Barthes's Punctum

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 539-574

  Fried, Michael ^a,b  

^a Humanities ^*

^b JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749661999     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430984     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris, 1980), hereafter abbreviated CC;
2. trans. by Richard Howard under the title Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981), hereafter abbreviated CL.
3. Victor Burgin, "Re-reading Camera Lucida," The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1986), p. 78.
4. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980; Chicago, 1988), Courbet's Realism (Chicago, 1990), and Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, 1996). See also Fried, "Caillebotte's Impressionism," Representations, no. 66 (Spring 1999): 1-51;
5. rpt. in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), pp. 66-116;
6. and "Roger Fry's Formalism," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City, 2004), pp. 3-40.
7. See Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), pp. 148-72.
8. On the distinction between seeing and being shown, see Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 43-45, 89, where he makes clear the relation of that distinction to the reading of Diderot put forward in Absorption and Theatricality. In fact Barthes, as we have seen, inserts the qualifiers "not strictly" and "probably" in his initial formulation of this law, but the passage as a whole expresses no uncertainty.
9. A few commentators have noted this simple but decisive point; see, for example, Gregor Stemmrich, "Between Exaltation and Musing Contemplation: Jeff Wall's Restitution of the Program of Peinture de la Vie Moderne," in Jeff Wall: Photographs, ed. Edelbert Köb (exhibition catalog, Cologne, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 22 Mar.-25 May 2003), p. 154: "The punctum is what a photograph can show without being intended by the photographer, or even being capable of being intended." Stemmrich's further claim is that "there is no punctum in the Barthesian sense in Wall's images [because of the degree of artistic control Wall exercises over their contents - M.F.], but indeed something that we might call the artistic use of the idea of the punctum." Stemmrich goes on to relate Wall's work to my "Art and Objecthood" and Absorption and Theatricality (pp. 155-56).
10. See also Naomi Schor, "Desublimation: Roland Barthes's Aesthetics," in Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, ed. Diana Knight (New York, 2000), p. 228, where she writes: "Like Proust's madeleine - and Camera Lucida is Barthes's Recherche - the punctum does not come under the sway of the will. It escapes the intentionality of both the photographer and the spectator." For more on Proust and the punctum, see below. Miriam Bratu Hansen, in a superb recent essay, remarks that for Walter Benjamin in his brilliant "Little History of Photography" (1931), the "mechanically mediated moment [of split-second photographic exposure] may preserve 'a tiny spark of contingency' an element of alterity that speaks to another - and 'other' - in the future beholder"
11. (Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Room-for-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema," October, no. 109 [Summer 2004]: 39). She adds in a note: The technologically-based disjunction between storage and release allows for an unconscious element to enter at two levels, the moment of inscription and the time of reading. In the case of the photograph, this distinction may involve an uncanny sense of futurity (as in Benjamin's example of the wedding picture of the photographer Dauthendey and his wife who was to commit suicide after the birth of their sixth child) - something that was not visible or knowable at the time speaks to the later beholder of his form of death .... It is no coincidence that this particular staging of the optical unconscious has invited comparison with Roland Barthes's notion of the "punctum," the accidental mark or detail of the photograph which "pricks," stings, wounds the beholder. [Ibid., n. 97] (More on the punctum and death below.
12. See Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. [Cambridge, Mass., 1999], 2: 507-30.) But in the bulk of the secondary literature on Camera Lucida (or at least in the bulk of the literature that I have read - the total mass is enormous) the structural invisibility of the punctum to the photographer has gone unrecognized, and in the few instances where that is not the case the antitheatrical implications of that invisibility have not been pursued.
13. For example: "Le contraste mal entendu est une des plus funestes causes du maniéré. Il n'y a de véritable contraste que celui qui naît du fond de l'action, ou de la diversité, soit des organes, soit de l'intérêt." ("Contrast wrongly understood is one of the most disastrous sources of mannerism. The only true contrast is that which arises from the depths of the action, or from the diversity of organs or of interests.") (Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière [Paris, 1959], p. 672; my trans.).
14. On the past fifty years of that tradition, see, for example, Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, Open City: Street Photographs since 1950 (exhibition catalog, Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 6 May-15 July 2001).
15. See Walker Evans, Many Are Called (1966; New Haven, Conn., 2004).
16. See also Mia Fineman, "Notes from Underground: The Subway Portraits," in Walker Evans (exhibition catalog, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 Feb.-14 May 2000), p. 108,
17. and Judith Keller, "Walker Evans and Many Are Called: Shooting Blind," History of Photography 17 (Summer 1993): 152-65.
