Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness: Probing the (Im)possibility of Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why exactly do paintings and photographs affect us, despite being flat, inanimate objects? Merleau-Ponty and Barthes both attempted to answer just as much and arrived at two conflicting accounts of the ontology of image consciousness. In Merleau-Ponty’s conception, paintings offer an infinite number of hermeneutic possibilities, while in Barthes’, photographs are a “closed field of forces,” thereby making their meanings necessarily contingent and circumscribed. In an effort to identify the point of contention between the two theories, this paper first outlines Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting and contrasts it with Barthes’ theory of photography. Next, it considers both theses through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, positing that both Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of art and Barthes’ notion of the studium correspond to Sigmund Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle, while the Barthesian notion of the punctum maps onto the Freudian concept of the death drive. Finally, I argue that the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s and Barthes’ disagreement on the metaphysical status of images has to do with the possibility -- or impossibility -- of meaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".