(Said the tree: P here) My first masters (Mus.M. incomplete of course) thesis was entitled “S/A: on the Death of Socrates and Analysis.” Clearly that is ridiculously clever. But the retarded voice in my head, which is extremely retarded (did I mention?), is indicating a complete synaptic firing of a blank. S/A = an “essay,” and “to essay.” The thesis was on Erik Satie’s Mort de Socrate, the third movement, you know, with the hemlock. Which itself is around a thousand things to comment on, hence the masters level (ASP-RPG = academic single-play role-playing game). And it was analysis, but (kind of falteringly) a deconstruction of the act of music analysis. I was an angry young man, disliking the rigor of structuralist methods. Or anything else I was made to learn or was forcibly taught. But it was a kind of inversion of Roland Barthe’s S/Z: an Essay. That book is a virtuosic retelling, analysis, meta-analysis, method, meta-hodos, whatever ever, “anything you can do he can do meta” way beyond (ugh, that’s what “meta” means) what anyone else could do. Barthes was the bridge from structuralism to post-structuralism, I think. And following his writings is really a pretty decent way to follow French critical thought from the early 60s to the 80s. (The S and the Z more than anything else refer to the difference between the grapheme “s” and the /z/ sound that we make—if at all in French.)
Here a couple of things about Barthes. I love him; his work is a pleasure to read as well as dripping in meaning about a thousand times richer, more useful, reasonable, beautiful, and unambiguous (can can something be more unambiguous? That’s like driving twice as slow. Or, kind of morally or medically, smoking “natural” cigarettes is better for you health I THINK NOT! Not as disastrously terrible. But you never hear it put that way, so I mean, less ambiguous) as any Great Pretenders to drippiness. (I’d rather be a raindrop than a drip, as the song goes.) There is not a senseless moment, there is no talk about nothing, there could never be a high sin tax levied because his word order is consistent, and ~-ly “just right” (pretty left, actually) in the Goldilocks sense.
I’ll look for the original (translators are very smart people) but my French is not my Italian or Latin (where I can beat out a fairly good translation, or correct some over-zealous or determined one, in fact, in all my premature perjaculations, my shortcomings, I think I’m pretty okay at translating or editing. I took quite a subtle bashing because I have always, only when invited and with a gentle hand, corrected girlfriends’ papers, mss., whatever, and that is because I am deflecting my own writing agenda (Latin, things to be done). So I can feel good at writing well. A lot of journalistic writing that mixes units of thought (50% of this, but 0.3 of that): all that needs correcting. The Greeks and Romans had terms for Rhetorical figures, for a reason. But I did notice that my uncontorting of texts (“but, although they, often consider—only by...” non-tail-end recursing) was often ignored. It took me a while to realize quite why, especially as the issue was directly raised within that very reason. Okay, a little philosophically regressive or retrogressive. But, again, how the hoity toity in the modern sense are really the hoity toity in the old sense (the pretentious are mere fools).
) somewhere. Why should thoughts be com
This is a nice summary of one of the essays in Barthes’ slender volume Image, Music, Text. (Another such work is his Mythologies, well worth reading, say, before diving into Žižek’s exercises in Pop Culture.) It is a summary of “The Photographic Message” (from the Hill Editition, Ed. and Trans. Stephen Heath, 1977. pp.15-31) by Laurie Dickinson on the teaching website of Prof. Michael Hancher. [Retrieved from http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibld3.html on 20110124-1016.]
If more people read Barthes...
And here are two quotes I lifted straight from my copy of the Hill edition, trans. Richard Miller, 1974. I will just leave them, “we have a neither confirm nor deny policy”; and try to find the French to sea how the translation shores up.
Any text, from any book, by Barthes (not the theologian) is worth more than a casual read. More a causal one. Oh, Susan Sontag is very interesting: her collection of essays on photography, which is called On photography, go out and read it; interesting feminist critiques, and on multiple “readings” of photos. I love her tag-line for her website: “If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension to my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”
While I’m P-ing, A will [verb]: Belle and Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard” (The Life Pursuit, 2006). I must have just written about “brass rubbing” somewhere else because that is what made me think of this song. I hope they don’t mind me posting it; Stuart Murdoch is one of the great craftsmen of the English/British language. He doesn’t drink the alcohol and is a vegetarian. He is thinks he is “straight to the point of boring himself.” (I think there’s a name for that; at least he didn’t say “dead boring.”)
