Barthes on the photograph

Roland Barthes said of himself somewhere that he took up in turn the great intellectual enthusiasms of his time without ever committing himself firmly to any of them. We are to think of his work as reflecting, or refracting, the light of those around him. So in his first years he is something like a phenomenologist and a Marxist (Sartre: Michelet, Degrée Zero, the writings on Camus). By the end of the 1950s, he has taken up structuralism and will follow it through a series of ‘scientific’ moments into its frantic self-dissolution in what we now call ‘post-structuralism’ (Mythologies is an important step from Marxism to structuralism, S/Z, which I haven’t read, is usually cited as the text in which structuralism swallows its own tail and becomes something else). In the 1970s Lacan and Lacanians become important; Barthes’ work becomes less ‘scientific’ and more ‘literary,’ more personal (Barthes par Barthes). Throughout all this, Barthes’ work seems governed by the idea of the text. Already in Degrée zero, the literary text is a kind of utopia. Probably Barthes’ most read work, Mythologies, is an origin-moment for cultural studies because in a sense it treats world as text, revealing layers of meaning and ideology attached to such self-evident staples as steak frites.

I go through this because La chambre claire [1979], which I have just finished reading, is quite a different sort of book than one might expect from his other late work. To begin with, it is about photographs, not text. It quite explicitly returns to a Sartrean and phenomenological viewpoint in order to treat this material. For Barthes, the photograph is the opposite of text: it is pure reality—its essence is to have been, rather than to ‘play.’ Barthes’ later work is insistently personal, but La chambre claire is ‘personal’ in a radically different way than is Barthes par Barthes [1977, i think]. I immensely enjoyed this last book—I have also enjoyed La chambre claire. The two books, taken together, might be an argument for Barthes’ status as a great French writer.

La chambre claire is divided into two parts. In the first part, Barthes gives us a sort of phenomenology of the photograph. He makes his distinction between studium and punctum. The studium of a photograph is something like one’s intellectual, or cultural, interest in it. In historical photographs, we might be very interested in the clothes worn by those in the photograph, in the building we can see in the background, and so on. A photograph of an author whose work I have read may interest me in this way. This is our usual way of interacting with photographs. Then there is the second way,

Le second élément vient casser (ou scander) le studium. Cette fois, ce n’est pas moi qui vais le chercher (comme j’investis de ma conscience souveraine le champ du studium), c’est lui qui part de la scène, comme un flèche, et vient me percer...Ce second élément qui vient déranger le studium, je l’appellerai donc punctum...Le punctum d’une photo, c’est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne). [pgs 48-49]

Sometimes, but not always, and entirely contingently, according to no expressible rule, the surface of studium presented by a photograph will be broken by a punctum. Often, Barthes says, the punctum is a detail (71-3 ff), it might be a necklace, a shoe, or the precise form of an open hand. The punctum may also have to do with the temporality of a photograph. Barthes reproduces the well-known picture of Lewis Payne, who was condemned to death in 1865 for plotting to assassinate the US secretary of state. Barthes says, of this photo, “le punctum, c’est: il va mourir. Je lis en même temps: cela sera et cela a été; j’observe avec horreur un future antérieur dont la mort est l’enjeu...Que le sujet en soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe” (150).

I suspect that it is this distinction, these conceptual tools, that students are generally expected to take from the book. The second part of the book becomes increasingly personal and lyrical, less careful and more powerful. The concluding passages are perhaps something like a theoretical statement, but it feels more to me as though Barthes was simply obliged, somehow, to conclude with a transgressive and transportable conclusion.

What I find most remarkable, however, is the cascade of associations provoked by the photograph: the disjunction of temporalities, absence, but then also reality unmediated by method, death. Barthes contrasts photography with cinema, with writing, with painting. Barthes dislikes cinema. It will never be subversive in the way that photography can be. But photography clearly means death (and not only because of the circumstances in which the book was written), whereas text means life. Photographs fix and assert meaning. They are absolutely what they are—and here it makes no difference if the photograph has been altered, or that Barthes lives before digital photographs, the reference is to Sartre’s imaginaire, which is a realm of the simply and immediately true, which cannot not be true--a realm in which perception is reality. Painting emerges as not at all the source of photography, but rather as a radically different mode of artistic production. Indeed, in the end, photography looses its special ontological characteristics when it is reduced to art.

This book deserves more than I can give it just now. I should look into what I am sure is the enormous quantity of secondary material on it. I am intrigued, for instance, by the presence of race in the book (that is, several of the pictures are of African-Americans), which I think must be linked for Barthes in interesting and subtle ways to the immediate reality of the photograph, and also to the idea of his own family photographs and identity. I would want to look carefully at what Barthes says about his method, and the obvious violations of this method (he says explicitly that the one thing he does not want to do is erect his own experience as abstract socius, and then he does precisely this—what’s his game?).

The book is, at any rate, wonderful. It almost convinces me to buy the recently published Journal de deuil, made after his mother’s death. At the very least, I’ll look at his late seminars.

Contingency, Habit, Being

There follow some quick thoughts on reading Emile Boutroux’s 1874 philosophy thèse, De la contingence des lois de la nature.

The essential movement of Boutroux’s De la contingence is a double gesture of logical affirmation and then empirical wiggling. He establishes in the first chapter, ‘de la nécessité,’ that the only true necessity, the only true determination, is that which applies to a priori causal syntheses. He says, “c’est seulement aux synthèses causal à priori qu’appartient la nécessité tant objective que subjective: elle seules peuvent engendrer des conséquences analytiques entièrement nécessaires” (13). There is another form of necessity, of fact rather than logic, submitted to rigorous empirical testing. Boutroux says, “Celle-ci existe lorsque la synthèse que développe l’analyse est posée à priori par l’esprit et unit un effet à une cause. Lorsque cette synthèse sans être connu à priori, est impliquée dans un enseble de faits connus, et qu’elle est constamment confirmée par l’expérience, elle manifeste, sinon la nécessité du tout, du moins la nécessité de chaque partie, à supposer que les autres soient réalisées” (14). Having established these conditions for necessity, Boutroux then proceeds up the chain of being, showing at each stage that those laws we believe to be posed a priori are, first, in fact derived from experience and, second, do not meet the conditions of the second kind of necessity in an entirely rigorous way. Boutroux constantly reminds us that “il s’agit ici, non de l’être en soi, mais de l’être tel que le considèrent les sciences positives, c’est-à-dire des faits donnés dans l’expérience” (16). In this sense, the ideas of causality and of possibility, are not given a priori, but rather are drawn from experience. Boutroux, this is to say, presents us with a rigorous definition of necessity, and then demonstrates at successively ‘higher’ levels of reality, that this necessity is an idea we derive from experiment and experience (the words are slightly ambiguous in French, but Boutroux does not, here, draw a sharp distinction between the two), and that even at this level, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge, there cannot be said to be strict causality.

Ravaisson, in his ‘rapport’ on the state of French philosophy published a few years before Boutroux’s thèse, marked out the divergence between those who began with the higher, and derived the lower, and those who began with the lower, and built their way up into the higher. Boutroux’s intervention, in a sense, is to reject this dichotomy. The physical world is imagines in a strictly hierarchical fashion, along an ascending, stepped scale not so much of complexity, as of contingency. Although no step can be derived from those below it, or conversely made to yield up the ‘truth’ of the one above it, it is important that we do not have simply overlapping sets of rules, but a genuine hierarchy. The laws of one step on the ladder cannot explain (though they apply within) a different step on the ladder.

The bulk of the book is taken up with the elaboration of this way of thinking and the erecting and demolition of various objections to it. Consciousness, he says, is simply not reducible to its component physical parts. Boutroux continually inquires after the relation of what we assume and our experience. Metaphysics, together with claims to absolute necessity, is cordoned off into its proper field, excluded from the given world. It is this negative and defensive part of Boutroux’s book that functioned as a touchstone and foundational text for the epistemological tradition. But this was only part of Boutroux’s project. It is not enough to reject determinism, a positive ideal must also be erected. This aspect of the book, which links it strikingly to Ravaisson’s De l’habitude, seems to have been less important for the founders of the RMM. This second, constructive, part of Boutroux’s work is crucial, however, if we want to contextualize him more broadly, and understand how his work could have been read.

The question of probability is important. If, later on, it would be possible to regard the physical world as, at a certain level, essentially probabilistic, Boutroux does not yet arrive at this point of view. It seems to me that his contingency is not based on chance, but on irreducibility. At the very least, I am comfortable saying that Boutroux is enormously cagey on the question of the epistemological status of statistics, skeptical at best.

