How can dominant ideologies successfully present themselves as simply the way the world should

be? The French theorist Roland Barthes thought

they did so by appropriating popular culture – and repurposing it. He believed they drained

popular ideas of their real meaning – and then repackaged them to create “myths”

that carried new and often very different implications.

Writing in Mythologies, a collection of essays published in 1957, Barthes looked at examples

drawn from everyday French life, from advertisements to the world of wrestling.

His aim was to show that images – which he called “signs” – were stripped of

meaning when they were removed from their proper context. The result, he thought, was

the spread of a uniform, unthreatening and above all bourgeois ideology – a comfort

blanket of myth that might be cosy and reassuring, but could easily prove stifling.

To understand what Barthes meant, consider the iconic image of a charismatic revolutionary.

What did he really stand for? How has he been depicted in popular culture? And what does

his iconic image represent today? Barthes argued that the 'signs' that society

projects onto our revolutionary bear very little relation to his actual qualities. The

reality was that he was willing to kill to achieve political aims – and that the state

he helped to forge was more repressive, and less free, than his public statements might

suggest. Stripped of this context, though, his image

becomes a sign with other uses. It can exploit consumers' eagerness to identify with qualities

that they believe symbolise youthfulness, rebelliousness, hatred of authority.

Companies that exploit the image, Barthes explains, introduce a 'second order signification'

– a new myth, one that symbolises something different.

It's an image drained of real meaning – one that no longer refers to the revolutionary's

real beliefs. Before long, the famous photograph is appropriated

to sell all sorts of products – t-shirts, beer, even washing powder.

So when Sofia goes to a shop and buys a t-shirt with our revolutionary's face on it, she

thinks she's making a statement about her individualism, rebellion and anti-capitalism.

When in truth, the image is now a capitalist commodity. By buying the t-shirt, she buys

into that conformity. It's the sort of “rebellion” her bourgeois

society is happy to live with. Popular culture has taken a real person whose real ideas posed

real danger, and turned him into an image which, Barthes would point out, has been safely

reinvented as 'myth'. Roland Barthes's writings have had a huge

influence on the ways that critics seek to deconstruct and examine meaning. A more detailed

examination of his ideas can be found in the Macat Analysis.