Monday, September 12, 2005

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. 

To attempt these notes (on notes on a thing indescribable), I have simply assembled marginalia and annotations, crunched them together here, as if in a build-up of please make sense, so that I can comb through, piecemeal style.

Early distinctions: obvious (55) and obtuse (56).  The obvious meaning is evident; it "comes to seek me out" (54)--emphatic and important.  The obtuse meaning or third meaning ("the one 'too many'"...yes!) "extend[s] outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically, it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure.  Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival" (55). 

Third meaning gravitates to the curiously disguised.  "The characteristic of this third meaning is indeed-at least in SME[isenstein]-to blur the limit separating expression from disguise, but also to allow that oscillation succinct demonstration--an elliptic emphasis, if one can put it like that, a complex and extremely artful disposition (for it involves a temporality of signification), perfectly described by Eisenstein himself when he jubilantly quotes the golden rule of the old K.S. Gillette: 'just short of the cutting edge'" (58).  And so it seems to close in on the touching, sensitive and emotional without precisely locating such conditions. Next: "Caught up in the disguise, such emotion is never sticky, it is an emotion which simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation" (59).

"If the obtuse meaning cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not copy anything--how do you describe something that doesn't represent anything? The pictorial 'rendering' of words is here impossible, with the consequence that if, in front of these images, we remain, you and I, at the level of articulated language--at the level, that is, of my own text--the obtuse meaning will not succeed in existing, in entering the critic's metalanguage.  Which means that the obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlocution.  For if you look at the images I am discussing, you can see this meaning, we can agree on it 'over the shoulder' or 'on the back' of articulated language" (61).  Paradoxically, third meaning can be understood (right?) and also steer clear of the "critic's metalanguage." Third meaning, in this sense, "outplays meaning" (63), it takes the side exit on "literacy's depletion."

"In short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism). Reasons: 1. discontinuous (61) 2. depletion (not filled out) (62) 3. accent (the form of an emergence, a fold) (62).

Just a few more observations, quotations and one or two questions: Barthes develops this notion--third meaning--around stills (frames from films).  He argues that third meaning "makes the filmic possible" because it "structures the film differently without--at least in SME--subverting the story" (64).  The possibility of an excessive meaning (in this out-there stratum) that doesn't destroy narrative seems important here. "The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins (whose science, therefore, cannot be linguistics, soon discarded like another booster rocket).  The third meaning--theoretically locatable but not describable--can now be seen as the passage from language to signifiance and in the founding act of the filmic itself" (65).  Barthes explains that the filmic is not the same as film (a corollary: novelistic/novel).  Could it be that this explanation of filmic makes it writable; can the filmic be written?  Can writing be filmic?  Is third meaning relegated to the visual?

More on narrativity and subversion:

"The indifference of freedom of position of the supplementary signifier in relation to the narrative allows us to situate with some exactitude the historical, political, theoretical task accomplished by Eisenstein.  In his work, the story (the diegetic, anecdotal representation) is not destroyed--quite the contrary: what finer story than that of Ivan or Potemkin? This importance given to the narrative is necessary in order to be understood in a society which, unable to resolve the contradictions of history without a long political transaction, draws support (provisionally?) from mythical (narrative) solutions.  The contemporary problem is not to destroy the narrative but to subvert it; today's task is to dissociate subversion from destruction: the presence of an obtuse, supplementary, third meaning--if only in a few images, but then as an imperishable signature, as a seal endorsing the whole of the work (and the whole of his work)--radically recasts the theoretical status of the anecdote:  the story (the diegesis) is no longer just a strong system (the millennial system of narrative) but also and contradictorily a simple space, a field of permanences and permutations.  It becomes the configuration, that stage, whose false limits multiply the signifier's permutational play, that vast trace which, by difference, compels what SME himself calls a vertical reading, that false order which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory combination (chance is crude, a signifier on the cheap) and the attainment of a structuration which slips away from the inside.  It can thus be said that with SME we have to reverse the cliche according to which the more gratuitous a meaning, the more it will appear as a mere parasite of the story being narrated; on the contrary, it is this story which here finds itself in some parametric to the signifier for which is is now merely the field of displacement, the constitutive negativity, or, again, the fellow-traveler" (64).

Why such a long passage?  Just one megaloparagraph.  But in it we have one of Barthes's two references to Eisenstein's notion of vertical reading (a dilute or thinly-known story-structure?).  And I'm not sure what Eisenstein or Barthes mean--vertical reading.  I'm also interested in the idea of "radically recast[ing] the theoretical status of the anecdote"; I guess this works on the analogy still is to film as anecdote is to narrative. 

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 12, 2005 5:00 PM to Reading Notes