Nudawn: “Reading is fun-dimental. A photographic series inspired by mills and the characters of the tumblrvers.”
Embarrassingly, I’ve never read any Baudrillard (another instance in which Langer is my superior), although I come across him fairly regularly. I was pleased to see this, however, as I’m rereading Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos at the moment and he expends considerable effort explaining his theory of semiotics as it relates to the crises of the self.
Both Baudrillard and Percy derive much of their work, as do all semioticians, from the efforts of Ferdinand de Saussure, the subject of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs (which I’ve mentioned before).
Percy’s discussions of semiotics have always seemed to me among the soundest and sanest explanations for the irreducible restlessness of the self, if such an explanation is even possible. Moreover, they are replete with interesting observations about art and the mind, the role art plays in defamiliarizing signifiers that have encapsulated and reduced their signs into mere, rote letters.
Art makes strange what has been dulled by triadic reduction into language. So does catastrophe: war, disasters, upheaval. The attraction the self feels towards states of extremity has to do with the drive to experience reality again as the self did before everything was codified into staid symbols: vividly, powerfully.
One cannot remember where one was yesterday; one always remembers where one was when a leader is assassinated. One never notices the birds; one is transfixed by the sparrow over the battlefield. Etcetera.
