studium_and_punctum
jane In order to understand the importance of the studium and the punctum in BarthesCamera Lucida, we must first understand what they are. This is somewhat difficult, because Barthes rarely comes out and simply defines these terms. Rather, he devotes large sections of the books to them, and then references them sporadically relative to other concepts.
Barthes describes the studium as the basic intention of the photographer, their message, or the idea behind the photograph. Sometimes, however, the message is apparent, but the studium still does not show its face. So the other aspect of the studium is it’s so-called form of functions: “to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire” (28). In this sense, the studium must somehow affect the viewer of the artistic spectacle, whether it is a feeling of like or dislike, but not a feeling of love, because this will be left to the punctum.
The concept of the punctum is a bit harder to follow. I think it is important to note thatpunctumis Latin fortrauma.” Barthes writes that the punctum disturbs the studium, that it is asting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice” (27). The idea of the punctum as a little hole reminds me of this passage in Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being. In it, she describes how most of each day is not lived consciously. Thesemoments of non-being” are embedded in cotton wool. Then there are these moments in life that pierce through the cotton wool; these are calledmoments of being.” I believe the concept of these moments of being is applicable to Barthespunctum, in that this is something that is subjective to the viewer, something that jars them and makes them stop and think.
The other text that the idea of the punctum reminded me of was the Platonic notion of a “summoner.” Plato says in Book VII of the Republic that sometimes our sense perceptions are adequate, with the thought that some objects we perceive are comprehendible using solely our senses. Other objects are more ambiguous and require the use of the intellect to comprehend. These he calls “summoners,” because they summon the understanding required to look into them. In other words, summoners present a contradiction to the soul that can only be unraveled by thought. These paradoxes of how opposites can coexist within the same object invoke the philosopher’s intellect, and as a result, are cultivators of truth via the thought process. Plato says that summoners “awaken understandingand that theydraw one towards being,” meaning that they are enlightening because they induce a resolution in the soul. In a way, I think Barthes would say that the punctum is a summoner, because it invokes the imagination of the viewer in order to understand it.
We must also keep in mind, though, that the punctum is subjective and, consequently, not noticed by everybody. Because of this, we must respect the potentiality of something in a picture to be a punctum. The way I have come to understand this is that anything unintentional in the photograph is a potential punctum. This takes care of the question of whether the studium can be the same as the punctum. The answer is this: because the studium is intentional, it simply cannot be the punctum.
So then, is there a photograph somewhere out there with no punctum? It is certainly possible. The experience of flipping through the photographs in a newspaper or magazine and finding nothing thatshoots out of it, like an arrow, and pierces” (26) is universal. However, somebody else might look through the exact same magazine and find that every photograph moves them deeply and permanently. It is because of this subjectivity that we cannot say things like, “All photographs have punctum,” orSome photographs have no punctum at all.” We must say things like, “This photograph has no punctum for me, but it has potential punctum for someone, somewhere out there.” And quickly, can there be a photograph with no studium? No, because the studium is the photographer’s intention. The mere movement of a finger pressing down on the so-called trigger of the camera is the intention of the photographer, no matter how conceptual the photograph is (e.g., the photographer taking pictures with his or her eyes closed).
This is also applicable to the idea of punctum multiplicity. If everything unintentional in the photograph is a potential punctum, then certainly I can recognize more than one of them at times. Take, for example, the portrait of William Casby. My first “punctive” instinct is the way the water in his eyes glasses over his corneas. This is something about which I could write a poem, two poems, perhaps a short story. I also notice his forehead. I think at first this is a bead of sweat, and, looking at it still, cannot decide if it is or if it is a sort of boil. Because it makes me wonder so, I am drawn to it, and my eye stays stubbornly upon it. If it is a boil, how long has it been there? If it is a bead of sweat, why is he sweating? If it is a bead of sweat, this bead carries with it the history of his people, the years of slavery, the burden of being owned. Both these things inspire such controversy in my eyes that I cannot see anything else in the picture anymore.
The punctum is also the line we can draw between the pornographic and the erotic. Barthes offers an example of this: Mapplethorpe’s close-up pictures of genitalia are erotic and not pornographic because the fabric of the underwear is photographed at close range. Barthes explains that the tactile element of the photograph, the intriguing texture of the material, makes the photo erotic. He refers later to Mapplethorpe’s photo, “Young Man With Arm Extended.” He says that for him, there cannot be a punctum in a pornographic image. I say this is assumptive, but I must excuse his presumptuousness because the punctum is entirely subjective. The erotic photograph does not objectify the sexual organs as the pornographic photograph does; on the contrary, it may not show them at all. I agree with Barthes that this photo encompasses the erotic through lack of directness. The question arises: Is he completely naked? And from this the desire to see what the photographer has left out—the real eroticism is in the anticipation of the subject moving from the frame of the photograph, but also in the texture of his skin, his hair. I also agree that Mapplethorpe has caught just the right openness of the boy’s hand.
With the discovery and the mention of the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes introduces the other important facet of the punctum: its relation to time. He uses the phrasewhat-has-been” to describe how photographs make things immortal. The punctum of the Winter Garden Photograph was its ability to make Barthes necessarily face his mortality. The photograph captures a moment that undeniably existed at some point, so that even when Barthes comes across a photograph of himself that he doesn’t remember being taken, he must admit that he was in that place at that moment. Next in this line of reasoning is that this moment has died, and in this sense, Barthes argues, the photograph is the modern medium in which we experience the reality of loss and, ultimately, death.
There is also the question of whether the punctum can exist in different genres. There is evidence to support that it can. For example, in sculpture we have its three dimensions, which includes color, light, and form. I can be affected by the way shadows fall across sculpted fabric, or, thinking of Mapplethorpe, the way a hand lies at the perfect degree of openness. Here, though, comes the argument over how we know what the artist intended. Did the artist intend the light to fall this way, or the gleam of a shoulder? This question cannot be answered, especially if the sculptor is dead. Does the sculptor even know what they intended or not? The same principle can be applied to paintings. Perhaps the artist did not intend for the color blue of the sky, but this is all they had access to. And let us say that this color pierced me, that it is a punctum.
Barthes mentions film, but he does not speak of the possible studium or punctum of film. Instead, he berates film as an art form inferior to photography, because you can close your eyes for a moment, and the picture is gone. With photography, you close your eyes as long as you wish and the picture remains eternal. But I think there is some merit in the ability to capture a graceful movement—the graceful movement that is a potential punctum. The punctum could be the way somebody blinks their eyes, or the way the wind blows through the trees in the background. It is probably easier to find a punctum in a filmed landscape than in a photographed landscape, because a landscape does so much more with movement.
Music seems a little more elusive than the visual arts, and so many might doubt the existence of punctum in music. I disagree with those who do this. A friend of mine heard the songAll I Needby Air, and he said that the way Beth Hirsch sings an accentuated lettert,” as in the wordweight,” is a punctum for him. He says that the entire influence of the song hangs on the double-stranded “t,” that it is what makes the song different than other music, make it worth repeating and remembering.
The final genre to discuss is the literary genre. This is a more obscure and questionable genre, but I think it’s important to examine. I also think that literature is supporting evidence for the multiple-punctum theory, setting aside the idea that everything in the book is intentional. I think Barthes would disagree with me on this one, but I think the thing that makes literature so compelling is in fact these multiple punctums, rather than the story line (which is the studium).
The problem that exists with the studium and punctum arises with their concepts. This is essentially the problem of being able to communicate the existence of the punctum. If Barthes is sufficient in describing and explaining the punctum then it fits into a category of things that can be explained to the public; it can be “socially communicable.” Here’s the problem: if all things “socially communicablebelong to the studium, why, then, is punctum not studium? Barthes addresses his awareness of this issue in part 24, the conclusion of the first half of the book. He says:

I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonist project could not recognize the universal. I would have to descend deeper into myself…I would have to make my recantation, my palinode (60).

Here he explains with strange word choices that instead of moving towards a more objective theoretical approach, he is turning deeper into himself and his subjectivity. I suppose in a way this means the problem is negated by his own philosophical license. He is saying, this is my book, these are my theories, and they are imperfect because they are subjective. I recall Douglas Davisdescription on the back of the book, where he states, “This is a great book—flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving…” Davis seems to recognize the genius that Barthes unfolds, though it is flawed, what philosophy isn’t?
050303
...
stork daddy and she's a scholar. i like barthes mainly because he wrote a psychoanalyticish interpretation of pro-wrestling. 050303
...
neesh fascinating.

in music, there's such a thing as aleatoric melody, which is melody made randomly, or by chance, which seems to me more of the realm of punctum than studium. added to which is the thought that instruments are unique, and performances never identical. these chance differences, though sometimes infinitesimal, also come under the name of aleatorics, i believe. and finally, i think it was valéry who said that no note can be understood to its very bottom. the meaning of each note is something found by the listener, and as such it could completely coincide with or indeed completely contradict the intentions of the composer or performer.

as for literature, it was barthes himself who nailed the coffin on intentionalist schools of thought, with his essay "the death of the author". it might just be because my english teacher was also a musician that he sometimes used aleatorics to talk about literary texts, such things as chance allusions, words that opened up chance mis-meanings or reinterpretations. as both a writer and a critic i'd say an author doesn't always fully understand what they're writing as they're writing it. i've done experiments like analysing my own works, and finding things any fool of a critic would see, but that simply hadn't occurred to me as i was writing it (this is probably testament to the lack of thought i put into my writing, but hey). but maybe subconsciously i had meant to put in polar opposites of introversion and extroversion, or blatant phallic imagery in a fight scene, or whatever, but it was not a conscious intention.

another aspect that applies to all arts i would say is personal experience, and that's something a creator really can't take into account. there's a cartoon on explodingdog of someone taking lots of "invisibility" pills and looking very free. it chilled me to the core, because only a little while earlier a friend was telling me about how she'd nearly OD'd once, trying to commit suicide. but another friend of mine liked it. she's a very trapped person and was suffering from depression then, so maybe that was exactly the kind of release she secretly wanted. it might mean nothing at all to someone else.

in literature it might be a word that means a lot to you, or that the meaning of a word is different in your mind to that of the author's. this word could then be a punctum, something that unintentionally surprises or captures you.

barthes says of literature "the text's unity lies not in its source but in its destination", meaning that all the potential interpretations allusions and layers of meaning to a text are either lost or realised as the text is read, not as it is written, and so the reader is the one to form the meaning of the text, not the intention of the author. and i don't see why this shouldn't apply to any art form.
050303
...
stork daddy one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence is having data be understood in a variety of ways and allowing for multiple probabalistic interpretations of meaning rather than one or two best associations. for instance, when i said "and a scholar" the meanings that might have occured to jane were many. she might have thought, beautiful (that was perhaps my studium) or she might have thought of the phrase, "a gentleman and a scholar". she might even have thought i meant "a jackass and a scholar" while this is less likely, it is something that occured to me after i had posted. it seems meaning is something we have evolved to determine in a probabilistic way based on the strength of previous associations and perhaps natural and intuitive associations (such as the natural eroticism of skin). the meaning found in any given sensual experience (including art) varies from person to person and is indeed subjective, but there is in given societies and then in humanity as a whole, some common and probable interpretations to any given experience. that our communications are inexact is a tool and weapon used by both the communicator and the communicatee. we often say intentionally ambiguous things, tailoring our expressions so that they convey certainly what we mean to convey certainly, and convey broadly what we hope our ambiguities might catch if we lack specificity in our expressing or as to what we desire to express. the delight in being human is entertaining the multiple associations we have at any given juncture all at once. one sensual experience can open a million imagined worlds. sometimes which seems more probable or useful is quite besides the point. 050303
...
stork daddy in keeping with this theme...i saw two pigeons today in a mating dance - and their motions matched each others to a degree approaching almost mechanical perfection. of course, perhaps they were more finely attuned to any discrepancies than i. but i was amazed. it made me think of how humans have a quite different strategy for survival and communicating desire. we are free to not be or mirror the other in a totally flush manner. this makes those moments when we do experience the totality of another's experience quite miraculous. 050303
...
ever dumbening hahaha
fuck you

but i will eventually read this.

