[lbo-talk] "An Obtuse Meaning"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 4:38 PM -0800 4/4/03, Ian Murray wrote:
>Leftists need to tap Eros

Roland Barthes writes that in addition to information and symbolism, 
an image may offer "a third meaning -- evident, erratic, obstinate," 
which holds the viewer:

*****   I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain emotion. 
Caught up in the disguise, such emotion is never sticky, it is an 
emotion which simply _designates_ what one loves, what one wants to 
defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation.  Everyone will agree, I 
think, that SME's [Sergei M. Eisenstein's] proletarian ethnography 
fragmented the length of Vakulinchuk's funeral, is constantly 
informed by something loving (using the word regardless of any 
specification as to age or sex).  Maternal, cordial, virile, 
'sympathetic' without any recourse to stereotypes, the Eisensteinian 
people is essentially _lovable_.  We savour, we love the two 
round-capped heads in image X, we enter into complicity, into an 
understanding with them.  Doubtless beauty can work as an obtuse 
meaning....But the eroticism included in the obtuse meaning (or 
rather: the eroticism which this meaning picks up) is no respector of 
the aesthetic....

A new -- rare -- practice affirmed against a majority practice (that 
of signification), obtuse meaning appears necessarily as a luxury, an 
expenditure with no exchange.  This luxury does not _yet_ belong to 
today's politics but nevertheless _already_ to tomorrow's....

(Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning: Research on Some Eisenstein 
Stills," _Image, Music, Text_, pp. 59, 62-3)   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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