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module outline.Roland Barthes and a Pictorial Semiotics
(again, the notes are extensive and intended to be used as back-up for the assignment,
as well as for any later work you may care to do with media-texts.)
Return to
module outline.
Last updated 17.11.11.
Introduction
Summarised below are three short discussions which feature the principal texts demonstrating Barthes' own approach to visual material in general and pictorial semiotics in particular; they are all in the library, exist as summaries and extracts on the internet, and are well supported by secondary texts dealing with the construction and communication of meaning. Of the three, the one which is closest to our immediate concerns is Mythologies itself. The second, Camera Lucida, introduces you to the way in which Barthes began to draw back from a 'method' of analysis and began to reflect personally (rather than abstractly) about photographs, and the last - Image-Music-Text - illustrates how he came to think about communication in general - across all media. In fact this collection is probably worth buying, since it contains the three most famous essays he wrote on the subject, as well as another much discussed in the study of literature: 'The Death of the Author'.
Mythologies
The sample which you have in your reading pack - 'Toys' - is typical of Barthes' style at this time. He is dealing first and foremost with an aspect of his immediate culture and a set of lived practices - in this case, the toy-buying habits of French adults circa 1957. Inevitably this entails that what he observes has aspects of visuality, textuality, and much else relating to beliefs about children's interests and needs. Nevertheless, the particular issue we need to address is the extent to which we feel Barthes is detecting and describing recognisable codes, and codes in which it will be appropriate to use terms such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic. If this proves not to be the case, then we need to identify what other strategies are being employed in his method at this time. To quote Barthes' own introduction, "I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that be treating 'collective representations' as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature' (Barthes, 1993: 9; Barthes italics). It is telling, I think, how many of these samples admit to - or are taken directly from - media representations - typically film, TV, or still photography. Now consider the following two extracts from other entries in Mythologies - and remember when this was written!
Soap-powders and Detergents
... One could then usefully contrast the psychoanalysis of purifying fluids (chlorinated, for example) with that of soap powders (Lux, Persil) or that of detergents (Omo). The relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very different in each case.
Chlorinated fluids, for instance, have always been experienced as a sort of liquid fire, the action of which must be carefully estimated, otherwise the object itself would be affected, 'burnt'. The implicit legend of this type of product rests on the idea of a violent, abrasive modification of matter: the connotations are of a chemical or mutilating type: the product 'kills' the dirt. Powders, on the contrary, are separating agents; their ideal role is to liberate the product from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is 'forced out' and no longer killed; in the Omo imagery, dirt is a diminutive enemy, stunted and black, which takes to its heels from the fine immaculate linen at the sole threat of the judgement of Omo. Products based on chlorine and ammonia are without doubt the representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but a blind one. Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive dirt through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public order not making war. This distinction has ethnographic correlates: the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman's movements when she beats the clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board.
Novels and Children
If we are to believe the weekly Elle, which some time ago mustered seventy women novelists on one photograph, the woman of letters is a remarkable zoological species: she brings forth, pell-mell, novels and children. We are introduced, for example, to Jacqueline Lenoir (two daughters, one novel); Marina Grey (one son, one novel) Nicole Dutreil (two sons, four novels), etc.
What does it mean? This: to write is a glorious but bold activity; the writer is an 'artist'; one recognises that he is entitled to a little bohemianism. As he is in general entrusted - at least in the France of Elle - with giving society reasons for its clear conscience, he must, after all, be paid for his services: one tacitly grants him the right to some individuality. But make no mistake: let no woman believe that they can take advantage of this pact without having first submitted to the eternal statute of womanhood. Women are on the earth to give children to me; let them write as much as they like, let them decorate their condition, but above all, let them not depart from it: let their Biblical fate not be disturbed by the promotion which is conceded to them, and let them pay immediately, by the tribute of their motherhood, for this bohemianism which has a natural link with a writer's life.
