Cultural message into mass image…
Given that what is in question is not a ‘naïve’ analysis but a structural description, the order of the messages, the first is in some sort imprinted on the second: the literal message appears as the support of the ‘symbolic’ message.
What is the signifying structure of ‘illustration’? Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?
This is without doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.
Even when the signifier seems to extend over the whole image, it is nonetheless a sign separated from the others: the ‘composition’ carries an aesthetic signified, in much the same way as intonation although suprasegmental is a separate signifier in language. Thus we are here dealing with a normal system whose signs are drawn from a cultural code (even if the linking together of the elements of the sign appears more or less analogical).
- Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, Image, Music, Text
