Mythologies

Mythologies contains 54 short journalistic articles (28 in the English translation) written between 1954 and 1956 for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres nouvelles. In these essays, literary scholar and critic Roland Barthes references the work of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as he tries to expose the “mythic” content of mass cultural phenomena. The texts are at the base of Barthes's investigations into the Marxist concept of ideology and how it situates human identity.

In Mythologies, Barthes demonstrates the potential of semiotics as an instrument of cultural analysis. Semiotics (Greek sêmeîon “sign”) is a system that examines the life of signs within society, and the basic unit of all sign systems is the sign. Anything that expresses meaning is contained within a system of signs—a semiotic system. Semiotics takes its analytic framework from the linguistic model formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Semiotics is, therefore, encoded within linguistics, but also extends to nonlinguistic sign systems. Semiotics focuses on all modes of signification, that is, all things that possess a capacity for meaning; for example, painting, architecture, literature, but also photography, film, fashion, highway codes, music, restaurant menus, and so on. Barthes's influence as a writer and thinker is attached to his application of semiotics to this diverse range of cultural materials.

Taking his semiotics initially from Saussure and then from the structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, Barthes began in the 1950s to write a series of monthly essays on topics that were suggested by current events. These essays considered the hidden codes and strategies deployed in mass-cultural phenomena, for example, advertising and film. A selection from this group of essays makes up the book Mythologies. Barthes's purpose in Mythologies is to see how ideology works in reality and how it positions human identity. The notion of ideology is developed and extrapolated by the French Marxist-structuralist Louis Althusser, who [Page 485]argues that ideology is a continuum and permeates everything, everywhere, and is absolutely inherent in all societal practices and within institutions themselves. In this account—an account analogous to Barthes's work—the social construction of the image can be seen as a kind of inscription, indeed an impress, albeit mediated, of these values and beliefs that are also evident in societies’ “thoughts” and “actions.”

Mythologies is significant because it introduces Barthes to an international audience (Barthes's work was initially disseminated in the United States by the critic Susan Sontag). It also includes a crucial afterthought, “Myth Today.” This important essay articulates his concept of semiological analysis. In “Myth Today,” Barthes develops the terms that reoccur throughout his career: the sign, representing the culturally mediated manifestation of the signifier and the signified, the signifier being the perceptual image of the sign, and the signified representing the idea expressed by the signifier. Although the signifier and the signified can be analyzed separately, they only exist in relation to one another, like the sides of the same coin. In this essay, Barthes introduced the concept of myth into semiotics, myth being a particular form of signification, which is attached to previously existing significations. Signs are constructed of signifiers and signifieds, which conjoin to form the communicative message. Myth, according to Barthes, functions at a different level than the sign does because myth takes the sign of a preexisting message and uses that to signify within the myth's own system; this is the process of secondary signification. Myth can be understood as a metalanguage because it is a second language that speaks of its precursors. Myth is a peculiar system in that it is constructed from a semiological chain that existed before it: Myth is thus a second-order semiological system. Secondary signification is contingent on society and culture. It represents a powerful system of underlining meanings encoded into images, artifacts, and cultural practices. The essays that compose Mythologies are motivated by a clear critique of political and social convention—it is fair to say that Barthes's writing displays a Marxist approach toward identity, consumption, power, and ideology.

...