There are many similarities between the ideas of French social theorist Roland Barthes (see Mythologies (1972)), and the "probes" of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (see Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)). While these two authors lived in different countries and claimed to never have systematically read each other¹s works, the connections between their works is an important, yet understudied, area of technology and culture studies.

One parallel between McLuhan's Mechanical Bride (1951), and Barthes' Mythologies has been identified for some time now. In his review of The Mechanical Bride for www.mediatic.net, Geert Lovink includes a quotation from The Sunday Times comparing the authors:

Few people know that Marshall McLuhan's first book, published in 1951, is completely devoted to the phenomenon of advertising. Although popular in the 1960s, The Mechanical Bride is difficult to obtain nowadays, in contrast to the Mythologies Roland Barthes wrote five years later. On the back cover of the 1973 Granada edition of Mythologies a blurb actually cites Barthes as the McLuhan of signs... and like McLuhan's most engaging book, The Mechanical Bride, Barthes' Mythologies has its penetrating gusto (McLuhan, 1964, p. 55).

But despite this realization, an in-depth comparative study that illustrates the accord between the authors' works remains nonexistent to this day. This abscence is partly due to the fact that, traditionally, the "French connection" to McLuhan has been drawn to French scholar Jean Baudrillard - a pairing that may have somewhat overshadowed a less obvious but equally plausible connection to Barthes. Furthermore, as the quotation above clearly exemplifies, McLuhan has been paired with Barthes using The Mechanical Bride as the only point of comparison. Nevertheless, an interesting and rich connection can be established to Understanding Media, which, along with The Gutenberg Galaxy, sums up McLuhan's thought in the 1960s. Breaking away from the conventional paradigms, this essay will draw a connection between Mythologies and Understanding Media.

A good way to begin this study is by establishing a link between Barthes and the concepts of time and space-bias developed by Canadian political economist Harold Adams Innis, one of McLuhan's main sources of inspiration along with James Joyce, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Frech Symbolist poets. The long concluding chapter of Mythologies, entitled "Myth Today," is of special relevance here. "Myth Today" provides a theoretical framework to help rationalize and clarify the significance of the numerous case studies provided in the first part of the book. For the purpose of our comparison, Barthes could not have chosen a better title to begin with. For "Myth Today" suggests, as Innis pointed out in reference to some types of media almost sixty years ago, that myth is the "speech" of history:

One can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things (Barthes, p. 110).

From this premise, it follows that being "time-biased" is not synonymous with being "eternal," a conclusion that is not at all contrary to Innis' theory, for the same thing happens continually to media. Throughout history, it has happened over and over again that a medium undergoes functional displacement: it is sometimes rendered obsolete by another medium and, to survive, must go through a complete transformation:

When the movie scenario or picture story was applied to the idea article, the magazine world had discovered a hybrid that ended the supremacy of the short story. When wheels were put in tandem form, the wheel principle combined with the lineal typographic principle to create aerodynamic balance. The wheel crossed with industrial, lineal form released the new form of the airplane...The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born (McLuhan, 1964, p. 55).

These statements provide a first indication that myth could possibly be regarded as a media. But what exactly is a myth, and what exactly are media? What is the difference between these two concepts?

McLuhan claims that, "Every human artifact can be seen as a medium of communication whose message can be said to be the totality of satisfactions and dissatisfactions they engender (1989)" Barthes, on the other hand, claims that just about everything can be myth:

Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things (Barthes, p. 109).

Both authors believe that the formal characteristics (shape and function) of the structures they propose are their distinguishing and essential features. Barthes maintains that "myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no substantial ones (p. 109)." Barthes adds that "myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning (p. 110)." Meanwhile, in reflecting upon the electric light (the only medium without a message), McLuhan concludes that it is the medium itself - not the content - which shapes the scale, pace and pattern of human affairs:

Let us return to the electric light. Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the content of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association (1964, pp. 8-9).

In emphasizing the formal characteristics of myth, Barthes is suggesting the same idea, that the medium is the message:

A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree, as expressed by Minou Drouet, is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter (p. 109).

