7.03 The Lexical
Semiotics of Roland Barthes.
In 'Image, Music Text'
(1977) Barthes starts by differentiating between denoted and connoted meanings.
The denoted meanings of an image, or denotation, are equivalent to our
perceived reality. Barthes calls this the analogon. But before we can know
this, "the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the
denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence".[1]
The connotative meanings,
which are at least partly constructed by the treatment of the image, are the
sum of responses to the meanings of the image. All these responses are
historically derived and culturally specific.[2]
Barthes discusses the
relation of images to words. The caption is said to quicken connotation. It
guides and locates our reading through 'the floating chain of signifiers'. This
he calls 'anchorage'. Another effect achieved is that of 'relay', the hinting
at what might have gone before or might follow the image. I would add that
context can act in a similar way on an image implying a preferred reading.
The reader then brings their
own specific knowledge to bear which may be 'practical, national, cultural or
aesthetic'. This set of knowledges from which we make sense of the world can be
called idiolects. Widespread domains of idiolect are known as ideologies.
However the paradigmatic
condensation at the level of connotations is ordered and constrained not just
by the idiolect of the reader but by a visual syntax. Barthes does not make any
hypothesis of what a non-verbal or visual syntax might be. A sequence of images
can borrow verbal syntagmatic relations, but if we look for syntagmatic
relations within the two dimensional picture plane we need a new approach,
which Barthes does not provide.
A third level of meaning is
then posited by Barthes. What we have talked of so far he sees as the
'obvious'. The third level he calls 'obtuse'. It is the zones of meaning that
are produced from the relations of signs, from the oscillation between two
possible readings, or from a 'spasm of the signifier'. It is the meaning of a
movement of semiosis. These obtuse meanings contribute to, often unnamable,
atmosphere, quality and emotion-value.
Such
obtuse meanings may be produced in montages, like those that comprise much
of the programme imagery from the space that produces a tension between two
or more parts.
[1] Barthes (1977) p49
[2] Barthes reviews the main procedures by which
connotations are achieved, with the photographic image in mind.
a. 'Trick effects', which
could apply to collage as well.
b. 'Pose', which is the
gestural language of the humans and animals depicted.
c. 'Objects', these are the
elements of a lexicon of signifying units. He hints that these are 'constituted
into a syntax', but we have to wait until Kress and Van Leeuwen in 1996 to find
out what this syntax might be.
d. 'Photogenia', which is the
treatment of objects with regard to such things as lighting, contrast, focus,
printing.
e. 'Aestheticism'. Any
references to past art particularly the established canon.
f. 'Syntax'. This is not
the syntax within the image but rather the syntax between a sequence of images,
which he suggests, is particularly good as a source of comedy.