Fair point. But what does? Surely more than just arbitrary preference...
Barthes
- Thread starter Diggedy Derek
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entertainment
Well-known member
There is no system for that. Which is why I would prefer approaching the text without an elaborate analytic scaffolding.
Nothing that extensive or seriously scholarly, but for a while when I was in more of autistic state, I was really focused on something like a phenomenology of knowledge, or a study of the experience of building expertise in a given area of discourse. I referred to it as nootopology, and designed an autodidactic methodology around it:
I remember this.
entertainment
Well-known member
The basic point of Barthes' semiotics is to reach an appreciation of a text which lays bare the ideological traps embedded in the language. I'm less paranoid of those and I think if you seek that degree of knowing of what goes on, you naturally flatten some of the more immediate enjoyments in reading.
I don't go by authorial intent but I also don't think it makes sense to completely disregard a shaping consciousness behind the text. I like having that contact to another human trying to reveal something about the world through a story, getting an idea of how their brain works.
I enjoy the sheer force of imagination.
I like the sharp moments of insight into a characters' consciousness. The way that layers of significance interact in their world, how thought conditions emotion and vice versa.
I also think that there is a larger feeling to reading a text, some aggragate ambient sensation that is unique to the text, which is not deconstructible.
All of that is basically absent from the reading he makes in S/Z. Barthes would maybe say that those things are naive or argue that they pressupose a hierarchically structured interpretation which priveleges the denotive level. Which it does but which I don't see anything wrong with.
entertainment
Well-known member
I'm sure though that someone could completely rinse me for these points and I would be slightly dissappointed if it didn't happen
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
luka
Well-known member
culture having never been a living vital presence. just the enigmatic relics of a vanished civilization.
culture having never been a living vital presence. just the enigmatic relics of a vanished civilization.
There he is, the gazer, the sifter.
Consumption is too definitive for him.
Amazing.
You are the distilled essence of your time. Of course you're not unique, you're literally a version. But you are such a pure version of everybody else that you are the Ideal Form. Abstract, perfect, unchanging.