. 

So, if that’s the case, well, what was the point of all this? The point has been to lay the methodological groundwork for dealing with terminology that carries a lot, and I mean a lot of ideological, political, and historical baggage, and demystifying, demythologizing these ideas is going to take some work. And if we’re to philosophize about work, then we’re going to need to work though some of these highly politicized and charged ideas. “And yet,” as Barthes concludes, “this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.” To wit, I would add, between Philosophy and Work. 

Next up is our first dive into Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Specifically, I want to take a look at teleological and non teleological utopias; in short, utopias that have an “end” and utopias that don’t. We’ll be coming back to Weeks’ on work a few weeks afterwards, but before we get to that, we’ll need to deal with the mythological 800 pound gorillas in the room: Marx, Capitalism, and Communism. 

I hope you’ll join me. 

‘til then. 

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