In the first essay, The World of Wrestling, Barthes argues that wrestlers, not athletes but the entertainers derived from Mexican luchadores, are personifications of good and evil, and each wrestling match is a “ spectacle of excess”. Barthes’ book Mythologies (1957) is a short set of critical essays focusing on modern day production of mythology and meaning. Barthes examined “ texts” such as advertisements for clothes and food products, noting that certain fashions were meant to signify luxury, happiness or freedom and certain food products meant to signify health, decadence or satisfaction. Barthes argued that there are no natural pure states, but networks of signification that can be revealed as historical processes and cultural practices. Barthes saw in his own day older religious pronouncements about what is “ natural” being replaced by political and scientific claims about the “ natural”, as well as countercultural calls to return to the “ natural” from the modern. Like Foucault, Barthes was a critic of the idea of “the natural”.
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