The Natural Relationship of Sign, Signifier and Signified in Myth: A reading of Roland Barthes’s Myth Today.
The Natural Relationship of Sign, Signifier and Signified in Myth
A reading of Roland Barthes’s Myth Today.
175.707
Thursday July 22, 1999
Peter Fogarty
STILL DEFIANT: A Muslim guerrilla during target practice not far from the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistani troops. The “holy warriors” have vowed to liberate Kashmir.
NZ Herald, Wednesday, July 21, 1999
To paraphrase Barthes in Myth Today [is] to consume a myth innocently, the reader does not see myth as a semiological system, but as an inductive one. The equivalence of signifier and signified is seen as a causal process, they have a natural relationship. A myth today may be one rooted in old legend; the classic struggle of man against the world and himself, or it may be an image in a newspaper, or an essay sprung from quotation. Barthes defines myth as “a mode of signification, a form . . . everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse.” Hence we may mythologise a newspaper photo and an essay. But what does all this mean? Why do signifier and signified have a natural relationship when we speak of myth?
Saussure sets us on our journey into myth with his lecture notes on sign, signifier and signified in a first order semiological system. A sign may be any single word, object, image, film or groupings of such. The phrase we are deconstructing in this essay may be regarded as a sign, a cluster of inkblots containing meaning laid out assymetrically on a page. The sign is an inseparable correlation of signifier and signified and if we take that example: the signifier is the collection of letters in the english language that compose the Barthes paraphrase while the signified is the conceptual meaning behind the paraphrase: the statement that signifier and signified have a natural relationship in the inductive system of myth. Consider the image of a bearded man carrying a weapon, with two fingers upraised is the signifier that joins the signified concept of a muslim guerrila fighting to liberate Kashmir and becomes a sign, a historical representation of a freedom fighter at a fixed point of time. When we see the sign, we absorb its signifier and signified as a complete entity, they are correlated into the sign. This combination consistutes a first order semiological system, language.
Saussure regarded semiology as the study of the parole, a particular use of a sign or a set of signs, as a manifestion of langue, the general system of implicit differentiations and rules of combination which enable communication with signs. The focus of interest for Saussure was not on a particular sign, but how that sign manifests the general system of langue in the first order semiological system. Moving into the second order semiological system of myth, we are therefore interested in how the photo of the guerilla manifests the general system of revolutionary myth.
Myth is formed when the full sign from a first order semiological system is presented as an empty signifier of a second order semiological system also containing a signified and a third term is created from their correlation: signification, which is myth. Myth is a metalanguage, a collection of expressions and terms for talking about language; it is as inextricable from linguistics as it is from language. As sign is a correlation of signifier and signified, myth follows with its own correlation of signifier and signified in a second semiological system that is skewed in relation to the first.
The signifier of myth is, as we have said, the sign of the first system. As a sign, the photo of an bearded muslim holding a machine gun aloft, with his other hand raised in a two fingered salute is endowed with meaning, he is a muslim guerrilla fighting for liberation. But as a signifier, the muslim guerrilla has meaning torn from him, he becomes an empty form without context, a man holding a weapon, with the face of a saint, and a two fingered salute. Myth strips meaning from the sign. When we attach the signified to this signifier/sign, the concept behind the image emerges, the meditative guerilla fighting for the liberation of his beloved Kashmir, holding aloft symbols of might and peace or victory, depending on our individual interpretion of his raised fingers. The signified in myth is shapeless, fluid and associative. It is the signified/concept that enables the mythologist to unravel the multiple layers of signification. The Muslim guerilla is instantly recognisable as revolutionary myth, representing the form of revolutionary in the tradition of other iconic revolutionaries such as Che Guevera. Myth notifies and points out the inner meaning and interpretation to be found within the empty sign, the form.
