Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

I once wrote an impulsive post on Dr Mabuse on how moved I was by the film theory of the French critic André Bazin (with an unspoken implication of how tired I was of constantly encountering misread and misled Bazin-bashing). In one of the comments that followed, Scott offered a figure which I wish I had also brought up, and which I shall do so now: Roland Barthes.

There are many texts of Barthes's I can bring up which move me ("Third Meaning", "That Old Thing, Art..." were momentous) but the most inspirational is undoubtedly a slim book on photography, titled Camera Lucida. In CL, Barthes explores numerous concepts in photography, from the status of its referent, its noeme, its air, to madness (I love this one) and, of course, the well-known studium and punctum. (Small aside: Word's dictionary automatically corrects "studium" to "stadium" - not unexpected, but certainly something I had to watch out for!).

Like all his other works, Barthes's theory is not ponderous, yet profound (in the best sense of the word) and typically earnest, optimistic, humanist. Yet CL is different from all his other works, and this shift is quickly noticed in Part II of the book (which is divided into two Parts): the theory in the first Part, primarily of studium and punctum, rapidly gives way to his real motivations for studying photography, which is to grieve the passing of his mother, to "find" her again in the photographs he had of her. Yet he could not: "I never recognized her [in the photographs] except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else." His seeking became almost frantic in its perceived futility:

Straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false... Confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.

The ending of the story of Camera Lucida - whether he actually does or does not find his mother (and yes it does go one way or the other) - I shall not give away. My point is my shock at how the theory had unravelled: from the erudite depths of Part I into this patent demonstration of an almost unbearable grief. Yet it is not an unravelling of logic or sense, for Barthes remains as lucid and discerning as ever, but an unravelling of tone and predisposition - subtle yet emotional. There is a lot of theory in the book, but underpinning it all is not the bald drive of intellectual rigour as one normally assumes, but the voice of a desperate, tragic mourning. And reading Camera Lucida became more than just being moved, but transmuted into a terrible voyeurism, not into a murder scene or an illicit bedroom, but into something from which I would give anything to avert my eyes - the stricken depths of someone's heart, inconsolable and despairing.

This is theory that matters - does that make sense? It is so "easy" to propound theory dry as dust (try any film theory from the 70s) or senselessly radical (try almost anything from any period) - change for the sake of change. But this is theory that comes from life itself - no matter how private or terrible - informed by experience, laced with emotion, yet always dignified and intelligent.

In my awful upgrade exam (how quickly trauma fades!), I was given this comment: "You sound like you are trying to write another Camera Lucida." It was meant as a criticism and I acknowledge it as such, for it is rational feedback on how a thesis should be conceived, thought through and written. But on another level, in a very private corner of my heart, brazenly misconstruing the comment I also take it as a high and wonderful compliment, at which I could not help but smile, and glow a little inside.