Iwan Awaluddin Yusuf[1]

“Tidak ada pemahaman tunggal atas suatu teks”, “.. pemaknaan teks bersifat otonom merupakan inti dari kebebasan yang memberi tempat bagi siapa saja untuk bersuara”. Demikian aksioma yang sering mengemuka dalam diskusi mengenai “pembacaan” atas suatu pesan. Kehadiran konsep ini sendiri tidak dapat dilepaskan dari sumbangan pemikiran Roland Barthes, seorang intelektual yang pernah mengembara dalam alam pemikiran eksistensialis, marxis, strukturalis, hingga post-strukturalis

Pandangan Barthes terkenal dengan sifatnya yang dinamis. Berbagai pergolakan dan kematangan intelektual membuatnya tidak fanatik terhadap satu pendekatan. Pada awalnya ia dikenal dengan kecenderungan strukturalis yang melihat dunia dan realitas sebagai kategori yang tersusun ajeg dan tertata menurut sistem tertentu. Karya-karya Barthes banyak menganut pada paham arbiter (tanda) dari Ferdinand de Saussure. Sebagai ahli semiotik di era 50-an dan 60-an, ia sepaham dengan Saussure bahwa bahasa merupakan dasar untuk memahami struktur sosial dan kehidupan budaya. Namun menjelang akhir hidupnya ia cenderung masuk pada pandangan poststrukturalis yang lebih cair. Barthes memandang bahwa proses pemaknaan tidak ada pada teks, tetapi ada pada diri masing-masing pembaca. Dikatakan oleh Barthes dalam esainya The Death of The Author bahwa ketika pengarang menulis karyanya, maka sebenarnya ia (pengarang) telah mati. Ia terpisah dari teksnya. Teks tersebut menjadi bukan miliknya lagi.

Penghapusan sang pengarang dimaksudkan untuk membebaskan teks dari pengaruh pengarang. Ada jarak antara pengarang dengan teks. Ketika teks itu terlahir, maka teks tersebut sudah sepenuhnya terpisah dari pengarangnya. Ada sifat temporal yang melekat pada kehadiran teks. Kesatuan teks berada pada kondisi aslinya, bukan pada tujuan di balik pembuatan teks itu sendiri. Dalam kaitan ini, pembaca dinisbatkan sebagai bukan dirinya yang sebenarnya. Ia adalah orang yang tengah membaca teks yang entah siapa pengarangnya, seperti dalam kutipan:“…The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them lost; a text’s unity lies on its origin but its destination.

Ketika pengarang dihapuskan, pemaknaan teks menjadi bebas. Menyerahkan teks pada pengarang hanya akan membatasi kebebasan teks. Karena teks bersifat tidak terikat. Dengan kata lain, ia hanya sederetan abjad, simbol, atau tanda kosong yang tak berarti apa-apa. Teks dalam pendekatan Barthes terbuka terhadap segala kemungkinan. Konsekuensinya, pembaca teks berhadapan dengan banyak alternatif. Dan pada titik inilah tafsir monolitik menjadi cara menafsir yang tidak komprehensif karena pembaca berhadapan dengan pluralitas signifikansi.

Riwayat dan Karya

Roland Barthes lahir pada 12 November 1915 di Kota Cherbourg, Normandy. Barthes berasal dari golongan keluarga menengah Protestan yang ditinggal mati ayahnya saat ia berusia satu tahun. Ayahnya,seorang perwira angkatan laut terbunuh dalam tugas di North Sea. Sejak itu Ibunya-Enriette Barthes-, bibinya, dan neneknya mengajak pindah ke kota Bayonne, sebuah kota kecil di dekat Pantai Atlantik, sebelah barat daya Perancis. Di sana ia pertama kali mendapat pelajaran soal kebudayaan. Barthes kecil juga giat bermain musik, terutama piano dari bibinya. Ketika berumur sembilan tahun, ia pindah ke kota Paris mengikuti ibunya yang bekerja sebagai penjilid buku dengan gaji kecil.

Sepanjang tahun 1934-1947, ia menderita TBC sehingga mengharuskannya berobat ke Pyrenees. Dalam proses penyembuhan itulah Barthes banyak menghabiskan waktu dengan membaca.  Pada tahun 1962, Barthes telah memperoleh posisi di Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes sebagai dosen reguler. Di bulan Februari 1980, saat ia menyeberang jalan setelah keluar dari pertemuan makan siang dengan para politisi dan intelektual sosialis, Barthes ditabrak truk binatu di depan College de France. Empat minggu kemudian, di masa penyembuhannya, ia meninggal dunia.

Barthes adalah sosok ilmuwan yang produktif menulis. Karya-karya Barthes mencakup banyak bidang, di antaranya teori-teori semiotik, esai-esai tentang kritik sastra, sejarah, catatan perjalanan, hingga psikobiografi. Berbagai buku dan kumpulan tulisan Barthes di antaranya: A Barthes Reader, Camera Lucida, Critical Essays, The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, Elements of Semiology, The Empire of the Signs, The Fashion System, The Grain of the Voice, Image-Music-Text, Incidents, A Lover’s Discourse, Mythologies, New Critical Essays, The Pleasure of the Text, The Responsibility of Forms, The Rustle of Language, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, The Semiotic Challenge, S/Z, Writing Degree Zero, Michelet par Lui-Meme (1952),The Photogrphic Message in Barthes (1971), The Rethoric of the Image in Barthes (1975), The Third Meaning in Barthes (1977), Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), Plaisir du Texte (1973), de I’Ecriture (1952), dan yang paling kontroversial hingga melambungkan namanya; Suracine (1963). Pada buku yang disebutkan terakhir inilah Barthes menggagas sebuah pendekatan baru yang diberi nama nouvelle critique (kritik sastra baru).

gambar: www.ideesdefrance.fr

Tulisan ini dimuat di Newsletter Polysemia, Edisi 3/Tahun I, Juli  2006.

p.3

Barthes ‘wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.

p.4

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

p.5

The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look,” “See,” “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-á-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language.

