Title

Myth as Metalanguage

Description

In myth, we find again the tri-dimensional pattern which I have just described: the signifier, the signified and the sign. But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. … Everything happens as if myth shifted the formal system of the first significations sideways. As this lateral shift is essential for the analysis of myth, I shall represent it in the [figure], it being understood, of course, that the spatialization of the pattern is here only a metaphor: It can be seen that in myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language (or the modes of representation, which are assimilated to it), which I shall call the language-object, because it is the language which myth gets a hold of in order to build its own system; and myth itself, which I shall call a metalanguage, because it is a second language in which one speaks about the first.

Designer

Barthes, Roland

Date

1978

Source

Mythologies

Bibliographic Citation

Barthes, Roland. 1991 (Twenty-Fifth Printing). Mythologies. Selected and translated by Annette Lavers. The Noonday Press. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux. Pages 113-114.

Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Editions du Seuil.

depict things of type

Structural or Hierarchical

Typological or Classification

is composed of

English Square

use feature

English Brace