Roland Barthes. "Rhetoric of the Image." Image,
Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977. 32-51.
In this essay, Barthes attempts to "submit...the image to a
spectral analysis of the messages it may contain" (33) by turning
to the advertising image, an image which, he argues, draws from
"signs [that] are full, formed with a view to the optimum
reading"(33), and which therefore is more "frank" and explicit in
the information it conveys. Barthes wishes to use this clarity to
move toward a clearer conception of how the image (and its
linguistic attendants) produces signification. He turns to a
particular advertising image, one in which a mesh grocery bag
lies
on the table; its contents: beautiful, fresh vegetables and a box
of
pasta displaying a brand name. This image is designed to incite
us
to buy the pasta and it attempts to do this by signifying on
several
levels information that will provoke desire. Barthes proceeds by
breaking this system of signification into three parts, that of
the
linguistic message, the coded iconic message, and the noncoded
iconic message. The linguistic message--the Italian name that
appears on the package of pasta--itself operates on two levels:
denotational, or pointing directly to the name of the company,
and
connotational, by signifying what Barthes refers to as
"Italianicity."
The coded iconic message is the totality of all of the messages
that are connoted by the image itself: those of freshness, of
plenty,
of Italianicity (in the yellow, green, and red of the tomato and
peppers), and of a certain still-life aesthetics. The noncoded
iconic
message is simply the literal "what it is" of the photograph, the
vegetables and sack and pasta that we "see" when we look at the
image. After articulating the three levels of signification,
Barthes
pursues another question: "What are the functions of the
linguistic
message with regard to the (twofold) iconic message?" (38); and
he comes up with two such functions: anchorage and relay. With
anchorage, "the text directs the reader through the
signifieds of the image...remote-control[ing] him towards a
meaning chosen in advance" (39-40, italics in text). In a system
of
relay, "text...and image stand in a complementary
relationship...and the unity of the message is realized at [the]
level
of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis" (41). Most systems are
actually a combination of anchorage and relay and "the
dominance of the one or the other is of consequence for the
general economy of a work" (41). In addition to these modes of
analysis, Barthes argues that attention must be paid to the
composition of an image as a signifying complex and to the
naturalizing role played in photography, where the exact
replication of reality "naturalizes the symbolic
message...innocent[ing] the semantic artifice of connotation"
(45). (Laurie
Dickinson.)
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Michael Hancher
Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibld4.html
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Created 21 May 1995
Last revised 17 September 1996