The Countertext review : on the idea of adieu in the poetic now

Abstract

his is always a good question to ask. In any review. But Barthes's Mythologies, to cite only his most familiar text, sits less than lightly on attempts to observe a trend, a drift, an evolving imaginary within cultures of contemporaneity. Ostensibly about such recognisable tropes, practices, or ‘collective representations’ within mass culture as the face of Garbo, depth advertising, or Romans in the movies, those essays were in fact attempts at understanding sign systems and performing ‘semioclasm’ (Barthes 2012 [1957]: ix–x). Before the desires, operativity, and reach of the mythic and the semiological, they sought to read past the disingenuousness, the canniness, and the intuitiveness of what had become seemingly self-evident in culture. The example will be borne in mind in what follows. [excerpt]