Roland Barthes--Beyond Structuralism

From Narrative to Signifiance

Roland Barthes began as a structuralist, focusing on the many details of the narrative in such a way that it would be possible to map it out in a diagram. His structuralist work is well written and interesting in its own right, as one of his main tasks (especially in S/Z) is to reveal the functional/narrative mechanisms that play into all texts--even so called "realist" texts, which seem to present reality. If he would have stopped there at this achievement, he would be important, but not as important as he is today.

Reading Image-Music-Text is an interesting experience because it is a compilation of essays that range in years published. Many of these have become anthologized in either compilations of Barthes texts (not "work") or the Norton series. While the title suggests that Barthes may be moving from Image to Music to Text, the form of the book scatters itself across these topics. This method is in keeping with Barthes claim that no text is isolated in itself and is part of the "Text." In a way, Barthes  does arrive at a theory of the Text (and the reader's interaction with it) rather than becoming a comprehensive theorist of the Image or Music.

But the book is not chronologically arranged either and this must be taken into account when discussing the relationship among image, music, and text. His three essays dealing explicitly with  images, "Rhetoric of the Image," the "The Photographic Message," and "The Third Meaning" are written after his engagement with the Structural Analysis of Narrative. This movement makes sense since signifiance has no place in a purely "structural" analysis of narrative. Barthes began to see that the text is sometimes left open, containing dissonances, resonances and almost meanings. "Signifiance" or the third meaning is something beyond the limits of structuralism.


Gesture


Although "writing" and "Text" will eventually become the focus of Barthes work, he also writes a lot about the importance of 'gesture'. This focus stems from his interest in Brecht's concept of "estrangement" in the theater. Brecht, as well as Eisenstein, uses the "social gest," which "is a gesture of set of gestures (but never a gesticulation) in which a whole social situation can be read. Thus, in the Eisenstein still with the fist--this allows us to 'read' the proletarian struggle.Thus,  the image takes on much more meaning than the narrative 'subject' or even the 'movement' of film: "The subject is false articulation: why this subject in preference to another? The work only begins with the tableau" (Barthes 76).

Signifiance

The signifiance disturbs this sort of unity of gesture and meaning. Drawing from his elaboration of "codes" in his structural days, Barthes focuses more on the vertical, paradigmatic reading of images and stills, which imply several different codes or lexias at once. Signifiance is not a particular lexia, but precisely what is between the lexias. To Barthes, at least in the essay "The Third Meaning," signifiance belongs to "the family of the pun, buffoonery, a useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories, it is on the side of the carnival" (Barthes 55). Describing the Eisenstein still of a beard, he sounds like he is engaging the carnivalesque logic of Bakhtin: "a multi-layering of meanings which always lets the previous meaning continue, as in a geological formation: saying the opposite without giving up the contrary" (Barthes 58). In other words, there seems to be a kind of undercutting or debasing going on with signifiance--a rupture in the gesture.

Indeed, this rupturing of the gesture from the actor is something Barthes explores in the essay on Banraku theatre:

Barthes claims that Bunraku theatre is signifi(c)ant because it maintains the separation of actor, gesture, and character which he finds also in Brecht's estrangement:

This distance, reputed by us to be impossible, useless, or derisory and speedily abandoned [. . .] is precisely what Bunraku shows--shows how it can function: by the discontinuity of codes, by thte caesurea imposed in the different traits of the representation, so that the copy elaborated on the stage is not destroyed but shattered, scored, freed from the metonymical contagion of voice and gesture, soul and body, which entangles our [the West's] actors

 In Bunraku theater, the "emotion no longer submerges everything in its flood but becomes matter for reading" (Barthes 177). Thus, we return to the problem of 'reading' and, ultimately, the realm of text.

Production

We have been speaking in class a lot about the importance of 'production' as part of visual literacy. Although Defining Visual Rhetorics argues that Barthes is not aware of the material aspects of production, he enjoys confusing the processes of 'reading' and 'production,' arguing that the Text must be read to be really "produced" in any meaningful sense of the term. To really read a text means that we can also re-write it.

