Another Quixotic (?) Search/Desire for the “Absolute”… - Notes

I

I would like to start by asserting that I find the theory that Barthes put forth in Camera Lucida to be extremely compelling, for several reasons.

1.1. Of all the thinkers studied so far on the course, (the late) Barthes seems to be the only one operating with an interesting version of the correspondence theory of truth, as opposed to the coherence one implicit in most of the texts discussed so far – particularly in Saussure. Thus, it appears that, in Barthes, the truth of a photograph (NOT of a proposition, as the traditional correspondence theory requires) presupposes the capturing of the “air” – of the truth of the subject (p. 109), the correspondence between the punctum and the real, between the subject and its image. On account of this, a photograph is almost invariably true “at the level of time” (“a just image”; p.70) – except for those cases in which the spectator is unable to identify the punctum or “the photographer cannot, either by lack of talent or bad luck, supply the transparent soul its bright shadow” (p. 110). Barthes’ implicit theory of truth belongs, therefore, to the realm of (in my view, unfairly discredited in the contemporary world) metaphysics.

1.2. Interestingly, in Camera Lucida, Barthes appears to postulate the “beyond”, attesting for a desire for the “Absolute” (the soul?; the Being?; “Pure” Existence as envisaged by Plato?). Could this “Absolute” be the inaccessible essence of (individual) life – the great un-representable – of which only the “Photograph” can offer a taste?

1.3. The photograph becomes, for Barthes, the (perhaps singular) reliable certification of existence (but does this imply that if something has not been photographed it “has not been” at all?) as well as, perhaps more importantly, a reminder of Death – the (most) fundamental human experience that appears to me to be largely ignored in the contemporary world through all sorts of distraction mechanisms (such as the cinema). Of all media, the "Photograph" is, I agree with Barthes, the one which raises the most powerful awareness about Death and its imminence, and it does so due to three of its defining characteristics: its time-disruptive effect; its “intense immobility” (p. 49); and its silence.

These characteristics are the ones which distinguish the photograph from film. On account of these, I believe – in opposition to Bazin and in line with Barthes – that cinema cannot give punctum, nor does it presuppose a “beyond” or make its spectators aware of Death. In a sense, cinema is the “profane” alternative to photography.

II

One of the most intriguing points Prof. Chun made in the lecture on Wednesday was for me the claim that ethics is a question of the relationship between the self and other and NOT of knowing. Even though my position towards this assertion is ambivalent at the moment (it probably lies somewhere in a “middle” ground), I am deeply surprised by the bitter contemporary “campaign” against knowledge … in an age which is often hailed as “the Age of (largely media-generated) Information”. Despite my reservations about the Socratic tenet that to know the “good” is to be good (at the cornerstone of his ethical theory) and later developed and reconfigured during the Enlightenment, I would argue for the necessity of recognising knowledge as absolute and of “knowing” as an essential component of ethics in order to prevent all discourses (about the self, subjectivity, and others) from “ending up” in the realm of the political and/or the cultural.

III

The screenings for this week: I was particularly fascinated with the idea/presence of the narrator in both La jetee and Grizzly Man. The voice “beyond” the system of images in succession that the films presuppose is, I think, the best approximation of the “Absolute” that cinema can achieve.

IV

Does the Barthesian metaphysical theory formulated in Camera Lucida fit in the web of political and cultural theories dominant in the contemporary world? Is the “Absolute” an out-dated concept?