Mythologies

Still a darling of critical theorists, the French academic Roland Barthes was the subject of glowing essays in recent issues of both Artforum and Frieze. He was one of the most elegant and perceptive writers on late 20th-century product design or, more precisely, on the way in which we endlessly reinterpret the perceived meaning of objects. Mythologies is a collection of Barthes’s essays published first in 1957, and again in a new edition in 1970.

It is a wonderful book, although it is worth reading for the essays on the Citroën DS 19 and plastic alone. As Barthes points out, it can’t be a coincidence that the French pronunciation of the letters D and S sounds exactly like déesse, the word for “goddess.” He describes the Citroën DS 19 as the contemporary equivalent of “the great Gothic cathedrals” and an “exaltation of glass and pressed metal,” the product of a “humanized art” and a “change in the mythology of cars.” Plastic is “a miraculous substance” and “ubiquity made visible” that creates “the stuff of alchemy,” even though different types of plastics, such as polystyrene and polyethylene, are inexplicably named after ancient Greek shepherds.