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Image - Music - Text
Image-Music-Text brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, and on the practice of music and voice.
Throughout the volume runs a constant movement from work to text: an attention to the very ‘grain’ of signifying activity and the desire to follow – in literature, image, film, song and theatre – whatever turns, displaces, shifts, disperses.
Stephen Heath, whose translation has been described as ‘skilful and readable’ (TLS) and ‘quite brilliant’ (TES), is the author of Vertige du déplacement, a study of Barthes. His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as ‘the best... introduction so far to Barthes’ career as the slayer of contemporary myths’. (John Sturrock, New Statesman)
Throughout the volume runs a constant movement from work to text: an attention to the very ‘grain’ of signifying activity and the desire to follow – in literature, image, film, song and theatre – whatever turns, displaces, shifts, disperses.
Stephen Heath, whose translation has been described as ‘skilful and readable’ (TLS) and ‘quite brilliant’ (TES), is the author of Vertige du déplacement, a study of Barthes. His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as ‘the best... introduction so far to Barthes’ career as the slayer of contemporary myths’. (John Sturrock, New Statesman)
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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5,918 people want to read
About the author
Roland Barthes
368 books2,456 followersRoland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
October 27, 2011
Thinks like an angel, writes like the Devil.
March 17, 2019
Πώς γίνεται αυτός ο άνθρωπος σε μία παράγραφο να αναταράζει τα γνωστικά αξιώματα εκαντοταετιών!! Από τα πιο οξυδερκή πνεύματα που έχω διαβάσει.
May 5, 2021
A few of these eassys I've read before separately, but reading them again along with those I hadn't made for a brilliant book all round. One of the French philosophers that I find isn't as difficult to penetrate as some of the others. Like some of Georges Perec's non-fiction, he can even be fun to delve into. A Lover's Discourse, Camera Lucida, and Mythologies are still my three faves (basically because they are easier to read) but this one is certainly right to be mentioned when it comes to his very best work.
Contents —
The Photographic Message
Rhetoric of the Image
The Third Meaning
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives
The Struggle with the Angel
The Death of the Author
Musica Practica (probably my favourite)
From Work to Text
Change the Object Itself
Lesson in Writing
The Grain of the Voice
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers
Read
September 18, 2020What I sounded like at 20: (Bong rip) “The author's dead, fuckers.” (Turn left) “Hey wanna go back to mine?” (Sound of vintage ballet flats moving across the hardwood as far away from my pathetic ass as quickly as possible).
So yeah, I'd read a bunch of these before. It's a lot of vintage Barthes, which is always a good time. Now, some of the deeper, semiotic dives – the ones where it gets into hardcore, full-contact structuralism – not for me. Nor are the essays about music, really, because with rare exceptions, music seems damn near impossible to theorize about other than in explicit music-theory and musicological terms, and frankly I don't know enough about the canon of classical music to address his points intelligently. But the rest are very much worth your time.
So yeah, I'd read a bunch of these before. It's a lot of vintage Barthes, which is always a good time. Now, some of the deeper, semiotic dives – the ones where it gets into hardcore, full-contact structuralism – not for me. Nor are the essays about music, really, because with rare exceptions, music seems damn near impossible to theorize about other than in explicit music-theory and musicological terms, and frankly I don't know enough about the canon of classical music to address his points intelligently. But the rest are very much worth your time.
June 25, 2017
Brilliant stuff. I want to be a French philosopher when I grow up.
June 13, 2015
Mostly bullshit, special interest, vague unproductive theories, bad writing style, lack of logic and layman readability.
Even with the non-special interest essays, I wasn't impressed. The writing style is simply bad in my opinion, there are way too many parentheses, sometimes as many as normal text, and his arguments lack structure (ironically) and logic. If i recall correctly, i never saw a single definition of a term, even in "The 'Grain' of the Voice" he only defines 'grain' very late after using it, and only vaguely.
Barthes simply likes to let his creative associative powers loose on adjectives, terms and relations, jumping from one to the next, without showing a logical connection between them.
And even in The Death of the Author, which seems to have become famous, and whose idea he seems to be credited with, an idea i like a lot, he just mostly writes - sorry - meaningless bullshit.
With special interest I mean two things: First of all most of these essays serve to support the theoretic system of semiology, with its own specific terms. If you are not aquainted with this special field, even with the translator's introduction explaining the different french terms, that often don't have exact english counterparts, you will likely not understand or be interested in much of what Barthes writes. This was my introduction to semiology, and it strikes me as arbitrary. It doesn't explain much of literature or visual art forms, it just tries to fit them into its own system of terms. Maybe it's a good system of description, maybe not, but it doesn't have any meaning to me. And i'm not averse to theory, I've happily gone my way through university and delved into theories in literature and other fields not my own.
With Image, Music, Text, I expected interesting ideas for the layman, like Hawkings' A Brief History of Time, but I got academically entrenched papers instead that require a lot of background knowledge in their unexplained references.
The second way this collection is special interest is by its subjects: 6 of 13 essays deal with objects that are likely not familiar to most readers. Eisenstein film stills, a biblical passage, Beethoven's piano music, two classical singers in Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau (the former, more obscure, being the object of his admiration), and japanese Bunraku theatre.
Let me criticize some examples:
"Now even - and above all if - the image is in a certain manner the limit of meaning"
what does that mean? that there can be no more meaning than in an image? what is the limit of meaning and why would it be the image?
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives - Introduction
"The narratives of the world are numberless."
(...) [almost a page of meaningless introduction]
"Must we conclude from this universality that narrative is insignificant?"
Ridiculous idea, not worthy to be discussed, which he goes on to do. Why would significant things need to be rare? We can easily conjure counter-examples: literature, love, any artworks, humans, stylistic elements...
In short, this introduction is not only pointless, but also stupid.
"Where then are we to look for the structures of narratives? Doubtless, in narratives themselves."
This sentence joins the introduction in being one of the most stupid things i read for a long time.
"The sentence, being an order and not a series"
how? what is an order or a series here? I guess he means that there's order in a sentence, it's not just a random series. but a series can also have order. This is just another example of Barthes throwing terms at you without explanation. Like the following completely unexplained equation:
"The levels are operations."
At some point Barthes makes the point that linguists only look at single sentences, and that discourse operates as a higher level of language than linguists by being organized over multiple sentences. Then he contradicts himself by saying that this higher discourse conception is now developed by linguists. It seems Barthes has a naive view of linguistics.
"According to this code, the fantasmatic (that is to say corporal) image which guided the performer was that of a song ('spun out' inwardly)"
phantasmatic, whyever Barthes or the translator chose that word, means incorporeal. so, a contradiction. Also, piano pieces are not songs, especially not Beethoven piano pieces. This whole essay is a bit naive musically. Why does Barthes try himself in writing about music and even in music criticism in "The Grain of Voice"?
"to want to play Beethoven is to see oneself as the conductor of an orchestra."
Nope. Polyphonic piano pieces and orchestral works are two completely different worlds.
I don't see how this collection of essays is so popular, even the film theory is completely isolated and teaches you nothing about how film works. Though i was too disgusted not to skim some of the essays about visuals after a while, so I'd be glad to be corrected.
Even with the non-special interest essays, I wasn't impressed. The writing style is simply bad in my opinion, there are way too many parentheses, sometimes as many as normal text, and his arguments lack structure (ironically) and logic. If i recall correctly, i never saw a single definition of a term, even in "The 'Grain' of the Voice" he only defines 'grain' very late after using it, and only vaguely.
Barthes simply likes to let his creative associative powers loose on adjectives, terms and relations, jumping from one to the next, without showing a logical connection between them.
And even in The Death of the Author, which seems to have become famous, and whose idea he seems to be credited with, an idea i like a lot, he just mostly writes - sorry - meaningless bullshit.
With special interest I mean two things: First of all most of these essays serve to support the theoretic system of semiology, with its own specific terms. If you are not aquainted with this special field, even with the translator's introduction explaining the different french terms, that often don't have exact english counterparts, you will likely not understand or be interested in much of what Barthes writes. This was my introduction to semiology, and it strikes me as arbitrary. It doesn't explain much of literature or visual art forms, it just tries to fit them into its own system of terms. Maybe it's a good system of description, maybe not, but it doesn't have any meaning to me. And i'm not averse to theory, I've happily gone my way through university and delved into theories in literature and other fields not my own.
With Image, Music, Text, I expected interesting ideas for the layman, like Hawkings' A Brief History of Time, but I got academically entrenched papers instead that require a lot of background knowledge in their unexplained references.
