Mythologies

Barthes spent two years writing short essays about French everyday life — wrestling, steak and chips, the face of Garbo, the new Citroën, Billy Graham, detergent advertisements — and discovered that each one was doing the same ideological work: presenting something historically constructed and politically motivated as natural, inevitable, and obvious. Myth, in Barthes's usage, is not a fairy tale but the mechanism by which history disguises itself as nature. The most accessible and entertaining introduction to semiotics ever written. Semiotics in Barthes's hands is not an academic exercise but a practical tool for reading the world. After you read this book you cannot look at an advertisement, a news photograph, a restaurant menu, or a film poster without seeing what it is actually saying underneath what it appears to be saying. Directly relevant to Punk & Pedagogy's Department of Childish Revolution: every child who makes an image needs to understand that images are never innocent. Pairs with Society of the Spectacle as the theoretical framework and Against Interpretation as the productive tension: Debord says the spectacle controls us, Barthes shows you how to read it, Sontag says don't just read it, feel it first.