"As will be seen more clearly in a moment, all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of singifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction, even if this dysfunction is recuperated by society as tragic (silent, God provides no possibility of choosing between signs) or a poetic (the panic “shudder of meaning” of the ancient Greeks) game; in the cinema itself, traumatic images are bound up with an uncertainty (an anxiety) concerning the meaning of objects or attitudes."
Roland Barthes, Image ~ Music ~ Text , pg 38-39
|