4.11.2006
Image Music Text (Narrative)
Title
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by essay, also. It is weird because some of this stuff fits better in the Film and Media Studies field than Narrative, but let's carry on.
The Photographic Message: This essay looks at the way that the photograph (in the newspaper) is denoted and connoted. "The press photograph is a message...formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission, and a point of reception."(15) The photograph, unlike other arts, is a message without a code - it denotes. It gives rise to connotation - "a coding of the photographic analogue." (20) However, we learn over the course of the essay that the purely denotive photograph is impossible. "If such a denotation [that is, pure denotation] exists, it is perhaps not at the level of what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective, but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images." (30) "Photographic connotation, like every well structered signification, is an institutional activity; in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man, to reassure him. Every code is at once arbitrary and rational, recourse to a code is thus always an opportunity for a man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason and a liberty." (31)
Rhetoric of the Image: This essay deals with similar things as the previous one does. He looks at how meaning gets into the advertising image. "all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signified, the reader able to choose some and ignore others."(39) "the image is penetrated through and through by a system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted..., it is also the totality of uterances received: the language must include the 'suprises' of meaning."(47) "The rhetoric of the image...is specific to the extent that it is subject to the physical constraints of vision...but general to the extent that the 'figures' are never more than formal relations of elements." (48)
The Third Meaning: Here Barthes looks at some stills from Eisenstein's films. It seems very Camera Lucida, punctum before the punctum. Beyond information and symbol, Barthes gets something else from the image - a third meaning "evident, errative, obstinate." (53) It is not obvious meaning, it is obtuse meaning - "the thrid meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely." (55) "The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty naming it...what the obtuse disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)."(61) "It is clear that the obstuse meaning is the epitome of a counter narrative; disseminated, reversable, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines...a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms...-an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'"(63) The third meaning is integral to film, it structures film differently without subverting the story (64) "The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins." (65)
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein: Here Barthes looks at the tableau in the work of these three "authors."
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative: Ok, here we go. Narratives are infinite and everywhere - does this mean that they are so diffuse as to have no meaning? "Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." (79) No, we can do a structural analysis of them. We can do this by looking at narrative as if a sentence, with grammar, units and rules. So there are levels to narrative. The first is that of the function: "the essence of a function, is so to speak, the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later, either on the same lever or elsewhere, on another level."(89) There are two functional units - the distributional function and the integrational index. "function involve metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of being." (93) Functions can be further divided into cardinal (nuclei) functions (the important stuff) and catalysers (the not so important, complementary stuff). Indices themselves refer to the character of something in the narrative where as its subgroup, informants, simply identify, they are data, immediate - indices need deciphering. But what makes narrative narrative is confusion in temporality : "narrative institutes a confusion between consecution and consequence, temporality and logic."(98) A sequence is a bunch of nuclei bound together. "Sequnces move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued."(103) The next level is the level of actions, what we might think of as characters - but not characters understood psychologically, but rather on what they do (hence actants, level of actions). Finally, there is the level of narrative (which helps us makes sense of the level of actions) This brings confusion in terms of who is telling the story (point of view and all that stuff) Rather than getting caught up in that, Barthes asserts that there are only two kinds of narration, personal and apersonal, but they get all mixed together (even within the sentence). "The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its donor and addressee." (114) "the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its strictly narrative forms...Narration can only receive its meaning from the wolrd which makes use of it: beyond the narrational level begins the world." (115) "'What takes place' in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming." (124)
The Stuggle with the Angel: A structural analysis of a passage from the book of Genesis. "Let me indicate in conclusion, however, that what interests me most in this famous passage is not the 'folkloristic' model but the abrasive frictions, the breaks, the discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition of narrative entities which to some extent run free from an explicit logical articulation. One is dealing here...with a sort of metonymic montage: the themes...are combined, not 'developed'." (140)
Death of the Author: "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (142) The author is replaced by the modern scriptor, simultaneous to the text. "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." (148)
Muscia Practica: About the change in musical performance, discusses Beethoven. "In short, there was first the actor of music, then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing." (150)
From Work to Text: Chronicles the move from Work to Text. "The work is a fragment of sustance, occupying a part of the space of books..., the Text is a methodological field."(156) The Text is experienced only in the activity of production. The Text is only approacted "in reaction to the sign...THe text...practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action." (158) The text is plural. The text is a network.The text requires the reader's collaboration. The text is approached through pleasure. "The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing."(164)
Change the Object Itself: A follow up, reflections on Mythologies.
Lesson in Writing: An essay on Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and how it differes from the Western binaristic mode of thinking. "As in the modern text, the stressing of codes, references, discontinuous observations, anthological gestures, mutliplies the written line, and this not by virtue of some metaphysical appeal but by the play of a combinatory set which opens in the entire space of the theatre: what is started by the one is continued by the other, unendingly." (178)
The Grain of the Voice: On music and the texture of the voice in it. "The grain is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance."(182) "The 'grain' of the voice is not - or is not merely - its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)."(185) "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as its sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."(188)
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers: "Within the very limits of the teaching space as given, the need is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating...; a floating which would not detroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The necessities of promotion, professional obligations..., imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method, ideological criticism - everything is there, but floating." (215)
Other Thoughts
"Thus is the body expressly introduced into the idea of the tableau, but it is the whole body that is so introduced - the organs, grouped together and as though held in cohesion by the magnetic power of the segmentation, function in the name of a transcendence, that of the figure, which receives the full fetishistic load and becomes the sublime sustitute of meaning: it is this meaning that is fetishized." (72)
"There is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the narrative." (109)
"The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance." (183)
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by essay, also. It is weird because some of this stuff fits better in the Film and Media Studies field than Narrative, but let's carry on.