Women, be therefore courageous, free; play at being men, write like them; but never get far from them; live under their gaze, compensate for your books by your children; enjoy a free rein for a while, but quickly come back to your condition. One novel, one child, a little feminism, a little connubiality. Let us tie the adventure of art to the strong pillars of the home: both will profit a great deal from this combination: where myths are concerned, mutual help is always fruitful.
....
Man at first seems absent from this double parturition; children and novels alike seem to come by themselves, and to belong to the mother alone. At a pinch, and by dint of seeing seventy times books and kids bracketed together, one would think that they are equally products of an ideal parthenogenesis able to give at once to women, apparently, the Balzacian joys of creation and the tender joys of motherhood. Where then is man in this family picture? Nowhere and everywhere, like the sky, the horizon, an authority which at once determines and limits a condition. Such is the world of Elle: women there are always a homogeneous species, an established body jealous of its privileges, still more enamoured of the burdens that go with them. Man is never inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful; but man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist; he is in all eternity the creative absence, that of the Racinian deity: the feminine world of Elle, a world without men, but entirely constituted by the gaze of man, is very exactly that of the gynaeceum.
Discussion
You need to re-read 'Toys' again in order to get a reasonable grasp of the range of Barthes' methods in this book. In the case of the first example, the analysis of detergents, one must assume that Barthes is mainly being influenced by his knowledge of magazine and newspaper advertisements - along with the presentations made on the boxes and bottles themselves. (A TV set at this time in France was only just beginning to be affordable by the working classes - and the classes themselves were reasonably distinct groups at this time.) Secondly, he is able to deploy his general cultural knowledge of domestic washing practices in this class - still predominantly manual. That having been said, these sources in themselves do not really mandate one method over another, but in this case it is reasonably clear that he is suggesting the existence of a code. But unlike his menu example (see the semiotic notes) what is presented here is all at one level - as though all that is available is a range of starters. He is therefore reduced to talking about the particular qualities of each product (each 'starter'), but the syntagmatic dimension of analysis is therefore weak or non-existent (but note the subsequent introduction by manufacturers of 'rinse aids', etc.). As to the paradigmatic dimension, clearly there is scope here, since as Barthes suggests, distinctions can be made between the liquids and the powders, and each can be further refined.
The second example is much harder and you may come to the conclusion that there is little semiotic analysis going on here - rather a great deal of ideological unscrambling. However, consider very carefully what he has to say about the existence of men in the representations of Elle at the time. What he is in effect suggesting is that men are the unmarked term - the signifier that is the taken-for-granted norm against which all else is both news and, in a sense, non-significant froth, i.e., maleness is the principal signifier that is so pervasive that it never needs to be represented. This is a useful semiotic insight - and a warning - because it indicates that simply restricting oneself to what is presented is never sufficient - of equal or of greater importance is what is not represented. It is in this sense that one can again identify the paradigmatic dimension being applied to an analysis of the coded representations contained within Elle - and once again one is rather at a loss to know where to look for an equivalent syntagmatic axis. But as was the case with the last example it is there, but weakly. In his discussion of women novelists he makes explicit the tacit assumption that being a novelist cannot be separated from the state of motherhood - and while a precise sequence is not identified, the fact that these very different acts of creation are represented as bound together does satisfy syntagmatic requirements - there is a social narrative that these women's lives conform to.
Camera Lucida
The following extracts are taken from chapter 10, and the addition in square brackets is my own.
My rule was plausible enough for me to try to name (as I would need to do) these two elements whose co-presence established, it seemed, the particular interest I took in these photographs. [Barthes has previously commented on a photograph of a rebellion in Nicaragua in which he detected two 'discontinuous' elements: one which seemed to conform to a rule-like system of consistent representation which held true for the entire image, and another much smaller component which seemed to introduce a fragment from a completely different 'world', i.e., he is not really discussing montage, although, clearly, there is a theoretical linkage which needs to be worked out between montage and the phenomena Barthes identifies.]
