All Things Must Pass

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It's a very curious thing that my patchy attempt to refute the central thesis of Roland Barthes' essay 'Rhetoric of the Image' [blog posts passim] should still haunt my thoughts to this day, forty-four years after I wrote my final year dissertation on the subject. At the time - very pre-internet - very few outside of a fairly small academic circle were taxed by Structuralism and Semiology, or the essay in question itself, though widely published since the 1960's. Now, YouTube is awash with analyses of the document - which can only be a good thing - college lecturers and Grad students alike throwing their hats into the ring.

I started watching an online lecture by Timothy McGee, posted I assume for his students (as I don't know of him, I can't say for definite). Interestingly, although I've re-read Barthes' essay several times in recent years, it was only in McGee's structuring of his analysis and its telling that I started to remember the thought processes that sparked my attempt to debunk Barthes' notion of the photograph as a message without a code - I don't have a copy of what I wrote for two reasons: the entire piece was written in three days and was only partly typed up - the rest was handwritten - and as student at a UK art college at the time, no formal arrangements were made for the storage and retrieval of submitted theses.

Now, I'm starting to reconstruct my thought processes from the time, and will maybe try once again to get a proper, finished and updated essay together on just why I thought then and think now that the great Roland Barthes got his analysis so wrong in the first place. Caveat, no spoiler: there is one apparently self-contradictory assertion in his original essay which I think actually brings us to where we are today, over four decades after his death, and which presages the age of the digital image. Keep you posted if and when I make any progress...

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