Ouphilpo

In Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the underlying problem of an assumption of being remains hidden within his phenomenology of photography. It is peculiar that he, a Frenchman, would make the faulty assumption that his body is a pure Notion of his self; or, what is perceived by an other (whether man or machine) directly correlates to the subject in its purest sense. By continuing this assumption, he thereby limits his evaluation to the realm of sense-certainty. To be is to be perceived. A healthy existentialist will quickly jump to point out that Barthes is very interested in how photography stops or frames a moment in time – the death of a particular event. However, time belongs to the realm of the intelligible, not the sensible. How, then, does Barthes expect his analysis of photography to express any amount of truth when his schema forces that: the image of the photograph can never express the subject beyond picture thinking, and the essential basis of photography, time, is fictitious insofar as it cannot be perceived?
Barthes begins, “’myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn…and ‘myself’ which is light, divided, dispersed” (Barthes 12). We see here his attempts the classic mind and body differentiation. This is very appealing to his audience of modernity, the notion of a body as a vessel or impeding to the true self, and agrees with popular modern science and research. Given that 1. His image is not his ‘self;’ and 2. His body is his image – visible, empirical; then 3. His body is not his ‘self’. However, Barthes’ central point of his analysis is “a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent” (Barthes 5). If a photograph were taken of Roland Barthes, it would thereby be a referent of Roland Barthes-an-sich¬. However, all that the photograph contains is an empirical, sensory account of Roland Barthes, and thereby objectifies the subject, leaving it up for interpretation and removing any qualities of truth from it. The photograph can never move beyond sense-certainty, and will never contain any amount of objective truth within them. The photograph is never distinguished from the referent, only because the photograph assumes and creates the referent—the moment in time.
The eidos of photography is death (Barthes 15), and death is simply time; all things die with time. For Barthes, the photograph is a mechanical recreation of a moment in the past. However, the past is merely a notion, just as surely as the future is a guess. Time belongs completely to the intelligible realm, and can thereby have no bearing in Barthes’ analysis, as it cannot be perceived; to be is to be perceived. Images, photographs, and photography in general assume time, or more accurately, create time. Running under the assumption that the photographs are objectively capturing a subject in itself, photography grabs a hold of legitimacy, and allows societies to timeline events and chronicle unfoldings, correlations of images with truth, however continually containing the underlying existential assumptions of the correlation of the empirical with the formal. This assumption deviates from the Cartesian cogito—I think therefore I am. Thinking is most certainly not an empirical action or Notion, and if Barthes’ assumption of to be is to be perceived is to remain upheld, we must disavow Descartes altogether. With Descartes, we learned that objects conform to the mind, rather then the previous assumption of the mind conforming to objects. Barthes’ analysis, while appealing to modern era values criteria for truth, is antiquated to pre-Descartes.