The first, obviously, is an extent, it has the extension of a field, which I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my knowledge, my culture; this field can be more or less stylized, more or less successful, depending on the photographer's skill or luck, but it always refers to a classical body of information: rebellion, Nicaragua, and all the signs of both: wretched un-uniformed soldiers, ruined streets, corpses, grief, the sun, and the heavy lidded Indian eyes. Thousands of photographs consist of this field, and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest, one that is even stirred sometimes, but in regard to them my emotion requires the rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture. What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn't mean, at least not immediately, "study," but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call the punctum, for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).
Having thus distinguished two themes in Photography (for in general the photographs I liked were constructed in the manner of a classical sonata), I could occupy myself with one after the other.
Discussion
Central to the study of semiotic terms are two propositions which need to be kept in mind: language provides the context within which individuals construct meaning; and words gain their meaning not by naming things, but by functioning so as to establish a difference of meaning between themselves and other words. Taken at face value, these two propositions make the construction of individual meaning dependent on a pre-established consensus - we build meaning for ourselves and others by using the 'blocks' provided by our community's language resources. As individuals, therefore, apparently we will be rendered literally dumb as soon as we attempt to utter anything that is 'outside' what can be expressed within the language of our community - and, perhaps, these are thoughts which we cannot even think! However, ask yourself how new symbols are created - we may not be able to think 'outside' the terms made available by living in a community, but we do appear to be able to change and even 'grow' our ways of thought - review your understanding of metaphor, model, and analogy.
Barthes does not attempt to directly contest the 'prison house' of language. Instead, he asks us to think about the nature of photographs, and the enormous reliance we place on images in making representations to one another, and in consuming the dominating representations that constitute modern life, i.e., political characters, scenes and events deemed to be 'significant' by the media, represented relationships judged to titillate the jaded, e.g. Desperate Housewives, Footballers' Wives, etc. With respect to this consumption of images he proposes a single distinction - a matter of principle. That which matches - indeed, relies upon - cultural knowledge within images he calls the Studium, and this concept is the photographic equivalent to the application of the kinds of codes which we understand as operating throughout language. (And if you draw back from wanting to use the term code - try social narratives - the kinds of stories about 'types' and situations that our culture makes us familiar with - simply by virtue of us living within it.). But that which elicits a private meaning - equivalent to the experiences that one might want to identify as being 'beyond' normal meaning - perhaps, even, 'educational - he calls the Punctum, and his attempt to characterise what is special about being 'pricked' by a photograph is of great educational moment. (Translating this back to the previous comments on discourse, this becomes a commentary on free/individual and constrained/conventionalised statement-making.) However, it is important to follow Barthes closely, because his account of the punctum is not simply the distinction between intelligible private experience and dominant assumptions about the significance of those experiences made by policy makers, etc. - and so to talk of ideology and hegemony, etc. Barthes tries instead to characterise the punctum by making the nature of meaning within these experiences not only private, in the sense of unique, but also potentially harmful, wayward and unpredictable in relation to the observer's own consciousness, falsifying the assumptions of what a subject should experience in this situation, faced with this representation, etc. Barthes' argument here becomes disruptive - as are so many other aspects of his work - because he thinks of the subject's private consciousness as being invaded, corrupted, infested - whichever term appeals - by the social narratives of our culture. (Like Foucault, he is extremely critical of the notion of the sovereign subject, but as we can see here, he does allow that individual experience can transcend an everyday banal conformity.) .
Image-Music-Text
This is the text which contains some of Barthes most famous essays: 'The Photographic Message', 'The Rhetoric of the Image', and probably most famous of all, 'The Death of the Author'. Given this richness it may seem perverse not to quote from any of these, but they are so good that it would be far better if you were to read them for yourself - none of them is particularly long or complicated. But for these notes the extract is taken from 'The Third Meaning - Research notes on some Eisenstein stills' - all italics are those of Barthes. (In case you are not familiar with the name, Eisenstein was a film-maker during and after the Russian Revolution, produced some memorable films that were far in advance of anything else being produced anywhere at the time, and wrote extensively on the theory of film montage.)
