Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Degrees of fixity


financial market #2
I love the way these glowing messages chase each other round the buildings of Canary Wharf. I know just about enough about financial markets to get the gist - but there are plenty of holes in my understanding. Although their meanings are ephemeral, they're not simply open to any old interpretation. In fact their meaning is far more anchored than that of authors who need a degree of open, unfixed and flexible interpretation - and keep reminding us that the words and the things they represent are not the same and that meaning must be shaded by personal experience and perspective. For the occasional news-fix I really enjoy The Week, partially because it loosens the certainty of the newspapers it extracts from. "Facts" become less fixed when they are prized away from their context and just about everything you read is cradled in quotation marks. Wasn't it Derrida who said that all writing should be contained in quotes? I read that once and have been looking for the reference on and off for about eight years!

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