(second draft)
This paper was rewritten twice for the same class, expanding its scope each time.
English 205
January 14, 2010
When looking for meaning in a particular text, what exactly is the process used to discover what meaning might be there? Like situational ethics, the very method itself varies, not so much in accordance with the text itself, but certainly with the context in which it is encountered. The reason is as simple as the above quote from the sarcastic philosophy espouted by the fictional feline: ignorance becomes boring to me, and so I spend my commodity of time in order to gain the return on my investment in the form of further thought and—at times—some sort of understanding of a subject or idea.
To illustrate, let us walk through some of this process while examining two separate texts. The first will be an incident that had its source in “real life” and was repeatedly examined in fiction by author Philip K. Dick. The other will be a more straight-forward text, that of an online comic strip called XKCD.
Jumping into the Phildickian example is going to be necessarily as brief and cursory as possible. This is a singular subject which produced at least three full-length novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his “Exegesis”). In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication. The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace. Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, “In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me.” More than that, “as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome” (Dick). In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define. He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?
On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his “mystical experience” and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions. Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause. But he never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, including some more outlandish theories such as a Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam or influence from an extraterrestrial satellite.
Given Phil Dick’s wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the event was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or that it never happened at all. My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.
Contrasting this delightful somewhat existential quagmire, is the January 13, 2010 edition of the comic strip XKCD by Randall Munroe titled “Self Description.” From its title, wearing my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, I can deduce a self-awareness of post-modernism which demonstrates a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative. Which might mean that it knows it is going to be playing with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of its audience knowing that is aware of itself, or so on down the infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon themselves:
 One of the traits this web-comic has, is a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) that is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration. This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise givens meaning or complication to what is shown. In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, “the contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters” (Monroe). Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that. Being an ideological omnivore, I can place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot. These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express. This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface.
Not to meander off-topic—nor add filler to this self-aware personal narrative—but like the meaning sought for in any given text, the meaning of “meaning” is not as simple as one might think. In looking up the word in the OED, the first definition encountered is: “The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation,” which refers to “a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person). b. To pity or comfort.” So the seemingly most obvious meaning of “meaning” is not the initial meaning at all.
This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made. That is, the meaning is pretty much anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention. And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intending its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text. What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.
Philip K. Dick. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)." In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995, Print.
─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.
Watterson, Bill. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Kansas City. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1992. Print.
~•~
This paper was rewritten twice for the same class, expanding its scope each time.
English 205
January 14, 2010
But What Does It Mean?
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
―Hobbes
―Hobbes
When looking for meaning in a particular text, what exactly is the process used to discover what meaning might be there? Like situational ethics, the very method itself varies, not so much in accordance with the text itself, but certainly with the context in which it is encountered. The reason is as simple as the above quote from the sarcastic philosophy espouted by the fictional feline: ignorance becomes boring to me, and so I spend my commodity of time in order to gain the return on my investment in the form of further thought and—at times—some sort of understanding of a subject or idea.
To illustrate, let us walk through some of this process while examining two separate texts. The first will be an incident that had its source in “real life” and was repeatedly examined in fiction by author Philip K. Dick. The other will be a more straight-forward text, that of an online comic strip called XKCD.
Jumping into the Phildickian example is going to be necessarily as brief and cursory as possible. This is a singular subject which produced at least three full-length novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his “Exegesis”). In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication. The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace. Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, “In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me.” More than that, “as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome” (Dick). In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define. He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?
On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his “mystical experience” and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions. Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause. But he never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, including some more outlandish theories such as a Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam or influence from an extraterrestrial satellite.
Given Phil Dick’s wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the event was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or that it never happened at all. My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.
Contrasting this delightful somewhat existential quagmire, is the January 13, 2010 edition of the comic strip XKCD by Randall Munroe titled “Self Description.” From its title, wearing my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, I can deduce a self-awareness of post-modernism which demonstrates a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative. Which might mean that it knows it is going to be playing with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of its audience knowing that is aware of itself, or so on down the infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon themselves:
 One of the traits this web-comic has, is a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) that is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration. This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise givens meaning or complication to what is shown. In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, “the contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters” (Monroe). Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that. Being an ideological omnivore, I can place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot. These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express. This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface.
Not to meander off-topic—nor add filler to this self-aware personal narrative—but like the meaning sought for in any given text, the meaning of “meaning” is not as simple as one might think. In looking up the word in the OED, the first definition encountered is: “The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation,” which refers to “a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person). b. To pity or comfort.” So the seemingly most obvious meaning of “meaning” is not the initial meaning at all.
This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made. That is, the meaning is pretty much anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention. And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intending its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text. What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.
Works Cited
Philip K. Dick. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)." In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995, Print.
─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.
Watterson, Bill. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Kansas City. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1992. Print.
~•~
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