Consequences of Barthes Theory

What does Barthes have to offer us in visual rhetoric? Sid claimed that the work of rhetoric "breaks things apart" and claimed this is might not be the way toward understanding of the visual. Indeed, Barthes in his later work is all about breaking apart Texts (or images, or whatever) into smaller pieces, ultimately claiming that the reader unifies these elements: "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" (Barthes 148).

From various cultural studies, we know that this kind of "ideal reader" is a critical fiction. The reader does not necessarily unify the text. Barthes has a tendency to steer clear of particular political or social groups when he discusses encounters with texts. I think this may have been one of the things that attracted me to his text as an undergraduate, but now I see that his theories must be modified to be useful in today's critical world.

We need to work through the viability of reading an image like a "text," based in either structural, hermeneutic or deconstructive practices. Visuals, though they can be broken down into their parts, seem to have a kind of unification of affect. Should we merely go back to the rhetorical concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos? Is there another way to describe this unity (holism) of the image without resorting to the "adjective"? Can we really "change the object itself" as Barthes tells us to do?

And yet, images interact as texts do too. Images can be related to one another in terms of form, content, medium, presentation. Mitchell and others claim that word and image are closer related than we think. Words are 'image' or at least 'visual' as are paintings or photographs. Do "visual" images (as opposed to verbal images) have something "different" about them that resists rhetorical analysis and calls for a new understanding? Or perhaps it is not that they are fundamentally different, but that classical rhetoric is oral, contemporary is textual, what is visual? If we cannot use the word "Rhetoric," is the idea of 'text' any better?

The problem with 'text' is the connotations that come with it in the literary community--interpretation. Texts are to be 'read' 'deciphered' or, in Barthes terminology, "re-written." Greg Ulmer suggests that an analogy of text for the 'visual'  is Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of "felt". Text is "to weave"--is this how we understand what we do when we produce visuals? Are we "weaving" elements together to make our new creation?

In my very brief experience with GIMP, I have been playing around with the "layering" function. Layering images and objects--its more like a palimpsest (still a textual concept) or, perhaps, a puzzle? A puzzle with depth? Do we want to talk about the "depth" of a particular image (and return to Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting?)? If the key to understanding what we would call this combination of visual communication and visual "rhetoric" is production, then we have to look at how we interact with the tools used to produce and circulate images.

Praise for Prezi--Zoom Zoom!

Remember when I was talking about diagrams and images and how this affects the way we think?

Well, after playing around with prezi for a few minutes, I realized that it has answered my question: yes.

I hope that everyone goes and uses prezi and never touches powerpoint again--I don't think I ever will (except for the powerpoints for ENC 3254--and I might even turn those into prezis)

But really, what is so great about Prezi? Think about what we know as an "Idea map"--those things with bubbles and branches that look like mutant spiders.We tend to think about the idea map as a "pre-writing" exercise, something that prepares to write a paper or presentation. With Prezi--pre-writing IS presentation writing. As Sid said in class today, you just start with a blank canvas and you draw the boundaries around the pieces of your presentation. There are no "slides" and no reason for "bullet points." The canvas can be organized in zig-zaggy patterns with whatever "path" you choose, which is more akin to a narrative or a route on a map than an ordered series of pages. So Prezi can cut down on a lot of time.

So you could just plunk down everything and organize it with the path (rather than 'aesthetically'--I'll address what I might mean by this soon), but you can also 'group and layer' objects so that your presentation itself looks more like a "diagram" than a linear narrative. This addresses my question about what happens when we start to stick stuff in relation to one another visually through figural relationships rather than just type lines and lines of text.

• You would probably not write so many full sentence under bullet points
• And your students would probably have to think more visually
• And you wouldn't get bullet points that are basically sentence fragments strung together (like I just did)

Also, your students (or you) would be more inclined to write out a 'script' that isn't on the screen. So, students would have to listen to your words and not just write down your outline you have pasted on power point.

But Prezi is mostly entrancing to the viewer/reader because of the power of Zoom, so that you can embed 'pages' (or elements) within elements, getting all sorts of crazy ways to approach material such that the visual presentation can reinforce what you are trying to say.

