11 april 2000
from peter jones, sheffield hallam university
dear folks
another dollop of stuff i'm afraid.
On the April discussion paper (If meaning is constructed, whats it made of?)
Congratulations to Peter on a provocative and stimulating paper on this very
difficult subject. Just to stir things up a bit more, Ill offer a dissenting
point of view on the main issue addressed by the paper: what (how?) do texts
mean? Peter refers to Bakhtin in his discussion, but I dont think his view of
this problem is Bakhtinian. Im going to refer to Voloshinovs text Discourse
in Life and Discourse in Art which addresses quite directly Peters question .
In fact, Peter, I would be very interested in your views on Voloshinovs text
in relation to your own. Voloshinov develops his own conception of producing
(and understanding) texts through a critique of two different ways of
understanding the meaning, or aesthetic value of a work of art (of any kind).
The first - the fetishization of the artistic work artifact - restricts
attention purely to the work of art itself, so that the socio-cultural,
communicative nature of the artistic artefact is lost. This is like the view
that Peter is mainly reacting against - ie a view in which meaning somehow
inheres in the work independently of writers and readers and their shared
business. The second view restricts itself to the study of the psyche of the
creator or of the contemplator (more often than not, it simply equates the
two). For it, all art is exhausted by the experiences of the person doing the
contemplating or doing the creating. I would suggest to Peter that his
conception of the reading process, despite the many qualifications he
introduces in relation to the social and cultural nature of the process, falls
very much in line with this second view. Peter is claiming that understanding
the meaning of a text is the construction of a new text by the reader. The
reader does not uncover or decipher a meaning embedded in the text since the
text itself is not meaningful. What happens is that readers compose a text of
their own in the transactional zone and it is this new text which becomes
meaningful. Thus, readers do not interpret the text (following Rosenblatt);
what they interpret - what serves as the basis for meaning - is their
associations with the text, rather than the text itself. What they interpret
is not the text, but their own responses (evocations) to the text, which take
the form of a new textual composition. A number of questions arise here. If
the text being read is not itself meaningful, why is the text which is produced
in response meaningful? In other words, if the meaning of (original written)
text X lies in its evoked text Y, where is the meaning of Y? How is it that
text Y can be a repository of meaning and not X? This position, it seems to
me, has something in common with those theories of perception that say that we
do not see objects but rather we see images of objects. Similarly, we dont get
the meaning of a text but we get another text (and so on); I dont interpret
the text, I interpret my own interpretation of a text etc. Voloshinovs own
solution to the problem is to see art (of whatever kind) as a special kind of
communicative interrelation which is realized and fixed in the material of a
work of art. The meaning of the work lies neither in the material per se,
nor in the mind of the creator, nor (if you will allow me) in the text evoked
by the material in the mind of the reader. The meaning of the work lies in the
relation between all three. I think Peter would agree with this, and I think he
says something like this in his paper. But for Voloshinov, understanding a text
is not creating another text containing everything evoked by the first,
although we may well (have to) do this to grapple with the texts meaning, as
part of a discussion (for example) of what the text is about, and its
implications etc. The role of the reader is not primarily in this process of
creating a new text. Rather, the text has already been written for a reader
(with a reader in mind) - ie the readers role is already built into the
text itself. Understanding the text is trying to re-create, reproduce that
communicative relation between writer and reader already embodied or fixed in
the material; understanding a text means trying to make the text speak to us,
trying to reproduce or become that reader addressed by the author through the
text. Verbal discourse, as Voloshinov puts it, is like a scenario of a
certain event. A viable understanding of the whole import of discourse must
reproduce this event of the mutual relationship between speakers, must, as it
were, reenact it, with the person wishing to understand taking upon himself
the role of the listener. A little bit further on he puts it this way: In
poetry, as in life, verbal discourse is a scenario of an event. Competent
artistic perception reenacts it, sensitively surmising from the words and the
forms of their organization the specific, living interrelations of the author
with the world he depicts and entering into those interrelations as a third
participant (the listeners role). Now by listener, Voloshinov does not at
all mean the actual people who in fact made up the reading public of the author
in question, but the listener whom the author himself takes into account, the
one toward whom the work is oriented and who, consequently, intrinsically
determines the works structure. This, I suggest, does not mean creating our
own text, which takes us away from the actual material in which this specific
interrelationship of creator and reader is fixed. To understand a text (let
alone appreciate it, enjoy it, be enraptured by it, or disagree with it etc)
means not to distance ourselves from its form, from the words and the forms of
their organization, including rhythm, rhyme, meter, epithet, metaphor, etc but
to increasingly feel those social interrelations through that very material.
From this point of view, the relations between verbal art and the plastic arts
become clearer I think. To understand, to appreciate, to enjoy a painting, a
sculpture or a piece of music does not mean to interpret a text (of whatever
kind) evoked by the original work, but to see, to feel, or to hear in (through)
the very material, the very body of the artistic work, ourselves being
addressed about something, and to feel that voice which addresses us. Verbal
art is rather like sculpting in speech sounds (or writing). A text is an
objectivity, a product of objective social interrelations which takes the form
of an irreducibly sensuous, sonorous, beautiful, ugly etc thing. To appreciate
it involves absorbing it with our senses and imaginatively reproducing its form
which is the very form of this interrelation itself. Where is the meaning,
then? The same place as its beauty, its emotional and intellectual power: It is
in the work (the text) itself; indeed, it is the text itself, where a specific
interrelationship between writer, reader, and hero has been fashioned into a
meaningful, communicative thing. Romantic or what??
Best wishes to all
P
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