“sexed subjectivity”

Thinking about subjectivity and how it comes about. Thought of as a product, and effect(?), of objects – of Marxian commodities, the actual results of this consumptive rumination on sexuality. Thinking a lot about this and the relation between image and text that is being investigated in Wei Weng’s Antimapping project.

There are narrative fragments but there is no linear coherence. We are encouraged to read vertically, through association, across the relations of text to image, along the terms of the primary processes of condensation and displacement. No longer consumers at the margin of a finished work, we are drawn onto the site and onto the process of meaning itself. In this process our sexed subjectivity and its pleasures in representation are also implicated, and indeed become the subject matter of the work. [a discussion of the films of Victor Burgin]

  • TICKNER, Lisa (1984). Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists. In: ed. Preziosi, Donald, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p.364.

Writing as value

I’ve now finished reading the selection of Roland Barthes’ essays published under the title Image, Music, Text. From these I can see how Barthes’ writings straddled both Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, in that they very strongly reveal systems at play in texts, while adding a definite historical context and contingency to those readings.

There were a couple of things which interested me that I’d like to write about. First I wanted to take a quick look at the last text in the book: Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers (Barthes, 1971, pp. 190–215), in which he lays out the distinct roles that these take in relation to the social production and activity of the Text.

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