A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered – from the start, and because of its status – by the way in which the object is simulated): it is not possible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do do), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or reflection.

p.6

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both.

Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. In short, the referent adheres. And this singular adherence makes it very difficult to focus on photography.

p.9

[Barthes questions:] What does my body know of photography?

p.10

It seemed to me that the Spectator’s Photograph descended essentially, so to speak, from the chemical revelation of the object [...], and that the Operator’s Photograph, on the contrary, was linked to the vision framed by the keyhole of the camera obscura.

p.14

[...] the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a microvision of death (of parenthesis) : I am truly becoming a spectre.

p.16

I see photographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking; they are only “images,” their mode of appearance is heterogeneous.

p.18

[Barthes says] it was necessary to take a look for himself [in order to explore] the impulses of an overready subjectivity,  inadequate as soon as articulated: I like / I don’t like [...]

p.20

So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in “lifelike” photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.

back to p.19

[Barthes originally calls this attraction] advenience or even adventure [saying] This picture advenes, that one doesn’t. The principle of adventure allows me to make photography exist. Conversely, without adventure, no photograph.

p.32-33

[Barthes discusses various creative photographic techniques to shock or stimulate viewers and how they are inadequate  and do not produce a punctum – much like Benjamin in A Short History... speaks disparagingly of creative photography...]

p.42

In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me (but perhaps memory sometimes would)

p.45

However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion.

This power is often metonymic.

p.47

Certain details may “prick” me. If they do not, it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally.

Perhaps, as Barthes himself points out, ‘I imagine (as this is all I can do, since I am not a photographer)’ [p.32] it is his lack of knowledge of the Operator that leads him to make assumptions about the content of a photograph and to conclude that the punctum is not something the photographer intended. (Olin) Barthes goes on to revise his statement:

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; [...] [my emphasis]

I recognise, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long ago travels in Hungary and Romania [...]

p.51

I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own.

p.53

Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite  its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum.

[...] however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accommodate a certain latency (but never any scrutiny).

Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.

p.55

Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). The photograph touches me if I withdraw from its usual blah-blah: “Technique,” “Reality,” “Reportage,” “Art,” etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

Whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.

Do I add to the image in movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram.

Yet the cinema has a power which at first glance the Photograph does not have: the screen [...] is not a frame but a hideout; the man or woman who emerges from it continues living: a “blind field” constantly doubles our partial vision.

p.57

Now, confronting millions of photographs, including those who have a good studium, I sense no blind field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond.

When we define the photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field is created (is divined) [...]

p.73

(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your stadium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.)

[...] besides how opposed I am to that scientific way of treating the family as if it were uniquely a fabric of constraints and rites: either we code it as a group of immediate allegiances or else we make it into a knot of conflicts and repressions. As if our experts cannot conceive that there are families “whose members love one another.”

p.76-77

[that-has-been]

p.81

What matters to me is not the photograph’s “life” (a purely ideological notion) but the certainty that the photographed body touches me with its own rays and not with a super-added light.

p.87

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth. The Photograph, for the first time, puts an end to this resistance: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch.

p.88

To ask whether a photograph is analogicalor coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.

p.89

In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not, however, have this completeness [...] because the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn around other views; in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor (sic) of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a spectre.

p.90

[on cinema] (what is it then? – it is, then, simply “normal,” like life). Motionless, the photograph flows back from presentation to retention.

[on the Winter Garden Photograph]

I cannot place it in a ritual (on my desk, in an album) unless, somehow, I avoid looking at it (or avoid its looking at me), deliberately disappointing its unendurable plenitude and, by my very inattention, attaching it to an entirely different class of fetishes: the icons which are kissed in the Greek churches without being seen – on their shiny glass surface.

p.91

That the Photograph is “modern,” mingled with our noisiest everyday life, does not keep it from having an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, the stasis of an arrest.

Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.

p.92

For Death must be somewhere in society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.

Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.

p.93

[on the photograph:] Not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages… Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there  is nothing left to do but throw it away.

Early societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument.

A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.

p.94

And no doubt, the astonishment of the “that-has-been” will also disappear. It has already disappeared: I am, I don’t know why, one of its last witnesses (a witness of the Inactual), and this book is its archaic trace.

In front of the only photograph in which I find my father and mother together, this couple who I know loved each other, I realize: it is love-as-treasure which is going to disappear forever; for once I am gone, no one will be able to testify as this: nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature.

p.96

This new punctum which is no longer of form, but of intensity, in Time, the lacerating emphasis on the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.

This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die.

p.97

It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the exciting world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of the generality (but not outside of any transcendence).

