Roland Barthes made a decisive break with structuralism and Marxism, organizing his investigations around semiotics (the theory of signs) which drove contemporary French culture toward post-structuralism and post-modernism

Myth dissolves the realm of history by making it appear as nature; it makes the world appear natural and given, disguising the message being proposed, which is the most important effect of myth that Barthes analyzes

Barthes withdraws into interiority and cultivates a carefully thorough self, and is the great philosophical exponent of pleasure and the pleasure principle in contemporary thought, moving away from the external world while trying to render it dubious, contingent, arbitrary, and dependent upon construction by the self

Barthes argues that myth has become a commodity and commodities have become myths, reversing the Marxist formula of commodity-money-commodity into consumer goods-mythology-consumer goods.

Barthes reads plastic as embodying the myth of infinite transformation: plastic can be turned into anything, changed in color and shape, made to do all kinds of things, making plastic the ultimate postmodern substance with infinite freedom and infinite transformation

Barthes' reading of Nietzsche emphasizes aesthetics, a critical stance, and the outsider status of the critic, which transforms the critic into a creative artist and creates a new approach to human creativity that allows for questioning all previously established foundational discourses

Barthes' initial project of demythologizing mass culture artifacts was designed to liberate readers from the tyranny of mass-produced consciousness by decoding hidden messages in cultural artifacts to discover who is generating them and for what purposes, usually coercive purposes rooted in Marxist tradition

Barthes argues that the external world is not given to us but actively constructed by us, which is a more radical derivation from Kant's project of showing we actively construct the external world, because Barthes extends this to argue that we construct not just the world of signs and society and history, but ultimately nature itself is a social and linguistic construct

Barthes' demythologizing project is formulated as a poetic protest against human limitations, but ironically takes the form of a demythologizing myth that is itself mythological

Semiotics is defined as the science of signs or the theory of signs, a general science of science, and is a subset of structural linguistics founded by de Saussure around the turn of the century, viewing the human domain as the domain of symbols and signs and trying to read these signs and look for their internal coherence

Examples of semiotic systems include psychoanalysis, Marxism, clothing (the kind of clothes you wear), mass culture (advertising, MTV), and other linguistic systems that are separate and incommensurable from each other

A sailor can read the clothing worn by women as a semiotic text: a nun's long black dress and crucifix signals one meaning ('hello sailor' means greeting), while a woman in red satin hot pants and see-through blouse signals prostitute and 'hi sailor' means sexual proposition, demonstrating that people are constantly doing semiotic analysis through reading the first-order meaning of signs

Barthes wrote a book called 'The System of Fashion' in which he analyzes ladies fashion and treats it as a semiotic system, analyzing the system of signs in fashion as a remarkable idea that can be applied to the entire human domain to break down every kind of communicative activity and sign

Barthes attended a world congress of detergents in 1954 in Paris and analyzed detergent advertisements as texts, finding that chemically identical products are differentiated through constructed myths: green vs. blue detergent, masculine (lumberjack) vs. feminine (housewife) imagery, creating contemporary myths where chemically equivalent products are made into different commodities through mythology

Contemporary mythology is created by modern advertisers and manufacturers rather than Homer and Shakespeare, and people worship commodities like the new Cadillac because it represents myths of good life, ease, and luxury—the myth 'cadillac style' means 'good life,' and possessing a Cadillac has become an icon of contemporary life

Barthes analyzes striptease and infers that it desexualizes woman because the process never goes the entire way into actual sex; it is an elaborate stereotype ritual that provides catharsis for men's sex drives, constructing the myth of woman as incomplete sexuality through the ritual form

Barthes analyzes the brain of Einstein as a cultural icon embodying the myth that knowledge is a formula or container—Einstein's brain in a jar means knowledge is enclosed within space and physical matter, the opposite of a postmodern icon which would destroy the brain and break the box

Barthes analyzes a French magazine photograph from the mid-1950s of a Black soldier saluting the French tri-color, arguing that the first level of meaning is simply what is depicted (a photo of a soldier saluting), but the second level of myth is an apology for French colonialism—it presents the image of a happy, content, loyal, docile Black soldier to reassure that there is no problem with colonialism despite its breakdown and the movement against it

Using Rambo movies as an example, the first level of meaning is simply sylvester Stallone killing people and being invincible, but the second-order mythological meaning is an apology for American defeat in Vietnam—the myth of American invincibility constructed to deny historical loss through the fantasy of one American defeating 500 enemies

Barthes undergoes the 'death of the author'—the author is abolished so that the critic has completely free play within the domain of the text; if the author objects that the critic's reading is not what was intended, the post-structuralist critic responds that the text is completely free and authorial intent has no authority over meaning