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affect
YURIKO FURUHATA
Abstract
1. Trace
When one considers the di¤erence between the linguistic trace, as in the
case of a written quotation, and the non-linguistic trace, as in the case of
Indexicality as ‘‘symptom’’ 183
to. On the other hand, the linguistic use of the word index retains an ety-
mological sense through deictic words such as ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘this,’’ and
‘‘now,’’ words whose meanings are completely contingent upon the con-
text, agent, time, and place of the act of enunciation. The link between
the sign and the referent hence remains contextual. Nevertheless, in all
three cases the index leads the reader of the sign to the referent; it has a
directional or pointing function.
There is also, however, a temporal dimension to the indexical sign.
While often overlooked in discourses on the index, there is as a temporal
lapse between the sign and the referent in the case of the footprint, the
fingerprint, or the photograph, all which hinge upon the spatial as well
as the temporal dissociation between the index and its referent. In spite
of this spatio-temporal gap between the index and the referent, theorists
of photography often appear certain of the causal link between the sign
and the referent. Sontag expresses such certitude in her discussion of the
photographic index:
2. Symptom
In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else:
the Photograph always leads the corpse I need back to the body I see; it is the ab-
solute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This
(this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the
Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression. (Barthes 1981: 4)
It is worth noting that in the above passage Barthes emphasizes the abso-
lute singularity of each photograph, which cannot be subsumed under the
universal rubric of ‘‘Photography.’’ (I will come back to this problem of
the particular and the universal in my discussion of Kantian aesthetic
judgment and its relation to desire in my conclusion.) Moreover, Barthes
Indexicality as ‘‘symptom’’ 189
3. Punctum
While Barthes turns to photography with this keen awareness of the rad-
ical impossibility of the direct symbolization of a¤ect in Camera Lucida,
we should also note that he had already touched upon this same issue in
his earlier texts. However, in these earlier works he was rather optimistic
about the possibility of symbolizing a¤ect. For instance, in the essays
‘‘The photographic message’’ and ‘‘Rhetoric of image’’ Barthes estab-
lishes general rules for the semiotic reading of a photographic image. Al-
though he di¤erentiates the coded iconic message (connotation) from the
un-coded iconic message (denotation) of a photograph, ‘‘the perceptual
message’’ of denotation is presented as a universally recognizable and
hence communicable message. According to Barthes, ‘‘in order to ‘read’
this last (or first) level of the message, all that is needed is the knowledge
bound up with our perception’’ (1977: 36).
In the subsequent essay, ‘‘The third meaning,’’ Barthes further classifies
photographic signifiers at the level of denotation (the literal message of
the image) by separating ‘‘obvious meaning’’ from ‘‘obtuse meaning.’’
Obtuse meaning is conceived as a ‘‘supplement’’ to the semiotic reading
of photographic images that a reader’s ‘‘intellection cannot succeed in
absorbing, at once persistent and fleeing, smooth and elusive’’ (Barthes
1977: 54). This supplementary addition of obtuse meaning functions as a
floating ‘‘signifier without a signified,’’ malleable and flexible in its power
to signify, depending on the context and the object of signification. Again
Barthes asserts the general applicability of his particular reading of ob-
tuse meaning, which he finds in photographic stills taken from Sergei Ei-
senstein’s films:
The pictorial ‘‘rendering’’ of words is here impossible, with the consequence that
if, in front of these images, we remain, you and I, at the level of articulated
language — at the level, that is, of my own text — the obtuse meaning will not
Indexicality as ‘‘symptom’’ 191
succeed in existing, in entering the critic’s metalanguage. Which means that the
obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlo-
cution. For if you look at the images I am discussing, you can see this meaning, we
can agree on it ‘‘over the shoulder’’ or ‘‘on the back’’ of articulated language.
Thanks to the image . . . or much rather thanks to what, in the image, is purely
image (which is in fact very little,) we do without language yet never cease to under-
stand one another. (Barthes 1977: 61, emphasis mine)
locatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in
a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet mu¿ed, it cries out in silence’’
(1981: 53).
