Nature and Myth

My considerations start from Barthes's classic quote found in a note to his afterword to Mythologies. Here, Barthes defines semiology as the ‘science of forms’ and mythology as the science of ‘ideas in form’. Barthes explains that as such, myth is simultaneously a forming part of ‘semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is a historical science’ (Ibid.). This observation calls into question the totality of communication systems (Barthes includes radio, press, advertisement, illustration and the rituals of communication and social prestige) as founding elements of contemporary mythology. I often think about this phrase when I reflect on the relationship between body and clothing, skin and dress, body and signs because, in its literality, it contains a figurative image. It makes me think of somebody, maybe Barthes or anybody else, by the sea. That ‘sea’ soon turns into a beach, and this person's body develops connotations – it is tanned, with some wrinkles – which tell a story about that body, there at that moment on the beach. By the entrance of the beach, a sign reads ‘Naturist Beach’, so the person is naked. However, is this body and this beach really ‘natural’ or ‘naturist’? As attentive culturalists, our answer is no. And the body, that naked body, is not actually naked, because it is embedded in a network of signs, and it is itself a sign in the universe of the immense semiotic material around it. Thus, Barthes's image/example of the myth introduces an idea of nature as already defined by what we generally call ‘culture’, made of sign systems ranging from social relations to the forms of communication and intentions which define and mark human presence. Nature is present as a sign residual – as Rossi-Landi (1992, 285) would call it – as the ‘body’ of the sign, namely, as something which does not act as a sign, but exists instead in isolation and without intentionality: the tide, the movement of the sand in relation to waves, the erosion of rocks because of the seawater that touches it.