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Barthes' Mythologies reads everyday cultural objects and signs—advertisements, fashion, food—as semiotic systems where connotation (cultural associations) naturalizes ideology, making contingent social meanings appear eternal and biological. Myth operates by rendering the cultural historical, the social universal. By learning to read connotations and the secondary meanings generated through myth, we denaturalize ideology and recognize how consumer culture recruits us into particular worldviews.
Choose a familiar cultural artifact (advertisement, fashion item, celebrity image). Identify its denotation (literal meaning) and connotations (cultural associations). How does myth make the cultural appear natural? What ideology does it reproduce?
That connotation is subjective or personal association. Barthes argues that connotation is social and systematic—tied to cultural codes and ideologies that structure what signifies as natural or universal.
From Saussure, you learned that the sign consists of a signifier (sound-image or written form) and a signified (concept), and that their relationship is arbitrary — the word "tree" has no natural connection to the concept of a tree. This account operates at the first level, describing how denotative meaning works. Barthes inherits this framework and extends it: he asks what happens when a first-order sign becomes the raw material for a second-order system of meaning. In *Mythologies*, that second-order system is myth — not in the sense of ancient stories, but in the sense of a mode of speech that naturalizes ideology.
The mechanism is crucial. Take a photograph of a Black French soldier saluting the flag, which Barthes analyzes explicitly. At the first level, the sign denotes a particular person performing an action. But this denotative sign is seized by myth and made into a signifier at a second level, where the signified is something like "France is a glorious multicultural empire; French imperial subjects are loyal and proud." The historical contingency of this meaning — the specific political context of the image's production — disappears. What was a political claim becomes something that merely *is*, something that feels simply true. This is the operation Barthes calls naturalization: myth converts history into nature, the contingent into the eternal.
This is why connotation in Barthes' sense is not personal association. The connotations of luxury cars, white wedding dresses, organic food packaging, or celebrity endorsements are social and systematic — structured by cultural codes that distribute meanings predictably across a community. When you feel that a product is "wholesome" because of wooden packaging and earthy colors, you are not having an idiosyncratic response; you are being recruited by a semiotic system that routes these signifiers toward that signified. The feeling of naturalness is the myth's achievement — evidence of its success, not its absence.
Reading culture semiologically, as Barthes teaches, means applying the two-level structure to everyday objects and images. First, identify the denotation: what is literally represented? Then ask: what cultural codes are being activated, and what ideological claim do they make? What is being presented as natural, universal, or inevitable that is in fact historical and contingent? A luxury car advertisement does not just sell a car; it sells a mythology of success, freedom, and deserved reward. The myth works by making this secondary meaning feel obvious — pre-reflective, self-evident. The analytical task is to make the second level visible again, to restore its historical specificity, and thereby to recover the political choices hidden inside apparently innocent images.
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