To speak meaningfully about ‘texts’ we have to have something to which we can attribute it’s actions. Even in that very sentence, I implicitly speak of actions it performs, which attributes to the text a limited kind of agency. The only other options that I can see are to speak of the agency of the creator or the agency of the reader.
The creator’s intent, and that’s really what I’m talking about, is something that I have been indifferent to for quite some time. Not only can’t we know it most of the time, but what the creator intended and what she actually did, let alone what the creation does, are entirely separate things. This is why I’m simply unconcerned with intend. It seems immaterial compared to the effect of the work, the art itself.
So what about the intent of the reader? If we can’t know the intent of the writer, how can we speak of the reader’s? We might not be able to. Most literary criticism has a little trouble with that concept. It projects a reader as possessing some kind of ‘average’ nature, which means that it becomes a receptacle for our social norms, but ultimately we can’t actually know what the reader intends, or even, in the end, what effect the text has on the reader. The best we can do is talk to readers (plural) and make some very general statements about large-scale trends.
What we’re left with, then, is granting a kind of limited agency to the text for the sake of discussion. It’s generally agreed that it is the reader who evokes or makes meaning out of the text. Without a viewer or a reader, the text is merely an object, ink and paper, lights on a screen, whatever. But the important thing to observe is that that’s a relationship between observer and object, not observer and creator of the object. So the text doesn’t actually do anything. It is a vessel for signifiers that the viewer interprets. Now, there is a very large common ground for how those signifiers are interpreted given a particular cultural context, so the individual viewer interprets given a set of cultural norms. But that doesn’t mean that the text is doing something, does it? It means that we’re trained, socialised, to interpret it in certain specific ways.
But it seems like the way we talk about that experience is as a text doing or saying or demonstrating or performing, or other words like those. They’re not strictly an accurate way to describe the phenomenon. The more accurate way, if the preceding paragraphs are themselves accurate, is to say that predominant social norms would have it that we will mostly likely interpret this arrangement of signifiers in a particular way. To shorten that, however, we say the text does this, but that agency seems… metaphorical?
Posted by orion at September 25, 2006 2:31 AMSure, it's personification, pure and simple. I've always liked the (semiotic) notion that every text begins with an infinite number of interpretations, and that every word the author adds to it progressively limits its range of potential interpretations, until only a limited number remain.
The way I've described that, it's the author who does the interpretive heavy lifting--but I suppose meaning is also limited/prescribed by editors, publishers, illustrators, translators, etc. And then there's all that intertextual jiggery-pokery... but mostly, I think, I blame the author.
--SS
Posted by: Scott at September 25, 2006 1:31 PMJust to play devil's advocate, you're both privledging a rational, Western perspective. One could argue that a physical object accrues an interpretive residue the more it is handled and considered by other beings. You probably dismiss this out of hand, but consider the way that certain interpretations become more 'valid' than others simply because they have been argued more frequently. One comes to look for those interpretations and see them more readily, even though the physical object appears no differently.
Heh. Just being difficult. I like to think as artistic products as "specifically designated sites for the negotiation of identity," wherein one person or group (the artists) construct a set of patterns or reflection of worlview perspective and another group (readers or consumers) extend their sense of self into that construct and measure their worldview against it.
Posted by: Sheila at September 28, 2006 4:38 PMI actually entirely agree, Sheila. The cultural norms I mentioned (in italics) most definitely includes the accrued analytical assumptions of the past. We have always read it this way, therefore we now read it this way.
I'd want to spend a little more time with your identity construction to say what I really think of it, but I agree that that's a major part of the process. Again, this comes back down to cultural assumptions as socialisation. WE read it this way or I read it this way, partly as a way to define who 'I' and 'we' are.
Posted by: orion at September 28, 2006 4:42 PMI just randomly came across your site while searching for any sort of intellectual writing on comic books, and I just spent a good hour looking through all your entires. I've been having trouble finding anything close to what I've been looking for, but your site has helped me sort out my ideas and has helped reiterate my belief that comic books are much more important and influential than most of those associated with the academic world give them credit for.
thanks,
-katie west