"Myth Today" in Mythologies

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As the concluding chapter in Mythologies, "Myth Today" combines the various cases into a unified theoretical idea. Here, Barthes conceptualizes myth as a system of communication, that it is a message cannot be possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form (Barthes, 1972, p. 109) Also, he analyzes the process of myth concretely, presenting specific examples.

Based on Saussure's definitions, Barthes argues that signification can be separated into denotation and connotation. Denotation is the descriptive and literal level of meaning shared by most of members within a culture; connotation, on the other hand, is the meaning generated by connecting signifiers to the wider cultural concerns, such as the beliefs, attitudes, frameworks and ideologies of a social formation. 1

Myth is the signification in connotative level. Where connotation has become naturalized as hegemonic, that is, accepted as normal and natural, is acts as conceptual maps of meaning by which to make sense of the world. These are myth. 2 If a certain sign is adopted repetitiously in the syntagmatical dimension, this particular adoption is seen as more suitable than applications of other alternatives in the paradigmatic. Then, the connotation of the sign becomes naturalized and normalized. Naturalization of myth is nothing but a cultural construct.

Myth is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign in the first system (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) becomes a mere signifier in the second (Barthes, 1972, p. 114) Barthes defines the sign in the first-order system, or language, as the language-object, and the myth as metalanguage.

In order to advance his argument, he uses two examples, that of a sentence in Latin grammar textbook and a photograph of a black soldier. The signified of the sentence and the photograph in the first-order system disappears when the sign becomes the form for the concept in the second-order system. The sentence loses its own story and becomes just a grammatical example. The factual discourse about the young black soldier is also obscured by the lack of context concerning French imperialism. According to Barthes's table (Barthes, 1972, trans. A. Leavers, p. 115), the examples can be drawn like below.

The signification of myth deletes the history or narrative of the sign and fills up the empty space with the intentioned new meaning. Myth is thus not just a message, but a message that is political by depoliticizing. It turns history into essence, culture into Nature, and obscures the role of human beings in producing the structures they inhabit and thus their capacity to change them (Moriarty, 1991, p. 28)