Who was Roland Barthes?

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Semiotics is the study of sign processes, which are any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the sign's interpreter. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism. He was particularly known for developing and extending the field of semiotics through the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture.

His monthly essays were collected in his Mythologies (1957), and frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values through them. E.g. Barthes cited the portrayal of wine in French society. Its description as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in these interrogations. He developed a theory of signs to demonstrate this perceived deception and suggested that the construction of myths results in two levels of signification: the "language-object", a first order linguistic system; and the "metalanguage", the second-order system transmitting the myth.