Not really what I wanted to be doing this morning—and I only have 25 minutes to do it, because I’ve just taken my Gaspari SuperPump 250, and that powdered supplement is a tough taskmaster, demanding of me a certain timeliness to my workouts—so this will be rather quick (though not short).
First, let me point out that for someone whom they supposedly believe to be a paste-eating idiot, there are many leftist academic bloggers who have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to discredit me, particularly on the subject of interpretation and meaning making. They have several reasons for doing this, but for the time being, I’ll leave their motivations out of the discussion and just point out that they seem to favor a particular gambit, namely, pulling bits and pieces from my course notes out of context in order to label my arguments “insane,” “crazed,” “weird” and “idiotic” (as well as “pedestrian”, “useless,” and unenlightening). Ironically, they can’t seem to decide if what I’m arguing is simply nutty or too obvious to bother with.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that what I’m arguing when I argue from an intentionalist perspective (and there is no other perspective that makes sense, incidentally) IS obvious; but to others—like, for instance, those who continue to call me names and try to debunk what it is increasingly clear they don’t understand—what I am suggesting, namely, that originary meaning is fixed in an author’s text by the process of signification itself, is some alien notion that must be met with vitriol and suspicion, and then summarily dismissed as, at various times, unimportant or crazed.
Which is precisely what we see happening when we trace the following link chain. First, we’ll begin with Thersites, who, from the tone of his post, I think you’ll find is quite happy to have found someone else to take up the mantle of misunderstanding for him. Writes my esteemed opponent:
Scott Lemieux draws my attention to this post, where we see pasty dismembered by another who is not myself:
So I was skimming this piece of excrescence from Mr. Goldstein, because I get off on seeing people with absolutely no training in linguistics or analytic philosophy of language bloviate about meaning. Get a load of this footnote (comments in brackets). The punchline is at the end.
Won’t spoil the punchline, but please read it through—oh man, it’s funny.
Dan Brown is laughing, it’s that funny…
The punchline is that I attributed the Mona Lisa to Michaelangelo. Of course, whether I did so by mistake or not is unimportant (on which more later*). The question is, how does doing so derail my argument? As to the alleged “dismemberment,” well, we’ll see. I’m just happy that this new “someone who is not [Thersites]”– even though he, too, proves to be every bit as undeservedly cocksure—didn’t trot out “withal” and “delectation.” Because really, who writes like that?
But let’s continue with Thersites:
pasty’s stuff
—for those of you who haven’t been following this exchange, I am referred to always as “pasty,” which is precisely the kind of thing one expects from a university professor—
really IS that bad. I got involved in this particular dustup because he whizzed a Conrad reference. I then looked at the PDF pasty posted, and just thought it was… weird.
—Uh, I think he means I “whiffed” the reference—but maybe part of the current cultural dialogic that is busy imprinting “Thersites” is some concern over an enlarging prostate, so I suppose it’s possible he didn’t simply make a mistake deploying convention. But let’s not let this slow us down. Please—onward!:
I’m actually not a linguist or an analytic philosopher of language
—Well there’s a real shocker—
I come at this sort of stuff from a totally different direction, from the perspective of trying to solve a problem like the one presented here. You know, from the perspective of my actual discipline, literary scholarship. See, the “radical intentionalism” stuff is bizarre, as I see it, because it is so useless. The problem I described that’s to do with McGahern—that’s actually an EASY one. (That’s why it’s good for purposes of illustration.) Applying “radical intentionalism” to, say, James Joyce, would be a fucking nightmare. The most hardcore intentionalists of the Joyceans are the geneticists, and even THEY won’t sign on to this nuttiness. (If you can’t get the Belgians to dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.)
Difficulty = justification for avoidance. Well, at least he’s honest, I guess.
But I digress:
Consider. Aside from the hilarious gaffe in the footnote, as spotted by Nate, let’s look at how that note opens:
Would we, for instance, argue that MacBeth, printed in The Riverside Shakespeare, is a different text from MacBeth printed in a Penguin edition? Suppose that each is printed in a different typeface. The marks, under these circumstances, have been altered, but the signs, we assume, have remained the same. What allows us to make this claim for verbal texts?
This is just crazed. We all know or can easily learn about how and why different editions of MacBeth are different. For fuck’s sake… The answer to the first sentence’s question is a clear and emphatic YES. We HAVE different editions of Shakespeare. Why would “we” suppose anything about the typefaces? Why are we not discussing folios and quartos and all that shit? Why, in short, are we pretending that there is no textual history of Shakespeare—of SHAKESPEARE! Oy…
The sheer bloody-mindedness pasty puts on display is just staggering.
Well, I suppose it is, if you reference part of a footnote but don’t bother including the argument it is trying to illuminate. None of which has anything to do with the textual history of Shakespeare. Or even Shakespeare in particular, whom I simply picked as a random example. Which is why we aren’t “discussing folios and quartos and all that shit”; further, suggesting that the mere mention of Shakespeare’s name requires of me some discussion of certain attendant material is rather curious coming from someone who is always going on about the infinitude of context.
But then, I’ve long since given up on trying to make coherent sense of Thersites’ remarkably confused objections to intentionalism.
Which takes us to the post Thersites is so happy to enlist as part of his “dismantling” of the intentionalist argument for meaning making—the post that, he happily brays, “dismembers” me. Not surprisingly, given the level of response to me thus far, the post in question, writtten by “philosophy blogger” Nate Charlow (occupation: student) is titled “Jeff Goldstein: idiot.”
And how does this post go about “dismembering” me? Well, let’s take a look:
So I was skimming this piece of excrescence from Mr. Goldstein, because I get off on seeing people with absolutely no training in linguistics or analytic philosophy of language bloviate about meaning. Get a load of this footnote (comments in brackets). The punchline is at the end.
But let’s stop here for a second. I’ve already told you the punchline, so let me provide you instead with something that neither Thersites nor Nate bother to provide you with: the context for the footnote that they each seize upon. From my notes:
For the purposes of this course, the discussion of semiotics is interesting because text semiotics (pragmatically) foregrounds the role of the receiverâ€â€how s/he processes the marks into signs, how s/he turns signs into additional, meaningful signs. Thus, what semiotics shows us is what people do with signs. But we shouldn’t confuse what people do with signs with how signs operate within a given system of signification. Because verbal texts which are intended carry with them, implicitly, an expressed “meaning,” it is important to distinguish between the intentions of the producers of those texts and the intentions of the receivers of those texts. What allows us to interpret rather than simply to resignify is our assumption that we are reading a text whose signs are stable (that they are, in fact, signs). But what is truly stable, if we decide to ignore the intention behind those signs, are the marks themselvesâ€â€their material or historical existence.20
What follows, then, is Nate’s supposed “dismemberment” of my argument, which he pulls off (in the estimation of Thersites and and others) by providing bracketed interpolations to footnote 20:
20 Would we, for instance, argue that MacBeth, printed in The Riverside Shakespeare, is a different text from MacBeth printed in a Penguin edition? Suppose that each is printed in a different typeface. The marks, under these circumstances, have been altered, but the signs, we assume, have remained the same. What allows us to make this claim for verbal texts? [I was under the impression that this wasn’t a hard question. Egad! I just remembered that no two people have the same handwriting!] If I were, for instance, to move the Mona Lisa’s eyes closer together, no one presumably would claim that I haven’t altered the composition of the Mona Lisa in some way. [An attempt to make the question seem hard by drawing an irrelevant analogy with a non-linguistic object.] What is it, then, that makes the verbal text different in this regard from the non-verbal or iconographical text? [Paintings—at least the good ones—are, of course, never texts. And wtf is the contrast between “verbal” and “non-verbal” texts supposed to be?] In both instances, intended marks have been altered. But the difference is that in the case of verbal texts, the marks themselves are not what we consider important. [So, by analogy, in vocalized speech, the phonic character of each spoken word is “not what we consider important.” Right on!] What we do consider important are the signsâ€â€the marks plus their signifieds. And what makes these marks signs to begin with is the intention to use them as such. My revision of the Mona Lisa certainly has a “meaning"â€â€and it was clearly intentional. [Certainly not.] But my meaning is different from the meaning of the original composition, the meaning intended by its producer Michelangelo (at 20n21, emph. mine).
