Roland Barthes:Thinking through Media

This article follows the twists and turns of Barthesian thinking from its emergence in response to the fast-thinking stereotypes of mass bourgeois culture in Mythologies, to its invigorating encounter with non-Western traditions of thinking in Japan, to the ethical and political implications of thinking in Barthes’s late work on the ‘pensiveness’ of photography. If thinking is inextricable from language (‘Il n’y que la pensée-mot’), it is always inflected—and constrained—in different ways by different media. Focussing on the diverse and often competing forms of cognitive investment at stake in writing, film, and photography, this article reads Barthes’s unorthodox intertwining (entrelacement) of different media as an effort to expose bourgeois culture’s ‘naturalisation’ of surface-level rhythms of attention. In this respect, Barthes’s attempts to think through media have much to tell us about our contemporary digital media environment, where excessive thinking seems more discouraged than ever before.