Here is an image from Ivan the Terrible: two courtiers, two adjuvants, two supernumeries (it matters little if I am unable to remember the details of the story exactly) are raining down gold over the young czar's head. I think it possible to distinguish three levels of meaning in this scene:
1) An informational level, which gathers together everything I can learn from the setting, the costumes, the characters, their relations, their insertion in an anecdote with which I am (ever if vaguely) familiar. This level is that of communication. Were it necessary to find a mode of analysis for it, I should turn to the first semiotics (that of the 'message'); this level, this semiotics, however, will be of no further concern here.
2) A symbolic level, which is the downpour of gold and which is itself stratified. There is the referential symbolism: the imperial ritual of baptism by gold. Then there is the diegetic symbolism: the theme of gold, of wealth, in Ivan the Terrible (supposing such a theme to exist), which makes a significant intervention in this scene. Then again there is the Eisensteinian symbolism - if by chance a critic should decide to demonstrate that the gold or the raining down or the curtain or the disfiguration can be seen as held in a network of displacements and substitutions peculiar to S. M. Eisenstein. Finally, there is an historical symbolism, if, in a manner even more widely embracing than the previous ones, it can be shown that the gold brings in a (theatrical) playing, a scenography of exchange, locatable both psychoanalytically and economically, that is to say semiologically. taken in its entirety, this second level is that of signification. Its mode of analysis would be a semiotics more highly developed than the first, a second or neo-semiotics, open no longer to the science of the message but to the sciences of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy).
3) Is that all? No, for I am still held by the image. I read, I receive (and probably even first and foremost) a third meaning - evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can see clearly the traits, the signifying accidents of which this - consequently incomplete - sign is composed: a certain compactness of the courtiers' make-up, thick and insistent for the one, smooth and distinguished for the other; the former's 'stupid' nose, the latter's finely traced eyebrows, his lank blondness, his faded, pale complexion, the affected flatness of his hairstyle suggestive of a wig, the touching-up with chalky foundation talc, with face powder. I am not sure if the reading of this third meaning is justified - if it can be generalised - but already it seems to me that its signifier (the traits to which I have tried to give words, if not to describe) possesses a theoretical individuality. On the one hand, it cannot be conflated with the simple existence of the scene, it exceeds the copy of the referential motif, it compels an interrogative reading (interrogation bears precisely on the signifier not on the signified, on reading not on intellection: it is a 'poetical' grasp); on the other, neither can it be conflated with the dramatic meaning of the episode: to say that these traits refer to a significant 'attitude' of the courtiers, this one detached and bored, that one diligent ('They are simply doing their job as courtiers'), does not leave me fully satisfied; something in the two faces exceeds psychology, anecdote, function, exceeds meaning without, however, coming down to the obstinacy in presence shown by any human body. By contrast with the first two levels, communication and signification, this third level - even if the reading of it is still hazardous - is that of significance, a word which has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) and of linking up with, via the path opened up by Julia Kristeva who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text.
Discussion
In fact, in all three of the essays which begin this book, Barthes is writing about the same topic, but from different starting points. To summarise, the theory that emerges is something like this: It may be the case that we are incapable of perceiving the world without already beginning the process of categorising it - possibly into those categories provided by language - but there is a sense in which Barthes wants to make a distinction between the real as existing before the construction of meaning, and all that follows. As we identify parts of this real and communicate our sense of it to ourselves and one another, our starting acts of meaning-making are what Barthes calls denotations - the world is parcelled up into those units recognised by language and in so doing reality is transposed - we move from a continuous and intensive field of experience to a restricted, extensive one - the mechanical building blocks of our language (if one accepts this interpretation). But - Barthes stresses - the photographic image, once incorporated within our communications, undergoes no such transposition - each picture becomes a message without a code, i.e., at this stage it does not function as an illustration of text.
