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'Myth Today' and national identity

An examination of Roland Barthes' 'Myth Today' in relation to advertising perpetuating the myth of national identity in New Zealand, especially the manifestation of this within the New Zealand tourism campaign. 


by Rebecca Burns 

All Rights Reserved © Rebecca Burns and Deep South
Deepsouth v.6.n.3 (Spring 2000)

 

This essay will focus on Roland Barthes' 'Myth Today' from the 1957 essay Mythologies which examines the way in which mass-culture infiltrates our lives with "myth." This will be discussed in relation to a number of supplementary articles in order to link Barthes' work to the manifestation of myth upon the national identity of New Zealand, especially with regard to advertising and the tourism campaign in New Zealand. Particular attention will be paid to the "100% Pure New Zealand" website.

 

From my research into this topic, I will try to explain what in fact our national identity is deemed to consist of within advertising and tourism, "mythological" as this may be. However, I will not endeavour to provide an alternative answer to the question of what our national identity actually is, as this is too difficult a question to answer from the subjective view of a single person. As well as the fact that our culture and identity is always forming and growing and never static. As David Novitz points out in On Culture and Cultural Identity, "The trouble is that the concept of 'culture' is murky, and talk of cultural identity doubly so."1
 
 
 
 

An understanding of Barthes' "myth" is necessary before any analysis of it in relationship with any medium is undertaken. Barthes' "myth" however, is not quite the same as the definition of myth at which one would usually arrive. That is, Barthes' "myth" is not a fictitious tale. Rather myth is a perpetuation of mass-culture upon the world. Barthes' definition of myth is actually more aligned to a definition of ideology such as Terry Eagleton's in Ideology: An Introduction:

 
"A dominant power may legitimise itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalising and universalising such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such 'mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception if ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions."2

 
 

The important ideas from the above definition, which share an affinity with Barthes, are those of naturalisation and masking. Both share the idea of a notion of a socially constructed reality which is passed off as natural. This is an important concept in relation to advertising and tourism in New Zealand as both are utilised to create contemporary cultural myth, which in turn leads us to construct a view of ourselves in relation to the world around us. Barthes challenges the naturalness of cultural texts and practices by approaching mass-culture from a semiological standpoint and investigating how things function as signs, their connotations and denotations. Barthes is asking what lies beyond the images we are shown in advertisements, how this affects us ideologically and whether or not we can break down the myths to reveal them for what they truly are:

 
"... the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?"3 

 

The underlying theme in Mythologies is that what we accept as being natural is in fact an illusory reality constructed in order to mask the real structures obtaining power in society, that is, the bourgeois.4 These myths saturate our daily lives, especially through the media. Advertisements produce knowledge, but this knowledge is always produced from something already known that acts as a guarantee for the truth in the ad itself.5 This is a central part of the ideology of Barthes: the constant reproduction of ideas which are denied a historical beginning or end - referred to as they already "exist" in society and continue to because they are lived in everyday practice.6

 

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1 David Novitz, 'On Culture and Cultural Identity' in Culture and Identity in New Zealand, Novitz, David and Wllmott, Bill, (Eds.) Wellington: Crown Copyright Reserve, 1989, p278.
2 Terry Eagleton, Ideology - An Introduction, London: Verso, 1991, pp5-6.
3 Roland Barthes, 'Myth Today' in Mythologies, New York: The Noon Day Press, 27th Edition, 1993, p135.
4 Tony McNeill, 'Roland Barthes: Mythologies (1957)' @ http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~osOtmc/myth.html, (last updated) April 1996, p2.
5 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements - Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978, p99.
6 Ibid, p99.