The second way this collection is special interest is by its subjects: 6 of 13 essays deal with objects that are likely not familiar to most readers. Eisenstein film stills, a biblical passage, Beethoven's piano music, two classical singers in Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau (the former, more obscure, being the object of his admiration), and japanese Bunraku theatre.
Let me criticize some examples:
"Now even - and above all if - the image is in a certain manner the limit of meaning"
what does that mean? that there can be no more meaning than in an image? what is the limit of meaning and why would it be the image?
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives - Introduction
"The narratives of the world are numberless."
(...) [almost a page of meaningless introduction]
"Must we conclude from this universality that narrative is insignificant?"
Ridiculous idea, not worthy to be discussed, which he goes on to do. Why would significant things need to be rare? We can easily conjure counter-examples: literature, love, any artworks, humans, stylistic elements...
In short, this introduction is not only pointless, but also stupid.
"Where then are we to look for the structures of narratives? Doubtless, in narratives themselves."
This sentence joins the introduction in being one of the most stupid things i read for a long time.
"The sentence, being an order and not a series"
how? what is an order or a series here? I guess he means that there's order in a sentence, it's not just a random series. but a series can also have order. This is just another example of Barthes throwing terms at you without explanation. Like the following completely unexplained equation:
"The levels are operations."
At some point Barthes makes the point that linguists only look at single sentences, and that discourse operates as a higher level of language than linguists by being organized over multiple sentences. Then he contradicts himself by saying that this higher discourse conception is now developed by linguists. It seems Barthes has a naive view of linguistics.
"According to this code, the fantasmatic (that is to say corporal) image which guided the performer was that of a song ('spun out' inwardly)"
phantasmatic, whyever Barthes or the translator chose that word, means incorporeal. so, a contradiction. Also, piano pieces are not songs, especially not Beethoven piano pieces. This whole essay is a bit naive musically. Why does Barthes try himself in writing about music and even in music criticism in "The Grain of Voice"?
"to want to play Beethoven is to see oneself as the conductor of an orchestra."
Nope. Polyphonic piano pieces and orchestral works are two completely different worlds.
I don't see how this collection of essays is so popular, even the film theory is completely isolated and teaches you nothing about how film works. Though i was too disgusted not to skim some of the essays about visuals after a while, so I'd be glad to be corrected.
April 11, 2020
I think like many people I first read "The Death of the Author" as a stand-alone essay a while before taking the time to engage with Barthes' project -- it's easy to take that particular essay as a kind of synecdochic stand-in for the whole of Barthes' work, and also to slide immediately from the death of the author and the refusal of "God and his hypostases - reason, science, law" into poststructuralism. (147). But trite as this may be to point out, the other essays are also good.
I think "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is actually the heart of this book, its longest and most systematic essay. It could be read as a less provocative version of "The Death of the Author." It also pairs very well with "The Struggle with the Angel," which I actually thought was the most enjoyable essay in here. He clarifies that his reactions to this text are those "of a reader today," which means he approaches the biblical passage in a way that reproduces certain impressions and reactions that we can much more easily recognise in ourselves, even if he works them out in sophisticated detail. This is partly a consequence of an approach that as he admits is only the working out of a new system of analysis, maybe even one that just collages "what is being developed round about him" (164). He is staking out new ground in the practice of reading and you can follow his process pretty closely and with a reasonable degree of satisfaction even 50 years later.
I feel like the essays that deal with music -- "Musica Practica" and in particular "The Grain of the Voice" - go underappreciated in the musicological sector of the academy. There's naturally a story about the slow speed at which musicology has paid attention to semiotics as a discipline, but it's interesting over and above this to read Barthes explicitly make the claim in 1972 that "the simple consideration of 'grain' in music could lead to a different history of music," a history that would totally recast the centrality of tonality to musical history (189). Like, he just comes out and says this; no need for a musicologist to 'draw interdisciplinarily' on his work, they could just read it. To be fair, 'grain' is an unusual concept for literary theory too, thus the innovativeness of Barthes for all who read him, but it's interesting that he effectively develops this concept out of an immanent problem with music criticism, the problem of music criticism's reliance on the 'adjective,' on its inability to analyse music in a way that moves beyond a superficial paradigm of representation. 'Grain' means here the gap that opens up between the music and the language - as if they were recto and verso of a sheet of paper called 'lied' - or in other words the gap between the level of the sign (what I have called the paradigm of representation) and the underlying level of the pure signifiers, its physical dimension. There's maybe an interesting unstated similarity between the concept of grain and the layers of meaning that Barthes identifies in the first two essays in this collection about the photograph; the opening up of a grain is analogous to the opening up of the photograph into its linguistic or cultural messages and its "photograph message," which, perhaps like the grain, is a message without a code (17). This grain admits of an erotics but is also the domain for the application of a more systematic structural investigation, which would be not just a solution to one of music criticism's big problems but which was also a historical moment of development for the history of literary criticism. So literary criticism was listening to the innovations of music criticism, one might say, while musicology was not reciprocating!
I think "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is actually the heart of this book, its longest and most systematic essay. It could be read as a less provocative version of "The Death of the Author." It also pairs very well with "The Struggle with the Angel," which I actually thought was the most enjoyable essay in here. He clarifies that his reactions to this text are those "of a reader today," which means he approaches the biblical passage in a way that reproduces certain impressions and reactions that we can much more easily recognise in ourselves, even if he works them out in sophisticated detail. This is partly a consequence of an approach that as he admits is only the working out of a new system of analysis, maybe even one that just collages "what is being developed round about him" (164). He is staking out new ground in the practice of reading and you can follow his process pretty closely and with a reasonable degree of satisfaction even 50 years later.
I feel like the essays that deal with music -- "Musica Practica" and in particular "The Grain of the Voice" - go underappreciated in the musicological sector of the academy. There's naturally a story about the slow speed at which musicology has paid attention to semiotics as a discipline, but it's interesting over and above this to read Barthes explicitly make the claim in 1972 that "the simple consideration of 'grain' in music could lead to a different history of music," a history that would totally recast the centrality of tonality to musical history (189). Like, he just comes out and says this; no need for a musicologist to 'draw interdisciplinarily' on his work, they could just read it. To be fair, 'grain' is an unusual concept for literary theory too, thus the innovativeness of Barthes for all who read him, but it's interesting that he effectively develops this concept out of an immanent problem with music criticism, the problem of music criticism's reliance on the 'adjective,' on its inability to analyse music in a way that moves beyond a superficial paradigm of representation. 'Grain' means here the gap that opens up between the music and the language - as if they were recto and verso of a sheet of paper called 'lied' - or in other words the gap between the level of the sign (what I have called the paradigm of representation) and the underlying level of the pure signifiers, its physical dimension. There's maybe an interesting unstated similarity between the concept of grain and the layers of meaning that Barthes identifies in the first two essays in this collection about the photograph; the opening up of a grain is analogous to the opening up of the photograph into its linguistic or cultural messages and its "photograph message," which, perhaps like the grain, is a message without a code (17). This grain admits of an erotics but is also the domain for the application of a more systematic structural investigation, which would be not just a solution to one of music criticism's big problems but which was also a historical moment of development for the history of literary criticism. So literary criticism was listening to the innovations of music criticism, one might say, while musicology was not reciprocating!
February 12, 2021
نوشتهای کمی پیچیده اما همزمان روشن کننده از ذهنیت بارت دربارهی ساختار نشانه و لایههای معنایی اثر. او نمونههای گوناگونی از انجیل تا آگهی پاستا برای شرح و بسط نظرش میآورد.
February 4, 2019
"Image-Music-Text" comprises a number of texts by Roland Barthes, with edition and selection by Stephen Heath. The topics covered are broad in both content and subject, ranging from considerations on Eisenstein's photograms (with particular incidence and considerations on Eisenstein's decorative meaning) to a textual analysis of "The struggle with the angel", a passage from Genesis.
Barthes is with no question both a writer and a teacher, despite and in concordance with the sort of dichotomy created by him in the last text in the book, "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers". Here, he argues that the fundamental differences between writing (static) and discourse (dynamic; with teaching as an example) make the former explicitly different from the latter, even though writing always tries to model discourse. In spite of this, Barthes writing still feels fairly modern as far as essays are concerned; for a static piece of text, "Image-Music-Text" does not feel old.