In light of these remarks, I would like to return to Barthes’s aforemen-
tioned reference to the Lacanian notion of the Real at the beginning of
Camera Lucida: ‘‘Photography evades us . . . We might say that Photog-
raphy is unclassifiable . . . it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Con-
tingency . . . in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the En-
counter, the Real’’ (1981: 4). This unclassifiability of photography, as I
suggested earlier, derives from the absolute singularity of each photo-
graph. Thus, one could say ‘‘Photography’’ only provisionally. This is
why Barthes suggests in a parenthetical note, ‘‘[F]or convenience’s sake,
let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tire-
less repetition of contingency’’ (1981: 5). Like the Real, an enigmatic ker-
nel which eludes symbolization through language, the ine¤ability of pho-
tography can be rendered only conditionally in a form of as if. In other
words, we only have access to this sublime entity of ‘‘Photography’’ in a
mediated manner through recourse and reference to particular photo-
graphs, and it is only this way that we can talk about the a¤ect generated
by ‘‘Photography.’’
Accordingly, the ine¤able essence of ‘‘the Photograph’’ is presented
through the conceptual framework of Buddhism, which Barthes suggests
problematizes linguistic signification: ‘‘In order to designate reality, Bud-
dhism says sunya, the void’’ (1981: 5). His Orientalist fascination with
Buddhism notwithstanding, Barthes points out an important aspect of
photographic indexicality. He suggests that in our gesture or reference to
a photograph, we can only name the pre-photographic referent in deictic
language: ‘‘The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’
‘see,’ ‘Here it is’; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape
this pure deictic language’’ (1981: 5). That is, every reference to a photo-
graph must begin with a linguistic indexical sign designating ‘‘this’’ or
‘‘that,’’ as if our reference to the photograph replicates its own referential
relationship to the pre-photographic referent.
Interestingly, in his essay ‘‘The deaths of Roland Barthes’’ dedicated to
Barthes Derrida mentions just such indeterminacy in the status of the ref-
erent in photography. He writes:
first from the looking subject (the spectator) to the spectacle object (the
photograph), which emits the spectrum or radiant energy (eidolon) of the
pre-photographic referent, and finally, this conjures the ghostly specter of
the past (‘‘the return of the dead’’). What Derrida calls the ‘‘haunting’’
economy of photography characterizes this peculiar spectatorial relation-
ship between the viewer and the photograph (Derrida 2001: 41).
Moreover, it is precisely this e¤ect of apparition or spectral haunting
that links photography to hallucinatory madness, giving rise to what
Barthes calls ‘‘a temporal hallucination’’:
Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is
also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object
has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it . . . The Photograph
then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination. (Barthes 1981: 115)
In other words, symptom is the way we — the subjects — ‘‘avoid madness,’’ the
way we ‘‘choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radical
psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)’’ through the binding
of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a min-
imum of consistency to our being-in-the-world. (Žižek 1989: 75)
[T]he man or woman who emerges from it continue living: a ‘‘blind field’’ [un
champ aveugle] constantly doubles our partial vision. Now, confronting millions
of photographs, including those which have a good studium, I sense no blind field
[un champ aveugle]: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely
once this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionless
image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means
that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down,
like butterflies. Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field [un champ aveugle] is cre-
ated (is divined). (Barthes 1981: 55)
By incorporating the notion of ‘‘a blind field’’ (un champ aveugle) into his
discussion of the photograph, Barthes thus creates a kind of ‘‘o¤-screen
space.’’ As Peter Brunette and David Wills suggest, ‘‘the punctum endows
the photograph with the structure of the moving images’’ (Brunette and
Wills 1989: 111).
Now, the o¤-screen space in cinema, especially in a conventional narra-
tive film, establishes the impression of the spatial continuity of the repre-
sented scene in the areas that are blocked from the view of the spectator:
namely, the space above, below and beyond each side of the frame, as
well as the space behind the set and the camera. Through the techniques
of continuity editing, shot/reverse shot, reframing, and camera move-
ments such as panning, the spectator is allowed to imagine the continuing
existence of the characters and objects in the diegesis of a film, even when
they are not depicted on the screen. In particular, the moving camera, in
using pans and tracking shots, creates a mobile frame that enhances our
sense of three-dimensional space inside the screen. Additionally, the e¤ect
of this mobile frame is inseparable from the duration of time in which
such camera movements take place. O¤-screen space can also be sug-
gested by the characters whose looks and gestures connote the existence
of something outside the frame. Similarly, the intrusion of something or
someone moving into the frame can also create the sense of an expanded
space outside the frame (Bordwell and Thompson 2001: 216–217). Most
of all, the spectator’s willingness to imagine the invisible space outside the
frame plays a significant role in establishing the o¤-screen space.
