Derived investment value : Investment growth formula.

Are there other messages without a code? At first sight yes : precisely the whole range of analogical reproductions of reality — drawings, paintings, cinema, theatre. In fact, however, each of these messages develops in an immediate and obvious way a supplementary message, in addition to analogical content itself (scene, object, landscape), which is what is commonly called the style of the reproduction ; second meaning, whose signifier is a certain "treatment" of the image (result of the action of the creator) and whose signified, whether aesthetic or ideological, refers to a certain "culture" of the society receiving the message. In short, all these "imitative" arts comprise two messages : a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it. This duality is of messages is evident in all reproductions other than photographic ones : there is no drawing, no matter how exact, whose very exactitude is not turned into a style (the style of "verism") ; no filmed scene whose objectivity is not finally read as the very sign of objectivity. Here again, the study of these connoted messages has still to be carried out ; one can only anticipate that for all these imitative arts – when common – the code of the connoted system is very likely constituted by a universal symbolic order or by a period rhetoric, in short by a stock of stereotypes (schemes, colours, graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of elements). — When we come to the photograph, however, we find in principle nothing of the kind, at any rate as regards the press photograph (which is never an "artistic" photograph). The photograph professing to be a mechanical analogue of reality, its first-order message in some sort completely fills its substance and leaves no place for the development of a second-order message. Of all structures of information, the photograph appears as the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a "denoted" message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence. In front of a photograph, the feeling of "denotation", or if one prefers, of analogical plenitude, is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible ; to describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or second-order message derived from a code which is that of language and constituting in relation to the photographic analogue, however much care one takes to be exact, a connotation : to describe is thus not simply to be imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to signify something different to what is shown. — The photographic paradox can be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the "art", or treatment, or the "writing", or the rhetoric, of the photograph) ; structuraly, the paradox is clearly not the collusion of a denoted message and a connoted message (which is the – probably inevitable – status of all forms of mass communication), it is that here the connoted (or coded) message develops on the basis of a message without a code. This structural paradox coincides with an ethical paradox : when one wants to be "neutral", "objective", one strives to copy reality meticulously, as though the analogical were a factor of resistence against the investment of values (such at least is the defenition of aesthetic "realism") ; how then can the photograph be at once "objective" and "invested", natural and cultural? It is through an understanding of the mode of imbrication of denoted and connoted messages that it may one day be possible to reply to that question. — Roland Barthes / The Photographic Message / Image, Music, Text / Flamingo — Fontana Paperbacks

BC Studio 3:
Accelerating Customer Success with SAP and the Ecosystem

This session will highlight how SAP and its ecosystem is helping customers lower TCO and achieve value quickly. New packaged offerings such as RDS, more emphasis on regional expertise and industry specificity are all special efforts SAP and its partners are focusing on to better enable customers to derive more value from their SAP investment.