The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Roland Barthes

  • On Photography

    A photograph isn’t thinking in motion, as writing is. A photograph is a stop sign, a red light. Our automatic pilot, built for continuous movement, starts to hallucinate. We are at the intersection of natural and unnatural.

    Of the three foundational arguments framing photography, its effects on the hopeful snapper and unwitting object, the one viewfinders might agree most persuasive is Roland Barthes “Camera Lucida,” for he preserves the physicality of perception. The other two arguments are contained in the books “On Photography,” Susan Sontag’s theoretical warning that photography is political in its power to capture, and Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media,” showing photography emerging from woodcuts. If you’d like to add a fourth chair to the discussion table, we might include the newbie Nathan Jurgenson, whose book “The Social Photo” argues photos are now pics like burps in a ballpark, adding to the communal noise that both applauds and boos.

    What is a photograph? McLuhan called it “The Brothel Without Walls” (169). In a few sentences, he opens corridors leading to distant galleries:

    “It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments in time. The TV camera does not. The continuous scanning action of the TV camera provides, not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour, the iconic profile and the transparency. Egyptian art, like primitive sculpture today [1964], provided the significant outline that had nothing to do with a moment in time. Sculpture tends toward the timeless.” 169

    What does the photograph change?

    “Awareness of the transforming power of the photo is often embodied in popular stories like the one about the admiring friend who said, ‘My, that’s a fine child you have there!’ Mother: ‘Oh, that’s nothing. You should see his photograph.’” 169

    McLuhan distinguishes between what he calls hot and cool media. Users of hot media can do other things while engaged with it, for example, dust the furniture while listening to the radio. Users of cool media are stuck, unable to do anything else while watching TV. Hot media doesn’t require full participation. Cool media does. The importance of the distinction comes from the different effects each has on the user.

    “There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, ‘high definition.’ A cartoon is ‘low definition,’ simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.” 36

    In McLuhan’s analysis, the photograph is complete; we don’t have to finish it as we do a cartoon. We don’t have to participate in a photo because it is visually “high definition” – not in terms of megapixels, but in communication density. It’s “hot” – so packed with detail – we don’t so much work to finish the picture as simply consume it – we photograph the photograph. The viewer is a passive participant.

    What do we mean when we say someone is “photogenic”? Why isn’t everyone photogenic?

    “The vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been by-passed and engulfed by new media.” 175

    Images can do a lot of damage.

    A problem might stem from thinking of photography as something more than a disappearing act, of wanting to think about pics as a creation that exceeds film, paper, or pixels, of something that must be learned to look at. Is every photo an argument? In a selfie, what is the subject and what the object? Why do snappers take so many pics of their food – an act seemingly like cats who bury their business? Is taking a photo compulsive, ritual, disposable? What is the source of that urge to take yet another sunset pic, to join a doom stream of falling flowers, of posting not simply one photo of our trip to the market, but a gallery down each aisle, the veggies, the dry goods, the deli, the dairy, the meat and fish, and even that’s not enough, but we must add a selfie at the self-service check out, the shopping cart navigating the parking lot, the loaded brown bags in the trunk.

    On the way home we catch the same stop signs, the same red lights. Someone standing on a corner waiting to cross pulls out their cell phone and appears to snap a pic of the light. The light changes. We move on.

    Photograph of child’s hand and footprints in cement.
  • Signs

    Signs

    No Vacancy Next Exit Yield Yellow
    Curves Ahead Jesus Saves 20 is Plenty
    Men Working Wrong Way Slow Down
    Beach Turnout R R Trucks Surf’s Up
    No U-Turn Warning Coming Merge
    Living Together Dinosaur Crossing
    Strong Odor Theatre No Syntax
    Call Mother Footnotes Wait Here
    Boiler Room Home Economics Pool
    Skid Row Lemonade Hardware
    Look Concrete Buy Sell Trade
    Cash for Cool Clothes Shoes Hats
    Only the Lonely Steel Plate Cars
    Dance Tonight Bingo Poker
    Yoga Beer Book Rack Comics
    Yes Short Story Masterpieces
    Happenings Falls Rounding
    Not an Exit Lemon Drops
    People Sleeping in Roadway
    Birds Icy Spots Leery Reckless
    Backstage Backstory Face Front
    1000 Ugly Christmas Sweaters
    Noises Off Flying Goat Coffee
    Trees of Mystery No Roller Skates
    Route 66 Las Vegas Barstow
    Fabulous No Standing Anytime
    Lands End Dip Advertise Here
    Mudslide Homes of Happiness
    End of the Trail No Lifeguard

