Saussure's linguistics gives us a two-part model of the sign. A sign is the combination of:
- A signifier: the sound-image, the physical form of the word (the sound "tree" or the letters T-R-E-E)
- A signified: the concept, the mental content associated with that form (the concept of a woody plant with roots, trunk, and branches)
The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, there is no natural connection between the sound "tree" and the concept it picks out (speakers of French say arbre, speakers of German say Baum, and the tree does not care). What matters is the relationship of difference within a sign system: "tree" means what it does because of how it differs from "bee" and "free" and "three." Meaning emerges from structure and difference, not from any intrinsic property of the sign.
Now here is Barthes's important move, explained clearly in "Myth Today." He takes the complete Saussurean sign, signifier + signified = sign, and treats it as the signifier of a second system. Myth is not a first-order language but a second-order semiological system, a metalanguage that parasitizes the first-order system.
His own example: in a French grammar class, a teacher writes on the board "quia ego nominor leo" (because my name is lion). In its first-order meaning, this is a sentence in Latin that means something. But in the grammar class context, the sentence is not being used to make a claim about any particular lion. It is being used to illustrate grammatical agreement in Latin. The full first-order sign (the Latin sentence and its meaning) has become the signifier of a second-order meaning: "I am a grammatical example." The first meaning is not destroyed. It is hollowed out, emptied, and made to serve a different function.
Myth works identically, but with ideological content instead of grammatical illustration. Consider the saluting soldier on the magazine cover. At the first-order level, there is a genuine sign: a particular image (signifier) + a particular meaning (a Black soldier saluting a flag in a specific historical context) = a sign with a specific denotative content. At the second-order level, this complete first-order sign becomes the signifier of a mythological meaning: French imperiality, the idea that France's empire is natural, diverse, willing, and just.
The ideological sleight-of-hand happens in the transition. The historical specificity of the first-order sign, the fact that this soldier is from a French colony, that his "choice" to serve is embedded in a complex of coercions and inducements, that the relationship between France and its colonies involves exploitation, is drained away at the second-order level. What remains is an image of Black military loyalty that has been stripped of its history and now functions as a pure form, available to carry the mythological concept of imperial France.
As Barthes puts it, "myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them. Simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification." This is what makes myth so much more effective than straightforward propaganda. Propaganda is an assertion, it can be contested. Myth is a form of apparent observation, it presents contingent, constructed arrangements of power as simply how things are.
The concept of naturalization is the key term. Myth naturalizes ideology: it takes what is historical, contingent, constructed, and politically contested and presents it as natural, eternal, self-evident, and beyond question. The bourgeois values of French culture in the 1950s were not natural features of French reality. They were specific, historically produced, class-interested arrangements. But they appeared, and were experienced, as simply what France was, what French people valued, what was simply obvious. The myth had done its work so well that the question of whether French society was organized differently, for whom it was organized, and who had produced the apparent naturalness did not arise.