Saturday, April 18, 2020

A Note from Cece Chapman: Roland Barthes: Empire of Signs

Cece Chapman says, "came across this in my ongoing search for signs, symbol, image info...".
What Cece Chapman found was a truly seminal work in asemics in Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes.

Here is a sample from Barthes:

The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in i
without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or 
vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the 
systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formula­tions, other 
syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject's 
topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it, 
until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the "father tongue"--vacillate that tongue which 
comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers[--]and proprietors of a culture which, 
precisely, history transforms into "nature." 


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