Sunday, November 15, 2009

Leaf Soup (November Thoughts)



Reluctantly had to go out this morning to pick up money for tomorrow's taxi and food shopping. However, as I made my way to the shops I saw how fresh and beautiful yesterday's storms had left everything. So I made a second journey with my camera and collected some ideas...

My mind was full of recent things and the crisp air always seems to encourage clear and wide-ranging thinking. So I thought of the possibilities of the trumpet for albums, in both its raw and cooked states (acoustic and electronic) following on from contact with trumpeter Amy Horvey who sent some sounds to Consemble G yesterday.

And I though of the language soup that is Semiology, as I prepared and gave a lecture on this and other topics to my first year group last Wednesday -hence the allusion to Lévi-Strauss above. Through re-contacting it through my research I've become much more interested and sympathetic towards Post-Structuralism (it was the only mode of analysis when I was an art student so I rather took against it).

It still leaves me with questions though (every pun intended).

I find inspiration in the general thrust of writers such as Barthes and Derrida as they point to the fact of writing (language) being a potential trap - and the way beyond this trap is to be playful, to constantly reinvent, to be comfortable with being decentred.

The problem I have is with the whole of language being structured through difference; intuitively I feel this is wrong or at least only part of the story. And I'm left wondering whether I am in error through my misunderstanding of difficult material or whether I'm correct and need to explore alternatives. On a day in November.

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