But what happens subsequently is that the image does eventually become incorporated into a system of meaning - typically text-based, although not necessarily expressed directly in association with the image - in which what was denoted is now understood to illustrate, to exemplify, to typify, etc. From being a two-dimensional analogy of the world, the photograph becomes a guarantee that the world really does conform to the narratives that our culture imbues our lives with - this is the level of connotation and also the studium - the photograph is invested in cultural meaning. But as we have seen, both when Barthes identifies the punctum, and here, the third meaning, he wants to re-assert the possibility of a romantic individuality to the construction of meaning. (I say 'romantic', because it is along these lines that he has been criticised, but if we say instead 'imaginative' then perhaps you will agree that there must be some sense in which we can talk meaningfully about the construction of new meaning, and that is certainly part of Barthes' project. But you must decide for yourselves whether or not you think he has provided the theoretical vocabulary to take on such a task.)
Suggestions
for further reading on photography:
Berger,
J. & Mohr, J., (1989), Another Way of Telling,
Brettle,
J. & Rice, S. (eds.), Public Bodies
Private States: New Views on Photography, Representation, Gender,
Bright, D., (ed.), The Passionate Camera:
Photography and Bodies of Desire, Routledge,
Clarke,
G., The Photograph,
Crary,
J., Techniques of the Observer, MIT
Press,
Foster,
H. (1993) Compulsive Beauty,
Kelly, M.,
Imaging Desire, MIT Press,
Price,
M., The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space,
Roberts,
J. (1998) The
Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday,
Solomon-Godeau, A., Photography at the Dock,
Sontag,
S., On Photography, Penguin,
Spence,
J., (1986), Putting Myself in the Picture: a Political, Personal, and
Photographic Autobiography,
Spence,
J. &
Tagg,
J. (1988) The
Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories,
More on Visual Analysis in Particular, or ...
Just how are we going to analyse pictures?
Presenting a representation of child to somebody else amounts to making a 'nested' statement of what was the case at the time the photograph was taken - nested in the mathematical sense of there being representations within representations, etc. Depending on the social circumstances - the practices involved, the relationships assumed or understood, the interests to hand - the viewer is to varying degrees left to decide if the scene is typical or unusual, if it should be understood as implying a set of circumstances that existed at the time of the photograph being taken, if it supports the contention of the presenter, etc. In other words - and to simplify - there is normally a set of social expectancies about how the image is to be 'read', and so one is normally dealing with at least two levels of representation - the present social circumstance, and the one assumed by the person who originally constructed/selected the representation. (You normally experience at least three levels in your lectures: the initial representation of an idea or image, its 'framing' in a contemporary book, and the framing provided by the tutor's notes - and if they then re-interpret these during the lecture you get four levels - and that's not counting your own representation of what you have received!) In terms of social performance, representational framing often takes the form of utterances in which one suggests, implies, or even insists upon a single way of looking at the state of affairs depicted - so, one moves in a labyrinth of contested, forgotten, and newly discovered meanings - in a word, the experience is baroque, or if you like, one is confronted by a structure of windows within windows in which each imposes a different code - introduces a different form of distortion.
The following provides a number of suggestions about how these further forms of analysis might be conducted with respect to selected examples. Although the assumption is that the objects of study are photographic, related arguments can be developed for film, text, and the various performance arts. Assume in each case we are dealing with photographs that have the potential to be read as autobiographical.
The Frame
One of the major arguments that is often put forward about ideology and propaganda is that the most successful examples are those in which the single meaning offered is felt to be natural and self-evident. Consider these now dated, and therefore 'distanced' images.
Observer, 30th. June, 2002, p. 18.
And here's a related image - both images being part of what is sometimes called the pornography of violence.
Guardian, 9th. November, 2002, p.17; source: Reuters
More generally, what might be said about one's own involvement in propaganda and ideologically-motivated representations?
In summary, then, there is a viewing of the world through the particular framing offered by a representation, and as soon as the state of affairs is accepted one becomes a protagonist within a world which is seen to exist in terms of this representation - one lives 'inside' its code. One may, of course, object to a particular representation, but however much one may object, social convention (backed up by force) may be so strong as to make it impolite, impractical, or simply dangerous to avoid acquiescing with, for instance, President Bush's 'You're either with us or against us!'
Selected Reading:
Spence, J. & Holland, P., Eds. (1991) Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, London, Virago; selections from Part One: The Child I Never Was.
