PROLOGUE
From semioclasm to mythological model
The French aesthetician Jacques Rancière, in his analysis of the relationship between art and
history suggests a particular analytical tool called the “mythological” model. The base of this model is
the well-known Roland Barthes’ “semioclasm”. According to Barthes, the task of semioclasm is to carefully analyse common contemporary cultures or modern mythologies. Modern mythologies, distinctively from traditional popular mythologies created though centuries by oral tradition, are those products
of mass communication media and marketing. Their exclusive aim is to sell, or more precisely, to create
particular consumer habits, and by doing so, they aptly alter history and nature. Whereas the origin of
the traditional myths is connected with the necessity of rationalisation and that of a rational explanation
of what once was irrational, the Modern myth is working in the opposite direction, altering history and
nature, irrationalising the rational in order to create a consumer crave, a desire of a new object. In order
to critically analyse and decode those mythologies, this the title of his collection of essays first published
in 1957., Barthes suggested semiology as a social science with a specific scientific apparatus and above
all, by reducing all the sensible to a sign, and semioclasm as an efficient and radical tool for dismantling
the mythologized everyday life and of marketing illusions and deceptions.
After almost half a century, our understanding of marketing is far more complex. It is clear that
beyond the creation of consumer habits, there is greater interest to manipulate history, everyday history, history tout court. Hence the criticism of the consumer mythologies gave way to the criticism of
historical mythologies, or of mythologies of history of spectacularised society where the picture and
the visual bear the inviolable power. Rancier’s mythical model therefore necessary widens and complicates Barthes’ semioclasm, and is based upon the assumption of an innate connection and of unbreakable discursive relation between image and history in the process of mythologisation. Because
image or visual representation is never just a passive herald of significance (the object of analysis), as
is the case in Barthes’ semioclasm, but it is contemporarily the trace and the actor of history. Foremost
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