Barthes's Punctum
Michael Fried

And this brings us back to Barthes, for whom in Camera Lucida nothing is more imperative than somehow to evade, elide, or otherwise get round the photographer's intentions, and for whom the crucial element in the photographs that move or wound him, the punctum , is known only in and through a particular viewer's subjective experience (the punctum has no existence apart from that experience). These are literalist notions, ¹ but I think it would be hasty to identify Barthes's position in that book as literalist tout court . For one thing, that would be to overlook the oddness of some of his claims (for example, that the best way to experience the punctum of a given photograph may be to shut one's eyes and let the crucial detail rise into one's consciousness) and, for another, much more seriously, it would be to fail to do justice to the depth and pervasiveness of his antitheatrical commitments. What we find revealed in Camera Lucida is the impossibility of constructing a radically antitheatrical photographic "esthetic" (another less than ideal term but let it stand), while at the same time acknowledging more fully than any previous thinker the inherently theatrical nature of the photographic artifact, without that "esthetic" giving rise to the sorts of literalist consequences that have just been cited.²

FIGURE 7. Gerhard Richter, Reading, 1994. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Finally, the present essay as a whole raises a different sort of question, namely, the status of antitheatricalism elsewhere in Barthes's oeuvre. A thoroughgoing attempt to answer that question would have to consider at least his early writings on the theater both before and after his epochal 1954 encounter with the Berliner Ensemble and the plays and theories of Brecht (a highly ambiguous figure with respect to the issue of theatricality); the articles "Baudelaire's Theater," "Rhetoric of the Image," and "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein"; his more covert involvement with Artaud; the essay "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills" (points in which anticipate ones in Camera Lucida ); and the exhilarated pages on the bunraku puppet theater in The Empire of Signs.³ It is not to be expected, given the several intellectual peripeteias in Barthes's career, and also in view of the fact that even in Camera Lucida he remains incompletely aware of the ultimate import of key distinctions and arguments, that the story would be simple.

1My thanks to Walter Benn Michaels, who read the present essay in manuscript, for insisting on this point.

2 All this will eventually have to be understood in the context of the book on recent photography I am currently writing (see n. 14 above). Without wishing to anticipate my argument in that book, I will simply say that Barthes's hyperbolic desire to sever the (ideal) photograph from the intentions of its maker subsequently found its mirror image in the increasing use of digital techniques by ambitious photographers in order to make photographic artifacts every bit of which may be seen as potentially the manifestation of an artistic intention (or as I say earlier in this essay, as having been put there by their maker). Even more striking in this connection is Thomas Demand's signature project of making photographs in which the photographer's intentions are everywhere foregrounded by the practice of replacing his ostensible subjects (typically scenes devoid of persons where something criminal or otherwise noteworthy has taken place) with brilliantly, but not perfectly, verisimilar constructions and then photographing them.