University of Pennsylvania Press

Chapter Title: Barthes and Bazin: The Ontology of the Image

Chapter Author(s): Colin MacCabe

Book Title: Writing the Image After Roland Barthes

Book Editor(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press. (1997)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhsd6.8

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4
Barthes and Bazin
The Ontology of the Image
Colin MacCabe

The last decade has witnessed a veritable avalanche of work around the
recently dead. Not just Barthes but Foucault and Lacan look set to be
buried underneath a mudslide of biographies and studies. How is one
to account for this mountain of print, a mountain for which I can think
of no historical parallels? The most cynical reason is the professional.
The injunction to publish or perish is so deeply engraved within the aca-
demic system through annual salary review and research selectivity that
there is now no alternative; we perish by publishing. But when publish-
ing has become the vacuous activity that it now so often is, when many
books are read only by those who referee them for an academic press,
when these same books provide pleasure only to those who review them
for an academic journal, it becomes obvious why so much of that print
is devoted to academic thinkers.
Even when one has discounted this academic self-interest, this vain
preening where material ambition finds itself perfectly reflected in false
judgment, there is still a surplus to be explained. I suspect that part of
the answer is to be found with death itself. One of the most profound
inadequacies of a secular society is its total inability to find forms that
relate it to the dead-unless they have died in violent combat. If the
tomb of the unknown soldier is the monument around which modern
nations take form, all secular pantheons are simply testimonies to the
folly of their builders. I feel sure that part of the impulse that has moti-
vated the contributors to this volume and the idea of the volume itself
is part of a work of mourning.
Barthes was undoubtedly one of my most important intellectual in-
fluences. It is difficult, even now, to convey his importance to me-the
pleasure that I found in his writing and the time that I devoted to a full

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72 Colin MacCabe

understanding of his texts. Over a period of two years at the beginning

of the 1970s, I must have read S/Z some ten times-copiously annotat-
ing each reading. I feel confident that almost all the contributors to this
volume would attest to similar experiences and feelings even though the
examples would be different. In that sense I feel that this volume func-
tions as a kind of memorial-and perhaps all the more for those who
knew Barthes well. One of the attractions of Barthes's writing, and one
that exceeded any particular intellectual content, was a kind of wisdom
that avoided (even in the heat of polemic) the fixity of intellectual posi-
tion, the dogmatism of certitude that is the bane of so much theoretical
and academic discourse.
My own very brief acquaintance with Barthes, when I was a student
in Paris in the 1972-73 academic year, confirmed this impression ofwis-
dom very strongly. I am sure that this volume is in part an attempt to
remember and to bear witness to that wisdom. If this is true, then per-
haps this volume should have taken a less conventional form. We should
perhaps have selected readings, photos, and interviews and in their
juxtaposition found some adequate symbol to express our relationship
to a dead master.
But behind this simple wish to honor the dead is a more complex loss
that this volume addresses. From one perspective it is foolish to assess
Barthes's importance a decade after his death. Barthes cannot partici-
pate in the debates and circumstances of the 1990s. He will remain
forever part of the period from the Liberation to the end of the Cold
War-his texts simply do not reflect the final failure of Soviet planning,
the perceived collapse of World War II political settlements, or the re-
newed importance of nationalism. On the other hand, although he is
still very close to us, he appears caught up in yesterday's arguments and
priorities; whatever the elegance of his writing (which is always con-
siderable) his texts often seem very dated.
To take only one example, the whole semiological project now seems
a historical curio, part of the desperate attempt for the arts to claim
equal academic footing with a science triumphant in the aftermath of
World War II. There is little doubt that this "datedness" itselfwill pass-
that further developments in our own fields and a clearer view of the
real significances of the recent past will enable us to see how much of
Barthes will be debated far into the future. But the attempt to force that
moment seems doomed to futile failure. If it is a project that attracts us,
I am sure it says a great deal about our own situation - that as critics,
scholars, intellectuals, we find ourselves increasingly unable to justify
our own activities in a crisis of aesthetic value, of the literary tradition,
of political action. It may be that the deepest level of our interest in
Barthes is an anxiety about our own situation, our own future.

