“One can conceive of very ancient myths, but there no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech” (Barthes, 1957, p110)
Mythologies, signs, myths. "Symolic exchange is no longer the organising principle of modern society" (Baudrillard, 1993, p1). I love semiotics, I love learning about myths, about what means what. Sometimes it is difficult however, because learning about the myths makes me wonder about if the object, if the signifier really means anything at all. In the words of Barthes, take a bunch of roses used to show my passion. The roses are just the object, the signifier, until the singified, the message, turns them into a sign, a myth. Baudrillard argues we live in the age of signs and therefore "In survival, death is repressed; life itself, in accordance with that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death." (Baudrillard, 1993, p127). "The emergence of survival can therefore be analysed as the fundamental operation in the birth of power" (p129). "The price we pay for the reality of this life, to live it as a positive value, is the ever-present phantasm of death. (...) This is why, in whatever field of reality, every seperate term for which the other is its imaginary, is hainted by the latter as its own death" (p133). Baudrillard essentially says death as we know it is a myth, a sign. That the end of things, our own life or anything else really, any kind of death, is of course natural and cyclical. An exchange between life and death is natural. We have mythologised a sanctity of life against a nothingness of death. Yes life is sacred, but so is death, otherwise life becomes haunted. So the end of things is what? What is anything? Cyclical energy, denied by the myth of the linear.
Not my typical day x of being post but ive been reading baudrillard and barthes all day, smoking and feeling inconsolable for some strange reason, i shed a tear on the train. I am listening to Seta Hagopian in the library now, reading Symbolic Exchange and Death, when I am meant to be writing a sociology essay about something else. I feel a little hopeful. Maybe I could pursue a PhD in semiotics, will be a huge struggle to afford all that and also need to get my MA first but it's a thought, a slither of hope <3
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