It is very sad that smug cleverness and certain cultivation has a longer left leg: wrongly leans right loftily. Tears me up. I just noticed that plato upside looks a little like adolf. (I think the inclusion of the backward-masked Satanic message in “Stairway to Heaven” is to draw attention to how backward Satanism is, or something. Probably something, as things are.) But there is no irony or wit to be found in the plato/hitler thing, as I am sure that, if the latter could read the former, then the latter (which was previously the former but I’m now referring to a more recent clause) would acknowledge the [other] was a role model, except for the whole race thing rather than meritocratic thing. Which leaves two final thoughts: Some people who fit themselves into the category of “merit” think that Michael Young’s 1958 essay (now a short book) is seriousness posing as satire. He he. And, lead singer of OK Damien Kulash says (taken from Wikipedia), “The great thing about the internet is it is a meritocracy and it’s free.” Makes me want to find an abacus, and two tin cans with a string connecting them. Or... I’m not reading it right.
Not much left to say.
Here a couple of things about Barthes. I love him; his work is a pleasure to read as well as dripping in meaning about a thousand times richer, more useful, reasonable, beautiful, and unambiguous (can can something be more unambiguous? That’s like driving twice as slow. Or, kind of morally or medically, smoking “natural” cigarettes is better for you health I THINK NOT! Not as disastrously terrible. But you never hear it put that way, so I mean, less ambiguous) as any Great Pretenders to drippiness. (I’d rather be a raindrop than a drip, as the song goes.) There is not a senseless moment, there is no talk about nothing, there could never be a high sin tax levied because his word order is consistent, and ~-ly “just right” (pretty left, actually) in the Goldilocks sense.
I’ll look for the original (translators are very smart people) but my French is not my Italian or Latin (where I can beat out a fairly good translation, or correct some over-zealous or determined one, in fact, in all my premature perjaculations, my shortcomings, I think I’m pretty okay at translating or editing. I took quite a subtle bashing because I have always, only when invited and with a gentle hand, corrected girlfriends’ papers, mss., whatever, and that is because I am deflecting my own writing agenda (Latin, things to be done). So I can feel good at writing well. A lot of journalistic writing that mixes units of thought (50% of this, but 0.3 of that): all that needs correcting. The Greeks and Romans had terms for Rhetorical figures, for a reason. But I did notice that my uncontorting of texts (“but, although they, often consider—only by...” non-tail-end recursing) was often ignored. It took me a while to realize quite why, especially as the issue was directly raised within that very reason. Okay, a little philosophically regressive or retrogressive. But, again, how the hoity toity in the modern sense are really the hoity toity in the old sense (the pretentious are mere fools).
) somewhere. Why should thoughts be com
This is a nice summary of one of the essays in Barthes’ slender volume Image, Music, Text. (Another such work is his Mythologies, well worth reading, say, before diving into Žižek’s exercises in Pop Culture.) It is a summary of “The Photographic Message” (from the Hill Editition, Ed. and Trans. Stephen Heath, 1977. pp.15-31) by Laurie Dickinson on the teaching website of Prof. Michael Hancher. [Retrieved from http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibld3.html on 20110124-1016.]
In this essay, Barthes sees the newspaper as “a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the title, the caption, the lay-out and... by the very name of the paper” (15). He separates the totality of the representation into two structures—the visual and the textual—which are “contiguous but not ‘homogenized’” (16), and, laying the question of textual signification to the side, focuses on elaborating “a structural analysis of the photographic message” (16) and then on projecting some methods whereby the photographic image and attendant text relate. The photograph, according to Barthes, “transmit[s]... the scene itself, the literal reality” (17); that is, it provides a “perfect analogon” of the object represented. This direct representation (the “what it is”) is the photograph’s “denoted” message. In addition, a photograph also conveys “a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it” (17, italics in original). (Paintings or other, more ‘worked,’ visual forms, on the other hand, have a second-order meaning which is the denoted or representational (first-order) meaning supplemented by the second-order style or ‘treatment’ of the image.) Barthes lays out six “connotation procedures” or processes whereby a photograph takes on a connoted meaning. These are: trick effects, pose, objects which index certain things, photogenia, aestheticism, and syntax, where photographs exist in a series. Connotation is historical or social in the sense that how an image is connoted is entirely dependent on the conventions and expectations of the society within which that image appears. In his example, an image of fire will connote very differently in a culture in which predominates a belief in hell as an actual, physical place from one in which no such belief exists.
