The Man Who Read a Glass of Wine as a Political Document

Here is the setup. It is Paris, 1954. Roland Barthes (1915–1980) is reading a magazine. On the cover is a photograph of a young Black soldier in French military uniform, eyes raised and fixed on what appears to be the French tricolor, giving a crisp salute. Nothing in the image is accidental. The soldier's uniform, his gaze, the implied flag, everything is arranged to produce a feeling. The feeling is: France is a great and diverse empire, and even her colonial subjects freely and proudly serve her. The image does not say this in words. It does not need to. It means it through its arrangement of visual and cultural signs, and it means it in a way that feels like a simple observation of the world rather than an argument that could be contested.

Barthes was electrified. What he had just identified was not a lie, exactly, the soldier presumably existed, the photograph was presumably real, but something more insidious: a myth in the precise semiological sense he was developing. The image had taken a contingent, contested, historically specific fact (France's imperial relationship to its colonial subjects) and presented it as if it were a natural, timeless, self-evident truth. The historical had been disguised as the natural. The constructed had been presented as the given. And this was not an accident or an oversight. It was exactly how ideology works.

Barthes had been working on a series of essays throughout the mid-1950s for a French literary magazine, doing exactly this kind of analysis for a wide range of French cultural phenomena: the myth of French wine, the myth of professional wrestling, the myth of Einstein's brain (displayed in a jar, transformed into a symbol of the mind as a magical object separate from the body), the myth of steak (rare steak as a symbol of vitality, virility. and Frenchness) These essays became Mythologies (1957), and they were followed by a dense theoretical essay, "Myth Today," explaining the semiological machinery behind all of them.

A biographical note that is philosophically important: Barthes was the child of a widowed mother who raised him in genteel poverty in Paris, educated at the Sorbonne despite chronic tuberculosis that interrupted his studies repeatedly, and steeped in the French left-intellectual atmosphere of the postwar years. He was neither a Communist Party member nor a straightforward Sartrean existentialist. His method, applying rigorous semiological analysis to popular culture rather than elite literature, was genuinely novel in the French academy of the 1950s, and it was also politically motivated: he wanted to make the ideology of bourgeois French culture visible to itself, to crack the naturalizing shell around the values and assumptions of the French middle class by showing that the shell was there.

The intellectual tool he used was semiology, the science of signs developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, but transformed and applied to culture in ways Saussure had never attempted. To understand what Barthes is doing, you need to understand Saussure's basic model, and then you need to understand what Barthes adds to it. Because what he adds is the move that makes everything else possible: the concept of second-order signification, the level at which culture's hidden ideological work happens.