TYG - Barthes

My brain hurts.

And I am liable to go off into a rant about how frustrating and stupid this all seems, so bear with me. I am only able to continue with this assignment because during our first class Dr.Not.Rog. said something like "if you just do the readings and stick with it, something will 'click' about half-way through the class and understanding will come." I don't really believe it, but I will take it on face value and continue; maybe I have a masochistic bent, I don't know, but I do need the course.

So, why am I writing about what Roland Barthes had to say in "The Pleasures of the Text" instead of one of our other illustrious authors? Probably because his opening paragraph describing the "intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing" grabs my attention and actually gave me some idea of what he was trying to say: meaning lies between the lines.

I understand that picture much better than Saussure's sparse diagrams and redefinitions of words -- I learn best visually and hands-on -- and Macherey's discussions about recognizing "the area of shadow in or around the work" and "the silence that is doing the speaking" were almost understandable; I can relate these concepts to a piece of art in which the white space is at least as important as line and use (or not-use) of color.

The fog is still quite thick all around me, but I see occasional glimpses of light and form: subtlety is almost essential in poetry, and those things in dialog that are left unsaid paint at least as much of a picture of the characters as do the words they "speak." Perhaps there is meaning behind all the static; I'll keep watching the screen.

And I still want to hack up the vast hairball of most of what postmodernism (-ity?) appears to be selling. First, I object to unnecessary jargon and gravitate to simple explanations. The concepts behind Shaker furniture have always seemed near-perfect to me; I eschew the rococo. And these PM philosophers appear to glean far too much pleasure from the obscurity of their snake-oil recipes -- like Macbeth's witches, they seem to all be parading around the monstrous PM cauldron, each tossing in their own various poisons.

Mmmm. Tasty.