1. Roland Barthes:
Text and Image
Introduction to Digital Media
September 14, 2009

2. Context: Structuralism
• A mid-20th-century movement in the
social sciences
• Study of coded relations, or patterns,
between phenomena traditionally studied in
isolation
• Beginning in linguistics, it was later applied
to anthropology, sociology, and literature

3. Saussure and the Sign
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics (1922)
• Language as a system of differences
• A structure of meaning -- internally
referential
• Sign = signifier + signified
• Langue and parole

4. Arbitrary Links . . .

5. . . . But Not Random
• Language's rules are conventions --
historical and social
• Cat,
le chat,
die Katze,
el gato

6. Freud & Levi-Strauss
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900)
• Manifest content, latent content
• Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
(1958)
• Myth as system: mythology as cultural
communication, or code

7. Roland Barthes (1915-80)
• Began as literary scholar
and teacher -- French
literature and classical
languages
• Influenced by
structuralism: 1950s
• Turned to cultural studies
and literary theory

8. Roland Barthes (1915-80)
• Began as literary scholar
and teacher -- French
literature and classical
languages
• Influenced by
structuralism: 1950s
• Turned to cultural studies
and literary theory

9. Image as Sign
• Images are representations, or signs, of
things, not the thing themselves, and they
create meaning systematically
• Like language, dreams, and myths
• Therefore, they can be studied under
semiology, or semiotics, the study of
sign systems

10. Image--Text
• "[W]riting and pictures ... do not call upon
the same type of consciousness ... pictures,
to be sure, are more imperative than
writing, they impose meaning at one
stroke, without analysing or diluting it"
• "But this is no longer a constitutive
difference. Pictures become a kind of
writing as soon as they are
meaningful" ("Myth Today"110)

11. Signification Is a Process
• "[D]espite common parlance which simply
says that the signifier expresses the
signified, we are dealing, in any semiological
system, not with two, but with three
different terms. For what we grasp is not all
one term after the other, but the
correlation which unites them"
• "[T]he signifier is empty, the sign is full, it is
a meaning" -- the black pebble (113)

12. Second-Order Systems
• "Mythical speech is made of a material
which has already been worked on so as to
make it suitable for communication" (110)
• "Myth" uses pre-existing cultural codes,
including language but also images and
socially created concepts--material from
ideology--to perform its significations

13. First-Order Signification
"Tree"
1. Signifier 2. Signified
Language:
3. Sign
Tree

14. Second-Order
1. Signifier 2. Signified
Language:
3. Sign
I. SIGNIFIER II. SIGNIFIED
Myth:
III. SIGN
"Everything happens as if myth shifted the formal
system of the first significations sideways" (115)

15. Form & Concept
Signifier Signified
Language:
Meaning
FORM CONCEPT
Myth:
SIGNIFICATION
Myth is a metalanguage,
"because it is a second language, in which one
speaks about the first" (115)

16. "French Imperiality"
• Form: "a young Negro in a French
uniform is saluting"
• Concept: "a purposeful mixture of
Frenchness and militariness"
• Signification: "There is no better
answer to the detractors of
alleged colonialism than the zeal
shown by this Negro in serving
his so-called oppressors" (116)

17. Depoliticization
• The mythic signifier (or image in culture)
"has a sensory reality (unlike the linguistic
signifier, which is purely mental), there is a
richness in it"
• A myth empties this meaning from the form,
in service to the concept, "impoverishing" it:
"only the letter remains" (117)
• Myth "purifies" things of their history;
it "makes them innocent" and "natural" (143)

18. The Image's Three
Messages
• In the case of an image with text, such as
an advertisement or news photo:
• Linguistic (text)
• Iconic, or symbolic, or connoted (image)
• Non-coded iconic, or perceptual, or
literal, or denoted (image)
• The "message without a code"

19. The Panzani Ad
• Linguistic: the caption
• Denotative: "Panzani"
• Connotative:
"Italianicity"
• Acts as the "anchor"

20. The Panzani Ad
• Iconic -- here, 4 signs:
• Fresh products to be
picked up and prepared
at home
• Colors of "Italianicity"
• Providing everything a
meal needs
• The still life tradition

21. The Panzani Ad

22. The Panzani Ad
• Noncoded:
• Objects as arranged in
the scene, the elements
of the image
• "Naive," never met in
pure form (in myths)
• Naturalizes symbolic,
cultural messages

23. Myths: Cultural,
Historical
• "[T]here is no fixity in mythical concepts:
they can come into being, alter,
disintegrate, disappear completely. And it
is precisely because they are historical that
history can very easily suppress
them" (120)
• "[M]yth is a type of speech chosen by
history: it cannot possibly evolve from the
'nature' of things" (110)

25. Garbo
Hepburn

26. Garbo
Hepburn
Essence Existence
Awe Charm
Concept Substance
Archetype Individual
Platonic Idea Mortal
Simplicity Complexity

27. Full-Face: "Penetration,
Gravity, Frankness"

28. Full-Face: "Penetration,
Gravity, Frankness"

29. Full-Face: "Penetration,
Gravity, Frankness"

30. "The Gaze Lost Nobly
in the Future"

31. "The Gaze Lost Nobly
in the Future"

32. "The Gaze Lost Nobly
in the Future"