The reading of public photographs is always, at bottom, a private reading. This is obvious for old (“historical”) photographs, in which I read a period contemporary with my youth, or with my mother, or beyond, with my grandmother, and into which I project a troubling being, that of the lineage of which I am the final term.

p.98

But this is also true of the photographs which at first glance appear to have no link, even a metonymic one, with my existence (for instance, all journalistic photographs).

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds rather precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.

I experience the Photograph and the world in which it participates according to two regions: on one side the Images, on the other, my photographs; on one side, unconcern, shifting, noise, the inessential (even if  I am abusively deafened by it), on the other, the burning, the wounded.

(Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot – or will not – achieve the mastery of the profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it he who stands closer to the noeme of Photography)

p.99

[...] as spectator: I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I retard, in order to have time to know at last. The Photograph justifes this desire even if it does not satisfy it: I can have the fond hope of discovering truth only because Photography’s noeme is precisely that-has-been, and because I live in the illusion that it suffices to clean the surface of the image in order to accede to what is behind: to scrutinize means to turn the photograph over, to enter into the paper’s depth, to reach its other side (What is hidden is for us Westerners more “true” than what is visible).

Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance; and if I do not enlarge, if I content myself with scrutinizing, I obtain this sole knowledge, long since possessed at first glance: that this indeed has been: the turn of the screw has produced nothing.

p.102

All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental.

p.103

Likeness leaves me unsatisfied and somehow sceptical (certainly this is the sad disappointment I experience looking at the ordinary photographs of my mother – whereas the only one which has given me the splendor (sic) of her truth is precisely a lost, remote photograph, one which does not look “like” her, the photograph of a child I never knew).

p.104-105

[lineage]

p.106

[Barthes concludes] I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface.

p107-109

[The air]

p.111

One might say that the Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter; this is the abherrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of thought without thought.

p.115

Now, in the Photograph, what  I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it.

I’m currently reading Camera Lucida*,  a kind of meditation on the meaning of photography by the French philosopher Roland Barthes. It’s rather a mixed experience: one minute i’m thrilled, the next exasperated. Let’s leave that aside however; what i’d really like to talk about is a passage on page 10 where he writes:

… once i feel myself to be observed by the lens, everything changes: i constitute myself in the act of “posing”, i instantaneously make another body for myself, i transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: i feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice…

Do you recognise what he’s talking about? Maybe it made you smile? Well, for me, reading those lines was like being struck by lightning.

Instantly, i remembered how in the years before i transitioned, i would smile as brightly and as widely as possible whenever i was photographed. This was truer than ever during the years of my marriage. I beam like a sun in practically every picture taken of me in that period; i gleam ecstatically. Yet that was the beginning of the long, slow unravelling that brought me to the point where i finally understood that i had to transition. It was a time when turmoil, pain and confusion reigned inside my mind.

So why the smile? The reason is simple: i believed that if all the pictures of my life showed me to be happy, then i would have been happy – not simply seemed to have been happy, but actually been happy. It was one of those beliefs that possessed me so deeply that i wasn’t aware of its existence.

Now it shocks me: not just the power i ascribed to photography, but the thrall that i was in to images in general. It’s as though i thought that they were realer than reality itself. My life at that time was a constant parade of impersonations of the female sex: i was ‘earth mother’, ‘sophisticated lady’, ‘out and out tart’ – sometimes all in the space of an afternoon! Even after my marriage broke down i didn’t abandon the attempt. It was only after i’d exhausted every version of ‘female’ i could think of that i gave in and bowed to the inevitable.

My naive belief in appearances reflected my own inability to understand why i couldn’t be a woman. I didn’t – couldn’t – recognise that gender identity has to have its roots inside a person. I thought it could be planted on the outside and cultivated till it flowered within. It also showed how deeply ashamed i was of my own unhappiness, the misery i didn’t understand and couldn’t name. What better way to hide a big, big sorrow than with a big, big smile?

Now i smile when i’m happy – although not always and never like i did back then. I don’t do impersonations anymore.

* Camera Lucida (ISBN 978-0-099-22541-6; publisher: Vintage Classics)

Chris Orwig in his wonder-full photography book Visual Poetry says’

If there is one lesson that photography’s taught me – life is short.  I use my camera in order to extend and slow life’s time frame.  Sometimes it works and other times it gets in the way.  Either way, whatever gear you have, whatever light is available….it is good enough.  Don’t let another day pass.

Orwig makes the above statement having told the story of a student who travelled home to take photograph’s of his father.  He didn’t because he didn’t think the light was very good – and shortly after returning heard that his father had passed away.

Extending or slowing down the time frame is an example of a more general truth about new media and the digital age.  The Mp3 player, the Sky+ box, podcasting, DVDs are all about control of time-arranging time, allowing us experiences that are outside of the normal time-frame.

This ‘Eternal Moments‘ blog is my journal exploring the spirit of photography, including the idea that photography like cinema bears close similarity to what’s called the mystical experience which in shorthand might be said to be a three stage experience – 1. me and object – 2. object -  3. object and me.  This experience was caught a long time ago (8th Century) by the Chinese poet Li Po;

“The birds have vanished from the sky,

and now the last clouds slip away.

We sit alone, the mountain and I,

until only the mountain remains.”

