Semiotic Drift

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My post-structuralist reading of photography draws on haiku poetics. In my practice, structural techniques reach their limit when I try to account for the sudden, subjective force of a photographic encounter. Beyond the schematic, I need a method that can respond to what Barthes calls satori.1

A process that brings semiotic visual analysis into contact with haiku poetics. Positioned as a barre oblique (/) between the two, preferring neither.2

In drift.

  1. I use satori here in Barthes’s sense: the sudden disturbance produced by the photographic punctum, ‘a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void’. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 49.↩

  2. Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani describe the slash as a mark that ‘brings together by dividing and keeping separate’. I adapt their formulation as a non-hierarchical relation between semiotic visual analysis and haiku poetics. See Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani, ‘Barthes, Burgin, Barre oblique’, in Barthes/Burgin, ed. by Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 11–24 (p. 20).↩