Particularly interesting are Boutroux’s discussions of the relation of law to fact. He says, “les lois sont le lit où passe le torrent des faits: ils l’ont creusé, bien qu’ils le suivent” (39). At the end of the chapter ‘de l’homme,’ Boutroux has mounted a sort of sneak-attack on the supposed law of the conservation of psychic energy. He is willing, perhaps, to accept the idea, but fragments it so that it applies not to all people equally, but to each in a particular way. He says, “plus que tous les autres êtres, le personne humaine a une existence propre, est à elle-même son monde. Plus que les autres êtres, elle peut agir, sans être forcée de faire entrer ses actes dans un système qui la dépasse.” Individuals, by making their own facts, make their own laws, “la loi tend à se rapprocher du fait...L’individu, devenu, à lui seul, tout le genre auquel s’applique la loi, en est maître. Il la tourne en instrument; et il rêve un état où, en chaque instant de son existence, il serait aisni l’égal de la loi et posséderait, en lui-même, tous les éléments de son action” (130). This dream in which actions are coterminous with laws is evidently a re-import of the Kantian imperative back into the realm of the physical, a smearing together of the moral and the physical realms, of the ideal and the real. This is perhaps why, at the end of Boutroux’s text, he speaks a great deal about the good and the beautiful, but not at all about the true.

If stability is the truth of the physical world, so also is change. Both are present everywhere, but the great chain of being is constructed by increasing change, indeed, this is expressed in terms of being and its law. Boutroux says, “dans les mondes inférieurs, la loi tient uns si large place qu’elle se substitue presque à l’être; dans les mondes supérieurs, au contraire, l’être fait presque oublier la loi. Ainsi tout fait relève non seulement du principle de conservation, mais aussi et tout d’abord, d’un principe de création” (139-40). Necessity is understood here in something like a Kantian way—it is an imperative and an ideal, rather than a fact. Each level of reality takes as its ideal the one above it. Compare this idea of a hierarchy of necessity and freedom to Ravaisson, in De l’habitude: “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). Boutroux retains hierarchy, and the basic idea of a chain of being, but some things have changed, though perhaps somewhat subtly. We can perhaps say that Habit, for Ravaisson, is the sliding of willed actions into unconscious performance, their regularization and becoming routine. How different is this from Boutroux’s metaphor of law as like a riverbed carved out by the flow of fact?

In this light, Boutroux’s ‘system,’ built around contingency, presenting an ideal of pure understanding towards which one strives, appears as remarkably mystical. Metaphysics does not provide a mode of intellectual access to the world, but rather an unrealizable but motivating ideal. Ravaisson seems almost the more content to understand. I suppose Ravaisson’s stance is the serenity of rationalism, and that Boutroux’s mystical frenzy is the defensive result of overcompensation for the encroachment of vulgar materialism.

A great deal more could and should be said in particular about Ravaisson's and Boutroux's handling of the concept of being. I think Boutroux has taken an important step toward a conception of being as radically discontinuous, and would therefore represent an interestingly non-Bergsonian development of Ravaisson's thought. The next step for me to take here is, in any case, looking over the relevant work by Jean Beaufret and especially Dominique Janicaud’s Ravaisson-Bergson book. More laterally, it seems that Boutroux’s book fits into a sort of cohort of work appearing just after the fall of the Second Empire—I think that Janicaud puts it in a box with other thèses by Alfred Fouillée and Jules Lachelier. I know already a bit about Fouillée, Lachelier might be worth looking at.

Doubled Reading

Yesterday, I was told that Toni Morrison would be giving a reading here at the ENS the next day. I had seen no signs, had heard nothing. So today I went, a little skeptical, but indeed she was here—standing room only. I wasn’t able to stay for Q&A, which is often the best part of a reading. There were four texts, two of which were from her new novel. Each one was read first in French (by another person, whose name I didn’t catch), and then in the original by Toni Morrison herself. The contrast was striking. The French reader gave the texts a theatricality that Morrison avoided. I want almost to say that they seemed, in French, melodramatic. Certainly Morrison’s writing is sensual and emotionally charged enough that it runs this risk. In the past, I have heard poets read their own work, and have found that I often prefer another person’s vocalization of a poem to the author’s. Not in this case.

