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.