RE-Rereading Camera Lucida: viewing Barthes through Victor Burgin.

Through Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Burgin discusses infantilism and symbolism and concludes that Barthes's phenomenology is incompatible with Burgin's psychoanalytic and intertextual approach because Barthes denies the concept of the unconscious. (13) Only in "The Third Meaning" does Barthes draw upon the unconscious through Julia Kristeva and the concept of signifiance. Burgin clarifies Kristeva's use of signification as akin to Lacan's symbolic or Barthes's studium--both in the public realm of meaning. But signifiance for Barthes is what Kristeva deems semiotic: that which is linked to the pre-social processes of the body. It is the meaning that is forced into repression through the "speaking subject's" socialization process; "it is anterior to language and ... (dis)covered in terms of the 'primary processes' of the unconscious (metaphor and metonymy) which are in turn known only through the disturbances they create in the orders of rational discourse." (14) Understood this way, we can relate Barthes's punctum to the infantile gesture as the rudimentary articulation of the "speaking subject"--the raw expression and unrepressed gesture of the photograph's observed subject.

As I reconsidered the photo of the Hapu, I realized that both subject and object enact the infantile in the production of phenomenological implications. As a gesture of the "speaking subject," the infantile is involved in the production of the punctum. The object of a photograph, for instance, can express and evoke the "primary processes of the unconscious," leading us to the essences that escape our collective imagination. This perception allows us to understand the punctum as the photograph's true a-cultural essence, as in that intangible element Barthes sought in wanting to "be a primitive." The primary, primitive, and pre-social punctum is always what affects us with such profundity. Whether we consider it unconscious or simply personal (perhaps indebted to desire and mourning), the punctum inarguably arrives on a level that is nonlinguistic and involved with our pre-social sensibilities.

The infantile drive on the end of consumption is incorporated by its absence of linguistic communication but remains a discourse defined more by desire and force of imagination. The consumptive infantilism is driven by presumption and the desire to produce and conquer the fantasy image. In my reading of the postcard photo, its punctum is unquestionably the toddler's naked bottom, but not merely as the slight detail that arouses delight or affect. My amusement at the child's bottom is in some sense personal and in many ways contingent (as Barthes would maintain), but as a disturbance of an attempt at coherent image production, I follow Burgin through Kristeva and understand the punctum as the child's pre-social impulse. The toddler is yet outside the socialized realm in which he would repress the instinct to drop his pants at whim, and the punctum is my shock and amusement at this recognition. Yet I also see the photographer's act as infantile in its clearly egoistic desire for ethnological authority and authenticity--as an intentional image made tangible through the photograph. As an act saturated with colonial arrogance, I disdain the photographer's infantilism as much as I champion that of the child. I glorify the toddler's stance as a radical act of anti-representational rebellion, consciously turning his back to the photographer in a nonlinguistic gesture of disdain, while turning up to the posed crowd to mock the objectivity of the photographer as Operator. But on second thought, I see even in my second reading what Barthes repeatedly overlooked in his: that theory and desire aside, my understanding is still my imagination, and it is merely my intention.

NATALIE BELL is a writer and artist based in New York City.

NOTES 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 7. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Ibid., 14. 5. Ibid., 13. 6. Victor Burgin, "Rereading Camera Lucida," in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986). 7. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 42. 8. Ibid., 45. 9. Ibid., 54. 10. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 20. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. As quoted in Burgin, 80 81. 13. Ibid., 83. 14. Ibid., 84.