The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lovers’ discourse is today of a lingering patriarchy. This discourse is experienced, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is reproduced and naturalized in Hollywood films, in romance novels, in magazines, in self-help books. Once a discourse is thus driven from its own momentum into the backwater of the static and unchanging, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of a reconstruction. That reconstruction is, in short, the subject of the book which begins here . . .
How this book is constructed
Everything follows from this principle: that love is not to be reduced to a one-sided action, but rather a relationship constituted by the actions of two people—two lovers. The description of the lovers’ discourse has been replaced by its visual simulation, and to that discourse has been restored to the fundamental unit, the we, in order to stage a scene, not an analysis. What is proposed, then, is a portrait—but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the sight of two lovers interacting equally.
1. Gender
The fragments of discourse offered here, unlike in Barthes’ text, are primarily visual. The book uses, edits, adapts, and adds to Barthes’ terms while defining them in a new way: both through visual media and as an interaction between two lovers, not a lover and a lovee. The “lovee,” rather than the poetic beloved, is just the receiver of the lover’s thoughts and actions. Like Wendy Ewald’s American Alphabets, which uses images to define different languages within an American context, this project uses images to redefine the discourse of love.
Barthes suggests that, “A figure [a piece of discourse] is established if at least someone can say: ‘That’s so true! I recognize that scene of language.’” However, within Barthes’ text, there is only the lone lover, based primarily on the sorrowful Werther, who can recognize himself. It is the project of this book to create a template for a reciprocal and equal love—Werther’s wish for himself and Charlotte if not their reality.
The use, then, of images is not insignificant to this point: in a photograph, the “we” depicted can be situated in a way that they can be equal, even if not the same. The intention is that the viewer is free to identify with either party—active or passive, if the lovers are both or either of those things—whereas Barthes’ language only leaves room to identify with the active, masculinized lover. Lawrence D. Kritzman’s essay “Roland Barthes: The Discourse of Desire and the Question of Gender” may suggest that Barthes searches for a “neuter” subject by constantly switching between the masculine and the feminine, but it is the reproduction of the binary—active and passive—that locks him into a man/woman dichotomy. As John Berger so succinctly sums up the active and passive roles of men and women in visual culture: “men act and women appear.”
Although Luce Irigaray declares that the word is somehow more appropriate than music or painting “because it would escape the objectality of a thing,” the image escapes the problem of the implied male subject (I[he] or the erasure of ils, the French masculine plural equivalent to they[he]). The phrase “I love you,” which she transforms to “I love to you” (“J’aime à toi”) changing the passive, feminine you from an object into another subject, is transformed into a chorus of “I love you,” “I love to you,” “We love each other,” “We are in love,” and so on—both parties are implicated in the act of loving; both, either, or neither can be the “I” for different people, at different moments of viewing, in different contexts.
It is Barthes’ own suggestion that the figures of love can be articulated as moments where readers, or in this case viewers, see themselves that points out the constructiveness of love—made up of figures as one might imagine the components in paint-by-numbers—and opens up the possibility of reconstructing love. In her book All About Love, bell hooks discusses the way that love is depicted as something that just happens, typified by the expression “falling in love,” and how, automatically, “even in non-heterosexual relationships, the paradigms of leader and follower often prevail, with one person assuming the role deemed feminine and another the designated masculine role.” hooks, like Irigaray, suggests we change our language, yet the book itself fails to create that new language and is steeped in old romantic notions of true love. With these images, I would like to dismantle the active-passive paradigm present in romantic relationships and instead suggest a space where lovers act reciprocally.
2. Media
“Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the ‘sign,’ or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be leveled into a ‘history of images’ nor elevated into a ‘history of art,’ but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.”
The visual not only gives a presence to the “lovee,” but also acts as an investigation into Barthes’ other work about the photographic image and text. When Barthes discusses the news photograph, he suggests that text, in the guise of captions, “quicken” the text or make meaning appear more readily within the photograph. This project does the opposite: it uses Barthes’ terms and explains them with the accompanying image. The image serves as an elaboration or elucidation of the abstracted word. The term, however, does not close down the meaning of the image in the way that a caption might; it evokes from the image, but does not simplify it. The single word cannot function as an explanation or an encapsulation of the image; instead, a space for the on-going interplay between the word and the image is opened.
When image and word are paired, like the way two lovers pair, the two do not function in the same way. The term was occasionally irreconcilable to an image, it was within a discourse divorced from the visual. The image, however, always seemed to lend itself to some kind of descriptor, but a term would never fully capture the image. As Mitchell suggests, “The picture wants equal rights with language, not to be turned into language”; like lovers, the word and the image work equally to create each figure (or, perhaps in the case of a word without an image, the impossibility of the figure), even if not in the same fashion. The relationships between the images and the words are not static. Like lovers, the way they combine differs in every coupling, but in each case both elements act.
The relationship forged by the image and the term is dynamic, the viewer is encouraged to work out the meaning of the figure through the interaction of both elements. Although Barthes suggests that each photograph is a death in Camera Lucida, the pages of this book are marked more by revitalization. He suggests it himself: “[The photograph] animates me: this is what creates every adventure.” If there is a death created in every photo, it is the act of viewing that brings it back to life (as well as, if successful, the photo bringing the viewer to life). This is the bridge between “there-then” and the “here-now”: the reanimation of the photograph. Perhaps this is what Barthes connects to the idea of the “third meaning” of the photograph that he cannot pin down: “Is that all? No, for I am still held by the image. I read, I receive (and probably even first and foremost) a third meaning—evident, erratic, obstinate.” The life of the photograph is what captures us, such as the power of Barthes’ Winter Garden photo. In Barthes’ search for a photograph that truly captures his mother, he finds the Winter Garden photo: a picture of her as a child. The “truth” of that photo and the power it has on Barthes is not the death of his mother, a reality of which he is painfully aware, but his ability to see her alive again within the moment of the photograph.
The photographs that compose this book, likewise, bring to life the moments of love. The viewer is invited to inhabit these scenes and allow the scenes to play out. The interaction of the lovers, of the image and the text, and the viewer and the page are all instances of life, not death.
