Many thoughts about the relation between images and texts rushed into my head after I visited a couple of events of the Audiovisual Poetry Festival in Vilnius. For this reason somewhere in my computer brain I found an essay about an imagery that I’ve written some time ago in the context of cultural studies. This is an introduction of the essay.
It is said nowadays that our culture, which was the culture of writing for many centuries, now became the culture of visuality, pictures, or images. Every day we get much information in images, so called visual texts.
But, in fact, can we use such term as ‘the culture of images, visuality’ to distinct our everyday life phenomena from the old, let’s say, cultural system, ‘the culture of writing’? Are images the main, most popular manner to communicate nowadays? Or is visuality so important in our lives that we would say that images are more important nowadays than some centuries ago? Or maybe both these ‘cultures’ has something in common?
To answer all these questions I read four great studies in imagery:
- ‘Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology’ by Thomas Mitchel;
- ‘Rhetoric of images’ by R. Barthes;
- ‘Mythologies’, ‘Myth Today’ by R. Barthes;
- ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality‘ by Irina Rajevsky.
Barthes carefully analyzes the concept of image in both of his studies which are mentioned previously. In ‘Rhetoric of Images’ he narrowed the subject of the essay by choosing to write only about advertising images, but, despite that, he still discuses many issues on imagery in general.
In fact, I must admit that I won’t write about the problem of image in a historical point of view. It would be a great problem to put so much information, problems and different points of view in one short essay. It should only be said that in different times (Byzantium, middle ages and so on) there were lots of disputes on iconoclasm, icons and idolatry, and these disputes sometimes sparked even war or sow the seeds of strife.
The subject-matter of this essay is the relation between the image and text, to be more precise, some common issues between an image and a text, we will try to see, what exactly is in ‘heart of an image’ and how is it similar to the logic of language or even – in a Barthes’ term – metalanguage.
What does Barthes say about the relation between an image and a text? First of all, he discusses the possibility that perhaps all images are published, given to us, shown with a text message somewhere near them. “It’s not very accurate to talk about the civilization of an image”, he says, “we are still, more than ever, civilization of writing”.[1]
Yes, most of the images come with some particular message, which is written somewhere near an image, but that is not the most important issue for this essay. The most important question is: are there any similarities between an image and a text, message given by image, not the message around it?
The first and very important similarity between an image – to be more precise – “the iconic message”, as Barthes calls it, and the message of the text is their polysemy. It means that the iconic message and the textual message both function in the same way. There is so called “floating chain” of signifieds. Some of them are chosen by the reader, some are ignored. Polysemy always brings the question of meaning.
The most frequent function of the linguistic message is an anchorage[2]. This function is also commonly found in press photographs and advertisements.
Although, as we see, we can talk about certain kind of similarities of an iconic message and a linguistic message, yet we have to be very cautious. As Barthes says in his essay ‘Rhetoric of images’, linguists are ‘the only ones who to be suspicious as to the linguistic nature of an image; general opinion too has a vogue conception of an image as an area of resistance to meaning – this is in the name of the central mythical idea of Life: the message is re-presentation which is to say ultimately resurrection and, as we know, the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to the lived experience’[3].
Thus the both sides consider an image to be weak in respect of meaning. There are those who think that an image is extremely rudimentary system in comparison of language and those who think that signification cannot exhaust the image’s ineffable richness.
Barthes ends these doubts by claiming that – above all ‘if’ – the image ‘is in a certain manner the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification’[4].
[to be continued]
[1] Bathes, ‘Rhetoric of images’.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
Žymos: barthes, cultural studies, iconology, image, mitchel, polysemy, relation between image and text, tarpfest, text, visuality