UPDATE: Wuh!? Thanks, Jane, Lindsay, and Thersites. […]
As you can see, Nate is both excited and thankful for the attention his “dismemberment” of my argument received, being linked, as it was, by noted experts on interpretive theory Jane Hamsher, Lindsay “Majikthise” Beyerstein, and our pal Thersites, he of the recent admission that he has no idea what it is he is talking about—and that he in fact approaches theories of interpretation from “a totally different direction,” one that, well, isn’t interested in how signification works (which didn’t keep him from putting together a series of faux-mathematical formulas for our “delectation”), but rather is interested in how sociology can help him come up with new ways to solve literary “problems.”
None of which is at odds with “radical intentionalism,” something he has finally admitted he doesn’t understand.
Anyway, let’s get back to Nate and his interpolations. What follows is the comment I left on Nate’s site, which alas has yet to appear (automatic comment moderation on leftist sites being all the rage, for whatever reason), slightly expanded to connect it with my previous arguments:
Yes, Nate, the idea that images, including paintings, can act as non-verbal texts, certainly is crazy! Unless you happen to know what it is you’re talking about, that is.
From A Handbook of Semiotics:
Since textuality ‘is not an inherent property of certain objects, but is rather a property assigned to objects by those producing or analyzing them’ (Petofi 1986), it is not surprising that semioticians of the text have been unable to agree on a definition and on criteria of their object of research.
Texts as Cultural Messages: The concept of text in its broadest sense refers to messages of any code. In this sense, ‘texts’ include the most diverse cultural phenomena: films, ballet performances, happenings, pieces of music, ceremonies, or circus acts. In a most programmatic way, the Soviet semioticians define texts in this broadest sense as their field of research. Bakhtin, as quoted by Todorov, calls the text the ‘primary datum’ of the human sciences: ‘The text is the immediate reality (reality of thought and experience) within which this thought and these disciplines can exclusively constitute themselves. Where there is no text, there is neither object nor inquiry nor thought.’ More specifically, Uspenskij et al. Regard texts as ‘the primary element (basic unit) of culture,’ as a message generated by systems of cultural codes.
The above excerpt was included in my notes—in fact, it appears on the very page with the footnote under discussion, and follows up on the distinction between verbal and non-verbal texts—so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to Nate, who has decided, with the kind of certainty one finds truly embarrassing, that “paintings—at least good ones—are, of course, never texts. And wtf is the contrast betweeen ‘verbal’ and ‘non-verbal’ texts supposed to be?”
I won’t even touch this very, er, curious aesthetic distinction between “good” paintings and bad as it redounds to determining the nature of their textuality other than to say that Nate seems to be hedging his bets here a bit, and not in any way that makes sense: either a painting can be a text or it cannot, presumably; whether or not one finds the painting “good” wouldn’t appear (or at least, it shouldn’t appear) to make any difference whatsoever with regard to a text’s ontology.
So that part of Nate’s “dismemberment” of my argument falls a bit flat.
Beyond that, though, let’s take a look at my very next footnote and its context:
21From Handbook of Semiotics, “Text Semiotics” (329-333). Because the semiotic of interest for this course is text semiotics, one of the challenges I encountered was discussing just what, exactly, a “text” is. Once we signify it, anything can potentially be designated a “text,” and so our discussions turned to the claims behind where the “meaning” rests in various textual situations.
The context for this footnote was an entire section that deals with the nature of textuality, which, to anyone with even the most basic understanding of contemporary semiotic theory (hell, for anyone who claims to have the most basic understanding of cultural materialism in any of its theoretical guises) is nothing new or earth shattering.
And yet Nate reacts to the idea that there can be such things as non-verbal texts with astonishment!
And Thersites, Hamsher, Lemieux, et al, link this mess approvingly?
Anyway, such is the problem with posting a footnote without reading or understanding what it references. The footnote Nate pulls out, once put into context, is clearly meant to illustrate an obvious point relating to why it is the sign—and NOT the signifier—that is important when we are interpreting verbal texts. Which is to say, when we read a book or a handwritten letter (to incorporate Nate’s example), we are not interested in the signifiers (which can be altered by changing the font, or with each person’s unique handwriting). Instead, we are interested in the signs—which, in order to be signs in the first place, must be signified. This is what turns accident into language.
The “irrelevant analogy with a non-linguistic object” that Nate points out, then, is not “irrelevant” at all, but is rather precisely the difference between the two types of texts being compared—though Nate (amazingly, and going against what are very well established and very common notions of textuality) refuses even to allow that there can be such a thing as a non-verbal text. Ironically, though, Nate goes on to (inadvertantly) make this point himself when he tries to trivialize a bit about phonic character in vocalized speech. In verbal speech acts (and remember, the basis for the entire intentionalist project I’m writing about in my notes is that the text is a speech act), we are not concerned with changes to the mark, except insofar as such changes problematize our ability to decode the sign that they index. To use the example of vocalized speech, someone with a very thick accent, say, could potentially trouble the communication process—in which case her accent becomes an impediment to signaling intent, though we certainly wouldn’t say that it effects her “meaning,” which is made the moment she signifies.
In a non-verbal text, however, changes to the marks (in the case of a painting, the brush strokes) have a different impact, because altering the mark can alter the totality of the text in a way that altering the marks in a verbal text do not.
Let’s backtrack a bit, though. Meaning, I’ve argued, is created by intention, either on the front end or the back end of the communication chain. This is simply a fact of signification. However, where we believe meaning comes from has quite a bit of significance.
By way of illustration, here is an example of interpreting a non-verbal text that many liberals took an interest in not too long ago—various “readings” of the Flight 93 Memorial.
Several months ago I argued with many conservatives over the design of the Flight 93 Memorial, particularly its supposed incorporation of an “Islamic Crescent.” But I did so not because it wasn’t possible to read the Memorial’s design in just that way (it was), but rather because many of those on the right were saying that their ability to see in the Memorial design an Islamic crescent gave the Memorial a kind of cultural or conventional meaning that trumped the architect’s intent.
Which is simply untrue, if what we are talking about is interpretation.
For me, the difference between seeing something as a Islamic crescent rather than, say, an arc, is a function of intent; and if I wasn’t convinced the architect was intentionally creating an Islamic crescent, then I wasn’t going to say that the Memorial design “meant” to subtly undercut its proposed intent.
In that instance, of course, there were other considerations to factor in—the design was approved by survivors’ families, etc.—but the basic point stands: without intent, an arc is not an Islamic crescent meant to ironize or deconstruct the Memorial’s ostensible meaning. Unless, of course, you are predisposed to see it as such—that is, unless you rely on your intent to signify it in such a way.
