#Barthes

[thirdity]

“I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional.

Roland Barthes, The Neutral

[dreams-of-mutiny]

“The voracious consumption of images makes it impossible to close your eyes. The punctum presupposes an ascesis of seeing. Something musical is inherent in it. This music only sounds when you close your eyes, when you make "an effort at silence." Silence frees the image from the "usual blabla" of communication. Closing your eyes means "making the image speak in silence." This is how Barthes quotes Kafka: “We photograph things to drive them away from the spirit. My stories are a way of closing my eyes.. »”

― Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty

[libriaco]

Dichiarazione

«Sono innamorato? – Sì, poiché sto aspettando».

R. Barthes, [Fragments d'un discours amoureux, 1977], Frammenti di un discorso amoroso, Torino, Einaudi, 1997 [Trad. R. Guideri]

[soulbornincoldandrain]

this too, is yoohankisms

- michelet by rolant barthes, about Michelet as a historian, an author reader and victim to narrative

[cocoon2010]

The world enters languages as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied out the history and filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning as so to make them signify a human insignificance.

[rinconliterario]

Diario de un duelo. Roland Barthes, 1977.

[liberatedlilgirlblue]

Roland Barthes, A lover's discourse: fragments (1978)

[heavenlyyshecomes]

My ideas about photography changed during this period, for I saw that a photograph can work in more than one way. I had always distrusted the medium for its insistent claims to reality, the way it invites an acquisitive, violent gaze, and its usefulness to a worldview that crops and categorizes and frames, that reduces a human face to a racial type. But now I saw that there is also something else: a shadow. The imprint of an irreducible presence. If one side of a photograph gloats, “The eye can know everything,” the other side murmurs, “The eye knows almost nothing.” Almost nothing. Only a flicker, a trace that can’t be grasped, that can’t be built up into an official record or a proper historical study. A mark that’s not useful as evidence but simply evident. Untranslatable. “What I can name cannot really prick me,” writes Barthes.

—Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque: A Memoir

[zurich-snows]

ÇA-A-ETÉ? AGAINST BARTHES Joan Fontcuberta

Walter Benjamin aside, the most cited essay on photography in history is without a doubt Camera Lucida. It is Roland Barthes’ final book, and was published shortly before his death. With his poetic gaze and theoretical reflections, Barthes develops key concepts in the book, such as punctum and studium, which have since been incorporated into the heritage of photographic criticism. In one of the most significant passages, we find another central idea: “In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality, and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a photograph is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography. Photography's noeme will therefore be: ‘That-has-been’” [Ça-a-été].

This ça-a-été constitutes the ontological bulwark of photography’s documentary value: without the certainty of “that-has-been”, all visual testimony ends up delegitimated. This is why it could be beneficial to analyse photo-journalistic snapshots in light of this criteria. For example, as a case study, we could take the photographic archive of the now-closed Mexican journal Alerta, a tabloid dedicated to blood and guts news stories, which in Latin America is referred to as “nota roja” [red note]. If we do an analysis, we are surprised to see how frequently the iconological pattern of the gesture of pointing appears: a figure in the image (a victim, a witness, an “expert”, whoever) points with a finger at someone or something in the composition to draw attention to it. These are theatrical, artificial situations where it is clear that the model is following the reporter’s instructions, while nevertheless making doubly clear the pretension of applying he principle of ça-a-été, in a way that is as naïve as it is rudimentary. We are witness to an effect of superimposed indexicalities: one passed down through photography and the other of the finger (the index) pointing. Both the camera lens and the finger focalise our perception towards something that has gone by. Yet the staging is so naïve, rudimentary and artificial that instead of emphasising, what it does is problematise the validating value of the camera, especially in genres like forensic and news photography, which should be characterised precisely by an aseptic, derhetorized treatment of information.

Barthes, perhaps, fascinated by the theatricality he had also dedicated enthusiastic studies to, sought to pass over this drift: “What is theatricality?”, he asked in 1971. “It is not decorating representation, it is unlimiting language.” Very well, then, but if so, ça-a-été is no longer a guarantee of objectivity, inasmuch as it explores staging. A triple staging, in fact, as all photography implies the staging of the object, the gaze and of the photographic device itself. It is from the conciliation of these stagings that language emerges. We can decide to not limit it, we can grant it all freedom available to it, but at the cost of breaking the contract of verisimilitude.

Unmasked by the overplayed gesticulation of accusing or pointing fingers, we discover that the noeme heralded by Barthes is more a theatrical operation than one of reference. “That has been”, indeed, but what, in fact, has really been? It is imperative to ask this when there is no spontaneity, but rather construction. Yet worst of all is that photography, in and of itself, tells us very little about “that”. Very little beyond scenery and costumes.

Joan Fontcuberta

[date-prisa-estamos-leyendo]

Kate Zambreno, hablando de Barthes, cuenta que la sociedad permite una duración específica para el duelo. Una vez ha pasado ese tiempo, debe dejar de dolerte.

Llego con tres heridas, Violeta Gil.

[echoland]

[thirdity]

Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection. [...] Driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

[sammeldeineknochen]

Eines der Kennzeichen unserer Welt ist vielleicht diese Umkehrung: unser Leben folgt einem verallgemeinerten Imaginären.

Roland Barthes: "Die helle Kammer", S.129

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Regard, objet, symbole, la Tour [Eiffel] est tout ce que l'homme met en elle, et ce qui est infini. Spectacle regardé et regardant, édifice inutile et irremplaçable, monde familier et symbole héroïque, témoin d'un siècle et monument toujours neuf, objet inimitable et sans cesse reproduit, elle est le signe pur, ouvert à tous les temps, à toutes les images et à tous les sens, la métaphore sans frein.

- Roland Barthes, La tour Eiffel, 1964

Tina Turner was an unrestrained metaphor too.

Photo: Tina Turner et la Tour Eiffel by Peter Lindbergh, 1989.

[thinkingimages]

[detournementsmineurs]

Mia Wasikowska dans "Madame Bovary" de Sophie Barthes, 2014.