Semiotic Drift

020 · Satori

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In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes returns to a problem already present in ‘The Third Meaning’: the element of an image that exceeds coded interpretation. He introduces the terms studium and punctum. The studium names the cultural field through which a photograph becomes intelligible. The punctum disturbs that field. It provokes ‘a tiny shock, a satori’.1

Barthes brings certain photographs close to haiku. Their notation is ‘undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the possibility of a rhetorical expansion’.2

Bruce Ross offers another vocabulary for the haiku moment. He defines it as ‘the conjunction of the particular and the absolute in a moment of time’. Haiku is ‘basically an epiphany’.3

In Empire of Signs, Barthes locates the force of haiku in an interruption of signification. He observes that ‘to speak of the haiku would be purely and simply to repeat it’.4 Explanation draws the haiku into metaphor, syllogism, and development. Satori becomes a ‘panic suspension of language’.5

The photograph, the obtuse meaning, and the haiku meet at the limit of commentary. In ‘The Third Meaning’, Barthes writes that the obtuse meaning, ‘if it could be described (a contradiction in terms), […] would have exactly the nature of the Japanese haiku’.6

  1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (Vintage, 2000), p. 49.↩

  2. Ibid.↩

  3. Bruce Ross, Venturing upon Dizzy Heights: Lectures and Essays on Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 82.↩

  4. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 72.↩

  5. Ibid., p. 75.↩

  6. Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’, in Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 52–68 (p. 62).↩