Now, does this mean that people can’t be upset that the architect has included in his design a figure that may, to those disposed to see it in a particular way, cause consternation? Of course not. People can be upset—and in fact, a large number of people were. And they succeeded in having the design changed based on their outrage (just as, previously, a Muslim man succeeded in having a swirly cone icon removed by Burger King from its packaging by claiming it reminded him of Allah’s name, an example of conflating a non-verbal, iconographic text—the graphic representation of the edging of a swirly cone—with a verbal signifier in another language).
In both cases, the reaction is no less real or authentic for the fact that the “meaning” of the original signs didn’t match the intepretation of those who reacted so strongly to them. But then, conversely, the strength of the reaction does nothing to change the original meaning, either. It simply shows that people can intepret an author’s meaning incorrectly, and that intention is the maker of meaning on the addressee’s side of the communicative equation, as well.
My argument is that when one does not take into account what the author intended, one is no longer concerned with “interpretation” as such. Instead, s/he is concerned with what s/he is able to do with a text—something that I had hoped to hammer home with my discussion of Think Progress’ criticism of Tony Snow’s use of “tar-baby,” which TP continued to assert had racial overtones even after having acknowledged Snow wasn’t using it to mean anything racist (or even racial).
But back to Nate’s interpolations. I’m not certain if he is being ironic when he says my hypothetical revision of the Mona Lisa was not intended (or is it that it has no meaning?), but either way, I think his explanation as to why it is such [“Certainly not”] is in any case rather, uh, vague.
As for the Michelangelo thing, well, Nate and Jane and Thersites can have their fun with that, if they wish. I’ve no interest in explaining the origin of that bit of personal history as it relates to the classes the notes were prepared for (though a thorough bit of biographical study might turn up something), so they can run with it. Because to them, it is this—and not any of the linguistic arguments I make (none of which Thersites or Nate seems to understand)—that is PROOF OF MY IDIOCY!
Or, to put it another way, the essence of Nate’s entire critique, in which he asserts that I have “absolutely no training in inguistics or analytic philosophy of language,” is what he takes to be a misattribution of a famous painting to the wrong artist. In a footnote. And it is to this that Thersites, a professor of English, links to approvingly.
Meanwhile, Nate and Thersites seem to have missed every semiotic study of textuality over the last 60 or so years—in addition to being unable to place the information contained in the footnote into the larger context of how meaning is made. Which makes sense, given their very limited understanding of textuality.
And I’m the idiot?
One of Nate’s commenters, d.b., is similarly dismissive—which is a shame, because s/he seems to have some interest in the topics at hand. Sadly, however, s/he decides to see the notes as some kind of political treatise, when in fact they were written long before I’d ever paid a bit of attention to politics.
Again: saying a literary text has a single meaning and that the meaning belongs to its author is not as mind-bogglingly “radical” as s/he seems to imagine. For instance, that assertion does not say that other people can’t draw different meanings from the text, or that the meanings they draw can’t be even more interesting in many ways than the author’s original signification.
It simply points out, from the perspective of how both meaning-making and interpretation actually work, that doing so is itself an intentional act, and that when one does not appeal back to authorial intent, one has ceased interpreting and commenced writing his or her own text, which is what happens when we add our own signifieds to signifiers that have been emptied of any previous signification.
What is amusing about all of these shallow and uninformed counter arguments to intentionalism is that no amount of their own ingnorance seems able to prevent my critics from asserting, with an assuredness that borders on the egomaniacal, that I am a crazed idiot who is unable to understand theory—even as some of them admit they have absolutely no training themselves in what it is they are attempting to correct me on.
All in all, a fascinating study in hive-minded ad hominem at the expense of serious discussion. Had these folks simply taken the time to understand the argument, they could have avoided these embarrassing posts they keep directing my way.
But as has become all too predictable, “scholars” like Nate and Thersites are more interested in arguing from a position of weakness than listening to anything that might challenge their worldviews.
Which is the essence of anti-intellectualism.
Tag closer alert!
An unclosed blockquote in there?
The funny thing is that this highly original band of lively figures took the cue from lapsed economist Duncan Black and honed in on ‘paste-eating’ comment rather than the far richer vein of ‘Ralph Wiggums’ – who’s picture accompanied the comment.
As such, Theristes et al. have been ringing the changes on ‘pasty’ with increasingly feeble returns.
I mean ‘pastyfoot’?
~ sigh ~
fwiw, my foray into the exciting world of signified meaning through typography consisted of me telling my professor, ‘you’re out of your reckoning’ when he posited the notion that typeface mattered.
It doesn’t.
Other than to the few people who choose to try and make a living trying to make it matter.
And God Bless that we live in a society where such an occupation and field of research can support a family and make a career. In a more rough-edged society, these people would be digging ditches and birthing cows, or – more accurately – assisting in the process of birthing cows.
What’s staggering, besides The Jane Hamsher of the Left, Lindsay, and Thersites focus on the jot-and-tittle, is the intentional ignorance of a lively intellect.
I’m not saying Jeff is ‘right’ but Jeff’s at least addressing the issues in those debates he chooses to enter.
A conversation between Jeff and Lindsay about *something* might be interesting as Lindsay, when she’s willing, can lay out some good, well-reasoned posts.
Jane Hamsher, not so much.
Thersites, not at all.
.
– Jeff, the evidence that you’re wasting your time with these dolts is mounting by the post. Anyone who doesn’t understand the rich range of signs in symbionics, including all forms of symbolism such as cave wall art, should just sit quietly with their hands folded in their laps, and try as hard as they can just to limit their participation to asking inane questions from time to time.
– Arguing intentionalism with the likes of Jane “riding on the spescul subway” Hamsher, or the other two nitwits, that have already admitted they are ignorant of the subject, is like arguing nuclear physics with Wayne Newton.
– I’m assuming you’re about using their natterings, and specious personal attacks, as a fun way to post your work, which I’m sure you take a good bit of pride in.
– When any of these three Gorns attend an academic session, I can only hope they post extra guards to prevent the honored guests from losing their hubcaps, or in Janes case, make sure she isn’t overcharging the Johns.
– My guess is they’re responding rapaciously because they can’t handle being called out for “revisionism” on everything in sight to stack the deck for their idiotic Marxist claims. Being “progressive” these days means never having to accept what is written.
– Heres to you Jane Hamster sweety. I’d tell you to have your boyfriend read the message on the lower half of the condom, but then he probably can’t roll it down that far.
Does this mean the “Constitution in Exile” debate is useless? The constitution means what Thersites says it means, nothing more, nothing less?
There are times when I do not necessarily agree with our host (elements if immigration policy come to mind). But Jesus, I have no interest in arguing with the man; I’ve never enjoyed having my ass handed to me in a carefully wrapped package.
Old fart alert here… Anyone here besides me old enough to remember Norm Crosby who elevated malapropisms to a comedy art form?
Even as he used inappropriate signifiers, in the context of the whole of his routines we understand what he intends as his meaning, the comedy coming from the close-but-no-cigar occassional word along the way.
I have not one bit of training in Jeff’s area of study … I’m amazed not only at his knowledge, but that he explains it so I can [mostly] follow along and that he hasn’t succumbed to the Dark Side, as Thirsty has, in spinning the high-faluting language into a secret society codebook that can sneer at us lesser beings for actually believing that a person’s speech has meaning the person intends regardless of how the recepient perceives it.
Bravo, Jeff. Bravo.
Darleen,
I resemble that remark.
And I’ll see your Norm Crosby and raise you one Jose Jimenez.