I’ve suggested that perhaps there is no such thing as the spirit of photography – HERE Perhaps the camera is no more, and no less, than the calligrapher’s brush, or the dancer’s body in space.

Chris says; ‘ I use my camera in order to extend and slow life’s time frame.’

The moment ‘captured’ in the photographic image reminds us of the eternal now.  Whether we wallow in regret and a longing for what cannot be re-created or whether the moment simply reminds us to come back to the now, and to there rest content, depends on how egoic we are being at that time!  Tolle is a contemporary master teacher who is completely relevant to the idea of exploring how and in what ways photographic experience (photographer and viewer) is like spiritual experience – some of my favourite Tolle-isms are HERE.

Chris says, ‘….Sometimes it works and other times it gets in the way…’

What does it get in the way of – when it doesn’t work?  My answer is it gets in the way of the flow of spirit, life-force, xin in Chinese.  This includes flow in the traditional Chinese sense of chi, the interruption of which, or the diminution of which, is re-balanced via such arts as acupuncture.  It is also flow in the sense of by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept who gave us the notion that flow is   the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.   See – HERE

The timelessness of the contemplative experience has a co-equivalent in photography.  For the photographer it is the flow experience that culminates in a perfect, or sufficiently perfect, photograph.  For the viewer it is the experience of a photograph, or set of photographs, that provide the kind of experience that Li Po describes in his poem. We then have what I am sure is a highly unfashionable aesthetic theory – namely that the art experience is the mystical experience.

The spirit of photography perhaps is the spirit of being human – experienced via the photographic medium.

Is there such a thing as the spirit of photography?  Perhaps there is a spirit in the sense that the medium has a number of distinguishing and defining characteristics – some shared with painting, dance, music et – some not.

If the spirit of photography relates to the characteristics of the medium does Barthes in Camera Lucida conflate two subjects best kept apart; the workings of the human spirit and the distinguishing features of the photographic medium?

I am so glad Chris Orwig has published his wonder-full book.  I say this as has someone who has loved poetry, and the teaching of poetry, for a very long time – and as someone who has loved photography for a long time.  But I never put the two together.  It is possible that Orwig’s main contribution might well turn out to be his extending of the language of photography, and thereby extending the language of the human spirit.

I’m off to do Assignment 1!

-0-

The Visual Poetry site is HERE

The Visual Poetry FLICKr site is HERE – send in your Visual Poetry assignment photographs!

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days.   Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness.

Against the sweet insouciance of Friends, there is something terrifying about this sitcom, which is marketed in Korea under the title: “I love Friends.” As if Friends, and the friend, had already become the object of a pathetic longing. As if, even in this, we must resign ourselves to an Ersatz-friends. With a macabre instinct, someone recognized that the great joke of Seinfeld, the fake cast, had suddenly been recast as a real sitcom.  As if there were a third repetition in history, beyond tragedy and farce.

But this third brings us back to the first: the husband, an architect like Mr. Brady, tells his children how he met their mother.  The purest form of the tyranny of mythopoesis.  As if the children could, or should care.  As if the very idea that they should care, that the mystery of their birth could be reduced to an endless sequence of tawdry vignettes, were not the most terrible offence against childhood. As if the novelty of birth could be seamlessly folded into the life of the parents.

What did Oedipus and Antigone talk about during their long years of wandering?

All myth, every beginning, is perverse.  This silliest of sitcoms brings us to the brink of tragic, Dionysian knowledge. The parents who entertain their child with the story of their prehistoric misadventures demand that the child replicate their own desire for life — without having lived.  They seek nothing less than the confirmation of their own desire for life in the lifeless desire of their children.  This is the prosaic, everyday form of mythic incest. And the tyranny of desire is always this: the desire for obsolete forms of desire.

We who watch are like the children who listen.  We do not live, but we desire to live.  And we late-born theorists (we theorists after theory…) are, in this, not so different than the couch potato. (Hence the critique of television is not the least bit irrelevant for proto philosophia) We do not think, but we desire to think.  We desire the form that thinking once took in its still fresh, but wholly mythic past.  We cannot imagine happiness but in a form that is no longer possible for us. True happiness for us is whatever happiness we cannot have.

The genius of Tristram Shandy suddenly dawns on me:  the sobriety of prose begins with the parody of the myth of our own drunken birth.

I was born then, in 1966, and before this: in Weimar, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Prague, in Jena, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, and Athens. And also in places far from the cities.  Why do I then feel so melancholy as I read this book by François Cusset:  am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth. Is there greatness only in beginnings?   But hasn’t philosophy, which has created so much from a single matter, always been the next best thing.

Roland Barthes in his book  Camera Lucida (section 24 p60 (final section in Part 1) says;

“Proceeding this way from photograph to photograph (to tell the truth, all of them public ones, up to now), I had perhaps learned how my desire worked, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography.  I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonistic project could not recognize the universal.  I would have to descend deeper into myself to find the evidence of Photography, that thing which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph and which distinguishes it in his eyes from any other image.  I would have to make my recantation, my palinode. “

For me some interesting issues arise;

Proceeding this way from photograph to photograph (to tell the truth, all of them public ones, up to now), I had perhaps learned how my desire worked, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography.

Does Barthes dismiss desire too easily desire within being human?

I had to grant  that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonistic project could not recognize the universal.

