Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang, 2010.
Foreword by Geoff Dyer
Barthes likes “to write beginnings” and multiplied this pleasure by writing books of fragments, of repeated beginnings; he also liked prebeginnings: “introductions, sketches,” ideas for projected books, books he planned one day to write.(x)
Camera Lucida is … a more elaborately formulated series of hypotheses - not a definitive account - … Barthes’s preferred way of presenting his hypotheses was in the form of linked aphorisms, and, as Susan Sontag noted, “it is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding.” The paradox, then, is that this man who liked first words (and adored paradoxes) offered his provisional findings as if they were the last word. Needless to say, this last word was always susceptible to further elaboration and refinement, to further beginnings. This is how Barthes’s prose acquires its signature style of compression and flow, a summing-up that is also a perpetual setting-forth.(x)
He was one of those writers whose life’s work was destined, by increments, to remain unfinished.(x)
Subsumed in a general mass of cultural theory, the works in which Barthes most clearly revealed himself as a writer were the least valued. … on his semiotics, on works such as Image-Music-Text and Mythologies, while dismissing the later, more personal works as “marginal, lacking the satisfying stamp of authority.”
All of which was in sharp contrast to Sontag’s approving observation of the way that “his voice became more and more personal,” that he derived pleasure from the “dismantling of his own authority,” and that the marginal would come to seem absolutely central to Barthes’s achievement. … Writing in the immediate aftermath of Barthes’s death, Italo Calvino offered a similarly nuanced view of two Bartheses: “the one who subordinated everything to the rigor of a method, and the one whose only sure criterion was pleasure (the pleasure of the intelligence and the intelligence of pleasure). The truth is that these two Barthes are really one.”(xii-xiii)
By the time of Camera Lucida, Barthes’s ornate sentences, with all their colons and semicolons, italics, hyphens, ellipses, and parentheses, came quite naturally to him. Where one might remember particular scenes or sentences in a novel, with Barthes the focus narrows to favorite deployments or permutations of punctuation.(xiv)
In Roland Barthes, Barthes had warned readers that “it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel,” and in his last years he talked about the possibility of writing a novel.(xv)
It is ironic, then, that one of the most memorable tributes to Barthes comes in the form of an image that would have been inconceivable without the benefits of digital technology. In 2004 Idris Khan made a photograph entitled “Every Page . . . from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida,” in which he combined the pages in a single image so that Barthes’s text and the pictures reproduced in the book peer at the viewer through a dense fog of their own making. (The return of the read!) It is as if decaying and enduring memories of the book’s successive pleasures - first words and last - have been compacted into a ghostly blur of almost impenetrable purity.(xvii)
Part One
… (life consists of these little touches of solitude), … (3)
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.(4)
Show your photographs to someone - he will immediately show you his: …(5)
By nature, the Photograph (for convenience’s sake, let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, … (5)
In short, the referent adheres. And this singular adherence makes it very difficult to focus on Photography.(6)
… my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, … but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system.(8)
The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glances through collections of photographs, … And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.(9)
For The Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double.(12)
The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.(13-14)
(The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.)(15)
...Death is the eidos of that Photograph.(15)
...cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, … in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.(15)
The disorder which from the very first I had observed in Photography … I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate.(16)
...the best word to designate (temporarily) the attraction certain photographs exerted upon me was the advenience or even adventure. This picture advenes, that one doesn’t.
The principle of adventure allows me to make Photography exist.(19)
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. … this is what creates every adventure.(20)
Next, my phenomenology agreed to compromise with a power, affect; affect was what I didn’t want to reduce; being irreducible, it was thereby what I wanted, what I ought to reduce the Photograph to; but could I retain an affective intentionality, a view of the object which was immediately steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria? … As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.(20-21)
Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me). I understood at once that its existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong in the same world … a structural rule (conforming to my own observation) … this kind of duality which I had just become aware of. (23)
The first, obviously, … the extension of a field, … a consequence of my knowledge, my culture … it always refers to a classical body of information …(25-26)
...it is studium … application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, …(26)
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pieces me.(26)
This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice.(27)
To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers. The studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices, but to experience them “in reverse”, according to my will as a Spectator. … And I, the Spectator, I recognize them with more or less pleasure: I invest them with my studium (which is never my delight or my pain).(27-28)
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. … it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death.(31)
I imagine … the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole of the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. … for the photographic “shock” (quite different from the punctum) consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. Hence a whole gamut of “surprises” (as they are for me, the Spectator; but for the Photographer, these are many “performances”).(32)
Very often the Punctum is a “detail,” i.e., a partial object.(43)
However lightening-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic.(45)
Certain details may “prick” me.(47)
Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, 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. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum.(53)
Ultimately -or at the limit- in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.(53)
The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: … to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.(55)
Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, itis an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.(55)
Part Two
… (but do we see, in dreams, or do we know?) …(66)
Photography, moreover, began, historically, as an art of the Person: of identity, of civil status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the body’s formality.(79)
No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. … language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in reverse: … Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence. Impotent with regard to general ideas (to fiction), its force is nonetheless superior to everything the human mind can r can have conceived to assure us of reality - but also this reality is never anything but a contingency (“so much, no more”).(85-87)
Photography’s noeme is precisely that-has-been, and because I live in the illusion that it suffices to clean the surface of the image in order to accede to what is behind: to scrutinize means to turn the photograph over, to enter into the paper’s depth, to reach its other side (what is hidden is for us Westerners more “true” than what is visible). Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance; and if I do not enlarge, if I content myself with scrutinizing, I obtain this sole knowledge, long since possessed at first glance: that this indeed has been: the turn of the screw had produced nothing.(99-100)
A proof a contrario: finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like”? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental (at most, I can say that in certain photographs I endure myself, or not, depending on whether or not I find myself in accord with the image of myself I want to give).(102)
Since Photography (this is its noeme) authenticates the existence of a certain being, I want to discover that being in the photograph completely, … beyond simple resemblance, … This something is what I call the air (the expression, the look).(107)
All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, … (109-110)
Thus the air is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body, … (110)
… I then had the certainty that he was looking at me without however being sure that he was seeing me: an inconceivable distortion: how can we look without seeing? One might say that the Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter; this is that aberrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of though without thought, an aim without a target. And yet it is this scandalous movement which produces the rarest quality of an air. That is the paradox: how can one have an intelligent air without thinking about anything intelligent, just by looking into this piece of black plastic?(111-113)
… - the Look is always potentially crazy: it is at once the effect of truth and the effect of madness. … by leading me to believe (it is true, one time out of how many) that I have found what Calvino calls “the true total photograph,” it accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (“that-has-been”) with truth (“there-she-is!”); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness; it joins what Kristeva calls “la vérité folle.”(113)