In a sense, therefore, this is a negative approach to myth: it breaks down rather than replacing. Wine may, in fact, for contingent reasons of sense-experience, be good. His social constructivism is also partial. He believes there are things, with specific attributes, separate from their mythical constructions (accessible, perhaps, through denotative language). But a semiotician can only study the signs or myths, not the things.Īccording to Barthes, he can tell us about the myth of the goodness of wine, or the way wine is signified as an essence it doesn’t really have. He does not believe that myth is necessary. It is crucial to emphasise that Barthes is not saying that all language-use is myth. Barthes uses the example of a Basque chalet in Paris, which ostentatiously displays certain signs of what is taken as Basque style, minus other aspects of Basque houses as they would be found in the countryside (it has a sloping roof, but not a barn). It usually does this by reducing a complex phenomenon to a few traits which are taken as definitive. Its function is to freeze or arrest language. It makes particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen.

It alienates the history of the sign.īarthes’s main objection to myth is that it removes history from language. Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. Instead, myths inflect or distort particular images or signs to carry a particular meaning. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, myths don’t hide anything. They always contain some kind of analogy which motivates them. Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For instance, it uses a photograph and a book in exactly the same way. Myth is a metalanguage. It turns language into a means to speak about itself. However, it does this in a repressive way, concealing the construction of signs. The system of myths tends to reduce the raw material of signifying objects to similarity. Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.īarthes’s example is a magazine cover which shows a black soldier saluting the French flag. At the level of first-order language, this picture is a signifier (an image) which denotes an event (a soldier saluting a flag). But at the second-order mythological level, it signifies something else: the idea of France as a great multi-ethnic empire, the combination of Frenchness and militariness. The main purpose of his work in ‘Mythologies’ is to dissect the functioning of certain insidious myths.

He is discussing the type of discourse which is particularly typical of right-wing populism and of the tabloid press. Barthes’s work on myths prefigures discourse-analysis in media studies. Many of the myths he studies come from the fields of politics and journalism. The most explicitly political aspect of Barthes’s work is his ‘mythology’, or analysis of myths.

Barthes mythologies explained