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Roland Barthes, who might be regarded as the founder of semiotics aiming at demystification or culture criticism, writes in his Elements of Semiology that "as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself"-"degrave;s qu'il y a société, tout usage est converti en signe de cet usage" (1967:41). This process is crucial, he continues; "it expresses the fact that there is no reality except when it is intelligible." But once a sign is constituted in this way-a usage become a sign of this usage-society may very well refunctionalize it and speak of it as if it were a pure instance of use. A fur coat one wears is a sign of its category; it signifies fur coat as one wears it. But, says Barthes, a society may well attempt to mask this mythological function and act as if the coat were simply an object that serves to protect one from the cold. This last process is what Barthes in Mythologies calls the "alibi," or the general tendency of culture to convert history into nature (1972:128-9). The semiotician must penetrate that alibi and grasp the object as sign, as an instance of the category it exemplifies. But this notion of a usage become a sign of itself is somewhat obscure and scarcely provides the methodological instruction that the semiotician needs to penetrate alibis and identify sign structures. How is one to proceed?
Fortunately there is an exemplary case which can provide considerable guidance and illumination: tourists and tourism. The tourist is not interested in the alibis a society uses to refunctionalize its practices. The tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself, an instance of a cultural practice: a Frenchman is an example of a Frenchman, a restaurant on the Left Bank is an example of a Left-Bank-Restaurant: it signifies "Left-Bank-Restaurantness." All over the world the unsung armies of semiotics, the tourists, are fanning out in search of the signs of Frenchness, typical Italian behavior, exemplary Oriental scenes, typical American thruways, traditional English pubs; and, deaf to the natives' explanations that thruways are just the most efficient way to get from one place to another, or that pubs are just convenient places to meet your friends and have...