I object to your use of s/he. The slash is used, by those of us with fancy book learning in mathematics, to indicate ratio, or division. So by using it, whether you intended to or not, you are signifying that women (womyn) are defined only in relationship to, and divided by, men. And since I get to decide, its meaning includes but is not limited to that.
Simultaneously, I claim that the slash means that you assume all womyn to be defined by their relationship to the lead guitarist for ‘Guns-n-Roses’, while also meaning and/or, meaning that you think everyone is a hermaphrodite, you prevert.
Personally, I never thought paste could hold a candle to Elmer’s glue, for adhesive gustation. Superglue smells much better than it tastes, and the obligatory acetone chaser, while bracing, spoils the whole effect.
Another grand smack down, Jeff, but too long for such plebes.
Just using that paragraph of Nate-diz-awg’s you quoted one could not be a radical intentionalist to understand it; he’s all over the place. What the hell did he say or intend to say, beyond “pastyfoot eats paste [ed: WTF? One would think that the losers on the playground would have learned something about insults by now.]”?
I personnally love how Nate fucks up right from the get-go along with Thersites and the gals and blunders into the simplist literature distinction plausible; the difference between form and structure. Although I suppose being literate might help alleviate this distinction, to the woe of Thersites and the gals. (Stay in Skool, girls!)
Form can be vast, everything from the Bible to a revolutionary pamphlet to a novel to a science paper. That is what Thersites and the womyn are trying to pry away from any given text so Thirsty can write about Vaginal Vibrations of Adult Rabbits and Hermaneutic Theory as it relates in the DaVinci Code or Jesus and Betty Friedan: Class Warfare in the Bible as his Doctoral Thesis.
Well, structure is what words you use to form what types of sentences; questions, answers, metaphors, parables, narratives, quotations, dialogue, socratic dialogue, stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response, until the work is complete. These are the bricks, mortar, steel and iron girders that make a work have form, like an architect creates buildings; the Golden Gate Bridge and the Sears Tower are very different forms but there are very similiar structure underlying them both.
Nate talks about altering the structure of the Mona Lisa, the composition of her features, which could collapse the entire work’s form, especially as the eyes center the piece. Not, say, a photo version like they sell outside the Louvre. He compares that drastic change to altering the barest trivia of a form of writing, of changing the typeface per Jeff’s example.
Even if he and the flesh-swordswallowers were 100% in the message, he STILL dicks the dog in his argument.
And his cheer section applaud. And I roll my eyes.
Because that is the entire point of this fatutious argument; Libruls make up whatever they want from whever they want and it is impossible to reign in their micro-craniums.
There’s a “radical” intentionalism now? Awesome! What’s the Thrasher of linguistics journals? Because I’m totally stoked on reading it.
Duuuude, you so meant that!
Retract your slur, sir!
Wayne Newton wouldn’t react to a description of the Exclusion Principle with an atavistic preverbal frenzy, or call on his band to have a gang-dung-hurling at the person who described it (though it’s funny to imagine). Musicians are a far more civilized lot than Jeff is dealing with hereâ€â€Guns N’ Roses included.
– Moses alert – Darleen, Old Dad… I’ll see your Norm and Jose’, and raise you Rose-ann Rose-ana Dana, and call your bets with Yogi Berra, who really nailed his detracters with:
“I didn’t really say all those things I said”… and later finished the interview with:
“….What time is it…. you mean now?”
I don’t know about text semiotics, radical intentionalism or any of that, so perhaps I just don’t understand this. If so I am sorry, and please disregard the rest. But I was 100% sure that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Is that now in dispute, or were you saying Michaelangelo was involved behind the scenes in the creation of the painting, like a movie producer does these days? I would be interested to know more about that, if you have the time.
Nate appears to be from central casting.
Traces of fascism in American conservatism
By Nate Charlow
http://www.uwire.com/content//topops022805002.html
photo:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6175/1540/1600/556474743_l.jpg
If I raise my hand with my middle finger extended, am I:
a) Telling acthole to fuck off.
b) Testing the wind in order to adjust the sights on my M-14.
c) Showing you where I caught the tip in the table saw and thought I cut it off.
d) Making a guess as to the IQ of the Typing Telephone Pole.
I know which one I mean.
Vercingetorix,
It hasn’t been about scholarship from the start. It hasn’t even been about JG defending his ideas of intentionalist perspective since just after the start – Jeff won that battle handily in one or two posts. There are points of difference that could be disputed between JGs position and an opposing viewpoint in an academic arena, but that approach was surrendered in Thersites first post. Granted blogs don’t usually qualify as academic forums but Thersites tried to establish a stance of professorial chastisment when he strated this. Instead he came off as a jackass. Derision and vulgarity aren’t the tools a serious player uses in the academic forum.
For Thersites’ and his clown corp to back down is to admit that JG has the better of them in an intellectual arena. Since it’s been about sophisticate discrediting paste eater from the start, that’s not going to happen.
e) Discussing Jane Hamscher’s feelings about Scalito’s evil groping hands and how Rove touched her.
f) Commenting on how many more months before Fitzmas will come…finally. [See e. above]
g) telling Jeff how many days before the Armadillo gets it, unless we have pie again.
Oh, I know, JPT. So far, Nate’s post was the one that had even the barest hint of stepping a tippy toe into the ring of ideas, and he fell flat on his face within the first sentence.
Consider my addition to be the added paddle-whacking of the layperson. But seriously, could there be a more incompetent bunch of boobs anywhere on the internets? To pick a fight at someone else’s game and then flub it everywhere and badly? And to do it with such immaculate stupidity that you contradict yourself three times in the same paragraph?
Truly a thing of beauty.
Is this a serious question? This lightweight Nate is fastening on a trivial error that has no impact on the core argument as evidence that the core argument should not be takeb seriously. It’s no different than hooting that spelling or grammer errors in blog comments invalidate the idea behind the comment. It’s the mark of the loser taking refuge behind the inconsequential.
Verc,
Here you are interpreting signs again. I think that you should leave “origninal intent” to the signer (me)….although I could have subconsciously have meant one or all of those…..
Tortoise —
No, that’s not in dispute, so far as I know.
Which means either a) I made a mistake, or b) there is a context in which my attributing the painting to someone other than da Vinci exists, but that context is not readily available in the text itself.
As an interpreter, then, you would have to decide what to do with that were I not here to tell you what I meant (and even then, I could be lying to you). Which is why intentionalists note that conventions, context, biographical and historical research, etc., are all helpful in divining intent.
So, some choices. 1) It was a mistake 2) I simply don’t know who painted the Mona Lisa, or 3) in the first quarter of the two quarter course (and these notes were handed out in the second quarter, after the basics for intentionalism were laid down in th first part of the course) a student made a reference to the Mona Lisa being painted by Michaelangelo, and we had a bit of fun with that as kind of a running joke for the duration of the two quarters.
Now. How, as an interpreter, would you decide which of those scenarios obtain? Clearly, Nate and Thersites, et al believe the reference marks me as an idiot, so they believe either that I don’t know who painted the Mona Lisa, or else that I made a mistake in haste.
On the one hand, if they believe I made a mistake (rather than believing me ignorant), then they are condemning me for an error that is extraordinarily trivial; if, on the other hand, they are suggesting that my ignorance on the subject of who painted the Mona Lisa can be extrapolated out to ignorance of interpretive theory, then they are making a rather huge logical leap.
Either way, the question, from their perspective, boils down to this: did I intend to write da Vinci and instead wrote Michaelangelo, which would mean I mis-communicated my intent? Or did I intend to write Michaelangelo all along, which would mean I said what I meant, but that I was simply wrong on the facts?
