Second draft in progress

its a process, man

Now that I’ve finished the first draft of this piece, today I got started on the second draft. I’m trying to have the images and the content of the text interact more thematically, and not in a literal way. The images don’t exist to represent material reality but to act as symbols. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the Russian Formalist idea of defamiliarization, that is, the process of presenting a familiar item in an unfamiliar way, presenting, not representing, and in turn showing it (and ourselves) in a new light. Intellectual circles get paralyzed by the continental idea that the signifier can mean everything and nothing at once. Is the lack of solidity in our languages really that horrifying to people?