A Message Without a Code

The photographic paradox is said to be that of a message without a code, a communication lacking a relay or gap essential to the process of communication. Tracing the recurrence of Barthes's definition in the essays included in Image/Music/Text and in La Chambre claire, this paper argues that Barthes's definition is platonic in its will to dematerialize the troubling — graphic — immediacy of the photograph. He writes of the image in order to flee its signature. As a function of media, his categories are written in order to be insufficient and inadequate; to maintain an ineluctable difference between language heard and letters seen; to protect an idiom of loss which the photograph disallows. The article studies the strategies of his definition in «The Photographic Paradox» as instrument of abstraction, opposes the notion of code, in an aural sense, to audiovisual markers of closed relay in advertising, and critiques the layout and order of La Chambre claire in respect to Barthes's ideology of absence. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol5/iss2/4 A MESSAGE WITHOUT A CODE? TOM CONLEY University of Minnesota Barthes's essays on the photographic message and the rhetoric of the image resurfaced in America in 1977, in the collection of translations by Stephen Heath entitled Image/Music/Text. They show us how powerful linguistic theory can be when mapped onto the organs of major media. Barthes had long ago specified how rhetorical strategies of advertising naturalize objects, how they charge things with symbolic meaning and motivate them as an absence a buying public must fill-desperately-in primal scenes of purchase. As early as the publication of Mythologies in 1957, Barthes concludes that if publicity could eroticize everyday life with a death drive, it would force masses to consume endlessly. Along with Sartre, Barthes was one of very few intellectuals lucid enough to locate the nauseating mimesis we live when we buy collective pictures of ourselves in magazines. In jubilant moments we might call that identification an element of communication. But after reading Barthes, we see them more generally as purveying narcissism. Long before Wilson Key's studies of advertising-studies that generally promote the modes of media exploitation in their very manner of critique, Barthes provides a sound theory for their decipherment. Yet one of his definitions remains so problematic that it can be seen less as a form of truth, a conclusion, or a code to be withdrawn from Image/Music/Text than an effect of his effect, that is, of gloss and sepia at the center of all his writing. We must ascertain exactly where the photograph encloses itself viciously in the circularity of the media he sets out to categorize. It occludes us from the clear timber of the Racinean voice that seems to motivate the Mythologies and contributions to Communication. Nowhere does Barthes better accede to the platitude of violence than in his 147 1 Conley: A Message Without a Code? Published by New Prairie Press 148 STCL, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring, 1981) definition of the photograph as a message without a code. Message without a code defines the media in their own tradition of the slogan. For while Barthes tenders the definition at the onset of «The Photographic Message» to determine later that no photograph of that sort can exist, the initial description remains pure, ideal, of another world. If only the photograph were a message without a code; without relay, the photograph would conflate all difference in exact duplication of the world. Yet, since no picture can copyright its image either so perfectly, or naively as in its own impossibility, the pictural slogan assumes that perfection. So, like a self-enclosing figure that turns about and within itself in a circular symmetry, the definition incites the reader to throw it away...and buy another. A fabulous alterity that categorizes what the photograph can never be-that is, a mechanism devoid of relay-supplants the image to become, by definition, an image-or definition-of itself. In the case of a newspaper title, we recall that the headline serves to provoke the eye, to tell of things catastrophically violent in their purity. Mythic thought at its best, or ideology, the headline or lead photo is the soul of a newspaper, while the text is its body. The higher the case or the greater the point size, the more potent the dose of truth. In the caption this will to apocalypse generates the vicious turbulence of circularity by evoking a pristine state that would allow no caudal difference. Alterity and platitude arouse the reader who sees either the image or the text (or both) in a unity that displaces their difference. For if a code can, on occasion, represent a syntactical gap, it is more generally an erotic delay. A strand of hair, a stain, a mole, a nipple, a bulge, a rift, a crease, a line between cloth and flesh, a printed mark, a displaced letter, a code always enframes itself. Without a mark, the slogan or caption marks a non-mark; that is, it persists in placing an absence within a marker that had displaced itself in the act of marking. A codeless message would be a borderless, frameless photograph. In effect the only analogy to Barthes's might be in the acronym Kodak, the trade-mark George Eastman coined to naturalize the photographic apparatus at the moment of its birth in mass production. A palinym of sorts, we see in Kodak a code that sets the clicking noise-in the grapheme -ak-of its own cliche in the final syllable; the word all but closes upon itself to play in its own symmetry. Kodak encodes the messages of itself in the uncanny border of K, holding the sound of its message in its shape. The fabulous con2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 5, Iss. 2 [1981], Art. 4 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol5/iss2/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1102