If you absorb the basic notion of fluidity in fiction, language, and representation, something that metafiction pushes with all its might, then the very idea of a totalizing ideology would, I would think, be bizarre and unfathomable. How could any "master narrative" be convincing if Rule #1 is that no identity is fixed and no story is closed?
We have a logical problem, though. Positively asserting "total" fluidity is, itself, an attempt to totalize. The most logical claim I can make, then, is that I simply do not have sufficient evidence to believe in totalizing systems (especially in the face of all the evidence that they're fluid). The best I can do is refrain from the claim that any system can possibly totalize, much the same way that I refrain from saying if there is or isn't a god. So instead of making a positive claim about what narratives/representations "are"--fluid, multistable, unfixed--the best I can do is make a cogency claim about what they are not: solid, stable, fixed, and closed. I think that makes me a semiotic agnostic.
Posted by orion at September 12, 2007 12:19 PM