Because if intention doesn’t matter—if they are free to take the fact of the signifier “Michaelangelo” to mean whatever they wish it to mean—there would be no force in using it to point out my idiocy.
Brux – Oh would I love to fisk that idiotrarians BS screed article. But nay. Its the same old anti-American crap we’ve all heard and read a thousand times. Horray for France. He simply restates, in bent logic and long strings of uneccessary verbage, what everyone already knows; That anything thats not Marxist collectivistic Socialism, is an enemy of the Nannystate cult, and automatically branded Fascism, since Fascism is the “Great Satan”, and enemy to the death, of Communistic Collectivism.
– I doubt he realizes he shot himself in the theoretical foot by basing the piece on the main premise that “Fascism…[read Conservatism]…is the ideology of ressentiment.” Which in short means that Conservatives by nature “resent the success of other “systems”.
– Since I don’t know of a single Conservative who “resents” the legion failures of collectivistc Socialism for the last 100 years, I would take that to mean we’re in the clear.
– The whole thing is a cynical, innacurate, piece of projectionistic AGITDUMP, the atypical paranoia of a hardline moonbat.
Did anyone catch this? I thought it was pretty interesting.
I know what I think, but I’d like to know what you think, Jeff.
I was once stuck at a dinner party with a well-trained mechanic who had years of experience who would simply not stop insisting that the reason there was motor oil all over the engine compartment of my old volvo was a bad rubber gasket on the oil filler cap. This was after I had told him that the dipstick had been pushed up because my flame trap was all crudded up, I got a new one from a junker and the problem was solved. He ended up drawing me a graph to explain to me that if there was enough pressure in my engine to push up the dipstick, my block would have cracked. Therefore demonstrating that I had no idea what I was talking about, even though I had not only had the problem (that he had demonstrated couldn’t have been the problem) but I had also fixed it.
In short, a really smart guy, by trying to impress me with his knowlege came across as maybe not stupid, but as a total asshole. He ended up being a pretty cool guy, but I never let him work on my car because he had demonstrated that he knew a lot about cars, but nothing about mine.
I think you’re in sort of the same situation here, I think they are arguing with you because they want you to look bad, but they are having a different argument than you are. You could win the Nobel Prize for superphilosophizating and you would still never win.
You’re married though, you should know how this works.
This is beginning to resemble the Spencer/Esmay “debate.” One side hurls malicious attacks in the guise of intellectual criticism, while the other replies with reason and facts that are inevitably ignored. I feel for ya man. Rationality used to be a sword and shield, now it’s a freakin whiffle bat against these people. I wonder if it’s good old fashioned blinding hatred or if they’re not teaching children how to reason anymore.
Jeff,
“Because if intention doesn’t matterâ€â€if they are free to take the fact of the signifier “Michaelangelo†to mean whatever they wish it to meanâ€â€there would be no force in using it to point out my idiocy.”
That’s precisely what has always bothered me about postmodern theory. The logical conclusion of you’re thought is that a principled relatavist would just shut the hell up, which they never do.
One wonders if they are simply ignorant, or cynical maniplative bastards, or both.
Keep giving them hell.
Lost My Cookies —
I get an error when I click on the link, so I can’t respond to it just now.
I will say, though, that I don’t necessarily post these responses because I think it will change the opinions of those I am having the ostensible debate with. Instead, I reply for the benefit of those who have an interest in how language works and are trying to follow along.
The way we think language works has practical, real-world effects, I believe. Which is why I take time to craft these replies. They are for the benefit of whomever might be interested in thinking through them critically. Because I am trying to do the same thing.
Vercingetorix,
Like yourself, I’m a layperson in these matters. It’s easy enough to follow and easy enough to see that Jeff ate Thersites’ lunch long ago and no serious player would have approached this the way Thersites and company did. Jeff can’t lose this one to 4th line wannabees, but they can’t back down for reasons of both nature and nurture. They can only keeping backing themselves deeper into the corner.
It’s fun to check in every now and then for the entertainment value though.
First indicator Nate wasn’t paying proper attention.(note to Nates homies, don’t let him drive)
I am finding this trend of dumbasses trying to dissect real scholarly work, being too ignorant to “Git’er done” and then making up a position out of whole cloth disturbing. They weren’t Ward Churchill students were they?
rls,
LMAO. They better hope it’s not b)
– The “Progressive” cockroaches, hidden within the public school system, are insidiously trying hard to do that (free thinking is anathema to the group think Nannystate), but we parents are fighting back more and more effectively every day.
TW: schools. Mr Turring is getting freeky again.
I agree. I’ve often thought of conversation sort of like a board game. If playing a board game, there were no rules, then how could you determine the outcome? Sort of like “Calvin Ball”.
In order for conversation to have any meaning, there must be rules. If you say that “balls” has only the meaning of “testicles” and I say “balls” also may mean orbs, and I am trying to explain the art of juggling to you…..you are going to get an entirely different picture that I am trying to project. Your lack of perspective in no way changes the meaning of what I am saying.
Dear Jeff,
If you’re going to truncate the text in my “UPDATE”, you could at least make it clear that there was truncation going on.
I did not claim to find the idea that there might be non-verbal texts puzzling. I claimed not to understand the notion of a non-verbal text, i.e., I claimed that it was insufficiently explicated in your notes.
Certainly some paintings can be texts (e.g. a work I saw at the Musee d’art Moderne in Nice which attempted to visually represent aesthetic arguments), while others are transparently not texts (e.g. a simple portrait painted by a three year-old). What distinguishes one type from the other is the notion of representation, which is in part a function of what the painter intends to do with his painting. This seems like the sort of view you ought to like.
Anyway, this debate is fatiguing. I do want to say that you take yourself much too seriously. Seriously, just count the words you’ve expended defending yourself from a light-hearted, admittedly non-rigorous intellectual criticism from someone who hasn’t even started grad school and whose blog averages 10-20 unique visits a day. What is the deal with you? My criticism wasn’t a serious one because I simply don’t take your ideas or your field of study seriously (though see my response to your comment on my page). You apparently took it as an affront to your intellect, which says volumes more about your psychic wellbeing than it does about the content of my post.
– Well, worry not rls. I’m sure the Typing Telephone Pole would be able to describe in flowery prose, the image of you trying to juggle your balls and remain upright, while brandishing your M-14 at target cards emblazened with photos of various moonbat likeness’s. He’s really good at totally missing the most glaring of points, particularly when you load him up with salient “clues” that reinforce the signifiers. Maybe an indication that he has his own “balls” in a perpetual knot.
Obligatory ignore actus alert
BBH,
Heh. Heh. Heh.
Nate – Aside from your moon-batiness, of the people that have ventured out onto the academic dance floor, hell bent on displaying their three left intellectual feet, your comments have been at least civil, and from what I’m able to tell, a reasonable atempt at honest debate. That said, your article on Fascism, despite your “modifiers” to soften the hard edges, is just a very good example of “intemperate class warfare speak” in sheeps clothing. I responded to the main premise of your piece above, where it seems to me, you managed to cut your own arguments off at the ankles.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote to make money.
What does that signify, Jeff?
I’m only about halfway through this post so far but it seems like everyone who is aligning themselves with Nate is demonstrating that they have absolutely no experience with theory at all. Anyone who’s sit in on a Literary Theory 101 class should know that everything is a text.