The first few (four) essays are devoted to the analysis of images with focus on semiology and attempting to establish a structural analysis framework for images. "Rhetoric of the Image" is especially good and a good example of this, while being a worthy introduction to the basic principles of the semiology in images. Apart from this, "The Third Meaning" also stands out as a new way to read/interpret images using Eisenstein's photograms with an additional meaning (the first two here are the "obvious" meanings, as they come to seek out the reader) - the "obtuse" meaning, that of the signifier without a signified, that which makes the distinction between the expression (authentic) and the disguise (inauthentic) thinner, the "filmic" meaning. This segues nicely into "Diderot, Brecht, Eisentstein" which would, in a way, combine this "third meaning" (and the other two as well) into a new form of criticism, which considers simultaneously the "vertical" (i.e. which and how different elements/signifiers/signifieds are arranged in an image) and "horizontal" axis (i.e. a "time" characteristic that allows the image to move from the "pregnant moment" where it permanently lies).
The fifth essay, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is one of my favourite pieces in "Image-Music-Text", as this was my one true introduction to structural analysis in general (this, to me, should have been the first text in the book). Oddly enough, this transitions into "The Struggle With the Angel", a textual (i.e. the possible interpretations of what is written in the text), and not really structural (as Barthes mentions), analysis. "The Death of the Author" comes next, which is Barthes's best known work. In essence, it is the first push against the critic's inherent necessity (still very much alive today) to "link aesthetics to ethics" and to incorporate an author's life and intentions into whatever work he is reviewing; Barthes is firmly against this because it greatly reduces the search space for a text's interpretations, trying to create objectivity where, to him, there should be none. I have absolutely nothing against this perspective and can happily agree with it - in fact, this stands out as one of my favourite texts from the book. This makes way for "From Work to Text", where Barthes further develops this thought, calling for the shift from the interpretation of the "work" (i.e. something that, semiologically, holds a single, correct interpretation), to the "text" (i.e. something that holds not only several meanings, but also several layers of meanings, arranged into several different levels, creating what, to me, feels a lot like a [nicely done] marriage between reductionism and emerging properties).
The remainder of the texts that I did not mention did not cause much of an impression on me when compared with the ones mentioned. In particular, those about the analysis of "audio aesthetics" were perhaps the dullest (good reads, nonetheless, but they do break the natural flow of "Image-Music-Text"). This is, of course, a consequence of how comprehensive this book is (something that, if you try to summarise Barthes work, is not really a choice but a necessity).
In summary, I can safely say this was one hell of a journey - but definitely a worthy one if the topic of structuralism/semiology interests you. Barthes is a giant on these fields, and while it may be a complicated read, it is also a very worthy introduction. Alas, it does have it's shortfalls: The language, while clear, holds several terms that made me reread the same sentence several times/eventually give up and Google whatever they meant. A small glossary for these terms would have been more than welcome, but not strictly necessary with the advent of the Internet. Something that also made this a bit more complicated to read were references to the work of others contemporary to Barthes which, if you have no particular clue about who they are, only make the whole thing a bit more confusing.
Barthes is with no question both a writer and a teacher, despite and in concordance with the sort of dichotomy created by him in the last text in the book, "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers". Here, he argues that the fundamental differences between writing (static) and discourse (dynamic; with teaching as an example) make the former explicitly different from the latter, even though writing always tries to model discourse. In spite of this, Barthes writing still feels fairly modern as far as essays are concerned; for a static piece of text, "Image-Music-Text" does not feel old.
The first few (four) essays are devoted to the analysis of images with focus on semiology and attempting to establish a structural analysis framework for images. "Rhetoric of the Image" is especially good and a good example of this, while being a worthy introduction to the basic principles of the semiology in images. Apart from this, "The Third Meaning" also stands out as a new way to read/interpret images using Eisenstein's photograms with an additional meaning (the first two here are the "obvious" meanings, as they come to seek out the reader) - the "obtuse" meaning, that of the signifier without a signified, that which makes the distinction between the expression (authentic) and the disguise (inauthentic) thinner, the "filmic" meaning. This segues nicely into "Diderot, Brecht, Eisentstein" which would, in a way, combine this "third meaning" (and the other two as well) into a new form of criticism, which considers simultaneously the "vertical" (i.e. which and how different elements/signifiers/signifieds are arranged in an image) and "horizontal" axis (i.e. a "time" characteristic that allows the image to move from the "pregnant moment" where it permanently lies).
The fifth essay, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is one of my favourite pieces in "Image-Music-Text", as this was my one true introduction to structural analysis in general (this, to me, should have been the first text in the book). Oddly enough, this transitions into "The Struggle With the Angel", a textual (i.e. the possible interpretations of what is written in the text), and not really structural (as Barthes mentions), analysis. "The Death of the Author" comes next, which is Barthes's best known work. In essence, it is the first push against the critic's inherent necessity (still very much alive today) to "link aesthetics to ethics" and to incorporate an author's life and intentions into whatever work he is reviewing; Barthes is firmly against this because it greatly reduces the search space for a text's interpretations, trying to create objectivity where, to him, there should be none. I have absolutely nothing against this perspective and can happily agree with it - in fact, this stands out as one of my favourite texts from the book. This makes way for "From Work to Text", where Barthes further develops this thought, calling for the shift from the interpretation of the "work" (i.e. something that, semiologically, holds a single, correct interpretation), to the "text" (i.e. something that holds not only several meanings, but also several layers of meanings, arranged into several different levels, creating what, to me, feels a lot like a [nicely done] marriage between reductionism and emerging properties).
The remainder of the texts that I did not mention did not cause much of an impression on me when compared with the ones mentioned. In particular, those about the analysis of "audio aesthetics" were perhaps the dullest (good reads, nonetheless, but they do break the natural flow of "Image-Music-Text"). This is, of course, a consequence of how comprehensive this book is (something that, if you try to summarise Barthes work, is not really a choice but a necessity).
In summary, I can safely say this was one hell of a journey - but definitely a worthy one if the topic of structuralism/semiology interests you. Barthes is a giant on these fields, and while it may be a complicated read, it is also a very worthy introduction. Alas, it does have it's shortfalls: The language, while clear, holds several terms that made me reread the same sentence several times/eventually give up and Google whatever they meant. A small glossary for these terms would have been more than welcome, but not strictly necessary with the advent of the Internet. Something that also made this a bit more complicated to read were references to the work of others contemporary to Barthes which, if you have no particular clue about who they are, only make the whole thing a bit more confusing.
December 24, 2008
This is a classic work of critical theory by the French writer Roland Barthes. It is by turn illuminating, bewildering, infuriating, contradictory, and revelatory. For graphic designes, the most relevant essays are "The Rhetoric of the Image," about the signification of commercial photography, and "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text," about new models of reading and writing. The last two piece in particular had a big impact on experimental design in the late 80s and early 90s. Those were some inventive times.
June 11, 2008
Roland Barthes on Sound and Vision (to quote the great David Bowie). I can't imagine if you love the cinema you haven't read this book. Do read it, I think it's essential work in film studies as well on aesthetics in general.
March 4, 2022
The Photographic Message
I am a little bit on love with the way Barthes hones in on the most random, uber-specific stuff. This essay is all about non-art photographs, basically newspaper photographs with captions. That’s important, because one of his Big Deals is how the text in that context is subordinate to the image. He thinks a lot about photography as a medium.
“From the object to its image there is of course a reduction – in proportion, perspective, colour – but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in the mathematical sense of the term).”
I get the impression that he is not impressed with the ‘artistry’ of photography.
“In short, all these imitative arts comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”
“Connotation, the imposition of second meaning on the photographic message proper, is realised at the different levels of the production of the photograph (choice, technical treatment, framing, layout) and represents, finally, a coding of the photographic analogue.”
This has to do, I gather, with how you ‘read’ a photograph.
“[…] in photography […] there is never art but always meaning […]”
See what I mean?
“[…] the shock photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorisation can have a hold on the process instituting the signification.”
I think this is a good point, too; if I’m reading it right, he’s saying that if something is blatantly shocking or awful, there’s no sophisticated interpretation needed, and it can only carry a small amount of (powerful) meaning.
Rhetoric of the Image
Again, Barthes subjects a (pretty crap) add for tinned tomatoes to intense scrutiny and comes up with some WILD stuff, in terms of how linguistically advanced it is. I wonder do they teach this in marketing courses?
“[…] the signifieds of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product […]”
You know something about the product going into the advertisement (what happens when you don’t?).
“[…] the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image is connoted.”
“[…] all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”
HAHAHAHA.
“The denominative function corresponds exactly to an anchorage of all the possible (denoted) meanings of the object by recourse to a nomenclature.”
“The coded nature of the drawing […] requires a set of rule-governed transpositions eg perspective. […] the drawing does not reproduce everything […] where as the photograph […] cannot intervene within the object. […] drawing demands an apprenticeship […]”
I found this breakdown of how drawing differs from photography really interesting! All about the technique, yo.
Photographs are captured mechanically, so “the mechanical is here a guarantee of objectivity”.
