Abstract
Tackling mythologies means seeing the invisible: de-habituating media encounters to expose underlying political messages often assimilated unawares. Nestled in Rebecca Houze’s New Mythologies are wide-ranging case studies that look inside contemporary ideological signification. The book pivots on a socially and intellectually important question, specifically resonant with readers engaged in media and cultural studies, social construction of and through cultural artifacts or visual discourses, as well as design. How can a work inspired by Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) contribute to contemporary research in the humanities and social sciences, which have observed various turns about aspects of meaning and being beyond language and human, from the digital, affective, to nonhuman turn? A key challenge Houze faces lies in sustaining a critical (re-)orientation targeted at motivating changes in consumption, conceptualization, even legislation and worldviews. The task entails solidly arguing for applying a Barthesian analytic to examine current phenomena, explore and establish radical, future-oriented visions that aptly engage with the mediatized present. While the prose appears to occasionally strain in containing connecting notions and require readers’ additional parsing, the overall argumentation of the book proceeds with clarity. Drawing on her expertise as a design historian and practitioner, Houze guides readers through an ambitious inquiry that unveils tensions and value systems beneath the surface iconography of popular myths that percolate the early 21st century.
Where Barthes re-framed criticism as progressive politics, presenting linguistic analyses of sociopolitical phenomena to appropriate visual media and practices for language, Houze advances her inquiry in a manner at once critical, design-oriented and playful. Examining nine contemporary phenomena, Houze affirms the need of exposing the myriad contextual dynamics and Barthesian myths that continue to shape popular culture. Amidst analyses of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, historical depictions of Native Americans, shopping at Target, McDonald’s Golden Arches, the cultural meanings of green, brands and products of global consumption, her examination of the mobile game platform Nintendo DS (in relation to digital games and Apple merchandise) and the symbolism of both digital and analog play (e.g. Minecraft and Lego) justly highlights our digital entanglement and the imperative of sustainability, in contrast with the nascent awareness of dynamics among design practices, industrialization, mass production and environmental impact.
Closing the book with a study of the digital sandbox game Minecraft and the tradition of such analogue precedents as Lego, wartime Tinkertoys, and Froebel blocks, Houze urges for a deliberation of what instincts our play satisfies, specifically instincts that fuel consumption of goods and energy in contrast to instincts that inspire world creation. This evokes imagined futures where visual and material culture are re-designed to nurture critical play and to re-envision how we live with naturalized views deep within our socially constructed reality. Houze discusses how ubiquitous touch screen interfaces and digital games interact with our sensorium, creating cyborg subjectivities that engage our ambivalence towards childhood, violence and essential tensions between order and destruction, whereas analogue world-building toys and their digital successors embody the human impulse to design, manifested in collecting, combining and structuring with differing degrees of creativity and emotional attachment.
Situated in the inherently interdisciplinary field of design history, the volume interweaves discussions that are anthropological, iconographical and post-colonial, simultaneously sure-footed in contemporary design studies, reminding us of the behaviour-shaping agency of the overlooked artifacts in our daily lives. Design history emphasizes understanding design through sociocultural contexts, with endeavours involving such fields as cultural studies, sociology, economics and ethnography; and tensions between national studies and the discipline’s globalization key to exploring local, regional and international dynamics (Fallan and Lees-Maffei 2016; Lees-Maffei 2016). Like Barthes in exposing how designed artifacts function as metaphors of our collective desire (Huppatz, 2015), Houze’s approach constructively intersects other areas of complementarity to shed light on why specific human longings attach to certain artifacts and phenomena. Integrating multimodal analyses with examining mediating discourses/practices among producers and consumers as a research paradigm will be fruitful. It helps identify relationships among (a) meaning-making resources within designs, (b) meanings accrued to designs, and (c) emotion/affect and ideology. Thinking into these vectors will bring insights into the expansive grounds that New Mythologies traverses, as well as the self-reflexivity of potential myths in design itself not yet observed in the book. Premised on individual, generalized motifs and proceed in webs of associations, the essays at times speedily spin multiple references across several pages, potentially dizzying. This does not deny, however, how they distinctively braid well-researched, occasionally quirky, histories with Houze’s personal, engaging anecdotes. Her voice reflects with honesty the relevance of attending to moments of clarity and probing insights into webs of hyperconnectivity and uncritical engagement with media and artifacts, common markers of our contemporary mode of being: digitally driven and heavily paced, seemingly with little room for contemplation.
New Mythologies problematizes mass culture and its recycled visions with perspective and a refreshing sense of humour, without succumbing to passive critique of the enduring influences of the psychology of global capitalism and the military–entertainment complex. We do not outgrow all myths. Disturbing implications notwithstanding, Houze demonstrates in her multi-angled analytical approach that it is feasible to find buoyancy by leaning into the full contradictions of the politically tumultuous present. In this, New Mythologies presents an engaging contribution for readers who search for a timely ideological critique that aims to inspire new trajectories for our future visual and material culture.