Roland Barthes said that “French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.” (Mythologies, 54). The toys are mostly made up of miniature versions of the instruments of adult life. “French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life” (53). The myth that the toys convey is an early level of socialization into the adult world of institutions, including the worker’s role in them which will in the future become the child’s role, and at least the ostensible functions that these institutions serve. The toys naturalize the world of armies, hospitals, schools, and science as it is in the historical moment, as well as the future roles the child will occupy in that world. This is what Barthes means when he says that the toys constitute for the child “the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas” (53). The world that the toys create for the child is an early preparative version of the adult world of work, and it inculcates the child in that world already by defining the horizon of the child’s life as a user of previously determined instruments rather than a creator of anything original, and a performer of specialized roles and functions in society predetermined by institutions the child is conditioned not to question but to simply accept.
Toys which are so literal and substitute creativity for mere use, for Barthes, create subjects which are content to perform functions within institutions as they exist. These toys are an active part of the process of reproducing society as it is. Barthes gives the example of the lifelike “dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies; soon, no doubt, milk will turn into water in their stomachs. This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to ‘condition’ her to her future role as mother.” (53). There is an eerily unnatural quality to all of this for Barthes, as the institutional world itself is not natural but conditional. This unnatural quality is worth demonstrating. What about women who can’t or don’t want to play the role of mother? There’s nothing inherent about women that designates them to a specific social role; it is a cultural process brought about by even the toys the women play with as children. What of assumed boys who want to play with the dolls, even play the role of mother? There’s no inherent gendering of an object, nor of a role. These things are conditional and conditioned.
There are modern day American equivalents to the French toys Barthes analyzed. Dolls such as the one he described have only gotten more lifelike over time. Toys have those bland and plastic qualities of use instead of creativity and unnatural conditioning in contemporary American culture as well, and the same function of reproducing society by naturalizing it is certainly served by them. Even the most fantastical toys exist only in the universes created by the most mass-consumed intellectual properties owned by the largest corporations in the world. In consuming toys of this type, we are conditioned to consume more, to become consumers and adopt consumer identities, to become fans rather than artists ourselves. Creativity and the role of creator is again placed beyond our grasp in this process. This serves to suffocate cultural originality further and obscure the underlying reality that large capital owners get to determine even the parameters of our children’s enjoyment.
UMF English Department Blog 