Roland Barthes - Relay

Reference to:

Barthes, R. (1977) "Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. 32-51.

As a follow-up, here's the other side of the 'language and image' marriage:

"The function of relay is less common (at least as far as the fixed image is concerned); it can be seen particularly in cartoons and comic strips. Here text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a complimentary relationship."

Take the image on the left as an example (I'm sorry, but it made me LOL so hard. Had to include it).

It is pretty obvious in the image what is happening, though without direction, some unusual persons could probably mis-read the image minus a caption (aka chavs).

To dumb it down for said unusual individuals, a 'macro' - or caption, in posh terms - has been added to compliment the image (or to demonstrate in lay-mans terms just exactly what is happening in the image).

For hilarity, rather than using 'proper English' to describe the content, text speak (or game speak) has been included. This makes the image immediately attractive to gamers, youngsters, geeks, (even chavs!), etc. I suppose it would probably not count as a relay example to those who do not understand the meaning behind the word represented (bless, it would probably just serve to confuse them). However, for those who do understand that 'powned' is a gamer term for being beaten quite violently by an opponent, the language directly compliments the image, thus relaying meaning between text and picture.

Before you ask, no I'm not going to include this in my essay... but it made me chuckle.

I doubt Barthes could ever have predicted his theories would one day be used to describe a Macro image...