![]() In other words, what I am provisionally suggesting is that, in fact, Barthes does not deny the applicability of the logic of the mark, the law of structural iterability, to photography in this passage, nor in Camera Lucida as a whole. (For Barthes, we may remember, the photographer, that primary seat of intention, is literally and figuratively 'out of the picture'-his concerns are with the subjects and the readers of photographs). Or, one might simply argue that this passage is indicative of the absence of attention to the issue of intentionality in Barthes's analysis (a subject which is greatly detailed in Derrida's essay). ![]() Unlike the performative speech acts analyzed by Derrida, one could perhaps argue that there is not necessarily an intent to communicate something in the photograph, that there is not really an address to an other, at least in a strict or straightforward sense. Nevertheless, I find the refusal of the logic of the mark (as Derrida defines it) in this passage to be unconvincing: in the imaginary dialogue I have set up between Barthes and Derrida this passage can perhaps be read as simply denying the status of communication to photography. ![]() For Derrida, therefore, photography-and the "totality of experience"-would clearly be governed by the "structure of the mark," the law from which he concludes that "there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks" (SEC 183).īarthes, while writing in virtually the same historical and intellectual context (though not in any kind of direct response to Derrida), seems, quite explicitly, to deny the applicability of this logic of the mark to photography: "Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurences it aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of a language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don't take, which turn, as milk does. They are valid not only for all orders of 'signs' and for all languages in general but moreover, beyond semio-linguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience, even the experience of being." (SEC 181). As Derrida writes: "the traits that can be recognized in the classical, narrowly defined concept of writing, are generalizable. The conflict appears in even greater relief if we take into account that "writing" for Derrida is an all-inclusive concept. However, as evidenced in the above-quoted passages, Barthes's phenomenological reflections on the presence and authenticity of the Referent in photography would seem to be somehow fundamentally in conflict with the arguments advanced by Derrida regarding the structural iterability of writing and the functional necessity of absence within any presence. Roland Barthes, in his 1980 book Camera Lucida, and Jacques Derrida, in his 1977 essay "Signature, Event, Context," are, in at least one respect, engaged in similar projects: both endeavor to define the eidos or constitutive nature of their respective objects of inquiry-photography for Barthes and writing for Derrida. Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer." And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the 'death' or the possibility of the 'death' of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. "To be what it is, all writing must, therefore be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. "Every photograph is a certificate of presence." ![]() (I didn't yet know that this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for)." It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself. "By nature, the photograph has something tautological about it: a pipe here is always and intractably a pipe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |