Before a full week cycles around, I wanted to tack up a few notes about the
Digital and Visual Rhetorics Symposium hosted at SU last Thursday and Friday.
Each of the talks was stimulating/evocative; w/ these notes: I’m going for a patchwork of what was said and what it got me
thinking about (highlights plus commentary). Fair enough?
Tag: Barthes
Barthes – The Third Meaning (1970)
Barthes’s essay, "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some
Eisenstein Stills," approaches a third order of meaning, an inarticulable
beyond, extant to the first-order obvious and the second-order symbolic but not
wholly divorced from them. The third meaning takes its shape from a
"theoretical individuality" (55) (close associate to the punctum/sting,
no doubt). And it is, of course, difficult to name
because, as Barthes puts it, the third meaning or obtuse meaning "is a signifier
without a signified" (61). Barthes’s essay-notes proceed through a kind of
awkward profundity; piling through an array of near-descriptors, as near as one
can get without reducing the third meaning into something it is not.
Barthes – Rhetoric of the Image (1964)
In the advertising image, nice bright colors–a net-sack of Panzani pasta and
assorted spaghettimakers including vegetables, fresh and plenty.
Though non-linear, many of the signs accord with a variety of "euphoric values,"
says Barthes: domestic preparation, freshness, an unpacking, the casual
market-knowledge of slow foods of a pre-mechanical pace (no need for
preservation, refrigeration). Also, in the coordination of colors and types,
Barthes suggests second meaning–Italianicity or a gathering of things
Italian, much of this "based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes"
(34). Each of these meanings match with distinctive kinds of knowledge.
A This-side of Language
On trauma and image from RB, "The Photographic Message":
These few remarks sketch a kind of differential table of photographic
connotations, showing, if nothing else, that connotation extends a long way.
Is this to say that a pure denotation, a this-side of language, is
impossible? If such a denotation exists, it is perhaps not at the level of
what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective,
but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images. The
trauma can be seized in a process of photographic signification but then
precisely they are indicated via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates
and pacifies them. Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in
photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene
‘really’ happened: the photographer had to be there (the mythical
definition of denotation). Assuming this (which, in fact, is already a
connotation), the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes,
violent deaths, all captured ‘from life as lived’) is the photograph about
which there is nothing to say; the shock-photo is by structure insignificant:
no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold
on the process instituting the signification. One could imagine a kind
of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult its connotation; or
again, the ‘mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to
its traumatic effect. (30)
"The more difficult its connotation…," close to what Jeff posted
Monday at
this Public Address on
spectacle, disaster and "signature images."
Barthes – The Photographic Message (1961)
Press photographs. Barthes refers to several such photographs in this
essay from 1961. He was concerned with contending orders of connoted
and denoted meanings operable in the reading of photographs. The
"photographic paradox," as he puts it, involves the double structure of
contending linguistic orders (connotative, denotative) and the photograph as
analogon, "a message without code" (17). Paradoxically, the press
photograph bears a "continuous message" sustained in the two significant
structures (of which "only one is linguistic"…either accompanying text or
description). Barthes calls the relationship between the image and the text
"contiguous" rather than "homogenous" (16). And so the photograph must be read
with some awareness of these variations, which lead to variations in meaning.
Barthes: "What can at least be done now is to forecast the main planes of
analysis of photographic connotation" (20).
Amphigeography and Doppelspace
Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes on Amphibologies:
[I]n general, the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and
to forget the other. Each time he encounters one of these double words,
R.B., on the contrary insists on keeping both meanings, as if one were winking
at the other and as if the word’s meaning were in that wink, so that one
and the same words, in one and the same sentence, means at one
and the same time two different things, and so that one delights,
semantically, in the other by the other. This is why such words are
often said to be "preciously ambiguous": not in their lexical essence (for any
word in the lexicon has several meanings), but because, by any kind of luck,
a kind of favor not of language but of discourse, I can actualize their
amphibology, can say ‘intelligence’ and appear to be referring chiefly to the
intellective meaning, but letting the meaning of ‘complicity’ be understood
(72).
The Almost
Eight years ago today my mother died; nothing predicted it. Although we never learned the deciding cause (off with causality, off with dogma), it was a defining day that I’ve mostly come to terms with. Continue reading →
The Photographemic Map
I started with a simple impulse to document the park. I walk through
Thornden Park almost every day; it’s familiar, safe-seeming despite the
well-circulated commonplaces about the park’s hazards: the "don’t-go-alone"
and especially after dark.