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"†here is a †ransm‡†or of s‡gn@l and rec‡ever of s‡gn@l. and that iz *@ll*."
People make meaning, yes. But are there two people involved or only one? For normal, communicative writing there are usually assumed to be two (only the degree of remove is at issue), but cut-up or alleatoric writing seems to be a different animal. Let me be more specific than above: the cut-up is a machine that generates (one might less contentiously say "inspires") meaning in the reader. All text does this, but the cut-up makes the process more explicit than text written "by" someone "to" an audience.
The text itself is no more nor less an illusion than anything else, depending on your ontological outlook. The deception inherant in text is the appearance of intimacy, of human contact. When text is stripped of this mask and approached as its own entity, it can be dealt with more-or-less on its own terms. There is no human contact, just interaction between text and the reader. Every page is a rune-toss, with a greater or lesser degree of assumed "consensual" content (is it consent if one is not aware of the alternatives?).
Still, as with so many discussions of "illusion" versus "reality," when it comes into contact with our actual experience in day-to-day life, we would do well to acknowledge the relative utility of text for our usual purposes. The post-it note "Steve - pick up milk on way home from work" contains all the information it needs to, whether or not it transmits any deep Truth. If one is willing to acknowledge (at least tacitly) its inherant limitations, text works well as a tool of communication or information storage. Just don't idealize(/idolize) it, whether through adoration or condemnation, and everything works just fine.
About the only people these questions are routinely relevant to are people who work with text on a deeper-than-usual level: writers, philosophers, magickians, propagandists and the like. True, the typical reader could probably benefit from a little consideration of the limitations of the written word, but the ontological implications of text just aren't as relevant to most people on a practical level. (Or are they? Someone counter-argue that, please?)
[this whole thing is such rot to the original thread, but it's kind of interesting nonetheless]
~L |
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