The individualistic nature of pleasure may well be a poor guide in seeking the universal, but desire, longing for unitive experience may not.  Perhaps the universal is the very longing for unitive experience, rest-oration with the Whole.

I would have to descend deeper into myself to find the evidence of Photography, that thing which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph and which distinguishes it in his eyes from any other image.  I would have to make my recantation, my palinode. p60

I accept that universal truths may be revealed through such subjective activity as intense introspection.  Can we however find ‘that thing’ which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph?    (Does he mean any other kind of image e.g. a painting? – I assume so.)

My assumption is that we see what we are.

If we have a wide, deep sensibility we see beneath the studium of a photograph – into the affective, meaning-making possibilities below the surface

No raised consciousness = no interest, by viewers – in for example any of the photographs in Camera Lucida.

But surely once we leave the studium behind, once a punctum-detail has ‘electrically’ connected us to the photograph, and provided us with a unitive experience, we are in a process of meaning-making – the subjectivity of which is determined by all of the specifics that gave us our unique personal history?

Perhaps then there is no essential ’spirit of photography’ just an improving understanding of what it means to be human.  In this case it is what it is to be human when viewing photographs that move us.  Such photographs move us from a state of duality to a unitive state – through fellow-feeling, compassion and solidarity.  But there is nothing deep and spiritual about a box with a lens – the depths, and the being and becoming, are in our being and becoming human – in the world with others.

-0-

Son «opiniâtreté» n’est rien d’autre que la défense de son imaginaire.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, lexie 169

Chris Fynsk. Ferran Adrià, elBulli & l’Image en Cuisine. 2009

Chris Fynsk speaking to the European Graduate School (EGS) about the chef Ferran Adrià of the restaurant El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain and about how the cuisine relates to the thought of Jean Luc Nancy, Heidegger and the question of taste. Fynsk spoke about the Nancy’s idea of gastronomic affirmation as well as the concept of the image of art revealing itself through the distended time of the meal. Referencing Mallarme, Roland Barthes and others, Fynsk attempted to draw a sketch of the “coming forth” of food into a play of revelation and withdrawal. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS).

Chris Fynsk has been the Director of the Centre for Modern Thought as well as the head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen since 2005. He also currently holds the Maurice Blanchot Chair for Continental Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Previously he taught at SUNY Binghamton where he was co-director and founder of the Philosophy, Literature and Theory of Criticism department.

Internationally recognized as a Heidegger scholar and literary theorist, Chris Fynsk has worked extensively with Philipe Lacou-labarthe and Jean Luc Nancy as well as others over the course of his career. In his book Heidegger; Thought and Historicity (1986), Fynsk examined Heidegger’s notions of human finitude and difference, especially through an examination of the role of mitsein in Being and Time. In later works, Fynsk has taken up the idea of language (that there is language) and its relation to being. His book Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (2000) continues this engagement with language. A meditation on death and language using the texts of Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, as well as the images of Francis Bacon, Infant Figures describes “ an emergent figuration that attends a human subject’s birth to language.”

Amongst Chris Fynsk’s published works are Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy (1989), Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (1986), Politics Language and Relation: …that there is language (1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (2004).

O caminho que percorri para tentar entender (ou, ousadamente, descrever) um sentimento foi este: o registro de um instante que remete a séculos passados e que, no entanto isso não procede a uma passagem de tempo tão distante.

Abstraí aquilo que no ser amado sempre me intrigou e a reconstituição, me parece, teve ligeiros ares de obra de arte. Questionei se seria possível que uma pessoa em sua essência tivesse um caráter artístico e a resposta aparentemente não foi delimitada pela moldura como no restante dessa imagem que trago à tona.

Sempre trazemos em nossa mente referências de imagens e experiências passadas, porém cada obra de arte possui uma contemplação particular. Inquietava-me saber o porquê de eu me sentir tão irreconhecível diante do ser amado.

Sendo assim, isolei a imagem do objeto para um espaço bem distante da nossa realidade, porém bastante presente no meu imaginário. O Nu da História da Arte sempre me passou a impressão de configurar a modelo em um objeto de desejo que necessita de acolhimento, perdido diante do campo, geralmente um verde garboso. Paralisado e enjaulado para a contemplação seja no sofá convidativo, seja nas telas de computadores, o objeto ainda é presa por ação da vistosa moldura que delimita a ação da cena e parece não ceder espaço ao fora-de-campo. Isso ocorreria se a imagem continuasse latente, pois nem mesmo a moldura foi capaz de impedir que a imagem se estendesse e ganhasse mais e mais significados a partir do instante em que veio ao mundo.

Nu em pêlo, o ser amado é selvagem e sua barbárie parece ser domada através do desdobramento do real. Seriam de fato precisos tantos filtros para essa alteridade funcionar? Talvez a pureza que exista na beleza clássica e de simples contemplação seja mais direta e de fácil compreensão. Talvez quem precisasse de grilhões e enlaçamento fosse o Operator e não o referente, tranqüilo que repousa diante de um verde infindo. Afinal, se o campo dessa fotografia se estendesse existiriam limites para a possibilidade de questões? Quem sabe esta nova questão preenchesse a lacuna da minha inquietação.

