A Rhetoric of Mythology: A Barthesian Analysis of Marx’sRevolutionary Prophecy
Palavras-chave:
mythology, The Young Girl, The Privation of History, The Statement of FactResumo
The purpose of the paper is to re-examine Marx’s prophecy, essentially a critique of the exploited class’s relation to capital vis-à-vis the ruling class.
The application of Roland Barthes’s rhetorical forms (The Privation of History, and The Statement of Fact) is a post-structural pproach, offering nuanced understanding of Marx’s “failed” messianic prophecy in which the proletariat rises and subverts the ruling class vis-à-vis revolution–and why, still to this day, the modern-day proletariat remains enslaved–mythologized, willfully abetting in their own exploitation. Critical to our investigation, then, is our understanding of mythology and how it repurposes ideology–naturalizes, sedates, then seduces the everyday order of things. To this end, the mythology examined is The Young Girl (TYG)–an apparatus of control, by way of Barthes’s rhetorical forms. For the purposes of this paper, a brief overview of (1) Marx’s prophecy is offered, followed by an examination of (2) the architectonics of Barthes’s mythology and its rhetorical forms that interpolate the laborer. I then (3) discuss the mythology of TYG and finally (4) apply the rhetorical forms to the proletariat, so that a more nuanced understanding of why Marx’s prophecy failed and continues to remain at bay.
