Barthes Rhetoric of the Image

“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end?  And if it ends, what is there beyond?”  In “Rhetoric of the Image,” these are the questions that Barthes attempts to address, focusing his attention on the advertising image.  Images produce signification and Barthes desires to understand better how this production happens, which he proposes arises in the delivery of three messages: linguistic, coded iconic and a non-coded iconic.

Linguistic: written text (title and caption that nearly accompanies every image), which has two levels: denotation and connotation (in Barthes’ example of the pasta advertisement, the name of the pasta company is denotation and “Italianicity” is the connotation)

Coded: all the messages of the image, the totality (in Barthes’ example, freshness, Italianicity)

Non-coded: what image we actually see (in the example, vegetables, pasta, grocery bag)

The linguistic messages direct readers, and in particular directions, as readers “choose some [messages] and ignore others in their encounter the “floating signifiers” (39).  “The [written] text [that accompanies an image] helps to identify purely and simply the elements of the scene and the scene itself; it is a matter of a denoted description of the image (a description which is often incomplete) or, in Hjelmslev’s terminology, of an operation (as opposed to connotation)” (39). In other words, readers can understand explicitly what the image wants to articulate.  At this point, the image and text operate at the denotation level. Barthes posits that one of the functions of the linguistic is anchorage, which allows “the text [to] direct the reader through signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance” (40). When the written text functions on the symbolic level, it “no longer guides identification but interpretation” (39).  The other function of the linguistic is relay, in which text and image are complementary.  What the relay produces is “story, the anecdote, the diegesis” (41).

Both text and image, as Barthes continues, are never presented in a “pure state” and “even if a totally ‘naïve’ image were to be achieved, it would immediately join the sign of naivety and be completed by a third ― symbolic ― message” (42).  Thus, even in the denoted message(s), images and texts are relinquished from their “literalness” and relegated to the symbolic order.  Again, we see Nietzsche’s position on language, although now not restricted to written language, but images as well, as all metaphorical.  Images (and really photographs) become metaphors, although unlike language, they appear much more naturalized.  What I see here is a rethinking of Nietzsche’s outline: nerve stimuli à images (as well as words) à concepts.  I forgot to highlight, a very important highlight, in my other post that Nietzsche does make a clear distinction that images and words are not given equal value (although I know my outline doesn’t make that apparent).  An image is the first level of metaphor, and isn’t necessarily Nietzsche’s interest, and the sound, as it imitates the image, is the second metaphor. It is only at this second metaphor that we begin formulating concepts. “Let us further consider the formation of concepts.  Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin” (1174). So, Barthes explores the formulation of concepts in particular to photograph images, something that Nietzsche, although he identifies images as metaphors, either didn’t care much about or chose to ignore how images and their metaphors contribute to concepts.  

What I found particularly interesting in Barthes’ chapter, particularly in the “The denoted image,” is how he connects consciousness to the photograph.  He remarks, “the type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there.  What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority” (44). With this remark, I began to think about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and his appropriated concept of ‘homogeneous, empty time’ (Anderson borrows this idea from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, in which Benjamin suggests the idea is particularly important to the emergence of modernity, and applies it to the construct of the nation and national consciousness), which .  This ‘homogeneous, empty time’ provided a means for people to think of others who are active in the community as they are as well.  The concept emerged with the novel, which provided its reader with a ‘God-position’ or objective view of a social landscape.  This concept is one of two parts to Anderson’s ‘homogeneous, empty time’: the ability to see multiple activities and people all at the same time; the second part being the conception of people embedded in ‘societies’, where they are sociological entities with a reality that their members can be connected without ever becoming acquainted (Anderson 25-26). This same scenario can be, and was, repeated in the novel and newspaper.  As readers read these two genres, they begin to identify themselves with a community, within a nation.  The reader begins to understand that others are active in the same way they are and have a commonality.

In my undergraduate thesis, I further extended Anderson and Benjamin’s concept of ‘homogenous, empty time’ to what I called Live Homogenous, Empty Real Time: the ability to see live events unfold in real time.  Similar to Anderson, I connected Live Homogenous, Empty Real Time to images and discourse of the American flag around Sept. 11, 2001 as a way to illuminate a fixation of the flag and deployment of American nationalism.  In other words, I saw ‘homogenous, empty time’ happening at an accelerated rate for discourses, mythologies and narratives to be constructed.  I also believe that ‘homogenous, empty time’ could not fit with emergent technologies, especially at the mass level, as television and the Internet offered a reconceptualizing of national consciousness.  While I didn’t focus much on Live Homogenous, Empty Real Time as a dimension of postmodernity and postmodernism (I slightly hinted at it), I think the concept should consider its particularity as a postmodern condition, and possibly I could expound upon the connection in a paper or possibly in my thesis.   

But, coupled with Postcomposition and Sid’s assertion that spatiality ought to be appropriated in writing, I would like to begin, not necessarily in this post, to consider how images, writing, spatiality and the nation function together.  Both Benjamin and Anderson direct our attention to the novel and print culture in formations of national consciousness as temporal. We see, as Dobrin has underscored, the attention to temporality and writing (primarily because of literature’s influence on Rhetoric and Composition).  But what if we consider a ‘homogenous, empty space’ or something along the lines of my argument: Live Homogenous, Empty Real Space?  I’m so conditioned, I think, in many ways to think about time and cultural phenomena.  But what about space?  This is why I think Sid’s hitting on an interesting point with space, and writing studies neglect of conceptualizing it.  And Sid may already be articulating a ‘homogenous, empty space’ or Live Homogenous, Empty Real Space.  Of course, my interest would lie in what subjects write about the nation with spatiality, how subjects write about the nation with spatiality, where subjects write about the nation, why subjects write the nation in particular spaces, et al.  But I think I’m seeing some connections, although I need to flesh out more ideas.

Barthes also articulates a definition of rhetoric as a set of connotators and appearing as a signifying aspect of ideology (49).  Rhetorics vary in their substance (sound, image, gesture, et al.), but “not necessarily by their form; it is even probable that there exists a single rhetorical form, common for instance to dream, literature and image” (49).  With this definition and conception of rhetoric, Barthes shifts away from, or desires to rethink, ancient and classical rhetoric structural issues, thus focusing on how rhetoric functions with culture.  And it is here, with the connection to culture, that culture, whether national, gender, racial or class, attempts to naturalize itself and its ideologies. As Barthes posits that rhetoric is constituted by numerous messages and develops as a part of ideology, I wonder what he makes of formed narratives.  I, possibly mistakenly, have typically considered an ideology as part of a larger narrative (in other words, narratives are composed of numerous ideologies and ideologies are composed of numerous messages/connotators). And this is also where I often get confused with Barthes: In Mythologies, he tends to equate ideology with myth, whereas I see myth and narrative as synonymous.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 3rd ed. New York: Verso, 2006. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Print.