En Fin

     The readings for this semester have increased and clarified a fundamental internal tension for me. I, like a good Platonist, believe in the thing itself; that the object has material reality and a form which makes it identifiable as that thing. What is said or perceived about the thing does not in any way alter the nature of the thing itself. This is not to say that perception and discourse have no effect but rather that their effect is displayed in the realm of the social and of the internal mental space. Directly in conflict with this essentializing tendency is a real appreciation of the post structural project which seeks to remove the effects of positivism. Once we step into the realm of language all bets are off.
Beginning with Desaussure’s assertion that language is a ratio between sign and signifier which, however, does not maintain any “natural” relationship, but rather a conventional relationship based on cultural agreement. The abitrary nature of this arrangement puts us on the slippery slope to absolute relativism. DeSaussure does not follow the logic of his discovery to its logical end and  oddly neither does Derrida. They both back away from the ultimate consequence of their line of thinking which is that “meaning” cannot be situated at all. If there is nothing tying the word to the material fact, then meaning is always relative. As Nietzsche argues the “truth” is pre-linguistic. There is a material reality, that grey thing on the ground that just made your toe bleed when you kicked it, but this reality cannot be objectively stated in language. This ties in with Lacan’s/Nietzsche’s conception that language is the structure of consciousness. We cannot think but in terms of metaphor or metonymy. There is no absolute relationship between what we are perceiving and what is objectively true about the world. For me this does not necessarily lead to nihilism. The relational nature of language does not prohibit meaning, it simply reveals meaning as subjective. We each create meaning by the associations we make. Language cannot express Truth, but instead reveals the truth we create for ourselves. In effect our discourse is poetry. It is the expression of our individual experience through metaphor/metonymy; a painting of our subjective experience in the process of communication.
In effect language is always already story. Many theorists tackled the differences between oral and written discourse, but for me these are mainly practical considerations relating to the ease with which the interpreter can fully understand the position of the subject. As Ong and others point out, oral discourse does have the double benefit of contextuality and immediacy. The teller can refer to the environment around her and ground her poem in material fact which the interpreter can sense directly. Also any necessary corrections or clarifications can  be immediately added and the interpreter can question the teller to facilitate comprehension, but I found the argument that the spoken word  has any more authenticity or inherent meaning unconvincing. Oral discourse is a more efficient means to convey the subjective message from one person to another in a way that will allow the interpreter to approximately duplicate the message of the teller. The discourse though will still not mean the same thing or mean in the same way for teller and interpreter. All discourse fails in a one to one correspondence due to the difference inherent in the semiotic unit. Writing has the benefit of conveying the subjectivity of the writer across time and space, but at the cost of clarity. The meaning for the interpreter is less likely to approximate the message of the writer and that gap increases proportionately as the time or space increases. Again for me this does not lead to nihilism, but freedom. Discourse creqates meaning  in the way it creates relationships for the interpreter.
So what does this mean for the author? In one sense the author is everything. The discourse is the author’s poem which expresses her conception of experience. The words are her metaphors. The interpreter, through lagnuage is getting an iimperfect dlimpse into the way in which she has organizes her perceptions and how she creates meaning for herself. But we must stop before positivism. We cannot ever recreate for ourselves that poem exactly in the way she has. So in this sense the author is in fact dead. What she intended is always already beyond our grasp, even if she tells us directly! The words she uses already cannot convey absolute meaning so she can’t tell us exactly what she means, she can only create another poem. We as interpreters will always slip away from her down the bumpy slide that is the chain of signification. So what does that leave us? With absolute freedom. The text is a material fact resulting from her interiority; from there it is about the relationships created by the the interpreter in reading. Interpretation is as Fish argues about the ways in which we make meaning with the text.  There can be no accurate reading, only those which are more or less grounded in the material fact of the text. (Can you draw a simple connection between the words of the text and the interpretation or is the connection many times compounded and further from the text.)
I suppose I am simply arguing against an objective locus of Truth or Meaning that can be expressed in any way in language. (See, the Platonist has to qualify his denial of absolute truth.) This does not however deny the positive material fact of discourse. Our poems do have material effect. They exhibit power, they convey ideology, they reveal psychoses, they become enmeshed in the fabric of cultural memory, but always subjectively and imperfectly never in a one to one correspondence.