Note: Image, Code, and Perceptual Practices

�

In "The Photographic Message," Roland Barthes claims that a photographic image is "a message without a code," that is, a direct analogue of the reality it depicts. However, the presentation and use of photographs submits this analogon to a code. The photographic image is a denotation, but on the basis of this denotation a connotation (an ideological coding) is constructed by means of 6 discursive practices: trick effects, pose, the posing of objects, photogenia, aestheticism, and syntax. (Since every photograph transmitted through media is a connoting image subjected to the discursive and social practices of media, you might wonder under what circumstances any photographic image escapes coding, but that's as may be.)

Interestingly, Barthes suggests that the photograph becomes the site or occasion for the employment of these discursive practices (through which our shared understanding of reality is developed, spread, and maintainted), rather than that the discursive practices themselves call for the use of photographs. In other words, narrative practices don't bring about the need for photographic images, but they take advantage of the opportunity that photography presents. (This suggests that the development of the technological capacity of photography is relatively independent of the narrative practice that has come to dominate it. In fact, in a sense photography can dominate, because the photograph initiates discourse.)

What we have here is a theory attempting to explain how images have arrived at their central place in our discursive practices -- a theory of the primacy of images over discourse. Yet images have primacy not by commanding discourse, just by initiating it, by calling for a discursive response.

Let's see some typical media photos, from advertising supplements to a Sunday newspaper.

This is a small portion of a half-page from an office equipment store insert. The images of the equipment are equalized (as are the other images on the page that I don't have here, of fax and copy machines): the cordless phone, the pack of blank cds, and the scanners all look about the same size. Their equivalence in size is also supported by their equidistance in the matrix of the advertisement. Each item has its own quadrant. Another notable feature of the images is the little blue shadow underneath each item. The shadows clearly do not trace the shape of the product, but have been drawn in with computer graphics. Meanwhile, the items have no real backgrounds, no contexts. We don't see the phone or the scanner on a desk, but floating, with a fake shadow or halo.

Taken as a whole, this presentation of the images has the effect of de-objectifying the products. Their equal image sizes undermines the sense of the real sizes of the products, and also contributes to a sense of the exchangeability (another kind of equivalence). "Look: I can buy a scanner, or a phone, or cds, or a fax,...": my power as a consumer extends over them equally, they are equally available to me. More impressively, each is floating in space, each is to be purchased without entanglements - neither electrical cords, nor problems of finding room on my cluttered desktop. As they are presented, I seem to be able to bring the item to my home or office and just sort of hang the thing in empty space. The halo, if we want to take that gambit, has a ludicrous implication, but no more ludicrous than a great deal of advertising's suggestions about individual freedom, grace, or transcendence.

At a deeper level, the ad dramatizes exchange equivalence and of division into even grids - ideological metaphors for the division of labor (think cubicles and the practice of downsizing and rehiring people as contractors). That sense of the ad produces a tension: as an exchangeable part, one with no established place, floating in space, freely replaceable with any other part, what am I to do to get a grip on the situation? Perhaps I can buy my way into permanence, purchase my own purchase, if you don't mind the pun.

That's the kind of ideological naturalization that ads can accomplish: take it with a grain of salt. Barthes suggests that this kind of interpretive activity is called for by the photographic image, since this is a discursive practice of our culture. The academic interpretation I've given is the statement of the code of the culture, as suggested by the photo. But the question is, does the photo, or the discourse, establish this set of meanings? Barthes suggests it is the discourse, but then, he sets up an ideal of the photographic image as a purely denotative element in order to make this argument. However, that move does allow Barthes to open the possibility of meanings of the photographic image, even one already set in a presentation like the ad. First of all, a non-academic reader of the ad simply follows out the meaning of the dominant discourse of our culture, and sees in this ad the neutral information: "There's a rebate on cds;" "Scanners are on sale."

The following are two facing pages in a department store insert.

�

The presentation of this ad is stylized, like the office supplies, and the grid is explicitly marked. Where is the photographic image as analogon? Shall we interpret each separate image as its own analogon? Or is the entire presentation a kind of synthesized image?

Note the colors in the images of the kids. The backgrounds flow into each other continuously even while dividing each kid into a cubicle. The slate gray of cubicle D flows into C, is matched in B, and carries on in G. The blue in A zig-zags through D and E, and more weakly in H. The individual images, of the kids and of the toys and tee shirts, share common features as well. The two girls each lean to the viewer's left, an angle which is repeated in the toys in squares F and G. The two boys are each facing in directions repeated by the two toys in G. All of this is to say nothing of the grid itself as an imposed synthesizing element.

In a sense, what I'm saying is that the image's unity is in the eyes of the beholder, eyes which have already learned a social practice of organizing vision into certain shapes - shapes which themselves exploit visual capacity and good gestalt. Not just the selection and juxtaposition of images is at stake in the presentation of an ad; the ad as a whole is a composed or synthesized image, and although it can be reduced and analyzed in terms of these elements, the elements are already parts of the whole.

Not that Barthes is necessarily wrong about how discourse is called for by the image, nor about the openness of the meaning of the image (i.e., the equivocity of the discursive meanings initiated by the image). But we ignore the predetermination of what counts as an image by social practices at the peril of navively interpreting the discourse initiated by an image. The chicken-and-egg futility of debating the primacy of image or discourse can be seen in the image below.

Yes, of course Levi's are on sale. This picture reminds me of a writing exercise used by my 6th grade English teacher Miss Dorr. She would show a group of students a picture (usually a Rockwell) and have them write a story that fit the picture. What is implied in this narrative practice? Are pictures necessarily the tokens of narratives? It seems obvious that that is a narrative practice. But do narratives recall pictures? Are pictures taken or composed in order to initiate a narrative? But if they are already composed, they are already narrative.

In this case, the picture suggests to me a sexual narrative. The angles of the young woman's hips, her torso, her neck, the camera shot, the young man behind her, all connote this. Barthes would want me to claim that it is the connotation of the discourse initiated by the analogon of the photograph, and not the photograph itself. It seems more reasonable to say that the photograph is overdetermined by the narrative practice -- that this photography wouldn't exist if it weren't for the narrative practice it embodies.

Barthes places a divide between image and narrative that does not seem to fit the phenomena; the structuralist response traps us (as structuralists do) in a narrative practice, under the so-called "social control of meaning." A practice of perception takes place in looking at this image, a practice that is attends to physiognomy and approaches a world that is always already meaningful. Am I tricked into "reading" the image by an ever-present background "text," the text of my culture? Or is it possible to say that there is something expressive in a look or the angle of a neck?

That the image already means in both the connotative and denotative senses (if these can be distinguished) need not imply the subjection of image to narrative nor the initiation of narrative by the image. The meaning is in the image.

I think we engage the problem of interpretation at the wrong level if images are taken to be sites of text. Such a notion suggests to me that the perceptual meaning of experience is always subordinate to a text, and to a code. But to have assimilated a code is to have been trained not just in a narrative but also a perceptual practice. Umberto Eco made essentially the same claim in his essay on color perception, arguing that color names operate as categories not only of narrative but of the organization of perception. Since this is only relatively true (we do not fail to see hues and shades for which we have no ready names, we only fumble and tend to see and say these hues and shades as subsets of named color categories), and since it is true that cultures organize perception in one way or another, the issue is how perception is trained. Attending to the code alone, without considering perceptual acts and enactments of the code, provides half the answer at best.