18. See the photographs reproduced in Beat Streuli: New York City, 2000-2002 (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003).
19. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1977), p. 37; hereafter OP. Before Evans, Paul Strand used hidden cameras to record anonymous figures in the street. Evans too used such a camera; specifically, he used "a 'decoy' false lens screwed onto his camera at a right angle, hoping, by catching his subjects off guard, to capture on film a certain elusive 'quality of being'"
20. (Fineman, "Notes from Underground," p. 111). Strand had to be "invisible" so as not to disturb his subjects in their unselfconscious expressions, for he wished to capture whatever mood or mind was most symptomatic of their nature off-guard. To fix this essence involved his projection of empathic interest to establish - for a suspended moment - a connection with a stranger wholly unaware that he had become a partner in a tightrope act performed on a busy street by a spellbound photographer juggling a cumbersome machine. The process was, Strand said repeatedly, "nerve-racking," for the rapt quality of his intensity naturally attracted the attention of his subjects, yet if they gave it, the photograph was ruined.
21. [Maria Morris Hambourg, Paul Strand: Circa 1916 (New York, 1998), p. 37
22. In his essay in the Beat Streuli volume cited above, Vincent Katz writes that Streuli engages in empathetic response to his subjects ... paradoxically, as a voyeur, using a telephoto lens, sometimes ensconced inside a cafe, while photographing people passing outside. By not entering into a personal relationship with his subjects, he captures them in their natural, unguarded state .... Because Streuli sees without being seen, it is almost as if we are given access to the interior mental workings of his walkers. They inhabit the moment in which awareness and absorption are seamlessly blended. [Vincent Katz, "The New York Photographs of Beat Streuli," in Beat Streuli, p. 205]
23. See the discussion of that painting in Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 46-49.
24. See Jeff Wall, "Restoration: Interview with Martin Schwander" (1994), in Thierry de Duve et al., Jeff Wall, 2d ed. (London, 2002), pp. 126-27. The crucial exchange reads: Schwander: With Adrian Walker you made a portrait of a young man who is concentrating so intensely on his work that be seems to be removed to another sphere of life. Wall: But I don't think it is necessarily clear that Adrian Walker is a portrait. I think there is a fusion of a couple of possible ways of looking at the picture generically One is that it is a picture of someone engaged in his occupation and not paying any attention to, or responding to the fact that he is being observed by, the spectator. In Michael Fried's interesting book about absorption and theatricality in late eighteenth century painting, he talks about the different relationships between figures and their spectators. He identified an 'absorptive mode', exemplified by painters like Chardin, in which figures are immersed in their own world and display no awareness of the construct of the picture and the necessary presence of the viewer. Obviously, the 'theatrical mode' was just the opposite. In absorptive pictures, we are looking at figures who appear not to be 'acting out' their world, only 'being in' it. Both, of course, are modes of performance. I think Adrian Walker is absorptive.
25. In several writings I have suggested that historically there exists a close link between pictorial realism and a thematics of absorption. See in particular Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), pp. 42-45. The point is further developed in The Moment of Caravaggio, a book-in-progress based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that I gave at the National Gallery of Art in the spring of 2002, as well as in a chapter on the art of Jeff Wall in another book-in-progress, the one on recent photography, of which the present essay will be a part.
26. Among the sources of Barthes's resistance to absorption is undoubtedly his previous engagement with Brecht. That is, there is an important sense in which the "realistic" theater that was the heritage of the Diderotian tableau, with its inbuilt injunction to treat the audience as if it did not exist (thereby transfixing it before the stage), was exactly what Brecht felt it imperative to overthrow. In Barthes's words: "Now comes a man ... who tells us, despite all tradition, that the public must be only half-committed to the spectacle so as to 'know' what is shown, instead of submitting to it; that the actor must create this consciousness by exposing not by incarnating his role; that the spectator must never identify completely with the hero but must remain free to judge the causes and then the remedies of his suffering; that the action must not be imitated but narrated; that the theater must cease to be magical in order to become critical, which will still be its best way of being passionate" (Barthes, "The Brechtian Revolution," Critical Essays, trans. Howard [Evanston, Ill., 1972], pp. 37-38). In the later article "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," Barthes compares and contrasts the thought of all three theorists with respect to the tableau, but owing to his unhistorical allegiance to Brecht's theories he completely misses the antitheatrical import of Diderot's views.