Myth prefers to work with incomplete signs where the meaning is prepared for a signification already, such as the symbols in the photo of the guerilla, the weaponry, the gesture, the saintly demeanour. Without a caption, the picture presents us with the very myth of the revolutionary; the advocate of righteous change backed by a fist of steel in one hand and peace in the other. The form of the revolutionary is motivated by the struggle the sign represents: the liberation of Kashmir. Without context, the myth reader, responding to the complex whole consistuting meaning and form, signified and signifier, percieves the image as the essence of revolutionary, the reader experiences the myth at once as a event and as an ideal.
However, the myth reader does not see myth as a mythologist does, as Barthes says, “where there is only equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process”. The signifier and the signified are two different things but inextricably correlated. We cannot say that the signifier causes the signifier, or vice versa, but their equivalence is their sameness in their difference. This very sameness, their belonging to the sign in the first order semiological system creates a causal process in the mind of the myth reader. For us, the image of the guerilla is as inextricable from the revolutionary myth as it is from the conflict in Kashmir. The causality of the revolutionary myth is artifical; it sneaks in through the image only because the image itself is innocent. In the artifice of myth, the image’s second order meaning naturally forms within our minds through an inductive process; the artifical inference of a general law from a particular instance. We can naturally see the myth in the image.
When we speak of myth, the signifier and the signified have a natural relationship in the eyes of the reader as the Muslim guerilla on the Kashmir mountainside becomes a icon of revolution as we mythologise his image. He is at once filled with meaning and emptied of it before being refilled to overflowing with signification. He symbolises the struggle for a free Kashmir, he has the countenance of an Indian yogi yet carries weaponry, and his other hand shapes a symbol of peace, of reconcilation and love. The myth of the revolutionary forms out of these signs within the sign, and without realising, we automatically absorb and accept the significtion. He is the revolutionary incarnate. The righteousness of the sign of an armed Muslim guerilla gesturing against the backdrop of the historic struggle for Kashmir is enhanced with speech justified in excess and he joins the cadre of freedom fighters in the history of Myth in the eternal fight of the revolutionary.
Bibliography
• Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today”. Mythologies. London: Vintage, 1993.
• Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Henderson, Mary. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth. Auckland: Bantam Spectra, 1997.
• Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Moyers, Bill & Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Ed. Flowers, Betty Sue. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Course in General Linguistics”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
A reading of Roland Barthes’s Myth Today.
175.707
Thursday July 22, 1999
Peter Fogarty
STILL DEFIANT: A Muslim guerrilla during target practice not far from the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistani troops. The “holy warriors” have vowed to liberate Kashmir.
NZ Herald, Wednesday, July 21, 1999
To paraphrase Barthes in Myth Today [is] to consume a myth innocently, the reader does not see myth as a semiological system, but as an inductive one. The equivalence of signifier and signified is seen as a causal process, they have a natural relationship. A myth today may be one rooted in old legend; the classic struggle of man against the world and himself, or it may be an image in a newspaper, or an essay sprung from quotation. Barthes defines myth as “a mode of signification, a form . . . everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse.” Hence we may mythologise a newspaper photo and an essay. But what does all this mean? Why do signifier and signified have a natural relationship when we speak of myth?
Saussure sets us on our journey into myth with his lecture notes on sign, signifier and signified in a first order semiological system. A sign may be any single word, object, image, film or groupings of such. The phrase we are deconstructing in this essay may be regarded as a sign, a cluster of inkblots containing meaning laid out assymetrically on a page. The sign is an inseparable correlation of signifier and signified and if we take that example: the signifier is the collection of letters in the english language that compose the Barthes paraphrase while the signified is the conceptual meaning behind the paraphrase: the statement that signifier and signified have a natural relationship in the inductive system of myth. Consider the image of a bearded man carrying a weapon, with two fingers upraised is the signifier that joins the signified concept of a muslim guerrila fighting to liberate Kashmir and becomes a sign, a historical representation of a freedom fighter at a fixed point of time. When we see the sign, we absorb its signifier and signified as a complete entity, they are correlated into the sign. This combination consistutes a first order semiological system, language.
