Thursday 8 October 2009

ceci n'est pas une chair...


I have a lot of friends who took psychology for their A-Levels and some of them have gone on to do it at University, so I know that I don’t understand it at all, all the terminology about Freud and the like goes completely over the top of my head. So I was a bit stumped on Tuesday when in my first Animation History & Theory lecture, about representation, it started off sounding very much like a psychology one.
Ann, our lecturer, picked up a chair and asked what it was. Clearly it’s a chair. Apparently it’s not. Or maybe it was, I can’t really remember, I got very confused and felt like I’d had my mind raped. The aim was, according to the notes I took, to “recognise the difference between the thing (the subject, referent), the concept (or signified) of that thing, and the sign or signifier that represents it”.
Even now I'm still not really sure how it relates to the things we watched, the only thing I could really think of to try and understand it though was Magritte’s “This is not a Pipe” picture.

(I don't know if that's the correct way to write it, I know no French except for the odd [swear]word.)

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