Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician whose work influenced a number of scholars in media studies. Barthes is most well known for his work in semiotics, social theory, design theory and post-structuralism. Mythologies, written in 1957, helped him become established in France as a public intellectual. Bringing together most of a series of essayistic reflections that Barthes had been fashioning on a monthly basis for the journal Lettres Nouvelles (plus two pieces from other publications) on objects, phenomena, and key practices of contemporary mass culture, Mythologies stands as one of the first concerted modern attempts to attend closely to the concrete operations of mass culture as ideological practice.
The volume gains additional value from a long theoretical postscript, “The Myth Today,” that Barthes penned in 1957 after he had concluded his series of little examinations of French everyday life. He appended the postscript to these mini-studies, the individual "mythologies" of French life to seem to grant them the rigor of quasi-scientific method: although the analyses themselves tended to eschew jargon and high theoretical formulation for more journalistic commentary, “The Myth Today” claimed that underlying each of Barthes’s disquisitions on specific practices of mass culture was a grounding of analysis in that fairly new methodology known as semiology (the science of signs, here understood as the taking of mass cultural phenomena as so many loaded messages addressed to everyday citizens).
Dana Polan
I read S/Z in my senior year in a graduate seminar devoted just to it, and it soon became the decisive Barthes text for me. We might contrast the short and pithy readings Barthes enacts in Mythologies, finding the recurrent operations of bourgeois everywhere, to his slow-motion dissection of a single Balzac story over hundreds of pages in S/Z: there, Barthes uses close reading to capture Balzac’s text as caught between realism and modernism, between representation and its delirious breakdown, and between depiction of an older social order’s stability and the invocation of the new, unfixed social relations of an expansive capitalism geared to creative destruction. I had taken to heart Barthes’s insistent demonstration in Mythologies of the incessant operations of ideology in mass culture, but S/Z offered nuance, detail, a concern with contradiction, and a deeper sense of history (not all texts across time are ideological in the same way and to the same degree).
Roland Barthes has stayed with me as an inspiration (although I generally find his writings after S/Z up to his death in 1980 much less useful to the project of historical and ideological analysis that I continue to engage in). I’ve taught seminars on him over the years, and each time I see the spark that occurs when students engage with works like Mythologies and S/Z. But I also feel the spark anew myself, as I find myself learning again and remembering why Theory mattered—and continues to matter.
Susan Moeller
How do we make sense of our world? For me, always, images have been central. I’m a visual learner and a visual processor of both intellectual and sensory information. My memory is entirely tied to visual representations. Situations that I should process in words, numbers, sounds, or touch are recalled in my brain through images. I remember history through a progression of illustrations—even if I myself have to conjure the illustrations. I recall data by way of charts and graphics—or failing those, of the simple recollection of the shape of the numbers on a page. Music is called up as color for me, and I remember the softness of my dog’s fur or my daughter’s cheek via the visual reminiscence of the curly coat or the flushed skin.
That kind of processing results in an overflowing file cabinet of images in my brain, a virtual repository of personal scenes and faces alongside visual notations from the public sphere. In that cluttered cabinet, certain images, especially photographic ones, stand out as aesthetic, political, and even moral markers.
When I reference my “file cabinet,” there are certain pictures that surface first, that surface repeatedly, that are always accessible. I always wondered why. Philosopher, semiotician, and literary theorist Roland Barthes taught me why. He taught me to be consciously, photographically, and visually literate.
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) is arguably the most influential book yet written about individuals’ encounters with photographs. I read it in the midst of my doctoral program in the history of American civilization at Harvard, during my immersion in historiography and literary theory. I have since read and assigned it countless times. According to Geoffrey Batchen, a professor of photography and editor of a collection of essays on Camera Lucida, Barthes’s last work is likely “the most quoted book in the photographic canon” (2009, x).
When I teach media literacy, my favorite lecture is always the one I give about photography. I know my students have been looking at pictures their entire lives, and I know they have been taking and sharing photos at least since they first received a camera-equipped mobile phone. But even those students who consider themselves “photographers” have rarely considered the quantity and quality of information, messages, perspectives, and emotions they both imbibe and disseminate through photography. Why do people at different news outlets choose different photos—or occasionally the same photo—when they cover the same event? Do their choices have to do with differences in audiences? With the biases of their editors? With their understanding of the meaning of the story? With their assessment of what they ran two hours ago and what they might run two hours from now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
These are important questions—media literacy questions, life questions. And these questions are just a few of those that I raise in the first fifteen minutes of my class on photography. This is why I believe that Camera Lucida is such a valuable text. Barthes gives explanations for what the world observes, but rarely thinks about, in images. Barthes explains the banality of so much photography and why few images hit their viewers with gut-wrenching force.