15th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Reykjavik, August 11-13th 2001

Liv Hausken

Roland Barthes and the conception of aesthetic experience

Signifiance er abracadabra, det er okker-gokker-gummiklokker, det er erle-perle-pif-paf-puf. Palle Schantz Lauridsen There is something in the works of Roland Barthes that has always puzzled me. Besides all his writings on structuralism and semiotics he is searching for something which "appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information" (p.55), which "is not in the language system" nor "is it to be located in language use" (p.60). It "cannot be described" and "will not succeed in existing, in entering the critic's metalanguage" (p.61). The most well known text on this matter is probably his article "The third meaning" ([1970] 1987), from where the quotations above originate. As the title suggests, this phenomenon, or whatever we should call it, is labelled "the third meaning", referring to something transgressing the well known two levelled model in French semiotics as inherited from structural linguistics: the informational level and the symbolic level. The first level is that of information and communication, subjected to what Barthes calls a first semiotics, while the second level is that of signification, of symbolism which needs "a semiotic more highly developed than the first, a second or neosemiotics, open no longer to the science of the message but to the sciences of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy)." (p.53). These two levels of meaning can be compared to what Barthes in the well-known article "Rhetoric of the image" (1964) refers to as denotation and connotation. However, according to Barthes this is not all. "No, for I am still held by the image" (p.53), he writes as he reflects on his experience of some stills from Sergei Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible. "I read, I receive (and probably even first and

foremost) a third meaning - evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can clearly see the traits, the signifying accidents of which this - consequently incomplete - sign is composed [...]" (p.53). This third meaning is "the one 'too many', the supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing, at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive [...]" (p.54). He proposes to call this third meaning "the obtuse meaning" as opposed to "the obvious meaning" which comprises both the two first levels of meaning. As always with Barthes, he chooses the word "obtuse" with a nonchalant reference to the more or less uncertain sport of etymology: "The word springs readily to mind and, miracle, when its etymology is unfolded, it already provides us with a theory of the supplementary meaning. Obtusus means that which is blunted, rounded in form" (p.54-55). He metaphorically explains this aspect of the word by referring to his experience of the Eisenstein stills: "Are not the traits which I indicated [...] just like the blunting of a meaning too clear, too violent? Do they not give the obvious signified a kind of difficulty prehensible roundness, cause my reading to slip?" (p.55). He proceeds to unfold the meaning of the word obtuse with reference to the technical definition in the dictionary, that is: "An obtuse angle is greater than a right angle [...]; the third meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely. I even accept for the obtuse meaning the word's pejorative connotation" (p.55), he adds, "the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information: analytically, it has something derisory about it; opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of the carnival" (p.55). It might be possible to think of the entire body of Barthes' work as existing between the polar opposites of L'obvie et l'obtus, as one of the collections of his essays is called (1982). Although he does not generally use the word obtuse as a term when he is writing the writerly (S/Z 1970), is struggling with the angel (1971), is listening to the grain of the voice (1972) or the rustling sound of the language (1975), or is overwhelmed by jouissanse (1973) or by the arrested time of photography (1980), he is definitely searching for something not obvious to

anyone and not quite accepted by science. "In order to perceive the punctum", Barthes writes in his last book Camera Lucida, "no analysis would be of any use to me [...]" ([1980] 1993, p.42). And the same is presumably the case for "the obtuse meaning" in his ten - year - older article on Eisenstein's stills where he stresses that, "the obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence" (p.60). In all these texts and several others he uses different terms, or words, or metaphors to grasp, or try to grasp, what always seems to resist being grasped. His chosen metaphors are always closely connected to an experience of a particular medium, a particular materiality, a particular cultural phenomenon that matters for Barthes as a human being. Further, the experiences in focus are always opposed to a concept of meaning that can be handled by semiotics, communication theories or cultural analysis. I am not suggesting that we reduce all these dualities in Barthes' works to one single duality. That would be an act of unacceptable, hermeneutic violence. Neither do I suggest that we translate all of Barthes' metaphors for the different experiences of "the one 'too many' " into one, for instance "the obtuse". That would, in addition, be to neglect the differences between the experiences, and the objects and materialities on which they are based. The different neologisms must be read in the context in which they have been presented. Although a lot of Barthes' writings may seem idiosyncratic, I would suggest that his methods and metaphors should be carefully considered as to their productive capacity in the analysis of objects similar to those of Barthes, as has been done by for instance Kate Augestad on the concept of "the grain" (see Augestad 1997). I will not go further into this matter here, but rather pay attention to the similarities between the phenomena in question. Despite the objections mentioned above against reducing all these phenomena to one, it would be ridiculous to neglect the fact that they after all have something in common, something that Barthes in all these texts is trying to grasp. Two questions will be posed in the following: 1. What is it that all these phenomena of "the one 'too many'" have in common? 2. What is the problem that Barthes is trying to solve with these metaphors, and why is it a problem?