He then rambles on about the difference between film and photograph; personally I live too far away from a time when they might have been conflated to be compelled by the similarities.
“Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs; the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of the thing; […]”
The way he describes the relationship of time to both is galaxy brain, though.
“This is without doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.”
Hellloooo, social media.
“The variability of readings is, therefore, no threat to the ‘language’ of the image if it be admitted that that language is composed of idiolects, lexicons and subcodes.”
Basically – context is everything?
The Third Meaning
3 levels in a text: communication, signification, significance
The first is informational.
The symbolic meaning is intentional and comes from a common lexicon of symbols. It is obvious.
The third meaning is the obtuse meaning. It is indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories. Beauty is one example.
“Thanks to the image […] we do without meaning yet never cease to understand one another.”
The obtuse meaning ‘sterilises’ criticism.
“The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins […]”
“The filmic is not the same as the film, is as far removed from the film as the novelistic is from the novel […]”
The filmic nature lies not in movement but in this third meaning.
The movement bit is simply the framework.
He then goes into EXTENSIVE detail on the nature of stills from films, as distinct from both films and photographs. It’s ‘not a sample […] but a quotation’. I do kind of love his intensity here.
Then we have a temporal analysis at the end: in reading, ‘reading time is free’, in film you ‘cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure’. Which is true but I’d never thought of it before.
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein
Theatre ‘calculates the place of things as they are observed’. Thus is founded representation.
Representation ‘is not defined directly by imitation’ but also by decoupage.
Diderot: “so that a piece of painting in made up of a large number of figures thrown at random on to the canvas, with neither proportion, intelligence nor unity, no more deserves to be called a true composition than scattered studies of legs, nose, and eyes on the same cartoon edeserve to be called a portrait or even a human figure’. Tell ‘em, Diderot! He would have HATED Cubism.
Painting: has to pick a single moment, by necessity ‘unreal’. This is the ‘pregnant moment’ (Lessing). In Brecht, he calls it the social gest: a gesture in which the whole situation can be read.
The tableau has a meaning, not a subject.
Things are always ‘from somewhere’, and so representative.
Structural Analysis of Narratives
“there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative’
“either a narrative is a rambling collection of events”, about which you can only discuss the creator’s art, OR
“it shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis”
One is obliged to ‘devise a hypothetical model of description” to show which narrative species ‘conform to and depart from the model’.
‘mankind can be defined by the ability to create secondary self-multiplying systems
Halliday: description is not right or wrong so much as ‘more useful or less’
“Is everything in a narrative functional? […] in differing degrees, everything in it signifies. […] resistant to all functionality, it would nonetheless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or uselessness; everything has a meaning or nothing has. […] art is without noise […]”
So if everything is significant, you have to chop it up into theoretical bits. So:
Indices: unit ‘referrring not to a complementary and consequential act but to a more or less diffuse concept which is nevertheless necessary to the meaning of the story’, the ‘functionality of doing’.
Functions are ‘a functionality of being’.
Some functions are hinge points, some fill in and separate space between hinge functions. The first are cardinal functions, the second catalysers.
Catalysers are only consecutive, while cardinal can be both consecutive and consequential.
What comes AFTER is generally read as BEING CAUSED BY.
Cardinal functions are risky moments.
A catalyser’s functionality may be weak but not nil.
What is noted is always notable.
A catalyser ‘maintains the contact between narrator and addressee. A nucleus cannot be deleted without altering the story, but neither can a catalyst without altering the discourse.’
Indices proper refer to the character of a narrative agent, feeling, or atmosphere.
Informants locate in time and space. They bring ready-made knowledge; again functionality may be weak but not nil. They embed fiction in the real world.
Similar to difference between ornamental and significant description.
Chronological order roots the tale in temporality.
This is an illusion.
Aristotle: there may be actions without characters, but not vice versa.
In modern fiction, character stopped being subordinate to action.
Actions are not acts but articulations of praxis: desire, communication, struggle.
Who is the subject of the narrative?
Novels emphasise some character or another.
Is the author also the narrator?
“Thus, each time the narrator stops ‘representing’ and reports details which he knows perfectly well but which are unknown to reader, there occurs […] a sign of reading […]”
“[…] a narrative emanates from a person […] the author […] the narrative […] then being simply the expression of an I external to it.”
“[…] narrator as a sort of omniscient, apparently impersonal, consciousness that tells the story from a point of view, that of God […]” knows characters inside and outside
“[…] recent conception […] that the narrator must limit his narrative to what the characters observe or know […]
“All three […] consider narrator and characters as real – ‘living’ – people (the unfailing power of this literary myth is well known) […]
“[…] the (material) author of a narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative.”
Who speaks in the narrative, is not who writes in real life, and who writes is not who is.
“[…] a personal system […] the apersonal is the traditional mode […] designated to wipe out the present of the speaker.”
Writing is not telling, but SAYING that one is telling.
Modern lit strives to accomplish so pure a present that the whole discourse is the act of its delivery. (Yikes)
Bourgeois culture demands signs that don’t look like signs
Narrative substitutes meaning for a straightforward copy of events recounted.
Literature has an unrivalled elliptical power lacked by film.
Film only rarely uses the personal mode of treatment.
Ruwet: ‘a poem can be understood as the outcome of a series of transformations applied to the proposition “I love you”’
An incessant play of potentials whose varying falls give the narrative its dynamism or energy
‘What happens is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.’
I actually … agree?
The Struggle with the Angel
This is pretty interesting; an attempt to treat an Old Testament story as a story, and subject it to narrative analysis. I don’t think there’s anything particularly offensive in this aside from, you know, treating this as a story and not a factual event.
Every symbol is displacement.
A mark is creative of meaning.
Greimas worked out a grid of six formal classes of actants, defied by what they do according to narrative status (not psychologically)
Subject, Object, Sender, Reciever, Opponent, Helper
Propp established folktale structure according to function, which are stable elements, limited in number.
Preparatory section requries the absence of the hero.
The Death of the Author
I’ve obviously heard this term bandied about so much it almost has lost all meaning. I’ve usually taken it to mean ‘don’t read the biography of the author into a book’, but Barthes predictably goes to a weirder place. He’s basically saying (I think) that the text itself is what’s important, and what’s second most important is what the reader makes of it, and the Author themselves trails far behind both those considerations.
“writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”
For a lot of history, the storyteller was admired for his performance and not his genius.
After Enlightenment, the ‘prestige of the individual’ and ‘the person of the author’ predominated.
‘The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it’.
‘The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book’; book and author are before and after.
In modernity, ‘the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text’.
‘writing can no longer designate an operation of recording’; it is performative.
It suits criticism to have an Author to discover beneath the work, so everything is disentangled rather than deciphered.
‘No one, no ‘person’ says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of writing, which is the reading.’
‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of the being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’
Musica Practica
Listening to music predominantly means it is no longer an activity of the muscles.
I didn’t get much from this one to be honest.
From Work to Text
Futile to separate works from texts.
The Text is a methodological field.
The work can be held in the hand, the text in language.
The Text is only experienced in ‘an activity of production’.
The Text is always paradoxical; is dilatory; is an irreducible plural; is a network; is a social space.
To try to find the sources/affiliations of a text is to fall into the trap of ‘filiation’.
The Text ‘reads without the inscription of the Father’.
The distance separating reading from writing is historical.
School prides itself on teaching to read well and not to write (well).
The Texts asks the reader to collaborate.
“The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the ‘boredom’ experienced by man in the face of the modern (‘unreadable’) text, the avant-garde film or painting […]”
Yeah, I still dunno what ‘A Text’ is.
Change the Object Itself
Myth is a collective representation or reflection.
The reflection is inverted.
Contemporary myth is discontinuous.
A connoted system: signified is ideological/cynical.
Denoted system
The problem is not to uncover latent meaning, to change the symbols, but to challenge the symbolic itself. (Unclear as to how.)
“Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity (there is a real force of meaning, a war of meanings): woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and key words, each constitutes an idiolect, or more exactly a sociolect (a notion to which twenty years ago I gave the name of writing.)”
“The mythical is present everywhere sentences are turned, stories told”
Lesson in Writing
Western theatre reveals what is reputed to be secret while concealing the artifice of the process of revelation.
For us to attack meaning is to conceal or oppose it, never to absent it.
Bunraku theatre assigns voice a clearly defined but trivial function.
Brecht: “He limits himself from the start to simply quoting the character played. But with what art he does this!”
The Grain of the Voice
TBH where Barthes goes with music I cannot follow, but I was highly amused at his invective against adjectives:
‘the adjective, Music, is that which at once receives an adjective’
‘Are we condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predictable or the ineffable?’
