Structuralism later took the study of signs beyond linguistic analysis, opening semiotics to the entire world of human meaning-making and giving more attention to everyday uses of language.9 Roland Barthes provided a model for this kind of analysis in his witty collection of essays, Mythologies (1957; translated 1972). A laundry list, a myth, a wrestling match or an advertisement for margarine became subjects for Barthes' meditations on the interrelationships between “depoliticized speech” and the signification process. A discussion of the role of the military in modern society concludes with a slogan from a margarine advertisement: “What does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter, and costs less? What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply?”10 Seeing similar patterns in signification and in lack of resistance to the power of ideological discourse in the public sphere, Barthes' “mythological” analysis vivifies the inter-relationships of meaning-making and power. In his 1973 work, The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes characterized these interrelationships as “the free play of language” and the “endless play of signifiers” brought into arbitrary proximity through the continuous usage and mediation of speakers. Some critics assumed that he was sanctioning a hedonistic, relativistic understanding of meaning-making. “Arbitrarily” appropriated meanings, while both playful and meaningful in the world of advertising, seemed to undermine intentional communication. The implications for historical study seemed clear, and to many, clearly irrelevant: synchronic analysis eschewed the diachronic realm of historical meaning, presenting ahistorical systems only in the temporary present of their arbitrary (here taken to mean “meaningless and random,” rather than the structuralist sense of “not necessary”), playful existence.