Neste monólogo (a princípio), responderia a questão do início do texto imaginando que talvez o amadurecimento na relação com a arte me fez perceber o que é significativo em minha produção e em minha vida… O meu encantamento pelo ser amado é o responsável pelo brilho que o destaca do restante de toda a realidade e que me faz imaginar e imaginar questões.

16/11/09

Den frankse litteraturforskeren Roland Barthes utviklet siden teorien om at det er flere lag av viten i ord og bilde. Et stillbilde er sammensatt av mange forskjellige elementer og er ikke like avgrenset som verbalspråkets ord. Derfor har vi opp igjennom årene supplementert bildene med tekst. I film finner du tale, bilde og skrift. Reklame består ofte av et stillbilde bestående av tekst, pressebilder kommer med en forklaring under bildet og kunstbilder har en tittel. Hvorfor gjør vi dette og har det et navn?

Forankring og avløsning

I følge Barthes finnes det to typer funksjoner som verbalspråket kan ha i kombinasjon med bilder: forankring og avløsning. Avløsning betyr når teksten sier noe som ikke befinner seg i bildet, og dermed fører en ny mening til bildet og innholdet som helhet. Forankring er imidlertid kanskje den grunnleggende funksjonen, nemlig det å peke ut hvilke av bildet mangfoldige betydningsmuligheter som er tenkt å være hovedsak.

Med forankring ønsker en altså å avgrense tolkningen til seeren og dermed styre personen inn på “riktig” tolkning av bildet. I følge Jostein Gripsrud overså Barthes en vesentlig ting, at bildet også kan forankre teksten, den kan forme eller prege vår oppfatning av den i en eller annen grad og forstand.

Kildehenvisning

How do we read this photograph of the artist Alision Lapper with her son Parys?  Does Roland Barthes’ punctum-studium model help?

source

I am keeping a page as a list of responses to the seminal book Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.  I will post additions as separate posts.  Questions that are motivating this include;

What is the spirit of photography?

What can we learn from Camera Lucida – in our reading and taking of photographs?

Do your photographs help you understand your self and your life more?

What is the relationship between photographic and mystical experience?

Here is a short introduction to the ideas behind the book from WikiPedia;

Camera Lucida (in French, La Chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes’s late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the “spectrum”).

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum:studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. (WikiPedia article)

11th Nov 2009 – This is the first post on inspirations from Camera Lucida

1 The Barthes book is much more than the pair of concepts ’studium and punctum’ – but their importance cannot be ignored.  They give us a powerful, basic model with which to think about our responses in reading a photograph.

We have an overload of images everyday.  To most we are more or less indifferent – they have no point, because they have no ‘punctum’ – punctum for Barthes denotes the wounding, personally touching detail that establishes for us a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

To be moved by any work of art requires a degree of sensibility. Sensibility, the developed consciousness of the reader, is vital in the reading of a photograph or any work of art.  Most photographs deemed great are point-less for many.

2 The studium and punctum are special ways of referring to a) the apparent/evident context of a photograph and b) the emotional charge that (some) photographs have for us. The punctum is a text, or sub-text, within the con-text of the whole.

The emotional charge is not just ‘in’ the photograph.  Sometimes there is a specific object that is clearly vital, sometimes not.  The punctum as an identifiable object can vary from person to person. (Some of Barthes’ points are more those of a gay man).  And subsequent readings can shift what we see as being the punctum-object.

This photograph was instrumental in Barthes’ developing the punctum-studium mode – see HERE for an interesting discussion of Koen Wessing’s photograph and of its importance to Barthes.

I asked my wife what was the punctum for her – she said the rifle, and the nun looking in the direction of the rifle.   For me it is unquestionable the fact that the first nun is walking on regardless.

However with or without the punctum as an easily identifiable element in the construction of the photograph the punctum is wounding only to the sensibilty that can be wounded.

Cartier-Bresson spoke of the alignment of  eye, heart, eye and camera in the seeing and taking of a photograph.  The same is necessary for the reading of a photograph to provide you with an aesthetic experience.  Photographs that are mere representations or illustrations or documents rarely provide the transcendent experience that I call aesthetic.

For this writer the aesthetic is an experience identical to mystical experience.  The photograph takes you.  It takes you out of the boundaries of self. You are dissolved for a time into the timeless. There is no object and you as separate subject – only a unitive experience.

Perhaps the intensity is proportionate to the extent that head, heart and eye are attuned in experiencing the photograph?  Although, of course, great works of art are shattering.

3 The focus of meaning of Camera Lucida in English tends toward ‘mechanical device’. Source – WikiPedia

Is there a confusion between camera obscura and camera lucida in the title of Barthes’ book?  More likely

What if we literally translate La Chambre claire as clear room or room of clarity. Not just at the level of physical reality but as an inner space for experiencing (particularly) those photographs that lead to a greater understanding of our selves or of our world? To see more clearly, to gain in-sight.

Didn’t Picasso say something to the effect that he paints in order to see?  As ‘the clear room’ or ‘room of clarity’ photography becomes the means by which we can see clearly, gain insight into the world and into ourselves.

Here I’m suggesting that the experience of reading a photograph is of two kinds.  The first provides merely information about subjects that might or might not be one of our interests.