:)
050303
...
Cicero The four walls of this particular darkroom bear down on me the moment I become acclimated to the smell, which initially is so overwhelming that the claustrophobia is a somewhat delayed reaction. A single naked bulb protrudes from the wall. Everything is sharp, edged and organized. I know that to touch the raw tools of the darkroom is to touch the past, and to submit to its blackness is to embrace history.
Tacked to the wall beneath the light bulb is a letter-size piece of paper bearing step-by-step instructions for processing negative film. The facility is far too small to accommodate the chemicals needed for color processing. Instead, the fluids are all simple, very basic - for processing black and white film exclusively. Printing is done in the next room, accessed by exiting into the newsroom and reentering a few feet down the hall. But the creation is done in here, in this laboratory just large enough to accommodate me.
Grasping the spool in my hand I can feel it mutating into something else. Its sharp curves and distinct circular ridges become broad and full as a bar of soap. It is familiar to me. I recognize its new form as the slick plastic curves of a camera I held once as a 13-year-old, in a minivan, gazing without interest at the rolling nothing of Arizona. I recline in the backseat with it pressed against my eye socket. Tops of cactuses, streaked clouds, power lines and telephone poles are juxtaposed in the frame of the car window and these images of the desert are burned for an instant on my retina.
The van halts at another rest stop and I reluctantly pull my eye away from the viewfinder. My family scurries into the restrooms as I take a seat on a stone bench, disinterested, neither here nor there. I remember tilting my head up towards the pallid sky with my eyes closed and seeing images of Western America in my eyelids. Unlike the photos I took luxuriating in the synthetic fuzz of our minivan, I can remember the pictures I took with my eyes shut, alone, sitting on that stone bench with my camera in my lap. Even now I can conjure in my mind a cactus outside Flagstaff, Arizona - my brother sleeping in the seat in front of methe Grand Canyon reflected in my father’s sunglasses as he surveyed its majesty.
Grasping the negatives in one hand and the spool in another I must look not unlike a young parent trying to feed a defiant baby. No light is allowed to touch the negatives in these early stages. The film must be extracted from the canister in absolute blackness. Everything must be kept dark until the entire roll of negatives is safely inside the developing container and shut away from the eager light just outside the precariously unlocked door.
Middle-school pounces on me like a lion and suddenly I am shooting basketball games with a more advanced point-and-shoot camera, courtesy of the yearbook staff, who shoved it into my hand with no more ceremony than if I was borrowing a pencil. Unruly, puberty-plagued boys rush past in a blur of red jersey, orange basketball and black asphalt. I do not comprehend how my clumsy fingers depress a small button and allow light to react with silver chloride to make a photograph. I am unaware that 500 years ago Leonardo da Vinci passed light through a small hole in a dark room to project an inverted image onto the opposite wall, thereby enlightening the world to the principle of camera obscura. There is no science in my hands. The limit of my understanding is that the mechanized banshee screams of the automatic camera mark moments caught, stored, and ready to be shipped away for processing, out of sight, out of mind, out of consciousness. When the negatives are returned they will come to me in plastic sleeves folded accordion-style. They will be discreetly tucked into a pocket that is secondary to the larger pocket containing the prints. My peers on the yearbook staff will take the prints and discard the negatives. For us they are useless and abstract. “They have no purpose in the real world, and would you please keep them tucked away in the little pocket, thank you very much.”
At the end of the school year 1000 adolescents will open their yearbooks and look for their own faces. I will be among them. I have no special distinction as the photographer because I neither touched the negatives nor played any crucial part in their conception. As the slang term for an automatic camera reveals, my role was only topoint-and-shoot.” The crosshairs on the inside of the viewfinder simplified photography into the simple task of tracking the basketball in a basketball game.
The spool shut firmly in the developing container, I reach for a pitcher with exactly 12 ounces of D-76 developer fluid inside. I pour it cautiously into the developing container until the expected excess pools around the hole, which itself is a curious thing in that it allows liquid to enter but not light. The lid is sealed and the hand on the timer is rotated to exactly 14-minutes, for this film is 3200 speed and because of its unusual sensitivity must be processed longer with undiluted chemicals. The knowledge that this fluid is poison floats somewhere in the muck of my permanent yet nonessential memories. Swirling these thoughts in my head I agitate the container in a circular motion to prevent the process from stagnating. This must be done for ten seconds every sixty at the timer’s command.
