virtualization of design and production a thesis - Bilkent University

entrenched and shopping turned into a daily fact of life. In
other words, the ‘persuading efforts’ of advertising agencies
appeal to what is assumed to be an already established
consumer attitude and, in doing so, reinforce it” (Bauman
154).
Roland Barthes has studied the cultural and visual meanings of objects in his
illuminating book of “Mythologies” and proposed a general theory of ‘myth’ in
a concluding article: “Myth Today”. Barthes had been analyzing the
advertisements of his time and trying to solve the implicit meanings of
advertisements by using the linguistic method. Taking Saussure’s linguistic
theory as his methodological foundation, Barthes proposed a second-order
signification system. He calls it “mythical signification”, and argued that it
depends on historical and ideological premises. Just as a sign, or the unity of the
signifier and the signified, can itself be a signifier of another, connotative
signified, further levels of connotation can develop. In a special case, the
connotation becomes its own referent and we reach the level of myth.
(Gottdiener 15)
Mythical speech isolates itself from history and presents itself as the natural and
innate fact. By doing that, it does not reject that it builds on a pre-established
signification system from which it takes its strength. For Barthes, “everything
can be a myth provided that it is conveyed by a discourse.[…] Every object in the
world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to
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