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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