I’m not especially familiar with Morrison’s work (I read Beloved in highschool). I left the auditorium thinking that I should, at least, read Jazz.

end the book

"L’esprit emprunte à la matière les perceptions d’où il tire sa nourriture, et les lui rend sous forme de mouvement, où il a imprimé sa liberté."

this is the last sentence of Matière et mémoire. Lapidary.

Durkheim and analogy

Durkheim begins “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives” by defending the use of analogy as a tool of scientific analysis. Those who attempt to understand society through analogy with biology are not wrong because they employ analogy, but because they employ it badly. Similarly, those sociologists who look first of all to psychology, that is to the individual, are not necessarily wrong to do so. Durkheim says,

La vie collective, comme la vie mentale de l’individu, est faite de représentations; il est donc présumable ue représentations individuelles et représentations sociales sont, en quelque manière, comparables. Nous allons, en effet, essayet de montrer que les unes et les autres soutiennent la même relation avec leur substrat respectif. Mais ce rapprochement, loin de justifier la conception qui réduit la sociologie à n’être qu’un corollaire de la psychologie individuelle, mettre, au contraire, en reflief l’indépendance relative de ces deux mondes et de ces deux sciences (2).

This somewhat enigmatic explanation given, Durkheim turns to discuss the various materialist theories of psychology that attempt to reduce mental activity to a physical substratum—in the words of the period, to reduce the spiritual to the material. There follows a lengthy discussion of the various logical contradictions and metaphysical traps into which a rigorously materialist psychology must fall. Memory, perception, and the possibility of an unconscious mind are all discussed. William James figures prominently in this discussion, although Bergson (whose Matière et mémoire had appeared in 1896) is not explicitly mentioned. Durkheim concludes that it is impossible to reduce mental activity either to a physical substratum or to pure consciousness. This goes on for 30 pages, until one has nearly forgotten the point of the entire exercise.

The point is, of course, that there is an analogy to be made between psychology and sociology. (It should be said that for Durkheim ‘collective psychology’ is simply sociology—or rather the other way around—so ‘psychology’ can be used simply on its own, because it only ever refers to the individual. This leaves aside, I suppose, the whole range of groups that do not constitute ‘societies’ and must fall under ‘social psychology.’) Durkheim says: “Le rapport qui, dans la conception, unit le substrat social à la vie sociale est de tous points analogue à celui qu’on doit admettre entre le substrat physiologique et la vie psychique des individus” (34). That is, as brains are to minds, so individuals are to society. The analogy, then, is not between phenomena, but in the way that each science is delimited. The two ‘classic’ forms of explanation, called here materialist and idealist, are often (for instance, by Ravaisson in his survey) differentiated as, for the first, explaining the complex by the simple, and the second, the simple by the complex. Put otherwise, materialists explain the whole by its parts, and idealists the part by its whole. Debates in this period often organized themselves around physiology and morphology: does the function determine the organ, or the other way around?

Durkheim’s point here is that, as he says, to explain “le complex par le complex, les faits sociaux par la société” (41). Elements of one kind, to which one set of rules apply when in isolation, when combined give rise to phenomena that cannot be understood according to these rules. Durkheim says, “à mesure que l’association [for instance, of cells in a living being, or individuals into a society] se constitue, elle donne naissance à des phénomènes qui ne dérivent pas directement de la nature des éléments associés” (41-2). The potentially major problem of constituting these levels or systems of rules will be solved empirically. Suggesting, I suppose, that what will later be called ‘epistemological gaps’ in some sense ‘naturally’ occurring.

I mentioned already Bergson’s absence from this essay. It would be interesting to know more about Durkheim’s opinions of Bergson’s earlier writings—Les données immédiates...(1889) and Matiere et memoire (1896)—specifically in regard to the limits and meaning of materialist psychology. Later on, they come to represent two very different aspects of French philosophical/scientific culture, this is why I’d like to know more about the earlier period. Unexpectedly, this essay gives me yet more of a reason to read Emile Boutroux’s famous 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature (reprinted 1895) supposedly grounding human freedom in these gaps between epistemological levels of determination. For striking contrast, and in order to have a hyper-modern perspective on these questions of materialist psychology, I would want to go back and look through my notes on Zizek’s Parallax View.