In his discussion of the interrelation between text and image, Barthes lays out two paradigmatic forms of interaction: in the first, the “image illustrate[s] the text” and in the second, “the texts loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (26). In fact, he states, since words can’t “‘duplicate’ the image,” there is a new space of signification created “in the movement from one structure to the other [where] secondary signifieds are inevitably developed” (26).
If more people read Barthes...
And here are two quotes I lifted straight from my copy of the Hill edition, trans. Richard Miller, 1974. I will just leave them, “we have a neither confirm nor deny policy”; and try to find the French to sea how the translation shores up.
The more indeterminate the origin of the statement, the more plural the text. In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice...); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse. The best way to conceive the classical plural is then to listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths and subject from time to time to a sudden dissolve, leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one point of view to another, without warning: the writing is set up across this tonal instability (which in the modern text becomes atonality), which makes it a glistening texture of ephemeral origins. (41–42)
The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the muiltivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network—all the movements and inflections of a vast “dissolve,” which permits both overlapping and loss of messages. Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted.The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue...; they are so many fragments of something that has been already read, seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already. Referring to what has been written, i.e., to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is “lost” in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voice (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect: the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth (the hermeneutisms), the Voice of Symbol. (20–21)
Any text, from any book, by Barthes (not the theologian) is worth more than a casual read. More a causal one. Oh, Susan Sontag is very interesting: her collection of essays on photography, which is called On photography, go out and read it; interesting feminist critiques, and on multiple “readings” of photos. I love her tag-line for her website: “If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension to my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”
While I’m P-ing, A will [verb]: Belle and Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard” (The Life Pursuit, 2006). I must have just written about “brass rubbing” somewhere else because that is what made me think of this song. I hope they don’t mind me posting it; Stuart Murdoch is one of the great craftsmen of the English/British language. He doesn’t drink the alcohol and is a vegetarian. He is thinks he is “straight to the point of boring himself.” (I think there’s a name for that; at least he didn’t say “dead boring.”)
Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard
She did brass rubbings, she learned you never had to press hard
When she finished hanging out she was all alone
She decided that she better check in at home
There was an awful row between her mum and dad
They said she hadn’t done this, she hadn’t done that
If she wanted to remain inside the family home
She’d have to tow the line, she’d have to give it a go
It didn’t suit Sukie
So she took her things and left
Sukie was the kid, she liked to hang out at the art school
She didn’t enrol, but she wiped the floor with all the arseholes
She took a bijou flat with the fraternity cat
She hid inside the attic of the sculpture building
She had a slut slave and his name was Dave
She said ‘Be my photo bitch and I’ll make you rich’
He didn’t believe her but the boy revered her
He got her meals and he got her a bed
He watched behind the screen and she started to undress
He never got far
Just lookin’ and playing guitar
Autumn hanging down all the trees are draped like chandeliers
Sukie saw the beauty but she wasn’t wet behind the ears
She had an A1 body and a face to match
She didn’t have money, she didn’t have cash
With the winter coming on, and the attic cold
She had to press her nose on the refectory wall
They served steamed puddings she went without
She had to pose for life for all the scholars of art
She didn’t feel funny, she didn’t feel bad
Peeling away everything she had
She had the grace of an eel, sleek and stark
As the shadows played tricks on the girl in the dark
Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard
It is very sad that smug cleverness and certain cultivation has a longer left leg: wrongly leans right loftily. Tears me up. I just noticed that plato upside looks a little like adolf. (I think the inclusion of the backward-masked Satanic message in “Stairway to Heaven” is to draw attention to how backward Satanism is, or something. Probably something, as things are.) But there is no irony or wit to be found in the plato/hitler thing, as I am sure that, if the latter could read the former, then the latter (which was previously the former but I’m now referring to a more recent clause) would acknowledge the [other] was a role model, except for the whole race thing rather than meritocratic thing. Which leaves two final thoughts: Some people who fit themselves into the category of “merit” think that Michael Young’s 1958 essay (now a short book) is seriousness posing as satire. He he. And, lead singer of OK Damien Kulash says (taken from Wikipedia), “The great thing about the internet is it is a meritocracy and it’s free.” Makes me want to find an abacus, and two tin cans with a string connecting them. Or... I’m not reading it right.
Not much left to say.