I have pretty strong reservations about attempting to treat novels and parking tickets as the same, as one is extraordinarily complex and the other is so banal that there’s no need to discuss it, but the fact remains that theory has already succeeded in broadening its range of “texts” from one type of thing to all things. For a group of people who purportedly support the edifices that Theory has built of late, they have a shocking lack of foundation—It’s almost like they accept the prevailing theory without thinking about it at all!
That’s funny, Nate.
I mean, yeah, obviously no-one could interpret calling someone an idiot as an affront to their intellect.
Somebody get this one a bowl of milk, it’s a keeper!
Shorter nate:
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Also by Michelangelo.
Ummm, what about an H-bomb going off.
O’Brian – One nice thing about an H-bomb is that you don’t have to worry about anyone arguing your meaning.
Jeff: I’m sure this question has been asked (and answered) before, but what, in your opinion, would be a good starting place for an interested layperson who wanted to explore these matter further?
Sort of an obvious intent.
Years ago, Nate Charlow was an infamous troll at Neoflux.com who thought he was smart. It’s amusing, and unfortunate, to see that nothing’s changed. Well, except for where he does his trolling.
> what about an H-bomb going off.
“..269 acoustic watts in the first octave…”
GA-5009 Val III PDF page 103
Thanks for replying. I think I get what you mean, but this discussion is probably way over my retractable little head. I guess I had focused too much on the actual word ‘produced’. I thought maybe you intended it to mean something in addition to the painting part.
I should go back into my carapace for a bit.
Hmmmm.
@ Jeff
I frankly don’t understand why this guy is having a problem with concept. Language is by nature a reflection of common conventions, which are not always applicable.
A prime example is Chinese. There are over a hundred dialects of Chinese, and not all dialects are equal. They all share the same set of written characters, i.e. the pictographs are identical, but the actual *interpretation* of these is highly dependent on the actual dialect used by the reader. This is the same issue when spoken Chinese is used and it’s why there are many occasions where two Chinese trying to communicate cannot because neither can understand the other.
This is also why the standard language for the government was set as Mandarin a long time ago because provincial dialects couldn’t interoperate with one another. This is also why China has had a names registration bureau for generations now. Because only a relatively small subset of Chinese ideographs are actually known well enough that they can be properly interpreted when placed on official documents. Thus naming children with rare or obscure ideographs is not allowed because it would make it difficult for the bureaucracy to manage.
Off topic: This is also why there’s relatively few names in use in China which makes for significant amounts of confusion over exact identities. Imagine being named John Smith in an airport with 2,000 other John Smiths and a voice from a loudspeaker tells you that there is an important phone call for a “John Smith”. Amusingly enough this happens all the time with the equivalent Chinese names.
So I think you are asserting that meaning cannot be divorced from accepted convention and that nothing can have an intrinsic meaning that isn’t ultimately dependent on that convention. Which is a hard argument to make in English because English is itself the result of conventions, but I think would be easier to make when applied to Chinese.
Frankly this stuff isn’t trivial, but it’s amazing how much these people are trying to trivialise it.
Hmmmm.
That’s the common response after having had your ass handed to you.
Nate replies
Done. Elipses added.
Here is the rest of what you had written, which had no bearing whatsoever on anything I wrote. But if you want it on the record, fine:
Now, let’s get back to your comment.
You write:
What’s to explain? What do you think “non-verbal” means when juxtaposed with “verbal”?
And this makes one a text and another not a text…how, exactly? Textuality is based on the notion of perception. So all it takes to turn something into a text is a desire to see it as such.
Otherwise, both kinds of paintings are merely paint on canvas / paper, supplied by some agency for whatever his or her reason.
Well, the title of your post called me an “idiot,” so forgive me for misunderstanding your lightheartedness.
But as I noted above, it’s not so much “you” I am replying to as it is those who actually do take a serious interest in things you’ve shown yourself to know nothing about—but which you’ve decided to pontificate on nonetheless while accepting the plaudits of your ideological fellow travelers.
You interjected yourself into a conversation that didn’t concern you—on a subject you now claim doesn’t particularly interest you and with a half empty toolbox—and I’m the one who takes myself too seriously?
Uh huh.
As for your update, all your commenter has described is Peirce’s idea of unlimited semiosis, or, in Fish’s formulation, the idea that “every decoding is another encoding,” something I dealt with in previous posts on the subject (and linked in today’s post).
This vicious cycle is always potential. Habit, for Pierce, marks the practical end to what can (potentially be) endless semiosis.
As I noted before when addressing this red herring:
Then there’s this bit, once again from the Handbook on Semiotics:
Once again, had you bothered to read my stuff rather than simply pretend you did (or who knows? Maybe you did and you just missed it), you wouldn’t waste my time or my readers’ time with things that have already been sufficiently covered.
Intention determines meaning. Positing a conditional end to the process for diving meaning,—interpretation (the decoding of meaning)—provides a conventional ground for agreeing on what it is we’re doing when we say we are interpreting. But of course, we must intend to interpret, as well.
Not for nothing, but this just gets the award for the Most Obvious Effort to Pump Up Ones Ego: Not really what I wanted to be doing this morningâ€â€and I only have 25 minutes to do it, because I’ve just taken my Gaspari SuperPump 250, and that powdered supplement is a tough taskmaster, demanding of me a certain timeliness to my workoutsâ€â€so this will be rather quick (though not short).
Of course, it was neither quick nor short, but the image of your bulging pecs makes me think you more the man. Good show mate!
Also, Jeff, why did you find it necessary to bolt on the conversation over at Metcomments and hide tail to your own blog? Safety in numbers seems to be the answer.
As a long time reader, I’ve lost a great deal of respect for you this day. Not that it matters, but from your opening statment, I think it sorely does matter to you.
Too bad.
Huh? the *interpretation* of the characters are the same for any dialect. For example
馬　means “horse” in Cantonese OR Mandarin. There’s no different interpretation that is “highly dependent” on the dialect. You’re obviously confusing separate issues here. But then, if you’re a Goldstein fan, it’s not surprising. Read the above wikipedia, it’s better than anything you’ll find on this site.
MEant to say, read the BELOW wikipedia.
Don’t be sad Ralph, I get my Ninja Turtles mixed up all the time. The trick is that they all wear different coloured masks and have different weapons!
Wait–what? You’re trying to say that a portrait of all things has no representational or iconographic intent?
e – try hard to pay attention. A smallish number of the pictographs DO recieve common interpretation in a wide number of dialecs. The other 40,000+ ideographs tend to be uniquely decoded based on locale.
– Other than that, relying on Wiki for anything other than meatloaf recipes is hazardess to your intelligence.
Arch Conservative —
Uh, that opening? Tongue in cheek.
And why would you say I “find it necessary to bolt on the conversation over at Metcomments and hide tail to your own blog?”
I’ve responded at least 5 times today at metacomments. Thersites has yet to respond to me.
And this post responds to both Thersites and Nate. At length. So I ain’t the one hiding.
Somehow I doubt you were ever a regular reader of mine. And if you were, and I lost you, I don’t consider it a great setback. You were clearly in the wrong place all this time.
You typed all that in 25 minutes!!!
Man, I gotta get me some of that Gaspari SuperPump 250…
…and, apparently, a post-graduate degree in something.
One of the funniest responses to this kerfuffle has been that of atrios, who is so obviously limited in intellect that he very clearly did not bother reading either post. He refrained from labeling Jeff a “Wanker,” apparently since learning that only fey Englishmen and girlie American men use the term.