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 Barthes and Bazin 73

I cannot pretend to have a reading of Barthes that produces a new

vision linking literature, the academy, and society in fresh and more
productive circuits. However, what Barthes's work does offer, and in this
he is still fully contemporary, is a commitment to analysis across-to
use an affectionate archaism-the whole range of signifying practices.
From Mythologieson, Barthes constantly engaged in analysis that covered
image and sound, text and performance. There is, to my mind, no doubt
that any future cultural criticism of consequence will have to be as wide-
ranging as Barthes himself. This is worth stressing because that moment
in the 1970s that promised cultural studies ranging from the literary tra-
dition to contemporary media, from high theory to low culture, seems to
have given way to an academic compartmentalization in which film and
television are granted a legitimate field of study, but since this study is di-
vorced from traditional cultural analysis both are fatally impoverished.
The reasons for this marcheen arriereare multiple and far beyond the
scope of this brief chapter. All I wish to do here is indicate very briefly
to what extent Barthes's final work on photography finds in the image
arguments that are in direct contradiction with the major theses and
themes of his earlier work. I also want to sketch the similarity of the cen-
tral argument of CameraLucida with the fundamental premise of Andre
Bazin's reflections of the image. My conclusion is at one level no more
than an intellectual puzzle that can be simply stated in the form of a
question. Why does Barthes make no acknowledgment of his illustrious
predecessor? An answer might have to go beyond the crude positivities
of intellectual history to see that, whatever their similarities, Barthes's
and Bazin's analyses presuppose very different intellectual projects.
Camera Lucida not only dedicates itself to Sartre's L1maginaire but pre-
supposes as its method a traditional phenomenology in which Barthes
takes his own reaction to photographs as the fundamental given of his
study. This phenomenology is justified by a prior assessment that it is
impossible to separate a photograph from its referent. Barthes makes
almost no argument for this. More surprisingly, he simply ignores argu-
ments that refuse the photograph any privileged relation to the referent
and instead analyze it within systems of connotation and signification
that provide it with its meaning. The surprise stems from the fact that
Barthes himself most tellingly articulated such arguments from Mytholo-
gies onward.
All such arguments are summarily dismissed at the beginning of Cam-
era Lucida. After he has stated with admirable brevity that "the referent
adheres" (CL, 18), Barthes considers the various attempts in the analysis
of photography to ignore this basic fact and through either technical or
sociological analysis to produce photographs as signifiers or signifieds.
His reason for rejecting this form of analysis is personal and affective.

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74 Colin MacCabe

It is with "agacement" ("irritation," CL, 7) that he realizes that these dis-

courses are completely inadequate to deal with his own relationship to
the photos he loves. So affected is he that these analyses put him "en
colere" ("furious," CL, 7). It is deeply ironic that Barthes's account of
his rejection of these discourses reads exactly like the tirades of the en-
raged humanist when first confronted with a structural or sociological
analysis of his or her favorite canonical texts.
The aim of the text becomes a phenomenological analysis of the sys-
tematic regularities that unify the photos that touch Barthes, and he
advances the twin theses of the studium and the punctum. The studium
captures the relation to the referent by placing it within the comprehen-
sible world of objects. The punctum indicates that moment at which the
referent touches the subject, destroying the world of objects, and the
moment of comprehension disclosing the drives that make the world
comprehensible. Although the particular analysis in terms of studium
and punctum- itself a reworking of the plaisirfjouissance distinction of The
Pleasure of the Text-are quintessentially Barthesian, the surprising analy-
sis of the photograph in terms of its privileged relation to the referent
inevitably recalls the great theme of Andre Bazin's work. Bazin's single
most celebrated essay and, indeed, the first substantial piece he pub-
lished was "Ontology of the Photographic Image"; in it he argues, in
terms and examples that often run very close to Barthes, that photog-
raphy distinguishes itself from all other arts because of its privileged
relation to the real.'
Bazin's article analyzes the history of representation in relation to the
psychological desire to defy time and death. It is this desire that under-
lies our efforts to produce imperishable copies of bodies destined for
decay and dissolution. All Western art then finds itself (particularly with
the development of perspective) caught between its aesthetic function
of developing the reality of its own forms and. the psychological need
to represent reality. Photography liberates painting and sculpture from
this contradiction by offering a reproduction of reality with which they
cannot compete. The fact that no human agency is involved in the fun-
damental photographic process marks photography as a genuinely new
art and determines that realism is the essential aesthetic of both pho-
tography and cinema.
Once one has noticed the parallels between Bazin's and Barthes's
theses, it becomes absolutely extraordinary that Barthes makes no men-
tion of Bazin in his bibliography. The absence is all the more startling
because Barthes does mention Bazin in passing- but in reference to a
theory of the function of the screen in cinema (CL, 90). Indeed Barthes's
book was originally published in a series edited by Cahiers du Cinema, the
magazine founded by Bazin. How then is one to explain this astonishing

