Barthes, Roland (1915–1980)

Roland Barthes was a French cultural critic associated with both structuralism and post-structuralism who, even more than most other French intellectuals, resisted disciplinary categorization. Barthes spent his early career teaching, convalescing from tuberculosis, and writing for left-wing literary journals. After his iconoclastic argument in Writing Degree Zero (1967b) that no writing could stand apart from and comment on culture because it was always part of it, he went on to write about history, film, photography, language, art, music, and theater, as well as poetry and literature.

Many of these themes crop up in the work for which he is most well known, Mythologies (1972). This slim volume, which started life as a series of brief essays published in French magazines, has had an enduring appeal because it brings together a groundbreaking set of ideas about culture, politics, and modernity. Beautifully and sparsely written, Barthes' essays tell of a culture in transition from an elite, academic, hidebound set of ideas about the “arts” to an emerging popular, mass, everyday, and familiar consumer culture. He took seriously the “low culture” of wrestling, striptease, Hollywood films and actors, and the mundane everyday culture of margarine, children's toys, plastic objects, and steak and fries. Often a response to something in the news, his essays, like the one on the new luxury car in 1957, the Citroën DS (Déesse—“The Goddess”), heralded a new cultural mode: the mass consumption of multiple copies of designed artifacts that had once been consumed en masse in a singular religious form, such as the cathedral.

At the end of Mythologies is a longer essay, titled “Myth Today,” that introduces the idea of semiology (the study of signs and their meaning) to a new audience. In it, Barthes reformulates Ferdinand de Saussure's study of signs to give it an ideological and political edge. He argues that in addition to a system of linguistic signs, there is a second order of cultural signification, which he calls “myth,” that distorts meaning. At a second, less obvious, level of meaning, signifying systems such as writing or photography confirm a set of bourgeois cultural values as if they were beyond question. “Myth” makes the results of human history appear as natural and inevitable, as in the example of a magazine picture simply depicting a black French soldier saluting, in which Barthes finds a mythical interpretation: “The French Empire? It's just a fact: look at this good Negro soldier who salutes like one of our own boys” (1972, 124, italics in original). The essay raises the possibility of a systematic analysis of cultural artifacts using semiology that can reveal how motives are read as reasons, history is treated as nature, and bourgeois ideology is presented as universal truth. Actually, the power of Barthes' analyses in Mythologies derives not so much from systematic technique as from his critical capacity to situate the stuff of ordinary culture in a broader historical and political context; spotting the significance of social class in the form of marriages or the mythical connotations of a man with a jet-pack “going faster than speed.”

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