ghoti

This year, at the urging of a friend, I presented at the APU Asia Pacific Conference. I was rather impressed with the panel organisation and level of research done there. While my paper did not fit perfectly into the type of research done there, it was enough to fit in with concepts and ideas presented in the same room.

My ideas on the ontological status of concepts and signifiers found application in papers on postcolonial cinema (Yu-Ting Hung’s presentation on director Hou Hsiao-hsien) and television (Aldrie Alman Drajat’s presentation on Japanese dorama and Indonesian cinetron) studies and Jose Rodolfo Aviles Ernult’s presentation on Stephen King’s novel IT.

For Dr Hung’s and Mr Drajat’s presentations it was applicable to the reading in the wider context creativity and homage, the need to define one’s own work against The Other. Similarly, Jose Ernult’s study also consciously defines itself against a Freudian backdrop.

What was important was that they found the idea of gap between signifier/concept and the referential thing applicable to their research, that it can help explain some aspects of their own reading. I, too, found it useful to find for myself how to best explain the discrepancy in general reading and misreading.

Far more detailed explanation will be needed in order to make this reevaluation of the meaning of the triangle of meaning a truly tool rather than being just a self-indulgent intellectual exercise. Now I have my work cut out for me.