Saussure regarded semiology as the study of the parole, a particular use of a sign or a set of signs, as a manifestion of langue, the general system of implicit differentiations and rules of combination which enable communication with signs. The focus of interest for Saussure was not on a particular sign, but how that sign manifests the general system of langue in the first order semiological system. Moving into the second order semiological system of myth, we are therefore interested in how the photo of the guerilla manifests the general system of revolutionary myth.
Myth is formed when the full sign from a first order semiological system is presented as an empty signifier of a second order semiological system also containing a signified and a third term is created from their correlation: signification, which is myth. Myth is a metalanguage, a collection of expressions and terms for talking about language; it is as inextricable from linguistics as it is from language. As sign is a correlation of signifier and signified, myth follows with its own correlation of signifier and signified in a second semiological system that is skewed in relation to the first.
The signifier of myth is, as we have said, the sign of the first system. As a sign, the photo of an bearded muslim holding a machine gun aloft, with his other hand raised in a two fingered salute is endowed with meaning, he is a muslim guerrilla fighting for liberation. But as a signifier, the muslim guerrilla has meaning torn from him, he becomes an empty form without context, a man holding a weapon, with the face of a saint, and a two fingered salute. Myth strips meaning from the sign. When we attach the signified to this signifier/sign, the concept behind the image emerges, the meditative guerilla fighting for the liberation of his beloved Kashmir, holding aloft symbols of might and peace or victory, depending on our individual interpretion of his raised fingers. The signified in myth is shapeless, fluid and associative. It is the signified/concept that enables the mythologist to unravel the multiple layers of signification. The Muslim guerilla is instantly recognisable as revolutionary myth, representing the form of revolutionary in the tradition of other iconic revolutionaries such as Che Guevera. Myth notifies and points out the inner meaning and interpretation to be found within the empty sign, the form.
Myth prefers to work with incomplete signs where the meaning is prepared for a signification already, such as the symbols in the photo of the guerilla, the weaponry, the gesture, the saintly demeanour. Without a caption, the picture presents us with the very myth of the revolutionary; the advocate of righteous change backed by a fist of steel in one hand and peace in the other. The form of the revolutionary is motivated by the struggle the sign represents: the liberation of Kashmir. Without context, the myth reader, responding to the complex whole consistuting meaning and form, signified and signifier, percieves the image as the essence of revolutionary, the reader experiences the myth at once as a event and as an ideal.
However, the myth reader does not see myth as a mythologist does, as Barthes says, “where there is only equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process”. The signifier and the signified are two different things but inextricably correlated. We cannot say that the signifier causes the signifier, or vice versa, but their equivalence is their sameness in their difference. This very sameness, their belonging to the sign in the first order semiological system creates a causal process in the mind of the myth reader. For us, the image of the guerilla is as inextricable from the revolutionary myth as it is from the conflict in Kashmir. The causality of the revolutionary myth is artifical; it sneaks in through the image only because the image itself is innocent. In the artifice of myth, the image’s second order meaning naturally forms within our minds through an inductive process; the artifical inference of a general law from a particular instance. We can naturally see the myth in the image.
When we speak of myth, the signifier and the signified have a natural relationship in the eyes of the reader as the Muslim guerilla on the Kashmir mountainside becomes a icon of revolution as we mythologise his image. He is at once filled with meaning and emptied of it before being refilled to overflowing with signification. He symbolises the struggle for a free Kashmir, he has the countenance of an Indian yogi yet carries weaponry, and his other hand shapes a symbol of peace, of reconcilation and love. The myth of the revolutionary forms out of these signs within the sign, and without realising, we automatically absorb and accept the significtion. He is the revolutionary incarnate. The righteousness of the sign of an armed Muslim guerilla gesturing against the backdrop of the historic struggle for Kashmir is enhanced with speech justified in excess and he joins the cadre of freedom fighters in the history of Myth in the eternal fight of the revolutionary.
Bibliography
• Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today”. Mythologies. London: Vintage, 1993.
• Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Henderson, Mary. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth. Auckland: Bantam Spectra, 1997.
• Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Moyers, Bill & Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Ed. Flowers, Betty Sue. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Course in General Linguistics”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
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