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

[John Doe]

Well, yeah , jborg; any reader "'can' take a text to
mean 'anything' they want it to"; we can attribute,
with an active imagination and lots of fine crossword
puzzle skills, virtually any meaning we want, and
furthermore assume the writer  had no clue what she
was saying when her pen was making those eentsy widdle
black marks....but my profound reply to that is; well,
DUH!...if that's all that Contemporary Literary Theory
has to offer, it's nothing new and pretty moribund -
the point is not whether we CAN but whether we in fact
DO; are we in fact discerning and selecting several
meanings from a sign that the writer didn't intend
every time we read a 'No Smoking' sign and not
receiving the intended one?....the real issue is that
many adherents to Theory actually believe that authors
can't determine any meaning at all, and THAT is the
real "abuse of Critical Theory"; As for control over
decoding vs. control over response, well they are
different in the sense that decoding would be a more
passive "act'; it is the cogitational action of the
person's brain when reading, whereas the individual's
"response" entails more behavioral aspects...but
Control and Volition per se are not what's really the
fundemental features here; it's about volition to the
extent that an author of something written is an agent
who does intend for there to be a congruence between
the meaning he is 'feeling' or 'thinking' at the time
of inscription, and the meaning he anticipates will be
"received"...otherwise, how would we ever say things
like " I get it"; "good point"; " nice way he rendered
that waterfall image, huh Bob?";" Man, I love
Vonnegut's sense of humor!";" this was a really hard
book for me, Jane , but I finally understand what Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about"...etc.
etc. etc., and have them be understood by another? Do
you ever have that problem? Did you have it today at
anytime? Do people act like you're speaking Sumerian
everytime you utter an English sentence because (
presumably!)their heads are swirling and addled by all
the secondary and tertiary meanings they are deriving
from every remark you make?....things that make you go
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...



--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> On 18/12/2005, at 11:15 AM, Sean Mannion wrote:
> 
> > You're right in this sense, of course -- strictly
> speaking the author 
> > (who I would take here to be whatever governing
> party applies) has no 
> > control over the behaviour of the reader, but we
> cannot be in any 
> > doubt that the reader understands either the
> intentions of the author 
> > or of the meaning of the sign, and I'd argue that
> this is a 
> > significant degree of control over the way that a
> reader responds to a 
> > sign.
> >
> > I'm illustrating this to the point to the degree
> that the above 
> > example was presented.
> 
> I don't think it's always (or ever) quite so
> straightforward as 
> intention = reception; then again, I'm not wholly
> sure of the full 
> context of the original quote either, and whether it
> was talking about 
> control over decoding or control over response,
> which are different, 
> though connected, facets of the reading process. But
> I would definitely 
> argue that a reader can take a text to mean anything
> they want it to 
> mean -- it doesn't make that interpretation "right"
> or binding over 
> anyone else, but more power to them if they do.
> 
> But I do agree that positing all the dictionary
> definitions (or 
> homonyms, homophones, anagrams etc) of the word
> "smoking" to imply that 
> spontaneous combustion, for example, is a relevant
> meaning of the word 
> or phrase in the context of a "No Smoking" sign is
> nonsense. It's that 
> sort of misprision and/or abuse of Critical Theory
> which most people, 
> quite rightly, react strongly against. But setting
> up that type of 
> idiocy as the standard and main purport of Critical
> Theory is creating 
> a straw man.
> 
> best
> 
> 


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