RE: brouhaha-hahaha

I distinctly remember in past conversations that in Kafka's brief essay that
the meaning that everyone could agree on was too simple or plain or
un-intellectually stimulating or whatever. I can't see what you have said
here really differs from what I said. The meaning was describing universals
applicable to all of humanity. Evil, power, force. control etc. Now you
introduce applicability, ok, I sometimes use a hammer to drive nails,
stakes, break off splinters on a poorly sawn board but it is still a hammer
even if I use it to hold a stack of papers down against the wind or prop the
door open or clunk some one on the head. When it was manufactured it was
manufactured as a hammer regardless of the material it was made from,
rubber, steel, copper or wood. I guess an airliner with 200 passengers and
a hijacker can 'mean' lethal missile but of course that is against the
manufacturer's intention. Use or abuse away but what do you mean by
meaning?

Daniel

Yep, it's partly you :). It's partly me, too. I left out a word.
 "Filling in *of* the signs..." is what I meant to say, but I think it
wouldn't have helped you much.

You're having a hard time with these words or phrases:

"system of relations" -- meaning, a bunch of individual things related
to one another.

"elements of a text" -- everything you could associate with a "text"
(which I'm using here as synonymous with the written word): individual
words, syntax, etc.

"applicability" -- if you read our previous posts, you'd see
"applicability" has to do with how readers "apply" a text. For example,
some readers see the ring of power in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings
triology as representing nuclear weapons. While that's not necessarily
what Tolkein had in mind, what Tolkein did say about the ring of power
may also "apply" to nuclear weapons -- possessing them is motivated by
the desire to attain raw power, their possession corrupts the possessor,
and so on.

"specific cultural referents," in this case, would be something like
nuclear weapons -- something that exists in our world even if it doesn't
exist in Tolkein's fictional world. Probably not what Tolkein meant,
and not mentioned directly in the text at all, but something we may
think of when we think of Tolkein's ring.

"signs": "Elements of a text" such as the "ring of power" is what I was
referring to by "signs." The ring "signifies" raw power and the desire
for raw power. As a thing that "signifies" it exists as a "sign."

Now let's put all this together:

The ring is not only associated with power, though, but with "evil"
because the Main Bad Guy in Tolkein's trilogy actually created the ring,
and the ring serves him. The one sign -- the ring -- exists in a
relationship with another sign -- the main bad guy, who signifies
"evil." Since there's two signs (at least) working together, I'm saying
they exist in a "system of relations." To get "meaning" out of text,
though, we don't just see how these signs work together in a text; we
try to see how they may work as commentary on our world. So we say
Tolkein's ring is very much like our possession of nuclear weapons. The
"signs" presented by a text then act as "containers" that we "fill up"
with "specific cultural referents" in order to get "meaning" from a
text. We can say that the ring of power, for example, not only
represents nuclear weapons, but perhaps economic dominance of world
markets or biological weapons or anything we use to force other people
or nations to do what we want. Robbie would probably prefer I used the
word "applicability" instead of "meaning" here.

You could have figured all that out, but it would have taken a bit of
work, and there's no passing up the opportunity for a nice jibe when it
presents itself :)

Jim

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Received on Mon Apr 21 12:44:48 2003