A young generation was growing up with rising expectations of leisure and pleasure along with their shifting cultural consumption. Movies (including Hollywood ones) were vastly popular (and that’s where people saw commercials-they weren’t on television). Purchasing power was increasing, and, with it, purchasing and its attendant activities, such as industrial production and advertising.
In the nineteen-fifties, France was undergoing an economic boom, a social shift, and a political crisis. Perhaps no word appears in the book as often as “bourgeois,” and Barthes’s message throughout would be clearer if for every occurrence of the word “bourgeois,” a reader substituted “bad” and, for “petit bourgeois,” “very bad.” Given the metronomic predictability of the essays’ ideological framework and aims, it’s all the more fascinating to consider the circumstances under which the book came into being and why it is, and seems to have remained, so influential. Under the guise of linguistic analyses in terms borrowed from the theoretician Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes offers strangely simplistic accusations of what Marx called “false consciousness,” and, borrowing from Marx, he reveals the villain behind the curtain-it’s not a person, it’s a class.
0 kommentar(er)