27. See Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Howard (New York, 1985), pp. 89-97.
28. A further, almost shocking instance of Barthes's misreading of Diderot is found in the late A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Howard (New York, 1978), where he associates Diderot's notion of the coup de théâtre with "the 'favorable moment' of a painting" (p. 200), an association that runs exactly counter to Diderot's ideas.
29. Finally, the necessarily unintended nature of the punctum amounts to a radicalization of the gap between intention and action that Walter Benn Michaels brilliantly discusses in relation to the automatic nature of photography in "Action and Accident: Photography and Writing," The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 215-44. See also the penultimate paragraph of the present essay.
30. Fascinatingly, Barthes neglects to mention that photography is implicated in Proust's epiphany. In Brassaï's marvelously original study, Brassaï' [Gyula Halász], Proust in the Power of Photography, trans. Howard (Chicago, 2001), the same episode is rehearsed in greater detail: The narrator stays with his grandmother at the Grand Hôtel de Balbec. One day, he surprises her dressed up in her finest clothes. She explains with some satisfaction that Saint-Loup wants to photograph her. The narrator feels "slightly irritated by this childishness" and by discovering in the old lady a coquetry he had never suspected. Upon Françoise's insistence, however, he decides to let Saint-Loup go ahead with his project, while expressing some reservations, "a few ironic and cutting remarks intended to neutralize the pleasure my grandmother seemed to take in being photographed" (Within a Budding Grove). He succeeds so well that the grandmother poses for her picture quite uncomfortably. Some years pass, and the narrator is once again at Balbec. As he bends over to remove his boots, suddenly the memory of his grandmother occurs to him, and for the first time since her death a year before, he rediscovers her in her "living reality," even as he realizes at last that he has lost her forever. And he is immediately overcome with remorse for all the pain he had caused her, "like that day when Saint-Loup had taken grandmother's photograph and when, having made no secret of the almost ridiculous coquetry she revealed in posing for him,... I had allowed myself to be heard murmuring several impatient and hurtful remarks, which she had indeed heard and been wounded by.... Never again could I erase that painful uneasiness I had been responsible for in her expression" (Sodom and Gomorrah). Françoise surprises him in his grieving contemplation of his grandmother's photograph, but what she then tells him redoubles his remorse: The day Saint-Loup took that photograph, the old lady was very ill, but she had forbidden her grandson to be told. She had merely made this recommendation to Françoise: "If something happens to me, I want him to have a photograph of me." [Pp. 65-66] Obviously the circumstances of the taking of the Winter Garden Photograph have nothing in common with those discovered by Proust's narrator. But might there nevertheless be in this intertextual connection the merest hint of a fantasy: that Barthes's mother wanted him to have that particular photograph of her? Proust's grandmother is also the focus of a scene that exposes the potential cruelty of the absorptive dispositif. In Brassaï's retelling: The Guermantes Way doubtless affords the most magnificent example of this a-human vision, in which the [Proustian] narrator's eye functions like a camera. Back from Doncières, the narrator, eager to see his grandmother, surreptitiously enters the salon where she is reading, unaware of her grandson's arrival. "I was there, or rather I was not there since she didn't know it.... But of me - by that fugitive privilege when we have, during the brief moment of a return, the faculty of suddenly attending our own absence - there was only the witness, the observer still wearing a hat and overcoat, the stranger who is not of the house, the photographer who comes to 'shoot' places that will not be seen again. What, quite mechanically, occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother at that moment was indeed a photograph."... And the narrator concludes, his heart aching: "I for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her except within my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of continuous and superimposed memories, suddenly, in our salon ... for the first time and only for a moment, for she disappeared very quickly, I glimpsed on the couch, under the lamp, red, heavy, and coarse, ill and half asleep, her eyes wandering wildly over her book, a feeble old woman I did not know." [Pp. 121-22] The thought of this episode could only have confirmed Barthes in his distaste for the idea of taking the photographic subject by surprise.
31. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in "witnesses"; impossible, at least, to be one; Michelet was able to write virtually nothing about his own time). That is what the time when my mother was alive before me is - History (moreover, it is the period which interests me most, historically). No anamnesis could ever make me glimpse this time starting from myself (this is the definition of anamnesis) - whereas, contemplating a photograph in which she is hugging me, a child, against her, I can waken in myself the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder. [CL, p. 65;
32. CC, p. 102]
33. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1954), pp. 58-59: Non seulement l'intelligence ne peut rien pour nous pour ces résurrections, mais encore ces heures du passé ne vont se blottir que dans des objets où l'intelligence n'a pas cherché à les incarner. Les objets en qui vous avez cherché à établir consciemment des rapports avec les heures que vous viviez, dans ceux-là elle ne pourra pas trouver asile. Et bien plus, si une autre chose peut les ressusciter, eux, quand ils renaîtront avec elle, seront dépouillés de poésie. Je me souviens qu'un jour de voyage, de la fenêtre du wagon, je m'efforçais d'extraire des impressions du paysage qui passait devant moi. J'écrivais tout en voyant passer le petit cimetière de campagne, je notais des barres lumineuses de soleil sur les arbres, les fleurs du chemin pareilles à celles du Lys dans la Vallée. Depuis, souvent j'essayais, en repensant à ces arbres rayés de lumière, à ce petit cimetière de campagne, d'évoquer cette journée, j'entends cette journée elle-même, et non son froid fantôme. Jamais je n'y parvenais et je désespérais d'y réussir, quand l'autre jour, en déjeunant, je laissai tomber ma cuiller sur mon assiette. Et il se produisit alors le même son que celui du marteau des aiguilleurs qui frappaient ce jour-là les roues du train, dans les arrêts. A la même minute, l'heure brûlante et aveuglée où ce bruit tintait revécut pour moi, et toute cette journée dans sa poésie, d'où s'exceptaient seulement, acquis pour l'observation voulue et perdue pour la résurrection poétique, le cimetière de village, les arbres rayés de lumière et les fleurs balzaciennes du chemin. Contre Sainte-Beuve is not cited in the bibliography to La Chambre claire (the English translation carries no bibliography).
34. This has led to speculation that no such photograph ever existed. See, for example, Margaret Olin, "Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes's 'Mistaken' Identification," Representations, no. 80 (Fall 2002): 99-118.
35. See Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version," Selected Writings, 4: 257-58.
36. See Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974). In this connection it should be noted that Sontag discusses Benjamin, whom she calls "photography's most important and original critic" (OP, p. 76) and that Barthes lists Sontag's book in his bibliography.
37. Compare OP, p. 15: "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." And p. 69: "Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people." Sontag's book was translated into French in 1979.
38. To Proust's question: "But what is a memory we no longer recall?" which evokes that realm of the existence or nonexistence of memory-phantoms, this other question corresponds: "But what is a photograph that has never been developed?" No memory, and no latent image, can be delivered from this purgatory without the intervention of that deus ex machina which is the "developer," as the word itself indicates. For Proust, this will habitually be a present resemblance which will resuscitate a memory, as a chemical substance brings to life a latent image. The role of the developer is identical in both cases: to bring an impression from a virtual to a real state. [Brassaï, Proust in the Power of Photography, p. 139]
39. In this connection, see the important essay by Jean-François Chevrier, "Les Aventures de la forme tableau dans l'histoire de la photographie," in Photo-Kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren: Du XXème au XIXème siècle, aller et retour (exhibition catalog, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, 1989), pp. 47-81.
40. On digitalization, see, for example, Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, 2001).
41. For Barthes, being alone with a photograph seems above all to have meant being alone with the reproduction of a photograph in a book or magazine; hence his remark, quoted above, that in order "to perceive the punctum ... it suffices that the image be large enough, that I do not have to study it (this would be no help at all), that, given right there on the page, I should receive it right here in my eyes" (CL, pp. 42-43; CC, pp. 71-72; emphasis added). Compare Proust's fundamental disagreement with John Ruskin's account of reading as a conversation with men wiser and more interesting than those one normally has occasion to meet. Against Ruskin, Proust maintains that reading cannot be assimilated in this way to a conversation, even with the wisest of men; that the essential difference between a book and a friend is not their greater or lesser wisdom, but the manner in which we communicate with them, reading being the exact opposite of conversation in consisting for each one of us in having another's thought communicated to us while remaining on our own, that is while continuing to enjoy the intellectual authority we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, while continuing to be open to inspiration, with our mind yet working hard and fruitfully on itself. [Proust, On Reading, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 26] Further on in that essay Proust speaks of reading as "an intervention which, though coming from another, is produced deep inside ourselves, the impulsion of another mind certainly, but received in the midst of our solitude" (p. 35). Does it go too far to suggest that such a conception of the act of reading is essentially antitheatrical? The French original of On Reading, "La Lecture," appeared first as an article in La Renaissance latine in 1905 and a year later as the introduction to Proust's translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies; see John Ruskin, Sésame et les lys: Traduction et notes de Marcel Proust, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Paris, 1987), pp. 62, 72.
