BARTHES OUTLINES his project: "subjecting the image to a spectral analysis of the messages it can contain" (22). Barthes chooses advertising images as the object of his study "because, in advertising, the image's signification is assuredly intentional."

Levels of analysis

Barthes notes:
  • the linguistic level of analysis, in which the verbal text accompanying the ad has both a denotative and a connotative meaning
  • a coded iconic image (25), not unlike that noted in "The Photographic Message," in which objects (icons) are placed in a photograph, for their discontinuous symbolic value
  • a non-coded iconic message (roughly parallel to the analogic, denotative level discussed in "The Photographic Message")
The linguistic message serves two functions. One Barthes calls "anchoring," in which the text helps the reader choose the right level of perception, or select the correct details to notice (28). There is an ideological component of this function of the text: in relation to the freedom of the images signifieds, the text has a repressive value (29). Another function is relaying additional information: the text serves as a second, supplemental source of information, like dialogue balloons in comic strips, which is necessary for full comprehension of the image (rather than mere focusing of the image).
    The purely denoted image, Barthes recognizes, is not possible. However, audiences still recognize the (apparently) analogic relationship between the photographic image and the real world; that connection works to naturalize the advertising image. The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it makes innocent the very dense semantic artifice of connotation (34).
   The study of the connotative level Barthes calls "the rhetoric of the mage." There is no fixed system for reading the image, for "the language of the image is not merely the entirety of the utterances emitted . . . it is also the entirety of the utterances received; such language must include the 'surprises' of meaning" (36). Further, the study is young, and as yet lacks any definitive breakdown of the components of connotative meaning. Should such a categorization of the "connotators" be achieved, it will constitute Barthes's "rhetoric."

Larger implications

Above and beyond any semiological project to outline the rhetoric of the connotators, Barthes identifies the tension between the coded, connotative aspects of the image and the uncoded, denotative aspects of the image as reflective of a larger tension. "The world of meaning is torn internally between the system as culture and the syntagm as nature" (40). (David Beard.)
Return to Text and Image: Selective Annotated Bibliography.
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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: <http://umn.edu/home/mh/txtimdb3.html>

Comments to: mh@umn.edu

Created 24 December 1997