Even if the metaphors vary, as do the objects of study, the supplementary meaning Barthes is struggling with in most of these texts is more or less explicitly related to a term that exists independently of Barthes and his projects, that is signifiance. Let me give some examples. In his article "The Grain of the Voice" ([1972] 1987) the grain is explained as follows: "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (p.188), "[...] the 'grain' - or the lack of it - persists in instrumental music; if the latter no longer has a language to lay open signifiance in all its volume, at least there is the performer's body which again forces me to evaluation" (p. 188), and "The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance" (p.182). In "The Struggle with the Angel" ([1971] 1987), which is a textual analysis of Genesis 32: 22-32, he emphasises that his "object is not the philological or historical document, custodian of a truth to be discovered, but the volume, the signifiance of the text" (p.136-37). And again, in "The third meaning", he writes, "By contrast with the two first levels, communication and signification, this third level - even if reading it is still hazardous - is that of signifiance [...]" (p.54). But what is signifiance? In Le plaisir du texte (1973) Barthes explains beautifully what he means by signifiance. He writes: "Qu'est-ce que la signifiance? C'est le sens en ce qu'il est produit sensuellement" (p.97). This is translated into English as: "What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced" (1975, p.61). The poetry of the explanation is lost, as is often the case with translations. In this case it is particularly sad, because the French lyrics seems to demonstrate the explanation; "Qu'est-ce que la signifiance? C'est le sens en ce qu'il est produit sensuellement" exemplifies what signifiance is all about. Far more problematic though is the English term chosen: significance. As Stephen Heath points out in the anthology Image, Music, Text (Barthes [1977] 1987), "Signifiance has sometimes been translated as 'significance', but this, with its assent to the stressed position of the sign, is exactly what it is not [...]" (Translator's note, p.10, the italics are mine). Contrary to signification and significance, signifiance cannot be reduced to communication and representation. "The problem", Barthes concludes in his analysis of Genesis, "the problem at least posed for me, is exactly to manage not to reduce the Text to a signified, whatever it may be (historical, economic, folkloristic or kerygmatic), but

to hold its signifiance fully open" ([1971] 1987, p.141). This is, like "the obtuse meaning [...] opening out into the infinity of language" ([1970] 1987, p.55), and like the third meaning in the same article that "seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely" (p.55), a typical formulation in an era of poststructuralism. Signifiance is chosen as the term because this word "has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) and of linking up with, via a path opened up by Julia Kristeva who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text", Barthes writes in "The third meaning" (p.54). Kristeva introduced her concept of signifiance in her book Semeiotik: Recherches pour une smanalyse (1969). The term is also discussed by Kristeva in "The Semiotic Activity" (1973), and mentioned in several other texts. It refers to the work performed in language, through the heterogeneous articulation of semiotic and symbolic dispositions, that enables a text to signify what representative and communicative speech does not say. In Language: The unknown ([1981] 1989) she refers in passing to the works of Roman Jakobson, Emile Benveniste and Jacques Lacan (p.140), without specifying the references. The same is the case with Barthes, who also refers to Benveniste and Lacan on this matter. Benveniste's name turns up for instance in the article "Droit dans les yeux" (1977) and Lacan's concept of "signifiance" is mentioned in an interview in the film journal Cahiers du Cinma in 1963, without any information on where to find Lacan's own conception of the term. (According to Palle Schantz Lauridsen (1991 p.132), Benveniste uses this concept in "Smiologie de la langue" from 1969.) The point is firstly that signifiance is a term that exists outside Barthes' textual universe and that it exists in a landscape of structuralism and poststructuralism. Secondly, in this more or less French landscape theoreticians refers to each other in a typically French manner: indirectly. This makes their concepts and ongoing debates very difficult to trace. When depending mainly on English translations, this is even more difficult in the case of signifiance than in general, because the term, as mentioned above, is translated so badly. In addition to all this, Barthes does, as always, exactly what he wants with words, sometimes even ubiquitously in one, single text. In "The third meaning", the ubiquity of the term signifiance is expressed quite clearly. One the one hand, it is "a signifier without a signified" (p.61), and it is here that Lauridsen's

