Camera Lucida

 

I've just read Roland Barthes Camera Lucida.   it reminded me of a type of writing that I like - a type of writing that takes you somewhere.  He is really unpicking his personal relationship to photographs as opposed to photography. On page 51 he says -

I am a primitive child- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own. 

It was nice to pick a book up at the weekend that wasn't from a new materialist perspective and wasn't directly linked to what I felt I should be reading for my PhD, to not feel swamped or stuck in a circle that wasn't yielding much or spinning much out.

Barthes writes very complex texts sometimes - death of the author- is hard.  He writes Mythologies for the interested accidental person and then writes a treatise on Myth which although readable is academically dense.  What works in this type of writing for me are the short numbered sections each holding something that can be held onto.  The text is broken down into sets of ideas each leaping off into the world, a moment, a story, a thing. The text holds something in a way that for me many of the texts I read at the moment don't quite hold - the chunks are too big to bite off- the ideas about the material not located in anything I can feel as material.

I have an idea to write my PhD in a form of bite size chunks each chunk focusing on a material encounter.  I had this idea last week because I got to a point while in semi isolation due to the Corona virus outbreak. In this time  I managed to go through the things that were stopping me doing what I wanted to do and decided I should just have a go.  As I have been working and writing I have noticed that having an idea can sometimes be a problem as it feels good in your head but can be difficult to get down on paper, to craft.

I haven't really read many PhD's and I don't think many of them would look like what I'm thinking.  Ordinary Affect by Kathleen Stuart sort of does it . Her  the 100's  seemed to try and do this caused a bit of a stir and much mimicry had a go.  I am not sure the Dogma of a 100 words and the very loose roundabout referencing worked but the effort was noted. 

Punctum and Scars.

As I am writing this Monday Blog post ,before going out into the first day of spring I sit in a pre-troussard state and my finger in inadvertently follows the line of a scar on my leg.  It is one of very few permenant marks on my body, the scar on my back where my lump was removed, the scar on my face where I was cut by the Libyan barber, the funny second toe on my left foot I smashed on a marble floor in Greece in the late 1970's. My scars are minor but permanent.  The one on my leg I would call a cut rather than a wound but as I feel it with my finger tip I remember it was deep and I didn't look after it properly and it became infected.  I was working on the set of a play about age, Demetria and the people who used to stick back together the shredded documents of the Stasi.  It was hot sweaty work in an old office, a good place for wounds to fester.  The cut was a more wholesome experience, a trip to get some winter Kale from our long gone allotment. With my new personally engraved Sheffield made penknife. The combination of a Kale stem, harder than expected and knife sharper than anticipated resulted in an accident that happened in the blink of an eye.  The surprise of these moments always reminds me that it is impossible to go a few seconds back in time and erase something.  The cut feels temporary, the wound and the scar perhaps because they leave a mark are more temporal, they journey with us.

Barthes looks at photographs for their wounds, the thing that can never be intentional, the thing that stands out but not for reasons of meaning. He calls this the punctum of the image and likens it to a wound.  Barthes recognizes the limitations of the cut.  This cut that appears as intervention or break or position, the parting of the perceived from the lived feels more real when imagined as a wound.  A wound that includes the moment of the act of breaking the skin, the infection the healing and the scar.  The cut is something that happens, the thing that feels like it should be reversible yet it is the scar that holds the moment as it persists upon skin.  A bit like a photograph and a bit like the childs drawing that survives.  A bit, if we listen to Barthes like a death.