The bottom line: try it for yourself

Diagrams and Figures as Images

Lately, I have been interested in thinking about how we use diagrams to portray information or concepts. Although it would not be my first choice of object for analysis, Charles Kostelnick's "Melting Pot Ideology--Statistical Atlases of the US" and Andrea Lange's  "Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing Victorian Middle Class through Images of Home" are the kind of things I'm thinking about. First off, both of these essays illustrate Burke's epigraph to this class: "a way of seeing is a way of not seeing." One way we can understand this statement is in terms of the ideology that any presentation of information (visual, verbal, or both) hides its ideology.

However, the thing that I am interested in right now is the way that the visual and verbal interact to portray information, particularly on the conceptual level. Images are used for many different purposes but when writing a paper or giving a presentation they are usually used as illustration. Claiming that it 'illustrates' the point, as if it were an objective reality also hides the pictures ideology. But, that is not primarily what I want to think about here. I want to ask after how representing concepts in different ways, just as we would claim that using different words does, allows us to think about things in a different manner. For instance, in my class last semester we used (ad nauseum) Greimascian rectangles to image (i don't want to say represent) or 'imagine' science fiction texts in different ways. We talked a lot about how the text cannot be reduced to the image, but that the GR gave us something more to work with and indeed it allowed us to think of things in a different way--the thought process was no longer 'linear' but spatial. Lacan also is famous for using strange visual elements to get across a point.

As we began to use these Greimascian rectangles liberally and after the class ended, I started to think about the rhetorical purpose of their use. What I came up with is that these diagrams, much like literature's engagement with linguistics, allows the analysis the illusion of 'objectivity'. This is the same kind of rhetoric used by Hegel and Marx--History as a Science--dialectical materialism--oooh, so science-y! so complex!

You see that I'm poking a little fun at this. . .I apologize for it. On one hand, I see the use of Greimas as a powerful tool (and this is also how Phil described it), but on the other, the use of these things seemed to a claim on the rigor of literary analysis.

 The second example of visual conceptual diagrams (i just now defined what I was talking about) comes from Roberto Bolano's 2666 (though he also engages in this in another novel, The Savage Detectives). The context of the story is this: A philosophy professor, named Amalfitano, one day begins to doodle geometric shapes with philosopher's names on them. Here is one of the images:

From Blographia Literaria

 Keeping in mind that the professor is just mindlessly doodling, we could just understand these as meaningless, as jokes, but what I couldn't help wondering is how doing something like this might change forever the way we think about these certain philosophers and the possibility of this intertextuality. The blog where I got this image from argues that Bolano is interested in making us search for these authors and their relationships:

"All books, all literature exists in Bolaño because any book, even ones which may or probably do not have a physical existence, can be searched for, and the act of searching creates something which is equivalent to the weight of existence. The ability to search for anything on the internet means that everything is in the internet, even if it only exists in your search string; the page showing no results is still a form of existence of what you were looking for. What you are searching for is created the instant you search for it" (From Blographia).

Thus, it is possible that just playing around with visual relations between texts and figures that we may be spurred onto interesting connections and searches for meaning. I guess what I am trying to get in this post is how the visual allows us to re-think things conceptually--a giant topic that I think I'd like to explore more.

Invislbe/Visible; Image/Word

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read" --Stephen in Ulysses

"any theory of painting is a metaphysics" --Merleau-Ponty

In "What is an image," WTJ Mitchell, like many of the contributors to Defining Visual Rhetoric is attempting to struggle against the paragonal relationship between image and word (a struggle between the two). His main framework comes from Wittgenstein, an analytic philosopher who thought that ultimately philosophy is about ridding ourselves of the problems that we pose that are usually caused by misuse of language. As such, Wittgenstein and his followers try to demystify phenomena in the world: not to reduce it to meaninglessness, but to get rid of false problems caused by metaphysical speculation. Mitchell's analysis is powerful because he carefully analyzes the 'history' of our conceptions of images in order to show the complicated relationship between image and word and to argue that there isn't an "image proper" and an improper, much like Derrida argues in his discussion of the 'proper' name. I labeled Mitchell's analysis as an "analytic philosopher's deconstruction of the image proper."