The second kind of experience, requires two elements. First there is sufficient sensibility. Secondly in the photograph there will be some element that acts like a terminal or lightning rod and causes not just high impact but deep and potentially transformative experience. The second kind of experience can ‘move the internal furniture around’ – and possibly extend the sensibility, at the centre of which is compassion. Both sensibility and a lightning-rod element in the photograph are necessary.

source

In the photograph of Alison Lapper is the punctum or is it the child’s hand, Alison’s foot, the kiss, the missing arm, the boy’s eyes that might be said to be staring into his future…… One of those or something else is the lightning rod – if we have the compassion and the sensibility.

The statue of Alison is called Alison Lapper pregnant, but it is we who are pregnant – the issue is whether we as a society can deliver ourselves of  the next higher level of consciousness.

If you don’t know of Alison’s story and the great and good public debate it generated just Google her name.

There is one good article HERE

UN AÑO MÁS, LA COMUNIDAD DE MADRID CELEBRA UNA NUEVA EDICIÓN DEL FESTIVAL DE OTOÑO CON UN CARTEL DE PRESTIGIO. Y VAN YA VEINTISÉIS. DURANTE CASI CUATRO SEMANAS PASARÁN POR LOS TEATROS DE LA COMUNIDAD FIGURAS DE LAS ARTES ESCÉNICAS COMO ROBERT LEPAGE, DANIEL VERONESE, ANGÉLICA LIDDELL, EL CIRCO DE VIETNAM LANG TOI O EL COMPOSITOR JAPONÉS RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, ENTRE OTROS MUCHOS. Por Vanessa Ramiro.

UN CARTEL HETEROGÉNEO

Fiel a su estilo, consagrado ya en la región, el festival presenta un desfile de estrellas llegadas de todas las partes del mundo que contribuyen a crear un cartel heterogéneo orientado hacia un público variado que podrá disfrutar de montajes de teatro, danza, música y circo.

Del 4 al 29 de Noviembre.

Más información en www.madrid.org/fo/2009/es/index.html

die gesellschaft ist prädestiniert für die bildung von mythen. der bildungspolitische aktionismus rund um den wiener audimax ist eine fatale entwicklung. roland barthes über den “linken” und den “rechten” mythos.

“diese unvollkommenheit, wenn ich so sagen darf, erklärt sich aus der natus der ‘linken’. so unbestimmt dieser begriff auch sein mag, die linke wird immer in bezug auf den unterdrückten, den proletarier oder kolonierten definiert. nun kann die aussage des unterdrückten nur arm, monoton und unmittelbar sein. (…) die metasprache ist ein luxus, zu der er noch keinen zugang hat. die aussage des unterdrückten bleibt real wie die des holzfällers, es ist eine transitive aussage; sie ist gewissermaßen unfähig zu lügen. die lüge ist reichtum, sie setzt ein haben voraus, wahrheiten, ersatzformen. die armut bringt arme, magere mythen hervor, oder flüchtige, oder schwerfällig indiskrete. (…) man kann sagen, dass in gewissem sinne der linke mythos immer ein künstlicher, ein konstruierter mythos ist, daher seine ungeschicklichkeit.”

das ist auch das dilemma, in dem sich der universitäre sektor zZ befindet. die gesamte aktion rund um die besetzung des audimax und die bildungspolitischen forderungen der akteure bzw. der akteursmasse ist links, deswegen ungeschickt. ungeschickt aber vor allem deswegen, weil aus einer situation heraus argumentiert wird, die so einfach nicht zutrifft: studierende in österreich sind keine unterdrückten, keine normierten wesen. hier herrschen keine griechischen, balkanesischen zuständen. studieren in wien bedeutet studieren mit sehr viel freiheit. das ungeschick ist vollbracht, die forderungen wirken überzogen, künstlich.

um den mythos aus der anderen perspektive aufzuzeigen, sehen wir uns noch zum abschluss den “rechten” mythos nach barthes an.

“der unterdrückte ist nichts, er ist nur einer einzigen aussage, der seiner emanziperung, fähig; der unterdrücker ist alles, seine aussage ist reich, vielfältig, geschmeidig und verfügt über alle möglichen grade der würde; sie besitzt die exklusivität der metasprache. der unterdrückte macht die welt, er hat nur eine aktive, transitive (politische) sprache, der unterdrücker konserviert sie, seine aussage ist allgemein, intransitiv, gestenhaft, theatralisch, es ist der mythos. die sprache des einen meint veränderung, die des anderen verewigung.”

aus: roland barthes: mythen des alltags. suhrkamp.

den mythos am schopfe - oder am barte - packen, ist nicht immer die einfachste tätigkeit (PIXELIO/mimikry)

So, it’s Thursday and I have a boatload of reading to do, but I’d much rather do other things. That has kind of been this whole week for me. Monday, I was supposed to get things done and I ended up making paper snowflakes. Tuesday, I ended up doing some work, but it was mostly cartooning my way through Greek mythology (my way of memorizing), yesterday I had the Greek quiz and then decided to call people and watch the premiere episode of V.