The Photographic Message: This essay looks at the way that the photograph (in the newspaper) is denoted and connoted. "The press photograph is a message...formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission, and a point of reception."(15) The photograph, unlike other arts, is a message without a code - it denotes. It gives rise to connotation - "a coding of the photographic analogue." (20) However, we learn over the course of the essay that the purely denotive photograph is impossible. "If such a denotation [that is, pure denotation] exists, it is perhaps not at the level of what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective, but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images." (30) "Photographic connotation, like every well structered signification, is an institutional activity; in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man, to reassure him. Every code is at once arbitrary and rational, recourse to a code is thus always an opportunity for a man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason and a liberty." (31)
Rhetoric of the Image: This essay deals with similar things as the previous one does. He looks at how meaning gets into the advertising image. "all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signified, the reader able to choose some and ignore others."(39) "the image is penetrated through and through by a system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted..., it is also the totality of uterances received: the language must include the 'suprises' of meaning."(47) "The rhetoric of the image...is specific to the extent that it is subject to the physical constraints of vision...but general to the extent that the 'figures' are never more than formal relations of elements." (48)
The Third Meaning: Here Barthes looks at some stills from Eisenstein's films. It seems very Camera Lucida, punctum before the punctum. Beyond information and symbol, Barthes gets something else from the image - a third meaning "evident, errative, obstinate." (53) It is not obvious meaning, it is obtuse meaning - "the thrid meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely." (55) "The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty naming it...what the obtuse disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)."(61) "It is clear that the obstuse meaning is the epitome of a counter narrative; disseminated, reversable, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines...a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms...-an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'"(63) The third meaning is integral to film, it structures film differently without subverting the story (64) "The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins." (65)
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein: Here Barthes looks at the tableau in the work of these three "authors."
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative: Ok, here we go. Narratives are infinite and everywhere - does this mean that they are so diffuse as to have no meaning? "Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." (79) No, we can do a structural analysis of them. We can do this by looking at narrative as if a sentence, with grammar, units and rules. So there are levels to narrative. The first is that of the function: "the essence of a function, is so to speak, the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later, either on the same lever or elsewhere, on another level."(89) There are two functional units - the distributional function and the integrational index. "function involve metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of being." (93) Functions can be further divided into cardinal (nuclei) functions (the important stuff) and catalysers (the not so important, complementary stuff). Indices themselves refer to the character of something in the narrative where as its subgroup, informants, simply identify, they are data, immediate - indices need deciphering. But what makes narrative narrative is confusion in temporality : "narrative institutes a confusion between consecution and consequence, temporality and logic."(98) A sequence is a bunch of nuclei bound together. "Sequnces move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued."(103) The next level is the level of actions, what we might think of as characters - but not characters understood psychologically, but rather on what they do (hence actants, level of actions). Finally, there is the level of narrative (which helps us makes sense of the level of actions) This brings confusion in terms of who is telling the story (point of view and all that stuff) Rather than getting caught up in that, Barthes asserts that there are only two kinds of narration, personal and apersonal, but they get all mixed together (even within the sentence). "The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its donor and addressee." (114) "the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its strictly narrative forms...Narration can only receive its meaning from the wolrd which makes use of it: beyond the narrational level begins the world." (115) "'What takes place' in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming." (124)
The Stuggle with the Angel: A structural analysis of a passage from the book of Genesis. "Let me indicate in conclusion, however, that what interests me most in this famous passage is not the 'folkloristic' model but the abrasive frictions, the breaks, the discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition of narrative entities which to some extent run free from an explicit logical articulation. One is dealing here...with a sort of metonymic montage: the themes...are combined, not 'developed'." (140)
Death of the Author: "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (142) The author is replaced by the modern scriptor, simultaneous to the text. "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." (148)
Muscia Practica: About the change in musical performance, discusses Beethoven. "In short, there was first the actor of music, then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing." (150)
From Work to Text: Chronicles the move from Work to Text. "The work is a fragment of sustance, occupying a part of the space of books..., the Text is a methodological field."(156) The Text is experienced only in the activity of production. The Text is only approacted "in reaction to the sign...THe text...practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action." (158) The text is plural. The text is a network.The text requires the reader's collaboration. The text is approached through pleasure. "The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing."(164)
Change the Object Itself: A follow up, reflections on Mythologies.
Lesson in Writing: An essay on Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and how it differes from the Western binaristic mode of thinking. "As in the modern text, the stressing of codes, references, discontinuous observations, anthological gestures, mutliplies the written line, and this not by virtue of some metaphysical appeal but by the play of a combinatory set which opens in the entire space of the theatre: what is started by the one is continued by the other, unendingly." (178)
The Grain of the Voice: On music and the texture of the voice in it. "The grain is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance."(182) "The 'grain' of the voice is not - or is not merely - its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)."(185) "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as its sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."(188)
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers: "Within the very limits of the teaching space as given, the need is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating...; a floating which would not detroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The necessities of promotion, professional obligations..., imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method, ideological criticism - everything is there, but floating." (215)
Other Thoughts
"Thus is the body expressly introduced into the idea of the tableau, but it is the whole body that is so introduced - the organs, grouped together and as though held in cohesion by the magnetic power of the segmentation, function in the name of a transcendence, that of the figure, which receives the full fetishistic load and becomes the sublime sustitute of meaning: it is this meaning that is fetishized." (72)
"There is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the narrative." (109)
"The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance." (183)
# posted by SMRT : 12:15 AM