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers
A teacher is on the side of speech; a writer on the side of writing; an intellectual on the side of publishing his speech.
Teachers and intellectuals are compatible; writers a people apart.
‘Writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible’
‘Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it.’ Interesting; fair.
‘paradoxically, it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not momumental writing.’
‘Yet for the teacher, the student audience is still the exemplary Other in that it has an air of not speaking’ – burn!
Teacher demands of students: to acknowledge his role; to act as relay of his ideas; to assent to a loving relationship (you lost me here); allow him to fulfil his contract of employment.
Student demands: training; the teacher fulfils his role; to be a guru; to represent a school of ideas; to admit him into special language; to guarantee a thesis; to lend service.
The stereotype is ‘constituted by a necrosis of language’.
Natural language pretends it doesn’t know it is language (?).
Establish what doxa the author is opposing. A system calling for corrections is more useful than an unformulated absence of system.
‘I am condemned to the following aporia: denounce the imaginary of speech through the irreality of writing.’
2 types of criticism.
First dismisses all meaning of the support text. ‘This supposes a utopian vision of freedom: the law is lifted all at once, outside of any history, in defiance of any dialectic.’
Second type: nothing is rejected by the reading head.
‘the inherent violence which stems from the fact that no utterance is able directly to express the truth and has no other mode at its disposal than the force of the word’
‘There are some who finally prefer to give up the problem, to dismiss all ‘culture’ – a course which entails the destruction of all discourse.’
I am a little bit on love with the way Barthes hones in on the most random, uber-specific stuff. This essay is all about non-art photographs, basically newspaper photographs with captions. That’s important, because one of his Big Deals is how the text in that context is subordinate to the image. He thinks a lot about photography as a medium.
“From the object to its image there is of course a reduction – in proportion, perspective, colour – but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in the mathematical sense of the term).”
I get the impression that he is not impressed with the ‘artistry’ of photography.
“In short, all these imitative arts comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”
“Connotation, the imposition of second meaning on the photographic message proper, is realised at the different levels of the production of the photograph (choice, technical treatment, framing, layout) and represents, finally, a coding of the photographic analogue.”
This has to do, I gather, with how you ‘read’ a photograph.
“[…] in photography […] there is never art but always meaning […]”
See what I mean?
“[…] the shock photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorisation can have a hold on the process instituting the signification.”
I think this is a good point, too; if I’m reading it right, he’s saying that if something is blatantly shocking or awful, there’s no sophisticated interpretation needed, and it can only carry a small amount of (powerful) meaning.
Rhetoric of the Image
Again, Barthes subjects a (pretty crap) add for tinned tomatoes to intense scrutiny and comes up with some WILD stuff, in terms of how linguistically advanced it is. I wonder do they teach this in marketing courses?
“[…] the signifieds of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product […]”
You know something about the product going into the advertisement (what happens when you don’t?).
“[…] the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image is connoted.”
“[…] all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”
HAHAHAHA.
“The denominative function corresponds exactly to an anchorage of all the possible (denoted) meanings of the object by recourse to a nomenclature.”
“The coded nature of the drawing […] requires a set of rule-governed transpositions eg perspective. […] the drawing does not reproduce everything […] where as the photograph […] cannot intervene within the object. […] drawing demands an apprenticeship […]”
I found this breakdown of how drawing differs from photography really interesting! All about the technique, yo.
Photographs are captured mechanically, so “the mechanical is here a guarantee of objectivity”.
He then rambles on about the difference between film and photograph; personally I live too far away from a time when they might have been conflated to be compelled by the similarities.
“Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs; the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of the thing; […]”
The way he describes the relationship of time to both is galaxy brain, though.
“This is without doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.”
Hellloooo, social media.
“The variability of readings is, therefore, no threat to the ‘language’ of the image if it be admitted that that language is composed of idiolects, lexicons and subcodes.”
Basically – context is everything?
The Third Meaning
3 levels in a text: communication, signification, significance
The first is informational.
The symbolic meaning is intentional and comes from a common lexicon of symbols. It is obvious.
The third meaning is the obtuse meaning. It is indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories. Beauty is one example.
“Thanks to the image […] we do without meaning yet never cease to understand one another.”
The obtuse meaning ‘sterilises’ criticism.
“The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins […]”
“The filmic is not the same as the film, is as far removed from the film as the novelistic is from the novel […]”
The filmic nature lies not in movement but in this third meaning.
The movement bit is simply the framework.
He then goes into EXTENSIVE detail on the nature of stills from films, as distinct from both films and photographs. It’s ‘not a sample […] but a quotation’. I do kind of love his intensity here.
Then we have a temporal analysis at the end: in reading, ‘reading time is free’, in film you ‘cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure’. Which is true but I’d never thought of it before.
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein
Theatre ‘calculates the place of things as they are observed’. Thus is founded representation.
Representation ‘is not defined directly by imitation’ but also by decoupage.
Diderot: “so that a piece of painting in made up of a large number of figures thrown at random on to the canvas, with neither proportion, intelligence nor unity, no more deserves to be called a true composition than scattered studies of legs, nose, and eyes on the same cartoon edeserve to be called a portrait or even a human figure’. Tell ‘em, Diderot! He would have HATED Cubism.
Painting: has to pick a single moment, by necessity ‘unreal’. This is the ‘pregnant moment’ (Lessing). In Brecht, he calls it the social gest: a gesture in which the whole situation can be read.
The tableau has a meaning, not a subject.
Things are always ‘from somewhere’, and so representative.
Structural Analysis of Narratives
“there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative’
“either a narrative is a rambling collection of events”, about which you can only discuss the creator’s art, OR
“it shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis”
One is obliged to ‘devise a hypothetical model of description” to show which narrative species ‘conform to and depart from the model’.
‘mankind can be defined by the ability to create secondary self-multiplying systems
Halliday: description is not right or wrong so much as ‘more useful or less’
“Is everything in a narrative functional? […] in differing degrees, everything in it signifies. […] resistant to all functionality, it would nonetheless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or uselessness; everything has a meaning or nothing has. […] art is without noise […]”
So if everything is significant, you have to chop it up into theoretical bits. So:
Indices: unit ‘referrring not to a complementary and consequential act but to a more or less diffuse concept which is nevertheless necessary to the meaning of the story’, the ‘functionality of doing’.
Functions are ‘a functionality of being’.
Some functions are hinge points, some fill in and separate space between hinge functions. The first are cardinal functions, the second catalysers.
Catalysers are only consecutive, while cardinal can be both consecutive and consequential.
What comes AFTER is generally read as BEING CAUSED BY.
Cardinal functions are risky moments.
A catalyser’s functionality may be weak but not nil.
What is noted is always notable.
A catalyser ‘maintains the contact between narrator and addressee. A nucleus cannot be deleted without altering the story, but neither can a catalyst without altering the discourse.’
Indices proper refer to the character of a narrative agent, feeling, or atmosphere.
Informants locate in time and space. They bring ready-made knowledge; again functionality may be weak but not nil. They embed fiction in the real world.
Similar to difference between ornamental and significant description.
Chronological order roots the tale in temporality.
This is an illusion.
Aristotle: there may be actions without characters, but not vice versa.
In modern fiction, character stopped being subordinate to action.
Actions are not acts but articulations of praxis: desire, communication, struggle.
Who is the subject of the narrative?
Novels emphasise some character or another.
Is the author also the narrator?
“Thus, each time the narrator stops ‘representing’ and reports details which he knows perfectly well but which are unknown to reader, there occurs […] a sign of reading […]”
“[…] a narrative emanates from a person […] the author […] the narrative […] then being simply the expression of an I external to it.”
“[…] narrator as a sort of omniscient, apparently impersonal, consciousness that tells the story from a point of view, that of God […]” knows characters inside and outside
“[…] recent conception […] that the narrator must limit his narrative to what the characters observe or know […]
“All three […] consider narrator and characters as real – ‘living’ – people (the unfailing power of this literary myth is well known) […]
“[…] the (material) author of a narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative.”
Who speaks in the narrative, is not who writes in real life, and who writes is not who is.
“[…] a personal system […] the apersonal is the traditional mode […] designated to wipe out the present of the speaker.”
Writing is not telling, but SAYING that one is telling.
Modern lit strives to accomplish so pure a present that the whole discourse is the act of its delivery. (Yikes)
Bourgeois culture demands signs that don’t look like signs
Narrative substitutes meaning for a straightforward copy of events recounted.
Literature has an unrivalled elliptical power lacked by film.
Film only rarely uses the personal mode of treatment.