I have always had a difficult time figuring out what "imagery" is when analyzing poetry. When I looked at poetry I thought about 'images' as any 'concrete' words that the poet uses to convey a certain meaning or mood. Mitchell shows that imagery in poetry has changed throughout its history. We tend to think about imagery as figurative language as opposed to literal language. Though, I would argue that Derrida's essay "White Mythology," among others, has successfully argued that actually 'literal' language is only dead metaphor (or catechresis). In contrast, in the 18th century, because of their 'representational' view of imagery they understood the verbal image as "what the words actually name" (Kenner qtd. in Mitchell 513). In the 18th century, in the work of say Alexander Pope, everything was conceived in terms of "description," which led to the neo-classical aesthetic of measure in use of "ornament" in one's poetry. For instance, look at Pope's Essay on Criticism. Particularly this passage

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That give us back the image of our mind.  

Thus, poetry's job is to figure Nature in its exact description so as to give us back the world as it appears to us. Too much ornament can destroy the poet's ability to describe the world.

In response--the Romantics came up with the idea of "imagination," which Mitchell argues is imagery "sublimated and mystified" (515-516). Thus, the true images were abstract images of some pure form. Mitchell's view of imagination is highly reductive and has none of the poetic spirit that literary analyses of it have--but i do think it describes the Romantic aesthetic quite well. 

These two senses of image: an 'internal' and external (visible) image creates the ambiguity of the word 'image'. Ultimately, it has to do with the visible and the invisible, which Mitchell discusses at length toward the end of his work. This is where Merleau-Ponty comes into play, who, we must admit in "Eye and Mind" seems to re-mystify painting, depth, and the 'image' even as he combines this with psychological insight and description. Mitchell claims, 

"The pictorial artist, even one who works in the tradition known as "realism" or "illusionism" is as much concerned with the invisible as the visible world. We can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen" (Mitchell 526).

Furthermore, both Mitchell and Merleau-Ponty agree that linear perspective is not the one true representation of the world. Mitchel claims (much like the epigraph of this blog does) that linear perspective hides its own artificiality. But--it seems to make visible (within its metaphysics) "the very nature of the rational soul whose vision is represented" (Mitchell 526).

The question I want to ask is what is the relationship between Merleau-Ponty's sense of the the 'invisible/visible' and Mitchell's?

Both Mitchell and Merleau-Ponty believe that the realm of the image cannot be reduced to either space or time, such as Lessing did (and as Stephen ponders this relationship at the beginning of the "Proteus" chapter in Ulysses) but they frame this in very different ways. Mitchell argues that for Lessing "painting was incapable of telling stories because its imitation is static rather than progressive, and that it should not try to articulate ideas because these are properly expressed in language rather than in imagery" (527). This absolute separation of space and time, painting and language is what gets Lessing in trouble even though Mitchell agrees that obviously these are two different modes of presentation (Stephen says "nebeneinander" and "nacheinender" (next to each other; one after the other) for painting and language explicitly--I assume he is quoting Lessing).

This attempt to purify the image from the word and vice versa is exactly the kind of thinking Mitchell wants to avoid. He argues that the image's "invisible element," what we have variously described as "expression," "feeling," "affect" can be understood to be "clues in a picture that allow us to perform an act of ventriloquism, an at which endows the picture with eloquence, and particularly non-visual and verbal eloquence" (527). Even abstract expressionism is a "pictorial code requiring a verbal apologetics as elaborate as any traditional mode of painting, the ersatz metaphysics of 'art theory'" (528).

To me, this seems a bit of a reduction of "expression," or other similar terms that we usually define as an irreducible (to language) element in painting or other images. I agree completely with Mitchell that images signify and sometimes do have a 'verbal eloquence' but I'm not sure that we should think about painting as providing clues toward this ventriloquist act.

