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.

Barthes at the College de France

Earlier today, wandering about in a bookstore, I found an attractively slim Points Essais edition of Roland Barthes’s inaugural lesson at the Collège de France. It is titled, boldly, Leçon.

Leçon is interesting, for instance, in light of Micheal Behrent’s article on Foucault. In as much as it is admissible to read the text as argument, and I’m not sure such a reading would be the most nuanced or productive, it must be admitted that Barthes’s argument rests on a certain conception of insidious and all-pervading power. Barthes is in this text, and at this moment, linked especially closely to Foucault. Foucault brought Barthes to the Collège de France, and in a sense it is Foucault’s space. So given this, we can say that Barthes is inscribing a whole project of literary inquiry in a Foucauldian space.

The most painful thing about reading the Leçon, for me, is Barthes’s suggestion that an ever-renewed investigation, a continual assault on foundational assumptions, could be an effective counter to this kind of power (which is not capital, but is also not not-capital). Perhaps the least ‘modern’ sounding of Barthes’ opinions is that desire is somehow to be opposed to power. The opposition of elemental and natural desire (albeit conceived as multiplicity) to power (albeit also conceived as multiple), seems simply naïve. Perhaps I have not understood. Yet I can only cringe when I read, near the end, “Ce qui peut être oppressif dans un enseignement, ce n’est pas finalement le savoir ou la culture qu’il véhicule, ce sont les formes discursives à travers lesquelles on les propose” (pg 42). Although I understand that, at one time, Barthes was something of an adversary for certain professional historians, he was also deeply concerned with History. Perhaps this is the issue: History, not history. Surely both can be oppressive?

What I ask myself is, does the above quote suggest that Barthes thinks something like what Behrent says Foucault thinks about the new configuration of power—biopower as opposed to discipline? This, or something like this, seems plausible to me partly because Barthes engages in a certain amount of self-historicisation of the sort I always find fascinating. For him, there was a coupure with the Liberation, but again with or around Mai ’68. I wonder if it would be possible to track his opinions of the changing shape of French society over these decades in the something of the same way that Behrent does with Foucault. In the end, I think it is a mistake to take Barthes seriously as a thinker of political or social issues. As a writer, yes; as a literary critic, yes; but not as a thinker of the social. And I think he would agree with this. The Leçon suggests as much. It is too bad that he is read as ‘political’ by so many Anglophone critics.

As far as this particular text is concerned, it seems to me that it is best to heed the warnings Barthes gives at the beginning, that he only ever writes essays, “genre ambigu où l’écriture le dispute à l’analyse” (7). More plainly, I think we should take everything Barthes says here (I would go so far as to say, ever) as essentially a first person statement. It is about pleasure, about his own pleasure—we are invited to participate, and to get what we can from it, but the basic principle is always, as he says, “cette disposition qui me porte souvent à sortir d’un embarras intellectuel par une interrogation portée à mon plaisir” (8). He is a writer, and he is engaged in “un combat assez solitaire contre le pouvoir de la langue” (25). The thing of it is, I always enjoy reading him. I find that, while I often disagree with what he says, I agree profoundly with what I understand his project to be. I think next, perhaps when I run across it in a bookstore, since I have no professional excuse at the moment, I will take up La chambre claire.

le plaisir du texte

As a sort of antidote to Lukács, I plucked Le plaisir du texte off my shelf and read some choice selections. It’s quite a wonderful little book. Possibly I wanted to go back to Barthes because of an essay I read yesterday or the day before about Barthes and Richard Rorty, which I found myself disagreeing with at nearly every turn. It’s from a very recent issue of New Literary History—and it seems to me to miss several things. The argument seems to be that at the very end of his life, Barthes gave up the playful self-fashioning he’d been engaged in, and turned to a traditional account of literature and écriture as speaking to deep and enduring human questions. This means that he isn’t at all the icon of ironist self-fashioning he apparently was always thought to be, or at least that he rejected the constant play of language in the late 1970s, just before he died.

Now, there’s a reason Compagnon calls Barthes an antimoderne. We should not take his postwar Marxism as a profession of faith (or, if we do, we shouldn’t let it get to us). We should remember that the Mythologies were newspaper columns. They were fun—still are. He isn’t in any sense, I think it’s safe to say, committed to any particular politics. He is, in a certain sense, elitist. There’s plenty to say about that. I won’t go on about it all. Barthes is near to my heart, but I’d like to stay lucid about his successes and his failures.

Le plaisir du texte is from 1973—translated very quickly, in 1975. Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading was translated into English in 1978. Not so long ago I read a piece, also in New Literary History, by Brook Thomas about Iser’s reception in the US, and why it hadn’t gone so well. I’ve read some of Thomas’s other stuff, and been quite impressed. I liked this article as well, but now that I think on it, I don’t remember him mentioning Barthes at all. And if I can imagine myself back in 1980, trying to find a theorist who would help me talk about the reader and the text and their relation...well, there’s no context. Barthes is much sexier. Also shorter. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing intellectual history should be able to take into account when they ask ‘why not?’ questions (which, anyway, are always dangerous to ask).

As a side note, continuing to post ideas had-too-late about the Rancière paper: Barthes loves the idea of inattentive reading, of skipping around. His model of textuality and readerly action is about as far as you can get from Jacotot. Could they talk to each other at all? Lastly, having nothing to do with Barthes: the Jacototian idea that everything is in everything, that any act of language contains all language---this is the totalizing impulse that Rancière otherwise more or less stays away from, or might be. Again, bears some more thinking.