Ruwet: ‘a poem can be understood as the outcome of a series of transformations applied to the proposition “I love you”’
An incessant play of potentials whose varying falls give the narrative its dynamism or energy
‘What happens is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.’
I actually … agree?
The Struggle with the Angel
This is pretty interesting; an attempt to treat an Old Testament story as a story, and subject it to narrative analysis. I don’t think there’s anything particularly offensive in this aside from, you know, treating this as a story and not a factual event.
Every symbol is displacement.
A mark is creative of meaning.
Greimas worked out a grid of six formal classes of actants, defied by what they do according to narrative status (not psychologically)
Subject, Object, Sender, Reciever, Opponent, Helper
Propp established folktale structure according to function, which are stable elements, limited in number.
Preparatory section requries the absence of the hero.
The Death of the Author
I’ve obviously heard this term bandied about so much it almost has lost all meaning. I’ve usually taken it to mean ‘don’t read the biography of the author into a book’, but Barthes predictably goes to a weirder place. He’s basically saying (I think) that the text itself is what’s important, and what’s second most important is what the reader makes of it, and the Author themselves trails far behind both those considerations.
“writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”
For a lot of history, the storyteller was admired for his performance and not his genius.
After Enlightenment, the ‘prestige of the individual’ and ‘the person of the author’ predominated.
‘The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it’.
‘The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book’; book and author are before and after.
In modernity, ‘the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text’.
‘writing can no longer designate an operation of recording’; it is performative.
It suits criticism to have an Author to discover beneath the work, so everything is disentangled rather than deciphered.
‘No one, no ‘person’ says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of writing, which is the reading.’
‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of the being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’
Musica Practica
Listening to music predominantly means it is no longer an activity of the muscles.
I didn’t get much from this one to be honest.
From Work to Text
Futile to separate works from texts.
The Text is a methodological field.
The work can be held in the hand, the text in language.
The Text is only experienced in ‘an activity of production’.
The Text is always paradoxical; is dilatory; is an irreducible plural; is a network; is a social space.
To try to find the sources/affiliations of a text is to fall into the trap of ‘filiation’.
The Text ‘reads without the inscription of the Father’.
The distance separating reading from writing is historical.
School prides itself on teaching to read well and not to write (well).
The Texts asks the reader to collaborate.
“The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the ‘boredom’ experienced by man in the face of the modern (‘unreadable’) text, the avant-garde film or painting […]”
Yeah, I still dunno what ‘A Text’ is.
Change the Object Itself
Myth is a collective representation or reflection.
The reflection is inverted.
Contemporary myth is discontinuous.
A connoted system: signified is ideological/cynical.
Denoted system
The problem is not to uncover latent meaning, to change the symbols, but to challenge the symbolic itself. (Unclear as to how.)
“Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity (there is a real force of meaning, a war of meanings): woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and key words, each constitutes an idiolect, or more exactly a sociolect (a notion to which twenty years ago I gave the name of writing.)”
“The mythical is present everywhere sentences are turned, stories told”
Lesson in Writing
Western theatre reveals what is reputed to be secret while concealing the artifice of the process of revelation.
For us to attack meaning is to conceal or oppose it, never to absent it.
Bunraku theatre assigns voice a clearly defined but trivial function.
Brecht: “He limits himself from the start to simply quoting the character played. But with what art he does this!”
The Grain of the Voice
TBH where Barthes goes with music I cannot follow, but I was highly amused at his invective against adjectives:
‘the adjective, Music, is that which at once receives an adjective’
‘Are we condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predictable or the ineffable?’
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers
A teacher is on the side of speech; a writer on the side of writing; an intellectual on the side of publishing his speech.
Teachers and intellectuals are compatible; writers a people apart.
‘Writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible’
‘Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it.’ Interesting; fair.
‘paradoxically, it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not momumental writing.’
‘Yet for the teacher, the student audience is still the exemplary Other in that it has an air of not speaking’ – burn!
Teacher demands of students: to acknowledge his role; to act as relay of his ideas; to assent to a loving relationship (you lost me here); allow him to fulfil his contract of employment.
Student demands: training; the teacher fulfils his role; to be a guru; to represent a school of ideas; to admit him into special language; to guarantee a thesis; to lend service.
The stereotype is ‘constituted by a necrosis of language’.
Natural language pretends it doesn’t know it is language (?).
Establish what doxa the author is opposing. A system calling for corrections is more useful than an unformulated absence of system.
‘I am condemned to the following aporia: denounce the imaginary of speech through the irreality of writing.’
2 types of criticism.
First dismisses all meaning of the support text. ‘This supposes a utopian vision of freedom: the law is lifted all at once, outside of any history, in defiance of any dialectic.’
Second type: nothing is rejected by the reading head.
‘the inherent violence which stems from the fact that no utterance is able directly to express the truth and has no other mode at its disposal than the force of the word’
‘There are some who finally prefer to give up the problem, to dismiss all ‘culture’ – a course which entails the destruction of all discourse.’
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2023
As a beginner to semiotics in general and structural linguistics in particular, I’m not even going to pretend to have grasped or internalised everything Barthes tackles here.
All I can say is that I found his “method” organic and freewheeling, never constrained by a fixed dogma of “truth-hunting”, but rather emancipated by a curious, exploratory spirit, beckoning you down sprawling tunnel systems of unanswered questions and provocative observations.
This style is in such harmony with said observations that it results in an incredibly cohesive and fluid experience, even when he’s speaking in relatively enigmatic terms. Definitely looking forward to digging even deeper with another read-through.
All I can say is that I found his “method” organic and freewheeling, never constrained by a fixed dogma of “truth-hunting”, but rather emancipated by a curious, exploratory spirit, beckoning you down sprawling tunnel systems of unanswered questions and provocative observations.
This style is in such harmony with said observations that it results in an incredibly cohesive and fluid experience, even when he’s speaking in relatively enigmatic terms. Definitely looking forward to digging even deeper with another read-through.
May 20, 2023
P.80-81
Either a narrative is merely a rambling collection of events, in which case nothing can be said about it other than by referring back to the storyteller's (the author's) art, talent or genius- all mythical forms of chance- or else it shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis, no matter how much patience its formulation requires. There is a world of difference between the most complex randomness and the most elementary combinatory scheme, and it is impossible to combine (to produce) a narrative without reference to an implicit system of units and rules.
*1 Chance: There does, of course, exist an 'art' of the storyteller, which is the ability to generate narratives (messages) from the structure (the code). This art corresponds to the notion of performance in Chomsky and is far removed from the 'genius' of the author, romantically conceived as some barely explicable personal secret.
Either a narrative is merely a rambling collection of events, in which case nothing can be said about it other than by referring back to the storyteller's (the author's) art, talent or genius- all mythical forms of chance- or else it shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis, no matter how much patience its formulation requires. There is a world of difference between the most complex randomness and the most elementary combinatory scheme, and it is impossible to combine (to produce) a narrative without reference to an implicit system of units and rules.
*1 Chance: There does, of course, exist an 'art' of the storyteller, which is the ability to generate narratives (messages) from the structure (the code). This art corresponds to the notion of performance in Chomsky and is far removed from the 'genius' of the author, romantically conceived as some barely explicable personal secret.
June 28, 2023
on my conquest to completing Barthes’s bibliography, I consulted countless articles and chat GBT; only then did I conquer this book.
I need a martini after this.
I need a martini after this.
March 30, 2024
slowly but steadily my dissertation has become almost entirely about barthes - i wish i could dig him up and personally apologise for how stupid i am
December 27, 2018
While there is some inconsistency in quality (a few essays felt either rushed, tacked on to the overarching theme, or simply unmemorable) this general collection is beyond edifying. Barthes' unique exegesis of Genesis 32:22-32 is not only pedagogically savvy (using a beyond familiar biblical text to explore the intricacies of structuralism) it is also serves to totally defamiliarize this short, powerful narrative. "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers" is likewise a stunning portrait of structuralist epistemology and how it conforms/deforms to this traditional tripartite conception of "profession dealing with the written word." Perhaps most satisfying about the book entire, however, is Barthes ever present but subtle polemicism, his often prescient and always incisive criticisms of mass culture, ideology, and romanticism leave the reader consistently invested in his efforts.
December 21, 2014
It's my firist time to read critical essays so it's alittle bit hard to juge .
The firist two articles are about photographey but the most amazing essays was the death of the author and music practisa
The death of the author is adopting what most modern critics like T.S Eliot adopted about focusing on the work of art itself rather than the author , his motives or feelings , it was something I used to believe that the authors personality is showing in his writes but actully writing is escaping from the writers personality.
music practisa is involving bethoven's works and it drew mt attentiont to very important thing is the disappearance of the ameutres and it's only the pure professionals and only listners which threatnes the music education issues .