I checked. My respect for Jeff has grown in measure equal to AC-fwims’s loss.
And, thusly, equilibrium and opprobrium are maintained.
A smallish number eh? What is your source for this claim?
And the Universe retains it’s precarious balance.
I think Nate is scores a very good point in this comment reply. This is one of best intellectual judo moves, in which the arguist can use the weight of the heavier arguement against him/her in a LIGHTENING devastation fashion.
With all the blobloblobbittiblah that Pastey McIdiotface, somtimes its hard to see the elegants and beauty of this killer move, so that’s what I’m here to help. It goes like this.
You: (something like) What a idiot! (This is good if you can use some fancy words i.e “excrescence” but its not necessary for purposes.)
Pasty: (or any another dinger) Blobloblobitty…. (yawn).
You: Dude, your take youself WAYYYYY YY to serously. Serously dude, just even the fact that you wrote so much about is itself telling.
Pasty: Yammer, yammer, texts, footnote, ect.
You: Plus, I am not even in grad schol so… You are relly sick.
Obi Wan (Ben) Kenobi relly got to the heart of this idea (its relly kind of a Jedi Master maneuvuer if you think about) with his classical putdown of Hans Solo [SW4:ANH}
“WHo is more fool, the fool? Or the fool who ARGUES with fool.”
Use with caution with dingers who are within actual arms reach IRL (dingers are prone to violents). YMVM.
– Which just serves to affirm in the continuim, that we are all still safer hunting with Cheney, than riding with any Kennedrunk…
Comment moderation on lefty sites is to enforce the groupthink. So that the right of center or sometimes even center commentators will be flushed. This is brought to you by the same people who shriek “Quashing of Dissent” should a right of center site or even centrist site do the same thing.
Call it irony or hypocrisy, either one fits.
Arch, I don’t know where you are coming from. Jeff has a blog; he uses it to organize his thoughts. Yes, it’s obvious he has some kind of brain problem, manifested as an inordinate appetite for debate. I, for one, enjoy the progression of his prodigious noodlings. But cowardice and bad faith? Nah.
So, Archie, I’ve lost a certain amount of respect for you, which puts you in negative territory.
– and just for the record, I’m firmly against all the violins on television these days…..
This is, I don’t know, ironic? After poking through the thread on Metacomments someone wants to call Jeff on safety in numbers. There seems to be a rather desparate effort going on there to keep Thersites’ academic resume a non-issue.
Makes one wonder.
I sometimes try to explain to people how the vast majority of my thoughts are not in English, though that is the only real verbal language I know. The best way I can describe the representation of these thoughts is as a set of symbols (visual) with no phonetic analog (non-verbal). Once I have a very high quality (or well-refined) thought, it is often very difficult for me to then devise how to communicate it.
Of course, the process of understanding verbal thoughts is much, much easier than the process of understanding visual thoughts, where such thoughts may be considered as “texts” as opposed to non-textual “pictures”.
This entire series (as I think I’ve alluded to in comments before) has helped me tremendously in understanding how my own mind works, and in then leveraging its potential fully. I also enjoy watching how supposedly learned professors at presumably esteemed institutions cannot understand what, for me, is at once profoundly enlightening (in its textual expression) and common-sense (in my immediate recognization of its practical application to my situation).
I’m hoping that at least one superxtreme-intellectual will rationally explain what ‘same-sex union between a man and a woman’ actually means.
JPT sez:
Same goes for his non-existent traffic. But, PASTE!!! So there.
They’re both having the same sex. Together.
Ahem.
BIG BANG HUNTER AWAITING YOUR SOURCE FOR YOUR CLAIM! THX!!
Isn’t it interesting how we have people who are willing to step up to the plate and knock down a few strawmen, but when it comes to actually engaging in a debate they only bow out with an explanation of how they weren’t being serious?
It’s quite simple—If you don’t want the gauntlet to be picked up, don’t throw it down. Save the invective and the immature taunting and get on with your lives. When you can’t even demonstrate the slightest level of competence in the discussion the only thing such public posturing is going to get you is embarassed.
I’m dying to hear what you have to say about Lolita, by James Joyce
Brian Gygi : heh. As a young man I was greatly influenced by Catcher in the Rye, probably one of Jack Kerouac’s most enduring works.
Unfortunately, e is quite right. Chinese characters have much the same meanings across ‘dialects’ (often as dramatic as the difference between Italian and French). THis obtains for every common character, especially the simplified characters.
On the other hand, there are as many as 80,000 characters (or more) many of which are out of date, arcane, or apocryphral. The fact that the Chinese government has recently (~1970s, I think) simplified and universalized the writing system (one of dozens of times over the entire course of Chinese history) does not mean that all 1.3 billion Chinese are marching in perfect lockstep towards the Common Language. Over a 100 tongues are spoken within China by over a billion people in a country which is a civilization in disguise.
One of the best books on the subject is this: Chinese Characters by L. Wieger.
Narrowly, e is correct. But it would behoove him not to press the issue, lest he become an idiot by insisting that all Chinese everywhere intrepret things the same way. Which, since he is likely a Leftnaut, will be followed by; unless they are right wing Chinese and then they are racists. Or so.
e, still waiting for you to cowboy up to the plate, sister.
What do you think about the current thread? And do explain why.
hmmm … you mean ‘horse’ as in a mighty warhorse, ‘horse’ a farm animal, ‘horse’ something that pulls a cart … there seem to be any number of regional interpretations of the character ‘horse’ though all would share four legs and a tail.
Unless everybody in China got the memo that the character for ‘horse’ meant they should visualize “a particular horsie”
As this seems to be a rather important issue (for you) I’d point out that a tedious, mendacious level you’re correct – Chinese characters ‘mean’ the same thing whether they’re used in China, Korea, or Japan. At a reasonable, functional level, you’re not.
The use of a particular character in one dialect might ‘mean’ you’re a hick if you’re in an area where the other dialect predominates.
My bona fides in this are two years studying Korean which included mastering ~500 chinese characters, plus a semester of Chinese.
Which doesn’t make me a Mira Sorvino grade Chinese linguist, but I’m okay with that.
.
That doesn’t really matter. The important thing is what young women think about it in Tehran.
Nabakov is nearly irrelevant too.
No, say it isn’t so, Bumperstickerist. The Chinese being parochial and a-havin’ differences? I’m calling Bullshit on that one.
When I was a teenager acquainting myself with the “canon” I can’t say I really bothered myself with the question of the author’s intent… I assumed that the author in the case of Dickens’ “Great Expectations” for example was telling a story with perhaps larger implications but the real crux of the matter was my reaction to the story and how it affected my hopes and dreams.
But silly teenagers are like that.
And some grow up. Others…become Democrats/libruls.
I can’t tell. They’re an inscrutable bunch, those Chinese.
A case in point about interpretation from a pictograph are the symbols for “China” – they are a rectangle bisected with a line to the left of a square with some squiggles in it. (the latter description is for the benefit of the visiting metacommenters). We won’t concern ourselves with the latter symbol as it means ‘country’ and is pronounced, more or less, ‘gwa’
The bisected rectangle, though, ‘means’ “middle” as a pictograph.
So China considers itself the ‘middle nation’
So, what does *that* mean?
That China considered itself the middle of the world in the sense of ‘importance’ or China figured out early on it was halfway from here to there?
I dunno.
But if you’re lost at the UN and see a box with a line through it next to a square with some squiggles in it, that’s the ‘Middle Country’ which is China.
Thersites has set him up as a university professor of English. I suspect he’s a community college instructor who I’m not even sure teaches literature courses.