A philosophical reflection on what has been said so far:-
The selected readings given above complete a first survey of what may be meant by the term 'representation', but one really needs to go further to get a firm handle on this topic. The problem may be simply stated. All of the examples assumed in the previous account were photographic, so there was always the tacit assumption that beneath or behind the pictures there was a firm reality, even if it was misunderstood or falsified. The picture served, therefore, as a kind of trace of this reality, even if the reality no longer existed. Knowledge of this link to the world 'as it really is or was' also leant an air of authority to the resulting photographs - or suggested a means by which the 'truth' of the world might be levered out of the sludge of history and community life. But how would you deal with a photograph of a unicorn - or of one of the Na'vi? Perhaps a completely blank white rectangle might do - or, more probably today, a digitised composite. But however we might settle this problem of pictorial representation our failure or success would never undermine the meaning of the word 'unicorn', or of a reference to the Na'vi, now that the film Avatar has been released. The word has a precise meaning, despite both unicorns and the Na'vi being fictional. We would, for instance, be able to distinguish between a picture of a unicorn and one of a pixie, dragon, or ogre, but in none of these cases would the connection of the images to 'reality' make any difference - because by definition there wouldn't be one!
The reasonable conclusion is that the 'copy' theory of meaning is not much help when it comes to identifying the common features of our use of symbols. In fact one makes far better progress if one drops the assumption of there always being some kind of 'link' to the world and starts to think of the world as only existing for us as versions - aspects that are identified and articulated through our various symbol systems - or if you prefer, through our various linguistic domains; the corollary to this, which is unsettling the more you think about it, is that the world doesn't come 'naturally' bundled up into the blocks of sensation that corresponds to our particular use of nouns and verbs - unless you subscribe to some innate visual sorting system that the brain uses - tree things, animal things, etc. Furthermore - and this may be astounding to some of you - the world was not made in English!
So, while I may feature a person in any number of symbolic systems - as a man, as a husband, as a warrior, as a particular blood count, as standing as one of a kind, as a shadow, as a series of footsteps, as a statue, and as the subject of a poem or a photograph, none of these has a privileged relationship to the 'reality' or 'truth' of the person concerned - they exist amongst a potential multiplicity of representations within the range of our available symbolic systems, and come into reality precisely as a particular symbol systems gains currency relative to a specific social situation, whether this be in an art gallery, a church, or a surgery ward. And, equally, without an available or appropriate symbolic system we are left, literally, speechless and thoughtless - unless we resort to meaning-making by pulling together associations - Washoe's the domesticated chimp calling a pepper a 'cry-fruit' - or more typically for us as adult human speakers within a linguistically normalised community, metaphor and analogy.
This view may conflict with your common-sense understanding of how the world works, of course In the meantime, you may like to reflect on this short piece by Jorge Luis Borges from his A Universal History of Infamy:-
Of Exactitude in Science
... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658)
by J. A. Suárez Miranda
Barthes revisited.
Barthes' overall project in publishing Mythologies is described through this scene setting:-
What remains, however, beside the essential enemy (the bourgeois norm), is the necessary conjunction of these two enterprises: no denunciation without an appropriate method of detailed analysis, no semiology which cannot, in the last analysis, be acknowledged as semioclasm (Barthes 1993: 9; Barthes' italics).
As he explains earlier, each of the essays is intended as an ideological critique of (his) contemporary mass-culture, and the method employed relies on a particular set of assumptions about the life of symbols within society. According to the 1957 preface,
The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the 'naturalness' with which newspapers, art, and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history ... . I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn ... . Right from the start, the notion of myth seemed to me to explain these examples of the falsely obvious. At that time, I still used the word 'myth' in its traditional sense. But I was already certain of a fact from which I later tried to draw all the consequences: myth is a language (Barthes: 11).
Before turning to an explanation of how Barthes' version of myth works, we will itemise the evidence presented in his essay which seems to match what he has identified here. In other words, we will scan the text for all the examples he provides where he considers an ideological position is being presented as a normal and natural one - and possibly one that seems to ignore past understandings and other possibilities of imagination and understanding.