"abracadabra" comes in. According to him, Louis Hjelmslev used this expression to illustrate exactly this phenomenon, a signifier without a signified (1991, p.129). Abracadabra is an expression that draws the listeners attention towards its sound, repetition and rhythm. Like the obtuse meaning, it "belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure" (Barthes [1970] 1987, p.55). It is, moreover, related to a sphere of play, of purposeless activity. But, as Lauridsen points out, Hjelmslev's abracadabra is not totally devoid of meaning. It is a magic formula, and has as such an institutional meaning. And this is not in the spirit of Barthes'. Signifiance is abracadabra if we by that mean "a signifier without a signified", as Barthes does, sometimes. But in the same article, signifiance is explained not as a signifier without a signified, but as a signifier with an unknown signified: "I read, I receive (and probably even first and foremost) a third meaning - evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can clearly see the traits, the signifying accidents of which this - consequently incomplete - sign is composed [...]" (p.53). The relation between signifier and signified is incomplete. The signifier "is not empty (cannot empty itself), [...] it maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding issue in that spasm of the signified which normally brings the subject voluptuously back into the peace of nominations" (p.62). Do we get any closer to an understanding of this? Let's cut to the chase. What is the question to which signifiance, and all the different metaphors Barthes uses in relation to this term, seems to be the answer? What is the problem, and why is it a problem? I think the keyword here is supplement, the idea of a "supplementary meaning", "the one 'too many', the supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing". To what is this a supplement, something extra, something added? And, does it necessarily have to be seen as a supplement? There are obvious similarities between the first part of Barthes' last book, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography ([1980] 1993), and his ten years older article "The third meaning". The term signifiance does not turn up in this book, but the parallel between the

obvious and the obtuse in the article and studium and punctum in Camera Lucida is quite clear. In 1980 he is primarily interested in the punctum just like he in 1970 first and foremost focussed on the obtuse. Like all the metaphors that have been put into play in this essay, punctum is described and explained in several ways, among other things as a supplement. The punctum "occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is once inevitable and delightful [...]", Barthes writes (p.47). Punctum "is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there" (p.55). But gradually, the distinction between studium and punctum fades, as if it doesn't matter anymore, as if it has been played out. Barthes' project in Camera Lucida is "to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography" (p.9). From the start phenomenology is established as his main theoretical framework for this project. The founding father of semiology, the author of "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), thus turns towards what may be seen as the main intellectual trend in France just before semiology was established in the sixties. A lot of scholars in the field felt betrayed. However, Camera Lucida is not a critique of semiology. It is not a critique of studium, the obvious meaning, communication and representation. In 1970 Barthes asked: "Is that all?", and he answered: "No, I am still held by the image" (p.53). In 1980 he was still held by the image, a slightly different image, a photograph. He then decided to figure out "what constituted that thread which drew [him] toward Photography" (p.73). In the first part of the book he is struggling with studium and punctum, and particularly with punctum which gets gradually more diffuse, until he gives up and changes strategy: "I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonistic project could not recognize the universal. I would have to descend deeper into myself to find the evidence of Photography, that thing which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph and which distinguishes it in his eyes from any other image" (p.60). And so he does. He starts to take his own experience with photographs seriously, and inspired by phenomenology (Husserl and Sartre) he is able to present a well-founded description of the photograph as a phenomenon, as an experienced object. I will not go into this in detail here (see Hausken 1998). I will just like to mention that during this process he introduces a second punctum no longer opposed to studium. Compared to the first punctum, this second punctum is not as easily paralleled with the third meaning. (I am more inclined to believe that it can be related to another odd term,

