How to read Barthes' Image-Music-Text

204 Pages·2012·2.049 MB·English

by  Barthes, Roland, White, Ed

How to Read
Barthes’ Image-Music-Text
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How to Read Theory

Series Editors:
Stephen Shapiro, Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick
Ed White, Department of English, University of Florida

How to Read Theory is a new series of clear, introductory guides to
critical theory and cultural studies classics designed to encourage
readers to think independently. Each title focuses on a single, key text
and concisely explains its arguments and significance, showing the
contemporary relevance of theory and presenting difficult theoretical
concepts in clear, jargon-free prose. Presented in a compact, user-
friendly format, the How to Read Theory series is designed to appeal
to students and to interested readers who are coming to these key
texts for the first time.
Also available:
How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro
How to Read Marx’s Capital
Stephen Shapiro
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How to Read
Barthes’ Image-Music-Text
Ed White
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First published 2012 by Pluto Press
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www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Ed White 2012
The right of Ed White to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Photographic Message 13
2. Rhetoric of the Image 25
3. The Third Meaning 38
4. Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein 53
5. Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narrative 65
6 The Struggle with the Angel 100
7. The Death of the Author 111
8. Musica Practica 122
9. From Work to Text 129
10. Change the Object Itself 139
11. Lesson in Writing 145
12. The Grain of the Voice 151
13. Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers 159
Reading Across Barthes’ Work 192
Index 195
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Introduction
Image-Music-Text consists of thirteen essays published
by Roland Barthes between 1961 and 1973. As a whole,
the pieces track Barthes’ movement from an influential
early theorist of semiotic analysis and structuralism to his
emergence as a major poststructuralist thinker. Sometimes,
indeed, one essay will challenge, revise, and correct the
preceding essay: having offered an “Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966), the next essay, “The
Struggle with the Angel” (1971), asserts that it is attempting
“textual analysis,” not structural analysis. Stylistically, the
essays include methodically analytical essays laden with
highly specialized terminology (like “Structural Analysis”),
more accessible critical manifestos (like “The Death of
the Author”), and experimental, fragmentary projects
(like “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers”). All of the pieces
are genuine “essays” in the sense that they essay, or try
out, new types of analysis. This is evident, for example,
in Barthes’ two most famous pieces about music, “Musica
Practica” and “The Grain of the Voice,” which propose
divergent, if not exactly competing, frameworks.
Thus the range of styles, approaches, and conclusions
may strike some readers as particularly perplexing, all the
more so given the tremendous influence of this collection
prepared, in 1977, by Stephen Heath. Heath was particularly
interested in, and attuned to, the dynamic changes of
Barthes’ work. In a 1971 interview with Barthes, he began
by commenting on “a certain distance that…separates you
from your earlier work,”1 and Image-Music-Text creatively
1 “Interview: A Conversation with Roland Barthes,” in The Grain
of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, translated by Linda Coverdale
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128.
Introduction 1
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attempts to illustrate distance, movement, and change.
The three thematics of its title are less guides to some
Barthesian position—what Barthes concluded about images,
for example—than fields in which Barthes worked out larger
problems of language and interpretation. What this means
for today’s reader of Image-Music-Text is that the collection
is best approached not as an assemblage of position papers
but as an entry point to certain problems that characterize
Barthes and his tremendous influence. While anthologies of
literary theory may reprint “The Death of the Author” as
the paradigmatic Barthesian critical statement, it is more
helpful to see it as one essay in a series, Barthes at work
trying to address a particular set of problems and to open
up a new set of solutions. How to Read Image-Music-Text
attempts to be such a guide, helping new readers of Barthes
appreciate the stakes, revisions, aims, and above all process
of the various arguments of the collection.
What this means for you, as you read Image-Music-Text,
is that you are not seeing a critic’s set positions so much
as following the arcs of his writing, and I would highlight
three worth tracing. The first and most obvious is Barthes’
changing positions on language, which he initially views as
a system of meaning veiling reality, but increasingly comes
to see as the very environment of humans comprised of
both repressive elements and emancipatory potential. The
latter he increasingly finds in “writing” as an activity, and
the essays of Image-Music-Text can be read as Barthes’
path to becoming an exponent of that particular political
attitude about language. This is a second arc that might be
traced: Barthes was always friendly to radical politics, and
his earliest works are typically marxist, if also contrarian,
challenging orthodox positions of the Left. His critiques
2 How to Read Barthes’ Image-Music-Text
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of leftist assumptions accelerated through the 1960s,
producing a very different sense of the intellectual engaged
in political change. The last essay in this collection,
“Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” (1971), demonstrates
some of these shifts, though it also shows Barthes still
very much interested in the marxist project. I have not
offered much commentary on this political change, though
I have tried to highlight how it mutates. Some have argued
that Barthes’ political journey offers a needed clarity and
modernization of marxism, while others suggest that we see
a weakening of his politics with his institutional success.
I leave that verdict for readers to determine. The third arc
I would mention here concerns the dramatic changes in
Barthes’ style. His earliest essays are very methodical,
scientistic in tone, and focused on particular research
problems. In the mid to late 1960s, however, we begin to
see manifestos that are more calls to new ways of thinking
than detailed arguments in the older sense. The last essay in
the collection is openly experimental and fragmentary, not
to mention contradictory: it is more an attempt to write out
the process of thinking through several problems than it is a
didactic essay with a clear message. These varying styles are
among the pleasures and challenges of reading Image-Music-
Text, and are best read as indications of Barthes’ changing
positions on language itself. He adopts different styles of
writing in part to demonstrate his claims.
On a still larger scale, a reading of Barthes’ development
as a thinker—how he framed problems of analysis, then
revised them—will provide readers with a point of access to
the larger critical movement known as poststructuralism.
François Dosse, in his two volume History of Structuralism,
has written a long and detailed history of structuralism and
Introduction 3
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