Merleau-Ponty approaches this time/space division in a different way, arguing eventually that "the art of painting is never altogether outside time, because it is always within the carnal" (186). His evidence for this consists in the fact that when someone paints a 'horse' in movement, they actually  have to paint a position that the horse is never actually in (if we were able to see it frame by frame). Thus, like Mitchell, Merleau-Ponty does not think that the truth of painting (or any image) is somehow an objective truth of 'representation'. However, Merleau-Ponty's approach to painting comes from his discussion of vision as an embodied experience. This sense of embodiment is what is missing from Mitchell's analysis.

What is the 'invisible' in Merleau-Ponty if not a kind of 'verbal eloquence' coming out of the visual? In true phenomenological fashion, Merleau-Ponty can never quite express it in words or point to it an say "that's what I mean." But lets look at a few passages about the invisible:

"the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence [. . .] there is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible, but there is also that which reaches it from below--the profound postural latency where the body reaches itself to see--and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of light, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer int he heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments"

 The latter half of this passage is taken from Paul Klee, one of the painters Merleau-Ponty mentions in the essay. The first part, however, is I think the closest we can get to what Merleau-Ponty means by the invisible. Rather than naming it as "expression" or for a verbal connection, he places the visual in contact with the gestural, the eyes in contact with the body and the mind--all participating in Being. The invisible seems at other times to be that which in vision is a means of transportation and recognition of our belongingness to the being of things: "that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere [. . .] or to intend real beings where they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it" (187).

This primacy of perception (as the collection of Merleau-Ponty's essays are called) is sometimes difficult to swallow and Mitchell's more prosaic analysis is easier to grasp. Furthermore, Mitchell does not seem to privilege either vision or language (and goes through pains to demonstrate the difficulty of finding an analogy of the relationship: translation--privileges the language, geometry--gives us hope that one day we will be able to have a perfect relationship between word and image).

However, the benefit of bringing Merleau-Ponty into the conversation is that he brings in the consideration of the body and vision.

"Natural" Selection?

In the above clip, George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians  discusses "saving the planet" in the context of environmentalists, nature, and pollution.  He claims that "the planet has been through much worse than us," and goes on to cite many examples, attempting to put "environmentalism" in perspective. The reason I post this video here is that I want to to say a little about how we rhetorically (visually and verbally) construct "the natural."

In "Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric," Marguerite Helmers analyzes and exhibition of Homer, the American artist, called "Facing Nature."  The curators of the museum decided to contextualize Homer's paintings in an artificial natural environment, complete with nature sounds and 'audio tour'.  Nature is thus framed as something that is pre-existent and represented, but it is really something artificially constructed as the background for Homer's artwork. The exhibit reinforces its artificiality by mimicking some of these artificially constructed environments in commodified form in the museum gift shop. Helmers believes that in this exhibition and in another painting, Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in an Airpump, Nature is culturally constructed as "the state for human action, on which dramas of command, conquest, domination, and exploitation are played" (83). The exhibit's title "Facing Nature" becomes strange when we consider that an exhibit's title designates the subject, but here the 'art' subject is Homer's painting and 'nature' serves only as a framework. As Helmers puts it, "within the space of the exhibit, Nature is the occluded term: We are facing culture as we sit on the benches and gaze at the oiled sea" (83).

This passive and humanly constructed view of nature is reinforced by advertisements that 'gender' natural spaces, as Diane Hope's essay, "Gendered Environments," demonstrates. Nature is either associated with 'feminine' beauty and passivity, which may also set the stage for "relationship narratives" (159). Or, alternately, as a force to be reckoned with (read: dominated) by a male figure. For instance, Hope points out that in vehicle ads there are rarely humans represented--nature is the locus for a lone figure's adventure and control (161). By associating a wide array of products with images of a (gendered) natural world, these images justify consumer resignation to environmental degradation as 'natural' while reinforcing essentialist notions of gender (162). Although the exhibition discussed above does not explicitly point this out, it plays into the same narratives of these advertisements by suggesting that true 'nature' is as eternal as the artistic representation of it. As we are bombarded by images of untained nature, we tend to believe that nature is immune to human agency and is something that will 'always be there'.

