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the economic realities of feudalism is torn asunder and the cash nexus
that constitutes the social structure is made manifest. At times Marx
seems to view capitalism as the first society to propose an anti-idealist
conception of itself. (Incidentally, the deliberate poverty of bourgeois
idealization may be the cause of that peculiar phenomenon: bourgeois
self-hatred.) At other times Marx stresses the mystifications of bour–
geois society, its denial of its particularity in a universal ideology. The
greatest of bourgeois slogans, liberty, equality, and fraternity, purports
to speak for all men, but actually serves to mask a particular class
interest. Even in the realm of production, the end result, the commod–
ity acquires the radiant features of transcendence, a view that conceals
its source in human labor. Indeed, so strong is the impulse toward
mystification that Marx ruefully remarks: "The recent scientific dis–
covery that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but
material expressions of the human labour spent in their production,
marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the
human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the
social character of labour appears
to
us
to
be an objective character of
the products themselves."
Commodities compensate for the religious disenchantments of the
bourgeois world. They provide the experience of transcendence that the
religious relics of the previous society no longer provide.
If
Marx
hoped that it was only a matter of time before those mists were
dissipated, he would surely have been disappointed. For as capitalism
develops, its demystifying function weakens and its mystifications
become more powerful and impressive. So powerful, in fact, that the
ground reality which makes demystification possible seems to have
been usurped or
to
have evaporated. Barthes's French inclination to
discover emptiness is enforced by the increasing hegemony of capital–
ism. He himself suggests a reason for the difference between his
situation and that of Marx.
"It
is possible that in Marx's day the
pressure of culture on the proletariat was weaker than it is now; in the
absence of 'mass communication,' there was as yet no 'mass culture.'"
Without the ground reality, Barthes's use of a Marxist method in the
essay on myth is almost parodic. Barthes tries to compensate for the
empty prospect created by demystification. "Even here, in these my–
thologies, I have used trickery: finding it painful constantly to work on
the evaporation of reality, I have started to make it excessively dense,
and to discover in it a surprising compactness which I savoured with
delight."
Barthes is not the first critic
to
succumb to the temptations of the
