By Andrew Robinson
The most explicitly political aspect of Barthes’s work is his ‘mythology’, or analysis of myths. Many of the myths he studies come from the fields of politics and journalism. Barthes’s work on myths prefigures discourse-analysis in media studies. He is discussing the type of discourse which is particularly typical of right-wing populism and of the tabloid press.
The main purpose of his work in ‘Mythologies’ is to dissect the functioning of certain insidious myths. Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.
Barthes’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.
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. For instance, it uses a photograph and a book in exactly the same way.
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The most explicitly political aspect of Barthes’s work is his ‘mythology’, or analysis of myths. Many of the myths he studies come from the fields of politics and journalism. Barthes’s work on myths prefigures discourse-analysis in media studies. He is discussing the type of discourse which is particularly typical of right-wing populism and of the tabloid press.
The main purpose of his work in ‘Mythologies’ is to dissect the functioning of certain insidious myths. Myth is a second-order semiotic system. It takes an already constituted sign and turns it into a signifier.
Barthes’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.
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. For instance, it uses a photograph and a book in exactly the same way.
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