Theory of the Photographic Image (Doane) Mid-Term Essay

Obtuse Temporality
in Barthes and Kracauer

In his essay The Third Meaning, Barthes chooses to analyze a series of stills from the Eisenstein film, Ivan the Terrible - and in so doing, he points out instances of the "third meaning" - the "obtuse meaning" (what, later, in Camera Lucida, would amount to the punctum). Yet, as Barthes himself even admits, the stills he pulls do not correspond directly with the original film in its form as cinematic experience; in fact, they amount to a second text - in a sort of parallax relation to the first: they are mutually evocative and displaced (Barthes refers to this as a "palimpsest relationship"1 of texts). What's more, his description of the "third meaning" of those stills is one that he believes to be actually impossible to perform - he states that this is because the obtuse meaning exists on an order outside of articulation, and therefore only the location and effect can be described but the actual process is irreducible and incommunicable. To extrapolate on this point, the obtuse meaning exists within a personal relationship between the viewer and the film still, which occurs apart from (though in tandem with) the more communal relations between the viewer and the film-text, the auteur, and the socio-historical contexts of the images at hand. Also, the obtuse meaning is a product of the indexical (and contingent) nature of the image, which struggles with these iconic and symbolic intentions. Barthes' essay, therefore, must be doubly inarticulate: instead of description, he is forced to print the actual stills; and instead of a theoretical analysis, he can only refer the reader to his own personal experiences, which may or may not be generalizable. On the other hand, it is possible to literally "see what he is trying to say," as he prompts the reader to take his place as viewer, and to develop her own relation to the series of stills - perhaps to sympathize with Barthes', or perhaps not: "the reading of it is still hazardous."2

This incommunicativeness is also linked to a double self-referentiality in the essay. On the one hand, Barthes refers in his analysis not to the film, but to the series of stills that he himself (re)produces - in other words, the text he is analyzing may be found nowhere other than within his analysis. The second order of self-referentiality stems from Barthes' consequent uncertainty whether the obtuse meaning is universal, or something personal (thus, his constant qualifications of self-invocation3). For this reason, Barthes only mildly attempts to use his essay as the basis of a theoretical construct (that seems to be rather the job of the "future," which he invokes multiple times4); instead, his text is more of a (re)construction of the film-text (or rather a parallactic text), in which the iconic and symbolic levels of the film-text are subverted and de-naturalized. His essay is therefore not an analysis so much as it is the delineation of a second text he has discovered (or created, the difference here is tenuous) in relation to the first. Yet this poses the question: Why must a second text be discovered (or even created) in order to experience the obtuse meaning? In other words, is the obtuse meaning only evident in the text that Barthes produces (the series of film stills, contextualized by Barthes' recounting of his impressions) - or can it be captured in the original film itself? The response to these questions lies within the difference (for Barthes, at least) between the film and the film-still - and it may already be clear that this is a relation of temporalities.

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Years after writing The Third Meaning, Barthes writes in Camera Lucida that the punctum (what could be considered the signifier of the obtuse meaning) "is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there."5 It is therefore an excess of meaning: "a signifiance"6 - "a signifier without a signified"7. Moreover, the punctum "is divined"8, much in the same way that Barthes' parallax text in The Third Meaning is both created and discovered. Yet this divination requires, for Barthes, a certain frame of mind in order to be achieved. That is to say that the viewer must exist in a certain relation to the images he interprets; simply, there must be ample time for contemplation, for "pensiveness."9

This mode of being before the photograph is one of (spatial) digression and (temporal) abeyance - these, furthermore, can allow for a sort of existential "latency."10 Barthes claims that "the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me, and I think back on it"11. He goes on to say, "Absolute subjectivity [which must be taken to mean the condition required for the appearance of the punctum - and thus its obstinance against analysis] is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence)."12 The punctum is therefore a kind of subsequent reflection upon the image, yet which is nonetheless latent within it already at first glance (it in fact remains latent even, or especially, under scrutiny, as Barthes notes13).

This may begin to give a faint sense that Barthes' reference to the silent speech of the punctum could conjure more than a poetic paradox; it is also somewhat of an insinuation that each image carries with it a sort of message-laden "soundtrack" (as Robert Bresson writes, "The soundtrack invented silence."14). The soundtrack is a purely temporal aspect of the filmic medium - and thus silence is its equivalent of the photogram (sound technically existing merely as the temporal flow of aural vibrations - and thus silence being the lack thereof, a pause in the flow). In this regard, the reference to silence is a reference to the temporality - or, rather, the de-temporality - of the obtuse meaning. And it is here that we eventually come to Barthes' phenomenological specificity of the (a) photograph, insofar as it is in opposition to the (a) cinema-image.