42. Jacques Derrida too is struck by the phrase I have italicized. "Without either showing or hiding herself," he writes, This is what took place. She had already taken her place 'docilely' without initiating the slightest activity, according to the most gentle passivity, and she neither shows nor hides herself. The possibility of this impossibility derails and shatters all unity, and this is love; it disorganizes all studied discourses, all theoretical systems and philosophies. They must decide between presence and absence, here and there, what reveals and what conceals itself. Here, there, the unique other, his mother, appears, that is to say, without appearing, for the other can appear only by disappearing. And his mother 'knew' how to do this so innocently, because it is the 'quality' of a child's 'soul' that he deciphers in the pose of his mother who is not posing. Psyche without mirror. He says nothing more and underscores nothing. [Jacques Derrida, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, The Work of Mourning, ed. Brault and Nass (Chicago, 2001), p. 48] From the perspective of the present essay, of course, the "possibility of [an] impossibility" that Derrida elaborates on here is that of a quintessentially antitheatrical artifact (photograph, painting, sculpture, and so on), if not of antitheatricality as such.
43. The whole of the brief passage containing this phrase reads: "Perhaps the air is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value? Avedon has photographed the leader of the American Labor Party, Philip Randolph (who has just died, as I write these lines); in the photograph, I read an air of goodness (no impulse of power: that is certain)" (CL, p. 110; CC, pp. 168-69).
44. In a brief discussion of a Kertész portrait of the young Tristan Tzara, Barthes refers to "the gift, the grace of the punctum" (CL, p. 45; CC, p. 74).
45. Compare also the characterization of the punctum of the detail as occurring "dans le champ de la chose photographiée comme un supplément à la fois inévitable et gracieux" (CC, p. 80). The translation in Camera Lucida renders "gracieux" as "delightful" (p. 47), but here too "given as an act of grace" (or, more simply, "freely given") seems nearer Barthes's meaning.
46. See Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 164.
47. Compare Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 90: One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. One may object that the command is given not to achieve the unnaturalness of theater but precisely to give the impression of the natural, that is to say, the candid; and that the point of the direction is nothing more than to distract the subject's eyes from fronting on the camera lens. But this misses the point, for the question is exactly why the impression of naturalness is conveyed by an essentially theatrical technique. And why, or when, the candid is missed if the subject turns his eye into the eye of the camera. And pp. 118-19: "Setting pictures to motion mechanically overcame what I earlier called the inherent theatricality of the (still) photograph. The development of fast film allowed the subjects of photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control. But they are nevertheless caught; the camera holds the last lanyard of control we would forgo."
48. The cinema comes up earlier in Camera Lucida (section 23), where Barthes begins by saying that the punctum is an addition, something he adds to the photograph "and what is nonetheless already there" (CL, p. 55; CC, p. 89), and goes on to ask: "Do I add to the images in 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;
49. I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram" (CL, p. 55; CC, pp. 89-90).
50. And toward the end of the book he cites "the fictional [that is, narrative - M.F.] cinema" as one of several forces contributing to the "taming" or "domestication" of the photograph (CL, p. 117; CC, pp. 180-81).
51. See Steven Ungar, "Persistence of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to Film," in Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, pp. 236-49.
52. On Barthes's "resistance to cinema," see also Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Howard (New York, 1977), pp. 54-55.
53. It seems unlikely that Barthes would not have been familiar with at least some of Arbus's photographs by the time he came to write Camera Lucida. Might he have been influenced against her by Sontag's criticism of what she regarded as Arbus's exploitation of her human subjects? See Sontag, On Photography, pp. 32-48.
