Self Digestion

(Image my own)

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I discovered in researching Autolysis, that this is a reason for hanging game birds, as found in the Flemish Game Painting I’ve previously looked at. The process is used to ‘tenderise the meat’. So that which gives the meat its flavour, is basically ‘self digestion’. Which kinda puts me off that type of meat, consuming partial decomposed/digested food.

But this then loops back language and structure. I can’t quiet pin it down, but there is a commonality of impossibility/contradictory duality - non binary. Death is destructive and generative at the same time. The centre of a structure can have no natural locus but exists outside of itself - denying structure it’s structure. Deconstruction cannot escape it’s own deconstruction????

”Autolysis - a process of self-digestion, when the enzymes naturally present in what had been a living organism proceed, after the death of the organism, to break down its cells or tissues. For example, when game birds are hung to tenderize them, autolysis of the connective tissues occurs. This is most relevant to crustacea (crab, lobster, and prawns) where the enzymes in their ‘liver’ or midgut gland flood ‘the muscle tissue and break it down into a mush’ (McGee, 2004) if they die before they are cooked.” The Oxford Companion to Food https://search-credoreference-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/content/title/oupof?tab=contents

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Dislocated

Transformation at my shoulder. (Image my own)

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Reading Derrida’s ‘Structure Sign and Play’ is hard work. But then I didn’t expect it to be easy. I’m looking for something in his writing that I don’t even know if it’s there. I will push into some other peoples writing on him but I also wanted to look at his work firsthand.

There are some interesting phrases and I’m not sure that I properly grasp what he is investigating however I find it’s slow burn with him, that fragments gradually become more apparent and useful as I mulch over them.

Some key points/quotes for now:

• The impossibility of the centre of a structure being inside the structure. (Paraphrase)

• “The centre had no natural locus” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

• “We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped the from, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

• Evasion of the binary. Ideas and articles occupying more than one position at the same time.

• “without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self identity of a signified reducing into itself it’s signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself”

• “had been dislocated, driven from it’s locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p3

• “language bears within itself the necessity of it’s own critique” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p5

• “The superabundance of the signifier, it’s supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p11

• There is something about when reduction occurs, that it cannot but help be generative. Distillation seems impossible because that the act of it, creates the new. Similar to the decomposition of a body. The reduction is infinitely more generative. Death as a creative force.

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