........................................
Barthes' interpretation of 'myth'
Even in the 1957 preface, Barthes invites his readers to be critical of his own method:
... what I sought throughout this book were significant features. Is this a significance which I read into them? In other words, is there a mythology of the mythologist? No doubt, and the reader will easily see where I stand. But to tell the truth, I don't think that this is quite the right way of stating the problem. 'De-mystification' - to use a word which is beginning to show signs of wear - is not an Olympian operation. What I mean is that I cannot countenance the traditional belief which postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter a 'vocation' equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth (Barthes: 12).
Barthes explanation of how semiology changed his understanding of myth is set out at the end of Mythologies. Before getting into the details you should know that Barthes publicly questioned his own conclusions. When he wrote Mythologies he thought that semiology offered a means to gain a clear vision of the world - a vision in which our normal ideological 'glasses' were dispensed with. Subsequently he drew back from this claim, suggesting initially that one could only ever achieve temporary relief from any one ideological bias, and - as we can already see from the last quote - eventually becoming unconvinced by the presumption that one could faultlessly identify a background of objective truth against which the 'mythicality' of media claims could be exposed.
Barthes indicates that all symbols have two functions of meaning which cannot be separated: they act as signifiers, i.e. words, signs, or sounds which we can distinguish from others, and they also act as signals of meaning - he calls this the signified - the idea which the symbol conventionally means. Note that this does not mean that all signifiers are names, and neither does it mean that all signifieds are things. He also uses two other terms that are immediately important to our understanding of myth: connotation and denotation. Denotation is used to indicate the meaning which a sign normally has, often simply referred to as its 'literal' meaning. Connotation is used to indicate the various associations that may be set off by a particular symbol, and within the scope of this term we can usefully distinguish between private connotations that exist because of our individual life experiences, and public ones that come about because we, to a degree, conduct our lives in ways that are very similar to many other people within our community.
If you take a set of photographs as your illustrations, it will be hard to maintain that any of them are significations which generate meaning autonomously, i.e., are free from all cultural understandings. Barthes assumes that all photographs are 'iconic,' i.e., they resemble their signifieds. But while photographs may hold a simulacral relationship to some original that either exists or existed in the world (remember he is writing long before the development of digital media), they can quickly develop into more arbitrary signifiers of cultural meaning. This starts the move towards Barthes' notion of myth. For instance, a photographic representation of a terrorist may dominate the front page of a tabloid. The signifier, as a photograph, is assumed to be a particularly direct form of iconic symbol that accurately resembles (re-presents) its signified as an established fact: the terrorist. But although the picture seems only to offer mute evidence of a reality which exists outside of any conventional code of meaning, a moment’s thought leads to the conclusion that the photograph must also operate as a symbol - as a pre-existing sign.[1] Our cultural knowledge of ‘men of violence’ from the newspapers and television, and from films such as Die Hard, Patriot Games, Black Hawk Down, etc. all operate so as to invest the photograph of this specific 'terrorist' with a capacity to stand for a larger set of meanings related to popular understandings of what terrorism is, what the people look like, and what they intend to do if given half a chance. The more the selected image offers 'hooks' for us to attach pre-existing assumptions/associations about terrorism, i.e., activate public connotations, the more these conventional associations are available to influence our 'reading' of this particular which, in turn, will have an influence on subsequent understanding of new encounters with 'similar' images. In other words, it is as though the world starts to come to us already parcelled up in familiar packets. However, perhaps the picture is being used as the frontispiece for some critical writing on the continuing American detention of suspected 'terrorists' in Guantanamo. The more the image is subverted by text which undermines our anticipated connotations, the more this 'myth' is weakened and the more likely it that we return to the image's original iconic mode, i.e., here is a representation of a part of reality for which we do not have a ready-to-use code which we can slap on without thought or analysis.