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 Barthes and Bazin 75

absence? Does one attribute it to fashion? Bazin's Catholic humanism

and realist aesthetic had banished him from the theoretical reading lists
of the 1960s and 1970s. But if Barthes was always, as a good Parisian,
aware of fashion, he was scarcely its victim. In any case, given that the
whole book is written against all the intellectual fashions of the time
and that it explicitly takes its cue from Sartre's L1maginaire (about as un-
fashionable a book as one could wish for), such an explanation has no
plausibility. And it is even less likely that Barthes wished to hide a debt.
It is simply unbelievable that Barthes consciously borrowed from
Bazin without attribution. What is clear is that Barthes undertook no
systematic reading for what was to be his final book. It seems more than
likely that Barthes did read Bazin's essay at a much earlier period of
his career and it seems plausible that Bazin's meditation on the rela-
tion between photography and death, particularly in relation to family
portraits, did leave unconscious traces. Further historical research on
Barthes's reading in the late 1940s and a close comparison of the texts
might yield interesting results.
Whatever the similarities between Barthes and Bazin-and they are
striking-I would like to conclude by signaling the immense differences
that divide their texts. Barthes could not have taken full cognizance of
the similarity of his position to Bazin's without devoting a great deal of
his text to making those distinctions, which would have taken him to a
much more significant confrontation with his previous intellectual posi-
tions than Camera Lucida proposes. Bazin's work is written from a wide
anthropological perspective that attempts to situate photography both
in relation to the other arts and in relation to the fundamental evolution
of the human species. In this context the realism of photography offers
a fundamental transformation of humanity's relation to its own history.
Barthes's book is a work of personal mourning for a mother around
whom his whole emotional life had revolved. It is no exaggeration to
say that the whole text was written as a prolonged analysis of the photo-
graph of his mother as a young girl that he describes at length in the
second part of the book. I also have little doubt that this photograph
caused Barthes to reject with such uncharacteristic anger the semiologi-
cal and sociological theories that had occupied so much of his life.
The difference between Bazin and Barthes is that Bazin's analysis of
the photograph is the prelude to an analysis of the cinema, which is
then conceived as a fundamental transformation of human understand-
ing of the world in which we live. Barthes's analysis from the very first
page divorces photography from cinema and isolates it as the area of a
realism that is, above all, personal rather than social. In this context it is
very significant that the one moment at which Barthes mentions Bazin
is when he agrees that photography touches cinema. For Bazin it is cru-

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76 Colin MacCabe

cial that what happens on screen is immediately connected to a reality

that exceeds it; the screen is not a frame but a hideout from which the
characters step forward into the real world. For Barthes the realism of
the photograph mummifies the subject, who is thus removed of the con-
tingencies of action before and after the moment of the photograph.
But Barthes agrees that there is a moment when the photograph leads
one into the real world of which it is a part-it is the moment of the
punctum of an erotic photograph, when what is not in the frame of the
photograph animates both the photograph and the spectator.
Insofar as the realism of sexuality is annexed to the personal world of
the photograph, Barthes effectively constitutes a crucial divide between
a public world of codes and a private world of direct reference. Had he
chosen to investigate how the real of the mother and of sexuality re-
lated to the codes of the public form of cinema, he would have had to
confront directly not only his relation to Bazin but also the relation be-
tween his sexuality and his past theoretical project.

Note

1. "Ontology of the Photographic Image" was first published in 1945 under

the title "Ontologie de l'image photographique" in Problemesde la peinture; re-
printed in Andre Bazin, Qy-'est-ceque le cinema? (1st ed. 1958; rev ed. Paris: Cerf,
1975) pp. 9-17. Bazin writes, for instance, "The existence of the photographed
object participates of the existence of the model exactly as fingerprints do" (16).

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