The firist two articles are about photographey but the most amazing essays was the death of the author and music practisa
The death of the author is adopting what most modern critics like T.S Eliot adopted about focusing on the work of art itself rather than the author , his motives or feelings , it was something I used to believe that the authors personality is showing in his writes but actully writing is escaping from the writers personality.
music practisa is involving bethoven's works and it drew mt attentiont to very important thing is the disappearance of the ameutres and it's only the pure professionals and only listners which threatnes the music education issues .
November 19, 2018
I read a lot of Barthes all at once, and something that seems pretty clear is that this is, so far, the least clear thing I've read by him. I have no idea what the goal or organization of this work is.
That said, the first chapter is an excellent structuring of how to begin thinking about image analysis even if I wasn't entirely sold on all the details. It very simply introduces problems that still exist in image analysis.
That said, the first chapter is an excellent structuring of how to begin thinking about image analysis even if I wasn't entirely sold on all the details. It very simply introduces problems that still exist in image analysis.
July 29, 2013
Inevitably profound, political, lucid and richly personal.
I was particularly struck by his idea of 'the third meaning', the obtuse meaning and 'the filmic', something I have never seen or heard mentioned, but ALWAYS EXPERIENCED. It is as if the secret life of art were suddenly illuminated.
I was particularly struck by his idea of 'the third meaning', the obtuse meaning and 'the filmic', something I have never seen or heard mentioned, but ALWAYS EXPERIENCED. It is as if the secret life of art were suddenly illuminated.
May 23, 2021
He's a bit silly and he leans into his own logic so hard that it works. And I love it, and I learn from it.
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June 5, 2023Finally finished! I may or may not have understood 10% of what he wrote..
July 16, 2012
*This isn't all I have to say but it's a part of it. This is an incomplete review.*
Barthes extrapolates too much. He admits in one part of the book "This discussion has been limited to 'classical music'." Yeah, it was plainly obvious that his scope was too limited. Furthermore, he's just cheerleading for Beethoven part of the time after constructing an argument that makes Beethoven's music appear at some apogee of music. I can't buy this. Beethoven is confined by his biography just like every other artist is.
And don't even think about saying The Death of the Author applies only to literature. He uses Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky as examples of authors in that essay. He also refers to a reader and listener equally (but puts the listener in parenthesis, does this indicate something? why make the argument about "authors and readers" because it's just easier that way or what?)
On music, he says that,
"playing has ceased to exist; musical activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneadingly physical, but merely liquid, effusive, 'lubrificating'..."
"disappearance of practitioners (no more amateurs)"
"The modern location for music is not the concert hall, but the stage ion which the musicians pass, in what is often a dazzling display, from one source of sound to another."
"Such is the utopia that a certain Beethoven, who is not played, teaches us to formulate - which is why it is possible now to feel in him a musician with a future."
He's saying that making and doing music is no longer important. To whom is it not important? Everyone? Is is so concerned with statistics that he'd deny there are musicians and audiences who go against these trends? Has he taken a survey?
He only describes what a piano player looks like while the player's playing and how the player's manipulating the instrument. This is his interest. This isn't the interest of some other people. If he's so obsessed with the work of the performer, perhaps he should know one, or, oh I don't know, play an instrument before delving so far into what the difference is from the "bourgeoisie" instrument of the piano and the non-bourgeois instrument of the trumpet and harpsichord. Look who's calling an instrument bourgeoisie and attacking classical critics, it's Barthes, a person who's calling everyone "he" and only critiquing classical, and even more specifically, Romantic Period classical music.
He talks about how he noticed that r's are being rolled "but the roll had nothing peasant-like or Canadian about it." Barthes is too precious. He is too detached. He's talking about only the pieces he notices and pretending that's enough to build up or tear down the entire art of _fill in the blank_ and caught up in the bullshit he brewed in his head. He's talking only about the music he has a cultural point of reference to. That's looking into the biographical context he says to ignore. He is interpreting the r's being rolled and contextualizing them socially. Is he the only one who's qualified to do this? If this is only Barthes interpretation, why should we even listen to him?
Likewise, he says a Japanese marionette has an aim but what if its aim is not true and the audience does not appreciate all of the values he's assigning to it? Has the audience failed or does that change the purpose of the marionette? Whose meaning is this? He warned against not look to the author's aim earlier. He warns us later that words aren't sufficient in describing art, even. Surely there are degrees of this. Every time he mentions an aspect of each performance, western and japanese, he makes the art more restricted and confined by description.
He says, "The Western marionette too is a by-product of fantasy: as reduction, a grating reflection with an adherence to the human order ceaselessly recalled by a carictural simulation"
He says, a Japanese marionette is "not the simulation of the body that it is after, but, as it were, its concrete abstraction [...] Bunraku puppet: fragility, discretion, sumptuousness, extraordinary nuance, abandonment of all triviality, melodic phrasing of gestures"
He's clearly seeing differences in the purposes of the art and how different cultures appreciate different things, but comparing Bunraku to Western marionettes is like comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh to American Pie 3. His Death of the Author theory is also flat here because the purpose of the author is obsessed over by the Bunraku audience. Without interpreting the author, the highly formal Bunraku performances lose meaning. They are coded such that without knowing a set of semiotics AND a set of references from prior performances in Bunraku history, the language of the performance itself is meaningless. What if the people don't WANT the author to be dead to them? He famously says "a text's unity lies not in its origins, but in its destination." But in Bunraku, and a million other art forms, origins matter greatly. Barthes does not talk about this with Bunraku though. He skirts the issue by instead talking about the fact that people ignore that they can see the people manipulating the puppets. Is he trying to prove that this is the death of the author in Bunraku? He has made a MAJOR flaw in the argument by saying that the audience "reads nothing" in the practitioner. The practitioner did not write the play. The author IS INDEED studied. Plays from the past are interpreted. There is a form that everyone knows about and studies that carries from one play to the next. This is not good for Barthes. Barthes has become caught up in interpreting the performer's actions too, even though he says the audience meant not to. He's describing how the purpose of the performer's face is to be ignored but he's obsessed with it. Later, he says there's eroticism in the performers who play pianos and describes their fingers, wrists and arms but not the fingers, wrists and arms of of the practitioner with the puppets, but I guess the practitioners' features aren't that important when it comes to puppets, but are when they come to pianos. I doubt anyone could provide an answer as to why it is worth discussing those aspect of one and not the other. He is woefully limited by his over analysis of some aspects of what he talks about while making vast generalizations about others.
The Death of the Author only realizes that there are certain western biographies that cloud works. While there are certainly critics who inaccurately paint certain authors and artists as the following is NOT TRUE: "The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced" Who's responsible for this? He says "Classical criticism" is. This is a very ambiguous broad strawman. He does not engage with very many particular critics. He gives a general survey and concludes that "The explanation of a work is ALWAYS (emphasis added) sought in the man or woman who produced it." I feel like this essay is so popular because it makes such broad and aggressive statements and that's where it derives its power from. Barthes is not the first to divide authorship and text, or performance, and, to make matters worse, he is a bad critic known mostly for his theory of allowing the reader to be born.
Barthes extrapolates too much. He admits in one part of the book "This discussion has been limited to 'classical music'." Yeah, it was plainly obvious that his scope was too limited. Furthermore, he's just cheerleading for Beethoven part of the time after constructing an argument that makes Beethoven's music appear at some apogee of music. I can't buy this. Beethoven is confined by his biography just like every other artist is.
And don't even think about saying The Death of the Author applies only to literature. He uses Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky as examples of authors in that essay. He also refers to a reader and listener equally (but puts the listener in parenthesis, does this indicate something? why make the argument about "authors and readers" because it's just easier that way or what?)
On music, he says that,
"playing has ceased to exist; musical activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneadingly physical, but merely liquid, effusive, 'lubrificating'..."
"disappearance of practitioners (no more amateurs)"
"The modern location for music is not the concert hall, but the stage ion which the musicians pass, in what is often a dazzling display, from one source of sound to another."
"Such is the utopia that a certain Beethoven, who is not played, teaches us to formulate - which is why it is possible now to feel in him a musician with a future."
He's saying that making and doing music is no longer important. To whom is it not important? Everyone? Is is so concerned with statistics that he'd deny there are musicians and audiences who go against these trends? Has he taken a survey?
