Dear John,
Glad you answered. I was hoping you hadn't found my last posting too
cheeky.
I don't have a problem with Barthes' suggestion of a multiplicity of texts
rather than a multiplicity of arts. Or rather, I wouldn't if I thought
that text was necessarily the best model. I think that problem is behind
some of what I was saying last time, in a couple of ways. Within art, I
wonder if the text doesn't limit with its directed linearity. Within
experience in general, it's the implied intentionality that I object to in
reading all of the readable as language. Is language simply an ordering
process of the cognitive, with no necessary extension beyond the
individual? Again, if so, how useful is it to use the word when it also
refers to a communicative process? Then whatever word you want to use, I
often need to distinguish between those meanings.
I should also say that I'm deeply involved in textual experience,
intentionally. And that I recognise the linearity of time, and that the
mind can construct the synchronic out of diachronically received
information. I keep thinking of the amino-acid chains of the body, ordered
CCG GCA AAG GTT and so on in very long sequences. Where pattern recurs in
these, you can plot three-dimensional forms, the chains folding on each
other to make specific proteins, encode genetic information. I asked
someone once, why it was all in one big long line, and he said, So that
the body can read it. OK. That accounts for one feature, but the
conformation sites, the activity between cells, etc all function
differently. Umberto Eco gave a paper on being posed the question of
whether this system of signs resembled language, to which his answer was
decidedly not, because of the constructed and agreed aspects of language,
ie culture. Actually he refused the use of the word signs.
I don't know what happens to all this if you throw Schrodinger's cat into
the bag. Will maybe go out for milk with that one.
Fiona
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