In this quotation, Barthes suggests that the content or message of a medium is always another medium, reflecting another of McLuhan's famous ideas. Barthes goes on to argue that "a photograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as a newspaper article; even objects will become speech, if they mean something (p. 110)." In reference to what McLuhan sees as the subsidiary character of content, Barthes also states that,

When he reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign... (p. 115).

So what, exactly, is the relationship between media and myth if, according to the authors, everything and anything can be either one? To answer this question we first need to define what myth, media and technology are. For the first two terms (myth and media), we can say that they are "social constructs - softer than the later term (technology). Though McLuhan makes no distinction between technology and media, there is in fact a subtantial one in how we socially (not individually) use technology. Technology is the actual human artifact (hardware), while media are the social, intellectual, and cultural consequences of this technology (software). So, for example, the tubes (technology) give way to TV (media) because that is the use which is "socially accepted" for that technology. We could use a TV as a lamp if a lightbulb burnt out by using the light emanating from the tubes, or we could use it as a chair, but none of these are socially accepted uses. Thus, the TV medium is a socially constructed concept and a social convention, which is determined by a social type of usage.

Given this differentiation, one plausible hypothesis about the interplay between myth, technology and media is that "cool media" attract myth. McLuhan defined "cool media" as stimulating all of the senses simultaneously but in low intensity, and "hot media" as being information-rich and thus extending or stimulating one sense in high intensity. Interestingly enough, Barthes himself seems to confirm that it is the fill-in-the-blanks characteristic of cool media that attracts myth:

True, as far as perception is concerned, writing and pictures, for instance, do not call upon the same type of consciousness; and even with pictures, one can use many kinds of reading: a diagram lends itself to signification more than a drawing, a copy more than an original, and a caricature more than a portrait (p.110).

McLuhan argued, "any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary" (p. 15). Barthes went further: he believed in myth-controlled technology since "myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language... a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain" (p. 114). These assertions suggest that both myth and media can be embodied in any technology. It also means that media are qualitatively richer than technology and quantitatively poorer, a relationship which also takes place between the signifier and the signified of myth, as Barthes observes:

A signified can have several signifiers: this is indeed the case in linguistics and psycho-analysis. It is also the case in the mythical concept: it has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers... This means that quantitatively, the concept is much poorer than the signifier, it often does nothing but re-present itself (p. 120).

When Barthes states, first, that myth is a sign which belongs to and emerges from a secondary semiological chain, and second that the sign (signifier + signified) in the first semiological chain becomes the signifier of myth in the second, whose signified stands alone, independently, he is basically saying that the content or message of a medium is always another medium. The content of a sign is another sign, for myth is after all a sign that appropriates another sign: "we can say that the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated" (Barthes, p. 119). This phenomenon also happens between media through hybridization or compounding because, as McLuhan argues, "[media] do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages" (p. 49). Furthermore, while the second semiological system or "metalanguage" (what Barthes calls "myth" or "signification") corrupts the first semiological system or "langue-object," something similar happens between media: "Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 52). It is a dual, ambiguous effect, however, for it also happens that "the effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as 'content'" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 18).

Suming up, I offer three conclusions: 1) that the signifier chez Barthes equals the technology chez McLuhan, since "the signifier is empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning" (Barthes, p. 113); 2) that a medium is a technology defined by its use, much like myth is defined by its intention; and 3) that the signified equals the social usage which defines a given medium. In graphical terms:

This essay intended to prove that a connection between the works and thoughts of Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes not only exists, but has remained unexamined to this date. It is hoped that this comparison should strengthen the understanding of their theoretical perspectives and inspire future research. It is also hoped that from this innovative fusion, an invigorated way of seeing and thinking about the interplay between technology, media, and myth will eventually emerge.

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. London: J. Cape.

McLuhan, M. (1951). The mechanical bride : folklore of industrial man. New York: Vanguard Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man (2d ed.). New York: New American Library.

McLuhan, M. (1989). Playboy interview. Canadian Journal of Communication, 134-137.

About the Author

Laureano Ralon, a recent graduate of the Communication program at SFU, is currently a Masters candidate in the School of Communication and Information Sciences in Nice, France. In his current research work, Laureano is looking at the connections between the works of Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, and Argentinean essayist Arturo Jauretche. To find out more about Laureano vist http://laureanoralon.blogspot.com