semiotics

[John Doe]

bottom line: when you read a recipe or a simple how-to
instruction manuel, do you ACTUALLY find yourself
reacting to the infinite range of semiotic
possibilities it supposedly, by your thnking,
presents, or, do you, when you're honest with your
self, just take the signifier-signified relationship
as very limited indeed ( " add 1/2 cup peanut oil "
means the substance in your cupboard YOU call ...gee -
peanut oil! how 'bout that! , not the automatic
transmission from a Ford F150 )? Because when
novelists Create a scene for their characters to
behave in, and you read a sentence like " Jborg
drifted to the window, marsmallow bag pressed lightly
to her chest, peering remotely out at the unchanging
snowy hillocks crenelating the horizen..." do you
ACTUALLY get semiotic alarm bells going off in your
head that I DIDN'T mean by "bag" what YOU got an
inmage of as a "bag"? Or that "window" means something
utterly different than what I intended it to
mean?....Theory heads should do more "close readings"
of what is going on inside their HEADS before they
simply take for granted the psychological validity of
trendy theories about Textuality....it's easy to
"see", to accept, as valid a general view of Reader as
Totally determining every nuance of meaning and the
Author as a Unconcious Generator of Text....but....iS
it actually that way in execution? Theoryheads are
strangely unconcerned - or incapable - of using their
imagination to infer what is REALLY going on when a
person takes pen to paper....THAT is the real issue,
esp. since a writer ( Dosteovski is one example )
forms his ideas in his mind first, then transfers them
to paper; there is nothing magical about the process
of mere "inscription" since much of our planet's
stories have been orally transmitted or dictated..so,
what happens in the process of dictation exactly? I
vocalically tell you the sentences that will make up
pg. 49 of Chapter 2 of my novel, and you then type it
on paper...when you hear me say 'motorcycle', do you
the scribe already assume it's meaning is completely
ambiguous?..more importantly; SHOULD you? Can I have
had in fact a watermelon "in mind" when I said
"motorcycle"? No...not unless you want to wager
Lottery odds on it....this sort of common sense has
escaped the Critical Theory cult and its
outlandish....


--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> On 14/12/2005 Michael J. Hußmann wrote:
> 
> > [...] The authors claim to a
> > privileged interpretation is quite hollow; after
> all, his subconscious
> > may have been playing tricks on him, and some
> seemingly absurd
> > interpretation by some reader may be nearer to the
> truth than the
> > official interpretation. Not that we (or even the
> author) would ever
> > know for sure. (When Pynchon did comment on his
> works, as in the
> > introduction to "Slow Learner", how many even
> cared? When his comments
> > supported their interpretations, readers chose to
> believe him, and if 
> > he
> > contradicted their beliefs, they explained his
> comments as tongue in 
> > cheek.) [...]
> 
> Ain't that the truth. It's the extreme viewpoints --
> that everything 
> means everything on the one hand, and that meaning
> is always and 
> ineluctably fixed to one author-itative construction
> on the other -- 
> which are balderdash. Affective Fallacy and
> Intentional Fallacy, 
> respectively.
> 
> Just as one reader can accept or reject what a
> writer intended to mean 
> (or thought s/he intended to mean), so can a
> subsequent reader (or the 
> writer him/herself) accept or reject the meaning/s
> that first reader 
> extracted (or thought s/he extracted) from the text.
> And no writer 
> starts with a blank slate anyway. They're always
> writing about 
> something, i.e. they're reading something, attaching
> significance to it 
> or extracting from it, whether it's the drive-by
> that happened at 
> Wal-Mart yesterday, a coincidental correlation of
> phonemes, or the 
> meaning of life, the universe and everything. Blame
> is asserted, a good 
> (or bad) pun is made, or God is invoked. Or not. Or
> the reader doesn't 
> care for it. Or doesn't get it. Or it's (intended to
> be, or perceived 
> as) ironic. Or the writer's (or reader's) own
> biographical obsessions 
> and hang-ups start to colour, consciously or
> unconsciously, everything 
> s/he writes/reads. Or ... and any combination/s
> thereof ...
> 
> The two acts -- writing and reading -- are
> interconnected. The act of 
> writing is also an act of "reading" -- events,
> people, situations, 
> beliefs, prior texts etc. And the act of reading is
> also an act of 
> "writing" -- or rewriting -- the text. "Writing" and
> "Reading" don't 
> exist independently, in some sort of binary
> opposition to one another.
> 
> best
> 
> 
> 


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