198 Y. Furuhata
A new question thus arises: how does the ‘‘blind field’’ created by the
punctum correspond to the cinematic o¤-screen space? The connection be-
tween the blind field and the o¤-screen space is o¤ered by the notion of
what Barthes calls ‘‘a kind of subtle beyond’’ [une sorte de hors-champ
subtil ]. Although the English translation erases the direct reference to the
notion of the field indicative of the field of vision, the original phrase de
hors-champ plays with the cinematic concept of o¤-screen space/out-of-
field (le hors-champ) as well as with a connotation of a field beyond or
out of reach (hors). In aligning the pornographic photograph with an
anesthetizing quality of the studium and the erotic photograph with an
animating quality of the punctum, Barthes suggests that ‘‘[the erotic pho-
tograph] takes the spectator outside its frame [hors de son cadre], and it
is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me. The
punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond [une sorte de hors-champ subtil ]
— as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see’’
(1981: 59).
Barthes calls this movement of going beyond the frame of the photo-
graph and entering the imagined o¤-frame space ‘‘the right moment, the
kairos of desire’’ (1981: 59). What does he mean by the kairos of desire?
The term kairos suggests that the space Barthes claims to enter through
photographic spectacle is outside the realm of chronological time. If
kairos is understood to be a moment of ‘‘the fulfillment of truth’’ that in-
tervenes and suspends our chronological sense of the time (Lindroons
1998: 44), Barthes’s reference to ‘‘the right moment’’ in the photographic
works of Mapplethorpe points to the intense moment of jouissance: the
impossible fulfillment of desire. The punctum understood in this manner,
then, becomes an a¤ective index that directs Barthes towards the timeless
realm of plenitude, away from the dual threats of death and lack.
Through an intense a¤ective movement (fueled by erotic desire, madness,
love, or pity) that carries him beyond the frame of the photograph
Barthes narrativizes a momentary return to the realm outside language
and symbolization. The punctum animates otherwise still photographs,
and allows Barthes to enter the o¤-screen, psychic space of his own de-
sire, a space that is unknown even to himself before he embarks on his
long, labyrinthine quest for the essential features of Photography.
Barthes’s reference to the metaphor of Ariadne’s thread is, therefore,
over-determined; the unseeable blind spot is not only an e¤ect of the
punctum but it is also a crucial element of his narrativization of his quest
to find the ‘‘essence’’ of Photography. The labyrinthine structure of
Camera Lucida as a text and the blind, non-knowledge of the desire that
guides Barthes’’ inquiry are, in fact, complementary in nature. Here it
may be worthwhile to turn to Pascal Bonitzer’s essay titled, ‘‘Partial
Indexicality as ‘‘symptom’’ 199
What is important is that our blindness is reflected in that of the narrator. Appar-
ently he does know himself any better than we do . . . it is as if the story con-
fronted us with our own ‘‘blind spot.’’ At the heart of every labyrinth, in fact,
there is the blind spot. And if the subject of the narrative wanders in the labyrinth
of his own blindness, the narrative in turn becomes for us readers a labyrinth in
which we wander until someone like Theseus, just a name, attempts to deliver us
from it. (Bonitzer 1981: 57)
Just like the reader of Borges’ short story, the reader of Camera Lucida
shares the blindness of the narrator about his ‘‘self.’’ Instead of providing
an objective, theoretical inquiry on photography, Barthes o¤ers a narra-
tive of an inwardly, subjective quest to discover the kernel of his desire.
Camera Lucida is in this sense a keenly reflexive text that problematizes
the very premise of its own epistemological inquiry: the desire for an ob-
jective, ‘‘scientific’’ knowledge of photography in general. Barthes ex-
presses his predicament, facing the disparity between ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘sub-
jectivity,’’ or, to put it di¤erently, between semiotic theory and the
personal memoir: ‘‘I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, ‘‘scien-
tifically’’ alone and disarmed’’ (1981: 7). Barthes begins his reflexive jour-
ney with the awareness of this impasse, and it is precisely this awareness
that marks the singularity of Camera Lucida as a text.
Barthes is aware of the di‰culty of articulating and translating the af-
fect generated by photography into theoretical language, but he is equally
aware that without going through this inarticulable realm of a¤ect he is
not able to broach the issue of photographic spectatorship. Barthes there-
fore must position himself as both an inhabitant of the labyrinth, the
Minotaur who is blind to his own origin (i.e., his own desire), and as
200 Y. Furuhata
4. Aesthetic judgment
this liking’s being based on a concept . . . and that this claim to universal validity
belongs so essentially to a judgment by which we declare something to be beauti-
ful that it would not occur to anyone to use this term without thinking of univer-
sal validity. (Kant 1987: 57)
References