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
Comments to: mh@umn.edu
Created 21 May 1995
Last revised 17 September 1996
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