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.call upon the same type of consciousness; and even with pictures,one can use many kinds of reading: a diagram lends itself toIt can be seen that to purport to discriminate among mythicalsignification more than a drawing, a copy more than an original,objects according to their substance would be entirely illusory:and a caricature more than a portrait.But this is the point: we aresince myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth providedno longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation:it is conveyed by a discourse.Myth is not defined by the object ofwe are dealing with this particular image, which is given for thisits message, but by the way in which it utters this message: thereparticular signification.Mythical speech is made of a materialare formal limits to myth, there are no 'substantial' ones.which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable forEverything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for thecommunication: it is because all the materials of myth (whetheruniverse is infinitely fertile in suggestions.Every object in thepictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, thatworld can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, openone can reason about them while discounting their substance.Thisto appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural orsubstance is not unimportant: pictures, to be sure, are morenot, which forbids talking about things.A tree is a tree.Yes, ofimperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke,course.But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quitewithout analysing or diluting it.But this is no longer a constitutivea tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of107 108 difference.Pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they aremeaningful: like writing, they call for a lexis.Myth as a semiological systemWe shall therefore take language, discourse, speech, etc., to meanany significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: aphotograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as aFor mythology, since it is the study of a type of speech, is but onenewspaper article; even objects will become speech, if they meanfragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulatedsomething.This generic way of conceiving language is in factsome forty years ago under the name of semiology.Semiology hasjustified by the very history of writing: long before the invention ofnot yet come into being.But since Saussure himself, andour alphabet, objects like the Inca quipu, or drawings, as insometimes independently of him, a whole section of contemporarypictographs, have been accepted as speech.This does not meanresearch has constantly been referred to the problem of meaning:that one must treat mythical speech like language; myth in factpsycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, some newbelongs to the province of a general science, coextensive withtypes of literary criticism of which Bachelard has given the firstlinguistics, which is semiology.examples, are no longer concerned with facts except inasmuch asthey are endowed with significance.Now to postulate asignification is to have recourse to semiology.I do not mean thatsemiology could account for all these aspects of research equallywell: they have different contents.But they have a common status:they are all sciences dealing with values.They are not content withmeeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens forsomething else.Semiology is a science of forms, since it studies significationsapart from their content.I should like to say one word about thenecessity and the limits of such a formal science.The necessity isthat which applies in the case of any exact language.Zhdanovmade fun of Alexandrov the philosopher, who spoke of 'thespherical structure of our planet.' 'It was thought until now',Zhdanov said, 'that form alone could be spherical.' Zhdanov wasright: one cannot speak about structures in terms of forms, and viceversa.It may well be that on the plane of 'life', there is but a totalitywhere structures and forms cannot be separated.But science has nouse for the ineffable: it must speak about 'life' if it wants totransform it.Against a certain quixotism of synthesis, quiteplatonic incidentally, all criticism must consent to the ascesis, tothe artifice of analysis; and in analysis, it must match method andlanguage.Less terrorized by the spectre of 'formalism', historicalcriticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood109 110 that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the forming this third object, which is the sign.It is as true to say thatnecessary principles of totality and History.On the contrary: the on the plane of experience I cannot dissociate the roses from themore a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more message they carry, as to say that on the plane of analysis I cannotamenable it is to historical criticism.To parody a well-known confuse the roses as signifier and the roses as sign: the signifier issaying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning.Or take a black pebble: IHistory, but that a lot brings one back to it.Is there a better can make it signify in several ways, it is a mere signifier; but if Iexample of total criticism than the description of saintliness, at weigh it with a definite signified (a death sentence, for instance, inonce formal and historical, semiological and ideological, in Sartre's an anonymous vote), it will become a sign.Naturally, there areSaint-Genet? The danger, on the contrary, is to consider forms as between the signifier, the signified and the sign, functionalambiguous objects, half-form and halfsubstance, to endow form implications (such as that of the part to the whole) which are sowith a substance of form, as was done, for instance, by Zhdanovian close that to analyse them may seem futile; but we shall see in arealism.Semiology, once its limits are settled, is not a moment that this distinction has a capital importance for the studymetaphysical trap: it is a science among others, necessary but not of myth as semiological schema.sufficient
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