The process of semantic over-determination featured in the example of terrorism is referred to by Barthes as myth. Myth is a mode of signification that signifies by parasitizing other forms of signification. Its material is speech already spoken, signs already recognised, symbols already functioning. Myths operate at a different ‘level’ to ordinary symbols since they take the symbols of other messages and use them as signifiers for their own. In the terrorist example given above, whatever is communicated by the iconic sign of the photographic representation itself is taken over and subsumed into a set of understandings about terrorism itself. What we ‘see’ in the photograph becomes the mythical meaning of ‘terrorist’. To quote Barthes:
... myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before; it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second (Barthes: 114; Barthes’ italics).
Barthes illustrates this idea with a diagram along these lines. Note that Barthes uses sign rather than symbol, and that his definition of signified is usually that it is just the literal denotation, i.e., he tends to exclude connotations.
| First order signifier | First order signified |
|
First order symbol (the 'natural') Second order signifier |
Second order signified |
| Second order symbol - 'myth' |
Normal use of the symbol system employs the first order, while 'mythic' use employs the second order. So the whole point of this diagram is to suggest that a first order symbol can act as a signifier for a second order 'mythic' symbol.
Note that such myths are not mere fantasies. Rooted in primary signification through the iconic (denotative) function of the photographic image, they retain a concreteness of meaning despite this same meaning being constructed at one remove from the connotations of the first level. Myth, according to Barthes not only has the capacity to transform experience already individually experienced into a more publicly sanctioned forms of meaning, it also has a capacity to 'frame' in advance the meanings which will be attributed to experiences yet to be had. John Berger describes this situation with some menace:
... it can be said that myth steals or abducts meaning in order to use it for its own purposes. It abducts but it does not destroy. It needs to capture an independent meaning live, in order to establish its own mythical alibi - rather as a system of pretended justice may require the enforced confession of a prisoner spoken in his own words. (Berger, J. ‘Mythical Speech’ in New Society, 24 Feb., 1972, p. 407 - my adjustment to Berger's parenthesis.)
Two related points should be noted:-
A myth is indivisibly linked with the symbol which it co-opts as its signifier, and the 'immediacy' of the first level meaning (its 'naturalness') is said to confer authenticity and conviction to the second level meaning because of this link through denotation and 'literalness'.
In the case of the photographic (iconic) symbol, the primary signification is assumed not to be arbitrary and reliant on a code. Iconic symbols understood in this way therefore carry a greater tangibility and conviction than arbitrary/conventional ones since they are constituted by signifiers which apparently resemble their signifieds.
Barthes concludes that myth is politically conservative - it projects its meanings as essences - as immutable constructs. This effect is generated by the structure of mythical signification. While it is dependent on a primary signification it does not work to explore further the context of that meaning. Instead it works to bring the primary sign into a system of meaning that is natural and familiar, i.e., conventionalised and seen through hegemonic (dominating) ideological assumptions. Myth paradoxically deals with the ‘real world’ while retreating from it e.g. Tony Blair's demonisation of Sadam Hussain and his weapons of mass destruction. The point is not that the Iraqi leader was mad, bad, or simply confused, but that the combination of Blair's rhetoric, the selective use of evidence (including imagery), and the unified narrative presented by Ministers had the effect of transposing all news reports on Iraq so that they became either part of a pre-established narrative, or else as items that were discordant and therefore 'not real', e.g. the various responses made to the reports of the U.N. Weapon Inspectors.
Reference: Barthes, R. ([1957] 1993) Mythologies London: Vintage.
Note: 1 - Barthes' own explanation of semiotic codes involves the use of a restaurant menu. At its most basic this offers a standard sequence - 'starter', 'main course', and 'pudding'. This 'vertical' order is conventional and such orderings are called syntagms. For each of the elements in this menu there are usually choices, so one might have a fruit juice or a soup for a starter, roast meat or fish for the main course, and cheese or chocolate gateau for the pudding. Each of these choices is also conventional - for instance, we would not expect to see ice cream offered for a starter or fish as one of the pudding options. Orderings of this 'horizontal' sort are called paradigms. Using your own media experience, try to identify the elements of the 'mythic' terrorist code, as portrayed in the popular media, and suggest what may count as syntagmatic and paradigmatic in it.