This at first seems to be the view that George Carlin is advocating in this video clip. He seems to be outright claiming that nature will not go anywhere, but he does say that we initially screwed up the planet by 'interferring' with nature. Although there are still some unresolved tensions in his imagining of nature/'the planet', the power of his rant is giving the planet agency: "the planet will wipe us off like a bad case of fleas." The planet is not a passive background, but personifies it as a thinking being, "viruses! viruses might be good". Though he gets a bit 'mystical' at the end, his satirical take on nature avoids the silliness that seems to be involved in some of the more mystical and new agey rhetoric of nature--at least to me.

Commodified nature explored in these two essays comes to a head in Dickinson and Maugh's essay "Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market." I've always had some issues with organic and natural food stores and Dickinson and Maugh finally give me a well thought out reason for it. In the same way that the exhibition and advertisments do, Wild Oats hides their underlying consumer ethic. I'm not saying, and I don't think D&M are either, that Wild Oats are bad for doings this, but I think it does reveal some interesting contradictions. For instance, WO wooden shelves, baskets of bulk food (initial unpackaged), and food (in packages) labeled "natural" or "organic" all contribute to the idea that the consumer is not separated from the food. Selecting, packaging, and labelling makes it seem as though the consumer is actually doing something to get the food, even though it is clear that the store is just as convenient as the Publix. To increase this feeling, they have a full service stop that has butchers, fish mongerers, etc. where people can buy fresh cheese and meats. To a lesser extent, this is what Publix does with their meat as well at the 'deli', which seems like a better idea than getting the pre-packaged meat (even if it is the same publix brand meat). The difference is that Wild Oats draws on nostalgic images of older more "authentic" consumption that ultimately mystifies the "social injustices" that inevitably must take place for stores like this to exist (271).

While most of what I have written is summary, I'd like to apply some of these insights to this commercial for McDonalds salads that I found quite disturbing on a couple of levels. The video begins with black text on a white background and it says "Life is not black and white." The ethnicity of the woman in the commercial is a light brown (black, but yet, white enough to appeal to 'white' viewers) except at the beginning when she is filtered through a black-and-white screen. While this might be stretching it, it seems that an underlying ideology in this ad is that whether you are black and white or in between we can all agree on a "green" McDonald's salad. This is reinforced by a very very quick last line at the end of the video, "Green's the new black, dontcha know" said in a particular dialect that seems to indicate the commercial is subtly targeting African Americans. After this black-and-white scene with the woman frowning,  the woman looks up and both yellow M (the Mcdonalds arches) and branches start to spread across the screen as she says/sings (this kind of 'rapping' tone is another thing that seems to be targeted to a stereotypically hip hop culture--or actually, now that i think about it, it is the rhetoric of a slam-poem)  "My mood is lush and green." As she says green, there is the word "green" imposed on a darker green grass and the woman lays down on top of it and smiles. The juxtaposition of the M arches and leaves merges McDonalds with nature and the word green on green grass reinforces the words and images. Its very interesting that the woman says my "mood" is lush and green--its as if not just her diet but her whole consciousness is oriented toward the McDonald's salad or that the McDonald's salad induces a "green" consciousness. The next shot is the woman walking in the grass as she raps "In the field greens, the kind in Mcdonald's salads." The fact that grass is not used in McDonald's salads (or is it?) does not matter because the scene in the grass morphs into a screen full of fresh looking lettuce leaves, then very quickly switches to hands holding cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, and something else. While these are showing the woman raps as the shot once again switches to a background of lettuce leaves and the words the woman is saying, "gorgeous green beauties," remains on top of them, associating the salad with these powerful words. When the three salads are shown, the names of the salads are also in green (but notably, different shades each time--emphasizing the diversity of the greens). Everything is centered on the words "green" as another shot features the woman smelling a flower, with the word "green" on a green background and her rapping "I fill my green noon with McDonald's salads," with the last words of the "poem" proper "and I'm tickled pink," showing the woman in a dress--though I almost wrote 'girl' because she really is portrayed as more of a girl in this one image.

I guess it was only time before McDonald's realized they should appropriate literary forms associated with "alternative" consciousness (and slam poetry thrives on imagery and rhythm) to sell their salads.