jouissance.) It goes beyond the distinction between studium and punctum that comes out so strongly in the first part of the book. And he is able to use this punctum, just like he more generally is able to use his experiences of photographs, to say something intelligible about how and why he can still be held by the image. Camera Lucida can in my opinion be seen as an alternative approach to the experience of an aesthetic object to those represented in so many of Barthes' works as a transgression of a two levelled model of semantics. I am not suggesting that the idea of a supplementary meaning cannot be avoided in a semiotic perspective. I do believe, however, that we need alternatives both to the questions posed and the answers given in what Barthes sometimes has called "the civilization of the signified" ([1970] 1987, p.65). Barthes' phenomenology in Camera Lucida represents such an alternative, and I believe that alternatives can also be found in aesthetic theory and in Visual Culture. In Barthes' last book he writes: "From the beginning, I had determined on a principle for myself: never to reduce myself-as-subject, confronting certain photographs, to the disincarnated, disaffected socius which science is concerned with" ([1980] 1993, p.74). This is a principle I wish I met more often. I am not suggesting that we stop doing systematic investigations of whatever it may be, but that we as a part of these investigations take our own perceptions and experiences seriously, not to strengthen our self-esteem, but to become better scholars and to do more interesting research.

References to works by Roland Barthes:

([1963] 1985) "On Film" in The Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962-1980, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, translation of Grain de la voix, Seuil, 1981. Interview conducted by Michael Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, originally published in Cahiers du Cinma, no.147, (September 1963). ([1964] 1987) "Rhetoric of the Image" in Image, Music, Text, Glasgow: Fontana Press. ([1970] 1987) "The third meaning" in Image, Music, Text, Glasgow: Fontana Press. ([1970] 1990) S/Z, Oxford: Basil Blackwell ([1971] 1987) "The Struggle with the Angle" in Image, Music, Text, Glasgow: Fontana Press. ([1972] 1987) "The Grain of The Voice" in Image, Music, Text, Glasgow: Fontana Press. (1973) Le plaisir du texte, ditions du Seuil (1975) The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang ([1975] 1984) "Le Bruissement de la Langue" in Le Bruissement de la Langue: Essais critiques IV, ditions du Seuil. Translated into Norwegian by Knut Stene-Johansen as "Nr sprket bruser" in I tegnets tid. Utvalgte artikler og essays, Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1994. ([1977] 1987) Image, Music, Text, Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, Glasgow: Fontana Press. ([1977] 1982) "Droit dans les yeux" in L'obvie et l'obtus: Essais critiques III, ditions du Seuil. ([1980] 1993) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Vintage (1982) L'obvie et l'obtus: Essais critiques III, ditions du Seuil.

Other references Augestad, Kate (1997) "'Silent Night' Sounding Voices. Performing Pleasures or Pleasurable Performances?", Working papers, 23/97, Department of Media Studies, University of Bergen. Hausken, Liv (1998) Om det utidige. Medieanalytiske underskelser av fotografi, fortelling og stillbildefilm (Of the untimely. Media-analytic investigations of photography, narrative and slide-motion film). Dissertation, Department of Media Studies, University of Bergen (Rapport; 38). Kristeva, Julia (1969) Semiotik: Recherches pour une smanalyse, Paris: Seuil. Kristeva, Julia (1973) "The Semiotic Activity", Screen (Spring/Summer 1973), vol.14.nos.1-2. Kristeva, Julia ([1981] 1989) Language: The unknown. An initiation into linguistics, New York: Colombia UP. Lauridsen, Palle Schantz (1991) "Filmen og den tredie mening" (The film and the third meaning) in Tryllelygten Vol.1, no.1, Copenhagen, pp.125-147.