MYTHOLOGIES

Roland Barthes
Selected and translated from the French by
ANNETTE LAVERS
THE NOONDAY PRESS - NEW YORK
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX
1972 (12th printing 1991)

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Soap-powders and Detergents

The first World Detergent Congress (Paris, September 1954) had
the effect of authorizing the world to yield to Omo euphoria: not
only do detergents have no harmful effect on the skin, but they can
even perhaps save miners from silicosis. These products have been
in the last few years the object of such massive advertising that
they now belong to a region of French daily life which the various
types of psycho-analysis would do well to pay some attention to if
they wish to keep up to date. One could then usefully contrast the
psycho-analysis of purifying fluids (chlorinated, for example) with
that of soap-powders (Lux, Persil) or that of detergents (Omo). The
relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given
product, are very different in each case.

Chlorinated fluids, for instance, have always been experienced as a

sort of liquid fire, the action of which must be carefully estimated,
otherwise the object itself would be affected, 'burnt'. The implicit
legend of this type of product rests on the idea of a violent,
abrasive modification of matter: the connotations are of a chemical
or mutilating type: the product 'kills' the dirt. Powders, on the
contrary, are separating agents: their ideal role is to liberate the
object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is 'forced out' and
no longer killed; in the Omo imagery, dirt is a diminutive enemy,
stunted and black, which takes to its heels from the fine
immaculate linen at the sole threat of the judgment of Omo.
Products based on chlorine and ammonia are without doubt the
representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but a blind one.
Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive dirt
through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public
order not making war. This distinction has ethnographic
correlatives: the chemical fluid is an extension of the
washerwoman's movements when she beats the clothes, while

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powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling
the washing against a sloping board.

But even in the category of powders, one must in addition oppose

against advertisements based on psychology those based on
psycho-analysis (I use this word without reference to any specific
school). 'Persil Whiteness' for instance, bases its prestige on the
evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with
appearances, by offering for comparison two objects, one of which
is whiter than the other. Advertisements for Omo also indicate the
effect of the product (and in superlative fashion, incidentally), but
they chiefly reveal its mode of action; in doing so, they involve the
consumer in a kind of direct experience of the substance, make him
the accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a
result; matter here is endowed with value-bearing states.
Omo uses two of these, which are rather novel in the category of
detergents: the deep and the foamy. To say that Omo cleans in
depth (see the Cinéma-Publicité advertisement) is to assume that
linen is deep, which no one had previously thought, and this
unquestionably results in exalting it, by establishing it as an object
favourable to those obscure tendencies to enfold and caress which
are found in every human body. As for foam, it is well known that
it signifies luxury. To begin with, it appears to lack any usefulness;
then, its abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation allows one to
suppose there is in the substance from which it issues a vigorous
germ, a healthy and powerful essence, a great wealth of active
elements in a small original volume. Finally, it gratifies in the
consumer a tendency to imagine matter as something airy, with
which contact is effected in a mode both light and vertical, which
is sought after like that of happiness either in the gustatory
category (foie gras, entremets, wines), in that of clothing (muslin,
tulle), or that of soaps (filmstar in her bath). Foam can even be the
sign of a certain spirituality, inasmuch as the spirit has the
reputation of being able to make something out of nothing, a large
surface of effects out of a small volume of causes (creams have a
very different 'psychoanalytical' meaning, of a soothing kind: they
suppress wrinkles, pain, smarting, etc.). What matters is the art of

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having disguised the abrasive function of the detergent under the
delicious image of a substance at once deep and airy which can
govern the molecular order of the material without damaging it. A
euphoria, incidentally, which must not make us forget that there is
one plane on which Persil and Omo are one and the same: the
plane of the Anglo-Dutch trust Unilever.

Page 68

The Brain of Einstein

Einstein's brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest
intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date
machine, the man who is too powerful is removed from
psychology, and introduced into a world of robots; as is well
known, the supermen of science-fiction always have something
reified about them. So has Einstein: he is commonly signified by
his brain, which is like an object for anthologies, a true museum
exhibit. Perhaps because of his mathematical specialization,
superman is here divested of every magical character; no diffuse
power in him, no mystery other than mechanical: he is a superior, a
prodigious organ, but a real, even a physiological one.
Mythologically, Einstein is matter, his power does not
spontaneously draw one towards the spiritual, it needs the help of
an independent morality, a reminder about the scientist's
'conscience' (Science without conscience, * they said...).

Einstein himself has to some extent been a party to the legend by

bequeathing his brain, for the possession of which two hospitals
are still fighting as if it were an unusual piece of machinery which
it will at last be possible to dismantle. A photograph shows him
lying down, his head bristling with electric wires: the waves of his
brain are being recorded, while he is requested to 'think of
relativity'. (But for that matter, what does 'to think of' mean,
exactly?) What this is meant to convey is probably that the
seismograms will be all the more violent since 'relativity' is an
arduous subject. Thought itself is thus represented as an energetic
material, the measurable product of a complex (quasi-electrical)
apparatus which transforms cerebral substance into power. The
mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic
that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour
analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of
corn or the crushing of ore: he used to produce thought,
continuously, as a mill makes flour, and death was above all, for

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him, the cessation of a localized function: 'the most powerful brain

of all has stopped thinking'.

What this machine of genius was supposed to produce was

equations. Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully
regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Paradoxically, the more the genius of the man was materialized
under the guise of his brain, the more the product of his
inventiveness came to acquire a magical dimension, and gave a
new incarnation to the old esoteric image of a science entirely
contained in a few letters. There is a single secret to the world, and
this secret is held in one word; the universe is a safe of which
humanity seeks the combination: Einstein almost found it, this is
the myth of Einstein. In it, we find all the Gnostic themes: the
unity of nature, the ideal possibility of a fundamental reduction of
the world, the unfastening power of the word, the age-old struggle
between a secret and an utterance, the idea that total knowledge
can only be discovered all at once, like a lock which suddenly
opens after a thousand unsuccessful attempts. The historic equation
E = mc2, by its unexpected simplicity, almost embodies the pure
idea of the key, bare, linear, made of one metal, opening with a
wholly magical ease a door which had resisted the desperate efforts
of centuries. Popular imagery faithfully expresses this:
photographs of Einstein show him standing next to a blackboard
covered with mathematical signs of obvious complexity; but
cartoons of Einstein (the sign that he has become a legend) show
him chalk still in hand, and having just written on an empty
blackboard, as if without preparation, the magic formula of, the
world. In this way mythology shows an awareness of the nature of
the various tasks: research proper brings into play clockwork-like
mechanisms and has its seat in a wholly material organ which is
monstrous only by its cybernetic complication; discovery, on the
contrary, has a magical essence, it is simple like a basic element, a
principial substance, like the philosophers' stone of hermetists, tarwater
for Berkeley, or oxygen for Schelling.

But since the world is still going on, since research is proliferating,
and on the other hand since God's share must be preserved, some

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failure on the part of Einstein is necessary: Einstein died, it is said,
without having been able to verify 'the equation in which the secret
of the world was enclosed'. So in the end the world resisted; hardly
opened, the secret closed again, the code was incomplete. In this
way Einstein fulfils all the conditions of myth, which could not
care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric
security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and
unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and
conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and
mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with
the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without.

* 'Science without conscience is but the ruin of the Soul' (Rabelais,

Pantagruel II, ch. 8).