Our three-bedroom apartment is snoring. It’s Christmas morning of my sophomore year in high school and I am wide-awake in bed listening to the cavernous rumblings of our apartment at precisely 4:27 a.m. My younger brother is sleeping soundly in the bunk below and I ponder the embarrassment I would suffer if he were to awake and find me as restless as a 6-year-old. It was the morning I was awakened to the miracle of the Single Lens Reflex, a kind of that allows the photographer to see through the lens, meaning the what he sees in the viewfinder is exactly what will be exposed on film. I unwrapped it carefully that morning. It was the last time I would ever handle it with hesitation.
I am transparent before the eyes 6000 fellow student journalists. I am being recognized forSuperiorwork in Color Newspaper Photography. I am hiding something. I am trying desperately to conceal that one year ago I walked away from this same competition empty handed because the rules stated the processing must be done by the photographer himself. The rules changed. Lucky me. Standing now at the pinnacle of high school photojournalism I cannot fathom the science of a darkroom. On the walk back to my seat the medal dangling from my neck clangs like a cowbell in my mind. Each ringing note sends me higher and further until I am back home, in a museum I spent far too little time in, standing before Rondal Partridge’s famous photograph, “Adams in the Sierra.” The magnificent landscape is essentially irrelevant. What is important is that Ansel Adams records it with the intense precision of his zoning system and takes it down to more reasonable elevations for all of mankind to admire. For a few fleeting moments I understand. For a few fleeting moments I can sense the jurisprudent trinity between Partridge, Adams and the camera he is so intently focused on. I am keenly aware of the harmony between its existence as a work of art and its place in the real world, in this museum. I grasp at this fleeting clarity as somebody takes me by the hand and hauls me back to the award ceremony, shaking it vigorously to congratulate me on my monumental “superiority.”
I pour the D-76 from the tank and insert a water hose to rinse the negatives of the previous chemicals. This goes on for thirty purifying seconds. Water carrying traces of the creation that has just taken place overflows into the basin and trickles down the drain, out of sight. Left are 36 carefully washed negatives that must now be fixed, that is, stopped of further processing. I measure the fixing solution with the characteristic precision of the room and the people who frequent it. Next I pour it into the lightproof tank holding the negatives. The container must then be agitated for ten seconds every sixty. However, this time there is no change, only the fixing of moments chemically, precisely as they existed.
When I turned the first page of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida I had three years of experiencing the world as a photojournalist in mind. I had found my niche, photojournalism, and my approach to photography was very much affected by my journalistic orientation to the medium. I had come to judge a photograph in two ways: First, by how well it conveys a story or idea and second, by its aesthetic and technical merits. I found (and to this day believe) that Barthes concerns himself too much with the corporeal aspects of photography as a medium. Though he quite thoroughly breaks photography down with the terminology and methodology of a sociologist, he never reckons with his own demons.
The Operator is the photographer. The spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographsin magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives… And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any ediolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph… (Barthes 425).
For the author, Rondal Partridge’s “Adams in the Sierra” can be reduced to (and I do cringe at the connotations of the word) “operator”. He limits the photographer’s role to the act of depressing a button. In Barthes’s conception of the medium, Partridge’s role inAdams in the Sierra” becomes as juvenile as turning a car key. My fundamental disconnection with Barthes comes not only from his subversive terminology, but from the fact that in Camera Lucida he cannot overcome his personal discomfort with the unprecedented ability of the camera to render its subjects accurately: he cannotget overphotography:
But today it is as if we repressed the profound madness of Photography: it reminds us of its mythic heritage only by that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look atmyselfon a piece of paper. (Barthes 429)

