Thursday, August 26, 2004
(9:30 PM) | Tara Smith:
My cat prompts ruminations on the meaning of a text
443a4 er/nr 28819 hy8]’bhh/My cat Jack, who likes to sit on my keyboard while I’m working, wrote the above statement. He also managed to create a table, change the font, and save the whole thing as 23/er, but I thought the above represented the best of his work and was worth saving for posterity’s sake.
The question of the ages, I suppose, is how might we go about derive meaning from such a statement? In exegeting the phrase "4434a4 er/nr 28819 hy8]’bhh/", should we examine Jack’s personality (fortunately, he is still with us today), grilling him with questions about what he really meant by the third 4 and talking to those who know him about his views on "er/nr"? Should we examine what kinds of feelings and reactions the phrase produces within us, or should we try to concern ourselves with what might have been evoked for his original audience? Is it even a phrase at all? Perhaps we should consider other literary forms popular among cats, or exhaust other references to see if Jack was quoting somebody else. On the other hand, possibly the meaning really lies in what the editor (myself, in this case) chose to record or to delete. Whatever happens, shouldn’t we obviously determine what the sociopolitical climate was at the time of writing and pinpoint an approximate date and location?
Paul Ricouer (who, I'm fairly ceratin, has never met my cat), understands textual meaning to be a closed system: essentially uninhabitable. (Curse you, Adam Kotsko, for making it temporarily impossible for me to use the colon unselfconsciously.) Meaning swirls round and round within a text, with no recourse to the "outside" world. The reference of language, on the other hand, is language's application to reality. The reference is what makes language significant to a system other than itself. Reference deals not just with the imaginary world that language creates, boundless though it is. The reference of language is something that can in some sense be located on a plane in both time and space.
"Discourse", then, is language with reference, as opposed to language without a realistic referent. The problem, Ricoeur says, is that written discourse loses its referent. There is no spatial-temporal aspect as in oral discourse that can unite the reader and writer. Thus, the referential aspect of written discourse is no longer available: we can no longer speak of the text’s relation to reality. Instead, as Ricoeur dramatically puts it, "it is the role of most of our literature, it would seem, to destroy the world." (On a side note, how much of philosophy is a shameless attempt to create one-liners that will eventully be quoted in Readers' Digest?)
And yet we read, and seem to derive meaning from the process. Are we kidding ourselves? Is every beating heart really that complete and profound mystery to the heart beating nearest it? Or is there perhaps a world not destroyed by literature, one in which both writer and reader may reside? Possibly, the task of reading is to create a new world: a world of possibilities rather than a world of givenness. It is, nonetheless, a world given by the text, created by the text, or, as R. puts it, it is the issue of the text. It is in this shared world that discourse, or referential meaning, may be found. And so in trying to determine the meaning of Jack’s cryptic message to us, we must first inhabit that world–which can only be accessed when shared–presented to us by the text. Thus, as I persuade you, my reader, to be aware of Jack’s textual world, I can only do so in the the midst of an invitation for you to share with me this: our own textual world of possibilities. And in the world I have written for you but cannot meaningfully inhabit or even create alone, we collide irretrievably into one another in our creation, and we realize here that we will never step out as beings-without-each-other again.
It's either really beautiful, or a little creepy.
