Cartography of the Mind (Part 17 of 17)

The following are excerpts of an illuminated book sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

while itself being a more elaborately formulated series of hypotheses—not a definitive account, but a Note sur la photographie, as the French edition was modestly (and confidently) subtitled. Barthes’s preferred way of presenting his hypotheses was in the form of linked aphorisms, and, as Susan Sontag noted, “it is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding.” The paradox, then, is that this man who liked first words (and adored paradoxes) offered his provisional findings as if they were the last word. Needless to say, this last word was always susceptible to further elaboration and refinement, to further beginnings. This is how Barthes’s prose acquires its signature style of compression and flow, a summing up that is also a perpetual setting forth.

- excerpted from Cameras are Clocks for Seeing by Geoff Dyer, The Believer