54. See Fried, Manet's Modernism, pp. 405-6.
55. See, for example, Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London, 1992), p. 53: "A glance [in a narrative film] impies an interaction with an object. In fact, glances are so important to narrating a story world that the only glance that is generally avoided is a glance into the lens of the camera. A look into the camera breaks the diegesis because it makes the conventional reverse shot or eyeline match impossible. (Such a match would reveal the camera itself; its absence would be just as revealing.) " For a fuller treatment of the transgression constituted by "a look and a voice addressed to the camera," also characterized as "an infraction of canonical proportions, an affront to the 'proper' functioning of representation and filmic narrative
56. " see Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator, trans. Nell Andrew and Charles O'Brien (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), esp. chap. 2
57. "The Figure of the Spectator," pp. 16, 17. My thanks to Dudley Andrew for both references.
58. See also Barthes's late, possibly unfinished essay, "Right in the Eyes," The Responsibility of Forms, pp. 237-42. "As we have seen apropos of Avedon," the essay closes, it is not excluded that a photographed subject should gaze at you - i.e. gaze at the lens: the direction of the gaze (one might say: its address) is not pertinent in photography. [One sees what Barthes means, but that isn't exactly his view in Camera Lucida, where at least toward the end figures gazing out of the photograph are privileged. - M.F.] But it is so in the cinema, where it is forbidden for an actor to look at the camera, i.e., at the spectator. I am not far from considering this ban as the cinema's distinctive feature. This art severs the gaze: one of us gazes at the other, does only that: it is my right and my duty to gaze; the other never gazes; he gazes at everything, except me. If a single gaze from the screen came to rest on me, the whole film would be lost. [If true this would make the movies a radicalization of the Diderotian tableau. - M.F] But this is only the literal truth. For it can happen that, on another, invisible level, the screen ... does not cease gazing at me. [P. 242]
59. [Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, N.J., 2004), p. 89] Michaels's book is a wide-ranging critique of recent theoretical and fictional texts all of which make the analogous error of "think[ing] of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and [of substituting] the question of who people are for the question of what they believe" (from the book jacket).
60. Probably this is made most nearly explicit in certain remarks about the work of the British sculptor Anthony Caro. For example: "It is as though Caro's sculptures essentialize meaningfulness as such - as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes his sculpture possible. All this, it is hardly necessary to add, makes Caro's art a fountainhead of antiliteralist and antitheatrical sensibility" (Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 162).
61. On the logical connection between literalism and indeterminacy, see Jennifer Ashton, "'Rose Is a Rose': Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy," Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 4 (2002): 581-604
62. and "Modernism's 'New' Literalism," Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003): 381-90.
63. It scarcely seems necessary to give detailed references to all the texts mentioned or implied here. See, however, Timothy Scheie, "Performing Degree Zero: Barthes, Body, Theatre," Theatre Journal 52, no. 2 (2000): 161-81,
64. which brings out the significance of Artaud; Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, "Le Retour au théâtre," Parcours de Barthes, Communications, no. 63 (1996): 11-23,
65. a brilliant analysis of the vicissitudes of a different sort of "theatricality" in Barthes's oeuvre; and Sarrazac, "The Invention of 'Theatricality': Rereading Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes," Substance 31, nos. 2-3 (2002): 52-72.
66. There is much that might be said about the relationship between "The Third Meaning" and Camera Lucida, but probably the most important point is that the elements in a film still Barthes associates with the "third" or "obtuse" meaning cannot have been intended as such by the filmmaker; see Barthes, "The Third Meaning," pp. 41-62.
67. A very useful compilation of pertinent texts is Barthes, Écrits sur le théâtre, ed. Jean-Loup Rivière (Paris, 2001), with a brief but excellent preface. Two items in that volume are particularly interesting in connection with the present essay "Sept photo modèles de Mère Courage" and "Commentaire: Préface à Brecht, Mère Courage et ses enfants" (also based on photos of an actual production). For example, in "Commentaire" Barthes distinguishes between Brechtian "realism" (which he deeply admires) and ordinary "verism" (which he pretty much despises), characterizing the latter as "un art synchronique, sommatif, il veut représenter une accumulation de choses dans leur état, il veut donner l'illusion qu'elles sont incréés et comme simplement surprises" (p. 275; emphasis added) - as if "verism" as Barthes understands it aspires to the effect of the surprise-based photographs that get short shrift in Camera Lucida. Écrits sur le théâtre opens with Barthes's brief text of 1965 for Esprit, the first sentence of which reads, "J'ai toujours beacoup aimé le théâtre et pourtant je n'y vais presque plus" (p. 19), a remark cited and discussed in Sarrazac, "Le Retour au théâtre."