Writing
identity is perhaps more complicated that I realized or realised. Do my musings on the subject make me more
aware of identity? Is it now more easily discernible? Is it a matter of
acquiring or attaining identity? Is it something that can be achieved or even
managed? Do I understand what it is? Is
it tangible, haptic, or made visual by this enquiry?
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| Bal |
I
have recently come across a number of people whose worked has revolved around
text and display. Mieke Bal, professor of literary theory at the University of
Amsterdam (not without her critics) writes:
“Words
and images seem inevitably to become implicated in a ‘war of signs’ […] Each
art, each type of sign or medium, lays claim to certain things that it is best
equipped to mediate, and each grounds its claims in a certain characterisation
of its ‘self’, its own proper essence. Equally important, each art
characterises itself in opposition to its ‘significant other.’” Which brings us back to the laws of thought
(see blog Of the Laws of Thought 18-2-2013)
Identity = Identity
.jpg) |
| Sickert |
“But since we love words let us dally for a
little on the verge…Let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for
though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each
other: They have much in common.”
Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: A
Conversation (1934)
And
from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of Text
(1973)
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| Barthes |
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from innumerable centres of culture…The reader is the space on which all the
quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost;
a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this
destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history,
biography, psychology…[the reader] is simply that someone who holds together in
a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.
It
is the reader who identifies the sign, who gives recognition to the signified,
no matter what the writer intended his/her sign to signify. If the intention
and the recognition agree, then we have identity.
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