Response: “Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes

Really, what is there not to take note of in Roland Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image”? This in mind, here are a couple of bits that may or may not make their way into my work. It’s important to keep in mind that Barthes is primarily responding to advertising images and mass communications, but many of these statements could be applied to the reading of images as a whole.

Notes and reactions:
“Thus we find ourselves immediately at the heart of the most important problem facing the semiology of images: can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols? Is it possible to conceive of an analogical ‘code’ (as opposed to a digital one)? We know that linguists refuse the status of language to all communication by analogy…the moment such communications are not doubly articulated, are not founded on a combinatory system of digital units as phonemes are.” – 33
I like this debate centered around whether the language of the image has its own coding system or if it simply an amalgamation of symbols grouped together. I would assume there is a history of scholarship on the subject since Barthes originally wrote this piece. Look into this for further research.

“the image is re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection, and, as we know, the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to lived experience.” – 33
Image as re-presentation/resurrection is interesting language. It implies in it some of the debate around “death of the author” while also turning it on its head; is there a “death of the subject” that happens after an image is taken? Can an image only represent a moment that is past, that can never again be? I think there are links to image and memory that could absolutely be explored here as well.
Side note – reminds me of a moment in DiLilo’s White Noise (image of the barn). Bring this into the conversation?

“Now even – and above all if – the image is in a certain manner the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification.” – 33
Food for thought. Do the limits of images allow for a stronger understanding of the process of signification?

“If all these signs are removed from the image, we are still left with a certain informational matter; deprived of all knowledge, I continue to ‘read’ the image, to ‘understand’ that it assembles in a common space a number of identifiable (nameable) objects, not merely shapes and colors.” – 35
Points to the layered nature in which images must be read. There is almost a hierarchy to the information presented in images: some elements foundational to the composition of the image, other elements are signifiers helping the reader of the image know what is being signified.

“the relation between signified and signifier is quasi-tautological; no doubt the photograph involved a certain arrangement of the scene (framing, reduction, flattening) but this transition is not a transformation (in the way a coding can be); we have here a loss of the equivalence characteristic of true sign systems and a statement of quasi-identity. In other words, the sign of this message is not drawn from an institutional stock, is not coded, and we are brought up against the paradox…of a message without a code.” – 35
Again, interesting food for thought. The endless chain of signifiers those like Saussure and Derrida point to in words and language carries over to our images. Maybe this is why multimodal composition can be so successful; by using multiple modes/languages to communicate a message, the likelihood of signifiers being misunderstood or misrepresented is diminished.

“the viewer of the image receives at one and the same time the perceptual message and the cultural message” – 36
Multiple messages are receives simultaneously with images. Is this an advantage or a problem?

“the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image connoted.” – 36
No real reaction here. Just wanted to collect this to have for later.

“Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the informational structure. ” – 37
Would be interesting to open this up for discussion considering we’re around 50 years removed from when Barthes wrote this. With the current state of digital communication being as foundational to society as it is, has this changed at all? Are we shifting towards a language of images being dominant? Is text still king? What is the dynamic?

“What are the functions of the linguistic message with regard to the (twofold) iconic message? There appear to be two: anchorage and relay.” – 37
This point could be important when talking about how text juxtaposes with image in multimodal composition.

“all images are polysemous; they imply, underlaying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction, even if this dysfunction is recuperated by society as a tragic…or a poetic…game…Hence in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of these techniques…The text helps to identify purely and simply the elements of the scene and the scene itself; it is a matter of a denoted description of the image…The denominative function corresponds exactly to an anchorage of all the possible (denoted) meanings of the object by recourse to a nomenclature” – 37
Ties in to previous quotes/notes/reactions about the multiple messages contained in images being communicated simultaneously. Also ties in to images being a prime example of the floating chain of signifiers/signifieds. Text-as-anchorage helps the reader navigate these issues.

“When it comes to the ‘symbolic message’, the linguistic message no longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice which hold the connoted meanings from proliferating, whether towards excessively individual regions…or towards dysphoric values” – 37
This quote could be useful to highlight how text-as-anchorage serves multiple purposes.

“In all these cases of anchorage, language clearly has a function of elucidation, but this elucidation is selective, a metalanguage applied not to the totality of the iconic message but only to certain of its signs…anchorage is a control, bearing a responsibility – in the face of the projective power of pictures – for the use of the message. With respect to the liberty of the signifieds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested.” – 38
Ties back into the limits of an image. Text further limits image? Texts focuses image? Can text-as-anchorage open up an image?

“The function of relay is less common (at least as far as the fixed image is concerned)…Here text and image stand a complementary relationship; the words, in the same way as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level, that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis…While rare in the fixed image, this relay-text becomes very important in film, where dialogue functions not simply as elucidation but really does advance the action by setting out, in the sequence of messages, meaning that are not to be found in the image itself.” – 38
In multimodal composition, how does text function? Is it anchorage? Relay? Can the same text function as both?

“In the photograph – at least at the level of the literal message – the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of ‘transformation’ but of ‘recording’, and the absence of a code clearly reinforces the myth of photographic ‘naturalness’: the scene is there, captured mechanically, not humanly…Man’s interventions in the photograph (framing, distance, lighting, focus, speed) all effectively belong to the plane of connotation.” – 40
So the composition elements of an image are related to the connotation of the image; the artifact(s)/object(s) present within the image are denoted, but because there is an absence of code to fill them with meaning, it is in the compositional elements that meaning is made.

“The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing…but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.” – 40
Ties back into comment earlier about “death of the subject” as a nature of image, particular of the photograph. Also, these temporal concerns are interesting and could play into questions and understandings of delivery.

Quotes from: Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” PDF.