From Work to Text

This essay extends the notion of 'the death of the author' to an analysis of forms. The Work is the physical product, the Text comes after the consumption of the Work, where the ideas can live on and mutate. It's almost cliche now to look at an artwork and talk about 'the text that surrounds it', but this idea is relatively new, and represents for many a transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism.

In this essay Barthes brings up 7 points that can be briefly summarized;

1)     Method: Work is a thing, Text is a discourse

2)     Genre: Work often identifies as genre, Text transcends genre

3)      The Sign: Work = moderately symbolic, Text = radically symbolic

4)      The Plurality: Work is often singular and always finite, Text is infinite

5)       Filiation: Work has an author, the Text extends beyond the author

6)      Reading: the Work is consumed, the Text keeps giving

      7)    Pleasure: Work = fascination/delight, Text = Utopian Pleasure

What we learn here is that what we mostly get from a cultural product isn't something that's extracted from it, but rather an entity that becomes quite independent of the original thing itself.

Everything we've looked at this term is pretty well summarized in three videos by the rather brilliant and accessible Tom Nicholas

 

 

Barthes' Musica Practica

Beethoven quickly becomes a focus of this essay. What was written here seems to evoke his 9th Symphony, created at the end of his life. Music which today can become invisible because of its pre-recorded familiarity, or revelatory in its creation of soul-stirring vibrations.

This doc is a bit cheezy but still a rather moving chronicle of the present day life of this 200 year old piece;

"That because Beethoven was freed {by deafness? maybe} to explore deep within his own nature, he was able to create works that would have a future." And, he most definitely did.

"The truth is perhaps that Beethoven's music has in it
something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the
exact locality), and this brings us to the second Beethoven."- pg.152

It may be important here to think of Barthes as a student of Phenomenology, having an interest in the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Through Beethoven he may be waxing on the complexity of experience that music, and all other art forms, can stir up.

 

The Death of the Author

"The Death of the Author" by (author) Roland Barthes may be one of the most influential works of theory to date, as well as a rather poetic musing on creators and their influences. Reflecting on this in the present day one can't help but see it implying how creative work can be effectively created via artificial intelligence. Here's a video explaining the basics of this essay...

 

 Here's one that's digs a bit deeper and shows how Barthes appropriated concepts from writings that preceded his by decades, in the spirit of the essay itsself...

 

The most provocative concept in this essay is contained in the final sentence "...the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." suggesting the overlooked contribution of the reader in the functionality and meaning of an artwork (as understood in 19freaking67!!!). This awareness may be the key to effectively reaching an audience in the 21st century.

Photography's Mythic Objectivity

Panzani Advertisement from Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image.

 

Notes on Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image:

How images contain signifiers beyond pure representation.

 

Signs within the image (disregarding text)…

1) Narrative created by bag spilling onto ‘table’.

2) The colors of Italian flag create Italianocity.

3) Still Life genre…items are composed.

The photograph is a ‘message without a code’ so these signifiers are subjective.

 

Linguistic messages…

1) Brand name Panzani creates Italianocity. (repeated on carefully placed labels).

2) Most of the text here is simply the word associated with the depicted.

3) “A L’ITALIENNE DE LUXE” ...convenience with prestige? Truth?

The denoted message supports the connotated message.

 

Is an image always accompanied by a linguistic message…title, caption, text, dialog? What about image classifications that anchor images…found, random, surveillance, etc?

 

Although a photograph is a message without a code a drawing is a coded message, with it's visual abstraction guided by conventions of contour, linework, shading, perspective, etc.

 

Nature seems to spontaneously produce the scene in a photograph…masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

 

Rhetoric of the image…how are the signified of connotation to be named? (Italianocity)

“…the discontinuous world of symbols plagues the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence.”

Disclaimer; This is a mash-up of my notes from this essay and may not reflect the author's intent.

This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967) - The Movie

 

Printing your 11x14

 This can be done right in the print dialogue using similar tools but can be done more accurately in photoshop as follows;

 1) Go to image (at the very top) > image size

 2)  Work with your longest dimension. Leave at least a 1 inch margin on each side. This will be 14 inches wide after we resize the canvas, so we’ll select 12 inches as the width. The height will automatically resize. Set the resolution at 350 DPI. Click OK

  

 

 3)    Go to image > canvas size. Set the width at 14 inches and the height at 11. Leave the anchor in the middle. White is the most conventional extension color. Click OK

 

 

 

This is what your framed image will look like;

 

 

 

Below is what you get with 'scale to fit media'. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

 

Kraftwerk

 Here's a great doc mapping the influence of Kraftwerk...