• Speaking of V, apparently, from what I’ve read about it, people are annoyed that it corresponds (somewhat roughly) with the universal health-care debate going on in DC at the moment and there’s been a suggestion that it’s somewhat anti-Obama. I can see the parallels, but I don’t think it’s a) intentional (the creator did acknowledge it wasn’t intentional, plus someone involved with the production bizarrely noted that it’s “just a show on at 8 about aliens,” which I find is slightly disheartening because it’s so unintellectual and unconceptual) and b) I’m not sure that the interpretation stands up when you consider that the main black guy is not only one of the aliens (promoting the world-wide health care) but is so far the only alien that’s helping humanity discover the truth about the aliens. I’m liking the fact that Firefly actors are in this show (Wash! Inara! Joss Whedon, I forever hate your decision to kill off Wash…) and that the premise is sort of BSGish, but faux-cylons and actors from other reputable sci-fi shows do not a good sci fi show make. I’ll have to see more of the show before I completely dismiss it, but so far, there are very few characters that really interest me, and I have not been impressed with the storytelling. Ironically, a lot of reviewers have been saying things like “This show has great action sequences! It’s thrilling! OMG! What a great premiere!” but to me, it sort of looks like a BSG rip-off and I’m not sure how the action is all that great in comparison to say, other action shows like 24 or even the more science-fictiony action sequences in some of Joss Whedon’s shows, like Firefly, Dollhouse and Buffy. I have to agree with the NY Times review that said ” ‘Galactica’ could be a grind, but it had complex characters who made surprising (yet believable) choices.” Not so much with V as of yet. I am still waiting for tv to get over 1. the reality show and 2. the storyline premise “THE WORLD IS ENDING, OMG!” I’m just waiting for Peter Jackson to break into TV with his Temeraire miniseries. It sounds super. But still, I want a happy, humorous sci-fi show. Is that too much to ask?!
• More theatre questions for today as well… What is the least needed/necessary to still have theatre?
• Why is introspection not allowed in the sciences, yet it appears to be all that English literature study consists of?
• When is post-modernism going to end? I hate to be grouchy, but I’m getting a bit sick of pastiche everything. I like being able to mix and match and free to do anything from any time in any style, but I’m starting to miss standards. I guess I’m still struggling with that Barthes idea that all interpretations are equally valid. I just…I can’t find a way out of that assumption, because any way that I do, I inherently exclude some kind of group or expression…but aren’t limits helpful some way? I’m not saying art has to be all about laws, but what kind of art are people really going to remember from the post-modernist period? What will be our famous works of literature and art and theatre? I think there’s got to be some kind of validity to coming up with standards. (Even if that answer is just like “Standards! Giving you challenges to work around creatively”)
• Are focus and learning mutually dependent on or exclusive from each other?
• If gender is performed, like Judith Butler points out, when is one ever not performing? (Personally I’m starting to think the answer is never/only when we are alone by ourselves?) Is there some kind of interior, essential identity to human beings? I suppose I would argue that this inner is our thoughts, while our outer/performances are actions. Is it possible to act without being encoded in some way? I’m not sure it is. How do we break free from the performance (false) vs. nonperformance (true) dichotomy?
• Why can’t I find Skittles in this province? Just saying.

Well, that’s all for now…I’m a bit tired and sort of in a disgruntled place (for no particular reason), but I’ve (as usual) got a million things to do, so I should probably do them, before I get anymore behind than I am…

Over 500 pages behind (in only a week and a half!),

Mishy

O INTRATÁVEL

O mundo submete todo empreendimento a uma alternativa; a do sucesso ou do fracasso, da vitória ou da derrota. Protesto por uma outra lógica: sou ao mesmo tempo e contraditoriamente feliz e infeliz: “conseguir” ou “fracassar” têm para mim sentidos apenas contingentes, passageiros (o que não impede que minhas dores e meus desejos sejam violentos); o que me anima surda e obstinadamente não é tático: aceito e afirmo fora do verdadeiro e do falso, fora do êxito e do malogro; estou destituído de toda finalidade, vivo conforme o acaso (a prova é que as figuras do meu discurso me vêm como lances de dados). Confrontado com a aventura (aquilo que me ocorre), não saio nem vencedor, nem vencido: sou trágico.

(Dizem-me: esse gênero de amor não é viável. Mas como avaliar a viabilidade? Por que o que é viável é um Bem? Por que durar é melhor que inflamar?)

“As cores sobrevivem pouco. A maior parte dissolve-se e desaparece. Dos pólipos, igualmente, não resta senão a base, que tomaríamos por ignorância, e, no entanto, é apenas vida condensada, solidificada.”

O Mar, Michelet 1861

primeira leva do ensaio feito no hotel.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“Fiz grandes esforços para fazer-te esquecer, ao falar de outras coisas, a carta pouco conviniente, audaciosa que eu havia escrito. Enquanto estive contigo, consegui me conter. Uma vez afastado, me senti tão mal, os dentes cerrados, o coração contraído, ou batendo com força. Fiquei de te ver amanhã, mas muito provavelmente estarei de cama. Nesse momento mesmo, tremo ainda de febre. Eu não te culpo, amiga, ah! tinhas o direito de me fazer muitas outras censuras. A que fizeste, sim, foi merecida. O violentoamor que tenho por teu corpo, assim como por tua alma, torna-me sutil, talvez äs vezes penetrante, mas sobretudo, confesso, ávido do encantador mistério de tua vida, e mais do que me caberia deixar transparecer, no inicio tão recente dessa afeição.

(…) “

Michelet de Roland Barthes

………………………… . . .Soundtrack Bjork/Bacherolette

From Roland Barthes Mythologies, a semiological study of how myth functions to “depoliticize speech”:

In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth…it establishes a blissful clarity… (269)