"La rhétorique de l’image"

In spite of the confusion to which Barthes testifies in his employment of linguistic terms, and although the usage to which he puts these terms is in itself incoherent, "La rhétorique de l’image", first published in 1964, marks a real breakthrough in pictorial semiotics. There are some intrinsic reasons for this, for the article may well constitute the first attempt to employ a simple model permitting to fix the recurring elements of pictorial signification. Yet the importance of the work is mainly due to the influence it was to exercise on almost all later analyses, either directly, the Barthesian terms being applied as a matter of course, or by way of reaction, when the authors take pains to dissociate their approach from that of Barthes.

Since the article is concerned with a publicity picture boosting the delights of a particular brand of spaghetti, called "Panzani", it is not surprising that Barthes should have acquired a substantial following among specialist in advertising, both those intent on helping the agencies of publicity to amplify their resources of persuasion, and those devoted to a Marxist kind of ideological analysis. The socio-critical strand of the Panzani analysis gave rise to several national traditions, differently integrated with other scholarly conceptions, which have seemed to be fairly immune to later developments in semiotics, such as, in the sixties and seventies, the work of Hermann Ehmer and others in Germany, and that of Gert Z. Nordström in Sweden, as well as, much more recently, the publications by Gunthert Kress and David Hodge in Britain. However, some analysts interested in fine art, such as Louis Marin, rapidly tried to adapt the approach to the analysis of 17th century painting, and those who set out to deny the feasibility of a semiotical approach to pictorial art, such as Hubert Damisch, clearly identified the Barthesian approach with semiotics tout court.

Starting out from a few general observations, the article rapidly turns into a regular text analysis concerned with one particular photograph, defined both as to its means/ends category (publicity) and, somewhat more loosely, its channel division (magazine picture). The photograph under analysis shows samples of Panzani products, i.e. spaghetti, Italian tomato sauce and grated cheese, together with a selection of vegetables presented in a string bag, which is held up by an invisible hand outside the picture. The brand name is to be read on the Panzani products, and there is also a short text below the depiction of the string bag. Barthes first comments on the importance of the linguistic part of the message, and then, in the main part of the essay, goes on to specify a series of "connotations" supposedly appearing partly in the verbal text and partly in the picture.

It is here that Barthes (as well as in Barthes 1961) proclaims his famous paradox, according to which the picture is a message deprived of a code. The term "image" in fact alternates in the same paragraph with the more particular term "photograph", as if this were the same thing, but later on the photograph is opposed in this respect to the drawing. Yet many followers of Barthes retain the wider interpretation, using it to defend the inanalysability, or ineffability, of paintings and other works of art. Actually, neither Barthes, nor his followers makes any real attempt to analyse the picture: they are discoursing all the time on the referent, that is, on the depicted scene. Lindekens (1971) already recognised that a "rhetoric of the referent", not of the picture sign, was at stake in the Panzani article.

Another fundamental parti pris of the Panzani essay, which has left its imprint on pictorial semiotics, is the idea of no picture being able to convey information by itself or, alternatively, containing so much contradictory information that a verbal message is needed to fix (or "anchor") its meaning. No matter which interpretation we choose (and the latter one may have more support in the text), pictorial meaning is supposed to depend on linguistic meaning. Pictures certainly offer much less linguistic information than verbal texts, except in those cases in which the picture itself contains the reproduction of written messages, as is the case of the Panzani publicity; but it could be argued that the picture much better conveys another kind of information that resembles the one present in the perceptual world. Indeed, the brand name "Panzani", which Barthes discusses, is in fact, as Prieto (1975) notes, a visual-iconic sign, a part of the scene depicted. Curiously, Barthes has nothing to say about that portion of the verbal text which is not part of the scene, the slogan "Pâtes — Sauces — Parmesan à l’italienne de luxe"; and even when discussing the brand name, he in no way considers in what way it serves to "anchor" the pictorial message (cf. Sonesson 1989: 114ff).

In both the verbal part and the pictorial one, Barthes distinguishes what he calls the denoted and the connoted message. The brand name "Panzani" is said to connote "Italianity"; the picture, however, supposedly conveys the same connotation, in addition to "still-life", "abundance" (analysed into "complete meal" and "identity of commodities in their natural state and the corresponding industrial products") and "return from the market place" (implying "freshness" and "domestic preparation"). Although Barthes refers to Hjelmslev, it should be clear that these contents, with the exception of the linguistic one (see Kerbrat-Orecchini 1977:16), and "advertisement" which Barthes curiously rejects, cannot be connotations in the semiotical sense: rather they hover between stylistic connotation and implication (cf. Sonesson 1989:125ff). As Floch (1978) observes, Barthes identifies the opposition denoted vs connoted with three others: coded vs non-coded, perceptual vs cultural, literal vs symbolic. This is not quite true however: he actually takes the linguistic connotation to be less coded than its denotation, while the reverse is supposed to be the case in the picture (cf. Sonesson 1989:117f).

It has often been suggested that, when applying the categories connotation and denotation to pictures, Barthes is simply repeating Panofsky’s iconological model using other terms (cf. Floch 1978; Larsen 1976; Eco 1968). A closer comparison, however, will show the differences: since iconographical symbols are composite signs, Panofsky’s second, iconographical level remains on Barthes’ first, denotational level; and since the history of styles is located by Panofsky on the first, pre-iconographical level, it must contain Barthes’ "rhetoric", i.e. the expression plane of connotational language. Moreover, whereas the relation between the second and the third level of Barthes’ model is intrinsic and semantic, it is a relation of causality to Panofsky, serving to rely the sign to outer reality or thought (cf. Sonesson 1989,123ff). Yet, if we ignore the fact that the subject matter of iconography is formed by stories and allegories, and that the sources of interpretation should be literary (cf. Kaemmerling 1979:485ff), we might want to argue that many of Barthes’ examples fit much better in with Panofsky’s model than with the concepts which Barthes takes over from Hjelmslev.

Göran Sonesson

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See also:

Adverstising, Connotation/Denotation, Icon, Iconicity, Iconology, Image/picture, Picture (perception of), Visual semiotics