He only describes what a piano player looks like while the player's playing and how the player's manipulating the instrument. This is his interest. This isn't the interest of some other people. If he's so obsessed with the work of the performer, perhaps he should know one, or, oh I don't know, play an instrument before delving so far into what the difference is from the "bourgeoisie" instrument of the piano and the non-bourgeois instrument of the trumpet and harpsichord. Look who's calling an instrument bourgeoisie and attacking classical critics, it's Barthes, a person who's calling everyone "he" and only critiquing classical, and even more specifically, Romantic Period classical music.
He talks about how he noticed that r's are being rolled "but the roll had nothing peasant-like or Canadian about it." Barthes is too precious. He is too detached. He's talking about only the pieces he notices and pretending that's enough to build up or tear down the entire art of _fill in the blank_ and caught up in the bullshit he brewed in his head. He's talking only about the music he has a cultural point of reference to. That's looking into the biographical context he says to ignore. He is interpreting the r's being rolled and contextualizing them socially. Is he the only one who's qualified to do this? If this is only Barthes interpretation, why should we even listen to him?
Likewise, he says a Japanese marionette has an aim but what if its aim is not true and the audience does not appreciate all of the values he's assigning to it? Has the audience failed or does that change the purpose of the marionette? Whose meaning is this? He warned against not look to the author's aim earlier. He warns us later that words aren't sufficient in describing art, even. Surely there are degrees of this. Every time he mentions an aspect of each performance, western and japanese, he makes the art more restricted and confined by description.
He says, "The Western marionette too is a by-product of fantasy: as reduction, a grating reflection with an adherence to the human order ceaselessly recalled by a carictural simulation"
He says, a Japanese marionette is "not the simulation of the body that it is after, but, as it were, its concrete abstraction [...] Bunraku puppet: fragility, discretion, sumptuousness, extraordinary nuance, abandonment of all triviality, melodic phrasing of gestures"
He's clearly seeing differences in the purposes of the art and how different cultures appreciate different things, but comparing Bunraku to Western marionettes is like comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh to American Pie 3. His Death of the Author theory is also flat here because the purpose of the author is obsessed over by the Bunraku audience. Without interpreting the author, the highly formal Bunraku performances lose meaning. They are coded such that without knowing a set of semiotics AND a set of references from prior performances in Bunraku history, the language of the performance itself is meaningless. What if the people don't WANT the author to be dead to them? He famously says "a text's unity lies not in its origins, but in its destination." But in Bunraku, and a million other art forms, origins matter greatly. Barthes does not talk about this with Bunraku though. He skirts the issue by instead talking about the fact that people ignore that they can see the people manipulating the puppets. Is he trying to prove that this is the death of the author in Bunraku? He has made a MAJOR flaw in the argument by saying that the audience "reads nothing" in the practitioner. The practitioner did not write the play. The author IS INDEED studied. Plays from the past are interpreted. There is a form that everyone knows about and studies that carries from one play to the next. This is not good for Barthes. Barthes has become caught up in interpreting the performer's actions too, even though he says the audience meant not to. He's describing how the purpose of the performer's face is to be ignored but he's obsessed with it. Later, he says there's eroticism in the performers who play pianos and describes their fingers, wrists and arms but not the fingers, wrists and arms of of the practitioner with the puppets, but I guess the practitioners' features aren't that important when it comes to puppets, but are when they come to pianos. I doubt anyone could provide an answer as to why it is worth discussing those aspect of one and not the other. He is woefully limited by his over analysis of some aspects of what he talks about while making vast generalizations about others.
The Death of the Author only realizes that there are certain western biographies that cloud works. While there are certainly critics who inaccurately paint certain authors and artists as the following is NOT TRUE: "The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced" Who's responsible for this? He says "Classical criticism" is. This is a very ambiguous broad strawman. He does not engage with very many particular critics. He gives a general survey and concludes that "The explanation of a work is ALWAYS (emphasis added) sought in the man or woman who produced it." I feel like this essay is so popular because it makes such broad and aggressive statements and that's where it derives its power from. Barthes is not the first to divide authorship and text, or performance, and, to make matters worse, he is a bad critic known mostly for his theory of allowing the reader to be born.
December 16, 2018
I wish Goodreads had a 4.5 rating, because that's where this book fits. Barthes is evidently a cultured intellectual, commenting on many aspects of society, from Brechtian theatre to Eisensteinian cinema, he critically analyses and discusses, covering almost all aspects of modern culture. Read it as a recommendation from a friend, in my opinion his best essays were: The Photographic Message, The Third Meaning, The Death of the Author, Musica Practica, From Work to Text.
Some essays are extremely short yet effective (Change the Object Itself) whereas other ones, while it begins interesting, go through a long and convoluted path that seemingly reaches little conclusion (Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives). Barthes writes in an extremely prosaic style that is reminiscent more of a poet than a structural philosopher, at once utilising Lacan but also recognising that which goes beyond said structure. Oftentimes it can therefore be quite difficult to rid of that stylistic flair (in an act of 'summarising', as Barthes would say) but nonetheless, getting through the heavy French-philosophical-writing, one can find highly useful concepts and strategies for cultural analysis and theory.
Some essays are extremely short yet effective (Change the Object Itself) whereas other ones, while it begins interesting, go through a long and convoluted path that seemingly reaches little conclusion (Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives). Barthes writes in an extremely prosaic style that is reminiscent more of a poet than a structural philosopher, at once utilising Lacan but also recognising that which goes beyond said structure. Oftentimes it can therefore be quite difficult to rid of that stylistic flair (in an act of 'summarising', as Barthes would say) but nonetheless, getting through the heavy French-philosophical-writing, one can find highly useful concepts and strategies for cultural analysis and theory.
April 12, 2025
I was a bit conflicted on this in the beginning, but it ultimately won me over. This isn't a great book for someone just getting into semiotics (like me). Barthes' writing lacks layman readability, and there were plenty of times he referenced a scholar, definition, or theory I was unfamiliar with. When that happened, I'd sigh, look up the term, and then get back to reading. It was frustrating at times, but the actual content was fascinating enough that I didn't mind putting in the work. I love how exploratory Barthes is in his theories—never pinning anything down, but rather using them to, in his words, hold art's "significance fully open." It's the kind of thing you read that makes you excited to go back out into the world with a whole new way of seeing it. Good stuff!
If you have any passing interest in semiotics or just how meaning emerges from art, I highly recommend his essays: The Third Meaning, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, The Death of the Author, From Work to Text (maybe my favorite), and Musica Practica.
If you have any passing interest in semiotics or just how meaning emerges from art, I highly recommend his essays: The Third Meaning, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, The Death of the Author, From Work to Text (maybe my favorite), and Musica Practica.
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March 28, 2021A provocative and exhilarating collection of essays, at once offering insights into structuralist semiotics and rushing in a paradoxical call for alternative ways of assessing signs, of displacing meaning. A gateway into the experimental potential of the essay, and "non-fiction" in general. Enjoyed the way in which Barthes constantly refutes and contradicts himself, sometimes in the same essay, to dilute the mythical authority of the intellectual figure and to reinforce in the reader a critical sensitivity. Definitely a challenging read, even more so with the references to Marxism and especially (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Really want to say that this is a life-changing book, as that is how I feel right now. I guess we'll see.
June 22, 2020
Barthes is at his best when he writes about text; he is the author for authors, the meta-textual god. His 'Introduction to Structural Analysis' is vital for anyone interested in the philosophy of reading (and writing). 'The Death of the Author' is a classic. The others are invaluable, if dense and hardly repeatable without generous doses of warping due to personal interpretation. Barthes cannot be explained objectively; he cannot be understood consistently either. His fluidity is his master stroke.
The visual or aural components are far more abstruse than I know how to make use of at this stage.
The visual or aural components are far more abstruse than I know how to make use of at this stage.
January 11, 2024
Includes perhaps some of the more illuminating and straightforwardly didactic essays on semiology, and though I respect de rigueur I still find a lot of the project in its totality to be a bit totalitarian; fascinating, but perhaps a bit too obsessed with compartmentalizing. Not to say that this is without great moments — the intro to structural analysis is as good as I remember, Death of the Author struck me as a bit weirder than I remembered (having now read people like Blanchot, I suppose), and the idea that speech is impossible to retract has made me want to go back and read Derrida’s The Gift of Death again.
October 9, 2018
“the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.” I found “Image, Music, Text” while researching my thesis. Through Bond scenes, grocery ads, and Beethoven symphonies, Roland Barthes teases out the weird magic of seeing, hearing, and interacting with culture. The writing is dense and knotty – Barthes trained as a linguist – but the ideas are insightful. His explorations of “the infinity of language” and how photographs are “floating chains of signifieds” are indeed adventurous, lingering with you like charge in the air.
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