The "Mythologies" series of essays presents a brilliant analysis of mass culture as a sign system. The author semiotically explains the mechanism of the emergence of political myths as the transformation of history into ideology, provided this process is formalized in symbols. The summary section of the work, the article "Myth Today," offers both an explanation and a method for countering contemporary mythologizing—the creation of a new, artificial myth, the construction of a conventional, third level of mythology, if by the first we mean archaic-traditional, and by the second, "new" (as in the scientific class, for example, Soviet).
In R. Barthes's studies, the leading definition of myth is the word. Anything covered by discourse can become myth, since "our world is infinitely suggestive." Myth, according to Barthes, is a defining qualitative characteristic of "anonymous" modern bourgeois society, while mythologization is considered a characteristic of all societies.