Do I add to the images in the movies? I don't think so; I don't have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram.15

For Barthes, the cinema seems to induce a kind of panicked consumption, disallowing any re-registration of the images in the "affective consciousness"16 - because of the continual stream of images and the flood of information that each forces upon the viewer: each frame a framework, packed with denotative and connotative (semiological and mythological) messages. There is practically no time therefore (at best, one forty-eighth of a second) to re-regard each frame before it is replaced by the next. There is barely enough time to interpret the messages of the shot, much less the accidental, obtuse meaning. To look at it another way, during a film the viewer is so absorbed in the horizontal stream of the signified (the narrative - or, at least, the intentional message of the film), that she is unable to reflect on its artifice (or rather, its indexicality - and thus upon the artifice of its symbolic and even iconic significations). To find the punctum is to read the individual images and their articulations vertically17 - in other words, to interrogate the signifier18. Yet it is only by arresting the flow, segmenting it, reconstituting it, indeed re-writing it, that the punctum is given a space to enter the frame.

And to say that the punctum "enters the frame" is in fact more than a figure of speech. Barthes contends that the frame of a cinema-image, for one, predicates a "blind field" which "constantly doubles our partial vision."19 (This notion, and much of what is discussed here, in fact, echoes Jean-Pierre Oudart's theory of suture in the cinema, which similarly proposes an "absent field."20) This blind field allows the characters in a film to maintain a presence - a liveness - even off-screen, when the viewer is unable to see the movement of their images. In film, it is precisely this blind-field presence that keeps the narrative from collapse, and which furthermore, in its (carefully constructed!) oscillating relation to visible presence, presses the horizontality of the story to the forefront of the viewers attention. The blind field is the endowment of the signified with a sort of absent presence - and therefore it is less linked to a field of space as it is inextricably linked to a present temporality, which functions to aid the diegesis.

As for the photograph, on the other hand, it is precisely here in this unseen presence that the punctum resides (if there happens to be a punctum). Thus, the blind field of the photograph achieves a very different effect from that of the cinema. Barthes writes that the "cinema combines two poses: the actor's 'this-has-been' and the role's."21 There is a slippage in the cinema between the indexicality of the actor and the indexicality of the character: the diegesis takes over, due the overwhelming flow of the images. Yet in the photograph there is the possibility of that silent latency period from which the punctum can emerge.

Furthermore, in the latter half of Camera Lucida, Barthes believes he discovers a different kind of punctum - one which is spurred not so much by the accidental, subversive detail, but by the paradox of Death in the image as evoked by the historical photograph. He writes, "This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation."22 In fact, however, whether of the detail or otherwise, the punctum was and is always the evocation a temporal presence - that is, an uncanny spectral presence emanating from the blind-field. This presence has the effect of what Barthes refers to as the "that-has-been" - in the form of an unresolvable paradox. It is however, heightened in the historical photograph, as the viewer is faced not only with the death of the photographed moment, but also the physical death of the subject of the photograph. In other words, the historical photograph evokes a presence, but one which is only available in the photograph, as the subject of the photograph no longer exists.

Siegfried Kracauer writes of this very phenomenon in his essay, Photography. He describes the reaction of children (likely Kracauer himself) upon viewing the photograph of their deceased grandmother. At the odd fashion of her dress, "they laugh, and at the same time they shudder... they think they glimpse a moment of time past, a time that passes without return. Although time is not part of the photograph... the photograph itself, so it seems to them, is a representation of time."23 To Kracauer, the effect (the punctum) that these children experience in looking at the photograph of their grandmother is caused by the irresolvable paradox of the memory-image in conjunction with the photograph. As he notes, if it were not for the "oral tradition," there would be no way to know the identity of the subject of the photograph, as "the ur-image has long since decayed."24 Without the personal memory, the "oral tradition," the photograph would not retain its punctum - rather, the indexicality of the photograph merely becomes a kind of archive, a record: the photograph "could be standing with others of its kind in a museum, in a glass case labeled 'Traditional Costumes, 1864'."25

The appearance of the punctum, therefore, relies on a quite personal relationship between the viewer and the photograph (the uncanniness is not just a general sense of Death, but of course also of the viewer's own impending death). Perhaps this personal relationship once again pertains to the phenomenological difference between the photograph and the cinema. Barthes writes: "I am uncomfortable during the private projection of a film (not enough of a public, not enough anonymity), but I need to be alone with the photographs I am looking at."26 The photograph, to Barthes (and also to Kracauer), must first-and-foremost develop a personal relationship with the subject - if that is not achieved, it is just another item in the archive.

1 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 67
2 IMT, 54
3 e.g. IMT, 53, 57, 60, 65
4 e.g. IMT, 60, 63, 66, 67
5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 55
6 IMT, 54
7 IMT, 61
8 CL, 57
9 CL, 55
10 CL, 53
11 CL, 53
12 CL, 53
13 CL, 53, 100
14 Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinematographe, 1975, 48
15 CL, 55
16 CL, 55
17 IMT, 67
18 IMT, 53
19 CL, 57
20 Jean-Pierre Oudart, "La Suture," Cahiers du Cinema, April 1969
21 CL, 79
22 CL, 96
23 Siegfried Kracauer, Photography, p.49
24 Photography, 48
25 Photography, 48
26 CL, 97