I believe this is the reason he cannot distinguish between the photography and what it represents. Since Barthes cannot engage photography as a photographer, (“I am not a photographer, not even an amateur photographer: too impatient for that: I must see right away what I have produced” (Barthes 425)) he cannot understand how the photograph can be a sovereign thing, how a photograph in a newspaper (such as the ones I had been making for the past three years) can be appreciated for repeating what had happened and as have existences of their own.
While Bartes is busying himself withstudiumandpunctumI am floating further and further from this misguided sociologist. I pity that Barthes cannot come with me. If I could take him back one year to the day I photographed a wedding for the first time, perhaps he could understand the necessary interaction of photographer and subject. Unlike a bride, who is thinking about everything except the photographer (weaving in and out of the hubbub of bridesmaids, mothers, grandmothers and friends), Barthes absorbed himself with his role as the subject. The two are not always quite so aware of each other. Not all subjects are so keenly aware of the photographer and in most situations, especially in the daily lives of photojournalists, the event takes precedence over the photographer recording it. The medium he describes in Camera Lucida is peculiar to portrait photography more than anything else, and he only makes a vague distinction between any such branches and in no way accounts for the hyper-real moment when I the saw the bride cry without care for my presence. It was a moment of solidarity experienced by two people together. The moment is preserved in uniquely in my mind, though in hers, I am sure, it is lost somewhere in the blur of her wedding day.
And I pour the Permawash into the hole and agitate the negatives in the setting solution until they are free of change and can be exposed to light again. I hold real photographs created in the hands of the photographer.
050303
...
phil A photographer intends to create the
potential for understanding what one does not already know.
A photograph does not remain unchanged;
since the thoughts attributed to it are it's greatest value.
Their messages are preserved by craftmanship.
A beautiful photograph is able to reveal this intention.
050303
...
phil They appear the most detailed.
Yet are simplest to create.
They can become our very lives.
050304
...
catching rainbows Yet reveal such a narrow view. 050304
...
Cicero you should pay attention to the ideas you assign to them as well as the idea that compelled the photographer's hand in the first place 050304
...
phil doing your homework
and showing up to class on time
studium and punctum
050304
...
stork daddy both the ideas you assigned and the ideas that compelled the photographer's hand share a common feature - neither is definitive. this is especially true when you stop to consider that the photographer may not have known all of her true reasons for her artistic choices. in some ways your appraisal could be as valid as hers. 050304
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from