Invited to contribute to Hans Leo Höger’s edited volume "Updating Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Positionen aus Design, Architektur und Kunst".
The book edited by Hans Leo Höger offers a contemporary updating of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and examines everyday phenomena of the 21st century from the perspectives of design, architecture, art, and the environment. It brings together more than thirty internationally active authors who, in concise, essayistic texts, analyse and critically reflect on current myths such as streaming, the metaverse, citizen journalism, home office, and sustainability. At its core lies the guiding question of which objects, situations, and actors Barthes would classify as mythical today, and how attributions of meaning have been transformed since the 1950s under changing socio-economic and media conditions.
The publication combines subjective observation with theoretically grounded analysis and is aimed in particular at designers, students, and researchers in the fields of design and cultural studies. Its focus is on the role of design within consumer-oriented societies, on the symbolic charging of everyday objects, and on the political, ecological, and social implications of material and medial environments. In this sense, the volume functions both as a homage to Barthes’ project of cultural semiology and as an analytical toolkit that enables a nuanced account of contemporary everyday cultures and interrogates them with regard to their design-related, social, and discursive relevance.
My contribution examines the lemon squeezer “Juicy Salif” by Philippe Starck as a paradigmatic object of an aesthetic capitalism in which use value recedes in favour of aspects of staging and prestige. It demonstrates that the radical formal language and the deliberately accepted functional deficits are less aimed at the efficients queezing of lemons than at generating discourse, desire and processes of social distinction. From this perspective, “Juicy Salif” appears as an everyday myth that exemplarily reveals how design today shapes identity, lifestyle and communicative practices instead of primarily providing practical problem-solving.