Not that it matters—after all, I’m not the one who has been suggesting that my not having finished my PhD because I decided to stay home and raise my son somehow marks me as a failed academic.
But it would be nice to know if I’m wasting my time with someone who has a Masters and took maybe one required course in lit theory. Because that would explain a lot.
Anybody know who this guy is in real life? I asked over there, but so far mum’s the word.
I don’t even need to know his name. I’m just curious to know what he did his dissertation on, and what his area of expertise is.
Me, I keep my info on the “about” page. And I use my name. And I take Klonopin and talk to powdered supplements.
Because my life is an open book, baby!
Unfortunately? Would it be better if 馬　meant something different Mandarin and Cantonese? Or is it just unfortunate that BigBangHunter and our host tend to be wrong a lot?
And you have a tiny weenie…I’ve seen your picture, Naked Testicle Spider Man.
Could I please have a show of hands….how many knew this was coming?
SURPRISE!! SURPRISE!!!
>Anybody know who this guy is in real life? I asked over there, but so far mum’s the word.<
Check your contact box.
Do you know what “horse” means, right? It can mean any of those. It’s underspecified as to the distinction between those. Extensionally, its semantics is the union of the set of warhorses, old nags, clysedales, etc. Same with 馬.
I will point out that Jeff understands his subject matter well enough to be concise. That concision is found at various points along his essays.
That he enjoys laying out the thoughts that lead up to the summarizing statement on his blog is not a bad trait … on a blog.
An important distinction between Jeff and Thersites is that Thersites (and Hamsher for that matter) does not understand the material well enough to be concise. He might ‘know the material’ but hasn’t figured out a way to convey that knowledge with any sort of brevity or, for that matter, in his own words.
The Jane Hamsher of the Left is much the same.
Lindsay (and the guy who left Pandagon, Ezra) do take the time to write well and with originality on those topics that are in their field of expertise. I may not agree with an Ezra Klein political piece, but I am inclined to trust his summary of an issue about which he’s developed an expertise. The same goes with Lindsay. I don’t agree with her politics in general but when she chooses to do so she can write a damn fine analysis.
As does Bob Somersby – who’s become sort of a John the Baptist type out in the Lefty wilderness.
I mean, christ, The Daily Howler’s got archives going back nearly ten years.
Thank god nobody in Democratic politics bothers to pay attention to him. or we’d all be speaking arabic by now and our children would attend madrasas. (wingnut overreach because, hey, it’s Memorial Day.)
.
No shit, that’s what I said, or did you set your “Skim-a-Tron 2000” so that you read every 7th word instead of every 3rd word?
If you believe I’m wrong, e, state why. Don’t just link to a wikipedia entry and think you’re done.
In English, the signifier “cat” has been used to “mean” both a four-legged furry feline and jazz musician. And the only the way this is even possible is if at one time or another, someone was able to “mean” by the signifier “cat” two completely different things. S/he did this by intending it that way, and it caught on.
Once these different things catch on, they become, at different times and in different eras, conventional usages.
Incidentally, “horse” can also mean heroin.
If you are simply making the argument that “horse” or “cat” can mean any of those things at any time, I’ll go you one further. Theoretically, at least, it can “mean” whatever I intend it to mean. Though you’ll likely have a hard time understanding what I mean.
But spell it out, e. I’m curious.
Dude, did I just walk into a German schieze video?
What the hell is up with Franz? [Cue German voice]
Dude, you are siding with the idiots that say that meaning depends on where you are and all that crap but you just fucking happen to be on protein wisdom (bitches), in which case, we all KNOW what BumperStickerist said.
I mean, it’s like soooooo part of the Zeitgeist, per you morons.
In order to correct any of us any further you have get into an intentionalist mindset…”what, fraulein, did you mean to say?”
In which case, you are a fool, twice over. But don’t let that stop you. I’m sure it won’t.
A friend alerted me to this brouhaha. I took one of Jeff’s courses and I pulled my notebooks just to see if a contemporaneous account of a Jeff-taught course might help.
I noticed Jeff spent a great deal of time in class talking about ‘locusts of meaning’, but never really clarified what he meant.
Eventually I figured it was some Jewish “Plagues of Moses” thing he’d developed … but that might have been the hangover talking.
No former student of mine can write in complete sentences. So you’ve just given up the game, pal.
e – Let me give you just a sliver of a clue for you to follow, since I neither have the time nor inclination to get involved in the usual anal-retentitive, OCS, which piece of flyshit is rounder than the other, that you moonbats think substitutes for rational thought.
– As I mentioned a very large part of the pictographic whole is simply unused for the reasons already covered. If its really life and death important for you to deny that for some reason, then have at it. The rest of us have lives. Heres your clue:
– Try to think of several good reasons Chinese was one of the last languages integrated into computer keyboards/translators?
– Now try to think of why Korean had some of the same difficulties. (Be careful getting your shorts in a twist on Korean, and saying anything stupid. I speak it fairly fluently, so you’ll get you ass spanked, because I doubt you know how, and where it originated even, and if that triggers you into researching it a bit then you’re a good little boy.
– Now go away and play with your dollies, Grun-ups are trying to talk.
BBH-
I’m a former Korean cryptologic linguist with two tours at Osan with Skivvy Nine.
Korean, being a phonetic alphabet, was relatively easy to incorporate into typewriting. In fact, we linguists learned to type Korean using the mckuen-reichouer system so that the verb ‘ha da’ was written on an QWERTY keyboard ‘JE BE’ English letters were substituted for korean letters without any attempt at transliteration. The letters were broken up syllabically, as you do with Korean.
After some training we were able to poke along at 20-30 minutes typing Korean on English keyboards.
‘KEF FSK JE STU KY’ is ‘ahn young ha say-o’
‘KEF FSK JU LE GUW GU KY’ is ‘ahn young hi ka ship shio’.
‘OE OSF CHU VTU KY ZEF GUF LHTF OE OSF’ is ‘P’a p’yun chee-ray you t’an, sheen gwan p’a p’yun’ which means “High explosive fragmentary shell, super quick fuze’ … which, you know, comes up quite a lot in certain conversations.
Anyway, the Korean alphabet is a thing of beauty. Seeing the word ‘Presbyterian’ written phonetically in Korean, not so much.
Damn, that kid takes some long ass naps.
What I say means what I say it means. Capisce. Now, finish my lawn. Fuck, you can’t get decent help these days.
Too good. That border “needs” grooming.
– Ahem…. Tong’shun hungook mony mony ah’chu cho’ sim-nee’dah Bumper-sanei’.
– Yes I was aware that those sorts of early efforts were made. But as you know the tri-part pictographs of Omah’/Op’ah/Oder’-lemmee (mother/father/son) were eventually integrated directly by using the gliphiated sound forms instead of an “alphabet” persee’, (Korean uses pictographs to form the equivalent of our vowels and consonents, except instead of 6 vowels, as I recall there are some 30+ sound types), which the Mam’ah (King) of the three original provinces so beautifully designed. And yes, it is a pretty language, which was actually fun to learn. The story goes he used the tri-part form patterned after the three main provinces he united into Cor’ee’ia (Korea). Studying the differences between North and South is also interesting, because of the Manchurian influence to the North. Oddly enough if you go deep enough up into Manchuria, there are whole isolated villages that speak only the South Korean Dialect, and little Chinese. Thats where I saw some 6 foot long broad swords in a museum, which you know, is a real conversation piece over the dinner “floor”.
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