  • Where we go from Greil Marcus to Humpty Dumpty

    I bought two books at the Rose City Used Book Fair last Saturday, the Li Po of the previous post, and “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music,” by Greil Marcus (1975). The Marcus is a first edition hardback in excellent condition, though it’s apparently not worth much to a book collector; I paid $5 for it. In his “Author’s Note,” Marcus says he felt an affinity for history writers who felt through their work that they belonged to a part of the struggle they wrote about, even if that struggle was long past. “Mystery Train,” Marcus says, was written from “the fall of 1972” to “the summer of 1974,” a time when the struggles of the past merged with the struggles of the present. I’ve not read it, but I’m putting it on the top of the stack. I don’t know why I didn’t read it at the time it came out. I suppose because at the time I was struggling with a few other writers, and, like Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965).

    I have read Marcus, though. I liked his “Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads” (2005), 225 pages on a single song written and recorded by Dylan in 1965. The song is on the “Highway 61 Revisited Album,” which I listen to almost every day if I’m out in the Ford, since it’s usually the only tape in the car. “Once upon a time,” the song begins, and you know you’re in for a story, and the rimshot gets your attention. Dylan said, though I can’t remember where, either in “Chronicles” or in the 60 Minutes Interview, it might have been, something like, that guy [Marcus] went a little far. Sure he did; that’s what’s so great about Greil Marcus.

    I’ve also enjoyed Marcus’s “Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects,” his Believer magazine article that began, according to Marcus in a Powell’s interview (2006), in The Village Voice “around ’86.” It moved from Salon.com to The Believer, I believe, in 2008. Anyway, I started reading it regularly in The Believer at some point, though I confess I don’t always get the contemporary references (“You never understood that it ain’t no good, you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you…,” Dylan again).

    I like the way Marcus blends culture and music, and though he probably doesn’t think about it as literature, he might be a kind of contemporary American Roland Barthes. He certainly does not think of rock lyrics as literature. In a 2002 “Online Exchange with Greil Marcus” at RockCritics.com, Marcus had this to say about his “approach”:

    “You’re right about my approach, which is a matter of affinities – what I’m drawn to – and learning to follow affinities where they lead – in other words, to trust your affinities. I have no background in poetics. The difference between poetry and ‘rock lyricism’ – if by that you mean song lyrics – is obvious and complete: except for people who think they are poets, like Paul Simon, lyrics are meant to be sung, come to life when they are performed, take their weight and muscle and ability to move from music, and true songwriters understand this. They understand that the most intricate allusive subtleties will be lost in performance, superseded by another quality altogether, and that the most impenetrable banalities can reveal infinite possibilities of thought and emotion when sung. In this sense I think the best songwriters are less afraid of words than poets can afford to be.”

    In the film version of Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments” (1987), in a scene not in the book, Jimmy, who frequently fantasizes success by interviewing himself, toward the end of the film, has his fantasy interviewer ask him what he’s learned from his time as manager of the rock band The Commitments, and he replies with a quote from Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” When asked what the lyrics mean, the particular sticking point, according to a BBC analysis, being “the light fandango,” Jimmy responds, “I’m fucked if I know” (the film faithfully captures the flood of F words that fills and overflows the pages of the book).

    Words have meaning, too much meaning, suggested Lewis Carroll. Indeed, one should not let another get one’s kicks for one, which is to say one should follow one’s own affinities. Just so, whenever I come across lyrics or poems I can’t seem to get, even after giving them the old college try, I think of Humpty Dumpty’s conversation with Alice about the meaning of things.

    “I can explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet,” Humpty says, and he helps Alice unpack the portmanteau words in “Jabberwocky.” Then later, Humpty offers this:

    “‘The piece I’m going to repeat,’ he went on without noticing her remark,’ was written entirely for your amusement.’ Alice felt that in that case she really ought to listen to it, so she sat down, and said `Thank you’ rather sadly. `In winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight – only I don’t sing it,’ he added, as an explanation. `I see you don’t,’ said Alice. `If you can see whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than most.’ Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent.”