Unofficial notes from lecture C20 Barthes, semiotics, and phenomenology in James Elkins’s lecture series: Concepts and Problems in Visual Art, 2020

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Barthes initially worked as an historian and went on to write about a wide variety of subjects, using and developing a variety of approaches to theory.

Semiotics and phenomenology are the two main theories he elaborated on in his work.

Semiotics

Barthes and semiotics

• Some of his early work takes a semiotic approach

• It “decodes” objects, artworks, places, people, etc. to reveal how they create meaning

Rhetoric of the Image, 1964

• In this essay, Barthes analyzes Panzani Pasta print ad to see its “codes” or “levels of meaning” using four criteria -

1. The linguistic message - refers to the text, the caption, the labels on the product, as well as the literal meaning of the content and its connotation

(Pasta, sauces, parmesan are literally pictured, and their connotation is that they represent Italian culture to French consumers)

2. The symbolic message - this is part of the non-linguistic portion of the ad

(The mesh bag implied the shopper has just returned home, the tomatoes help signify Italian cooking, the composition of the ad evokes a painted still life to signify an idealized lifestyle)

3. The uncoded message - this is the visual presence of objects, in this case - tomatoes, peppers, cheese, packaging, etc. For Barthes these elements of the image are uncoded because the object is what it represents

(The tomato signifies a tomato and nothing more)

4. Formal elements - In another essay, Barthes asks, what would happen if all these messages, including the uncoded, were subtracted from the image? Formal elements such as color and shapes would be all that remained legible

• Elkins notes that Barthes sort of paints himself into a corner with this way of thinking because - if all codes, levels of meaning, language, and connotation are removed, you end up in a place where nothing can be said about how an image is structured.

A more formal introduction to semiotics

• Semiotics is the study of signs, or how one thing stands for another
• Common terms in semiotics - when something is considered a sign it is enclosed in virgules ( / / )
• For example, if the image is a jack-o-lantern

• The sign = / 🎃/
• The signified = / the idea of a jack-o-lantern /
• The interpretant = the person who sees 🎃

Charles Peirce (1839-1914)

• His idea is that there are three kinds of signs

1. Iconic signs resemble what they signify

(A drawing of a tree that looks like a tree)

2. Symbolic signs work by convention and are dependent on language, customs, and culture, and do not resemble what they denote

(We agree that the written word “tree” signifies a tree and that the sounds in the word “tree” signify a tree)

3. Indexical signs are directly caused by what they signify

(a pile of leaves doesn’t resemble a tree or symbolize a tree; it signifies that a tree is nearby, so a pile of leaves is an indexical sign of the tree)

• Examples mentioned in the lecture include, smoke from a chimney as an indexical sign of fire, and a wax seal or print as the indexical signs of the stamp or the plate, respectively, used to make them

• Peirce’s theory became relevant in art theory when Rosalind Krauss claimed “photography is indexical”

• Photographs signify because they’re physically caused by photons striking film or image sensors
• So, according to Krauss, photography is unlike painting, which is not physically caused by whatever it represents
• Krauss made this claim as attempt at setting photography apart from other mediums

The complexity of Peirce’s theory

• In the context of art theory, only a simplified version of Peirce’s theory is used
• Its complexity includes the idea that every sign actually combines index, symbol, and icon

• Peirce gives this example, “Take, for instance, ‘it rains,’ Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced. The index is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience. The symbol is the mental act whereby [he] stamps that day as rainy.”

• Peirce is an extreme example of how a theory can be more elaborate than is useful to the artworld

Nelson Goodman

• Against the idea that an artwork has to resemble something (be naturalistic) in order to represent it
• Denotation is distinguished from resemblance and representation

• For example, sheet music denotes a musical performance but does not represent it

• Part of his aim was to not privilege any particular sign system

• Languages of Art, Goodman’s book

• Analysis of different systems of denotation - music notation, labanotation (dance)
• Differences among pictures,graphs, charts, etc
• Goodman was interested in their syntactic (structural) differences, rather than their semantic (way of referring to the world) characteristics.

• Using these terms in relation to contemporary art

• Syntax - relations among parts of an artwork
• Semantics - relation between te artwork and the world

• Replete symbol systems

• “Pictures are more replete than graphs”

• Formal aspects of the graph like its color, font, line weight, etc. can be changed, and it will still communicate the same information.  
• But every change to a picture or visual artwork can make a difference
• A painting can be an example of a replete symbol system with dense signs brush marks blending into one another

• Languages of Art has many more analyses of denotation systems.
• Goodman’s theory represents a democratic way of thinking, in that he is equally interested in logical systems of donation from any source or field

Phenomenology

Barthes and Phenomenology

• Camera Lucida, Barthes book on photography is the most-read book on photography theory

Introduction to Phenomenology

• 20th c. school of philosophy mainly associated in the artworld with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
• The idea is that conscious awareness of our actual, lived experience within bodies encountering the world creates reality
• Phenomenologists don’t believe in objective, scientific truth because they study how humans actually experience the world

Phenomenological truths

• Elkins offers this as an example of a phenomenological truth - although the moon is a quarter of a million miles away, a survey conducted by astronomer Marcel Minnaert, “showed that when the moon is near the horizon on a clear night, most people experience it as being about half a mile away.” So basically answering the question - how far away does it look? - ignoring any information beyond an individual experience of looking at the moon.
• A second example - Rainbows are understood to be caused by moisture in the air, reflecting and refracting at exact angles. Despite how they appear, rainbows are actually three dimensional cones in space, leading out from a viewer’s eye to wherever there are droplets in the air. But a rainbow looks like a flat arc so phenomenologically, it is a flat object.
• Rejection of perspective space as too rational and scientific, excluding the body of the person experiencing the space

• In a perspective drawing, the act of observing is reduced to a single, unmoving geometrical point at odds with the lived experience of a viewer who would be moving around within spaces
• Merleau-Ponty is interested in experiences that don’t correspond to science, or to Euclidean space

• Barthes critique of Edgerton’s photographs

• Barthes is a phenomenologist and claimed to reject photography that is not phenomenological
• He mentions Harold D, Edgerton (engineer-photographer of explosions of drops of milk, bullets through balloons, etc. at high frame rates) as an example of photography he can’t respond to as a phenomenologist who is only concerned with images of appearance to his own measure
• These types of images/ explorations are not “to the measure of human experience” because they go beyond and do not correspond to actual lived experience
• Edgerton is recording images with a machine that enables the capture of objects and motion at scales of time and space inconceivable to a human body

• But - this photograph of Edgerton making one of his images is included in the lecture to make a point that Edgerton’s body did experience this event in some way, and we are now experiencing the event by holding or looking at a print of it.
• These types of experiences could be somehow represented phenomenologically, and in this sense there is nothing outside of phenomenology

• Barthes’s conception of phenomenology refers to things being “human-scaled,” and this is often how it is thought about in the context of art
• Phenomenology remains the principal theory that takes an art viewer’s body into account

Phenomenology in contemporary art theory

• Phenomenology is more common than semiotics as an approach to art criticism
• Critics concede that phenomenological concerns like awareness of their own bodies in relation to artworks, i.e. their movements and physical position, affect their reactions to a work

Resources

https://www.are.na/susan-lamarca/barthes-semiotics-and-phenomenology