In mid-1950s Paris, the French essayist Roland Barthes, then in his forties, wrote a series of unusual articles for the literary journal Les Lettres Nouvelles. These were later published in book form as Mythologies (1957). The subject was contemporary popular culture, and included analyses of objects which would appear too banal to warrant academic criticism — like an advertisement for washing-up liquid.Barthes drew upon semiotics to understand the role of popular culture in society. Semiotics, which originated in the works of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), is the study of signs and symbols and how they are interpreted by humans. Although initially developed in the context of human language (how the signs and symbols of the written language create meaning), semiotics has been applied to cultural anthropology and elsewhere. For example, the ‘red’ of a traffic-light system does not intrinsically mean anything, yet it is conventionally understood as a stop sign. However, Barthes, like Saussure before him, saw that there was something more ambiguous at play here. Saussure had pointed out that symbols or words themselves do not carry clear meanings. In fact, the relationship between a written word and its interpretation was, for Saussure, ‘arbitrary’.1For instance, a cloth in the colours blue, white, and red fluttering on a pole would represent the tricolore — France’s de facto national flag. For Barthes, however, this was only a first-order meaning, conveyed by the striking uniqueness of the design (the ‘signifier’). A second-order2 meaning exists too, something more abstract and immaterial — for instance, the mysterious feeling we may have (the ‘signified’) when we see that particular flag flying. For some this may represent pride in France’s achievements, for others it may represent a form of nationalism to be despised. The flag, and thus every sign, is ambiguous because its second-order meaning is changeable.In ‘Wine and Milk’ (Part 8), Barthes considers the ‘varied and contradictory’ meaning of France’s national beverage: wine. Wine’s first-order meaning is as an alcoholic beverage, a means of intoxication. However, for Barthes the French drink wine not merely to get drunk, but for its many mystical powers. Wine can turn ‘a weak man strong or a silent one talkative’, or make ‘the intellectual the equal of the proletarian’.3 To reject wine would be to reject what it means to be French — to love it is not a choice for a true French person. This belief in wine is, therefore, ‘a coercive collective act’4 representing the popular second-order meaning of wine. However, as we saw in the flag example, there is no natural bond between the signifier (the wine) and the signified (a magical elixir), and other second-order meanings may exist.In Paris, during Barthes’s heyday, academia was dominated by the ideas of the nineteenth-century sociologist Karl Marx. Marx believed that the ruling classes maintained their position by convincing the lower classes that the exploitation of their time and labour was simply the way the world worked.5 In other words, ideology is weaponised to encourage society to understand reality in a certain way.It is wine’s involvement in capitalism that provides an alternative second-order meaning. Barthes points out a ‘good and fine substance’ like wine is nonetheless yielded from the exploitation of labour by wealthy French winegrowers, or indeed that vineyards are violently imposed via colonial settlements in Algeria (in his time). However, this alternative meaning rarely reaches the public consciousness.Barthes refers to this dominance of a particular second-order meaning as a mythology. A sign becomes a myth when society believes it to represent a universal truth — here, the heady image of wine as a symbol of innate Frenchness and not one of expropriation. Rather than believing the formation of myths to be a benign action, for Barthes it is the pervasive tools of capitalism, such as advertising, that is the content provider for such contemporary mythology.Barthes’s fascination with how mythologies could colour popular culture in this way ultimately defined his lack of interest in any Marxist revolutionary impulse. He was not encouraging his readers to revolt against the illusions of myth — instead, he wanted only to unveil the possible subtexts of our shared signs and their influence in society.