NP Re: Semiotics (why a text can just be anything you want it to be)

John Doe tristero69 at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 18 18:12:34 CST 2005


If meaning "can't be so conveniently divorced from
purpose." then neither can intention....and it's not
germaine here that the sign is ALSO imperative; the
point is that it is AT LEAST descriptive, and ergo it
attepts ( via the intention of the "author' )to convey
a particular - more or less - set of signifiers, NOT
the whole bloody range of possible ones imaginable
when surfing on heroin or flying on LSD...signs
recipes, and ledgers were among the first, if not THE
first forms of 'text' known to man; we have the
earliest Sumerian tablets basically shouting imperial
slogans and doing inventory recods' "spurious" is lame
criticism - if you want a reliable Theory of
human-text interaction, you need to address signs and
other supposed trivial literary fare; otherwise,
you're just being arbitrary....wanna know why you
don't? Because it shows that we process the meanings
with relatively little ambiguity, which mucks your
Theory up - it's fun and easy using It on Big, Fat
Literary Texts, which you can mine endlessly for
'differance' in differ France, but Sean's point still
holds - again, where is all the mind-numbing
undetermined meaning in these e-mails when you read
them? Are you experienceing this  phenomenon when you
read them or the newspaper? You simply refuse to catch
yourself in the act of reading...if it happened the
way you and others claim, you'd never be able to
answer an e-mail - you RELY on conventional
interpretations all the time! LOL!Can't you see that?
Man, never underestimate the power of denial....


--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> On 18/12/2005 Sean Mannion wrote:
> 
> > if we can say that the intentions of the sign and
> the shape of a 
> > sign's meaning are recognised by an actor/reader
> (even if it is just 
> > to simply ignore them), then the original point
> that an encoder cannot 
> > enforce any significant control over what a
> decoder does with a 
> > sign-vehicle is wrong
> 
> Actually, this is quite wrong. The "No Smoking" sign
> isn't solely 
> descriptive. It's imperative. The author's intention
> was that the sign 
> would stop smokers from smoking in a vicinity (and,
> concomitantly, 
> advertise to non-smokers that the venue is
> smoke-free, augment the 
> directives of staff, comply with government
> regulations, validate 
> subsequent legal action against transgressors etc),
> not just that 
> people would read and understand the words.
> Ultimately, however, the 
> author (interesting to think about who is the actual
> "author" of the 
> sign here also) of the sign has no *control* over
> how a particular 
> reader responds -- whether he or she lights up or
> not, tells others to 
> put out their cigarettes, reports them to a staff
> member, whether he or 
> she leaves the venue, writes to the authority
> responsible for the rule, 
> or whether he or she defaces or rips the sign down,
> or how a staff 
> member or law enforcement officer responds to the
> sign in a specific 
> context (i.e what the individual reader *does* with
> the sign). Meaning 
> can't be so conveniently divorced from purpose.
> 
> Quite apart from that, spurious recourse to signs
> and recipes as 
> examples in no way validates a Theory of authorial
> privilege in the 
> construction of literary meaning.
> 
> best
> 
> 


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