020 · Satori

10 Jul, 2026

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In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes develops some of the precepts established in his essay ‘The Third Meaning’ concerning image analysis. He introduces the terms studium and punctum. The studium refers to the first two meanings: denotative and connotative. It is the structural reading of the image. The punctum is the obtuse third meaning that provokes ’a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void.’¹

A literal translation of satori from the Japanese is ‘awakening’. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘sudden enlightenment’. Bruce Ross draws parallels between Japanese poetics and moments of awakening and enlightenment, insisting that the brevity of haiku embodies this moment of heightened awareness. Ross defines the haiku moment as an ‘epiphany’² and argues that haiku ‘reflects a special case of temporality, a special union of the particular and absolute in a moment of time.’³

In Empire of Signs, Barthes documents his observations while travelling in Japan. He observes that ‘to speak of the haiku would be purely and simply to repeat it.’⁴ This is the approach of the studium: the structural approach that merely reflects what is already evident and codified, and perhaps easily discernible through appropriate structural schematics. The satori tries to resist the formalist reading. It is a ‘panic suspension of language.’⁵ In ‘The Third Meaning’, Barthes admits that ‘if it could be described (a contradiction in terms), it would have exactly the nature of the Japanese Haiku.’⁶