IN SEARCH OF THE LOST REFERENT: THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROLAND BARTHES'S APPROACH TO THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

Abstract

The article examines the transformation of Roland Barthes's approach to the photographic image through the prism of the problem of reference, the understanding of the status of which is more urgent than ever in our era of “post- truth.” Photography was a cross-cutting interest in Barth's wide range of endeavors, both in his early semiological and his late phenomenological periods. At the same time, Barth's continuing interest in photography is marked by a radical change in his position on the status of the photographic referent. The late Barth made a radical turn from his early critique of the referential illusion, the last bastion of which was photography with its claim to be a direct imprint of reality. In this article, we propose to call the late Barth's position “referential certainty,” arguing that it is an important and still not fully understood conceptual foundation for Barth's last book during his lifetime, Camera Lucida, dedicated to photography. The position of the late Barth was ahead of the intellectual program of visual and affective turns, which abandoned the radical constructivism of the linguistic model and began to remythologize reality (a notable example here is the reading of the turn within Barth undertaken by W.J.T. Mitchell, whose program we propose to call “pictorial animism”). Contrary to these readings of the late Barth, the article argues that the question of reference was central to both the early Barth the semiologist, with his Saussurean bracketing of the referent, and the late Barth the phenomenologist, who unbraces the brackets around the referent. The article suggests a way to reconcile these two opposing positions through the figure of “search,” using the example of an investigation conducted by the Bellingcat community. This introduces a procedural dimension to the static binary opposition of “referential illusion” – “referential certainty.” In the era of “post-truth”, the methodology of suspicion (critique of the “referential illusion”) practiced by the early Barth continues to provide important tools, but we need more than ever open verification procedures that will allow us to arrive at a shared “referential certainty.”